Nudge-Winking

Terry Eagleton, London Review of Books, Sept. 19, 2002

The 'Criterion': Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Interwar Britain
by Jason Harding | Oxford, 250 pp, £35.00

The Criterion, T.S. Eliot's periodical, ran from shortly after the First World War to the very eve of World War Two. Or, if one prefers, from one of Eliot's major bouts of depression to another. The two time-schemes are, in fact, related. In 1921, the business negotiations to finance the proposed journal had to be suspended when Eliot suffered a nervous breakdown; it was during his convalescence from this illness that he wrote The Waste Land. Though the breakdown had much to do with marital misery, it also reflects something of the postwar cultural crisis of which The Waste Land is itself symptomatic. It was as though the old 19th-century doctrines -- Romantic humanism, liberal individualism, dreams of social progress -- had all failed to survive the Somme; and Eliot, like his European Modernist colleagues, was dismayed by this spiritual devastation. Among other things, it raised the question of how they themselves were to write, bereft of a nurturing inheritance.

(snip)

The Criterion pulled in writers such as Woolf, Lawrence, Yeats, Aldous Huxley, E.M. Forster and Wyndham Lewis, but also gave Proust, Valéry, Cocteau and other European writers their first airing in English. Conservative reaction, like socialist internationalism, was distinctly un-English in its lack of provincialism. If the journal espoused an unpleasant brand of right-wing Christianity, it was at least an intellectually taxing discourse centred on Dante, Aquinas and Parisian neo-Thomism, rather than the parochial pseudo-religiosity of a Philip Larkin. In the epoch of High Modernism, it was for the most part the radical Right, rather than the liberal or social democratic centre ground, that opened up cosmopolitan perspectives in a stiflingly claustrophobic England, as exiles and émigrés such as Conrad, Wilde, James, Shaw, Yeats, Joyce, Lawrence, Eliot and Pound shuttled between cultures and languages in order to reap those symbolic resources for their art that England alone could not furnish.

Not all of these authors were right-wing; but the predominance of that outlook among them is nonetheless striking. In an epoch of cultural crisis, it was the displaced and deracinated who could respond to their historical moment in answerably ambitious terms; and it was these, therefore, who in raising the most searching questions about modern civilisation, were able to produce the finest literary art. But nobody is more in love with autocracy than the anxious and insecure. The fact that so many of these writers responded to the historical crisis with apocalyptic pleas for absolute authority and the violent exclusion of subversive elements is the price we have to pay for such art, if we should choose to do so.

full: eagleton

Seumas Milne on Martin Amis in today's Guardian:

The Battle for History:

The now routine equation of Stalin and Hitler both distorts the past and
limits the future

Seumas Milne, Thursday September 12, 2002

It would be easy to dismiss the controversy over the latest Martin Amis
offering as little more than a salon tiff among self-referential literati.
His book, Koba the Dread, follows a well-trodden political path. An
excoriation of Lenin, Stalin and communism in general (interlaced with
long-simmering spats with his once communist father Kingsley and radical
friend Christopher Hitchens), it is intended to be a savage indictment of
the left for its supposed inability to acknowledge the crimes committed in
its name. Strong on phrasemaking, the book is painfully short on sources or
social and historical context. The temptation might be to see it as simply a
sign that the one-time enfant terrible of the London literary scene was
reliving his father's descent into middle-aged blimpishness.
That would be a mistake. Amis's book is in reality only the latest
contribution to the rewriting of history that began in the dying days of the
Soviet Union and has intensified since its collapse.

Full:

Koba

Sasha Ethiopia writes: "
Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Guerilla, Ann Hansen (AK Press/BTL, 2001)

Mike Palecek writes:

Recently 37 people were sentenced to federal prison for protesting at the School of the Americas, Ft. Benning, Georgia. These people dared to point out our own "American Terrorists."

In November thousands more will travel to Georgia for the annual protest, at which more will illegally enter the base to put their bodies in the way of America. Actor Martin Sheen has been a regular at these annual demonstrations.

Fr. Roy Bourgeois, a Maryknoll priest, has served years in prison for these protests that he founded years ago.

Bourgeois is featured in a new book just released by Algora Publishing of New York City, "Prophets Without Honor".

Seize the Day: Lenin's Legacy

Slavoj Zizek

Tuesday July 23, 2002,

London Review of Books

A review of Lenin by Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, translated by George Holoch. Holmes & Meier, 371 pp, £35, 2001, 0 8419 1412 5

In 1917, fighting against the tide of Bolshevik opinion, Lenin claimed that there is no 'proper time' for revolution, simply emerging opportunities which must be seized. In the latest exclusive essay from the London Review of Books, Slavoj Zizek argues that the left today needs Lenin's lessons more than ever.

The left is undergoing a shattering experience: the progressive movement is being compelled to reinvent its whole project. What tends to be forgotten, however, is that a similar experience gave birth to Leninism. Consider Lenin's shock when, in the autumn of 1914, every European social democratic party except the Serbs' followed the 'patriotic line'. How difficult it must have been, at a time when military conflict had cut the European continent in half, not to take sides. Think how many supposedly independent-minded intellectuals, Freud included, succumbed, if only briefly, to the nationalist temptation.

In 1914, an entire world disappeared, taking with it not only the bourgeois faith in progress, but the socialist movement that accompanied it. Lenin (the Lenin of What Is to Be Done?) felt the ground fall away from beneath his feet -- there was, in his desperate reaction, no sense of satisfaction, no desire to say "I told you so." At the same time, the catastrophe made possible the key Leninist Event: the overcoming of the evolutionary historicism of the Second International. The kernel of the Leninist 'utopia' -- the radical imperative to smash the bourgeois state and invent a new communal social form without a standing army, police force or bureaucracy, in which all could take part in the administration of social matters -- arises directly from the ashes of 1914. It wasn't a theoretical project for some distant future: in October 1917, Lenin claimed that "we can at once set in motion a state apparatus consisting of 10 if not 20 million people." What we should recognise is the 'madness' (in the Kierkegaardian sense) of this utopia -- in this context, Stalinism stands for a return to 'common sense'. The explosive potential of The State and Revolution can't be overestimated: in its pages, as Neil Harding wrote in Leninism (1996), "the vocabulary and grammar of the Western tradition of politics was abruptly dispensed with."

The Errorist Menace:

Caleb Carr's The Lessons of Terror

Reviewed by Bob Black

(From Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed
at: http://www.anarchymag.org/53/review_terrorist.html )

The Lessons of Terror:

A History of Warfare Against Civilians: Why It Has
Always Failed and Why It Will Fail Again

By Caleb Carr

(Random House, New
York, NY, 2002) 274 pp. $19.95 hardcover.

The ideas in this book the author first set forth (he says) in a 1996
article, but no one needs to guess why the book was rushed into print. (A
list of seven errata has been put into the middle of the book, and it is
incomplete.) He proposes to place contemporary terrorism in the context of
military history stretching back as far as the Roman Republic. In a book of
256 pages, this necessarily implies a romp through history with only cursory
analysis of examples taken out of their contexts.

The author's purpose is avowedly didactic: Carr is literally teaching "the
lessons of terror." It is his startling thesis that terrorism is a form of
warfare, but "a form that has never succeeded." A further startling thesis
is that "it has been one of the most ultimately self-defeating tactics in
military history-indeed, it would be difficult to think of one more inimical
to its various practitioners' causes."

Quantum Mechanics & Chaos Theory:

Anarchist Meditations on N. Herbert's Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics
By Hakim Bey

1. Scientific worldviews or "paradigms" can influence -- or be
influenced by -- social reality. Clearly the Ptolemaic
universe mirrors theocentric & monarchic structures. The
Newtonian/Cartesian/mechanical universe mirrors
rationalistic social assumptions, which in turn underlie
nationalism, capitalism, communism, etc. As for Relativity
Theory, it has only recently begun to reflect -- or be
reflected by -- certain social realities. But these relations
are still obscure, embedded in multinational conspiracies,
the metaphysics of modern banking, international terrorism,
& various newly emergent telecommunications-based
technologies.

The Limitations of "Open Marxism"

Mike Rooke, http://mysite.freeserve.com/whatnext

Reviewing John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power, Pluto, 2002.
Paperback, 240pp, 15.99.

John Holloway has written an important book. It is a sustained
critique of orthodox (i.e. Leninist) Marxism from the standpoint of the
Open Marxism of which Holloway is an exponent (along with others
such as Richard Gunn, Werner Bonefeld and Kosmas Psychopedis). The
central argument is that the strategic orientation of the
(principally) Leninist tradition has focused on the capture and
wielding of state power, and the conception of socialism
characteristic of this tradition has been marked by a subordination to
this goal (the state illusion). More specifically he targets the
scientific-Marxist partyism of this orthodox tradition (p.84),
which he rejects for its pretensions to be an all-encompassing theory
of reality (a scientific epistemology). The greater part of the post-
Marx Marxist tradition, therefore, has become a reified theory and
practice, reflecting an accommodation to the structures and thought of
bourgeois society. Its fetishisation of state power (its capture) has
led to the consistent betrayal of revolutionary aspirations, and the
reproduction, rather than the abolition, of oppressive power
relations. While such criticisms of Lenin and Third International
Marxism are not new, a large part of the uniqueness of Holloways book
derives from his use of fetishism as a critical category with which to
construct a conception of revolution as the dissolution of power (as
anti-power).

Anonymous Comrade writes

Roads to Dominion:

Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States

By Sara Diamond




Reviewed by mhandelman1@yahoo.com)">Michael Handelman




While left-wing social movements have been extensively analyzed, right-wing movements have been inadequately analyzed. Thus, frequently, liberal interpretations suggesting that right-wing movements are “fanatical” have become the dominant ideology. This is why Sara Diamond’s book “Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing movements and Political Power in the United States” is so vitally important for leftists. This review is an attempt to outline the contents of this excellent book.

Mike Palecek writes:

PROPHETS WITHOUT HONOR:
A Requiem for Moral Patriotism

by William Strabala, Michael Palecek

The book deals with the historical necessity of protest in the U.S. and offers the lives and careers of these priests as example: Carl Kabat, Darrell Rupiper, Roy Bourgeois, Frank Cordaro, Larry Rosebaugh, Charlie Litecky.

PROPHETS WITHOUT HONOR:
A Requiem for Moral Patriotism

by William Strabala, Michael Palecek

380 pp., 2002
ISBN 1-892941-98-8 paper,
1-892941-99-6 hardcover

The book tells the story of a group of American men who happen to be priests ã who happen to have served decades in American prisons ã and the stalwart women who helped them form an international movement called Plowshares. In so doing, the book tells the morally patriotic story of America, a story told before only from behind an open hand across the face, like a football coach talking to his spotters in full view of a national television audience, afraid someone might see.