Ezra Pound in 1920 (source).
Michael Johnson has a new, long Substack post up about history which I can't really summarize, as he jumps around with a lot of different musings, all of them tied however to the present moment. (I talk about some of the topics he brings up in the comments.) I liked this bit:
I had the idea that fascism was always near. All my voting since age 18 felt like I was voting for the least likely to contribute to fascism, and never “for” anyone. I was never enamored with the Democratic Party, but in my suburban, very white hometown I often overhead things like “Hitler had the right idea; he just went about it the wrong way.” And these people were always staunch Nixon and Reagan lovers. I picked up on quite a lot of coded language. How quaint that all seems now. After I discovered Robert Anton Wilson - a total accident - I knew I had to read Wilhelm Reich, whose name I’d only heard. Reich’s thesis was that fascist authoritarianism was the default mode in History. It was Capital, aye, but crucially: a fearsome, retributive Daddy, leader of the nuclear family.
2 comments:
Terrific blog. As Ishmael Reed said of history, "It's hungrier than I thought."
I often wonder if I'm paranoid about fascism, because so few people express themselves in the way your quote of me does. Or maybe I'm overly sensitive to it? Or...properly sensitized to it?
I suspect the sociology of knowledge plays very strongly here: we have ideas about things that are more sticky depending on not only our "personality" but our - as the sociologists of knowledge often put it - our social situatedness. If you are never worried about money, you will accept some ideas about History as more sticky, important, interesting. If you're like most writers, artists, musicians, etc: you're not livin' on Easy Street and your ideas about History and economics will reflect the nitty-gritty over the remote, Platonic, projections coming from some tenured Ivory Tower personages. I have merely situated myself here, I think?
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