|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1784704113
| 9781784704117
| 1784704113
| 4.11
| 3,181
| Jan 05, 2016
| Jan 01, 2017
|
liked it
| Yanis Varoufakis held the role of Greek Finance Minister during its debt crisis but for only seven months. It was a rare example of a respected academ Yanis Varoufakis held the role of Greek Finance Minister during its debt crisis but for only seven months. It was a rare example of a respected academic taking the helm of national finance at a time of crisis. I am not qualified to judge his performance but this book comes out of that experience. What I do know is that he only lasted seven months. The forces ranged against him were insuperable. He exhorted, he reasoned, he argued from first moral principles but he failed. It is the type case of the intellectual situated in a bankrupt system. This is an odd book, published only a year or so after events about which the author cannot be wholly unemotional or objective. Yet he is clearly trying to do his best to retain his academic standards alongside his experience of seeing the cruelty of a total system in operation at close quarters. The early bulk of the book is an excellent guide to the politics of international finance. It links the logical ruthlessness of Americans that led to the collapse of Bretton Woods and then the Volcker revolution to the bumblings, squabbling and blunderings of Europeans. There is lots of meat for opinion here. Always on the Left, Varoufakis' experience has since clearly moved him increasingly away from a 'more in sorrow than in anger' progressivism to a more aggressive critique of late liberal capitalism but organisationally he has achieved little. In this book, with its clear attempt to appeal to American liberal opinion, he seems very careful not to upset the neo-liberal apple cart too much. There is intellectual submission here to New Deal progressivism as if pleading with American liberals to become a better hegemon. The other oddity is that, despite his own evidence (it mounts sub-section by sub-section, chapter by chapter) of elite European technocrats' lack of democratic legitimacy and utter ineptitude and of self-defeating Franco-German self interest, he remains a thoroughly utopian pro-European. At a certain point (although well into the book) a superb analysis of how Europe ended up in a mess after the 2008 crash and what and who were responsible shifts into the normative. Here, the author still cannot face reality. It would all be fine if, well, the world was different. Er, it isn't. The book then slips into something more emotional and polemical, simultaneously appealing to Americans to take some ideals they may no longer have more seriously and to Europeans to become more noble than the structures they have created can enable them to be. Indeed, the political as opposed to economic evidence is that self-regarding French elite technocracy and a fearful German self-centredness combine to make Europe not only what it is but what it must be. And in my opinion if it is not what it is now, it would probably be worse - a true tyranny. Varoufakis' sense of history is superb (he would make a fine professional historian if he was not an academic and a political activist). Non-Europeans will learn something important about the relationship between America and a shattered Europe that is not entirely to the former's discredit. They will also learn something about the inability of Europeans (possibly any peoples) to escape their historical narratives. They continue national conflict under cover of European idealism. The European Union looks increasingly like a cobbled together mess much like the United Nations. There are two emotional points that he makes that are well worth making regardless of our suspicion of exhortation. The first is the reference to the Melian complaint to the brutal Athenians (there are many classical references, authentic from a Greek) that suggest that moral choices matter. The Athenian way - destruction of the weaker party - is actually the way of the world, as we see in the behaviours of Israel and actual US hegemonic expansion, but it also means that what goes around may come around, that when the strong become weak, they have not earned the right to mercy. As Germany enters into a forced de-industrialisation because of a profoundly stupid political decision to be the agent of American hegemony as it moved East and as France destabilises as it tries to deal with its own financial incompetencies, it is possible that the European strong are indeed weakening. I doubt if little Greece will have much of a say on the fate of the old Franco-German alliance, rocky though it has always been on Varoufakis' evidence, but others might. It may be amusing to see either country using the Melian defence against a populist Washington or China. The second emotional point is the gross injustice of Germany raping much of Europe (but most notably Greece) and then being allowed to evade a reckoning for very comprehensible historical reasons - yet failing to show the generosity towards Athens that was once shown to Bonn. Varoufakis is a good man, an ethical man. His outrage shines through the latter half of the book but it is futile. His utopianism about American generosity and the ideals of justice in Europe may appeal to other impotent intellectuals but intellectuals now only provide convenient cover for power. I can strongly recommend this book as a clear and well argued description of how the global financial system reached the point of meltdown in 2008, how the European debt crisis unfolded and why Greece was hung out to dry as a convenient small scapegoat. However, once Greece is hung out to dry in the story, his analysis shifts from describing events accurately (certainly well enough to create justifiable outrage at the thuggery we call late liberal capitalism) to something a bit more normative and, yes, futile, a letting off of steam. At this stage in his politics (2016), it seems that Varoufakis was actually doing little more than asking for the current system to be managed better and to be more ethical. The problem is self-evidently that he is an outsider in a world where ethics are largely a fig-leaf for power. Secretary of State Blinken made his career as a front man for human rights but that has not stopped him being wholly complicit in disproportionate and vengeful behaviours by Israel against the Palestinians or in ignoring violations of rights inside Ukraine. Indeed, the book is an early indicator of something that has become more evident in the last two years, that the European Left (and indeed American left-liberalism) represents an exercise in exhortation, in impotent futility, that has no serious analysis of power. Or rather, perhaps because of the influence of the European Left's local divinity Gramsci, the game of 'influence' and cultural manipulation excites and engages the ethical intellectuals but it changes nothing where it matters. Capital and power simply appropriate language and minor behaviours. The Left has developed a touching faith in the sort of 'rainbow' identity politics where democracy seems to mean ensuring outlets for activists rather than finding out what people really want or need. The language of rights has ended up going up its own orifice like a political oozalum bird. Since this book, Varoufakis has continued to write but, outside his native Greece, his political efforts have proved the point. He sought a Progressive International but the Left should not be Progressives. They should be Left. The fate of Corbynism is the fate of all 'Progressives' who cross a line. DiEM25 achieved nothing in the 2019 and 2024 European Elections. On the other hand, the more hard-line BSW is making progress in Germany. In office, the BSW would be more likely to transform German 'Mittelstand' capitalism materially than a bunch of dreamy ethical liberal-lefties. Like all left-liberals, he also wants his cake and to eat it on Ukraine, failing to understand the brutal reality of NATO expansion or the ambition of European federalists. We suspect, for all the anti-fascist passion, the Progressives will offer us, in the end, just fascism with a more human face. In a game of power, there is a point when it is no longer enough to be moral and impotent. This eventually becomes complicity especially when elites become adept at stealing the language of progressivism in order to establish their authority on a firmer footing. There is no point in a more democratic federal Europe if that democracy, like liberal democracy in the UK or US, can be gamed by deep state technocrats and manipulative financial and party interests. There is certainly no point in exhorting ethical behaviour or justice rather than extorting them. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Sep 26, 2024
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| B012HTQ02S
| unknown
| 4.50
| 2
| unknown
| Oct 29, 1992
|
it was amazing
| Desmond & Moore's hefty 1991 biography of Charles Darwin was a landmark book linking the history of a major scientist with wider social and political Desmond & Moore's hefty 1991 biography of Charles Darwin was a landmark book linking the history of a major scientist with wider social and political change in mid-nineteenth century Britain. Some contemporaries were irritated by this interest in the times as much as the life but not this reader. The book is nearly 680 pages long. Perhaps the more casual reader might have liked some cuts to make it more manageable but the length is justified by the authors interweaving of three closely related stories - that of a personality, that of a scientist and thinker and that of his times. The personality is fascinating in its own right but what comes across as equally interesting is the subversion of his own class - that of the well-heeled but capable gentleman naturalist - by his alliance with the new men of professional science, self made and seeking 'jobs' in institutions. This is where personality ties in with wider social change. What drove this rather timorous man with a life time of seriously unpleasant psychosomatic illnesses to defy convention at some social risk and, quite late in the day, allow the publication of his radical thoughts on evolution and natural selection? Although Desmond and Moore do not quite answer this question directly, a personality that could do nothing but investigate and think on what it investigated - a classical case of scientific curiosity as core to personality - eventually had to break ranks to express its 'truth'. His biography (excepting a rather unprepossessing country gent early life and the last days of being lionised and loving every minute of it) can be roughly broken down into three phases - the days on 'The Beagle', those living his theory discreetly in the country and those once his theory was in play. The first phase is of a very young man with a considerable capacity for hard work who built up sufficient reputation from his specimen collecting to become accepted as part of a family of naturalists and scientists exploring the difficult terrain between nature and revealed religion. The second phase has him highly respected within a respectable world but finding that his 'thinking' was taking existing evolutionary thought and extending it into something that could and would 'in the wrong hands' completely undermine the very social order on which he and his family depended. We have to remember that Darwin was never in want of funds. He was connected to both the Darwin and Wedgewood dynasties and the valuation of his estate at £250,000 (roughly £23m in today's money) at the end of his life did not arise from his writings or scientific work. This was a man from a comfortable Whig family. It may have been in class opposition to aristocratic Tory squires and parsons but it was, like Labour and Tory today, essentially part of a struggle in which both sides competed for advantage within a system they both maintained as 'sound'. During this second phase (as the book makes clear) Darwin's 'thinking' led him into troubled waters because its logic was that of a challenge to the very ideological fundamentals that held the mob at bay in the years following the Chartist threat to property. Working and middle class radicals were very interested in evolution for ideological reasons although they preferred the ideas of Lamarck, a preference of the Left that was to prove highly problematic in the Soviet Union under Stalin. To undermine the ideology of God's grace creating a perfectly structured and benign nature (as proposed by the Anglican Paley) with the 'truth' of an evolutionary natural order with God (if present at all) very distant could imply that radical solutions to social problems were potentially correct. The secret to Darwin's triumph lies not in him being 'right' (which he mostly was) but in what he proposed arriving at just the right time to buttress rising social forces that endorsed a new imperial order that, in turn, buttressed the order of property more effectively than religion. The trigger of course was that Darwin could see that his ideas were in danger of being trumped with the less experimental or consistent thought of others, notably by the younger socialist (in a confused sort of way) Alfred Russell Wallace. He had to publish or lose his edge. It should be made clear here though that Darwin and Wallace were not competing as scientific equals and that Darwin had earned the right to leadership in the field. Darwin never treated Wallace badly and Wallace never regarded Darwin as having done so. Darwin is a complex character. The biography restores emotion to the Victorians but, for all the usual faults that lie in the character of the time (his imperialism, his casual racism, his patronising attitudes to the working class), he was by mid-Victorian lights ethical and broadly compassionate. So, Darwin has to publish to be the one who gets credit for a truth that is brutal in its vision of nature as a war of all against all in the battle of survival and of the survival of those who are fittest. These then, it seems, go on to drive species, racial and all other forms of 'progress'. We can see straight away how useful this was to the rising middle class professionals in the scientific community but also to a new imperial society being born out of the expansion of trade and industrialisation. It 'explained' hegemony. It 'countered' socially radical alternatives. 'Property' (all things being equal) might have been happy to continue with the old Tory paternalist ideology of a settled and benign Nature and of traditionalist values that placed everyone in their assigned role and relied on squires to protect the poor and parsons to comfort them. Science was always going to unsettle this view because science is what it is - the truth of the matter. Unfortunately, Nature is actually mindlessly brutal with God increasingly (if he even exists) pushed further back by reality into being little more than the designer of general laws. The initial challenge had come from two equally opposed sources. We have mentioned the radical challenge which became a socialist one in due course. This emphasised the possibility of social improvement on Lamarckian lines but the more important challenge at this point was the Whig one. Whig intellectuals took up Malthus which led, after the 1832 Reform Act, to the cruelest triumph of Liberal Progressivism - the Poor Laws. Prior to Darwin's publications over a quarter of a century later, 'existential struggle' was already being brutally imposed on the working classes. It is part of the centre-left myth of its own trajectory that Victorian Liberalism was a good thing and the Tories were a bad thing but nothing is so simple. For totally different reasons, yet both thinking in compassionate terms, Tories and radicals challenged the Malthusian ideology of this new elite. Victorian Liberalism was intent on a form of managed revolution in the interests of its own class alliances - wealthy industrialists and dissenters, evangelical Christians, Malthusians, the new professional class, self-made men, the first propertied feminists. This was a culture of trade and empire and of assumptions of worth epitomised by the Self-Help doctrine of Samuel Smiles. The way to handle too many working people was to force them to export themselves to colonies where the imperial authorities subjugated inferior peoples to fit them in. In a weak form, these are attitudes about cultural superiority, social control, ideological conformity and the handling of the working class that are still embedded in American progressives and what was once called 'New Labour'. It is the ideological original sin of the Anglosphere Centre-Left. Darwin straddled this main ideological divide. He was of free-thinking stock where the money had been made in industrial enterprise. He was 'liberal' in the best sense in his dealings with people but, on the other hand, he was also a village country squire and responsible for a parish and good order. The third phase in his life and in the book is what happens when he deals with his internal conflicts and publishes 'The Origin of Species' (1859) and later 'The Descent of Man' (1871) (as well as very many other works) dropping a lighted match into the oil dump of elite ideological tensions. Darwin's work becomes the weaponry to be used by a self-consciously engaged network of 'professional' (or aspirantly professional) elite scientists actively seeking to overturn the old order and transform the existing 'gentlemanly' institutions of the scientific community. Darwin's technique is interesting. He knows what he is doing and he wants to promote the scientific revolution but he also wants to retain his aura of respectability. He does this by standing back and providing the guns and bullets for his shock troops but avoiding the front line himself. His health shifts from being the psychosomatic result of intense stress at the potential revolution that he might create to its being the excuse for not engaging in revolutionary acts by attending events and for not commenting on the ideological, social or political ramifications of his theories. He sits like a spider at the centre of an ideological web as Huxley in particular (but not only Huxley) takes on those who refuse to abandon religion as the core of Victorian ideology (men such as Bishop Wilberforce and the Duke of Argyll) and builds up a shock troop of like-minded scientists. This is why the book is so valuable. It not only gives us an insight into Victorian elite society at a key point in its history between the troubles of the 1840s and the High Imperialism of the 1880s but it helps to explain why change happened and suggests how change might happen today or tomorrow. By the time of Darwin's death in 1882, the 'revolution' is completed. The thesis of Tory Anglicanism and the antithesis of Liberalism are synthesised into the sanctimonious hypocrisy of Darwin's interment in Westminster Abbey (fixed by Huxley and the gang). As Desmond and Moore indicate, Darwin had become a secular saint but his interment in the Abbey as provider of a neat indirect justification of British imperial superiority ('survival of the fittest') was a symbolic negation of the alternative of his interment in a family vault as local patriarch. In essence Gladstonian Imperial Liberalism 'won' and old-style Tory Paternalism lost but the Anglican Church was vouchsafed a place in maintaining social order and the Lamarckian socialists were 'dished' by the weight of evidence that Darwin had provided. Alongside the British story there is, of course, the story of 'Darwinism' (the -ism helps indicate the ideological aspect of this new way of seeing the world) as both Social Darwinism (a more overt ideological system with no serious evidential base) and as its reception overseas. Darwin cannot entirely be absolved of responsibility for Social Darwinism although he did not actively promote it or anything like it. It emerged as, if you like, its own 'bourgeois necessity'. However, he shared the baseline thinking - the struggle for existence with winners and losers in life's race. What becomes interesting is the rapid German intellectual adoption of Darwinism with an enthusiasm and excitability that sometimes comes across as at the edge of comical if we were not reminded of some of the eventual darker consequences of its adoption in the next century. The authors are only interested in how the Germans related to Darwin personally but we can see the lineaments of an interpretation that is similar to that we have seen in relation to the British Empire - an idea, strengthened by its apparent truth, met a newly necessary ideological need. This is the Germany of Bismarck. The defeat of 'effete' France by Prussia saw most of the British elite preferring modernising Germany to France with its perceived tin pot Napoleon III. Germany looked dynamic, the fittest, both to itself in potential and to the wider world. With Haeckel playing the role of Huxley, Darwinism appealed because it weakened the role of the churches in restricting the authority of the State and it suggested ideas of natural selection that were not uninfluential on philosophers like Nietzsche. As my mentor at university, the late Norman Stone, pointed out to me, national socialism was the consequence of a lot of young people being taught half-baked ideological theories by half-educated schoolmasters in small towns. Darwinismus would have been part of their tool kit. One day the path by which two decent men's ideas (those of Darwin and Marx who only interacted briefly in writing once) becomes socially transmuted away from their actual intentions into mass murder and genocide will be traced with more insight than we have seen to date. From this perspective, Desmond (who was an historian of evolution prior to the 'Origin of Species') and Moore (whose previous work was on the controversies in Victorian London triggered by Darwin's work) provide important material on the ideologisation of 'truth' and the role of intellectuals. We should add here that the authors concentrate as much if not more on the man as on his ideas and environment. This makes the book, based on deep research into available letters and papers, extremely readable as a human life that unfolds over more than seventy years. There are two critical death scenes (of Darwin's daughter Annie and of Darwin himself) that should move anyone - in both cases the available evidence gives us scenes of horror that few biographies tend to provide. It is important to understand what death entailed for Victorians. Similarly the account of the Voyage of the Beagle is a deft summary of Darwin's own writings that allows us to picture a young sea sick man prepared to put up with a great deal of hardship and risk to find out how the world might work and do his job of collecting specimens for home. For all the social and ideological aspects and consequences of the case, Darwin comes across as a basically decent human being who loved his family and especially his long-suffering wife Emma, was loyal and supportive to his friends and worked immensely hard because that is who he was. His 'genius' was not based on one just idea or the books for which most people remember him but on a major body of research work involving demanding and committed experimentation and the ability to worry at a problem and follow the logic of his experimental discoveries. How his material was used was not really his fault because he was only telling the truth as he saw it. His truth almost entirely (with the odd speculation overtaken by history) stands up as exceptional science that just happened to be very convenient to powerful people who then weaponised it. Fortunately we have long since moved past the ideological accretions. Scientists eventually returned to the science and built on it. One hopes that, at some stage, the same can be done with those aspects of the work of Marx that still hold 'truths' that it has now become all too convenient to deny. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Sep 08, 2024
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0198795548
| 9780198795544
| 0198795548
| 3.52
| 88
| Feb 22, 2018
| Apr 22, 2018
|
liked it
| This Oxford University Press 'Organised Crime: A Very Short Introduction' is solid enough but it reads throughout like an academic report to a governm This Oxford University Press 'Organised Crime: A Very Short Introduction' is solid enough but it reads throughout like an academic report to a government department. As a basic primer, it might be useful to someone entirely new to the subject but it cannot be said to be 'inspiring'. One insight (although dealt with rather tentatively by the authors) is that our perceptions have been over-defined by, first, American reactions to the very specific experience of Italian-American organised crime and by, second, the emergent special interests of 'law enforcement'. A sub-text of the final chapter is a frustration that law enforcement's propensity to secrecy makes it difficult for academics to get access to the data that they think they require in order to understand what is going on 'out there'. A suspicion is that law enforcement's political narrative may be flimsy. Although the book is largely descriptive with little or minimal opinion, the final chapter more than hints at an uncomfortable truth - that organised crime is really not that organised except insofar as the market is organised ... it is just another aspect of human aspiration. This leads us to some uncomfortable thoughts because, in the end, criminality is not defined in terms of moral good and evil so much as what the law dictates. Any assumption that the law is the same as justice or morality is as dodgy as the equation made between education and intelligence. In general, there is some consonance of terms. Most people most of the time can reasonably prefer the order of the lawful State over the disorder of a market without restraints especially when the human condition creates desire for things that are harmful to it. The discomfort comes from a number of factors - one is that criminal behaviour can be a reasonable response to aspiration in any system where aspiration for things (including security) is unavailable to some people but normal for others (within the system that law protects). We might add here that the desire for 'bad' things - like addictive drugs or tobacco - may be driven by legitimate anxieties and pressures that the system as a whole will not deal with. Even human and sexual trafficking may be far more a negotiation with crime by the vulnerable than we might think. Protection (revisited later as extortion) may be the least worse outcome where law enforcement itself has failed to provide it. Loan sharking would not need to exist outside a world of low wages and vulnerable small businesses. Criminals mostly exploit the already weak or exploited. The authors flip things on their head a little further by pointing out that many criminals simply want things and do a cost-benefit analysis on the various non-legal means of ceasing to be weak or exploited themselves. They are, in short, just business people working in a parallel system. Another factor is that we should be in no doubt that order (in the form of States) originated in what we would call crime if extortion is a crime. Most of our state structures are derived from older forms where tribute was exacted for 'protection' and eventually became 'taxation'. In other words (and we do not have to be an anarchist to accept this), exactly who benefits from the State structures dependent on taxation and how and what they define as criminal is highly relevant to any attempt to match any concept of good and evil to the law. Finally, in the struggle between order and criminality, order is not averse to extreme and cruel measures sanctified as law if and when it can get away with it. One matter not covered very much in the book is organised political crime or 'resistance' but this really needs considering. If the State under pressure can start banging people up for a Facebook post and turning them into 'criminals', frustrated and excessively exploited or marginalised communities can turn to criminality to finance resistance or create their own authority. The response of the prevailing global neo-liberal community has been to try to force the abandonment of any notion of resistance or national liberation but retain the political dimension by creating a super-criminal category of 'terrorism'. The category may have back-fired as the complexity of Hamas' or Hezbollah's resistance has been understood better under what amounts to a state terrorist operation against their communities by Israel but it has also enabled States to impose extreme measures on their own populations. The abstract problem here is that, whereas lawful states can define criminality by fiat, there is no universally valid international legal structure that has not ultimately been a measure of the American interest (now under severe pressure). The 'rogue state' category has been invented to deal with this. Globalisation, which may prove to have been order's fundamental strategic error in maintaining itself viably, has intensified the ability of aspirational actors to work the global market system and driven 'order' to go trans-national and build a sledgehammer bureaucratism under US influence. Similarly, the New World Order's attempt to define itself as a global police force seems to be in ruins as 'rogue states' and 'terrorists' have proven resilient with increasing sympathies for their predicament from significant domestic minorities who are otherwise law-abiding. This presents a fascinating crisis of definitions where the temptation of the system is to start criminalising aspects of political dissent at home. This threatens to worsen the situation as elements amongst those targeted may start to see unlawfulness as a reasonable response to unjust legality. On balance, one should very much be part of the faction of humanity that seeks order over market chaos but if that order fails to deliver what people aspire to, is inept at controlling the market in general and becomes tyrannous in defence of order, then we have mounting problems. In practice, we should not be romantic about criminals. Sometimes they deliver 'goods' that really should never have been under state sanction. The case study of alcohol during prohibition is probably one of humanity's greatest examples of unintended consequences on these lines. Far more often, they supply 'bads' - addictive drugs, faulty counterfeit products, low priced tobacco, unnecessary protection (extortion), financial redistribution from the most vulnerable in society to themselves, exploitative labour, access to non-consensual sex and so forth. Getting the balance right between meeting the aspirations of all humanity equally, dealing with the trade in oppressive and dangerous 'bads' and maintaining a 'good' (that is, smoothly functioning) market system is not easy. A certain balance was seriously broken with imperial neo-liberalism. It would have been good if the authors had been bolder in addressing this tension which is essentially political but, as a basic overview, even if unsatisfactory in places, this will serve most newcomers to the subject well enough. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Aug 24, 2024
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 3319615203
| 9783319615202
| 3319615203
| 4.50
| 2
| unknown
| Nov 16, 2017
|
really liked it
| Shilo Brooks has undertaken an exhaustive (and exhausting) analysis of the four 'Untimely Meditations' that Nietzsche produced between 1873 and 1876 ( Shilo Brooks has undertaken an exhaustive (and exhausting) analysis of the four 'Untimely Meditations' that Nietzsche produced between 1873 and 1876 (Ages 29-32) with one clear mission - to demonstrate that they are not to be treated separately but are part of the same philosophical project. In this endeavour Brooks is plausible and broadly successful but he also provides the insights that allows us to see the four essays as (by their termination) an ending and a beginning. Nietzsche expresses a romantic idealism only to prepare the ground for its eventual subversion. All Nietzsche's often absurd and certainly egoistic genius is to be found in these essays as he moves from his excessive debt to the Hellenic heritage of his education through a coruscating critique of contemporary German philistinism and on to the hero-worship of the monumental artist. As always with Nietzsche, the essays are filled with irony and philosophical exclamation points as he thinks his thoughts in public, half in love with the potential for his world-historical fame and half insulting those who would give him that meaning he craves. His reasoning has its logic even if the logic will eventually subvert the very argument he wants to make here. He is already doubting the hero-artist thesis even as he writes his last essay on Wagner. The conclusion may be daft but it does follow on from his reasoning. Thinking in public here does not mean thinking to persuade through sophistic appeals to what his audience wants to hear (mere 'rhetoric') but persuading his audience to think as Nietzsche thinks and Nietzsche cannot help but keep thinking to the point of the eventual subversion of his own thought. Much of 'Untimely Meditations' will seem irelevant to us now. Brooks is able to position what Nietzsche wrote as quite specific to the 'kulturkampf' that Bismark triggered after his victory in the Franco-Prussian War. He positions the essays as a cultural assault in their own right. What we have here is an insurgent cultural bandit attacking the apparent victors of Sedan but refusing to act for the older Catholic tradition that those victors were trying to put in its place. Nietzsche offers something entirely new - a 'forwards to a new past' that unravels conventional ideas of Truth. Is Nietzsche a radical or a conservative in these essays? This is not easy to say . His attack is radical on 'civilised philistinism' but the appeal is to grand post-truth monumental history (a rewriting of the past) and the example of 'great men' whose existence is no longer what they were in reality. The future is one based on new recreations of the past that need have no identity with the actual past but which provide unifying limitations on society. The future belongs to the young who can invent their own future out of the acquisition of the qualities of exemplars and so create new great men. The 'great man' thesis, of course, is of its time. Carlyle had driven that idea in England. Napoleon had existed as exemplar and (temporary) conqueror of Europe only six decades before, roughly where we sit in relation to John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King. Despite this romanticism, these essays become a way station of great value to understanding the Nietzsche whose tougher critiques of conventional thought would appear later. He will jettison the grand theorising around Schopenhauer and Wagner in order to create a new Nietzschean universal. On the way, he ruthlessly eviscerates the grand old man of complacent German bourgeois Hegelianism, David Strauss, to the point of cruelty and continues the destruction with a post-truth critique of history as the framework of culture. Having destroyed, he tries to rebuild with Schopenhauer and Wagner as exemplars of the great minds that will revive German culture although neither of these figures are to be taken as particularly 'real' - as Brooks argues, they are simply cover for Nietzsche himself as 'great man'. The egoism and narcissism of Nietzsche is here fully present to the point where one hates oneself for accepting that this man is both perhaps a little unhinged even at this early stage in his career and a true philosopher whose analyses (though not his prescriptions) are generally spot on. His critique of the civilised philistine hits home not only in the Germany of the 1870s but in the West of the twenty first century. There is also much meat in his critique both of the academic and professional world that stands today and of history as narrative that shapes culture for good or ill. The shadow of the Greeks lies heavy over early Nietzsche. His attitude to Hellenism is deeply romantic even if he uses it not to mimic the past but only to seek a methodology that will create new mythologies for a German and European future. He contests Plato and the latter's negativity towards the arts in order to engage in a reversal in which life exists within Plato's cave as illusion and not in the reality outside the cave. He wants Art somehow to create an (admittedly contingent) social order that has no room for philistinism. Much of this, of course, is romantic nonsense expressed with a certain desperation as this young man tries to will into being meanings that are not there. His negative experience of the actuality of Bayreuth after the last essay was published was the last nail in that particular coffin. However, what Nietzsche writes here cannot be easily dismissed. The way that he reaches absurd and contingent conclusions is far from absurd or contingent. He is beginning to give insights to the psychology of meaning and what it is to be human that will unfold in the next set of works. The 'Untimely Meditations' may be solely read for purely antiquarian reasons as an insight into Nietzsche's more mature thought but this would be a mistake. His process of thought (if one is patient) unlocks a much more profound critique of how we think under modernity. We are looking at a psychological and phenomenological approach to philosophy in which we construct truth out of reality against the truth constructed for us within reality. Destruction is sought to construct what will have to be destroyed again in order to construct something new once more. The essays come together as a description of the necessity for struggle, action and invented truth as processes required to enhance the life instinct against the flaccidity and deathliness of convention and the chatter of a culture which Nietzsche implicity criticises as 'capitalist' but from the 'Right'. The problem with most readers of Nietzsche is that they jump to the near-hysterical quasi-religious late works and neglect the process that led to their creation. The late works become triggers for just another form of civilised philistinism. What matters is what Nietzsche does when he 'thinks'. The 'Untimely Meditations' are rightly to be seen as coherent (even if the last is 'cringeworthy' in Brooks' words) and as providing a romantic idealist and sometimes absurd base-line for later thinking. Many of the themes that are worth noting and understanding later are first developed here. We can be unmoved (rightly in my view) by the more contingent aspects of the four essays and find the romantic idealism surrounding Schopenhauer and Wagner meaningless and even hysterical (in both the comic and neurotic senses) but the underpinnings of Nietzsche's analysis are deadly serious. A virtue of this book is that it exposes the bones of Nietzsche's thought processes and how they are consistently linked to one other regardless of the ostensible purposes of the essays. 'Untimely Meditations' is recovered as important for uncovering what makes Nietzsche great and dangerous. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Mar 31, 2024
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1862075956
| 9781862075955
| 1862075956
| 4.11
| 1,210
| 2000
| Jan 01, 2003
|
it was amazing
| One of the problems in studying philosophy historically is that philosophers are taken as an 'event' rather than as a 'process'. A master work is chos One of the problems in studying philosophy historically is that philosophers are taken as an 'event' rather than as a 'process'. A master work is chosen as exemplar or the writer of a book tries to set down the philosophy of a thinker as if it was a thing out of time or out of cultural place. This forgets that philosophers are thinking in time and over a life-cycle of their own from birth (as incipient personality) to culmination in death and that philosophers are not only responding to the past but to the shifting politics and social and cultural changes of their own era. Safranski's 'Nietzsche' is very much the story of a process of thought, a 'philosophical biography', that lodges Nietzsche's thinking within a life (less so within a culture) and tracks how his thinking changed over decades until madness overtook him. Seen in this way, his thought unfolds in three broad phases that match the way a man thinks as he grows and matures. How Nietzsche took something in his core personality and expanded it into something that changed our whole culture is the story of this book. I write 'in his core personality' because, from a very early age, Nietzsche is thinking 'differently' and showing a driven quality to pursue thought to its limits. His life is 'thinking to its limits' in ways that were literally 'unthinkable' to his contemporaries and to the vast majority of our species even today. The first phase of his thought is that largely of his twenties until his final breach with Wagner (1876, Age 32). Influenced by Schopenhauer, his early philosophy might be seen as interesting more in its potential rather than the actual. It is a philosophy of over-enthusiastic late romantic aesthetics. A man of high intelligence drawn into academicism, he rebels because his thought processes see how dessicated was the world that he had joined professionally. Art (not art but Art) as a total Dionysian experience appeared to be a way out as he developed a theory of culture. 'The Birth of Tragedy' provides a grounding for his later thought, situated between his own reaction to Greek thought and what will become an emergent psychology - the bicameral tension between Dionysiac excess and Apollonian order. The disillusion with Wagner (when he sees Bayreuth as just another example of what we might call 'show business') permits the second phase of his thinking which, in my view, is the most important of all - from 1876 until his transcendent peak experience in August 1881. This relatively brief period in his mid-thirties allows him to escape German Idealism entirely and think, without restraint, about the relationship between himself and the world and so, more generally, about what it is to be human in relation to existence. This is a period of both personal misery and sometimes ecstatic insight. He is making profound contributions to epistemology but also to psychology in ways that not merely anticipate Freud but, frankly, are vastly superior to the thinking of the later founder of the psychoanalytic wrong turn. Above all, Nietzsche is a phenomenologist, observing with care how his own mind works in relation to the world and drawing general conclusions about the human condition. From there, he draws, less reliably, further conclusions about culture and society. It is at this point that we might have hoped he would retain his full sanity and come to terms with the 'world-shattering' vision he was developing. But the link to personal misery, much of it expressed psychosomatically, and manic depression meant that things were not going to end well. Given the culture into which he was born and his undoubtedly unstable personality, the idea that he could have somehow transformed himself into Heidegger 'avant la lettre' and explored his thinking about our relation to Being with dogged academic determination is absurd. Nietzsche simply did not have the all the mental tools to sit back and observe his own thought in the way that he seemed to demand as necessary. He 'lived' his thought. His body 'lived' his thought. And he never found a way of conquering the psychological conflicts that his thought created. One of the most interesting aspects of that thought is the transfer of his initially academic Dionysian-Apollonian analysis of culture and the human condition to psychology. Bicamerality is today seen as neuroscientifically real as our minds try to cope with balancing two hemispheres in the brain. Nietzsche's intuitions about bicameral conflict, extended beyond the individual to society and culture as a whole, now look remarkably astute. Attempts to reconcile the impulses in one part of our brain with the cognitive apparatus of the other raise fundamental questions about perceived reality. Our relationship to Being is complicated by physical responses to the fact of our being in Being (questions for Heidegger to deal with although he lost this bicameral psychological assessment in doing so). Nietzsche's real physical reaction to the process of thinking is part of the thought. At the Surej boulder in 1881 (age 37), Nietzsche goes on a very different path. We might consider that the final phase before his collapse into madness in 1889 (Age 45) is one extended mid-life crisis in which he attempts to resolve his contradictions through assertion. What we see is a drive towards self-expression as the 'will to power' amidst a new mythology of the 'eternal recurrence' and the promotion of his poetic character of Zarathustra. It is fertile stuff culturally but often hard to pin down as reliable 'philosophy'. This final phase (if we discount the subsequent decade of insanity) is nevertheless of immense cultural importance although (I would argue) more philosophically barren. Sometimes it seems like a constant scream of egoistic 'look at me', increasingly monomaniac as time passes. This is not to say that these powerful final works are not important but only that the thinking, which is often contradictory and extreme, sometimes has the feel of a tormented man letting rip on the psychologist's couch. Yet it is these works that mostly define what Nietzsche is to the public. The power of these late works (which Safranski significantly spends relatively little time analysing) lies in the effect that their no-holds-barred narcissism has on Europeans looking for an excuse for high emotional expression in a repressive culture. Humans always need excuses. A final chapter on the way Nietzsche's work came to be employed after his death is invaluable in this context especially because of its German focus, indicating how his thoughts came to be used before Heidegger, Adorno/Horkheimer and Foucault employed them as seeds for their own thought. Can Nietzsche be 'blamed' for national socialism? Only a fool would not see that Nietzsche's late thought leads inexorably to its use as a tormented brutalism that follows logically from his refusal to compromise on his vision of the human condition. But 'blame' is absurd. Indeed, it is hard to fault Nietzsche's logic (such as it is). Or, in some respects, even Hitler's and that of the national socialist philosophers like Bauemler, a rival to Rosenberg, who Safranski recognises as sophisticated. Nietzsche's brutal logic can imply national socialism without much difficulty. Yes, his sister and brother-in-law twisted his legacy to serve German nationalism and, no, Nietzsche was anti-anti-semitic and highly critical of nationalism but special pleading cannot hide the continuity between the philosophy of existence and anti-Christian Nazi Darwinian struggle. It is at this deeper (the scientific, in its time) level of existential skirting of nihilism with an invented commitment to will that we see the affinity between Nietzsche and National Socialism and not at the secondary level of antisemitism, militarism, nationalism and imperialism. This is the problem with Nietzsche. The more you read his brute analysis of the human condition (the thinking of Truth including the non-Truth of Truth), the more plausible it becomes although there is no doubt that his struggle was always against the consequent logic arising from this of nihilism. To avoid the nihilistic interpretation of reality, Nietzsche required a will to something, a human engagement in Life and this engagement in Life married to the darkness of Being resulted in a cruel and vicious view of life that failed to live up to the fanatic expectations for Life itself. That this Truth troubled Nietzsche despite his attempt to think things through according to the facts of the matter becomes clear in snatches and it strikes me as no accident that he finally goes mad in response to the beating of a horse which could stand for inner revolt against his own philosophy. It is as if he thought himself into a corner from which there was no escape but insanity and at times, being an honest man intellectually, he could see the way of the meek as a form of will to power whose conquest of the brute might perhaps be part of the Truth too. Whenever he comes close to systematising his thought, his intellectual honesty (which is undoubted) would periodically break through in force to ask an awkward question of himself that might unravel the psychological scaffolding that held him together. If we accept that Nietzsche describes our condition accurately once God is recognised to be dead (God stands for all past solutions to the human condition invented to avoid the Truth), then we are left with decisions about what to invent in its place. Making the invention consonant with science as it was understood in the 1870s and 1880s in Europe means over-accepting science in the construction of the Overman (Ubermensch) and allowing Darwinism to become over-privileged in defining the human condition. In other words, a correct assessment of our relation to the world as material existence (a different issue than the relation to Being as Heidegger would attempt to understand the problem) can get bogged down in inadequate assumptions about our scientific understanding of that world. Nietzschean thought is literally 'beyond good and evil' because it can end up anywhere. Much of non-analytical philosophy since Nietzsche has, therefore, been spent trying to analyse the world in ways that restore some sort of value or re-jigs Truth to be more palatable (that is, not-Truth). Each attempt to do so must be of its time and place much as Nietzsche's own solutions, which were less 'truthful' than the Truth, were bound by its (or rather his) conditions of existence. At this level, all philosophy is personal and about knowing where to sever derivative truths from the Truth itself. In Nietzsche's case (Safranski is very informative on this), our philosopher was embedding his truth in the fact of science (the Appollonian/left hemisphere) in tension with the Dionysiac and so scientific materialism (not the Marxist version) became central to his will to power. This is where Truth becomes problematic for our species - the innocent Darwin set off a chain of events that led to Auschwitz and Nietzsche was no more responsible for that than Darwin was. In both cases, ideas that were true became tools and weapons in the struggle for human meaning. So, Nietzsche sits as a child of mid-century Germany trying to cope with personal turmoil, the death of God (which Heidegger found equally problematic), the rise of science, cultural philistinism, the chatter of the blind and the conventional and he came to certain conclusions. For example, his analysis of Christianity in 'On The Genealogy of Morals' was only too accurate although his assesssment of socialism remained that of a spoiled bourgeois brat. What we do with his analyses is what counts and that includes fundamental criticism of the limitations of his thought. Where Nietzsche 'went wrong' is only in failing to continue to think along the lines he was thinking in his second phase - phenomenologically, psychologically, epistemologically as well as existentially - and jumping into the cultural fray with a form of 'revelation' that over-privileged the Dionysiac. This seems to be core to Nietzsche and to Nietzscheans - the centrality of the rational Apollonian in their assessment of reality but under conditions where they desperately yearn for the Dionysiac, the animal spirits of music, poetry and religion and try to force an older animal brain into action. At a certain point, like an 'old man in a hurry' as if he knew time was limited, Nietzsche wanted to make a mark on the world, to be 'important, the centre of attention, a prophet, perhaps (through Zarathustra) a founder of new world religion or at least national culture. In fact, Nietzsche was not inherently Dionysiac. He wanted it desperately. He thought himself into this state out of this desperation and perhaps it helped tip him over the edge into insanity. Certainly, the psychosomatic aspects of the second phase merge into near-monomania in the third. He never stopped writing important things in that third phase but we, the reader, find ourselves shifting from the thought as a whole to abstracting the thoughts we find useful from a huge corpus of ranting and aphoristic position-taking which is exhausting and time-consuming to say the least. Nietzsche must be counted a true genius if an unstable one but one around which we should be careful to retain our critical faculties. Safranski has thus done us a great service by showing his thought as a process within a particular context underpinned by a very definite personality. What exactly we do with Nietzsche is down to our particular contexts and our particular personalities but one thing is clear. If we are at all serious about thinking, we have to start, in effect, from the Truth of our situation in relation to the world that this genius exposed to us. His thought is only the beginning of our own thought and is not for the faint-hearted. It was always potentially very dangerous to individual and society alike. The continuing denial of its truth may indicate just how deluded about our condition we necessarily have to be in order to be human. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Mar 28, 2024
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 3.75
| 130,561
| Feb 02, 1922
| 1990
|
it was amazing
| This is undoubtedly a work of genius although it has its longeurs and self indulgent moments but I have a recommendation - do not read it first, liste This is undoubtedly a work of genius although it has its longeurs and self indulgent moments but I have a recommendation - do not read it first, listen to it as dramatised by Irish actors on RTE in 1982, which you can find on the RTE web site or on Spotify, and then start reading it. The book comes alive when it is spoken, both the authorial voice and that of the various protagonists. The RTE team manage to make even Joyce's 'lists' seem essential to the whole. The spoken word, the narration and the streams of thought from within begin to make much more sense. The work is such a peculiar mix of astute observation and high intellectual endeavour that it is uncategorisable and probably unrepeatable. It is a massive literary experiment. The broadcast will take nearly 30 hours of your time but you will be enriched by it and then by the book. This is one of those cases where one either has to give a short immediate recommendation or produce a massively lengthy analysis to do the book justice. There is so much good commentary out there that mine would be unnecessary so I have just a few comments. The first is that the book is almost flawless - even the boring bits have a function within the whole - but the final chapter ('Penelope') which allows Leopold Bloom's wife, Molly, a final say seems the least authentic. This is what a man thinks a woman thinks. The second is that, since nearly all human life and nearly all forms of English language expression are here, sexuality is here too but at an intensity that can only be called pornographic. Buried in the text are descriptions of sex that could only be broadcast if the book had become an Irish sacred text. How did Joyce get away with this? Well, he didn't. Once the prurient had ploughed through the text or had the naughty bits pointed out to them, a great deal of effort was made to stop the public from reading it. The Irish themselves could not access their national epic directly until the 1960s. Given that this Odyssey takes place on just one day in the life of a cosmopolitan Irish Jew, the concentration of effort in writer and reader is quite remarkable. That it is also concentrated on a Dublin journey on foot that can be traced on a map to this day adds to the power of the work. Sometimes Joyce's descriptions of very small things have the ability to conjure the world of around 1904 as if it was our memory and not the invention of a writer. The lack of concession to the future with his account of the materiality of that world only presses us to know more of the background. This book (1918-1922) in its final form was asking to be annotated and made the subject of academic literary obsession but it also defies its own learning by being a phenomenological experience different from but analogous to the near-contemporary work of Proust (writing 1913-1927). It is also interesting how this phenomenological approach describes the past (memory) rather than contemporary life as if 'modernism' needed existence to settle down so that it could be objectified, not as truth but as a sufficient truth for artist and reader. Joyce left Dublin in 1904 (the year in which the book is set) to become a cosmopolitan European himself, a 'wandering Jew' if you like, and the humane liberal sentiments of Leopold Bloom seem to cast an olympian glow over the rest of the cast of Irish actors. Ireland is set in aspic in that year. The Boer War is recent in the narrative. The British Empire (whether seen as matter of pride or occupation) still lives in Ireland. Home Rule scandals are still recalled but the revolutionaries are a marginal twinkle in the eye of history like Lenin on holiday in Switzerland. This gap between the post-war writing of the novel and the pre-war world ignores both subsequent war and revolution (highly relevant to the Irish case) in order to remind its readers of what once was without foreknowledge of what was to be. This restraint is truly striking. Joyce goes further by allowing his characters their own memories (most obviously in Molly Bloom's rather sexualised orientalist memories of her young days in Gibraltar as what Americans might call a 'military brat'). Memories of the dead play an important subsidiary role in the narrative. This is not just memory but an attempt at the creation of an invented past that once was lived in a different form by the author and is now transmuted into an alternative experience that a reader can share, entering into the illusion that this was reality. Should the Irish be so proud of the work? Yes and no. It is about Ireland and the Irish so 'yes' but its tone remains distant, that of a 'European' who preferred Trieste, Rome, Paris and Zurich to Dublin and whose politics were moderately nationalist and socialist but at a distance. Joyce was clear that Dublin was a means to an end. This city was just a way of getting to the truth of all urban cosmopolitan culture. It was directed at the universal much as Homer is now 'universal'. Ireland may be quite incidental, simply 'what the author knew' to reach his ends. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Jan 10, 2024
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||||
| 0241256992
| 9780241256992
| 0241256992
| 4.05
| 26,158
| Sep 10, 2015
| Nov 22, 2016
|
really liked it
| Norman Ohler was not trained as a professional historian but this German novelist and scriptwriter has done a superb job in giving new insight into th Norman Ohler was not trained as a professional historian but this German novelist and scriptwriter has done a superb job in giving new insight into the Second World War and into Hitler's regime through original research. He looks at both through the prism of drug abuse. Perhaps some of his claims may be a trifle exaggerated because of lack of context but the three main themes are well argued: that German early military success, wartime errors of judgement by Hitler and the complicity of the German navy in concentration camp abuses were all related to drugs. In the case of drug use by the German military he makes a good case that the Blitzkrieg method of warfare owed a great deal to a deliberate use of drugs that had been normalised in Germany by commercial interests under Weimar and which continued to be used under the Nazis. He implies further that the weaknesses of the Germany military later (on the Eastern Front) may be partly put down to the 'lows' created by a drug dependency that decreased capacity over time. This latter must remain 'unproven' but the evidence for very high drug use to avoid sleep in 1940 is clear. The heart of the book, however, is the story of the malpractice of Hitler's personal physician, Morell, in solving short term problems of attention and drive with injections of substances that effectively turned Hitler into a 'junkie' in successive stages during the Second World War. Most of this claim is fully evidenced. Even the circumstantial evidence is more than plausible. Hitler's mental state was deteriorating month by month and year by year because his doctor was giving him cocktails of drugs that merely created the conditions for more drugs. If this is so (we are 99% convinced), then what becomes really interesting is not that Hitler was incapable of sound judgment but the total ineffectiveness of the officials around him to do anything about it. Some did see that something was wrong but none could act to reverse the process. There is something tragically eternal about this situation, well known to students of the worst Roman Emperors. Power is demanding. The means to make it less demanding have costs on frail flesh (leaders are not Gods) but no one dare bring power to account. The situation worsens. The point here is that Ohler rewrites the whole history of the war and the regime because, although it is probable that Germany could never have won in the long run, the cataclysmic manner of the defeat and the lack of ways out for negotiation might be partly put down to the work of a cowardly quack. The final account of how the German Navy in the last days of the war, desperate for answers to the impending defeat of Germany, became collusive in monstrous drug trials to help send teenagers on near-kamikaze missions is a coda, a foot note, to the main story. Like so many drug stories, the underlying themes are cynical greed and desperation. The cynical greed is that of the interwar German equivalent of today's Big Pharma and of a third rate Berlin doctor who 'struck lucky' when he solved a problem for the Fuhrer and made what he could of that. But we also have the desperation required for survival under Weimar, the desperate gamble of Guderian's Bilitzkrieg, the desperate attempt of Hitler to stay psychologically and physically on top and the desperation of Doenitz's navy to play a role in defeating the coming Allied onslaught. This heady cocktail of demand and supply is that of all criminal and legitimate pharamecutical call-and-response relationships between pushers and users. Once the user becomes a junkie, the pusher is in control. The pusher is not one to see the big picture or be moral and do the right thing. If Ohler is right, then we need to factor in part of the German population, a significant part of its military and its wartime Leader as 'de facto' junkies with all the inability to see straight of the junkie. You have to ask which other war leaders today and in the past have also been victims of their dealers. I, for one, am not convinced that this thesis of Ohler's alone is sufficient or sole explanation for German irrational exuberant behaviour and eventual collapse in the 1930s and early 1940s but the book makes a good argument for it being a very important contributing factor. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Dec 30, 2023
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0933932502
| 9780933932500
| 0933932502
| 4.40
| 15
| Jan 01, 1987
| Jan 01, 1987
|
it was ok
| 'Footprints in the Snow' is a hagiographical account of the life of Josemaria Escriva, founder of Opus Dei, the Catholic lay order that came out of th 'Footprints in the Snow' is a hagiographical account of the life of Josemaria Escriva, founder of Opus Dei, the Catholic lay order that came out of the Hispanic tradition. It is short in length, positioned as a pictorial biography and was designed very much for the faithful. Escriva is another of those influential mid-century figures who are generally pigeon-holed as having links to interwar fascism (Heidegger is another) but such an attitude is childish. That was then and this is now and it would be logical for a priest to be sympathetic to the Right in the Spain of the 1930s. The Spanish Civil War was, like all such wars, a vicious affair. It is an inconvenient truth that the Left engaged in violent anticlerical action and was not averse to murdering in cold blood priests and nuns much as the Right similarly murdered trades unionists and left wing activists. What is perhaps more interesting is just how dull the story becomes once the Civil War is out of the way. Escriva might be classed as a religious entrepreneur who became a top corporate executive managing a very large 'spiritual' empire with its own vanity projects. The Church is an amazing creation. Deeply flawed perhaps but complex and, although deeply conservative, quite capable of allowing such entrepreneurs as Escriva with a bright new spiritual idea to emerge and flourish - after all, St. Francis of Assisi and St. Ignatius Loyola were of that stamp. Opus Dei is an initiatory corporation without democracy and a level of common purpose that most CEOS would kill for. It helps of course that it looks to 'God' and not quarterly figures, has an ancient rule book and the patronage of God's CEO on earth, the Pope. Personally I am an atheist existentialist but I come from a Catholic background. I understand its language and values (even if my background was the very different, more 'Jesuitical', Irish tradition). The tradition I grew up would have regarded Escriva as on the edge of 'Protestant'. The ins and outs of Catholic theology and the politics of Opus Dei are not covered in this book nor should one expect to them to be. It is a hagiography, a life of a saint before he was canonised (this happened in 2002 in a rather fast-tracked manner). My experience of Opus Dei tells me that it has qualities both sinister and admirable (not unlike the Jesuits or the Church's bete noire, the Communist Party). Its deeply conservative communitarianism can, of course, be oppressive to any free spirit wanting to break free of the stranglehold of faith. On the other hand, it is a community that supports its members (albeit in ways that individualistic liberals may loathe). That means taking care of the elderly and sick and offering (if you accept its faith assumptions) meaning and comfort in a very dark world. At one end of the spectrum, we have the dark conspiracy literature about the order. At the other, hagiography (this one has a typically pious introduction by Malcolm Muggeridge) but it is probable that, if you strip away the prejudice, the reality comes somewhere in the middle of the two. Escriva in this context is a 'type'. A man determined on 'meaning' with a persistent idee fixe (in his case, that the Church would be strengthened by bringing ordinary lay people into a life of piety and not separating Church and community) and with the drive to build an empire out of the idea. Personally, I would be as miserable as sin (so to speak) in an Opus Dei society. Its faith model leaches religion out of its traditional containment within the Church and enters into every facet of the life of the believer in a form of faith-based totalitarianism that must be hell for the trapped free-thinker. But it has its logic and it is not deliberately cruel. For many people who need faith, tradition and authority, because that is how their brains are wired up, it will give greater comfort than the disorder of the modern world even if the idea of it ruling the world would fill me with horror. If the Church appears to be less important than at any time in its history, that is only because journalists do not write about it very much. In fact, for good or ill, it is the baseline of experience for a massive proportion of our species so it is as well to understand it if one needs to be protected from it. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Nov 19, 2023
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0099437880
| 9780099437888
| 0099437880
| 3.80
| 23,595
| Aug 24, 2001
| Aug 31, 2003
|
really liked it
| 'Platform' (2001) was Houllebecq's fourth novel. It may be more famous for a rather ridiculous scandal about his alleged (almost certainly actual) Isl 'Platform' (2001) was Houllebecq's fourth novel. It may be more famous for a rather ridiculous scandal about his alleged (almost certainly actual) Islamophobia in an era of terrorism than its content but its content is worth considering. This is the writer just coming into his forties with three novels under his belt. The maturation shows but, in maturing and producing a classically structured novel, he also, it must be admitted, has lost some of his pungent verve. It is a bitter-sweet book rather than an existentially desperate one. This is still the Houllebecq of the 1990s, detached, reminiscent of Camus' Meursault, fascinated by sexual expression and hanging on to a cultural traditionalism that is both highly political and which has abandoned conventional liberal democratic politics. It is perhaps one of the few novels from the literary class that treats capitalism and entrepreneurialism not only without condemnation but with a certain distant approval. He seems only to regret that 'culture' (society) gets in the way of it granting our true desires. The story centres on three individuals. The bitter sweetness comes from the fact that the protagonist, a time-serving civil servant in the Ministry of Culture, actually finds true emotional and sexual happiness with a woman who acts as business aide to the third. Houllebecque thankfully avoids any temptation to create some hackneyed menage a trois and has the three of them simply engage in a shared project with a shared vision and shared respect - an attempt to create a viable sex tourism business within the mainstream tourist industry. As we would expect, Houllebecq writes well and gives us a strong sense of what it is like to go on a package holiday, to Thailand or to Cuba but also what it is like to be detached from your father or slowly and inevitably detaching from an unsuitable wife. His ability to say the unsayable is undiminished not only with the sex scenes and cultural sterotyping but even with the third character's desperate short sexual laison with an under-age girl. The story is one of male desperation, the girl is willing and the issue is the law and not morality. A variant of this desperation is the meaning one of the dying victims of the atrocity, a working class guy, got from the happiness of his time with a Thai prostitute as if even his death was worth the brief moment of time when he was happy. The fact that the Thai prostitute is not invested in him at all and perhaps that one day such happiness may come from a well-formed robot is not the point. He is not an intellectual. He felt as if he was loved and experienced something in himself greater than being a cog in a wheel. The sex will not surprise those who know Houllebecq. It is graphic and fairly frequent, presented without all the moral or romantic gilding we have come to expect in literature, and yet the sex is not without love or respect even when it is purchased. What is framed in our world today as exploitation is interpreted differently here as a trade between people who are agents on their own account according to their desires, needs and situation. No wonder the book was loathed as much as admired by the 'bien-pensants'. It is a different conservative-libertarian way of looking at the world. It was unfashionable when the book was published and, now, nearly a quarter of a century on, it is tantamount to being forbidden. The fashionable philosophers are determined on not merely denying the self but controlling it. Houllebecq's vision of sex is thus totally counter-cultural, especially in this age of political correctness and wokery. He dismisses narratives of exploitation. The world is as it is, what looks like exploitation to the protagonist looks like fair trade under the circumstances. He may be right. What will surprise the Houllebecquians is how much not only sex but love based on sex, an unconditional and powerful love, is presented not as a trade but as a glorious thing in itself. It ends not because of decay but because of the violence of Islamic terrorism. Our protagonist, Michel, finds perfect happiness with Valerie but his world collapses him into becoming the Houellebecq hero we know from the past on the chance shot of a sex negative religious maniac and the subsequent posturing of Western, in this case French, society. The subsequent scandal was not so much about the book as about statements made by Houllebecq outside the text that then got read back into the text. Fortunately, French judges asserted the right of a man to criticise religion against the spurious claims of the human rights industry. The cultural attacks on Houllebecq are simply the defensive posturing of a lesser minds terrified of his exposure of the hollow at the centre of their lives, of the value of raw sex and its role in finding love and his brutal truths about the world that feeds them The ruthlessness of capitalism is a sub-text of the book but even this is not treated with the usual moral affectation of the literary set. When everything crumbles and Jean-Yves' high-flying career takes a dive there is no anger, just sorrow at the way of the world, the human condition. Houllebecq writes sympathetically of all his characters. There are no villains other than faceless maniacs. There is certainly no racism. His Arabs are treated as persons as much as Africans, Germans and Thais. Maybe a slight disdain for the Anglo-Saxon can be detected but he is French after all. The structure of the book is also interesting. The sexually graphic scenes appear at almost rhythmic intervals but what I was most struck by was his slight parodying of the airport thriller (he critiques three best selling authors in short didactic segments). The story is set in the world of global tourism which represents brief moments of exoticism for people living fairly meaningless lives of drudgery in roles imposed on them by chance and necessity. Thrillers are brief moments of dreamed excitement in those same lives. Houllebecq tells his story straight and chronologically without tiresome post-modern trickery but periodically inserts factual accounts of, say, management techniques in the tourism industry or some other bit of 'education' in the way that thriller writers explain the intricacies of weaponry. What struck this reader was that Houellebecq's honesty about the world and our position in it is not feigned or calculated for effect but rather structured with great art to provoke us into recognition. If we do not recognise what is being claimed or said, this will be down to our personality. He never preaches even about those things he clearly does not like - sex-negativity, intrusion into private life and choices, denial of pleasures, moral affectation. He presents us with an alternative way of seeing our situation, then gets sad that our situation is just how it is and probably always will be. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Sep 09, 2023
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0141986751
| 9780141986753
| 0141986751
| 3.68
| 774
| Jun 14, 2018
| Feb 27, 2020
|
really liked it
| Uwe Schutte's account of Kraftwerk and its influence has the advantage of coming from a native German who understands fully the cultural context in wh Uwe Schutte's account of Kraftwerk and its influence has the advantage of coming from a native German who understands fully the cultural context in which the 'band' or rather the performance art group emerged in the 1970s. I even forgave him the standard and rather silly Brexit comment which is 'de rigeur' now from miserabilist academics (and which usually loses at least one star from a rating) and his evident dislike of Rammstein who I still think are preferable all things considered. But these prejudices aside, and the evident fact that he is a thorough fan boy, I cannot think of a better guide to the phenomenon, its origins, its cultural context, its achievement and its influence. The book is not just about music but about culture in its broadest sense and its sociology. Kraftwerk is interesting (before we even get to the music) as an expression of the rather spoiled upper middle class youth of prosperous North-Rhine Westphalia, centred on Dusseldorf, whose Europeanism is presented as as logical as it is illogical for the English working classes. Indeed, I recommend the book to any British Leaver as an exercise in understanding a mind-set so utterly alien to the British outside London and the university towns that it may as well be that of Shanghai or California. This is a Germany closer to France and Benelux than Berlin. The work of Kraftwerk seems to go through three broad phases. I made the effort to listen to every album (as we used to call them) in sequence and in German versions to get a feel for this. Schutte provides a good background to each although more as critic than as musicologist. The first is an experimental phase in which Hutter and Schneider produce interesting but not particularly good prog rock. Kraftwerk has refused to reissue these three first albums so far which is a shame because their experimentation does give important insights into their creative drives. The second is the classic period of 'robot pop' from 1974 to 1981, arguably 1986 (Electric Cafe), although, as a non-cyclist (of which more in a moment), the later 'Tour de France Soundtracks' (2003) must count as the most boring concept album (bar a track or two) in musical history. Still, few people have not heard and enjoyed tracks from 'Autobahn' (1974), 'Radio-activitat' (1975), 'Trans Europa Express' (1977), 'Die Mensch-Machine' (1978) or 'Computerwelt' (1981) or failed to see the lads doing robotic movements in identical suits. The third phase is an almost cultic semi-reclusive phase belied by their constant touring where the creativity seems to be no more than a constant reworking of mostly old material in a nerdy, almost autistic approach, to their own history. Schutte rightly considers the band to be more an art performance operation (I would say, a typically German small technical business) by this stage. This is quite consistent with their roots in the late 1960s and early 1970s Dusseldorf art scene. Personally, I am in two minds about this. The constant refinement of an old body of work with a few new 'bits' actually works well by the time it is collected as '3-D The Catalogue' (2017) and relatively small groups of people clearly got a buzz out of the real world performances. On the other hand, constant refinement of the past - the retro in their retro-futurism - does seem like an evolutionary dead end. Since the late 1980s, they may have been a darling of the art world but of a conceptualist art world that also seemed to be rapidly going up its own orifices. The irony, of course, of all this is that Kraftwerk seems not to be able to decide which real world it is in. It does not exploit the contemporary transmission of the digital so much as take the digital to only semi-cultic fans constantly refined only for its followers in closed spaces. The actual performance now looks quite old-fashioned. Middle aged men in silly costumes standing stock still working flat electronic keyboards and relying on admittedly increasingly sophisticated audio-visual equipment. Its repetition must be an acquired taste. Nevertheless, no one can take away from them their influence. Although similar electronic work was inevitable simply because that is what the technology predicted and you have the likes of Joe Meek and Detroit Techno to look to, Kraftwerk distilled it for a mass audience early and powerfully. The constant refinement of their work is a response to the constant refinement of the increasingly extremely expensive equipment they deploy. Given their other interests, ageing and touring (and the 'small business' nature of the band), it is no surprise that new ideas die off quite quickly. Nothing comes out of nothing, of course. The Dusseldorf art and musical world was the world of Fluxus and of Stockhausen but also of a sleek industrialisation that could reflect with understanding on noise as music, an aesthetic that went back Luigi Russolo and Italian Futurism. Indeed, Schutte is very good at describing the emergence of Kraftwerk as an aesthetic of retro-futurism that was distinctively European and which we would see a little later in the quasi-political aesthetic of Laibach. This retro-futuristic ethic (as Schutte describes it) leaps back into the past before the horrors of mid-century. It re-boots culture as if the future of the past had become our present. Kraftwerk drop the violence of futurism to emphasise modernity and speed - cars, trains, cycles. This got them into an interesting little pickle with 'Radioactivity' since it was initially a very inter-war positive view of nuclear energy that they hastily had to redraft to meet the expectations of their cult members as the young German middle classes turned against the technology. The episode is trivial but it suggests a certain lack of philosophical authenticity in the 'business'. It is of its class, its location and its market. It seems to have no central core. It is hollow like much of its class and like the robotic humanity that its music consciously represented. It could be said to be 'music for music's sake' which draws us to the personalities of the two founders of the group, close friends in their youth. Unfortunately, the book is not much of an in-depth biography. Their personal reclusiveness is preserved. Do they have sex lives? Are they having a laugh? Schutte notes that it is probable that their public personae may have been influenced by the British artists Gilbert & George whose artworks are part of a package that includes the presentation of themselves to the public along consistent life-long lines. There is, of course, both genius and hollowness in this. The question for the public is always just how much such 'models' are true to themselves (whoever they may be) and how much are they mere shadows created to hide themselves or because there are no selves there. For those of us who clearly have strong selves, we can treat Ralf & Florian and Gilbert & George as peculiar entertainments, as arch manipulators or as insights into peculiar minds without ever being entirely clear which is the most appropriate response. The best approach might have be to separate personae and work but Kraftwerk (and Gilbert & George) deliberately do not permit this. They exist before our eyes solely through carefully managed communications and imagery. Perhaps an insight into Kraftwerk may come from the obsessive take-up of cycling (speed again) by the two principals which led to the interesting if dull (if you are not a cyclist) 'Tour de France'. Obsessive cycling is almost a personality trait, dictated by biochemical factors over time. As to their place in popular music history, although Schutte may be talking this up a bit in his book, it is assured insofar (as he rightly points out) Kraftwerk finally broke out of the Anglo-Saxon rock trap derived from African-American music and created something authentically European. European techno-pop has different roots (in the avant-garde of European classical music) and, as these things do, it moved across to become influential in American black music, perhaps subliminally sick of whites appropriating their roots and ready to appropriate the music of remorseful Aryans. The book may not tell us everything nor may it be the last word on the matter but as a readable popular Penguin paperback, it is stimulating and informative. There is lots of meaty detail to back up assertions and it will be of interest (I believe) even to those not wholly enamoured of electro-pop. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Aug 19, 2023
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1324021055
| 9781324021056
| B09KMDP6TS
| 4.11
| 1,168
| 2022
| May 17, 2022
|
really liked it
| Serhii Plokhy, a Ukrainian historian who has already written on Chernobyl, takes us through six nuclear disasters, the decisions that led to each disa Serhii Plokhy, a Ukrainian historian who has already written on Chernobyl, takes us through six nuclear disasters, the decisions that led to each disaster and its consequences in a useful contribution to the nuclear debate. He does not take a stand, he merely gives us the data to enable us to do so. The first three arise from the primarily military interest in nuclear power (Bikini Atoll [US], Kishtym [Soviet] and Windscale [UK]) and the second three from the 'atoms for peace' era (Three Mile Island [US], Chernobyl [Soviet] and Fukushima [Japan]). In all cases, there is no malice here. These are warriors, scientists, engineers and business people 'learning through doing' and getting it horribly wrong (quite rarely in fact) from ignorance, inexperience and/or basic human error often derived from local organisational realities. The problem with 'learning through doing' is that the consequences of mistakes are far more potentially serious with nuclear power than getting the building of a bridge wrong or a railway signaling system or even the electronics in an aircraft. The common denominator in all these accidents is simple human error compounding technological flaws in design and/or events that could have been predicted but were not because someone simply did not think of them (most notably the possibility of a major tsunami overtopping a sea wall). The question that springs to mind - since each accident improves procedures and technology and a consequent withdrawal from peaceful nuclear power allows time to learn for the next building cycle - is whether the next wave of enthusiasm for nuclear power will result in another major accident or not. The book does not give us a great deal of confidence in this respect. At the moment, thanks to the twin panics over energy security and climate change, both Green and national security apparats are going hell for leather for a massive revival of the use of nuclear power. This will ostensibly be based on an increase in new and 'improved' nuclear power stations but also on smaller, local SMRs (small modular reactors) assuming the proponents of these latter can get past the resistance of local communities - which is why safety is going to be a political issue. It is probably true that the next wave of nuclear reactors will be much safer than anything that has appeared before. It is equally true that nuclear accidents are uncommon - after all, there have (to date) been no further major accidents even with old Soviet stock in Ukraine since Fukushima. So, putting aside equally problematic issues related to waste disposal and the vast cost of decommissioning nuclear power stations (another major 'tax' dumped on a non-voting future), why should we retain a degree of concern? The statistics say that a multiplication of reactors is more likely than not to result in another major case of human error merging with technological weaknesses and strategic errors to provide us with the high probability of another tragic nuclear event some time in the next thirty years somewhere. And this likelihood is the more likely because the scale of production of SMRs and their spread creates serious issues with the availability of fully trained and (initially) experienced nuclear engineers. Junior staff with insufficient traning are a definite factor in some of these accidents. The UK Government has already recognised a shortage of nuclear engineers and proposes to do something about it but we are living in a global market place with nuclear power assets soon to be developed on a global scale - that is the accident waiting to happen: skilled labour shortages. But does it matter? Given the energy security and environmental arguments, surely a few thousand kids dying in one locality of thyroid cancer and so forth is a 'price worth paying' to the utilitarian types operating at the highest level of decision-making - not that any dare say so openly. What struck me was that, unlike the use of nuclear weaponry, the consequences of a nuclear accident were a lot less than I had expected. It seems that chance exposure and genetic resilience mean that some people are immune to radio-active effects and other devastated by it. It is a lottery. Nevertheless for those affected, the consequences can be truly devastating and long-lasting. The fear must be that nuclear power expansion, with the eventual inevitability of some accident or other, is going to result in 'hot spots' of misery and individual tragedy that need to be faced. The public policy debate is, as usual, one of misdirection, smoke and mirrors because the nuclear lobby dare not face us with the gaming aspect of the decision-making - a few of us will die or get sick so that the vast majority will have the energy they need to live. Who dies will be a chance event. The lobby is also wholly evasive about the problem of accumulating radioactive cost which will not be able to be dumped on the 'third world' in time-honoured waste dumping tradition and about the costs to future generations of replacement and decommissioning of assets. In a world where the US has just got a minor debt downgrade because of the scale of its debt, no one is calculating the fact that the private-public balance is actually thoroughly skewed. The taxpayer is going to pay through the nose for subsidising building, decommissioning and accident clean-up. On the other hand, there is the utilitarian argument that 'something must be done' to ensure energy security (despite energy insecurity being the result of suicidal foreign policy decision-making) and stop climate change (despite the burden on future generations of the solution). Personally I cannot come down on one side or the other of the debate but only want an honest debate that includes future generations and that cuts out the exclusive voices of those with an interest in taxing us or profiting from us. Plokhy's book will not answer the question 'what is to be done?' but it is well worth reading for a well researched blow-by-blow account of what actually happens in a nuclear accident and what the consequences are in each of his six cases. At the end of the day, nuclear power expansion is a gamble in which a disinterested position is hard to find and where it is hard to have confidence in those making the decisions. What we need are the facts in the case. Plokhy does us a great service in that respect. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Aug 02, 2023
|
Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||
| 1787385906
| 9781787385900
| 1787385906
| 3.64
| 44
| Feb 01, 2022
| Mar 03, 2022
|
really liked it
| When a regime collapses, it leaves a lot of political detritus, men unwilling or unable to knuckle down, accept defeat and build again under new condi When a regime collapses, it leaves a lot of political detritus, men unwilling or unable to knuckle down, accept defeat and build again under new conditions. The collapse of the Nazi regime allowed no opportunities to wait (as old Soviet warriors might have) for more propitious times for its ideology. First, the victors over the regime were absolute in their victory, occupiers, quite capable of setting the terms for recovery. Second, the old regime had committed awesomely brutal crimes that should have brooked no forgiveness. Third, the regime was not decadent like Sovietism but fanatic in its last days. Orbach's 'Fugitives' is about those war criminals, fanatics, psychopaths, cynics and opportunists who had to deal with collapse and build new lives in confused circumstances, what they did, why they did it and what happened to them in the end. He is not interested in the escape routes ('rat lines'), those who ended up in South America or those who buried themselves and hoped for nonentity within the German Democratic Republic. He has very little to say about those who chose to join the Soviet cause (simply for lack of sources). He has had exceptional access to the archives of the German and Israeli intelligence services. Although these will have their own biases, this is sufficient to tell some remarkable stories that shine a new light on post-war espionage and the 'politics of the dark side'. If a Nazi of some notoreity or prominence did not decide to go quiet and try to become a businessman or minor bureaucrat in the new German democracy, he would have four broad choices. He could hold on to the Nazi faith in the belief that he could play the allies off against each other. He could choose the Soviet path (if he got past the initial risk of the firing squad) on the basis that the Soviets were the enemy of Jewish capitalism. Or he could join the Western cause (if his crimes were not too obvious and he was not too high-ranking) because it was the enemy of Jewish Bolshevism. The fourth option was not to give a damn about ideology or politics (and perhaps never to have given a damn in the first place) and look to old contacts to earn some money through political means - as military or police adviser, as arms dealer or perhaps in what might amount to organised crime. Orbach looks at all these options and how they played out amongst a surprisingly small group of people, mostly chancers and sociopaths, over the few decades following the Second World War in a story that is highly complicated but is well presented here. The author is a professional historian. He does not allow himself to get over-excited by his subject matter. He is diligent. He has excellent and (I believe) reliable sources. He writes well and clearly. It may not be the whole story but the story is interesting enough. The first section concentrates on the oft-told story of Reinhard Gehlen and the compromises entered into in order to create the Gehlen Org, the precursor of the BND (the German State Intelligence Service). It is a revisionist tale, shattering Gehlen's own carefully cultivated legend. The truth is that Gehlen was a lucky opportunist, that American weakness when it comes to interagency co-operation rather than anything more malicious allowed his rather bungling organisation to continue as long as it did and that it became riddled with Soviet infiltration. The Soviets come out of this as rather clever, exploiting the Nazi old boy network with Nazis of their own to create a scandal that was highly disruptive of German politics as the German Establishment tried to avoid exposure of the rum ex-Nazi, Hans Globke, Adenauer's Chief of Staff, to world gaze. To be charitable, German democracy could not have secured itself without accepting the services of some who served under the previous regime and who had 'mains sales'. The chaos of collapse appears to have allowed the new system to avoid the worst of the Nazis only by taking the most weaselly. The first part of the book leads into the second with its strong Middle East focus by telling the story of the Gehlen Org's attempt to build a Middle Eastern intelligence network using old regime sympathisers while West Germany simultaneously tried to build a positive relationship with Israel. The second part of the book then deals largely with those ex-Nazis who embedded themselves in the world of Arab nationalism and took a more political view of things - that the war against the Jews was a war against Israel and the West. Ex-Nazis turned up in Nasser's Egypt and in Syria as it went through regime change after regime change, touting themselves as military, police and interrogation advisers and introducing the techniques of the Gestapo to Nasserite and proto-Baathist officers. The two main stories here are those of the vicious and murderous war criminal Alois Brunner who embedded himself in the Syrian security state and the Nazi arms trading operations such as OTRACO which ran guns, not always competently, to the Algerian rebels against French rule. Brunner is another well known story except that, here, because of his access to Mossad files, Orbach can give us a fuller picture of his adventures. One is gratified (spoiler alert) that he ends up a victim of the Baathists who clearly despised him, eventually languishing in a cell no better than a Gestapo one. What is more interesting are the insights into Israeli policy towards Nazi holocaust perpetrators. It is not quite what one may think. Although it was vital for Israel to trigger global awareness of the Holocaust, this was also a State with limited resources and other priorities. The capture and trial (1961) of Eichmann, which, of course, led to a classic text, Arendt's 'Eichmann in Jerusalem' which spoke of the banality of evil, satisfied that primary aim. Judgements then had to be made on use of resources once that core end had been achieved. Mengele (never captured) was never not going to be on the 'forever' list of Israel (with full justification) but other existential concerns of the nation pushed punishing war criminals to the back of the queue once the Eichmann Trial had had its effect. The Eichmann kidnapping unnerved old Nazis. The myth of Israeli 'justice' by any means was sufficient to drive some into hiding but, after an attempt to assassinate Brunner (rather than attempt his kidnap for trial), he was ignored for two decades. The FLN arms trading operation naturally brought into play the thoroughly murderous and ruthless French security services who conducted a campaign of car bombs against Neo-Nazi arms dealers, on German soil if necessary which was not good for Franco-German relations. The arms dealers were not particularly adept at either field craft or business. Some of the 'deals' appear almost comically inept in retrospect. The French scored a nice own goal by harassing the second rate Nazis out of existence only to create space for far more efficient Soviet suppliers. The strategic incompetence of security services seems to be a theme of this book. Gehlen and French intelligence are soon matched in the third and final part by the story of Israeli intelligence's poor analysis and diversion of resources into yet another murderous campaign. In this case, it was triggered by panic over Nasser's hiring at enormous expense of West German rocket scientists (not necessarily Nazis) who were presumed to be building a missile capable of dropping a nuclear bomb on Israel. The fear is understandable. Concern about nuclear weaponry led Israel into its own nuclear weapons programme and it has guided its foreign policy ever since. However, on this occasion, the evidence was there that these rocket scientists were second rate and there was no threat. The 'justice' agenda was dropped but the scientists were assumed to be Nazis seeking a second holocaust (they were not Nazis, just hired hands). Israeli intelligence went down the rabbit hole and undertook a violent programme of assassination that destabilised Israeli-German relations. In the end, Nasser's missile programme got nowhere for reasons that had little to do with Israel's efforts but simply because his team was not up to the job. The project was too expensive to be maintained. Again, to be fair, Cairo in the late 1940s and 1950s, was a hotbed of pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish sentiment but we are now well into the early 1960s. Nazis were getting old and tired in any case, past any serious usefulness to local Arab regimes if ever they were very useful in the first place. In the end, the West Germans and Israelis settled the matter far more intelligently by simply buying off the rocket scientists in 1964. The irony of it all is that the deal was partly enabled with intelligence acquired by Israel with the help of one of the most prominent Nazis of all - Otto Skorzeny. Skorzeny, as a foot note, in this context is interesting because, untainted by war crimes yet the hero of European Neo-Nazis, he comes across here as a pragmatic opportunist hinting at the first emergence of Far Right admiration of Israel as a plucky national socialist State in its own right. This might be puzzling but if there were Nazis committed to 'extermination', other Nazis were more inclined to forced emigration (like the forcing out of the Moriscoes of Spain) so the existence of Israel might not present such a problem. This has been a division within the Far Far Right ever since. There was another brief burst of 'justice' attempts at creating an assassination programme directed at elderly Nazis under Begin in the late 1970s but it did not get very far. Brunner lost some fingers because of a letter bomb attempt on his life in 1980. This book is a fairly detailed account of the history of post-war Nazi mercenaries yet it is readable. The overwhelming effect is one of despair at our species, not because of its crimes but because of its blundering ineptitude whether Nazi, the sponsors of Nazis or their enemies. We are watching a criminal circus of surprisingly few people either 'busking' their way through life or engaging in extreme measures that would have been less necessary with a little forethought and closer attention to intelligence analysis. The Nazis come across as losers in a struggle for survival that simply results in them doubling down on their earlier criminal or sociopathic behaviour. Their enemies come across as tending to panicked paranoia which perhaps marks out active service units today then as now. History never repeats itself precisely but we are left with a suspicion that the shenanigans of excitable security apparats from Moscow to London, from Warsaw to Kiev, are likely to exhibit much the same tendencies nowadays as French, German and Israeli intelligence in the two post-war decades. On the other hand, and more positively, it is equally probable that amateur banditti arising from regime collapse may be disruptive but have no serious means of changing history while, on the few occasions that the big boys of politics intrude into the game, problems can be resolved rationally. An excellent historical work on a neglected part of post-war espionage, Orbach's use of his limited but important resources is exemplary. We can only hope that, one day, the Russian, Syrian and Egyptian Governments will give him access to their archives to fill out the story. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Jul 22, 2023
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0500294712
| 9780500294710
| 0500294712
| 4.12
| 8
| unknown
| unknown
|
really liked it
| Whitney Chadwick is a well regarded scholar of women in art with a strong interest in Surrealism. 'The Militant Muse' might be regarded as a sequel to Whitney Chadwick is a well regarded scholar of women in art with a strong interest in Surrealism. 'The Militant Muse' might be regarded as a sequel to her 'Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement'. It is not a straight narrative history but rather a series of essays on a theme. That theme is less some feminist attempt to recover women's role in Surrealism (although there is that aspect) and more an assertion of uniquely feminine responses to friendship set in a period of artistic change and war. It is a humane book but very much one for women about women. One has to step back a little from the currently fashionable determination to promote female, black or LGBTQ contributions to history. These are enlightening at best but often severely distorting at worst. The Academy as a whole has tended to distort rather than enlighten in recent years. Finding black relatively minor composers in the eighteenth century or concentrating attention on Artemesia Gentileschi and her castrating art or creating some idea of gayness long before it existed is all very well but has ended up with Jane Austen performed by black actors in a travesty of history. Chadwick is better than that. She does not make outrageous claims but presents the facts based on the documents and letters that she can get access to. Although we see a tendency to will an interpretation that suits an agenda on occasions, this is a work of history and not ideology. Nevertheless, we must not be seduced. The gender approach to art history (like the racial and the sexual) is a fashion. It derives in part from the market fact that, as with crime fiction and romance, women are disproportionately interested in art history. There is a drive to validation here. Looked at more dispassionately, Surrealism did produce some very significant women artists (less so literary figures), notably Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning and Remedios Varo although only Meret Oppenheim can claim to be part of the initiating group. This is more than women being a simple muse although it is equally true that men had the driving thoughts and energy that created the space for these women. Is that simply a matter of a 'patriarchal society' or is it perhaps true that women often do not initiate revolutions but can exploit them? The master literary and intellectual initiator of Surrealism, Andre Breton, was not accidentally someone who radicalised thought from experience of the front line in World War I. The preceding movements of Futurism and Dada were also related to war (for and against). Chadwick has something to say here about how war might drive a feminine sensibility under the conditions of the Second World War (and the Spanish Civil War) where violence and disruption affected both genders with far more equality than in the previous war. Unfortunately her story ends to all intents and purposes in 1945. There is no evidence of some upsurge in new ideas from women outside the contribution to Abstract Expressionism. Similarly Frida Kahlo is not really a Surrealist and neither was Lee Miller, both subjects of Chadwick. So, the task of capturing Surrealism for feminism does not quite work here but what does work is profound insight into female-to-female relationships (not necessarily but sometimes Lesbian) and the shattering effect of war on mostly very young but not exclusively so, women. Chadwick does this by taking five sets of interwar friendship broadly chronologically with the 'muse' aspect of women almost inevitably emerging as several of the women are as much known as the wives or lovers of 'great men' (Breton, Ernst, De Rivera and Penrose) as achievers in their own right. Indeed, one of the emergent themes is that interwar artistic women still tended to domesticity (and nothing wrong that) while trying to carve out an individual artistic expression and some sense of personal autonomy. Cooking and food emerge more than once as solace to no surprise. The first set is the quasi-Lesbian (or possibly fully Lesbian) romantic friendship of Valentine Penrose (first wife of Roland) and Alice Palen. There is not too much to say about this. It is sweet but reads like a romantic Lesbian novel and seems based on slender material. The second is the relationship between Leonora Carrington and Leonor Fini which actually says little about the latter but a great deal that is valuable about the former and how her art was formed - and how she coped or did not with the brutal incarceration of her lover Max Ernst during the phony war. Carrington was almost broken by the experience. The suggestion is that she was supportive and loyal during the temporary incarceration by the French authorities but the relationship did not survive long after. What is interesting is how Surrealism acted for her as psychotherapy through art. The third set explores the relationships of the surrealist and left-wing circles in which Frida Kahlo lived in Mexico as European political exiles arrived in the 1930s to create a vibrant artistic and cultural centre in Mexico City equal to those of (say) Bloomsbury or Paris. The central friendship is that of Kahlo (who easily surmounts her role as Diego de Rivera's wife) and Jacqueline Lamba ('Mrs Breton') but the tale is broader than that involving not only artists and surrealists but the circle around Trotsky in exile. The fourth set is for me the most interesting and powerful - less gossip perhaps and more solid history. It is the story of two long-loving Lesbians, Claude Cahun and Suzanne Malherbe, on the island of Jersey during the war with a rather weak link to 'Mrs Breton' coming for a holiday. One of the great posturings of the intelligentsia is that 'resistance' is writing a tract or poem against an oppressor or talking about resistance in a cafe and then having it added to one's own CV after others have fought with blood and gold to liberate you. Cahun and Malherbe's story (Cahun was an interesting surrealist and political actor in her own right duriing the interwar period) looks as if it might head in the same direction and then rapidly shifts into a story of radical action against the German occupiers at enormous personal risk. The two women, no longer young, become the epitome of a courage, their actions perhaps not changing the course of the war by one jot but demonstrating that even the littlest person can do what they can to destabilise rule by monsters and thugs. These are both true heroines. They got caught and underwent a terrifying trial and imprisonment escaping death by a hair's breadth and demonstrating that cliche 'the indomitability of the human spirit' to the nth degree. This story should be abstracted from this book and, at the least, made into an inspiring Netflix docudrama. The final set explores the kindly 'menage a trois' of Roland Penrose, his first divorced wife Valentine in exile from France (returning only once a year to Paris for a Lesbian romance) and Roland's generous and interesting (and war-traumatised) second wife, the renowned photographer Lee Miller. It is an oddly heart-warming story of dysfunctionality and polyamorous survival that could be happily mangled into some BBC drama. Of course, you do not get Roland's view on his ex-wife and current wife in situ with him on a Sussex farm but one suspects that he was tolerantly happy. We can add that the book is well illustrated with images that alone make it worth holding in the library. It should comfort female readers. Male readers should not ignore it. These are profound friendships and there are insights here for any man who wants to plumb the mysteries of woman. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Jul 15, 2023
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1441199853
| 9781441199850
| 1441199853
| 4.67
| 6
| Jan 01, 2013
| Aug 15, 2013
|
it was amazing
| This companion comprises over 60 relatively short essays on Heidegger's key texts and life including two sections devoted to the sources and influence This companion comprises over 60 relatively short essays on Heidegger's key texts and life including two sections devoted to the sources and influences on his philosophy and on his influence on other philosophers and schools with one on major themes in his thought. It is exhaustive, some might say exhausting if you commit to reading it straight through as I did (bar two essays which I simply could not face of which more anon). Severely academic, you are warned that it is not for the faint-hearted even if it is an excellent guide to current scholarship. The essays are, as you would expect, variable in readability and depth but the vast majority are enlightening. The best approach for the generalist is not to worry that you do not understand it all but rather to allow the 'thinking' to wash over you and 'suggest' what might be learned. The book changed some of my views. Above all, it helped me to understand just how much Heidegger's thinking was a continuous process over time. What was thought in the 1920s must be considered on very different terms from what he might have been thinking in the 1950s or 1960s. There is no obligation here to accept a system, Heidegger's philosophy permits disagreement by its very nature. It is fluid. It is always possible to depart from its premises further down the line and come to very different position so long as one thinks in good faith. It also clarified for me the shift from Being & Time (which I can now understand could never have been completed and still allow Heidegger to continue thinking as he had to think) to his even more dense and sometimes almost mystical and poetic later thought. I still prefer the earlier Heidegger and I still appreciate where Sartre took it for all his Cartesian faults but I understand better and appreciate more the indisputable richness of Heidegger's later thought processes even where I find myself increasingly departing from them over time. As to his life, I am not overwhelmingly interested in the tortured 'Heidegger as Nazi' debate which is a flagellating exercise that tells us more about the debaters than Heidegger but I found myself enlightened throughout by just how embedded he was in the faith culture of Germany. His faith journey towards a curious form of spiritualised atheism from Catholicism via Protestantism has its integrity but it also teaches us that the thrownness of this particular Dasein (and of all of us Daseins) means that we cannot be detached from our environment no matter how much we 'think'. This sets up a paradox in his thought. It liberates us from our condition but only up to a point. Our thrownness into the world means that we are our condition even as we expose it to our gaze and question it. Our thinking might throw us back into ourselves but we are still bound by the 'out there'. No review can utter anything truly sensible about his thought but we can still see that it is both coherent and yet expresses the impossibility of any language defining our situation as coherent and fixed in space and time. The turn to the poetical and quasi-mystical seems inevitable in retrospect. We are dealing with Wittgenstein's 'whereof we cannot speak' except that, still interested in language but eschewing the logical-analytical approach, Heidegger will not give up on the possibility of saying much more than other philosophers think possible. Naturally this results in apparent obscurity and an increasingly private language shared publicly even if every word and sentence is coherent in relation to his previous words and sentences - that he should become increasingly engaged with the obscurity of Art is no surprise. Heidegger is a revolutionary force in Western thought. Even now his impact is being delayed by Western habits. The odd thing about him is that his philosophy is difficult to understand intellectually but, once understood even at a basic level, it is surprisingly easy to live. There are one or two low points - the intersectional feminist essay (added as perhaps a concession to the contemporary academy) was one that I could not tolerate after a few paragraphs and the psychoanalytic essay was simply uninteresting unless you are a psychoanalyst. The greatest disappointment was one of the Editors (Eric Nelson) offering an almost obligatory addition of a piece on Heidegger as Nazi. This was embarrassing. After an initially clear exposition, its standard rather pompous liberal moralism denied everything that the man had taught us. In other words, even this excellent and well edited volume could not escape 'fashion' and the associated posturing of early twenty first century ideology, although, having pacified the usual suspects, we can at least say that this stuff represented under 2% of the whole. However, some of these essays more than made up for the stolid academicism of the bulk and the bits of nonsense. Even the most academic and difficult article contained some seed that could grow into revealing thought despite the problems of comprehension. One stand-out essay was Anne O'Byrne's on the application of Heidegger's thought to Birth as much as to Death. It contained powerful insights that could probably only have come from a woman Dasein. If we all are defined by our Finitude, we are also defined by our thrownness into the world as Origin. This allows us to escape something which Heidegger himself seems to have understood as a limitation of his early work and perhaps a flaw in the Sartrean adaptation - an excessive emphasis on our autonomous solitude. We are born into something that is pre-shaped as community and its bonds. This tension between Birth and Death is revealing to me as the tension between male and female (with due regard to the transgender) - between our matriarchal and patriarchal modes of being to some extent. Heidegger finds other ways to remind us of our debt to history. Another stand-out essay, if only for the clarity of the exposition, is Ian Thomson's on Heidegger's Ontotheology. He argues that it is the key to Heidegger's thinking. He is persuasive. Whether right or wrong, he is so clear in his writing that it is the essay I would recommend if only one were to be read. On his influence, there are two essays worth picking out. There is Trish Glazebrook's on Heidegger's influence on environmental philosophy which has spun off into some fairly inhuman directions in ways that I suspect we will see soon in techno-philosophy as Heidegger is inverted in the age of AI. The second is the superb and instructive review of the dynamic relationship between Heidegger and East Asian philosophy (notably Japanese philosophy) where some extreme claims are moderated but the influence of equals recognised. It was a discovery to realise that Japanese student philosophers were present at very early lectures and that Japanese refutations of Heidegger represent some of the most coherent criticism from an intense Zen perspective. It made me want to explore the work of Nishida. Heidegger and the Japanese were targeting the same problem - the experience and expression of the ineffable. Heidegger overthrew the entire Western tradition since (and including) Plato to head in a direction that might be called (dubiously) the pre-Western rediscovered. Most criticism of Heidegger in the West simply fails to understand just how much Heidegger had pulled the rug out from all absolute (as opposed to utilitarian or pragmatic) claims made by Western thinkers. Western criticism is largely a recovery operation exercised in a state of denial. From a utilitarian-pragmatic perspective, the only Western criticism that still seems to have something to say in contestation with Heidegger is not the liberal tradition but the sometimes sarcastic Marxist tradition which, of course, has nearly been crushed to death as alternative. Japanese criticism was, however, far more powerful because it tended to finger Heidegger as still unable to escape his situation as a Western philosopher and unable to think in the absolute terms of the ineffable and of Nothing as East Asians debated the matter. One senses that this criticism was one that Heidegger accepted - that he knew when he was beat but that it did not matter because the fact was that the West was the place into which he had been thrown and the West needed different thoughts from the East because of its own history. In this context, Heidegger's concern with 'techne' (more than just technology) may be his most lasting legacy, creating a problem with the thing that, more than anything else, defines Western power and legacy - and the terms of resistance to it. The resistance is not about rejecting technology but not allowing technology to become more than the hammer that the peasant uses to hammer into place a nail. The Westerner has become his hammer rather than seeing that hammer as just an extension of himself or herself. The critique of technology on these terms has in a simplified and possibly poorly understand form driven romantic environmentalism but now we are faced with a new challenge - forms of technology that may become Dasein on their own account and which replace human functionalities. Personally I tend to disagree with Heidegger on technology as a 'problem' but not as a description in the context of the Being of beings. I slip back into the Nietzschean perspective of 'overcoming' and of mastery of technology as part of overcoming. However, the secret to all this lies in who is overcoming what or who and for what purpose. Heidegger's description and thinking about technology remain invaluable in defining the terms of mastery. Sadly few technologists would seem to have any idea of what he was talking about. This is probably as far as we can go here. Do not read this book (unless you are a professional philosopher) and expect to understand it even with some previous basic reading in Heidegger's thought. Thinking does not work like that. It is a continuous process. Let it flow over you and do not be frightened by what you do not understand. One flash of insight or trigger for thought in each essay is still 160 or so new thoughts or thought processes that may change your own way of thinking. It is hard work but worthwhile and you can take it slowly. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Jun 02, 2023
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0860915883
| 9780860915881
| 0860915883
| 3.92
| 777
| 1990
| May 17, 1993
|
it was ok
| I am going to have to make an admission - I got through 80% of this before finally cracking and skim-reading the rest just so that I could go get a li I am going to have to make an admission - I got through 80% of this before finally cracking and skim-reading the rest just so that I could go get a life. This is not to say that Baudrillard does not make some very interesting and fertile points but only that this is a dreadful presentation of them. I suspect a certain type of continental philosophy groupie will have been slavering over this back in 1990 but it is mostly no more than an exercise in quasi-nihilist ranting by a grumpy old man whose gods had failed and who now wants to take this fact out on the world. Where he scores is in being prescient about 'hyperreality' - the whizzy world of signs taking off into an unhinged world of their own. He would not have been surprised in the least, I suspect, by the emergence eventually of that artistic abortion, the mickey mouse NFT. But there is more going on here than seeing what few saw then and what most of us see now - the imagined world of humanity detaching itself from humanity itself and even from material reality to spin completely out of control and create increasing levels of absurdity. My view on this is relaxed and sanguine. This is what our species is. Some of it is only a democratisation of what once went on in aristocratic courts. It is absurd and wasteful but then that is what we humans and society are. There is no point in getting too gloomy about it. Baudrillard, however, is a French intellectual. He takes everything dreadfully seriously. He has to explain it in abstract terms because if he does not do so what is his point. He has done structuralism, situationism and Marxism and been post-structuralist so where next? As all his gods failed, he ages and humanity refuses to fit into any model he may come up with (he is clearly very cross that we are as we are) so he ends up with a sort of sub-Heideggerian mish-mash of personal near-nihilism and Lacanian reflections. And the style? This is a rant in obscure tongue with the most strained and almost anthropomorphic uses of scientific theory to make his point as sets of extended metaphor. This is not philosophy - it needs to be filed under 'Experimental French Literature' instead. The frustration is that there are some good ideas here that, if they were clearly expressed and less 'emotional' (the emotion masked by the claim to be a 'philosophe'), would help us understand better not only what we are but where we were going to go in the following thirty years. As a description of the world and of our human nature it constantly just misses, not because he is 'wrong' but because he has let style and performance overwhelm the content and become, in fact, part of the problem he is describing rather than part of any possible solution. He is, of course, a fatalist. He thinks there is no 'solution'. He may be right. If he is right, then perhaps acceptance is the best strategy. His raging against the dying of the light unfortunately suggests that tendency to moralism that is the most unattractive aspect of French thought. He does not really like us and, because he cannot avoid being one of us by dint of being human, he logically does not like himself very much. Yet he is no Olympian in reality, able to look down upon us and himself from on high even if that is the pretension of the modern intellectual. Nevertheless, Baudrillard has been influential and it is right that he has been. When you can get through the rant and obscurity and general guff, there is an analysis hidden here that escapes the nonsense about objects and subjects and mirrors and the repressed rage. It strikes home. His cold rage expresses something lost which goes further than the loss of status and importance of the intellectual class (we suspect that this is a real driver here) but is a loss of the bounded-ness of being repressed and constrained by a world lost to us forever by technological innovation. Humanity fears freedom because it does not know what to do with it. Baudrillard at least thinks about what we may become when abundance and freedom are general, a prospect that now looks theoretically possible with the emergence of artificial intelligence. It is going to take nerves of steel for us to survive the arrival of true freedom. A lot of people are going to be broken during the transition. It is why so many older people find the miserable 1970s a matter for nostalgia - there was something to fight for and now we have it, it tastes ashen. Baudrillard is also suggestive of something we have been seeing more of over the last decade - the revolt against reason, technocracy and the happiness-merchants as our impotence becomes increasingly demonstrable. Social bonds had created the illusion of potential agency. Reason in society requires that everything be connected like Newton's clockwork universe. When reasoning heads for uncertainty as the norm and social bonds are unravelled, the belief that levers can be pulled by autonomous agents begins to die to be replaced by atoms in motion. And that is what we and our environment have become - bodies and signs in constant motion, with an increasingly problematic relationship to trust because trusted connections have been broken. This is not going to get better in the coming age of deep fakery. Some of Baudrillard's psychology is quite acute in this context - especially about our invention of -isms like racism that allows the scientific oppression of 'others' and the loss to us created by sexual freedoms that are illusory and have lost us the seductions enabled by difference. There is social truth too. The sheer proliferation of forms and signs is noted although what we really need is an analysis of what this means in practice to the conduct of our lives rather than what we get ... an implicitly outraged 'horreur' at the facts of the matter. We can safely say that we are now in the middle of what Tooze has called a 'polycrisis' whose nature lies (in part) in the fact that rampant proliferation has made it impossible for elites to control the Frankensteinian monsters they created out of neo-liberalism and liberal imperialism. Baudrillard (rather typically) calls this proliferation cancerous and these are his best passages fairly early in the book. But, sadly, some very real insights are buried in 'style', obscurantist posturing, ranting and dubious analogy. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
May 10, 2023
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1840460873
| 9781840460872
| 1840460873
| 3.36
| 311
| Jan 01, 1996
| Aug 13, 1997
|
it was ok
| Between 1965 and 1975, there was a series called 'The Bluffers Guide to ...' This provided short light-hearted introductions designed to get the middl Between 1965 and 1975, there was a series called 'The Bluffers Guide to ...' This provided short light-hearted introductions designed to get the middle classes through their dinner parties. Today we have the far more serious Oxford 'Very Short Introductions to ..." which started in 1995. Inbetween came instant graphic guides to intellectuals and ideas - the 'Introducing ..." series published by Icon which was an expanded British version of an American series 'For Beginners' that went back to the 1970s. These dominated the instant knowledge market in the 1990s. The point of the 'Introducing/For Beginners' series was that they purported to introduce difficult ideas by explaining them in pictorial terms. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it did not. Introducing Baudrillard sadly does not. This particular introduction was an attempt to pack twenty years of dense French intellectualism into 170 or so pages with perhaps a 100 or less words on a page with the pictures adding very little. 15,000-20,000 words is an article of 30 or 40 pages at most, an hour's read. Half the book is taken up with Baudrillard's struggle to add something meaningful to the rapid decline of Marxist thought. Half the book is thus turgidly incomprehensible. This leaves only half available for when Baudrillard becomes potentially interesting. Baudrillard likes simile and metaphors from cosmology and physics so the best and kindest way to describe what is happening to his thought is that he is being dragged into a philosophical black hole as Marxism implodes and then decides that it is the black hole itself that is interesting. The result is a form of object-oriented nihilism that seems at times little more than a form of patrician intellectual despair at the masses who Marxism was supposed to liberate, a bit like Hitler's railing against the German people as the Russian shells burst overhead in his Berlin bunker. Think of it like this. For decades, intellectuals sat on a pile of dung claiming that it was not dung but the world. It gives way and they are forced to accept that it is dung because they are now suffocating in it as they sink downwards. As the world collapses around them and all the structures of meaning that they have created to explain that world prove meaningless, they drift, if not into cynical public intellectual careerism to enrich themselves, into assuming that the dung is the world and the world is dung. Meanwhile the rest of the world outside the pile of dung continues to do what it always has done without benefit of clerics and intellectuals - live, struggle, survive, die, create personal and social meaning and generally exist regardless of theory. From this perspective, one wonders why anyone would think the post-Marxist intellectual to be in the least interesting but Baudrillard, in his dead-end nihilistic way, still captures something worth considering - the elusive and increasingly absurd nature of social reality. I would tend to ignore his negativity about the mass of the population (and its undoubted impotence at changing what matters to Baudrillard) and think instead of his analysis as often being correct but from which he draws the wrong conclusions. The world he describes when he casts doubt on its reality is not the world of most of us most of the time, it is the evanescent and unstable world of elites (of which he is an unstable part). This is crumbling before our eyes while we duck and dive to deal with the consequences of the collapse. There is a good example at the moment where the real world continues to trade along inflationary lines despite all the efforts of the central bank technocrats to control the process according to 'theory' while governments contribute to the chaos through wasteful potlach expenditures. We have a war in the East whose actual operations work to one side's timetable (the attritional war economy-based long game of the Russians) while the public in the West sees a simulacrum made up of aspiration, agit-prop, hope and moral fervour much as Baudrillard might have pointed out. Nothing Western elites hoped to achieve from February 2022 in terms of economic war has turned out the way that theory predicted. The Russian and Chinese counterparts do not have a theory in the same way - they just have a set of actions based on values and struggle. Baudrillard's critique of society is actually a critique of Western society and of the utter failure of liberal democracy to be anything more than dysfunctional over the long term. We can merge Chomsky's Propaganda Model with Baudrillard's simulacrum here. What we see is a massively complex and unruly system of social and political control that is, indeed, plunging into its own black hole. The 'masses' withdrawal into their own world is a rational response to the absurdity of a distant world that they see humming with self-importance far from them. There is still a real world out there. It is still based on economics and competition for resources as well as on brute power and technology. The Marxism of simple faith rather than scholastic interpretation stands up, at least in part, surprising well. Layered over this real world of markets and techno-innovation, of personal struggles and movements, of brute military force that can mostly not be deployed, of weather and crops, lies a magical world of intellectuals, managers, activists, politicians and technocrats that sucks this real world dry. As the latter loses control over reality, the formally impotent masses enjoy themselves by treating their world as an elaborate game or as theatre with the fall-back position of taking to the streets as they are doing in France or may yet do on Trump's arrest. The frustration of those intellectuals, managers and technocrats who still understand the link of everything to reality is compounded as careerism and the structures of power and media communications intensify the air of fantasy that allowed Baudrillard to speak of wars as illusions. So, Baudrillard ends up both wrong and right. Wrong in that he did not have a correct description of all social reality. Right in that he had a correct description of the collapse of elites into their own black hole of illusion and ineptitude, out of control and taking the illusion for reality. To answer a question posed by the book, Baudrillard is a symptom of what he writes about. Although this particular book is not useful in that respect, he should be read in order to diagnose the symptoms of the disease of Western civilisation from within. If he is right (in this interpretation), the process of implosion will continue remorselessly. This will please political accelerationists but whether the implosion will even be noticed by most of suffering humanity is entirely another matter. They are living in another world entirely. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Mar 25, 2023
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1859844480
| 9781859844489
| 1859844480
| 3.76
| 1,134
| Nov 03, 2001
| Oct 01, 2003
|
liked it
| Baudrillard was a very fashionable intellectual in France in the run-up to the twenty-first century much as Fukuyama was in the US. Neither has lasted Baudrillard was a very fashionable intellectual in France in the run-up to the twenty-first century much as Fukuyama was in the US. Neither has lasted quite so well as history has unfolded although Baudrillard was much more perceptive than Fukuyama about our condition. In Baudrillard's case, we have to step over an instinctive French 'ressentiment' of American power and perhaps a touch of 'they had it coming', common amongst European intellectuals at the time, to get to the heart of what he says that is of value. The book, four essays responding to the events of 9/11 and the emergence of dramatic Islamist terrorism, has not aged well although Baudrillard does have some interesting things to say about the dialectic between any hegemonic system and the resistance it necessarily creates to its pretensions. The best essay is the last ["The Violence of the Global"] where our continental philosopher ceases to be the public intellectual sounding shrill and even hysterical about a particular event and returns to the business of thinking about the structures within which that event took place. If anything, read a little over two decades after its writing, this short book of essays reminds us that few were immune from the general air of panic and hysteria at the time. With history far from ending, we can now look back and see 9/11 as more incidental than Americans would like to think. The tussle between the West and Islam had begun a century before in Egypt and Northern India as a reaction to imperialism. It reached a trigger point with the Iranian seizure of the American Embassy. 9/11 was perhaps just an accident waiting to happen, exploitable by the darker forces in the West. Roll on twenty years and radical Islamism is reduced to tribal squabbles and male urban discontent. The real crisis was the rise of the less than competent and extremely expensive and wasteful surveillance and proto-terror state in the West. The psychological shock has long since passed. Where Baudrillard scores (eventually) is in analysing the dialectic between hegemony and resistance and how hegemony always breeds its own doom precisely because it tries to be hegemonic. Something animal in the human resists the Good when it is thrust down the throat at the expense of autonomy. Perhaps the brute liberationist analysis of Frantz Fanon was more to the point here even if it too had to be cloaked in an intellectual cover (psychoanalysis in that case) in order to be understood by intellectuals. Intellectuals are sometimes the least naturally bright of our species. The proof of Baudrillard's thesis lies in events unrelated to 9/11 - the resistance of Russia, Iran and increasingly China and, tacitly, major third world rising unstable powers like Brazil, South Africa nd Indonesia to the presumption of Western liberal universalism in dictating international values. The crisis of 2022 was and is a crisis over the Western hegemonic policing of the 1945 settlement which the Soviets and Russia actually fought to uphold until it became transformed into a system of values imperialism and insecurity. If ObL triumphed, it was not in creating space for Allah or turning the West into the monster of values imperialism that we could all now see, it was in making the West react against him in ways that enabled the 'imperial' Western narrative to become visible through its own actions. The current Ukraine War is fought as much in the cultural space as it is in the bloody trenches of Bakhmut. The Nordstream explosions are fought over as narrative to the extent that we must suspect deliberate obfuscation in order to have any true version be diminished against others. There is the war of blood and iron that is poorly reported in the detail and involves real deaths and property destruction and another war (one which Baudrillard would have predicted) of lies and half-truths centred on culture and image-making, a war that is virtual rather than real. And this is where it gets interesting because the Russians, not without cause, challenge the Western narrative today precisely in terms of resistance to hegemony. They get the number of listeners that ObL could never achieve, listeners who agree with the analysis in their hearts. 9/11, however, looks like a failed operation of resistance except insofar as it pushed the West (as Reagan pushed the Soviets into collapse through excessive defence spending) into more debt and forced such an assertion of its values globally that it created a more viable and resilient resistance. And if this new resistance fails, then, as Baudrillard seems to imply, another form of resistance will simply emerge in its place (almost certainly internally within the West in my view) because empire has long since over-reached far beyond the limits of its own legitimation. If the West had understood coolly the insignificance of 9/11 and had concentrated instead on the reaffirmation of its values within its own territories, I suspect that those values would have spread organically precisely because they would have been functional in a more relaxed silent hegemony. But to do so would not be human nature. Baudrillard (albeit using semi-impenetrable continental philosophy as his tool) is actually giving us an insight into the human condition - he did, after all, start his academic career as a sociologist (and a Marxist one at that). Social media and a traditional media under enormous economic and cultural pressure have introduced into the total globalising system an element of normalising hysteria - or is it hysterical normality? No problem of international relations can be considered coolly any more. There are cool pragmatic solutions to the Ukraine situation - the Chinese proposals are eminently rational - but the 'hegemony', shaken by failures from Iraq to Afghanistan, plays things as a zero sum game against a 'resistance' who only become resistors because of the way the game is played. The hegemon is trapped into a dysfunctional reaction to world events because it set the rules of the game and then feels obliged to follow them to the letter as 'moral principles'. But they are not actually moral principles, they are rules and rules can be changed to meet new realities. Yet this is why current events are existential and why nuclear world war is, in fact, a very real threat. The hegemony has lost the plot and it must win, not because it must expand any more but because it cannot shrink and because its own populations are beginning to become resistors too. The point here is that everyone could unite against the obscurantist terrorism of Al-Qaeda because it was so alien to core Western values but the response of Western elites to the crisis was to renounce those values and then fail to stop Western values splitting into warring camps at home. The attempt to label Moscow and Beijing as the Berlin and Rome of the 1930s failed because it was self-evidently not true. If it was a lie, then the West becomes a liar, in an internal contradiction given its own claimed nature. The hypocrisies of the West are the West's most powerful cultural enemy. The emotional extremities of modern psychological warfare operations will work for a while and then collapse because the West is not a centralised 'resistor' State but a culturally weak hegemon based on a universalism limited enough to encompass a thousand different ideologies within it. The tragedy is that the US in particular has been here before and never learned the lesson - massive support for the Vietnam intervention switched to massive opposition within something like nine months. Without a total war accepted by a total people, bullshit is eventually seen through. Baudrillard's essays are thus a useful way station in understanding how we got from a West with a shared and useful lie facing off Sovietism to a crumbling facade of united elites crossing their fingers and hoping that resistance is futile and that it will will crumble because of 'economic realities'. But this is a vastly interconnected hegemony. Taking out a chunk of the world economy to effect a political change destabilises the whole. In other words, the illusory virtual war which Baudrillard showed us is triggering a third and very real economic war affecting all of us directly. This is the dialectic. There may be real deaths and smashed property over there but total war is impossible now without mass immolation. What we have instead is a virtual war that enables an economic war and the economic war is what actually matters. It is the destruction! ObL's terror attack was a blip as far as economic war was concerned. The oil continued to flow, the financial markets adjusted. Possibly the only serious effect was the utter waste of resources on an intrusive and expensive international 'homeland' security operation. The emotional hysteria and invented narratives (of all sides) of the current crisis are very different. Inflation is real. Interest rates are real. Assets value declines when they come will be real. Increased government debt for arms, social cohesion and 'energy security' will be real. Even victory would be a problem - not the reconstruction of Ukraine which would simply be a matter of Western corporate plunder so that its hard fought for sovereignty would be as virtual as any of Baudrillard's wars - if the 'other side' really did collapse. So, Baudrillard gets it half right. He sees the dialectic. He sees the human condition of hegemonies being doomed to effect their own destruction. But, in 2002, he was still caught up in an alleged world-historical moment that proved only to be a way station to what is happening today. What we can learn from Baudrillard, much disliked by many for his chilly intellectualism about matters of value, is that the 'virtual' world of international relations is our problem then as today. It shapes real reality as an alternate reality, one in the command of surprisingly few people. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Mar 11, 2023
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0684816709
| 9780684816708
| 0684816709
| 4.40
| 5
| unknown
| Sep 02, 1996
|
liked it
| Although now thirty years out of date, Gerald Segal's one volume guide to global issues as they stood in the early 1990s is still useful as a summary Although now thirty years out of date, Gerald Segal's one volume guide to global issues as they stood in the early 1990s is still useful as a summary of international relations at that time. From there, you just have to fill in the subsequent three decades aware that many of the apparently intractable problems and disputes of what will soon be the mid-twenty-first century have very long histories and are unlikely to be resolved quickly. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Feb 19, 2023
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0192801686
| 9780192801685
| 0192801686
| 3.33
| 379
| 2002
| 2003
|
liked it
| Written almost immediately after 9/11, this 'very short introduction' cannot do much more than give us a basic history of what we like to place under Written almost immediately after 9/11, this 'very short introduction' cannot do much more than give us a basic history of what we like to place under the term 'terrorism' and to express a barely hidden frustration with the war on an abstract noun (Terry Jones of Monty Python fame). There are two major points being made here. The first is that there is no satisfactory definition of what terrorism actually is except in terms of its political purposes. And the second is that media-driven hysteria around the subject threatens the very fabric of liberal society. The book also debates whether terrorism as tactic (by whatever definition) is efficacious or not. The author suggests not and yet his examples sometimes tend to tell us the opposite especially if we take the long view. We can agree that most socialist or anarchist terror within liberal democracies was a waste of energy but then the later manifestations of it in the Red Army Faction and similar organisations were somewhat narcissistic and even patronising expressions of middle class outrage on behalf of others. However, the cases of the Soviet Union, Cuba, China, Venezuela and others tend to show that terror as a tool designed to eliminate opposition in the sea in which revolutionaries must swim did work and that national/socialist regimes did emerge and survive for decades - right up until the present day. This, of course, is very different from the attempt at an 'ethical' terrorism by the Narodniki although anarchism descended into very unethical behaviours before too long. Whether ethical or unethical, these types of political excitability without a greater strategy certainly failed. It could be argued, of course, that the failure of the Social Revolutionaries constructed the conditions for Communist ruthlessness as, if we want a symbol of this, Lenin's ideology emerged out of the State murder of his brother. This would certainly be taking the long view. Townshend does himself great credit by not shying away from the existence of state terror and not only of the communist type. The Western empires have not been averse to it, again as part of a wider strategy of warfare, even if they like to cover it up as 'counter insurgency'. Townshend could have gone further and deeper down this route but the danger would have been that the purchasing punter might have got confused if this commissioned attempt to explain what was then a new phenomenon to some had moved into Chomskian territory. He is certainly right that terror within a revolutionary struggle that does not have a national resistance aspect is likely simply to mobilise the resources of the enemy into counter-strategies of great brutality (as in Chile and Argentina) and alienate populations uncommitted to the struggle. Each case is different but Townshend is particularly good and honest on the cat-and-mouse terror tactics of Israel and the Palestinians where he unravels the self-serving Netanyahu narrative that drives American congressional opinion, a legislature of surpassing lack of sophistication. In fact, Israel is an example of terrorism working because it was primarily ethnic and capable of being integrated into the survival strategies of an emerging ethnic State. That Jews never truly repudiated the massacres committed on Arab villagers as ethnic cleansing is a blot on their moral reputation. He also looks at the IRA and ETA as national liberation movements making use of terror as a tactic and he judges, prematurely in the case of the IRA, that they were failures. This is probably true in the case of the Basques with the Basque territory still well locked into the Spanish State mechanism. However, the Whitehall sell-out by stealth of the Unionists in a trajectory that was perfectly happy to abandon aspects of UK sovereignty in collaboration with the Irish in return for Washington's little scheme to get Ireland into NATO was also partly driven by Irish terrorism. As each decade goes by the inveigling of Northern Ireland into an eventual referendum to get the Province off the back of the British budget and secure Ireland so that it was no longer a neutralist strategic risk factor in a European War could rely on Irish terror to make that job easier. If the purpose of Irish terror was to unite Ireland then, although Irish terror did not in itself bring the unification about, the conditions it created have enabled the possibility of their aspirations to be met just as Unionist terror has slowed the process down. In that respect, terror works. Terror, in other words, is a tool within a much wider political or military game. This is something the Israelis never forgot. When the Nazis called the French Resistance 'terrorists' they were strictly correct if we look at the term neutrally as a description of a 'practice'. The FLN in Algeria will have watched French terrorism 'working' in this way - as a process linked to politics and conventional or guerrilla war - just as the OAS blunderingly tried to do the same and the Islamist insurgents of the 1990s even more brutally did the same again. The claim that the 'terrorist' is someone else's 'freedom fighter' is trite because it separates the two as moral categories whereas the actual moral categories are a) the killing of 'innocents' on the one side set against b) the greater aims of, say, national self-determination on the other. We live with this every day. Ukrainian car bombs are called partisan activity and their terrorist nature is glossed over in the Western media and yet these same Editors froth at the mouth when the same tactic is used by Afghans or Hezbollah on their own soil. Townshend was also writing at that point where nearly all commentators found themselves thoroughly confused by the emergence of what appeared to be a nihilistic (from a liberal humane perspective) form of radical religious terrorism that looked to a supernatural end. As always throughout the book he is sensible here, if possibly overly non-committal. Research into Islamic terror was in its early days. Western observers were no more successful in getting into the mind-set of the Islamist than they are today in getting inside the mind-set of a Russian or Chinese. The overwhelming characteristic of the average Western policy wonk is a staggering lack of imagination which leads to simplistic and disproportionate, indeed hysterical, responses to what is generally far less of a threat to a population than exhausted doctors and truck drivers. However, Townshend's wise insights into the tactics of Hezbollah suggest that even Islamist fanatics (if we can only get to understand how they think instrumentally) are instrumental in their approach with attitudes no different in this respect from the Narodniki or the Tupamaros. One of the lessons of the book is that terrorism continues to have its instrumental logic and that we can soon begin to divine when it might be used ineffectively or effectively to achieve very long range ends in association with other strategies - military, political and economic. The liberal moral outrage at the tactic is justifiable in the abstract but the liberal rarely sits where the 'damned of the earth' (Fanon) sits and easily turns a blind eye to state terror when it acts in his interest. Morality is a tool like any other in the brutal game of power. Terror strategies tend to emerge when power is disproportionate so it was always likely that America as hegemon would face it because American power was and is disproportionately greater than anything else on the planet. We should really be surprised that there is so little of it. We might go further and say that, while national liberation strategies (for all the nonsense talked about a Terrorist International in Washington during the Cold War) were located in specific territories, globalisation has created a new West/Rest dichotomy that increases the risks of terror. Russian analyses of the nature of American power are far from incorrect. Russia has not been entirely isolated because non-Western elites connect with that analysis. The blocs that emerge in fact reduce the chances of terrorism because a countervailing non-Western bloc can imply sufficient resistance. However, if the resistance bloc is eliminated as a traditional network of powers striving not to be subsumed within the Western imperium, Western dominion creates the opportunities for asymmetric 'terrorist' resistance amongst the powerless and not only overseas. The same threat exists in the heart of the West from those who feel excluded from the imperium at home. So long as populist ideas and feelings have leg room, terrorism as a tactic is counter-productive but it becomes productive if the national populist or the deprived feel their back is to the wall. Similarly, the potential unravelling of the cosy consensus between the corporate sector, states and eco-politicians over green issues because of crude energy security and more urgent socio-economic requirements might also threaten the system with what might be called a Green Army Faction, The point here is that terrorism as a tactic is always a potential threat and increases to the degree that Western society behaves more like the old Russian Empire than the liberal democracy it purports to be - surveillance, social control, hunting down whistleblowers and so forth. Townshend notes something important - the grim dialectic between terrorism and the media and the way that the media's excitability and hysteria drives public panic far beyond what reason would dictate and so creates inappropriate political decision-making and manipulation. It could be argued (I would) that the most socially destructive force in Western society is not the potential terrorist but the Editor with his propensity for 'stories', fast news cycles, high emotion, moral posturing and attempts to manipulate power by the back door. There is nothing we can do about this because liberal democracy defines itself in part by the freedom given to the Press. The benefits of good journalism (where it exists) should theoretically always outweigh the disbenefits although increasingly they do not as serious journalism decays. Although now out of date by about two decades (especially in regard to Islamic terror), this very short book (139 pages) packs in a lot of information. If it does not do a great deal to help us define what the phenomenon is then that is because the phenomenon is not easily definable at all. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Nov 11, 2022
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0306803518
| 9780306803512
| 0306803518
| 3.66
| 92
| Nov 08, 1968
| Mar 22, 1989
|
really liked it
| Alongside Trevor-Roper's 'Last Days of Hitler' and Crankshaw's 'Gestapo', this book was one of the earliest attempts (1956) to come to terms with the Alongside Trevor-Roper's 'Last Days of Hitler' and Crankshaw's 'Gestapo', this book was one of the earliest attempts (1956) to come to terms with the then very recent experience of the horrendously chaotic and destructive national socialist experiment in Germany. We have to remember that the period from the Nazi seizure of power to the collapse of the regime in 1945 was just twelve years ... which is no more than three Presidential terms and only two years more than Tony Blair's 'reign'. Reitlinger was writing only a decade after the regime collapsed. In other words, a historian's objectivity was likely to be difficult in such circumstances. Reitlinger was, in fact, an historian and specialist in Asian ceramics who just wanted to tell this particular history and, in another book, that of the holocaust. He also had to rely on a limited range of sources - unreliable media and Nuremburg process documentation and self-serving memoirs from former German officials and soldiers with a great deal of important evidence locked up in the closed Soviet system. From this perspective, his achievement - even if only preliminary and overtaken by other researchers - was significant. Although his emotional responses to what were recent events come through, the work is nevertheless a work of history albeit a provisional one. There is a bias towards the story of the chaotic concentration camps uncovered by the Western allies rather than the extermination process uncovered by the Soviets. This would be corrected by later writers. His horrified emotional responses are, of course, understandable regardless. His holocaust study had underestimated deaths in the extermination camps by a significant number. It took two decades more for academics to expose the scale of what happened in the East. From that perspective, giving slight primacy to Belsen over Auschwitz is of its time. He expresses a righteous disgust at the ease with which so many SS mass murderers got off lightly and you sense anger that the German State at the root of the crimes was too ready to try and forget what was done. However, he does not mention the Cold War context enabling this leniency. As an interim assessment of the role of the SS in the Hitlerite imperium Reitlinger's account remains useful today even if those emotional qualities to the book now look unnecessary and more polemical than academic. Yet the horrible facts still stand. Reitlinger has a polemical point and it is a fair point. In contemporary terms he wants to knock on the head the dangerous myths surrounding the SS as competent or idealistic or the sole monsters of the Nazi regime. He wins his point on the evidence then available. The story is also the story of Heinrich Himmler (where perhaps the account is sometimes less satisfactory as psychology) and of the SS as just one important element in the fragmented one person rule of that brilliant monomaniac Adolf Hitler. The SS starts off as a personally loyal death squad to deal with Hitler's problem with his own Party embodied in the SA as a potentially revolutionary armed force. To understand Hitler, one must understand that he was not a revolutionary but concerned only with the seizure of the State. The Nazi State was not like the Communist State - the arm of a Party - but the German State owned and guided by the Fuhrer who exercised control through not only the Party but the traditional organs of state power (the civil service) and, after its personal oath, the Army. Hitler did not give a damn which bit of the system he used so long it was directed at his personal ideological ends - effectively, a throwback to Wilhelmine imperialism combined with an existential loathing of the Jews and Bolsheviks. Each of his gangster barons was granted personal leave to exploit a segment of the machinery for these ends and their own. Each was allowed to compete ruthlessly for territory knowing that the Fuhrer could dispossess any one of them at any time to the advantage of another. Goebbels incorporated the revolution into Hitler's mainstream and came to control the nation qua nation. Goering was responsible for the economy and air power until his failings saw his influence crumble, largely in favour of Speer. Bormann rose to rule Germany as administrative machine through the Party Gauleiters. Others ruled segments - whether foreign affairs (Ribbentrop), the navy (Doenitz), occupied territories. 'justice' (meaning state control of society) or whatever. Himmler was both immensely powerful and an outsider with an emerging two-fold brief to police the Nazi State and act as brutal agent of Germanisation and social control (and obviously anti-semitism) in the grey area between Germany itself and the front lines of war. Hitler was a creature of his own history. He feared a 'stab in the back' while he pursued his warrior ambitions. Himmler's job was in part (alongside those of Goebbels and Bormann) to make sure that German dissent could not rise from below and snatch victory away. This helps to explain the viciousness of Hitler's reaction to the July Bomb Plot. One of the three great arms of Hitlerite power (the Army) had gone over a line and stabbed Germany, represented by him, in the back. The SS' importance rose accordingly but still not above that of the Army. When Himmler in the last days tried to negotiate futilely with the West to create an anti-Bolshevik front (we see a pale version of this today in the East European nationalist-NATO alliance against Russia), Hitler saw another betrayal under conditions where the personal was the political. The SS may have started life as a death squad-cum-personal protection operation for the Party Leader and it may have poddled along for some years accumulating power and numbers as a slightly potty ideological avant-garde with influence but war made it. It was charged with implementation of the Commissar Order (the slaughter of captured Soviets) and then of Jews (brought to a fine industrial art in the camps) and expanded as an economy in its own right as well as an auxiliary generally brave but variably competent military force. It 'grew like topsy' to the point where it was to become clear that Himmler himself could no longer cope. The last months of the war in 1945 show a man constantly on the edge of personal mental breakdown. The overwhelming impression is not of some dark lord of inherent evil but of someone without a traditional moral bottom who was led by circumstances ever deeper into the mire so that one wonders whether his eventual suicide may not have been a relief. Reitlinger's contempt for him may be deserved but two decades in corporate life taught me that there but for the grace of god would go not a few people I have worked with given perks, status, pathways to the top and a carefully cultivated ignorance of the consequences of their actions. From this perspective, Reitlinger wins his implicit polemic point that the attempt by modern (1950s) Germans to put all the blame for the evil done on the SS was criminally self-serving. The SS was the implementation agent for evil acts in which the German State as a whole was complicit. I do not agree, however, with Reitlinger's attempt to blame the German nation as a whole - like many people even today, he cannot draw the correct distinction between a nation and that filthy but necessary thing we call the State. I tend to believe Doenitz when he said that he did not know of the miserable horrors of the last days of the concentration camps which were largely the product of regime chaos and neglect let alone the extermination programme. Many if not most Germans would have been insulated from all this. He is right that the SS, evil though its actions were, cannot be allowed to be an alibi for Germany but we should be specific that we are talking about Germany as an elite State operation made up of a forced alliance of Party, civil service and military. A lot of that State survived 1945. It took all these forces working together to murder Jews, engage in imperialistic wars and create widespread mayhem and carnage - the SS was simply given the dirty jobs to do and it is clear that many of them did not enjoy it. It was just a job in a system. Because of sourcing problems the period before the war is less well served than the war. The account then starts to come alive but this reflects the relative unimportance of Himmler in the grand scheme of things until he is commissioned to deal with the occupied territories. What is very useful is the picture that the book develops of the bureaucratic rivalries under Hitler and within Himmler's own network. These demonstrate just how circumscribed Himmler could be by the machinations of others. His fear of Hitler lasts to the very end. The figures of Heydrich, Canaris, Schellenburg, Ohlendorf, Kaltenbrunner, Wolff and many others weave in and out of the story as what amount to Divisional Directors of National Socialism, Inc. of Bertlin and its offices across Europe - competing, conniving, sometimes dying. Sometimes the machinations become so abstruse and complex that the general reader may have difficulty in following what is happening but, at its best, incidents such as the Night of the Long Knives (1934) or the July 20th Bomb Plot (1944) can be positively exciting. Reitlinger is also good on weakening substantially myths about the SS's competence and even idealism which still hold the attention of popular culture three quarters of a century later. There were competent bureaucrats and idealists but the total system was a shambles. Although they tried hard, the SS were not professional soldiers in general. By the last eighteen months of the war, Himmler was commanding a motley group of 'racial Germans' (from outside Germany proper) and anti-communist occupied forces with weak military skills. This is not to say that they did not often fight bravely but it is to say that they were no substitute for the fully trained regular Wehrmacht once their numbers exceeded the original German core of dedicated Nazis and some of those were more enthusiastic than capable. As to the idealism, this could certainly be found in fanatic Nazis and in the dreamy 'Europeanists' in the Divisions raised in the West (the starting point for the European ideal now represented by Ursula Von Der Leyen) towards the end of the war but this was a minority if a dangerous one. Perhaps sometimes Reitlnger overstates his case but the case is there on the evidence he has to hand. Further analysis would in due course refine the picture, remove some of the emotion without losing the values and balance the picture out a bit but this still remains a useful history. Himmler and the SS should definitely not be let off the hook. They engaged in horrendous crimes in a horrendous age. However, the buck does not stop with them. They were part of a total system and this book makes it hard to accept claims that Hitler knew nothing of these crimes. There may be no incriminating piece of paper fingering Hitler but we can be sure that the SS was an agent more than it was a principal and that it was only one part of a much more complex criminal enterprise that encompassed almost every significant part of the German State System. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Oct 08, 2022
|
Paperback
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
| 4.11
|
liked it
|
not set
|
Sep 26, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 4.50
|
it was amazing
|
not set
|
Sep 08, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 3.52
|
liked it
|
not set
|
Aug 24, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 4.50
|
really liked it
|
not set
|
Mar 31, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 4.11
|
it was amazing
|
not set
|
Mar 28, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 3.75
|
it was amazing
|
not set
|
Jan 10, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 4.05
|
really liked it
|
not set
|
Dec 30, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 4.40
|
it was ok
|
not set
|
Nov 19, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.80
|
really liked it
|
not set
|
Sep 09, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.68
|
really liked it
|
not set
|
Aug 19, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 4.11
|
really liked it
|
not set
|
Aug 02, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.64
|
really liked it
|
not set
|
Jul 22, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 4.12
|
really liked it
|
not set
|
Jul 15, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 4.67
|
it was amazing
|
not set
|
Jun 02, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.92
|
it was ok
|
not set
|
May 10, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.36
|
it was ok
|
not set
|
Mar 25, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.76
|
liked it
|
not set
|
Mar 11, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 4.40
|
liked it
|
not set
|
Feb 19, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.33
|
liked it
|
not set
|
Nov 11, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 3.66
|
really liked it
|
not set
|
Oct 08, 2022
|
Loading...
