Book Review: Fascism, a Warning by Madeleine Albright

 

The last decade registered an increasing frequency of authoritarian regimes all over the world, from the USA to Hungary. Some countries never experienced properly a democratic regime, but rather switches from an authoritarian variation to another. In some cases, representatives elected democratically abused in a totalitarian way democratic institutions and values. For instance, America under the Trump presidency. 

There are different variations on the anti-democratic scale, which are rather individual cases based on very specific historical, geographical, social and intellectual circumstances. 

There are big operational categories the political science operate with, like Fascism, Communism, Nazism, but it is very important to keep in mind the specificities of the system we are dealing with. Generalisations of any kind and gross comparisons are obliterating relevant details of the case-study. Instead of trying to find out the typical details, it focuses on the general lines without trying to identify the very specific information which may outline the differences.

Fascism, a Warning, by the ex-secretary of state during Clinton Administration Madeleine Albright, the first woman in America to hold the position of top diplomat, was written during the mid-term of president Trump. It was a time when America and the whole world was trying to understand what exactly this Trump administration was all about. Some may had the final revelation during the the very last weeks of the mandate when the Capitol Hill was under threat. Some, among which Albright, figured out long before. ´More generally, I fear that we are becoming disconnected from the ideals that have long inspired and united us´, wrote Albright, and the current US administration is way too ´green´ to make us hope that this values-oriented connection is restored.

Albright is uses her own personal history - as the daughter of a Czechoslovak diplomat forced to leave the country during the communism - when reading some of the cases presented: Chavez´s Venezuela, Milosevic´s Yugoslavia, Putin, Erdogan, Orban Viktor in Hungary. ´Repressive governments from across the globe are learning from one another´, and this is indeed, true, but mostly because the authoritarian regimes are not admonished in due time by using the complex international mechanisms. Orban Viktor, for instance, leads a party - Fidesz - with non-democratic tendencies, until recently member of the European People´s Party. The withdrawal in the end was Orban´s decision not the result of some outrage on behalf of the respectable parties part of the alliance.

The conceptual reference Albright used is fascism, as practiced by Mussolini. In her acception, ´a fascist is someone who claims to speak for a while nation or group, is utterly unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use violence and whatever other means are necessary to achieve the goals he or she might have´. In full honesty, I may say that this theoretical basis does not stand a critical approach to the book in its entirety. I considered valuable - especially for further analysis and evaluation - the specific cases outlines, but the theoretical framework is very superficial and does not creates a good basis for understanding the phenomenon in its amplitude. In fact, the situation may be more serious than presented in the book, with autocrats from all over the world out and free from their caves. 

In 1975, Hannah Arendt wrote: ´To look to the past in order to find analogies by which to solve our present problem is, in my opinion, a mythological error´. Entropy, the level of disorder within a specific system, is only increasing with time. Coping successfully with the current authoritarian wave can be done only through a straigthforward analysis of its risks and specificities, as well as the overall system-errors and disfunctionalities (mostly related to institutional mishapes). Generalisations and uniform translations are deemed to fail the path towards clarity.

Rating: 3 stars

Disclaimer: Book offered by the publisher in exchange for an honest review

Chuck Norris versus Communism

Dictators of any colors and the enormous system supporting them don´t want their humans happy. They want to keep their people they took captive in ignorance, cut from the rest of the world. They want to enjoy the priviledge of playing with their mind and even stomachs, to portion their food with the same minutiae they are portioning and distorting the everyday truth and reality.

My childhood memories are very fuzzy. I remember vaguely relative saying ´good bye´ late at night, warning to not share anything was talked about in the home with neighbours and practically anyone, my stepfather being red of fury after he caught my brother listening to Radio Free Europe, the radio elegantly set on the heating system - thus, allowing the resonance of the sound down to the upper apartments, it seemed. I was afraid of not being caught in the elevator during the sudden electricity shortages. The visits of the food smugglers, late at night. A horrible doll, looking like a Golem with blue eyes, that I was finally allowed to have, bought from my neighbour, who used to steal it regularly from the toy factory he was working. Sometimes I remember a bit more, what I cannot forget is the feeling of leaving behind everything on the very first days of 1990. Like the magic stick made all those bad people and their bad lives disappear all of a sudden. No regrets, but for our wasted years in a place of no-belonging. Memories are very subjective, also when it comes to enormous historical encounters.

Part of my fuzzy mental album, there were the movies. We had a TV and at a certain point even a video player. Once in a while we were allowed to watch some cartoons, Woody Woodpecker was for sure, also Tom&Jerry. I was an expert in imitating Woody´s hysterical laugh. I was recently remembered about the woodpecker a couple of months ago, when I was walking through the snow-covered forest with my bf and heard it. Tried to share with him my very personal childhood story but I bet he didn´t get it fully but it´s damn hard to explain such intimate stories when political restrictions are meet and seen through the world-ignorant children eyes. There were some ´good night, children´ Bulgarian cartoons with a rabbit able to fly using his long ears as a hellicopter. I´ve learned some words in Bulgarian that helped me when I was flirting with learning the language and/or was trying to impress a guy who was speaking it fluently. And there was another cartoon made in the communist east, with the villain wolf trying to catch the rabbit - Nu zayetz, nu pogodi. We love it, and I remember that once my mom used the word ´perestroika´ while we were watching. Was it because of the jeans the wolf used to wear? Have no idea if it was a very direct connection with the changes that Gorbachev started in the Soviet Union that made the cronies in Bucharest fear for their tug life. 

But, as I was reminded during watching the movie Chuck Norris versus Communism, directed by Ilinca Călugăreanu - this specific Soviet cartoon was on the list of must-watch&must-cut list of movies of the censors. A commission made of people with certain cultural affinities was supposed to vision in advance all the films and productions to be aired during the 4-hour TV program aired daily by the Romanian TV. Given that the discourses of the president and his wife - both illiterate in the alphabet and Marxism, it´s good to remind for the background story - were very long, the so-called entertainment should to be short. The censors were busy identifying a lot of images and dialogues that were considered dangerous: no swearing, no religious mentions, no Gd, no luxury, no decadent capitalism, not too much food on the table. As they were trying to create an experiment erasing from the human Romanian brain of some the references to things that they, Communist People´s Party were enjoying regularly. 

They were not able to do it, for a very simple reason. As usually in communist/closed societies, there is a parallel society which is created, where people are getting in touch, illicitly mostly, sometimes through the help of some people part of the system - doing it for money or just because they realize the absurdity of their everyday life. In the case of Romania, there were the power of images from the American movies that succeeded to help people survive. It´s not a cultural survival, as many of those movies were hardly identified as a high-cultural concept, but it was a survival through images. Rambo, Pretty Woman, Top Gun, Doctor Zhivago...they were brought to 20 million Romanians through a network that, surprise, was tolerated and even encouraged by people with connection in the upper echelons of the Party and ´Intelligence´ (the so-called Securitate). A total of around 3,000 movies, as Irina Margareta Nistor, the voice behind those movies confesses in the movie.

Irina Margareta Nistor was working by day as part of the state TV censorship commission. After work, she was ´recruited´ by a certain Mr. Zamfir, who was the manager of the network sharing VHS tapes all over the country. At a certain moment, somebody else, apparently a double agent, joined the team. According to the details shared in the movie - made exclusively from various testimonies of people involved in the network or who enjoyed in different part of the country the experience brought to them - a well-oiled sytem was operating throughout the country, distributing the VHS tapes on the black market, and further displaying for smaller audiences. Irina Margareta Nistor was translating - sometimes betraying the original script a bit - on her own, almost everything. Her voice was associated with those images of freedom and well-being, the Romanians were hoping for eventually while waiting in a long line in front of empty stores. 

During those times, in the 1980s Romania, having a video player and a TV set was the equivalent of using a VPN in countries where Internet is under the strict state control. In some cases, there were group auditions - some with an entrance fee. From my fuzzy yet awake child brain, I remember my mom mentioning watching Dr. Zhivago alongside with some machers from the cultural decision fora of the party, and maybe 1-2 ´intelligence´ guys. In very closed societies, you need a serious protection to play the brave, even the naughty kind of brave, and maintain your freedom.  

Irina Margareta Nistor, who seems to be a recluse person and with a relatively shy presence in the brutal vulgarity of the post-communist Romania, was apparently left alone to do her job. Definitely, not because no one was watching. The extension of the network reached such a degree that it´s impossible to believe that it was not allowed to extent from the upper echelons. The Zamfir guy who managed capitalistically kind of skillfully the entire enterprise mentioned in the movie that once, one of the dictator´s sons requested a special movie and he refused it. Let me have a laugh on that. It´s a task for the historians of Romanian communism - still unknown to me - to document this very interesting cultural development that may serve as a model of understanding how dictatorships of all kinds can be actually shaken. 

Chuck Norris was not able to replace communism and those wo did it were not heroes, but the power of images and the resilience of people who were just having enough, so enough, of the miserable life, can prepare people for a life after. A life when at least people do have the freedom to take that airplane to a better, drama-free life.

 

For the historians of communist Central and Eastern Europe, as well as for those curious to understand the everyday life suvival in dictatorships, the movie Chuck Norris versus Communism is an useful source of information, although not complete, comprehensive or clear enough for having an analytical macro-society picture. 

Book Review: Intellectuals and Fascism in Interwar Romania. The Criterion Association by Cristina A. Bejan

I vaguely remember a distopyan intellectual landscape in post-communist Romania: after being ruled for decades by a non-elite of (mostly) illiterate individuals - Party and secret police - who pretended to be communists and patriots, lately by a grotesque couple, the Ceaușescus, with a doubtful genealogy, displaying an inimaginable greediness and cruelty towards their own ´people´, the countrymen enjoyed the illusion of the institutional and mind-chaotic freedom. Only one year before the changes, some used to get under the counter versions of the History of Religions written by the exiled scholar Mircea Eliade, or acquired some obscure translation of Heidegger done by a pupil by a recluse scholar that used to be friend with Eliade, Constantin Noica. Now, the book and newspapers stands were overnight full with all kind of books - from porn to writings by authors previously forbidden, due to their non-communist beliefs, as Constantin Noica or Emil Cioran. It seemed that the public wanted books and bread and nothing else... 

The changes of mind of the censorship during communism, in charge with deciding which books should be allowed to be published and which not, were moody, with decision to take a book out of the market occuring within days after the official publication day. The literary value of the book was irrelevant, and the subversive message was relatively unclear, as everything depended on personal sympathies - or antipathies - or the sudden subjective interpretation - and fears - of a censor. I remember how intellectually surprised I was when after reading a book that mom had hidden under a row of children books - Drum fără pulbere/Road without dust by Petre Dumitriu, covering in the ´socialist realistic vein´ the works for setting up the megalomanic Danube-Black Sea Canal, inaugurated in 1984 - I realized that the book has in fact no subversive message at all. There were just some references that maybe, maybe a new political regime may have considered problematic but it was nothing really serious and anti-communist in this book, except that the author fled Romania in 1960. 

The catalogues of the post-communist publishing industry were overwhelmed in the first revolutionary years by an enornmous amount of titles and Romanian authors whose names where on the black list of the censorship - for very very diverse reasons. There were a lot of authors from the exile, there were religious texts - especially pertaining to the Christian Orthodoxy - there were authors that spent time in prison. A big part of those titles were authored by authors that belonged openly to the interwar far right. The publishing houses went a bold step further and started to publish the writings of those ideologues, but also the writings of their German counterparts, that in most cases were the sources of their pride and ideas. Instead, when the Journal of Mihail Sebastian, a Jewish author and playwriter, was published, it ignited a scandal among the nationalist thinkers, as the author reveals the clear oportunism, anti-Semitism and fascism of those considered the luminaries of the Romanian elites. In addition to Noica and Eliade - whose far-right orientation, never publicly assumed, was already the topic that a young researcher, Ioan Petru Culianu openly revealed, to be shortly thereafter shot dead - it was another figure that was re-tuned from the deep disposable Romanian intellectual memory: Nae Ionescu. An oportunistic and hedonistic teacher, whose attributed writings were in fact recollection of notes by some of his students or even various discussions, he enjoyed playing the role of the mandarin at the court of the far right characters of the time. Educated, with university studies abroad, particularly to Germany, he probably enjoyed the game of trading his knowledge for some visibility and power-broking, for being in the end the victim of his own intellectual rapaciousness.

Another very much appreciated author, the French-writing essayist E.M.Cioran, wrote a book Schimbarea la Față a României/The Transfiguration of Romania - that he later dismissed as a youth accident - where he maturely elaborated his expectations for a religious-like change over of his country of birth. Among others, he wrote: ´In everything, the Jews are unique; they don´t have a match in the wold, /they are/ under a curse for which only God is responsible. If I were a Jew I would commit suicide right here´. This version of his book was very fast published after 1989, being followed with an altered variant, omitting the problematic statements.

All those characters, and many many more, populated the intellectual realm of Romania in the early 1990s. Teenagers, keen to find their own intellectual way, separated from the communist world of their parents, avidly enjoyed those writings, the revelation of a national spirit and the freedom of attending religious masses on the occasion of Orthodox Church holidays. Which in itself, is a laudable activity, unless one realized that besides the Orthodox Church, there are also other Christian denominations in the country, co-existing with non-Christian ones. 

But this is exactly what was missing from the Romanian intellectual landscape: a critical approach of the sources and of the history in general. Things moved so fast - this is the pace of the sudden political and social changes, nothing to do about it - and the people with a proper intellectual decency and honesty were missing at the time. Thus, an important critical stage was unfortunately dearly missed.

Intellectuals and Fascism in Interwar Romania. The Criterion Association by US-based historian, poet and playwriter Cristina A. Bejan is, according to my knowledge, the first ever attempt in the English language to analyse critically the biographies and activities of the member of the group that aimed at shaped the intellectual future of interwar Romania. 

Trying to capitalize a ´unique moment in the history of the country´, Criterion was in the early 1930s an important medium of discussion of a large spectre of issues, trying to reflect as many as possible different perspectives. Practically, the most important voices of the cultural realm for decades in Romania had a longer or shorter presence at the events organised between 1932 and 1935. One needs 30 days to create a habit, therefore 3 years of intense intellectual dialogue make it as a long-life habit. 

Minutiously, Cristina A. Bejan is studying biographies and events, interactions and topics approached, displaying an impressive diversity of characters and group dynamics. At a larger scale, it reflects the inner conflicts of a society that for decades was - and in certain respects still - looking for an unyielding intellectual ground. 

Caught between cosmopolitanism and intellectual models from abroad - French, German particularly - they tend to emulate and replicate them at home - with the high rate of failure such an attempt always has. 

The book is a comprehensive work of displaying - and subsequently translating - information not available for the English-speaking researchers. Although attempts to diagnose and evaluate critically the roots of Romanian nationalism and the problematic references they embraced - some were valuable, as the studies of Marta Petreu or the late Zigu Ornea - , this study focused on The Criterion Association is the first of this kind. The fact that after so many years of ´intellectual freedom´ only one such study was published is revelatory for the state of the art of the critical thinking in Romania. But the information that Cristina A. Bejan professionally assembled and analysed made it into a good start to further and further researches on this topic. 

The most recent political and historical developments on the world stage is a proof of how important critical thinking is nowadays. Being at the same time intellectually clear in terms of the set of values to belive in and alert when those values are transgressed may prevent following in the footsteps of the pattern so well described in the 1920s by Julien Benda as ´la trahison des clercs´. 

Thoughts inspired by ´The Colonizer and the Colonized´

A classical book read from a new perspective. Some writings do maintain their availability thanks to their capacity of being adapted to new contexts and situations. Although they may prove obsolete in their initial application, the frame offered might be operational in a completely different area. The intellectual sparkle ensued...

After so many years, I stole some time to re-read again The Colonizer and the Colonized by Albert Memmi. My initial aim was to refresh some of the ideas and try to connect the dots of a project I am working on aimed at featuring intellectual voices from North Africa and the Middle East who wrote against colonialism and about social revolution. Voices like Fanon, Memmi and - the least known Ali Shariati - are some of the authors I am interested to (re)discover in various contexts.

Born in Jewish La Hara suburb of Tunis, Memmi analysed in this beautifully written book the dynamics between the colonizer and the colonized, with a specific interest for North Africa, particularly Tunisia. My edition was published in 1965, with an introduction by J.P.Sartre and a new introduction by Nadine Gordimer. 

There are two main parts of the book, figuring out the ´Portrait of the colonizer´, followed by the ´Portrait of the colonized´. The colonizer mostly speaks French and comes from Europe, while the colonized is usually described as ´lazy´, ´cheap labor´ and ´kept away from power´. I really appreciated the good balance between the economic and social aspects projected against a very complex intellectual background. Thus, Memmi is overcoming the usual Marxist perspective typical for the times of writing the book.

However, although the description of both elements of the power binome is accurate, it does not reflect the realities of the globalization, for instance. In some hot spots in the Middle East, Europeans are moving in search of tax heavens and a high - yet rewarding - salary. They will never be accepted as citizens of their respective countries and not even able to purchase properties there, however, they stay there for the advantages that were built especially for attracting their skills and knowledge to contribute to building societies they will never be part thereof. 

Another thought that inspired me a further development of the ideas exposed in The Colonizer and The Colonized has to do with the power dynamics within a specific - non-democratic - society. A dictatorship - of the proletariat, military, religious elites - is operating as a colonizer against its own people, particularly those who are excepted from the ruling elite. For them too, ´(...) the colonized means little to the colonizer´. They are also presumed unreliable, thieves as well, and often evicted from their own history - as the history of the internally colonized country is constantly re-written in order to answer the expectations - of self-agrandisement too - of the elites. The colonized should as well resemble the colonizer, in an effort of uniformization and brain washing on behalf of the colonizer. 

´Colonization distrusts relationships, destroys or petrifies institutions, and corrupts men, both colonizers and the colonized´, said Memmi. This thoughts can be easily apply to any dictatorship whose terrific impact on the society damages on long terms the chances of a healthy return to normality of an post-democratic new world.

To be continued...

Documenting ´A German Youth´

 

A German Youth, a French-Swiss documentary film co-production, that I watched yesterday on MUBI, diplomatically documents fragments from the rise of The Red Army Faction, a German organisation with terrorist minset created 20 years after the end of the Nazi rule. 

In the late 60s, the whole world was on fire: the Vietnam War was widely contested on the streets, the Cold War was close to his peak, the flower power movement anti-war and holistic in its world was preaching inner meditation and reaching peace - world and interior - including by using a complex drugs cocktail. Germany, too was affected, and offered its own version of coping with the new realities: The Red Army Faction (RAF).

20 years after the end of WWII, it was a new generation, born during after the terrible events, that was taking over. They were angry with their parents, they were angry with the establishment, they were angry with the world punishing them, the Germans. A German Youth, compared to artistic movies made on a similar topic, The Baader Meinhof Complex, documents those times, through archive films featuring the mentalities realm of the time. One can see the brave journalist Meinhof, smoking live while explaining to a row of old men about social justice, or the creative anti-establishment movies played, among others, by another founder of the movement, Gudrun Ensslin.

What the 1h30 documentary helps to understand is the intellectual background of the movement, with its philosophy of intellectual engagement - in the very military sense of the term. A fact that, didn´t occurred in the case of other similar movements in other countries. In France, the 1968 student protests did not lead to airplane hijacking or training by Palestinian military camps. Not too many made the lap to practice what they were writing. German youth did it again, and through the documented intervention one can easily see the roots, although there are a couple of missing chains.

For instance, there is not too much to be seen about the deep wounds of a generation trying to cope with the faults of the previous generation. The voices that Germans paid already too much for the Shoah were high and keep being loud since then. 

Another missing chain is the very complex Cold War background that cannot be ignored because it was very much part of the puzzle. At what extent was Soviet Union - through its usual Stasi-KGB strong chains (for instance, Axel Springer the verbal and physical target of RAF ideologues, the owner of Bild, on the forefront of the yellow press, was also very much involved against the Soviet Union and the division of Berlin, therefore an inconvenient ideological opponent - involved in maneuvring those ´german youth´? What about hijacking airplanes and killing people? Is it worth the cause? Obviously, RAF was by far more than an intellectual book club where people were fighting verbally, socratically, for their right to reach the truth. By not offering the entire contextual information, the risk is that again and again, the terrorism is glorified in the name of freedom and youth´s fight against the rigid academic bureaucracy. 

There is so much to be told about this ´german youth´ and any documentary testimony is important, with the condition of being critically weighted.