Political Reflections on November 9th

 

 

I. 

 

I'm sure there are reasons why November 9th might resonate within the British memory and cultural imagination; events that took place on this date include, for example, the birth of Edward VII (1841) and the murder of Mary Keller at the hands of Jack the Ripper (1888). The Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, also died on this date, in 1953. 

 

However, November 9th means far more for the Germans than it does for us Brits. For November 9th was the date of two fatally significant events in modern German history: the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 and Kristallnacht in 1938 ...

 

 

II. 

 

The Beer Hall Putsch was a failed coup d'état led by Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler (in collaboration with the famous German general and War hero Erich Ludendorff).

 

Inspired by the Fascist March on Rome the year before, around 2000 Nazis marched on the Feldherrnhalle, in Munich city centre. Here they were confronted by an armed police cordon, which resulted in the deaths of sixteen Nazis, four police officers, and one bystander.

 

Hitler escaped and hid out in the countryside for a couple of days before being arrested and charged with treason. Although things had not gone to plan, the putsch brought Hitler to the attention of the entire German nation for the first time and generated front-page headlines in newspapers around the world. 

 

His subsequent trial, which lasted for over three weeks, was also widely publicised and gave him an opportunity to promote his National Socialist ideology. Found guilty of treason, Hitler was sentenced to five years in Landsberg Prison (where he dictated his autobiography-cum-political manifesto, Mein Kampf). 

 

After serving only nine months in jail, Hitler was released on Christmas Eve, 1924. Having learned from his mistaken attempt to seize power through revolutionary force, he immediately set about transforming the NSDAP from a paramilitary organisation into a modern political party that could garner popular support and secure him victory at the ballot box.

 

In 1933, the Nazi Party won 44 per cent of the vote, which gave them 288 seats in the Reichstag. Hitler, as Chancellor, passed the Enabling Act in March of this year, which gave him the plenary powers to make laws without the Reichstag's approval. This also allowed him to destroy all opposition to his rule and by the autumn of 1934 - following the death of President Hindenburg in August of that year - Hitler was now in complete control as Führer of the German Reich.  

 

In 1939, Hitler declared that November 9th would henceforth be an official public holiday, on which to commemorate the martyrs of the Nazi movement who were killed during the Munich Putsch.

 

 

III.

 

There is, of course, another reason to remember this date: Kristallnacht - or the Night of Broken Glass - a planned and coordinated pogrom against the German Jews carried out by members of the Nazi Party's paramilitary forces (the SA and SS), in 1938.

 

Shamefully, a number of German citizens also actively participated in the orgy of violence and destruction, although most, like members of the civil authorities, simply stood by looking on (some with horror some with glee) as Jewish stores, houses, schools, and synagogues were ransacked and smashed. Even Jewish graves were violated.  

 

In all, 267 synagogues were destroyed throughout Greater Germany; over 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged, and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps. Estimates of fatalities caused by the attacks have varied. Early reports claimed that 91 Jews had been murdered, but more recent analysis of German sources puts the figure much higher and when deaths from post-arrest maltreatment and subsequent suicides are included, the death toll reaches well into the hundreds. 

 

The world was shocked at this widely reported event; The Times declared - rightly - that it had disgraced the entire German nation. The Daily Telegraph correspondent spoke of a nauseating mix of racism and hysteria. But no one really did anything other than voice their outrage at what was, we now know, a prelude to or foreshadowing of the Final Solution and the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust.   

 

 

IV.

 

When people today wonder why they should be concerned with the surge in antisemitism and anti-Israeli hate speech following the events of October 7th and the subsequent war in Gaza, this is why. 

 

To be perfectly honest, as much as one may feel sympathy for the Palestinians, I really don't want to hear calls for Jihad and/or intifada on the streets of London; nor chants of from the river to the sea. 

 

And nor, come to that, do I think it anything other than outrageous that the Anne Frank day care center for pre-school children in the small German town of Tangerhütte - which has operated under that name since the 1970s - may be renamed after a number of migrant parents complained.

 

Apparently, these parents find the name (and story of) Anne Frank problematic - presumably in much the same way that posters featuring the faces of Jewish children kidnapped and held hostage by Hamas are said to be problematic and provocative.  

 

For officials, including the mayor, in Tangerhütte to agree to this act of historical erasure is profoundly depressing. Didn't Germany promise to never forget what had happened in the twentieth-century and never allow such things to happen again ...?

 

Predictably, however, they justify the name change on the (woke) grounds that it is important to celebrate the diversity of the children attending and not oblige them (or their parents) to have to deal with complex political issues arising from a past about which they know nothing and care even less.

 

If these officials get their way - although following a huge backlash this now seems very unlikely - Kita Anne Frank will soon become known as the World Explorer [Weltendecker] day care centre; a name that is as vacuous as the people who came up with it.   

 

 

On Unity, Diversity and Unity in Diversity

"Our ability to achieve perfect unity in diversity 

will be the beauty and the test of our civilisation." [1]

 

  

I. 

 

Whilst I wouldn't quite define myself as a cockney cowboy, nevertheless, like Jimmy Pursey, I grew up in a time and place in which solidarity was a value the working class prided themselves on and the idea of strength through unity was an unquestionable truth on both the left and right of the political spectrum [2]. 

 

If the kids - or the workers of the world, or the German people - were only united, then they'd never be divided and all would come good; unity not only making strong, but happy in a state of harmony and wholeness. 

 

 

II. 

 

Of course, such idealism is highly suspect; a dangerous utopian (and authoritarian) fantasy. From an early age, I was always more excited by conflict and controversy rather than seeking consensus; difference and diversity, not uniformity. That's why the McLarenesque model of anarchy promoted by the Sex Pistols appealed more than the progressive politics of punk social workers, the Clash.

 

However, these days I roll my eyes to heaven whenever I hear the word diversity; particularly when it's tied to equity and inclusion and falls from the mouth of someone who ultimately desires unity in diversity - i.e., a form of dialectical synthesis in which diverse characteristics are finally unified (and utilised) in some higher goal or purpose.  

 

Like many other terms that were once part of a radical vocabulary - otherness, queerness, and even the prefix trans - diversity has been co-opted by woke humanists espousing multiculturalism and waving rainbow flags, whilst all the time working to create a global citizenship, who belong to One World (and One World Order). 

 

In other words, its the same old moral monomania or idée fixe: humanity united in Peace and Love. 

 

Personally, I'd rather witness a "vivid recoil into separateness" [3] and singular being; for I hate the attempt to deny the starry uniqueness of the individual in the name of false diversity.    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Quote attributed to the holy fool and hypocrite Mahatma Gandhi.

 

[2] This idea - beloved of fascists and communists alike - originally derived from an ancient Greek motto attributed to Homer: ισχύς εν τη ενώσει (power lies in unity).  

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Future States', The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 526. For Lawrence, this recoil will mark the end of universalism and cosmopolitanism.

 

 

Readers interested in what Nietzsche has to say on the topic of diversity should see the post of 21 July 2018: click here. 

Why I'm Suspicious of Pride

I.

I'm not a great fan or follower of the journalist Brendan O'Neill, but as an atheistic libertarian he often writes things that cut across aspects of my own thinking (or, as critics would say, reinforce my own fears and prejudices).

Thus, for example, I was interested to read a recent column in The Spectator in which O'Neill expresses his irritation at London Pride; the UK's largest queer celebration which sees rainbow flags hanging from virtually every public building and branded on just about every conceivable product you may wish to purchase in order to show your support for the LGBT+ community and the sinister political project known as diversity.        

Like O'Neill, I'm perfectly happy to commemorate the Stonewall riots and welcome many of the social, political and cultural changes that have unfolded over the last fifty years vis-à-vis the rights of sexual minorities. I might not fetishise notions of freedom and equality, or posit them as ideals over and above all other considerations, but neither do I wish to live in a time or place where these things are denied.  

But, like O'Neill, I also find it depressing to see a genuinely radical event co-opted by governments, corporations and the media and pinkwashed into a bland (and virtually mandatory) spectacle informed by a needy and therapeutic politics of identity:

"It’s no longer enough to leave homosexuals alone to live however they choose and to inflict on them no persecution or discrimination or any ill-will whatsoever on the basis of their sexuality, which is absolutely the right thing for a civilised liberal society to do. No, now you have to validate their identity and cheer their life choices."

Now, we must all assemble - cisgender heterosexuals included - beneath the omnipresent bloody rainbow and condemn anyone who refuses to do so as a political heretic.


II.

Actually, the very word pride is problematic, philosophically speaking, due to the fact that it has both negative and positive connotations. It is, for example, often used as a synonym for the Greek term hubris and refers thus to a destructively excessive or self-indulgent quality. It certainly isn't an unambiguously virtuous concept as Aristotle and the organisers of Pride events seem to believe.

Thus, I'm always rather suspicious of people who speak insistently in terms of pride; particularly those who belong to sexual or racial minorities, as they have a tendency to overcompensate for feelings of low self-esteem and guilt born of a long history of oppression and marginalisation. 

Indeed, it could be argued that pride which has been determined by such a history is simply shame on the recoil, or what Nietzsche would characterise as a revolt in morals and is thus still contained within the same old dialectic rather than part of a genuine revaluation of values ...

Ultimately, the old slogan gay is good is as mistaken as the homophobic view that gay is evil (and for the same reason).

See: Brendan O'Neill, 'Why I'm Sick of Pride', The Spectator (6 July, 2019): click here.

Diversity: What Would Nietzsche Think?

Image: Scotty Hendricks (2018)  

bigthink.com

I.

The word diversity is frequently used today, particularly by those who regard it as a value and like to signal their politico-moral correctness even if that means denigrating or disprivileging their own people, culture and history.

In order to illustrate this latter point, one might refer to the recent case of students at the University of Manchester who painted over a mural of a poem by Rudyard Kipling and replaced it with a verse by the African-American poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou.

This was done in the name of anti-racism - for Kipling, a well-known British imperialist, was said to dehumanise people of colour - and in order to celebrate the diversity of a student body looking to reclaim history by - quite literally - whitewashing it.            

I don't here wish to discuss the merits (or otherwise) of either Kipling's or Maya Angelou's work; nor do I want to express my concerns about historical revisionism and literary censorship. But I would like to say something further about diversity and the idea of multiculturalism, from a post-Nietzschean perspective ...


II.

If confronted with a world in which everyone was retreating to their own safe space from which to assert an identity (on the basis, for example, of sex, gender, race or religion) whilst, at the same time, speaking about the benefits of ever-greater diversity within society and culture, I suspect that Nietzsche would feel himself compelled as a philosopher to argue that greatness belongs only to the individual or the people who find a way to stylise chaos and give birth to a dancing star - the latter being a sign of unity within diversity.

Nietzsche loves words like difference, plurality and multiplicity; he thinks of the will to power as composed of a large number of competing forces, flows, and desires. But - and this is important to understand - he doesn't affirm diversity as a good in itself nor as a goal to be aimed at.

On the contrary, Nietzsche insists that culture, for example, has to be unified; that the only alternative to such is a civilization based upon a barbarism of styles and tastes and incapable of ever producing art or sovereign individuals. Nietzsche opposes the systematic anarchy, the aggressive philistinism, and the Volkerchaos that characterise European modernity and are the symptoms of culture's extermination.

Thus, whilst he may have announced the death of God and thereby decentered and demoralised the world, he still believes in shared ethical bonds between people. His nihilism is not the same as the nihilism of those who devote themselves to free markets and money-making, or to the neo-Platonic fantasies of science and technology; those who lack the ability to act under the constraint of a single taste or - as Heidegger would say - to dwell poetically upon the earth.


III.

Deleuze is right to say that, for Nietzsche, history can be read as the process by which "reactive forces take possession of culture or divert its course in their favour". That the will to diversity can therefore be understood as part of an ongoing slave revolt in morals and the overcoding of active forces by the modern State - that coldest of all cold monsters that thrives at the expense of culture and sucks the life out of people in the name of human rights and globalism.

Nietzsche is aggressively opposed to all this and when faced with the ways in which societies become decodified and unregulated, makes no attempt at recodification. But, again, we must be careful here. For whilst Nietzsche makes no attempt to recodify along old lines or patch the holes ripped in the great social umbrella, he very much wants to bring together newly liberated forces onto what Deleuze terms a plane of consistency and regain mastery over the chaos that has been released.

Why? Because for Nietzsche culture is above all unity of style in all the expressions of a people and this requires harmonious manifoldness - not fake diversity built upon idiotic identity politics and an ugly jumble of all styles and peoples. Multiculturalism is not just a failed experiment, it's an absurd fallacy.

Of course Nietzsche's thinking has anti-democratic and illiberal implications - and he wasn't shy about saying so. But I would suggest we need to urgently think about these questions and not simply attempt to close down conversation by calling anyone who does so a fascist or a supporter of the alt-right. 


Notes

Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, (The Athlone Press, 1992), p. 139.

Loving the Alien: Reflections on Otherness, Difference and the Joy of Kinship

It's important to note that otherness is not merely an extreme form of difference.

In fact, as Baudrillard makes clear, the latter, difference, is the insidious simulation of otherness and its regulation within Western culture. In other words, we generate difference in order to mask our extermination of otherness and the subordination of its singular principle to the law of the Same via knowledge and representation:

"Our society is entirely dedicated to neutralising otherness, to destroying the other as a natural point of reference within a vast flood of asceptic communication and interaction, of illusory exchange and contact."

Otherness, reduced to mere difference, is made both tolerable and useful; it can be packaged and it can be traded (often under the brand name of diversity).

However, Baudrillard also insists on the indestructability of otherness, which, as the fundamental dynamic of the world, is ultimately greater than reason, morality, or universal humanism. Otherness - like evil - will always return when we least expect it and extract its revenge.   

Now, whilst I still pretty much agree with this analysis - despite the fact it lends itself to romantic primitivism and seems designed to induce guilt - I have to admit I'm no longer as excited by the thought of radical altérité as I once was.

Indeed, at the risk of sounding insular and narcissistic or like a sudden convert to identity politics, it's become something of a relief (and a pleasure) to occasionaly meet a kindred spirit with similar interests and shared values, tastes and experiences; loving the alien is such hard work (the rewards uncertain, the consequences often fatal). 


See: Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, trans. James Benedict, (Verso Books, 1993). The line quoted is on p. 121.

In Defence of the Great White Male

Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, 

Great White Male and one of the 

Founders of King's College London (1829) 

As I'm not a Doctor Who fan, the fact that the 13th actor chosen to play the role of the irritating Time Lord is a woman - Jodie Whittaker - doesn't greatly interest or concern me.

If obliged to comment, then I suppose I can't think of any good reason why he shouldn't regenerate in female form and, indeed, rather like the idea of a transsexual and transracial Doctor to whom all identities remain open as fluid possibilities. Michael Jackson, once rumoured to be in line to star as the Doctor in a big-screen version of the BBC TV drama, would have been ideally cast.

Most of the criticism aimed at Ms. Whittaker from fans of the show seems to be rooted in tedious, rather old-fashioned sexism and deeply unpleasant misogyny. Unfortunately, they'll just have to get used to the fact that as times change, so too do fictional characters evolve and sometimes radically transform. Indeed, readers of Marvel comics have long become accustomed to this phenomenon ...

Thus, for example, following the death of pale-faced Peter Parker, Spiderman became the superhero identity of Miles Morales, a young man of Afro-Hispanic origin. There's also a black Captain America (Isiah Bradley) and a totally awesome new Hulk who happens to be Korean (Amadeus Cho). In addition, Ms. Marvel is now no longer busty, blonde-haired Carol Danvers; she is, rather, Kamala Khan, a teenage Muslim of Pakistani origin. Oh, and Thor, the god of thunder, is now a woman too - just like Doctor Who! 

Again, this push for greater diversity - driven by the wish to establish a new and broader fanbase in order to sell more comics and thus make more money, rather than political correctness - doesn't really trouble me. In fact, if anything, I find it mildly amusing.

But what does concern me, however, is when the attempt to denigrate all that is male and pale as stale, isn't being played out in the queer world of sci-fi and superheroes, but within academia ...

Thus, the decision by King's College London to replace portraits of its founding fathers with a wall of diversity in order that today's student body doesn't feel intimidated, is, I think, deeply depressing and disappointing.      

For whilst it's one thing for contemporary culture to reflect the Volkerchaos of modern British society, it's quite another thing to try and launder history or erase the past. This is not just foolish, it's also slightly sinister - not to mention patronising towards those it's trying to protect from the inconvenient truth that whilst blacks have soul and women their intuition, only great white males have genius ...