Keyword Search Results
There were 147 results from your search for keyword(s): 'Fascism'.
- "A series of outrages," Mr. Vladimir continued calmly, "executed here in this country; not only planned here -- that would not do -- they would not mind. Your friends could set half the Continent on fire without influencing the public opinion here in favour of a universal repressive legislation. They will not look outside their backyard here."
Source: The Secret Agent, p. 21 - "As always, we Surrealists still hold that our foremost objective be the liberation of humanity, and we cannot keep silent when confronted by a senseless and repugnant crime such as this. Surrealism only has meaning so long as it stands against a regime whose membership views this indignity as a joyous re-awakening, a regime that, from the moment of its inception, collapsed into a mire of compromise and extortion and that can only be a calculated prelude to the implementation of a new totalitarianism." [from the collective declaration, 'Liberté est un mot vietnamien']
From chapter: Attacks of the Fantastic, Donald LaCoss
Source: Surrealism, Politics and Culture, p. 288 - "Inverted totalitarianism" projects power inwards. It is not derivative from "classic totalitarianism" of the types represented by Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, or Stalinist Russia. Those regimes were powered by revolutionary movements whose aim was to capture, reconstitute, and monopolize the power of the state. The state was conceived as the main center of power, providing the leverage necessary for the mobilization and reconstruction of society. Churches, universities, business organizations, news and opinion media, and cultural institutions were taken over by the government or neutralized or suppressed.
Inverted totalitarianism, in contrast, while exploiting the authority and resources of the state, gains its dynamic by combining with other forms of power, such as evangelical religions, and most notably by encouraging symbiotic relationship between traditional government and the system of "private" governance represented by the modern business corporation. The result is not a system of codetermination by equal partners who retain their distinctive identities but rather a system that represents the political coming-of-age of corporate power.
Source: Democracy Inc., p. xxi - "It's the era of nice monsters, Käthe, and we must count ourselves among them. They're all nice, Veronica's nice too, Beverloh was nice, he was a regular paragon of niceness..."
Source: The Safety Net, p. 114 - "Only in 1984 does an investigating judge, Felice Casson, discover that the explosive used at Peteano came from a Gladio arms depot...And you understand that if a military secret service has three policemen blown up, it won't be out of any dislike for the police but to direct the blame at far-left extremists."
Source: Numero Zero, p. 210 - "The principle that society exists solely through the well-being and the personal liberty of all the individuals of which it is composed does not appear to be conformable to the plans of nature, in whose workings the race alone seems to be taken into consideration, and the individual sacrificed to it. It is greatly to be feared that the last stage of such a conception of democracy...would end in a condition of society in which a degenerate herd would have no other preoccupation but the satisfaction of the lowest desires of common men." Thus Renan [note: "one of the inspired pre-Fascists"]. Fascism denies, in democracy, the absurd conventional untruth of political equality dressed out in the garb of collective irresponsibility, and the myth of "happiness" and indefinite progress. But, if democracy may be conceived in diverse forms -- that is to say, taking democracy to mean a state of society in which the populace are not reduced to impotence in the State -- Fascism may write itself down as "an organized, centralized and authoritative democracy."
Source: The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism, p. 16 - "They stink, you just can't smell it anymore."...Things became quite awkward when she began to sniff at people and wrinkle her nose, saying laconically: "Stinks" or "Doesn't stink," and it was quite clear that she didn't only mean this morally, toward the end she spoke openly of a "stinking German cleanliness." He had to let her go...
Source: The Safety Net, p. 256 - "What began as an effort to promote and defend democracy," wrote [CIA labor infiltrator turned whistleblower Paul] Sakwa later, "evolved into operations designed to thwart real, incipient, or imagined Communist threats at the expense of democracy itself."
Source: The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, p. 68 - "What do you expect -- for me to send him our condolences, invite him for coffee, tell him how much I regret his having implored us to swallow him before anyone else did? Zummerling, for instance? The fact is that Blume prefers to be swallowed by us. He won't be short of money, he can even keep the old family house. Only his work, the liberal tradition -- that I can't give back to him, no one can give it back to him...Disgrace, yes, of course, it's a disgrace, but just ask the two Amplangers whether the feel any disgrace. Young Amplanger will tell you: 'Is it a disgrace for a chicken to pick up a grain thrown to it?'
Source: The Safety Net, p. 109 - "Yes, I do, I want to go on with you -- yet they're probably already practicing strongholds, looking into hypnosis, drugs, perhaps with drugs they'll persuade a security officer to 'grab me.' He will be a nice, well-drilled, thoroughly healthy, thoroughly vetted young policeman who will suddenly throw himself upon me with an apparently protective gesture that conceals the murderous grip. There is no security -- computers, rockets, rocketlike artificial birds, psychomanipulations, remote psychoterrorism -- so we might as well resign ourselves to the loneliness of extreme, luxurious imprisonment.
Source: The Safety Net, p. 124 - 'Switzerland is the only nation where the citizens are both prisoners and their own prison guards,' wrote Switzerland’s only Nobel Prize author, Max Frisch.
Source: Vulture's Picnic, p. 99 - A doctrine then must be no mere exercise in words, but a living act; and thus the value of Fascism lies in the fact that it is veined with pragmatism, but at the same time has a will to exist and a will to power, a firm front in face of the reality of "violence."
Source: The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism, p. 20-21 - A study of violence in eighty-four countries reached the conclusion that a little repression increases instability whereas a great deal of it has the opposite effect.
Source: The Age of Terrorism, p. 154 - Accepting the disturbing fact that effective dictatorships are immune to terror, but that even the most just and permissive democratic countries are not, it would still be of interest to know why certain democratic societies (Scandinavia, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Belgium, Holland and a few others) have witnessed relatively little terrorism. It will be noted that the population of these countries is small, that these states are predominantly Protestant in character, and that their political culture in recent history has been generally peaceful.
Source: The Age of Terrorism, p. 172 - According to Fascism, government is not so much a thing to be expressed in territorial or military terms as in terms of morality and the spirit. It must be thought of as an Empire -- that is to say, a nation which directly or indirectly rules other nations, without the need for conquering a single square yard of territory...Peoples which are rising, or rising again after a period of decadence, are always imperialist; any renunciation is a sign of decay and of death.
Source: The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism, p. 25 - After all, the affair of Pliefger's birthday cake had been extremely serious, and as for Father -- he was already dreaming of flying saucers descending on him and Käthe, now he was even scared of birds since that business with the duck and since old Kortschede had gone completely around the bend at the click of a lighter. And there had been that terrible business with Plotetti's cigarette package.
Source: The Safety Net, p. - After Socialism, Fascism combats the whole complex system of democratic ideology, and repudiates it, whether in its theoretical premises or in its practical application. Fascism denies that the majority, by the simple fact that it is a majority, can direct human society; it denies that numbers alone can govern by means of a periodical consultation, and it affirms the immutable, beneficial and fruitful inequality of mankind, which can never be permanently leveled through the mere operation of a mechanical process such as universal suffrage. The democratic regime may be defined as from time to time giving the people the illusion of sovereignty, while the real effective sovereignty lies in the hands of other concealed and irresponsible forces. Democracy is a regime nominally without a king, but it is ruled by many kings -- more absolute, tyrannical and ruinous than one sole king, even though a tyrant...Today it can be seen that there are republics innately reactionary and absolutist, and also monarchies which incorporate the most ardent social and political hopes of the future.
Source: The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism, p. 14-15 - All three, the Hausmeister, Max, the park attendant, were aware that Ulrich's father had worn a monocle, and that his name was Ulrich von Hargenau, and that he had died for his fatherland, another euphemism, and that Ulrich and his brother had dropped the von, a gesture that was universally regarded with suspicion and a quite irrational anger. As a rule, people did not drop their von. The Hausmeister, Max, and the park attendant also knew that Ulrich had been up to his neck in left-wing politics, and that as recently as nine months ago he had been involved in a long drawn-out trial in which his evidence had been used by the prosecution to build an airtight case, enabling them to lock up what everyone considered a bunch of ill-mannered agitators. In some quarters there was more outrage about their alleged bad manners than their left-wing rhetoric.
Source: How German Is It, p. 34 - And above all, Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace. It thus repudiates the doctrine of Pacifism -- born of a renunciation of the struggle and an act of cowardice in the face of sacrifice. War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to meet it. All other trials are substitutes, which never really put men into the position where they have to make the great decision -- the alternative of life or death. Thus a doctrine which is founded upon this harmful postulate of peace is hostile to Fascism. And thus hostile to the spirit of Fascism, though accepted for what use they can be in dealing with particular political situations, are all the international leagues and societies which, as history will show, can be scattered to the winds when once strong national feeing is aroused by any motive -- sentimental, ideal, or practical.
Source: The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism, p. 11-12 - Angel Face took no notice of these festive preparations. He had to see the general and make plans for his flight. Everything seemed easy until the dogs began barking at him in the monstrous wood which separated the President from his enemies, a wood made up of trees with ears which responded to the slightest sound by whirling as if blown by a hurricane. Not the tiniest noise for miles around could escape the avidity of those millions of membranes. The dogs went on barking. A network of invisible threads, more invisible than telegraph wires, connected every leaf with the President, enabling him to keep watch on the most secret thoughts of the townspeople.
Source: El Senor Presidente, p. 39 - As part of this back-channel "counterterrorism network," Casey recruited Oliver North, a doe-eyed Marine lieutenant colonel assigned to the National Security Council (NSC). Whipple served as North's case officer in the monumental political misadventures North embarked upon.
Cut from the same fascist cloth as his ideological forefathers Hunt and Liddy, North formed a crisis management center along with REX 84, "a plan to suspend the Constitution in the event of a national crisis such as nuclear war, violent and widespread internal dissent, or national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad." North's plan called for "the round-up and internment of large numbers of both domestic dissidents (some 26,000) and aliens (3,000-4,000), in camps such as the one in Oakdale, Louisiana."
Certain trusted members of Congress were witting (despite that august body's periodic protestations that the CIA operates as a "rogue elephant") and Senator Daniel Inouye cut off all debate about North's plan to suspend the Constitution when the subject was raised during the televised Iran-Contra Hearings in 1987.
Source: The CIA as Organized Crime, p. 166 - At the same time that [World War II] halted the momentum of political and social democracy, it enlarged the scale of an increasingly open cohabitation between the corporation and the state. That partnership became ever closer during the era of the Cold War (1947-93). Corporate economic power became the basis of power on which the state relied, as its own ambitions, like those of giant corporations, became more expansive, more global, and, at intervals, more bellicose. Together the state and corporation became the main sponsors and coordinators of the powers represented by science and technology. The result is an unprecedented combination of powers distinguished by their totalizing tendencies, powers that not only challenge established boundaries -- political, moral, intellectual, and economic -- but whose very nature it is to challenge those boundaries continually, even to challenge the limits of the earth itself. Those powers are also the means of inventing and disseminating a culture that taught consumers to welcome change and private pleasures while accepting political passivity.
Source: Democracy Inc., p. xxiii - Both spectacles [i.e., the Nuremberg rally and Bush's "mission accomplished" pageant] are examples of the distinctively modern mode of myth creation. They are the self-conscious constructions of visual media. Cinema and television share a common quality of being tyrannical in a specific sense. They are able to block out, eliminate whatever might introduce qualification, ambiguity, or dialogue, anything that might weaken or complicate the holistic force of their creation, of its total impression.
In a curious but important way these media effects mesh with religious practice. In may Christian religions the believer participates in ceremonies much as the movie or TV watcher takes part in the spectacle presented. In neither case do they participate as the democratic citizen is supposed to do, as actively engaged in decisions and sharing the exercise of power. They participate as communicants in a ceremony prescribed by the masters of the ceremony. Those assembled at Nuremberg or on the USS Abraham Lincoln did not share power with their leaders. Their relationship was thaumaturgical: they were being favored by a wondrous power in a form and at a time of its choosing.
Source: Democracy Inc., p. 2-3 - Breton's warning about maintaining the distinctions between 'the effort of liberation' and 'the struggle for liberty' in postwar Europe alludes to [Fourier]. Breton cautions that 'some are preparing to take advantage of this confusion to the detriment of liberty', just as Fourier had warned of those bourgeois-liberals who thought that progressive politics meant only that one had the right to prevent abject poverty by toiling in a coal mine or textile mill and, if one were male and paid enough taxes, voting every few years. In 'Ajours', the short collection of generally anti-authoritarian essays that he had tacked on the end of the 1947 reissue of Arcane 17, Breton's saw a similar set of constraints that recently liberated people had decided to put on themselves and one another, and was discouraged by those who would consciously choose not to be free by enslaving themselves to noxious resurgent ideals like patriotism and militarism...Freedom from fascism was not enough, 'we must "remake human understanding"'. It was imperative that 'human life be re-impassioned, made valuable again'...
From chapter: Attacks of the Fantastic, Donald LaCoss
Source: Surrealism, Politics and Culture, p. 285 - Breton, in his book Arcanum 17, written in Quebec toward the war's end, and thus after the publication of Down Below, responds to the news of the liberation of Paris with a warning that extends Carrington's crisis in consciousness into the postwar historical moment: the end of the Second World War was not necessarily the end of fascism. We must not, he urges, confuse liberation with liberty, or the remission of an illness with the onset of health. "Recovery," in both Breton's and Carrington's accounts, refers not to the simple relieving of symptoms but to "a constant renewal of energy." As Breton writes, "Liberty is not, like liberation, a struggle against sickness, it is health."
Source: Surrealism and the Art of Crime, p. 242-243 - Breton...writes: "The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd. Anyone who, at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well-defined place in that crowd, with his belly at barrel level." Interpretations of these lines from the Second Manifesto have fueled attacks against surrealism in general, most notably Jean-Paul Sartre's charge that the movement, like Breton's statement, represented a feeble attempt to organize "revolution" around the inner dictates of the individual -- a vulgar and politically bankrupt fusion of Leninist and Freudian rhetoric. Yet Breton is not invoking the "inner dictates of the individual," nor is he simply mobilizing this act of terror as a rhetorical flourish. He means it literally, but stresses that "my intention is not to recommend it above every other because it is simple, and to try and pick a quarrel with me on this point is tantamount to asking, in bourgeois fashion, any nonconformist why he doesn't commit suicide, or any revolutionary why he doesn't pack up and go live in the USSR." Surrealism's struggle lay in reconciling its radical break from the "ideology of continuity" with its awareness that even radicalism tends toward the continuous and the familiar whenever it expresses itself in forms, such as gunshots, that are merely extensions of preexisting violence...
The group's analyses and debates about the status of violence in the modern world extended to the very question of using revolutionary violence as a political strategy. To what extent could political violence ever be distinguished from crime? How did anti colonial violence differ from terrorism, from ethnic cleansing, or from colonial wars of invasion? Such questions, central to the activities of the surrealist group throughout the movement's history, show the surrealists' dedication to a public intellectualism that confronted the most fundamental principles of revolution and avant-gardism.
Source: Surrealism and the Art of Crime, p. 7 - But being seen to 'do something' is not easy when the opponent is invisible. Governments soon develop, as Adam Roberts says, 'a powerful thirst for intelligence' which can quickly lead to bending or breaking legal constraints in the search for information. It can lead to increased police powers, detention without trial, far-reaching changes in legal procedures, and the use of torture, or its milder relation 'inhuman and degrading treatment'.
Source: Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction, p. 120 - Carrington posits the subject's capacity for experience of the outer world as a precondition for the propagation of history. The body and mind are not merely cogs in a machine of history but the site at which history itself unfolds. By linking her loss of control over her mind and body with a loss of control over the master narrative of history, Carrington radically undoes the notion that history functions independently of its subjects. The body itself is the locus through which history manifests itself as a narrative, not merely as a useful fiction for maintaining the coherence of the subject, but as a site where temporality itself is reflected. Unlike Breton, who saw the experience of the marvelous as releasing the subject from the grip of history and society, Carrington's Surrealist experience shifts history to the foreground. Through her emphasis on the body, Carrington makes a claim for the subject in an aesthetic experience that registers history and subverts the notion that she is a unified subject in control of either her body or history.
Source: Disruptive Testimonies: The Stakes of Surrealist Experience in Breton and Carrington, p. 101 - Carrington's primary concern while ill is the possibility of intervening against Hitler’s influence [. . .]; after her recovery, however, the index that she uses to chart her trajectory into madness is her loss of ability to recognize or to gauge the significance of historical realities. Thus, while Down Below plays quite deliberately with the abstract peculiarities of perspectivism and madness, Carrington remains deeply concerned with the issue of how to perceive and articulate historical and political fact.
Source: Disruptive Testimonies: The Stakes of Surrealist Experience in Breton and Carrington, p. 101 - CIA and military intelligence units now operate out of a global network of bases, as well as secret jails and detention sites operated by complicit secret police interrogators. Their strategic intelligence networks in any nation are protected by corrupt warlords and politicians, the "friendly civilians" who supply the "death squads" that are in fact their private militias, funded largely by drug smuggling and other criminal activities. CIA and military intelligence officials understand that much of the intelligence they rely upon is dubious at best, but they act on it anyway, as did Sid Towle's bosses Tom Ahern and John Vann in Vietnam, because big "body counts" impress their superiors.
As a result, anyone can be an insurgent on a death list.
Source: The CIA as Organized Crime, p. 98 - Coming of age in a fascist police state will not be a barrel of fun for anybody, much less for people like me, who are not inclined to suffer Nazis gladly and feel only contempt for the cowardly flag-suckers who would gladly give up their outdated freedom to live for the mess of pottage they have been conned into believing will be freedom from fear.
Source: Kingdom of Fear, p. - Did one have to eavesdrop on one's children, take them by surprise, to discover their warmth, to gain insight into their lives?
Source: The Safety Net, p. 127 - Fascism repudiates any universal embrace, and in order to live worthily in the community of civilized peoples watches it contemporaries with vigilant eyes, takes good note of their state of mind and, in the changing trend of their interests, does not allow itself to be deceived by temporary and fallacious appearances.
Source: The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism, p. 12-13 - Fascism repudiates the conception of "economic" happiness, to be realized by Socialism and, as it were, at a given moment in economic evolution to assure to everyone the maximum of well-being. Fascism denies the materialist conception of happiness as a possibility, and abandons it to its inventors, the economists of the first half of the nineteenth century: that is to say, Fascism denies the validity of the equation, well-being-happiness, which would reduce men to the level of animals, carrying for one thing only -- to be fat and well-fed -- and would thus degrade humanity to a purely physical existence.
Source: The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism, p. 14 - Fascism, now and always, believes in holiness and heroism; that is to say, in actions influenced by no economic motive, direct or indirect.
Source: The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism, p. 13 - For Camila all this was either a game or a nightmare; it couldn't, no, it simply couldn't be true; what was happening, happening to her, happening to her father, couldn't be true.
Source: El Senor Presidente, p. 72 - For Crevel, Lacan's thesis was promising to the left for its understanding of paranoia as a psychotic structure that systematically accuses the very ideological forces signified by Freud's notion of "culture." This culture was repressive not simply because it beat back the death drive but because it represented the full force of bourgeois social conditioning which in the France of the early 1930s, was beginning to take on a frighteningly discernible shape: an attachment to so-called family values that sanctioned patriarchal privilege and a rampant homophobia; and an ever-present xenophobia and anti-Semitism whose deep roots in twentieth-century French culture only strengthened what Crevel and the surrealists considered to be a growing fascist sympathy among the French bourgeoisie.
The "accusation" performed by murderous exhibitionism thus does not canonize the psychotic as a revolutionary figure; insofar as the physical illness represents the moral illness that produces it, Crevel's structuralist notion of behavior as a representation allows his further ideas about political illness and oppression to be a matter of extension...Yet Crevel's version of political and psychological causality structured as a "fortuitous encounter" is particularly useful to surrealism insofar as it rethinks the causality not only of presumably legitimate revolution but of the most inexplicable, brutal, and regressive of events as well -- whether domestic murder or the growing domestic appeal of fascism.
Source: Surrealism and the Art of Crime, p. 189 - For I was not, as I liked to think, the indulgent pleasure-loving opposite of the cold rigid Colonel. I was the lie that Empire tells itself when times are easy, he the truth that Empire tells when harsh winds blow. Two sides of imperial rule, no more, no less.
Source: Waiting for the Barbarians, p. 135 - Gigantic dredges were on the march, mechanical shovels amiably-pitilessly-innocently-inexorably devoured the forest, swallowing the earth, spitting it out again at a great distance, exhumed the dead (reverently, ever so reverently), tearing down churches and villages and castles, and Käthe got "the shudders" when she drove through Neu-Iffenhoven with its new houses and churches. To shudder was good.
Source: The Safety Net, p. 71 - He turns away, but with a slow claw-like hand I manage to catch his arm. "No, listen!" I say. "Do not misunderstand me, I am not blaming you or accusing you, I am long past that. Remember, I too have devoted a life to the law, I know its processes, I know that the workings of justice are often obscure. I am only trying to understand. I am trying to understand the zone in which you live. I am trying to imagine how you breathe and eat and live from day to day. But I cannot! That is what troubles me! If I were he, I say to myself, my hands would feel so dirty that it would choke me -- "
He wrenches himself free and hits me so hard in the chest that I gasp and stumble backwards. "You bastard!" he shouts. "You fucking old lunatic! Get out! Go and die somewhere!"
"When are you going to put me on trial?" I shout at his retreating back. He pays no need.
Source: Waiting for the Barbarians, p. 126 - Historically speaking, 9/11 was certainly a world event with wide and tragic consequences, also for the global respect for freedom of expression, civil rights and international law. Dissident voices and alternative information sources are regarded as Fifth Columns instead of as the Fourth Estate, and are targeted as enemies, almost equivalent to illegal combatants.
From chapter: Wikileaks and War Laws by Stig A. Nohrstedt and Rune Ottosen
Source: Media & Terrorism: Global Perspectives, p. 219 - How times have changed. A decade after the Vietnam War ended, it was still possible to persuade voters that a former member of a covert torture and assassination program wasn't suitable to be a state's chief law enforcement officer. Since 9/11, it has become a badge of honor.
Source: The CIA as Organized Crime, p. 276 - How to persuade the reader that the actual direction of contemporary politics is toward a political system the very opposite of what the political leadership, the mass media, and think tank oracles claim that it is, the world's foremost exemplar of democracy?
Source: Democracy Inc., p. xx - I swung round in amazement. Before me, almost blocking out the night, was an enormous policeman. He looked a policeman from his great size but I could see the dim sign of his buttons suspended straight before my face, tracing out the curvature of his great chest. His face was completely hidden in the dark and nothing was clear to me except his overbearing policemanship, his massive rearing of wide strengthy flesh, his domination and his unimpeachable reality. He dwelt upon my mind so strongly that I felt many times more submissive than afraid.
Source: The Third Policeman, p. 156 - I want to emphasize that I view my main construction, "inverted totalitarianism," as tentative, hypothetical, although I am convinced that certain tendencies in our society point in a direction away from self-government, the rule of law, egalitarianism, and thoughtful public discussion, and toward what I have called "managed democracy," the smiley face of inverted totalitarianism.
Source: Democracy Inc., p. xxiv - In an extreme way, Britain's paradoxical stance on political violence is what Mr Vladimir is attempting to match with his plan of creating a terrorist 'outrage' in order to elicit more stringent policing. His idea takes on an absurdist tone, though, when he explains to Verloc his 'philosophy of the bomb': 'A bomb outrage to have any influence on public opinion must go beyond the intention of vengeance or terrorism', he argues: 'it must be purely destructive. It must be that, and only that...'. Attacks on property, religion, and churches fail to disturb the quiescence of the everyday, he states, for insurrection has become a mere media phenomenon: 'Every newspaper has ready-made phrases to explain such manifestations away'. An act without authorship is thus required, he argues, an epiphanous devastation irreducible to the familiar: 'what is one to say to an act of destructive ferocity so absurd as to be incomprehensible, inexplicable, almost unthinkable; in fact, mad?' [emphasis added by Houen]
Source: Terrorism and Modern Literature, p. 36-37 - In any case, the virtual camera is in our heads. No need of a medium to reflect our problems in real time: every existence is telepresent to itself.
Source: The Perfect Crime, p. 28 - In order to constitute itself it was necessary for rationalism to lose the profundity of modes of thought that shackled it. But if we now seek what is possible before us -- all that is possible, whether or not we might have wanted to, we who no longer have any need to construct rational thought, which is effortlessly arranged for us -- we are again able to recognize the profound value of these lost modes of thought.
Source: The Absence of Myth, p. 64 - In reality, none of the a priori assumptions about modern-day America noted above are justified on the known facts. Indeed, by any standard of measure, the reality of modern-day America differs strikingly from what these intellectual elites posit. There is very good evidence to suggest, for example, that the U.S. Government is no longer subject to popular, majoritarian control and is, for all intents and purposes, an unaccountable oligarchy. There is very good evidence that, far from being subject to the control of its citizens, the U.S. Government successfully employs extreme measures to control them. Finally, there is very good evidence that the U.S. Government has an immense ability to keep official crimes hidden from public view for very long periods of time.
Source: 9/11 As False Flag: Why International Law Must Dare To Care, p. 25-26 - In refusing the mantle of humanism, surrealism opened itself to the discomfiting possibility that its work would be overshadowed by the allure of terrorist action or of political expediency. Yet as the group's long-standing fascination with crime reveals, the movement was dedicated less to destroying al laws than to thwarting the tendency for experimental thought to become law. The surrealist experiment, then, might be understood as the attempt to mobilize art to "suppress the exploitation of man by man" by causing an insurrection within thought. Herein lies surrealism's essential contribution to twentieth-century thought: not, as Jean Clair claimed, in "preparing the mind" for the atrocities of terrorism and the Holocaust, but in preparing the mind to defend itself against the forms of ideological closure that ensure the continuation of such atrocities.
Source: Surrealism and the Art of Crime, p. 276 - In...earlier wars, media outlets and personalities have been indicted for their role in instigating conflict and contributing to it...The post-World War II Nuremberg Trial established a precedent in this regard...[T]he protection case, argued by Drexel Sprecher, an American, placed considerable stress on the role of media propaganda in enabling the Hitler regime to prepare and carry out aggression that violated the laws of war. The use made by the Nazi conspirators of psychological warfare is well known. Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically for the attack.
From chapter: Challenging the Media War by Danny Schecter
Source: Media & Terrorism: Global Perspectives, p. 313 - Is it true, or rather will it be certain tomorrow that this error is particularly, exclusively German?
Source: Arcanum 17, p. 27 - It is difficult to disagree with the observations of the historian of US imperialism Richard Immerman:
"The empire that America constructed in the twentieth century is the most powerful empire in world history...It has assembled institutions -- the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, the Organization of American States, the World Trade Organization, and more -- that provide potent mechanisms for global management." (Immerman, 2010:12)
The majority of mainstream media enthusiastically take part in this global management process.
From chapter: Introduction
Source: Media & Terrorism: Global Perspectives, p. 4 - It is not easy to make men perish entirely, and there are laws; but with patience one can exterminate the humanitarian ants one by one. [Lautréamont, from Chants de Maldorer, 6th Canto]
Source: Anthology of Black Humour, p. 178 - It is the State which educates its citizens in civic virtue, gives them a consciousness of their mission and welds them into unity; harmonizing their various interests through justice, and transmitting to future generations the mental conquests of science, of art, of law and the solidarity of humanity. It leads men from primitive tribal life to that highest expression of human power which is Empire: it links up through the centuries the names of those of its members who have died for its existence and in obedience to its laws, it holds up the memory of the leaders who have increased its territory and the geniuses who have illumined it with glory as an example to be followed by future generations.
Source: The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism, p. 22 - Jim Garrison, the New Orleans prosecutor who for years tried to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy, once remarked, "I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security." He was, perhaps, closer to the truth than he realized, for it was during the Kennedy Administration that senior U.S. military officials proposed a false-flag terror operation...called Operation Northwoods...Northwoods included proposals for false-flag acts of sabotage of the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; the sinking of a U.S. Navy ship in the Guantanamo Bay harbor (casualty lists for which, it was hoped, "would help cause a helpful wave of national indignation"); the blowing up of John Glenn's rocket ship during his historic space flight; and a highly elaborate deception for simulating the shooting-down of civilian airplanes which involved the retrofitting of aircraft by the CIA, secret landings and disembarkation of passengers, and the surreptitious substitution of drones for aircraft. On behalf of the Joint Chiefs, Lemnitzer submitted the Northwoods plan to President Kennedy's Seret of Defense, Robert McNamara, whereupon it was summarily quashed.
Source: 9/11 As False Flag: Why International Law Must Dare To Care, p. 16-17 - Just returned from the front line in the Spanish Civil War, Ernest Hemingway told the Second Congress of the League of American Writers that fascism was "a lie told by bullets."
Source: The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, p. 13 - Laqueur agreed with many scholars that Fascist Italy was never 'quite totalitarian,' and showed no interest in Gentile's concept of Italian totalitarianism as a means or process rather than a goal or structure. Laqueur also accepted the interpretation that the two regimes [i.e., German and Italian] possessed a certain 'polycratic' structure in so far as they were never fashioned into a single coherent bureaucracy.
Source: George L. Mosse and Walter Laqueur on the History of Fascism, p. 762 - Laqueur found terror and propaganda of approximately equal importance in developing and maintaining the two principal fascist systems, though the degree of terror was much less in the Italian case.
Source: George L. Mosse and Walter Laqueur on the History of Fascism, p. 762 - Laqueur gave fascist doctrine due importance, labeling it 'nationalist, elitist, and anti-liberal,' but differentiating it from the radical right because of its fundamentally revolutionary thrust. Racism was seen as an important variable, rather than intrinsic to all fascism. He treated key differences between the Italian and German movements, in terms of the importance of the myth of the nation and of the state for the former, and of race for the latter. Unlike some, Laqueur warned that not every idea and ingredient found in fascism was wrong just because it was used by fascists, and agreed with his co-editor that fascism was not truly nihilistic, as was so often claimed, but was based on a strongly held belief system and even a kind of perverted morality.
Source: George L. Mosse and Walter Laqueur on the History of Fascism, p. 761 - Liberalism is the logical and, indeed, historical forerunner of anarchy...As for Italian unity, its debt to Liberalism is completely inferior in contrast to that which it owes to the work of Mazzini and Garibaldi, who were not Liberals...From 1870 to 1914 a period began during which even the very high priests of the religion themselves had to recognize the gathering twilight of their faith -- defeated as it was by the decadence of literature and atavism in practice -- that is to say, Nationalism, Futurism, Fascism.
Source: The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism, p. 18 - Like Freud's depiction of the dream-work as the condensed and distorted projection of unconscious wishes, Desnos's poetic and cinematic marvelous eluded the conventional censorship of commercial narratives. It described instead a space beyond good and evil that Desnos attempted, in turn, to reconcile with the real. This reconciliation, he argues in a 1924 essay, is the "revolutionary" goal of surrealism, and, more specifically, of surrealist ethics as "the sense of life and not the observance of human laws." Yet whereas Breton argued for the inextricability of socioeconomic revolution from a surrealist liberation of the mind, Desnos's understanding of revolution privileged the latter aim...Desnos writes:
"They are a gang -- from the priest to the professor -- who invoke the spirit, who make a living from it, and who make it serve the lowest ends. It's against them, and against this deformed spirit, that the surrealists mean to fight. 'You claim to ruin bourgeois painting and yet you make paintings. Go and destroy the Louvre,' people told me on the way out of the surrealist exhibition. If we destroyed the paintings in the Louvre we would be individualists. Likewise you don't just go out and shoot fascist delegates. But you fight the capitalist spirit. Right now it's less a matter of carrying out revolution than of preparing for a battle of opinion."
Source: Surrealism and the Art of Crime, p. 128-129 - Lukács challenged European modernism in general and German expressionism in particular for their irrationalism, subjectivism, and utopianism. Essays like "Greatness and Decline of Expressionism" (1934) and "Realism in the Balance" (1938) maintain that fashionable avant-garde trends helped create the cultural preconditions in which fascism could thrive. Lukács' alternative was a form of "critical realism" perhaps best exemplified in the works of Honore de Balzac, Leo Tolstoy, and Thomas Mann.
Source: Critical Theory, p. 66 - May the recent events have taught France and the world that liberty can only subsist in a dynamic state, that it becomes denatured and negates itself at the moment when one makes of it a museum piece...Humanity's aspirations for liberty must always be given the power to recreate themselves endlessly; that's why it must be thought of not as a state but as a living force bringing about continual progress...Liberty is not, like liberation, a struggle against sickness, it is health.
Source: Arcanum 17, p. 126,128 - More important than the question of Henry Kissinger's fittingness is the broader pattern of CIA activity on Cold War American university campuses to which the Summer School episode points. Harvard was not unique in this respect...Countless other less well-known institutions contributed to the secret Cold War effort: the Ramparts revelations began in 1966 with a report that the CIA had paid Michigan State University $25 million to hire five Agency employees to train South Vietnamese students in covert police methods.
Source: The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, p. 128 - More telling still is the way that the radical revolutionaries defined -- or invented -- their enemies in relation to their special vision of the revolution. The men who dominated the Committee of Public Safety, Robespierre and Saint-Just, like the editor of L'ami du peuple Jean-Paul Marat, invested the people with a republican virtue that was often too sublime for the real world. They framed issues in absolutes and opposites: Robespierre's rhetoric invoked 'all the virtues and all the miracles of the Republic' against 'the vices and the absurdities of the monarchy'. Counter-revolutionaries were labelled monsters, ferocious beasts, vultures, leeches, or -- if allowed human status at all -- brigands, and were found even more frequently amongst the lower orders than amongst the aristocracy. There might be a monarchist or a 'non-juring' priest (one who refused to accept the Civil Constitution of the Clergy) under every bed. Along with these negative or visceral identifications went the positive identification of revolutionary justice, in the form of lynching. Marat argued from the outset that such killing was an imprescriptible right of the sovereign people: the natural violence required to resist oppression and preserve liberty against tyranny. Altogether this provided an ideological charter for the most extreme action, without compunction or remorse.
Source: Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction, p. 39 - Muller's sense of the "world of reality" to be discredited differed enormously from Dali's: for Muller, what was currently under siege was the "man-made" fabric of European social relations rent apart by fascism, its humanist claims demolished by Hitler's genocidal politics of hatred. The surrealists, though, implicated reality as the set of "learned machinations" that resulted in the West's complicity, conscious or unconscious, with the rise and militarization of fascism.
Source: Surrealism and the Art of Crime, p. 240 - Not only did the CIA seek to influence the production of commercial films -- "to insert in their scripts and in their action the right ideas with the proper subtlety," as C.D. Jackson put it, the Agency also occasionally initiated film projects. The best documented instance of the latter practice is the animated version of George Orwell's celebrated 1945 novella Animal Farm...
Source: The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, p. 118 - Once again he had to enter the gray area where discretion and security collide and one or the other could explode. If someone had ever predicted that it would one day be part of his security duties to find out in which month and by whom a woman was pregnant, he would have laughed.
Source: The Safety Net, p. 194 - Oscillating between Trotskyite and neo-anarchist political affiliation throughout the 1950s, surrealism's postwar project was oriented toward defending political and intellectual freedom against the military and ideological state apparatuses that worked to suppress it. Thus, although it recalled the anti colonialism of the 120s in its political imperative, by the mid-1950s surrealism's project was not defined in the same terms as its prewar incarnations; rather than seeking to incite revolutionary thought of action through their works, the surrealists instead committed themselves to defending and extending such thought and action as it happened.
Source: Surrealism and the Art of Crime, p. 271 - People think this is something that started in Central America during Iran-Contra, but it started in China when the US backed Chiang Kai-shek in the 1920s. The only way that Chiang Kai-shek could finance his government was through the opium trade. There were laws restricting the opium trade, but the US turned a blind eye to Chiang's opium business because they didn't want the Communists taking over China. The United States has been engaged in an unstated policy since the 1920s of supporting its political allies by allowing the leadership to make fortunes dealing drugs.
Source: The CIA as Organized Crime, p. 210 - Phoenix was a program in Vietnam, a methodology, but it is also a concept based in a speculative philosophy of history in which self-made America is exceptional, and its will to power is determinant. Phoenix the program goes through organizational changes. Over the eight years it existed, pieces were put into it and taken out. The pieces were called different things; different labels were put on the jar up on the shelf. But it is also a method of thinking about and controlling perceptions of, and events in, the ever present spectacular moment, and as such as transferable and adaptable to any situation.
Source: The CIA as Organized Crime, p. 206 - Policemen are not human beings so how can police dogs be animals?
Source: The Hearing Trumpet, p. 14 - She did not recognise captivity; she thought herself free.
Source: All Hallows' Eve, p. 80 - Since the incident with Kortschede, the last vestiges of irony had vanished from their comments on security surveillance; only Bleibl occasionally permitted himself a passing shot. Their relations with the guards had changed too, since Kortschede's fit their friendly but sometimes patronizing manner was no longer possible, and since the affair of Pliefger's birthday cake joking wasn't possible either -- there was work for Kiernter the psychologist, there were long conferences with Holzpuke (in charge of security), who asked for forbearance, after all the guards were only doing their duty, and as for themselves, surely they wanted to safeguard their lives, so they must accept apparent pedantries -- such as a guard inspecting the toilet before one of them used it, or "lady visitors" being closely scrutinized -- and, please, escapades such as those occasionally indulged in by Käthe should be avoided. Yet they should have realized that there was no such thing as security, either internal or external; he knew that all these measures had to be yet would prevent nothing.
Source: The Safety Net, p. 32 - Staging paranoia's reflexive play of delusional identifications as an artistic problem, I argue, offered the surrealists a critical system for diagnosing the social forces that threatened to replicate themselves in the age of fascism...Salvador Dali's "Non-Euclidean Psychology of a Photograph," published in Minotaure in 1935, most succinctly illuminates surrealism's "paranoiac" strategy of overlooking an obvious threat in order to highlight broader, more latent evils.
Source: Surrealism and the Art of Crime, p. 233 - Technical rationality today is the rationality of domination.
Source: Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 95 - That the murder of political opponents has altered, or could have altered, the course of history in certain circumstances goes without saying. If Pichegru or Cadoudal had killed Napoleon, if Lenin had met with an accident on the road to the Finland Station, if Hitler had been shot in front of the Munich Feldherrnhalle in 1923, the map of Europe would look different today. But these are the exceptions; in democratic and many undemocratic societies, statesmen are usually expendable...These examples refer to individual assassinations, but the results of systematic terrorist campaigns have not been very different. If there was an impact at all, it was usually negative; unlike King Midas, everything that was touched by the propagandists of the deed turned to ashes. Their actions usually produced violent repression and a polarization which precluded political progress.
Source: The Age of Terrorism, p. 137 - The analysis offered by de Tocqueville a hundred years ago has been fully borne out in the meantime. Under the private monopoly of culture tyranny does indeed "leave the body free and sets to work directly on the soul. The ruler no longer says: 'Either you think as I do or you die.' He says: 'You are free not to think as I do; your life, your property -- all that you shall keep. But from this day on you will be a stranger among us."
Source: Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 105-106 - The best we can do is acknowledge the fact that we are prisoners -- that we'll perish in security, perhaps from security.
Source: The Safety Net, p. 123 - The dissemination of popular songs, by contrast, is practically instantaneous. The American term "fad" for fashions which catch on epidemically -- inflamed by the action of highly concentrated economic powers -- referred to this phenomenon long before totalitarian advertising bosses had laid down the general lines of culture in their countries. If the German fascists launch a word like "intolerable" [Untragbar] over the loudspeakers one day, the whole nation is saying "intolerable" the next.
Source: Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 134 - The experiences of dead journalists and the case of WikiLeaks should be understood in a context of the emergence of a threat-society as a later phase of the risk-society Beck wrote about more than two decades ago (Beck, 1986). In threat-society there are trends that work as undercurrents, and channel opinions towards accepting violations of human rights and international laws for the sake of security. The culture of fear has a firm grip on popular culture, mediatized discourses and people's minds, and it is exploited for threat policies based upon speculative threat images together with public appeals for patriotism and trust to the leaders in these difficult times. In particular, the militarization of security policy implies that democratic deliberation is moulded into an iron cage of complicity and subordination .
From chapter: Wikileaks and War Laws by Stig A. Nohrstedt and Rune Ottosen
Source: Media & Terrorism: Global Perspectives, p. 218-219 - The Fascist State has drawn into itself even the economic activities of the nation, and, through the corporative social and educational institutions created by it, its influence reaches every aspect of the national life and includes, framed in their respective organizations, all the political, economic and spiritual forces of the nation...The individual in the Fascist State is not annulled but rather multiplied, just in the same way that a soldier in a regiment is not diminished but rather increased by the number of his comrades. The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone.
Source: The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism, p. 24 - The foundation of Fascism is the conception of the State, its character, its duty, and its aim. Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State...the Fascist State is itself conscious, and has itself a will and a personality -- thus it may be called the "ethic" State.
Source: The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism, p. 21 - The government took PR to a new level: it is now called PM for 'perception management' and it treats war as a product to be 'rolled out' and promoted. It is serious and systematic. It branded the war and used advertising-like slogans to sell it...Anchormen complained the the media had gone from being a watchdog to a lap dog, but did nothing about it...It is important to understand that this does not add up to a critique of a few lapses or media mistakes. The Iraq War was more than a catalogue of errors or flaws. The war was shaped for coverage, planned and formatted, pre-produced and aired with high production values, designed to persuade, not just inform. What we saw and are seeing is a crime against democracy and the public's right to know.
From chapter: Challenging the Media War by Danny Schecter
Source: Media & Terrorism: Global Perspectives, p. 314-315 - The guerrilla war in the villages baffled the Americans, so the CIA started experimenting with a lot of political and psychological ways of fighting the insurgency in the villages. They called it "the other war." Pacification. The job fell to the CIA because it meant killing civilians not soldiers. The military isn't supposed to go into a village and kill everybody. They did it anyway, plenty of times, but it turned the people against the US and its puppets in the South Vietnamese government.
So the job of killing civilians was given to the CIA, which isn't hampered by any rules of engagement related to the laws of any country. There is nothing to stop the CIA's hired killers from going into the villages and snuffing and snatching Uncle Ho's cadres. The cadres are teachers, labourers, mailmen, farmers; but they're not soldiers. They provide support for the NVA and the guerrillas. They're the backbone of the insurgency.
The CIA realises it has to "eliminate" these people to win the war. It works through its assets in a country's judicial system to create administrative detention laws that allow Americans and their subsidiary counterterrorism teams to snatch the cadres from their homes at midnight, without charging these targeted cadres with having committed criminal offences. It builds secret interrogation centers where the cadres and their friends and family members can be tortured and turned into double agents. It creates a system that terrorises everyone, in order to create millions of informers. Once it finds out who the cadres are, the CIA sends out its death squads. The CIA calls them counterterrorism teams like the ones it uses today in Afghanistan and Iraq and other countries around the world. They creep into the cadres' homes in the middle of the night, drag them away to the interrogation centers, or slit their throats and kill their friends and their families for psychological reasons, and run away before anybody knows what happened.
In 1967 the CIA brings together all these methods of fighting the guerrilla war in the Phoenix program. Phoenix combines all these things plus a lot I haven't mentioned. It pulls together people from the army, navy, air force and Special Forces. It includes the Vietnamese secret services. It coordinates everybody that's involved in the war and brings every resource to bear on the political people i the villages, i an effort to wipe them off the face of the earth. That's what the Phoenix program is. The total number of people killed was between 25,000 and 40,000.
Source: The CIA as Organized Crime, p. 205-206 - The internalization of boundaries that the State has put around freedom for a 'liberated' people -- the cowed, passive acceptance of rising levels of domination, restriction and repressive policing -- was a key factor in Fourier's disgust for Western civilization. Concomitant with the rise in repression in bourgeois-liberal European society, Fourier had also spotted sharp increases in the level of artifice that distracted and deluded the senses and the instincts. Anticipating the mid-twentieth-century research by Freudo-Marxists Wilhelm Reich and the Frankfurt School on the psychosexual origins and psychical costs of patriarchal State power, Fourier was alarmed by how unnatural, stifling conventions of thought and behaviour had been reified into civilized values of conformity and consent, and he deemed them to be ultimately toxic to the human animal. In their perpetually ungratified state (Fourier calls them 'suffocated'), passions became twisted and poisonous, resulting in crime, malice, selfishness and war.
This puts Fourier's thinking on human liberty on a trajectory that takes us to Herbert Marcuse and beyond. Fourier's criticisms of the consensual mentality and its pathologies of war, and the Surrealists' warnings about the inevitable ramifications of the hypocritical, lazy and compromised definitions of liberty allowed to circulate after 1945, lead us to Marcuse's thinking about 'unfreedom' in the lands of 'free' enterprise and 'free' elections...In seeing a third term of unfreedom in the imperialist war in Vietnam and in the bureaucratic micromanagement of everyday life which was parodied by the Da Costa Licence to Live, the Surrealists were attempting to extend the expectations of free people, a fight that was not without political implications.
From chapter: Attacks of the Fantastic, Donald LaCoss
Source: Surrealism, Politics and Culture, p. 291 - The lie which is no longer challenged becomes lunacy...The ideology which is materialized in this context has not economically transformed the world, as has capitalism which reached the stage of abundance; it has merely transformed perception by means of the police.
Source: Society of the Spectacle, p. 105 - The military or military-controlled regimes in Chile, Argentina, Peru, Brazil, Uruguay, and elsewhere, taking the socialist threat as justification, unleashed full-blown systems of terror designed to paralyse all left-wing activity. The keynotes of these systems, in which whole armies and police forces seem to have participated enthusiastically, were not only killing, but a perhaps more sinister and subversive structure of arbitrary imprisonment, torture, and 'disappearance'. Though these must be described as 'systems' of terror, they were not comprehensible as such -- rather the apparently uncontrolled action of variegated and overlapping security forces created a nightmarish situation that may perhaps be called Kafkaesque.
Source: Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction, p. 47 - The Nazi and Fascist regimes were powered by revolutionary movements whose aim was not only to capture, reconstitute, and monopolize state power but also to gain control over the economy. By controlling the state and the economy, the revolutionaries gained the leverage necessary to reconstruct, then mobilize society. In contrast, inverted totalitarianism is only in part a state-entered phenomenon. Primarily, it represents the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry.
Source: Democracy Inc., p. xviii - The Nuremberg prosecution raised an issue that is of the greatest relevance today: the role of Nazi media propaganda in inuring the German population to the sufferings of other peoples and, indeed, urging Germans to commit war crimes. Historical parallels are never exact and I am not here to argue that because the Nazis distorted their media, the US or British media are Nazis. That is specious reasoning. But a broader point, also argued at Nuremberg, does have resonance today. Many in the Pentagon believe to this day that it was the media coverage that was responsible for the loss of the Vietnam War. That led to large amounts of money and manpower invested in controlling the media in preparation for future wars.
From chapter: Challenging the Media War by Danny Schecter
Source: Media & Terrorism: Global Perspectives, p. 313 - The possible thoughts of the security guards killed all spontaneity in him...It wasn't only the security measures that deterred him from simply walking to the village: it was also his legs, which no longer behaved as well as they used to, and he couldn't have said which deterred him more: his legs or that inescapable surveillance.
Source: The Safety Net, p. 23 - The problem of the relation between the individual citizen and the State; the allied problems of authority and liberty; political and social problems as well as those specifically national -- a solution was being sought for all these while at the same time the struggle against Liberalism, Democracy, Socialism and the Masonic bodies was being carried on, contemporaneously with the "punitive expedition."
Source: The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism, p. 10 - The real power in America is held by a fast-emerging new Oligarchy of pimps and preachers who see no need for Democracy or fairness or even trees, except maybe the ones in their own yards, and they don't mind admitting it. They worship money and power and death. Their ideal solution to all the nation's problems would be another 100 Year War.
Source: Kingdom of Fear, p. - The Reign of Terror was informed by the Enlightenment assumption that the social order can be changed by human agency. For a long time, those who were prepared to defend the terrorists did so on the grounds that their action was rational, because inevitable, in the circumstances. Certainly the Revolution as the Jacobin elite saw it was under threat in 1972-3, confronted with both external and internal enemies. But this argument is weakened by the fact that the Terror reached its height, with the truly terrifying law of 22 prairial Year II (1794) -- depriving the accused of the right to counsel or to call witnesses, and empowering the revolutionary tribunal to execute suspects on the basis of moral conviction -- at a time when both of these threats were receding.
Source: Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction, p. 38-39 - The search for neofascists has been ongoing since the late 1940s, due above all to the broad use of the term as a pejorative, though such a discussion involves major issues of definition and taxonomy. By the 1990s, it was clear that there have been a long series of groups that have sought to revive and/or redefine fascist doctrine, even though no individual party with these characteristics ever became a major force in any country. Indeed, the only one that lasted for many years and enjoyed a certain mass following was the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI). Unlike the situation after the First World War, a 'dearth of new political ideas' set in after 1945. This resulted in the adjustment or moderation of old ideas, and even the MSI had to give way in the 1990s to the decidedly post-fascist Alleanza Nazionale.
The same may be said for the Front National in France, so that any political initiative worth discussing turns out to be rightist and populist, and always lacking key ingredients of fascism. Genuine neofascism never achieved significance because, historically, there had been an inoculation effect, and, secondly, because of the enormous change in circumstances, the unique crystallization of events in the 1920s and 30s being something that cannot be repeated. There was a countercultural rightist lifestyle among small minorities ('skinheads'), there was naturally and inevitably growing hostility to uncontrolled immigration by inassimilable and potentially subversive groups, and there was growing antisemitism on both left and right, but none of this amounted to the revival of generic fascism. Any obsessive search for the latter seemed likely to end in confusion and conflation.
Source: George L. Mosse and Walter Laqueur on the History of Fascism, p. 764 - The soldiery tyrannizes the town. They have held a torchlight meeting on the square to denounce "cowards and traitors" and to affirm collective allegiance to the Empire. WE STAY has become the slogan of the faithful: the words are to be seen daubed on walls everywhere. I stood in the dark on the edge of the huge crowd that night (no one was brave enough to stay at home) listening to these words chanted ponderously, menacingly from thousands of throats. A shiver ran down my back. After the meeting the soldiers led a procession through the streets. Doors were kicked in, windows broken, a house set on fire. Till late at night there was drinking and carousing on the square...Now that they seem to be all that stands between us and destruction, these foreign soldiers are anxiously courted.
Source: Waiting for the Barbarians, p. 130-131 - The ties between surrealism's politics and the problem of terrorist violence briefly became a public issue once more in 2001, in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Recalling the surrealist movement's anti colonial and anti-Western rhetoric, which had been especially visible during the 1920s and 1930s, the prominent French curator Jean Clair excoriated the movement for its resemblance to al-Qaeda. In a newspaper editorial published in December 2001, Clair juxtaposed the destruction of the World Trade Center with Louis Aragon's 1925 rant against the "white buildings" of New York City, suggesting a causal (rather than merely analogical) relationship between fundamentalist terrorism and the interwar European avant-garde. In making this juxtaposition, Clair contends that "the surrealist ideology never stopped hoping for the death of an America it saw as materialist and sterile, and for the triumph of an Orient that served as the repository for the values of the mind." ore than simply a historical coincidence, Clair argues, surrealism's anti-Western and pro-"Oriental" ideology helped "prepare the minds" of European civilization -- yet prepared them not for revolution but for an anti humanism complicit with the forms of totalitarianism and state terror that would follow, from Stalinist purges to the Holocaust.
Clair's polemic was an attack on avant-garde rhetoric, though, rather than a critique of the surrealist movement's actual political thinking, as represented in the many tracts, pamphlets, and speeches the surrealists produced throughout the movement's history. Indeed, Clair's own charge of surrealism's complicity in 9/11 -- a rhetorical gesture par excellence -- is a reaction, he claims, against the ideological stakes of surrealism's own intensified rhetoric, whose insults and violent polemics "are no different from those found in the fiery attacks of the fascist leagues or, on the other side of the political spectrum, those soon to be addressed to the 'mad dogs' in the Moscow trials. They signal an era." Violent rhetoric produces violent action, Clair maintains; and because surrealism spoke, and because its rhetoric thus served as the conduit between its artistic practices and the political sphere, surrealist appeals to violence and to the dissolution of Western humanistic ideals cannot safely be viewed as autonomous artistic utterances. In "seeking to conflate vita contemplativa and vita politica," Clair argues, the movements members become as subject to judgment and condemnation as any member of a political party.
Source: Surrealism and the Art of Crime, p. 268 - The White Man's Tools of Power, Crime, and Mystification: legislative lobbying, community organizing, international law, petroleum geology, political philosophy.
Source: Vulture's Picnic, p. 125 - Then there was the OSS's...penchant not only for paramilitary sabotage and subversion but also for the subtler arts of "psychological warfare," propaganda designed to undermine enemy morale and strengthen that of allies. "Persuasion, penetration, and intimidation...are the modern counterparts of sapping and mining in the siege warfare of former days," believed Donovan.
Source: The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, p. 18-19 - There have been incidents in which soldiers have gone into shops, taken what they wanted, and left without paying. Of what use is it for the shopkeeper to raise the alarm when the criminals and the civil guard are the same people?
Source: Waiting for the Barbarians, p. 123 - There is always a hidden camera somewhere. You can be filmed without knowing it. You can be called to act it all out again for any of the TV channels. You think you exist in the original-language version, without realizing that this is now merely a special case of dubbing, an exceptional version for the 'happy few'. Any of your acts can be instantly broadcast on any station. There was a time when we would have considered this a form of police surveillance. Today, we regard it as advertising.
Source: The Perfect Crime, p. 28 - There is no question that Carrington was in need of some treatment; she had become convinced that parts of Europe were becoming hypnotized by agents of Hitler. Although this doesn't seem very far off the mark for the people who experienced it, Carrington believed that magical forces were at work and repeatedly singled out certain Nazi figures (a man named Van Ghent in Spain, for example) as targets for assassination. She was ultimately committed to an asylum for constantly badgering the British Embassy that Van Ghent should be eliminated.
Source: Disruptive Testimonies: The Stakes of Surrealist Experience in Breton and Carrington, p. 100 - There was at least room for suspicion that the threat of terrorism was being used as a pretext for striking down disagreeable regimes.
Source: Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction, p. 135 - These and other attentions and courtesies had long been accepted by him as indications of his increasingly rigorous imprisonment, in which everything, every courteous gestures, was transformed into both surveillance and threat.
Source: The Safety Net, p. 29 - This nonfiction fable has a moral to it: 'Power, Crime, Mystification, Mr. Palast,' Etok said. 'That's how they do it. Power, Crime, Mystification.'
Etok walked me through the three steps on 'How to Take Oil That Isn’t Yours.'
1. POWER: The expression of the conqueror's strength or, more often, the weakness of the conquered. It's not wild coincidence that Bob Malone, who headed BP's Alaska and Gulf operations, was simultaneously co-chair of the George W. Bush re-election campaign.
2. CRIME: Making promises you don't intend to keep is fraudulent inducement. Do it three times and it's racketeering.
3. MYSTIFICATION: The web of rituals, usually legalistic -- including treaties, land deeds, and laws -- imposed by conquerors to legitimize their crime. In the fog of legalismo, the victims often acquiesce to the terms imposed.
Source: Vulture's Picnic, p. 285-286 - True antifascism, the surrealists argued, required more than a mobilization against some strange, alien threat. Rather, as the Noziere case fully revealed, it required a fundamental attack on petit-bourgeois values not just the revolution in class relations to which the surrealists remained committed throughout the 1930s, but even more fundamentally, a revolution in family values -- a revolution, in other words, in gender relations. Like the rewriting of Violette's name, this revolution would require not only violence but also a form of writing and thinking that is at once stealing and flying, a surrealist libération de l'esprit.
Source: Surrealism and the Art of Crime, p. 214 - Unlike the more celebrated surrealist images of the early 1920s, this composition [the before & after juxtaposition of the Papin sisters] invokes, through absence, the disruptive violence of the Papin murders for analytical rather than affective purposes. Its aim is no longer to "disorient us in our own memory by depriving us of a frame of reference," as Breton wrote in 1921, but rather to orient. Indeed by 1933 disorientation and disillusionment were no longer simply the watchwords of surrealist activity but had instead become conditions of political life under the threat of the seemingly incomprehensible rise of fascism. In this context the surrealist image offered a new frame of reference for political judgment; yet its value as theory would derive less from philosophy or logic than from the clinical study of paranoia, whose challenge to the naive realism at the core of communist thinking would provide the epistemological grounds for a renewed surrealist commitment to political resistance, directed explicitly against fascism....[P]aranoia increasingly offered...a form of thought that "was both autonomous and critical," and "could destabilize a consensual understanding of the real."
Source: Surrealism and the Art of Crime, p. 179-180 - Virtuality is different from the spectacle, which still left room for a critical consciousness and demystification. The abstraction of the 'spectacle' was never irrevocable, even for the Situationists. Whereas unconditional realization is irrevocable, since we are no longer either alienated or dispossessed: we are in possession of all the information. We are no longer spectators, but actors in the performance, and actors increasingly integrated into the course of that performance. Whereas we could face up to the unreality of the world as spectacle, we are defenceless before the extreme reality of this world, before this virtual perfection...This is the new form of terror...
Source: The Perfect Crime, p. 29 - We are experiencing the triumph of contemporaneity and of its accomplice, forgetting or collective amnesia. Stated somewhat differently, in early modern times change displaced traditions; today change succeeds change.
Source: Democracy Inc., p. xviii - We want to accustom the working-class to real and effectual leadership, and also to convince them that it is no easy thing to direct an industry or a commercial enterprise successfully.
Source: The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism, p. 9 - What needs to be stressed is that thousands of Americans, including unelected political cadres like Wolfowitz, and scores of journalists with access to them like Zakaria, know that the CIA-owned Ministry of Interior operates more than a dozen secret prisons. They know what goes on in them, too. As one Iraqi general told the film-makers, "drilling, murder, torture -- the ugliest sorts of torture I've ever seen."
Likewise, the composition and operations of Special Police death squads, an American interviewee said, "were discussed openly, wherever it was, at staff meetings," and were "common knowledge across Baghdad."
Common knowledge never shared with the public.
It is a testament to the power of US "information warfare" that this policy of systematic war crimes comes as a surprise to the general public. Such is the power of National Security State insiders like David Corn and Michael Isikoff, who happily turned a policy of calculated war crimes into the "hubris" of a few sexy mad patriots whom the Establishment is glad to scandalise, but never prosecute.
Certainly people have to be reminded, and the young have to learn, that America's policy of war crimes for profit cannot exist without the complicity of the mainstream media, which shamelessly exploits our inclination to believe that our leaders behave morally. As George Orwell wrote in 1945, "The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."
Belligerent nationalism is understood in America as the essence of patriotism, and this veneration for militants is taught to all budding reporters at journalism schools, along with the sacred Code of Silence. Which is why, when insider Seymour Hersh reported that the CIA and Israel were training Special Forces assassination squads for deployment in Iraq based on the Phoenix program model, he described it in a bloodless manner that made it seem necessary and, at worst, a mistake.
But war crimes are not a mistake; they are a "repugnant" and thoroughly intentional form of modern American warfare.
Source: The CIA as Organized Crime, p. 149 - What's coming now is the very, very new era which nobody will look back on with longing.
Source: The Safety Net, p. 115 - While Breton often locates this disruptive force in the mind's encounter with the feminine, Carrington places the disruptive force in mind and body alike, creating the space for a feminine experience that shifts Surrealist aesthetics away from mere male psychic liberation, while avoiding the trap of a universalized femininity. In so doing, Carrington makes history a central concern for surreal experience.
Source: Disruptive Testimonies: The Stakes of Surrealist Experience in Breton and Carrington, p. 102 - Who does like it, anyway, always having the police all over the place with their transceivers and cameras on the street?
Source: The Safety Net, p. 54 - With the triumph of fascism, the degeneration of communism, and the integration of social democracy, [Enlightenment] ideals were seen as having lost their cachet and, as a consequence, this kind of political critique as having lost its appeal. Auschwitz had punctured the aura associated with progress and modernity. Old-fashioned criteria for making judgements, constructing narratives and understanding reality thus became anachronistic. The postmodern appears avant la letter. Enlightenment and modernity find their fulfillment in a concentration camp universe run by an unaccountable bureaucracy, fueled by an instrumental rationality run amok, and expressed in the unleashing of an unimaginable rage.
Source: Critical Theory, p. 52 - Yes, said Ulrich. Is the young American woman on the floor above mine a radical? I can easily find out for you, said the chief of police, smiling, feeling proud of the Hargenaus. Old, old family with a castle somewhere in Westphalia. Pity they decided to drop the von.
Source: How German Is It, p. 38 - [A] very suitable definition of contemporary man might be that he is man under observation -- observed by the state, for one, with more and more sophisticated methods while man makes more and more desperate attempts to escape being observed, which in turn renders man increasingly suspect in the eyes of the state and the state even more suspect in the eyes of man...
Source: The Assignment, p. 16 - [A]fter ten years of seeing Europe crushed under the boots of fascist murderers and their self-serving political collaborators, the time had come for an even more revolutionary flavor of liberation that had exceeded the fantasies of Marx and Engels -- there was a need for a set of ideas that would totally reorder the very fabric of the universe in the service of freedom, and the Surrealists saw this as the best reason for a renaissance of Romantic socialism and Fourierist poetics. In a postwar political climate dominated by the viciously cynical Jesuit device of 'ends justify means', talk of Fourier introduced two things that were sorely lacking: a blackly humorous critical (and therefore revolutionary) spark and an unwavering dedication to the complete emancipation of human beings. 'Action, even in the rigorous and unquestioned form it takes today for those who fight in the name of liberty, will only be valuable so long as our interpretation of the world...will not have the brakes slammed on it', Breton thundered. The revolutionary poetry of Fourier's socialism was exactly the kind of critical extravagance that a truly free and freedom-respecting society should be able to tolerate and welcome.
From chapter: Attacks of the Fantastic, Donald LaCoss
Source: Surrealism, Politics and Culture, p. 279-280 - [A]s the Surrealists saw it, people had become dangerously complacent about the limits that the State put on 'emancipation'. Nazi Germany and the Iron Curtain were not the only threats to freedom -- from the French bureaucratic monoliths and colonial wars of the late 1940s to the union sacrée of the national security state in the US today, more and more people allow themselves to settle for less and less liberty, as Fourier had studied for himself and which the Surrealists had taken to heart.
From chapter: Attacks of the Fantastic, Donald LaCoss
Source: Surrealism, Politics and Culture, p. 290 - [Blurtmehl speaking] "Yes, there's no such thing as security -- and yet there has to be a security system."
Source: The Safety Net, p. 101 - [CIA front the American Society for African Culture representative Ted] Harris's move from New York to the Congo in 1961 is suggestive of his importance to CIA operations in Africa: the murder of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in January of that year had cleared the way for the creation of a US-friendly government in the central African republic, and the purpose of Harris's new institute in Leopoldville was to train local politicians in western administrative techniques (and, probably, channel CIA subsidies to them).
Source: The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, p. 214 - [E]nlightenment is totalitarian as only a system can be. Its untruth does not lie in the analytical method, the reduction to elements, the decomposition through reflection, as its Romantic enemies had maintained from the first, but in its assumption that the trial is prejudged...It equates thought with mathematics. The latter is thereby cut loose, as it were, turned into an absolute authority...For the scientific temper, any deviation of thought from the business of manipulating the actual, any stepping outside the jurisdiction of existence, is no less senseless and self-destructive than it would be for the magician to step outside the magic circle drawn for his incantation; and in both cases violation of the taboo carries a heavy price for the offender.
Source: Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 18-19 - [Fascism] is not reactionary, but revolutionary, in that it anticipates the solution of the universal political problems which elsewhere have to be settled in the political field by the rivalry of parties, the excessive power of the Parliamentary regime and the irresponsibility of political assemblies; while it meets the problems of the economic field by a system of syndicalism which is continually increasing in importance, as much in the sphere of labour as of industry: and in the moral field enforces order, discipline, and obedience to that which is the determined moral code of the country.
Source: The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism, p. 24 - [Following fascism and Communism] Now it is terrorists who lurk in every shadow, images of terrorist attacks that fill our television screens, and fears of new varieties -- nuclear, biological, cyber-terrorism -- that drive calls for increased surveillance and larger defense budgets. If such Orwellian transformations in the identity of the enemy do not make us skeptical, an element of construction in political and journalistic rhetoric about terrorism, even in terrorist acts themselves, seems inescapable. Bombings and hijackings begin with a few people plotting violence for maximum exposure, come to us on television, where distinctions between news and entertainment are ever more tortuous, and quickly pass into the popular imagination, into blockbuster movies and paperback thrillers.
Source: Plotting Terror, p. 1 - [From the introduction by Salman Rushdie:] Boll's message, for this is certainly a message-novel, is that this security system is as destructive a force as the terrorists it seeks to resist. If Beverloh and Veronica are the novel's devils, the security police are its deep blue sea.
Source: The Safety Net, p. viii - [Georges] Sadoul's essay is by far the most paranoid, arguing that the popular appeal of magazines like Detective extended the reach of the powerful right-wing police chief Jean Chiappe....For Sadoul, the law was merely the pretext for a conspiracy of police forces, whether professional, amateur, or journalistic...[H]is intent is to suggest the complicity of even this widely read magazine...with the ideological function of police activity. This function is fascist, Sadoul argues, to the extent that participation in the surveillance and pursuit of so-called criminals is less a question of desire than an automatic function of the state...the sensationalism Sadoul decries represented not a liberation of desire or an explosion of perversity but, as Aragon similarly expresses in his "Introduction to 1930," the "revenge of censorship on the unconscious."
Source: Surrealism and the Art of Crime, p. 156-157 - [Holzpuke] "No, but I have a few more questions for you -- about your friends. What you were saying just now -- that pride, that stubbornness, that being excluded -- or sense of being excluded -- those conclusions -- those ideas -- how big do you suppose it is, the group you have defined in this way?"
[Rolf] "You could figure that out very easily from your own files and those of other authorities working with you: we are all listed, aren't we -- it's not that we have a list of ourselves -- we don't know how many we are, but you should know, just take a look at this army, this phantom army -- review it -- let those hundreds of thousands of young women and men and their children parade before you, if only in your mind's eye, and ask yourself whether all their education, their potential intelligence, their strength and glory, exist merely to be kept under surveillance."
Source: The Safety Net, p. 239-240 - [H]e had read von Lambert's book on terrorism, there were two pages devoted to the Arab resistance movement, von Lambert refused to call them terrorists, which didn't preclude, and he had emphasized this, that nonterrorists were also capable of atrocities, Auschwitz, for instance, was not the work of terrorists but of state employees...
Source: The Assignment, p. 58 - [I]t may rather be expected that this will be a century of authority, a century of the Left, a century of Fascism. For if the nineteenth century was a century of individualism (Liberalism always signifying individualism) it may be expected that this will be the century of collectivism, and hence the century of the State. It is a perfectly logical deduction that a new doctrine can utilize all the still vital elements of previous doctrines.
Source: The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism, p. 19 - [Kirchheimer] In any event, the replacement of the legislative functions of Parliament with the federal president's emergency decree-based rule means that the concept of legality has been robbed of its previous meaning. We are not dealing here with a set of passing incidents. Rather, rule by emergency decree--and thus the fusion of legislative and executive authority--has taken on a permanent character in such a manner so as to leave no room for the core element of the principle of legality, the scrutiny of the administration against the yardstick of the law. So when there is talk today about the legality of government action as a way of contrasting its actions to those of "illegal" oppositional groups, obviously an altered version of the traditional conceptualization of legality is inherent in this discourse.
Source: The Rule of Law Under Siege, p. 48 - [Kirchheimer] It is difficult to consider it a moral victory for National Socialism that it has hammered into people's heads the idea that those with different political views are "subhuman."
Source: The Rule of Law Under Siege, p. 150 - [Kirchheimer] The emergency regime...is not characterized by legality but by legitimacy, an appeal to the indisputable correctness of its actions and goals. Essential to the concept of legality is not simply the fact that power has been acquired by legal means, but, more important, that it be exercised in a legal fashion. Nothing makes the shift in accent from a political system based on legality to one based on an appeal to legitimacy more clear than Chancellor Brüning's now famous comment: "If you gained power by legal means but then declared that you intended to disregard legal boundaries, that cannot be considered legality."
Source: The Rule of Law Under Siege, p. 49 - [Kirchheimer] The scope of political offenses has been expanded beyond all limits. Any activity of a political, social, or religious nature that is not expressly condoned by the government can be punished with a severe prison sentence or the death penalty. Judicial decision makers give themselves the widest possible freedom in the interpretation of criminal regulations that already are formulated rather broadly...Another rather idiosyncratic feature of this type of legislation makes it possible to punish undesirable expressions of opinion even when their truthfulness can be demonstrated...Rather than undertaking a nonpartisan examination of the evidence of the case, the regime's view is automatically assumed to be truthful, and everything else is dismissed as slanderous claims that distort the truth.
Source: The Rule of Law Under Siege, p. 151 - [Kirchheimer] Whereas the rule of law once represented a quest for objectification by means of legal guaranties and the formulation of clear standards, an opposing ideal is now transformed into the quintessence of Adolf Hitler's German rule of law. Guarantees of justice are no longer located in the statute, but in the extent to which the individual decision accords with National Socialist thinking.
Source: The Rule of Law Under Siege, p. 144 - [Laqueur's] last book on fascism, Fascism: Past, Present, Future (1996), was the broadest single work on the topic attempted by either of the co-editors. Like most historians, Laqueur avoided any precise definition of generic fascism on the grounds that this was too complicated, since there were too many different variants. Both claims were obviously valid, up to a point, but, if that were absolutely the case, how might the reader be sure that all these examples belonged to one political genus? Thus, as is common in fascist studies (and certainly in the work of Mosse, as well), broad issues of taxonomy were eluded, though many individual problems were discussed.
Source: George L. Mosse and Walter Laqueur on the History of Fascism, p. 761 - [Laqueur] found nothing uniquely 'bourgeois' about the social appeal of fascism, whose strength, by comparison with communism, lay in its capacity for cross-class mobilization. There was a large following among the middle classes, but that was true of many political parties. Many blue-collar workers became fascists but fascism was never a worker movement per se (save perhaps momentarily in Hungary in 1939). At times there was considerable support among the rural population, but that varied considerably.
There was never any uniform content to fascist culture. Nazi policy insisted on 'positive content' based on race, idealism and patriotism, rejecting most modernism, but Laqueur points out that what it denounced as Kulturbolschewismus was equally proscribed under the Bolshevik state. Italian Fascist policy was more tolerant, and much more accepting of aspects of modernism. It insisted primarily on formal compliance, not on total uniformity, as in Germany or the Soviet Union.
Source: George L. Mosse and Walter Laqueur on the History of Fascism, p. 763 - [Laqueur] noted in passing that the most effective enemies of the fascists were the right authoritarian regimes, which often simply suppressed them.
Source: George L. Mosse and Walter Laqueur on the History of Fascism, p. 763 - [Mosse's] initiative was important in championing the concept of a generic fascism and in achieving the empirical and analytic breakthroughs which revealed that fascist ideology, rather than being an intrinsic oxymoron, was a distinctive and indispensable part of fascist movements. He did path-breaking work on fascist culture and inaugurated the 'cultural turn' more than two decades before it became popular in the study of fascism and other aspects of modern history. His development by 1970 of an 'anthropological' approach was equally original, leading to a series of studies on myth, crowds, meetings, art, esthetics and liturgy. Altogether, this reoriented and broadened the study of fascism more than did the work of any other scholar, though a number of historians developed the model of a more unified single concept that he never achieved.
Source: George L. Mosse and Walter Laqueur on the History of Fascism, p. 758 - [Mosse] would write that 'the chief problem facing any historian is to capture the irrational by an exercise of the rational mind.' This would mean that scholarly work 'has to operate with the instruments of rationality in a so largely irrational world, it has to recapture the irrational rationally and thus it is in danger of getting it wrong.' At the same time, he corrected the common tendency to associate the irrational or non-rational with nihilism tout court, for fascism was not nihilistic but had its own peculiar value system.
A key aspect of this approach was to understand the nature and use of myth, something that the non-theoretical Mosse did very well in empirical and eclectic terms, though he never developed any broad concept of myth. His own approach he called, not inaccurately, 'a history of perceptions.' In a letter of 1990, Emilio Gentile pointed out to Mosse that he employed the concept of myth in two different ways, which one is tempted to term the authentic and the inauthentic, the first involving the 'irruption of the sacred' in a living faith, the second a cynical propaganda manipulation. Mosse acknowledged this problem without hesitation, saying that "I have never been able to get a satisfactory definition of myth, and as far back as 1960 Leonardo Olschki . . . told me that my use of myth was very problematic. Myth is both artificial and a sincerely held belief. I don’t think that they exclude each other."
Source: George L. Mosse and Walter Laqueur on the History of Fascism, p. 754 - [Neumann] All three functions of the generality of laws -- obscuring the domination of the bourgeoisie, rendering the economic system calculable, and guaranteeing a minimum of liberty and equality -- are of decisive importance and not just the second of these functions, as the proponents of the totalitarian state claim. If one views -- as, for example, Carl Schmitt does -- the generality of laws as a means designed to satisfy the requirements of free competition, then the conclusion is obvious that with the termination of free competition and its replacement by organized state capitalism, the general law, the independence of judges, and the separation of powers will also disappear and that the true law then consists either in the Führer's command or the general principle (Generalklauseln).
Source: The Rule of Law Under Siege, p. 118 - [Neumann] Voltaire's statement that freedom means dependence on nothing save law refers only to general laws. If the sovereign is permitted to decree individual measures, to arrest this man or that one, to confiscate this or that piece of property, then the independence of the judge is extinguished. The judge who has to execute such individual measures becomes a mere policeman...Equality before the law is, to be sure, "formal," that is, negative. But Hegel, who clearly perceived the purely formal-negative nature of liberty, already warned of the consequences of discarding it.
Source: The Rule of Law Under Siege, p. 118 - [Refusing to acknowledge Nazism as a political sequence as opposed to emanating directly from Evil is] Cowardly, because it is impossible to think politics through to the end if we refuse to envisage the possibility of political sequences whose organic categories and subjective prescriptions are criminal.
Source: Ethics, p. 65 - [Surveillance] gave rise to tension, friction, intimate knowledge that should never have been allowed to turn into familiarities and yet did. It was difficult to behave all the time as if such things were normal...
Source: The Safety Net, p. 67 - [T]he Nuremberg Tribunal rejected the Nazis' claim that Germany's judgment was conclusive on the matter of her need to invade Poland and Norway in self-defense, noting that "whether action taken under the claim of self-defense was in fact aggressive or defensive must ultimately be subject to investigation and adjudication if international law is ever to be enforced."
Source: 9/11 As False Flag: Why International Law Must Dare To Care, p. 37 - [T]his constant surveillance was causing mental distress leading to psychic damage, and that anyway it was futile, for if they were going to strike at all it would be somewhere quite different.
Source: The Safety Net, p. 66 - [T]otalitarianism is capable of local variations; plausibly, far from being exhausted by its twentieth-century versions would-be totalitarians now have available technologies of control, intimidation and mass manipulation far surpassing those of that earlier time.
Source: Democracy Inc., p. xvii
