gargoyles and architecture

Chris Brooke’s back from Libya, where he ate soup. So inspired he uses Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s analysis of New Labour’s quasi fascist rhetoric as the basis for a series of posts, turning around some remarkable similarities with Petainism and it's practitioners, to wit:

In particular, Tasca called for a reconceptualisation of the idea of rights, as he sought a new understanding of rights that would be distinct from both a liberal treatment of rights as inviolable possessions and the totalitarian ambition to have the scope and content of all rights dictated by the state. Tasca also broke decisively with the socialism he had hitherto espoused. He rejected, for example, the natural equality of citizens, and went as far as to insist that there was no "problem of the élites" and that "the masses" were a "negative factor in the Revolution".... Tasca further argued that the middle class was the sole active historical force; he emphasised themes of social stability and inter-class harmony; and he thought that those who sought change should work for a moral transformation of the already existing political class, rather than seek to transform the social or economic structure of France.

I think there’s also a Vichy parallel of sorts in the UK’s relations with the United States. AFAIK, Petain and his cohorts cast German control of France as a kind of scourge of God, a punishment for the sins of leftism, republicanism and secularism. New Labour’s stance towards America in it’s early years was to hold it up as a font of entrepreneurship and innovation, effectively a source of rejuvenation by which an exhausted culture would be turned into a “Young Britain.”. In both cases, a cultural cringe is seen as a historical inevitability. Over Iraq, for instance, I don’t believe that it occurred to Blair that he could do anything else other than offer full support to the United States irrespective of the pretext for war.

Other than that there’s a sort of architecture and gargoyles issue. We remember fascism because of it’s monstrosities, it’s perverse biological politics and the atrocities that ensued from them. But behind this is a theory of government as an organic manifestation of the society and volk from which it sprang, and the means by which the priorities and concerns of the volk can be placed into law and governance.

Now there’s no reason why a volk needs to be interpreted racially. Make it more inclusive of minority groups and you turn it into a “community”. New Labour’s occasional nagging at the issues of redefining Britishness seems to be precisely an attempt to get away from a racial interpretation of the nation. It also seem to be hankering towards basing government legitimacy on a fixed set of “national” values.

This is radically different from the idea that a government is something chartered by the public to keep the peace and provide greater or lesser amounts of public goods while reined in by an independent judiciary and by constitutional protection for individual liberty. Old Labour conformed to this model, providing one axis of the argument about how many goods should be public around which political life largely revolved.

New Labour want to leave all that behind. People think of New Labour as being more economically right wing than Old Labour, which is true but is only half the point. Programmes like the Private Finance Initiative recall the "co-ordination" between public and private sector that is a traditional feature of rightwing authoritarian governments. But in it’s hostility to civil liberties and the idea of inalienable rights and in its constant invocation of “community” New Labour seem to be working towards a reconception of government in the broadly fascist sense. The most obvious model that springs to mind is Singapore, with it's authoritarian government, efficient private sector and docile, muiticultural, highly motivated volk.

At any rate, and whatever you think of the other parties, a vote for New Labour is a vote against democracy as we've traditionally understood the term.

Comments

[chris]

"We remember fascism because of it’s monstrosities, it’s perverse biological politics and the atrocities that ensued from them."

We do, and it's a pity. The perverse biological politics and the atrocities that ensued from them were largely a specificity of Nazism, and did not characterise the original (Italian) fascism until Mussolini became totally dependent on Hitler.

People are constantly berated for identifying fascist-like tendencies in contemporary political movements on the grounds that they're not much more than averagely racist or genocidal. But to say that X has fascist tendencies does *not* necessarily mean they have Nazi tendencies (not that the Nazis were not fascist).

The damage inflicted by Mussolini on the Italian working class and its organisations was quite bad enough, thank you very much, that we need to be very careful not to let it happen again. And part of being careful means recognising the beast when we see it, and not being being lulled to sleep when they say, "Some of my best friends are..."

[jamie]

I think the National Alliance in Italy are the ones to watch in this regard, especially once the Berlusconi clown show finally collapses. They seem to have shed their baggage quite effectively whereas people like Le Pen can't seem to resist revisiting their own filth, so to speak.