El gran espectáculo del fascismo

 

Solo falta King Kong. Foto sin fecha del Valle de los Caídos. Patrimonio Nacional

El fascismo no se puede comprender sin su materialidad. Si los distintos regímenes fascistas no hubieran desarrollado estrategias materiales tan espectaculares y convincentes, quizá no hubieran tenido el éxito que llegaron a tener. Se ha hablado con frecuencia de lo bien coreografiadas y escenografiadas que estaban las grandes celebraciones nazis. Y es verdad. Los estetas del régimen claramente sabían lo que hacían: sin necesidad de djs ni de pastillas lograban poner a cien a las masas, las hacían entrar en un éxtasis colectivo tras el cual se les podía pedir cualquier cosa -que aceptaran una dictadura, una guerra mundial o un genocidio.

En esta cultura del espectáculo fascista tienen mucho que ver dos cosas estrechamente relacionadas: el desarrollo masivo de la cultura popular desde finales del siglo XIX y las tecnologías de la Segunda Revolución Industrial (como el cine, la radio y la electricidad). Existe un tercer elemento que resulta bastante paradójico: la expansión de la democracia. Hasta mediados del siglo XIX la gente de a pie contaba bastante poco, porque su capacidad de influir en la vida política era muy limitada (salvo en los excepcionales momentos revolucionarios). Sin embargo, a partir del último cuarto del siglo XIX el sufragio universal masculino se vuelve cada vez más común, surgen los partidos políticos modernos y con ellos la propaganda: es necesario convencer a la gente de que es mejor que les gobierne fulanito y no menganito. Y en esta labor de seducción no valen solo buenas ideas. Los colores, la música, los esloganes, los logos resultan esenciales: entre otras cosas porque la población iletrada era todavía muy numerosa.

El desarrollo de la cultura de masas, las tecnologías audiovisuales y la democracia representativa vienen de la mano de un cuarto fenómeno: el consumo capitalista. Las industrias producen mucho y a bajo precio. Los ciudadanos de occidente pueden acceder a productos nunca antes soñados. La competición entre empresas es feroz. Surge la publicidad.

Sin esta combinación de factores no se entiende el espectáculo del fascismo. Pero tampoco se entiende a Trump ni a Bolsonaro, herederos del populismo reaccionario de los años 30.

El fascismo italiano y el nazismo alemán desarrollaron sofisticados espectáculos de luz y de sonido que poco tenían que envidiar a las películas de Hollywood de la época. Y de hecho, ambos regímenes invirtieron grandes sumas de dinero en la industria cinematográfica. No es casual que la compañía pública de cine en época de Mussolini se llamara "luz" -LUCE (L'Unione Cinematografica Educativa). Los juegos de claroscuro ofrecían dramatismo y sensación de gravedad a las ceremonias políticas (que contrarrestaban la banalidad de las ideas). Por ese motivo fueron explotadas hasta la saciedad por los totalitarismos.

No se ha avanzado tanto en el estudio de la estética política del franquismo como en las de la Alemania y la Italia de la época. Pero las influencias fascistas son evidentes. Quizá en ningún sitio son tan claras como el Valle de los Caídos, una compleja escenografía que bebe del paisajismo nazi -el cual, por cierto, sobrevivió a la Segunda Guerra Mundial y se acabó utilizando para construir memoriales... ¡en los campos de exterminio nazis!

Aunque la estética fascista se puede percibir en el valle un día cualquiera, en la imagen que ilustra esta entrada queda si cabe mucho más de relieve. El juego de luces y sombras recuerda enormemente a la entradilla de las producciones de LUCE que reproducimos más arriba. Como todo en el franquismo, la experiencia catártica político-religiosa fascista toma aquí un carácter fuertemente católico. Parece que estamos a punto de contemplar una epifanía divina. Lo cual encaja perfectamente con la idea de que Franco era caudillo por la gracia de Dios. Si la leyenda en las monedas no lo convencían a uno del todo, ahí estaba el espectáculo del Valle para completar el trabajo.

He aquí pues uno de los problemas del fascismo. Y es que mola. Escenarios monumentales, muchas banderas, gritos al unísono, música a todo volumen, colorines, ideas simples, chivos expiatorios ¿Qué más se le puede pedir a la política?
___________

Falasca-Zamponi, S. (1997). Fascist spectacle: the aesthetics of power in Mussolini's Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Van der Laarse, R. (2015). Fatal Attraction. Nazi Landscapes, Modernity and the Holocaust. En Landscape biographies: geographical, historical and archaeological perspectives on the production and transmission of landscapes, 345-375. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press

Gracias a Luis Antonio Ruiz Casero por poner en mi conocimiento la existencia de la foto del Valle iluminado.

Source: Arqueología de la Guerra Civil Española
https://guerraenlauniversidad.blogspot.com/2018/10/el-gran-espectaculo-del-fascismo.html

Capitalism and Nazism

The next time someone tells you the Nazis were anti-capitalist, show them this.
by Corey Robin

From Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy.

Commenters on my blog claim the graph tells us nothing about the Nazis and capitalism; it only tells us that the economy improved under the Nazis. As it did in the United States under FDR. So maybe the graph plotting capital’s return under Nazism just shows general improvement in the economy in the 1930s, an improvement widely shared throughout the industrial world?

Luckily, Suresh Naidu, the kick-ass economist at Columbia, supplied me with the following graphs.

This first one, which comes from Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, compares the share of national income that went to capital in the US and in Germany between 1929 and 1938. Suresh tells me that the share roughly tracks capital’s rate of return.

Long story short: capital was doing better under the Nazis than under FDR. Not because of overall increases in economic performance in one country versus another, but because of the economic policies of the regime. Or so Suresh tells me. (Usually academics are supposed to acknowledge their debts to their friends and readers but own all errors as their own: in this case, I’m blaming everything on Suresh.)

The second graph — which comes from this fascinating article by Thomas Ferguson and Hans-Joachim Voth, “Betting on Hitler: The Value of Political Connections in Nazi Germany” — tracks the stock market’s performance in Britain, US, France, and Germany, from January 1930 to November 1933. As you can see, in the early months that Hitler came to power, Germany’s stock market performance was quite strong, outstripping all the others; it’s not until July that it even crosses paths with Britain’s, the second best performer.
voth-43-21

From Thomas Ferguson and Hans-Joachim Voth, “Betting on Hitler:
The Value of Political Connections in Nazi Germany”

On Twitter, Justin Paulson brought this fascinating article from theJournal of Economic Perspectives to my attention. It’s called “The Coining of ‘Privatization’ and Germany’s National Socialist Party.” Apparently, the first use of the word “privatization” (or “reprivatization”) in English occurred in the 1930s, in the context of explaining economic policy in the Third Reich. Indeed, the English word was formulated as a translation of the German word “Reprivatisierung,” which had itself been newly minted under the Third Reich.

After I sent him this article, Phil Mirowski also sent me this piece by Germà Bell, “Against the Mainstream: Nazi Privatization in the 1930s,” from the Economic History Review. This article also has some fascinating findings. From the abstract:

In the mid-1930s, the Nazi regime transferred public ownership to the private sector. In doing so, they went against the mainstream trends in western capitalistic countries, none of which systematically reprivatized firms during the 1930s.

Source: Jacobin
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/04/capitalism-and-nazism/

Giovanni Gentile, l’adesione al fascismo

Giovanni Gentile e il Partito Nazionale Fascista

Giovanni Gentile

Il 2 novembre del 1922 Giovanni Gentile, già personalità di altissimo spessore nel panorama culturale italiano, è nominato ministro della Pubblica Istruzione nel primo gabinetto Mussolini. Nella primavera del 1923 giustifica la sua adesione formale al PNF evidenziando la conformità del fascismo col liberalismo della destra risorgimentale in cui egli si identificava, e cioè col «liberalismo della libertà nella legge e perciò nello Stato forte e nello Stato concepito come realtà etica». Gentile vede concretarsi nella nuova realtà politica la sua “Fede antica” (opera gentiliana edita nel 1923), destinata a restaurare il carattere degli italiani e a liberarli dalla vecchia malattia dello scetticismo e dell’indifferentismo. Per questa «fede antica», egli si sente «precursore» del fascismo. Più esattamente: la nuova filosofia idealistica, il sindacalismo soreliano, il ritrovato sentimento religioso, l’impegno etico della guerra, in altri termini tutto il fermento ideale e morale del primo ventennio del Novecento – che reagisce alle logore ideologie illuministiche, democratiche e socialistiche della vecchia Europa – trova uno sbocco naturale nella marcia su Roma e nelle energie suscitate dal fascismo. Esso diventa così, agli occhi di Gentile, l’interprete della vita nazionale, il compito in cui tutti gli italiani, che non vogliono più «starsene alla finestra», devono impegnarsi.

Giovanni Gentile e il fascismoIl fascismo appare a Gentile non un’ideologia o un sistema chiuso, bensì un processo storico, un ideale da realizzare. Come tale gli è utile l’apporto di quella critica costruttiva che ne riconosce la funzione nazionale, mentre deve combattere «la democrazia degli avvocati arruffapopoli», «il socialismo radicaloide e umanitario», «il liberalismo dello Stato negativo e agnostico», dal momento che il fascismo – come ogni serio movimento storico – è «sentimento religioso» da restaurare negli animi e nella coscienza collettiva. Questa visione della politica come fede, che il filosofo aveva già maturato e caldeggiato negli anni precedenti, trova nel fascismo il suo riscontro più profondo.

D’altronde, che il fascismo non sia un episodio accidentale nella vita di Gentile, è comprovato dall’impegno pubblico e dall’azione di collaborazione e di stimolo esercitata verso il regime per l’intero Ventennio. Oltre alla carica di ministro della Pubblica Istruzione nel triennio 1922-1924, è presidente della Commissione dei Quindici – poi dei Diciotto – per la riforma costituzionale, fondatore nel 1925 dell’Istituto fascista di cultura, presidente del Consiglio superiore della Pubblica Istruzione dal 1926 al 1928, membro del Gran Consiglio fino al 1929 e seguace di Mussolini anche nell’ultima avventura della Repubblica sociale. Nei momenti critici, che pure Gentile attraversa – specie quando la sua riforma della scuola viene alterata o quando si stipulano i Patti Lateranensi con un compromesso che nega nell’essenza il suo concetto dello Stato etico – non scinde mai le proprie responsabilità da quelle mussoliniane e ribadisce la sua fede nel fascismo col quale continua fino alla fine a identificare il futuro stesso della nazione.

Pagherà la sua ferma adesione al regime con la vita, ucciso il 15 aprile 1944 a Firenze da un commando partigiano aderente ai GAP.

Bio
29/03/2014 di Matteo Anastasi

Source: Europinione (Italia/Italy)
http://www.europinione.it/giovanni-gentile-ladesione-al-fascismo/

Racial Science in Hitler's New Europe, 1938-1945. Anton Weiss-Wendt and Rory Yeomans

Racial Science on the Frontiers of Hitler's Europe

Alongside the theme of modernity, the subject of racial exclusion rests at the center of the now voluminous scholarship dedicated to the Third Reich. In particular, hundreds, if not thousands, of studies have investigated the caustic forms of racial science, which undergirded Nazi ideology and provided the rationale for Adolf Hitler's regime's murderous and utopian efforts to restructure Europe demographically. Yet surprisingly little is known about the ways in which Nazi racial thinking interacted with local state and parastatal institutions in the German occupied territories, not to mention among the Reich's allies.

This collection of thirteen essays edited by Anton Weiss-Wendt and Rory Yeomans seeks to close this important historiographical gap. Originating in papers given at a conference on racial science held at the Center for the Study of the Holocaust and Religious Minorities in Oslo, Norway, the work is consciously comparative in nature. Jettisoning the traditional narrative of a top-down imposition from Berlin, the anthology instead refreshingly seeks to problematize the relationship between Germany and its vassal and satellite states concerning racial policy. Spanning the breadth of Nazi Europe, from the Netherlands and Norway to Italy, Romania, and the Baltic states of Estonia and Latvia, the essays highlight the ways in which eugenicists and ethnographers not only adhered to the tenets of Nazi racial doctrine but also subverted or challenged them in order to pursue agendas aimed at strengthening the body politic in their own countries.

As several essays in the volume note, the often complicated wartime relationship between European racial scientists and their Nazi counterparts stemmed from the fact that throughout the interwar period Germany played a key role in the development of racial science. Having emerged as an academic discipline in the early 1900s, the field was well established in the country by the 1930s, and research institutions at universities, such as Munich and Giessen, attracted students from as far away as Italy, Romania, and the Baltics eager to learn about the benefits of racial hygiene from some of the most prestigious scholars in the field. Indeed, eugenicists in east central Europe's fledgling new republics were especially keen to promote practices advocated in Germany, such as birth control and sterilization, as they appeared to offer the best means of navigating the social and economic pitfalls of the unstable interwar period.

Despite their admiration for the central role that eugenics played inside Germany after 1933, the authors highlight the considerable and enduring differences between these racial scientists and their German colleagues. As Isabel Heinemann notes in her incisive essay on the activities of the Reich Settlement Main Office (RuSHA), "seduced by abundant research funding and the prospect of swift national revival," many German academics enthusiastically implemented the regime's increasingly exclusionary racial policies (p. 50). Using the case study of RuSHA's activities in occupied Poland as a backdrop, the essay reveals that these racial specialists not only helped draft legislation, but also proved willing to go abroad as Nazism's racial vanguard after the outbreak of war in 1939, overseeing the deportation and extermination of non-Germans. Drawing on the rich historiography of Täterforschung, Heinemann conclusively demonstrates that these "architects of extermination" formed a distinct type of perpetrator, who, much like the counterpart in the Reich Security Main Office, was equally comfortable taking part in operations in the field as managing violent population transfers from offices in Berlin (p. 48). While readers familiar with Heinemann's previous work ("Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut": Das Rasse-und Siedlungshauptamt der SS und die rassenpolitische Neuordnung Europas [2003]) will not find much new in terms of content, the essay serves an important function by setting up the juxtaposition between these Nazi racial scientists unconditionally committed to the violent pursuit of a racially pure Volksgemeinschaft and their often much less radical European contemporaries featured in subsequent essays.

The Nazis' uncompromising dedication to exclusionary racial ideology is further driven home in the keen contribution of Amy Carney. Fully intending the SS to serve not only as the martial arm of the German nation but also as an eternal wellspring of racially pure Nazi acolytes, throughout the war years, Heinrich Himmler took great pains to balance the tension between the burdens of frontline service and the need to ensure a demographic future for Nazism's racial elite. Unable to forego the necessity of providing valuable Menschenmaterial for the battlefield, the SS chief sought to encourage procreation by offering material incentives, reducing the bureaucratic red tape related to marriage applications, and even providing brief conjugal vacations for SS men. However, as Carney points out, these programs ironically cut against the grain of Himmler's vision of an ideal SS code, as the Reichsführer was dismayed to discover that most SS officers failed to grasp the importance of their reproductive obligations, and often simply reveled in the brief respite from frontline service.

The twisted nature of Nazi ethics is further astutely elaborated on by Wolfgang Bialas. Echoing the recent work of Alon Confino (Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical Understanding [2011]) and Raphael Gross (Anständig geblieben: Nationalsozialistische Moral [2012]), Bialas emphasizes the regime's efforts to supplant the Judeo-Christian humanist tradition with a new set of values that reflected National Socialism's view of history as a merciless life or death struggle between competing races by creating rigid binaries of belonging and exclusion. Citing as evidence the lack of apparent remorse among Nazi perpetrators during the postwar period and the often heard refrain that one was simply "following orders," he finds that the regime was largely successful in its attempt to provide justification for mass murder, reducing heinous crimes to mundane concepts, such as "work" or "duty," clinical terminology that revealed the lack of empathy for Nazism's victims and allowed killers to consider themselves, as Himmler remarked in his infamous Posen speech of 1943, "decent" guardians of the German racial community.

When placed alongside Nazism's ideological warriors, other European racial thinkers pale in comparison. Indeed, most eschewed violent schemes of racial purification, and others continued to adhere to competing conceptions of race, offsetting the hegemony of Nazi doctrine. For example, in Italy, eugenicists influenced by Latin and Catholic culture were more apt to promote positive eugenic policies, such as good hygiene and better working conditions, rather than resort to birth control or sterilization. The majority also tended to shy away from discussions of racial purity, instead using the term stirpe, or stock, to describe a national fusion of peoples that created a distinct, if superior, Mediterranean people. Indeed, throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, racial anti-Semitism and notions of pure races along the lines of those advocated by German academics remained relegated to the shadowy margins of racial discourse. However, things began to change after the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935, which proved to be a turning point in Fascist thinking regarding race. This quest for empire demanded that Benito Mussolini's regime take a more concrete approach to such questions, as reflected in the discriminatory laws passed in Italy that barred sexual relationships between Italians and Africans in 1936. Another sign of the growing shift in discourse came two years later in the form of Guido Landra's 1938 "Race Manifesto," which advocated biological forms of anti-Semitism, and demanded expulsion of Italian Jews as irredeemable ballast. However, many of the ideas espoused in this document remained contentious, and heated debates between the national and biological camps of Italian racial science continued to rage until roughly 1943, when the formation of the Salo Republic, and more direct forms of German influence, definitively shifted the discourse in favor of racial biology.

The field of eugenics followed similar trajectories in southeastern Europe, where national belonging continued to be defined in anthropological and cultural terms until the 1940s. It was during this period that states allied to Nazi Germany acquired new territories, forcing reconsiderations of race. As Marius Turda points out in his case study of Hungary, "during the Second World War racial science acquired renewed importance in the public imagination," highlighting the critical role that the conflict played in radicalizing perceptions of the nation (p. 238). Characterized by tension between competing cultural and biological conceptions, few Hungarian racialists argued for a homogenous race until roughly 1938, when these debates were used to pursue territorial claims in southern Slovakia and Transylvania. Much like their German counterparts, flush with state funding, Hungarian eugenicists proved exceptionally willing to turn their research toward political ends, crafting a "Magyar race," which evidenced common hereditary characteristics, with predictable repercussions for the country's ethnic minorities. In neighboring Romania, racial thinkers were deeply troubled by the alleged dilution of the middle strata of society by the influx of foreigners, particularly Jews, who arrived from regions annexed after World War I. Inspired by German racial science, they sought to recast ethnicity, or neam, in biological terms, while remaining true to the idea of a synthesis of peoples which dominated Romanian national mythology. While they acknowledged that neam was created by centuries of ethnic fusion and argued against the conceptions of racial purity that dominated German racial science, they also warned that the Romania nation was now characterized by its "blood relationship," in which all its members shared in a common ancestry and needed to guard against the corruption of outside forces, namely, Jews. Thus, by 1942, Romanian racial scientists had created a "biologically hardened ethnic nationalism" that encouraged violence against outsiders (p. 279).

As Yeomans demonstrates, the country that adopted a racial doctrine most in tandem with that of Nazi Germany was the Independent State of Croatia. However, despite consciously modeling their policies on those practiced in the Third Reich, Ustasha racism cut an erratic course contingent on both changing leadership and a host of other factors that justified both atrocity and softer forms of discrimination. These contradictions were best exposed by the discourse surrounding the initial main target of the Ustasha, the Serbs. In contrast to the Jews and Roma, who were classified as racial outsiders and sanctioned by legislation that prevented them from interacting with "Aryans," Serbs never became the target of racial laws, and although the media constantly trumpeted the need for Croats to protect their racial purity, marriage with Serbs was never banned. Instead they were targeted for a campaign of cultural destruction alongside the murder operations carried out by Ustasha death squads. In the face of widespread Serbian resistance and a changing of the guard to a more moderate Ustasha leadership, by 1942 the regime had largely begun to abandon mass violence in favor of temporary, forced assimilation. During this period, Croatian eugenicists backpedaled from their earlier project of providing justification for the murder of the Serbian population. However, they still played an influential role in shaping doctrine by arguing that the minority needed to be purged of its intelligentsia and clergy, as they constituted the core of the Serb nation. By September 1944, as a new, radical leadership took the helm, Croatian racial scientists again found themselves espousing racist rhetoric against the Serbs, as the regime undertook one last effort to wipe them out. By astutely charting the ebb and flow of mass violence, Yeoman's essay dovetails neatly with the assertions of Christian Gerlach (Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth-Century World [2010]) and Alexander Korb (Im Schatten des Weltkrieges: Massen Gewalt der Ustaša gegen Serben, Juden und Roma in Kroatien 1941-1945 ([2013]) by highlighting the often erratic and uncontrollable nature of atrocity. By doing so, Yeoman refreshingly departs from the well-established scholarly interpretations regarding the state's monopoly, or lack thereof, on the course and scope of ethnically motivated violence.

In other parts of Europe, racial scientists tried to align their field with Nazi doctrine in order to work through the occupation, toward the end of strengthening their own national composition. This was the case in Estonia, where Weiss-Wendt finds that the ethnographers who formed the backbone of the nationalist movement were eager to work with Nazi authorities. During the interwar period, Estonian eugenicists faced what they perceived to be a demographic crisis motivated by a growing Russian minority. They eagerly seized on the opportunity to work with Nazi security forces to remove this allegedly threatening demographic segment, and successfully lobbied for the repatriation of the Estonian minorities inside the occupied Soviet Union, mirroring the Nazis' own efforts to repatriate ethnic Germans. While Hitler's regime came to view Estonia as an advance base for a racially restructured new Europe, in a certain sense, Weiss-Wendt finds that the tail wagged the dog, as local eugenicists sought to consolidate and bolster the nation through collaboration, working through intellectual, material, and security resources offered by the Nazis.

The apparent benefits of siding with the Germans are also found in Geraldien von Frijtag Drabbe Künzel's piece on Dutch settlers in the Nazi East. Traditionally, Dutch eugenicists had looked to Netherlands' colonies in Southeast Asia as a pressure valve to release "surplus" segments of the population and prevent a drain of resources inside the metropole. With Indonesia and parts of New Guinea occupied by Japanese troops, Dutch eugenicists eagerly seized on the opportunities offered by the Germans to promote settlement in Belarus and Ukraine. Between 1941 and 1944, 5,216 Dutch "pioneers" trekked eastward to farm plots of fertile black soil promised to them by the Nazi regime. They soon found that life in the East was double edged--while they were given free rein to command and exploit the "racially inferior" Slavs, they also quickly discovered the startling absence of racial comradeship exhibited by the Germans. Disdained as black marketeers, crooks, and "white Jews" by the Germans, the Dutch discovered they fit uncomfortably low within the racial hierarchy of the East, a fact that cruelly debunked the myth of Germanic kinship touted by the Nazi and Dutch governments inside the metropole.

This comprehensive and diverse volume succeeds in its intention to fill an important historiographical gap and challenge the hegemony of Nazi racial thinking inside Hitler's Europe. The one glaring weakness is the absence of an essay on France. Given the country's contribution to the racial reordering of Western Europe, not to mention the still controversial subject of Vichy collaboration, such a contribution would have rounded out the anthology. Likewise, an effort to compare the eugenic and racial policies of Nazi Europe with those of the neutral states of Switzerland and Sweden might have added further weight to the overarching theme of the work.[1] Lastly, an essay that discussed the effects of these racial policies at ground level or from the perspective of their victims would also have been welcome. While engaging and important, the majority of the chapters, with the notable exception of Yeoman's piece on Croatia, fail to break out of the realm of intellectual history and consider how these ideas played out once they were put into action. Such an investigation would have added a further layer of problematization, demonstrating the contradictions between racial theory and practice that not only allowed for mass violence and discrimination but also showed how targeted groups were in some rare cases, even if only momentarily, spared the full brunt of eliminationist eugenic policies. Here the plight of half-Jewish Germans springs readily to mind, a case which demonstrates that even at the heart of Nazism, cracks and fissures in racial thinking remained, allowing space for survival.[2] These points aside, the anthology remains a refreshing, cohesive, and compelling contribution to the scholarship on racial policy inside Hitler's Europe.

McConnell on Weiss-Wendt and Yeomans, 'Racial Science in Hitler's New Europe, 1938-1945'
Author: Anton Weiss-Wendt, Rory Yeomans
Reviewer: Michael McConnell

Anton Weiss-Wendt, Rory Yeomans. Racial Science in Hitler's New Europe, 1938-1945. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013. 416 pp. (paper), ISBN 978-0-8032-4507-5.

Reviewed by Michael McConnell (University of Tennessee-Knoxville)
Published on H-German (September, 2014)
Commissioned by Chad Ross

Notes

[1]. See Thomas Etzemüller, "Total aber nicht totalitär: Die schwedische Volksgemeinschaft," in Volksgemeinschaft: Neue Forschungen zur Gesellschaft des Nationalsozialismus, ed. Frank Bahjor and Michael Wildt (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 2009).

[2]. James F. Tent, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Nazi Persecution of Jewish-Christian Germans (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003).

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=40388
Citation: Michael McConnell. Review of Weiss-Wendt, Anton; Yeomans, Rory, Racial Science in Hitler's New Europe, 1938-1945. H-German, H-Net Reviews. September, 2014.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=40388
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Source: H-Net
https://networks.h-net.org/node/35008/reviews/46331/mcconnell-weiss-wendt-and-yeomans-racial-science-hitlers-new-europe

Le origini culturali del nazismo

L'intento del libro Genocidio di Georges Bensoussan, ora tradotto in italiano, è indagare quali sono le origini culturali del nazismo: si occupa cosí di un tema classico nella storia delle idee, in cui questa disciplina dispiega la sua grande importanza per comprendere la storia, ma anche tutti i suoi trabocchetti e i suoi terreni scivolosi, tutte le sue soluzioni facili e ingannevoli.

È possibile trattare delle origini culturali del Terzo Reich solo se si è convinti che il fenomeno nazionalsocialista non rappresenti una malattia repentina nella storia tedesca, ma sia stato preparato da autori, temi, discussioni, che in qualche modo lo hanno reso possibile.

È opportuno chiedersi subito se "origini" sia da intendere come "cause": ricostruire le correnti intellettuali che stanno a monte della nascita del regime hitleriano significa rintracciare il punto di partenza di atteggiamenti, stili di pensiero, convinzioni, che hanno avuto quel regime come effetto? Ovvero: la storia delle idee può essere illuminata a posteriori dall'esito al quale le idee individuate come origini hanno condotto? La forza della cultura uscirebbe molto rinvigorita da una simile convinzione, ma anche con una responsabilità che non sappiamo quanto sia lecito attribuirle.

Il termine "origini" non si impegna in una simile affermazione, ma suggerisce in realtà, anche quando non lo dice in modo esplicito, che le premesse culturali sono essenziali nella formazione e nell'affermazione di un simile regime. Preparano il terreno indispensabile mettendo in circolazione questioni e accenti che formano il contenuto ideologico del regime a venire, predispongono ad ascoltare con attenzione e con favore parole d'ordine altrimenti inaccettabili, insegnano a non reagire in modo decisamente negativo ai provvedimenti del governo che assume il potere. In definitiva, ogni ricerca che si incammini per questa strada tenta di rintracciare quali parti delle premesse intellettuali siano state messe in pratica dal regime che poi si è affermato. Una volta che le ha identificate, definisce quelle parti come le origini culturali di tale regime.

Bensoussan rintraccia le origini culturali del nazismo in cinque correnti, che colloca tutte tra la seconda metà dell'Ottocento e gli anni Venti del Novecento: l'antilluminismo, il biologismo applicato alla storia e alla cultura, il culto della violenza, l'antisemitismo, il pessimismo culturale. Definisce il nazismo esclusivamente in termini di sterminio degli ebrei. Collega in modo stretto le correnti culturali che ha individuato con il nazismo cosí concepito. In questo percorso, a prima vista lineare, si nascondono più interrogativi che risposte, più soluzioni apparenti che indagini circostanziate, e a ogni proposta di spiegazione si affiancano altrettanti dubbi.

Iniziamo dall'antilluminismo: con questo termine Bensoussan intende la ripresa, alla fine del XIX secolo, del pessimismo radicale sulla natura umana (che proprio per questo esige il controllo sui cittadini da parte di uno stato forte) che era stato tipico degli autori controrivoluzionari, dei quali viene preso a esempio e tipo ideale Joseph de Maistre. Essi, a loro volta, basavano le loro teorie su un cristianesimo controriformista che vedeva il mondo invaso dal diavolo, destinato a una catastrofe, bisognoso di salvezza. Da qui deriverebbe il pessimismo culturale fin-de-siècle che vedeva il mondo sotto il segno della decadenza.

Peccato che le correnti culturali siano meno univoche di quanto possano apparire a prima vista. Proprio di uno dei maggiori illuministi, Voltaire, era la convinzione dell'esistenza delle razze e della gerarchia fra di esse, mentre non tutto il pensiero critico della Rivoluzione francese si fa ridurre a

reazione. Esiste anche la posizione liberalconservatrice espressa da uno dei primi e maggiori autori che riflettono criticamente sul 1789, Edmund Burke. Lo stesso vale per il pessimismo culturale: questo non era solo di matrice cristiana, come nel testo si sostiene, ma anche neopagana, vagamente spiritualista, e nient'affatto caratterizzata in senso religioso.

Ancor più difficile è identificare un suo preciso esito politico. La salvezza dal declino del mondo moderno era osservata da parti diverse, opposte: il presente veniva criticato perché troppo democratico o perché lo era troppo poco, perché troppo astratto o troppo concreto, perché impotente o perché malato di efficientismo; la salvezza dal declino era pensata come ancien régime o come un mondo di uomini liberi e uguali che potessero coltivare la loro anima.

Si può essere pessimisti sulla natura umana senza per questo vedere con favore le camere a gas, si può leggere nel mondo moderno un declino inarrestabile senza per questo sposare le ragioni dell'Olocausto. Inoltre, l'odio per la democrazia, lo spirito borghese, il parlamentarismo, proveniva in quel periodo da destra e da sinistra: e anche se sommiamo la critica alla democrazia con l'idea che l'uomo non sia buono per natura, e perfino con l'idea che la civiltà sia in una fase declinante, ciò che ne risulta non è necessariamente una posizione fascista (come Bensoussan afferma), ma semplicemente antimodernista.

È arduo sostenere che l'antimodernismo coincida con il fascismo, dal momento che l'equazione non torna da nessuna delle due parti. Da un lato il fascismo, cosí come il nazismo, fu anche fede nello sviluppo, nella creazione di uno stato e di un uomo nuovi, nell'industria, nel futuro, nella modernità; dall'altro, l'antimodernismo non è necessariamente la premessa del totalitarismo, tanto è vero che esiste anche un antimodernismo di sinistra.

Anche per quel che concerne il biologismo e il razzismo, che per Bensoussan preparano lo sterminio, le domande sono numerose. È vero che la cancellazione dell'umanità dell'uomo effettuata dal nazismo prende avvio dallo studio scientifico dell'essere umano che lo considera come un animale tra gli altri animali? Tutto il darwinismo sociale può essere considerato alla luce della soppressione dei deboli, di coloro che risultano perdenti nella lotta per la sopravvivenza applicata alla società? In un infiacchimento degli esseri umani credeva, a esempio, un autore come George Orwell, a proposito del quale è difficile parlare di simpatie naziste. Dell'onnipresenza dell'idea di razza nel periodo esaminato il volume offre un quadro inquietante, ma dubitiamo che l'idea di razza implicasse per tutti coloro che la utilizzavano una gerarchia fra le razze, un miglioramento da apportare a esse, la soppressione di una parte della popolazione.

Scrive Bensoussan: «Nel momento in cui la classe porta allo scontro (ma, anche, al compromesso), la razza genera l'idea di sterminio». Occorre notare che vi sono stati stermini (come quello staliniano) che non muovevano dall'idea di razza; vi sono stati scontri generati dalla prospettiva di classe che si sono tradotti in genocidi (si veda la Cambogia), mentre la razza, nella quale crede, non conduce tutta la cultura scientista di fine Ottocento al razzismo, tanto che molti positivisti sono sostenitori di un riformismo socialista che del darwinismo riprende solo l'evoluzione intesa come un progresso lento e inevitabile che elimina la necessità della rivoluzione.

Nelle premesse culturali del nazismo a essere in questione è la modernità: «L'ossessione della razza … è da mettere in relazione con la perdita dei punti di riferimento in un mondo diventato inintelligibile, e segna quella linea di sicurezza in un momento in cui ogni limite sembra svanire». Quasi che la responsabilità della centralità della razza in quel periodo sia da attribuire a un mondo che perdeva radici, sicurezza, si modificava troppo velocemente per gli esseri umani, lasciando una terra sconvolta e un cielo vuoto.

Bensoussan legge il pessimismo culturale in senso antiebraico poiché a suo parere fa dell'ebreo il simbolo della modernità. Ma il pessimismo culturale è decisamente critico di una modernità urbana, sradicata, artificiale: non è necessariamente antiebraico, cosí come non lo è l'antimodernismo. Per Oswald Spengler (uno dei maggiori esponenti del pessimismo culturale di quegli anni), il nomade

abitatore delle megalopoli contemporanee, sradicato da ogni terra, era il prototipo dell'uomo moderno, non dell'ebreo. Il fatto che antisemiti e critici della modernità di fine Ottocento dirigano i loro strali verso le stesse caratteristiche – urbanesimo, industrialismo, freddezza, impersonalità, artificialità crescente della vita – non autorizza a identificare le due correnti. Scrive Bensoussan: «Sinonimo di eredità da trasmettere, la razza è ciò che resta di fronte all'angoscia per l'opera distruttrice del tempo, e a maggior ragione sotto un cielo vuoto». Ma l'antisemitismo non è affatto un esito scontato di quell'atteggiamento che vede nella modernità una caduta. Si legge: «L'ebreo è necessario al nostro mondo, poiché la sua presunta malvagità cristallizza l'inquietudine sorta da un universo nuovo e incomprensibile». Certo, è innegabile che l'ebreo abbia fatto da capro espiatorio: come tutti i capri espiatori, ha compattato chi lo condannava e lo uccideva. Ma è possibile ricondurre l'antisemitismo al disagio della modernità? Se cosí fosse, perché ogni paese moderno non ha avuto il suo antisemitismo?

La sostanza del nazismo consiste, a giudizio dell'autore, nello sterminio degli ebrei, cioè nel genocidio del titolo. Ovvio che il razzismo, l'antigiudaismo, l'ideologia guerresca, il machismo, il darwinismo sociale, siano riconosciuti quali sue premesse. L'antigiudaismo caratterizza l'Occidente dal Medioevo in poi: resta da spiegare perché proprio in quel momento divenne un'idea-forza capace di tradursi nella tragedia della Shoah. Se quelle premesse sono pressoché tautologiche, siamo certi che il pessimismo culturale rappresenti una premessa altrettanto ovvia, altrettanto indiscutibile del nazismo? Il pessimismo culturale esprime una ripulsa della modernità e la convinzione che un'epoca dalle caratteristiche cosí negative condurrà a una fine dei tempi, a una catastrofe certa. È importante il tentativo di prendere sul serio questa corrente: ma si tratta di una corrente culturale assai composita, che da questa indagine risulta invece appiattita: è difficile, poi, indicare quale sia la sua traduzione politica, arduo addirittura affermare se ne abbia una. Peraltro, il pessimismo culturale non coincide completamente con l'impostazione che il nazionalsocialismo dà alla sua visione della storia né alla sua considerazione del progresso materiale, del valore dell'industrialismo e della modernità.

Come regime reale, il nazismo non poteva essere troppo nostalgico, e doveva, accanto al vagheggiamento di epoche più organiche, più comunitarie, più solidali, più artigianali nella storia del mondo, promuovere la propria industria per competere ad armi pari con le altre nazioni. La stessa cosa accade nel fascismo italiano, dove la contrapposizione fra un'epoca di crisi storica e di declino (che coincideva con l'epoca liberale, e anche con l'urbanesimo, il macchinismo, l'egoismo individualista) e un'epoca alta che coincideva con il fascismo e si caratterizzava con un ritorno alla terra, all'artigianato, al lavoro delle mani, alla corporazione medievale, doveva comunque fare i conti con la promozione della grande industria, di quelle macchine che sciupano il mondo e che erano tanto deprecate.

L'esaltazione della violenza e della guerra che Bensoussan individua nella cultura europea tra 1880 e 1914 può essere ricondotta per intero a preparazione del sistematico stato di eccezione del nazismo e alle sue violenze? Può essere ritenuta «la matrice di una brutalizzazione della società» accentuata poi dalla Grande Guerra? In verità, nell'esaltazione della violenza tra la fine del XIX e gli inizi del XX secolo confluiscono elementi molto diversi: il marxismo ortodosso che rifiuta il compromesso revisionista con il parlamentarismo, la lotta alla società borghese di Georges Sorel, l'anarchismo e i primi movimenti nazionalisti di massa. Dalla critica a una società che elimina dalla vita degli uomini la competizione e il progresso riducendoli a meccanismi tutti uguali, dal richiamo alla necessità della lotta anche cruenta, possono essere tratte conseguenze diverse: da un vitalismo individuale alla definizione del conflitto e della competizione come molle dello sviluppo, dall'esaltazione della selezione a favore dei migliori in quella lotta che è la vita al richiamo a non abbandonarsi agli automatismi sociali.

Le origini culturali del nazismo
MICHELA NACCI

GEORGE BENSOUSSAN, Genocidio. Una passione europea, a cura di Frediano Sessi, trad. di Carlo Saletti e Lanfranco Di Genio, Venezia, Marsilio, pp. 396

MICHELA NACCI insegna Storia delle dottrine politiche all'Università dell'Aquila. La sua opera più recente è Storia culturale della Repubblica (Bruno Mondadori, 2009).

Source: La Rivista dei Libri
http://www.larivistadeilibri.it/2009/10/nacci.html

Father of Koch Brothers Helped Build Nazi Oil Refinery, Book Says

By NICHOLAS CONFESSOREJAN. 11, 2016

The father of the billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch helped construct a major oil refinery in Nazi Germany that was personally approved by Adolf Hitler, according to a new history of the Kochs and other wealthy families.

The book, “Dark Money,” by Jane Mayer, traces the rise of the modern conservative movement through the activism and money of a handful of rich donors: among them Richard Mellon Scaife, an heir to the Mellon banking fortune, and Harry and Lynde Bradley, brothers who became wealthy in part from military contracts but poured millions into anti-government philanthropy.

But the book is largely focused on the Koch family, stretching back to its involvement in the far-right John Birch Society and the political and business activities of the father, Fred C. Koch, who found some of his earliest business success overseas in the years leading up to World War II. One venture was a partnership with the American Nazi sympathizer William Rhodes Davis, who, according to Ms. Mayer, hired Mr. Koch to help build the third-largest oil refinery in the Third Reich, a critical industrial cog in Hitler’s war machine.

David H. Koch, left, and Charles G. Koch
Paul Vernon/Associated Press; Bo Rader/The Wichita Eagle, via Associated Press

The episode is not mentioned in an online history published by Koch Industries, the company that Mr. Koch later founded and passed on to his sons.

Ken Spain, a spokesman for Koch Industries, said company officials had declined to participate in Ms. Mayer’s book and had not yet read it.

“If the content of the book is reflective of Ms. Mayer’s previous reporting of the Koch family, Koch Industries or Charles’s and David’s political involvement, then we expect to have deep disagreements and strong objections to her interpretation of the facts and their sourcing,” Mr. Spain said.

Ms. Mayer, a staff writer at The New Yorker, presents the Kochs and other families as the hidden and self-interested hands behind the rise and growth of the modern conservative movement. Philanthropists and political donors who poured hundreds of millions of dollars into think tanks, political organizations and scholarships, they helped win acceptance for anti-government and anti-tax policies that would protect their businesses and personal fortunes, she writes, all under the guise of promoting the public interest.

The Kochs, the Scaifes, the Bradleys and the DeVos family of Michigan “were among a small, rarefied group of hugely wealthy, archconservative families that for decades poured money, often with little public disclosure, into influencing how the Americans thought and voted,” the book says.

Many of the families owned businesses that clashed with environmental or workplace regulators, come under federal or state investigation, or waged battles over their tax bills with the Internal Revenue Service, Ms. Mayer reports. The Kochs’ vast political network, a major force in Republican politics today, was “originally designed as a means of off-loading the costs of the Koch Industries environmental and regulatory fights onto others” by persuading other rich business owners to contribute to Koch-controlled political groups, Ms. Mayer writes, citing an associate of the two brothers.

Mr. Scaife, who died in 2014, donated upward of a billion dollars to conservative causes, according to “Dark Money,” which cites his own unpublished memoirs. Mr. Scaife was driven in part, Ms. Mayer writes, by a tax loophole that granted him his inheritance tax free through a trust, so long as the trust donated its net income to charity for 20 years. “Isn’t it grand how tax law gets written?” Mr. Scaife wrote.

In Ms. Mayer’s telling, the Kochs helped bankroll — through a skein of nonprofit organizations with minimal public disclosure — decades of victories in state capitals and in Washington, often leaving no fingerprints. She credits groups financed by the Kochs and their allies with providing support for the Tea Party movement, along with the public relations strategies used to shrink public support for the Affordable Care Act and for President Obama’s proposals to mitigate climate change.

The Koch network also provided funding to fine-tune budget proposals from Representative Paul D. Ryan, such as cuts to Social Security, so they would be more palatable to voters, according to the book. The Kochs were so influential among conservative lawmakers, Ms. Mayer reports, that in 2011, Representative John A. Boehner, then the House speaker, visited David Koch to ask for his help in resolving a debt ceiling stalemate.

“Dark Money” also contains revelations from a private history of the Kochs commissioned by David’s twin brother, William, during a lengthy legal battle with Charles and David over control of Koch Industries.

Ms. Mayer describes a sealed 1982 deposition in which William Koch recalled participating in an attempt by Charles and David to blackmail their fourth and eldest brother, Frederick, into relinquishing any claim to the family business by threatening to tell their father that he was gay.

David Koch has since described himself as socially liberal and as a supporter of same-sex marriage.

By NICHOLAS CONFESSOREJAN. 11, 2016

Correction: January 12, 2016
An earlier version of a capsule summary for this article misspelled the surname of the author of a new book about the history of the Koch family. She is Jane Mayer, not Meyer.

Source: New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/12/us/politics/father-of-koch-brothers-helped-build-nazi-oil-refinery-book-says.html

More:
Koch Executive Disputes Book’s Account of Founder’s Role in Nazi Refinery (NY Times)
Review: Jane Mayer’s ‘Dark Money,’ About the Koch Brothers’ Fortune and Influence (NY Times)

The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France. Sandrine Sanos

Aesthetics, Politics, and Abjection: Gendered Fantasies of Race and Nation among 1930s French Far-Right Intellectuals

The intellectual far right in 1930s France sought to reimagine national belonging by challenging what they saw as pervasive moral degeneration and a crisis in a national sense of masculine sexuality. These challenges involved articulating an exclusionary, even violent, antisemitism, and scholars have long debated precisely how to account for the political choices and rhetorical strategies mobilized by far-right writers and journalists from the period. In this lucid and thoughtfully argued book, Sandrine Sanos argues against prevailing historiographical and literary approaches to the work of far-right intellectuals and journalists in 1930s interwar France. Specifically, she challenges scholars who have conceived of interwar far-right politics as thoroughly determined by the “shameful” homosexual longings of its most ardent practitioners. She explains that scholars have unduly privileged biographical readings that view antisemitic political commitments as pathological outcroppings of “deviant” homosexual and homosocial obsessions and desires. For Sanos, antisemitic fantasies of national regeneration in interwar France cannot be tied simply to the “perverted” masculinity of leading far-right figures. Her study focuses instead on the ways in which gendered discourses of sexual perversion became central themes in what she calls the “aesthetics of hate” developed by far-right thinkers.

Drawing on the literary and political writings of such figures as Lucien Rebatet, Robert Brasillach, Thierry Maulnier, Maurice Blanchot, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Sanos convincingly demonstrates that “we must take more seriously the ways in which the tropes of heterosexual deviance, sexual perversion, and abject homosexuality helped mark the bounds of the male citizen and the meaning of public letters in French history” (p. 203). These tropes, she explains, actually constituted the ideological foundations of interwar far-right thought and as such they were explicitly mobilized by intellectuals writing for publications like Je Suis Partout, Combat, and L’Insurgé. The figures Sanos analyzes in The Aesthetics of Hate emerged from early twentieth-century right-wing nationalist and monarchist circles and took inspiration from Charles Maurras, the leading figure in reactionary and antisemitic politics from the turn of the century. One of the book’s goals is to show how these intellectuals formed a loosely knit movement bent on redefining Frenchness (in the face of what they perceived to be social “abjection”) according to a political grammar that united discourses of gender, race, and sexuality (p. 4). Sexuality was a key category for the writers Sanos analyzes, as they called for a renewed French heterosexual masculinity (and, hence, a renewed sense of French citizenship) over and against the “unmanly” bodies of Jews and colonized subjects who were often coded as homosexual. As she puts it, “the appropriate gendered and sexual underpinnings of the social order” had become unmoored after the experience of the First World War and the embrace of modernity, and far-right intellectuals sought to “restore” stable sexual identities as moral foundations for national regeneration (p. 29). Thus the figures Sanos studies were obsessed with well-regulated gender roles, denunciations of sexual “deviance” (which tended to be linked with Jews, communists, and foreigners), and the restoration of a whole masculine self that had been torn asunder by sexual difference.

Central to Sanos’s argument here is the idea that far-right thinkers sought political responses to the tense and fraught social climate of 1930s France in the realm of aesthetics. Art and literature (and aesthetic form as such) provided these figures with potential avenues for regenerating and demarcating anew a corrupt and degraded social body that had been beset from without and from within by democratic and “foreign” (i.e., Jewish) intrusion. This claim explains why she aims to avoid narrowly historicizing the movement she seeks to define; instead, she ties historicizing readings to close consideration of “the narrative and rhetorical strategies [far-right intellectuals] developed in their journalism and in their literary writings” (p. 6).

As she points out in her introduction, the conjuncture of aesthetics and politics that frames her study owes less to what Walter Benjamin referred to as fascism’s aestheticization of politics than it does to Jacques Rancière’s theorization of how the overlapping of aesthetics and politics provokes new “distributions of the sensible;” she rightly highlights how Rancière’s work foregrounds aesthetics as politics and how this emphasis helps to define “the common of a community” (p. 7). This is precisely the problem that haunted far-right thinkers in the interwar period who were obsessed with renewing or recreating a bounded masculine self and, by extension, a bounded national community in response to the excesses of modern life. This theoretical point is an original and timely contribution, given how Rancière’s work has succeeded in drawing the attention of many critics back to the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Yet Sanos only devotes a paragraph of her introduction to this observation, which nonetheless undergirds the theoretical thrust of her project. One cannot help but feel that this underdeveloped discussion of Rancière is a missed opportunity, since its pertinence seems to demand a more sustained and in-depth engagement. Additional fleshing out of this point might reveal more clearly how far-right intellectuals’ turn to aesthetics for political solutions generated new “ways of doing and making,” in Rancière’s terms, that “intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility.”[1] The creation of new forms of visibility in particular seems crucial for Sanos’s study, since the far-right figures and publications she examines sought to make perceptible a pathological Jewishness (embodied by socialist Léon Blum, leader of France’s Popular Front government) that they felt was responsible for the abjection of France’s social body. Since Sanos views her project as a contribution to both the historiography and literary theory of far-right politics in France, drawing out her reading of Rancière a bit further would have been especially revealing.

The book’s chapters engage a variety of themes and figures, offering an intellectual genealogy of the 1930s far-right movement; a contextualization of the “crises” caused by modernity to which far-right journals responded by calling for a renewed sense of virility that would restore order and boundaries to a (masculine) national subject that had been decentered; and a synthetic analysis of how the far-right press polemically and even violently negotiated their fixation with the French nation’s “abjection.” The discourse and thematics of abjection thoroughly permeated the thought and written work of figures like Maulnier and Rebatet, and the figure of the “Jew” served to embody an abject national modernity that had to be transcended via a turn to aesthetics and the “rigorous order” of form (p. 113).

Two of Sanos’s strongest chapters are given over to extended studies of individual writers, Blanchot and Céline, respectively. In the first of these, she historicizes Blanchot’s interwar journalism, viewing his early far-right and antisemitic work as born of a contingent and problematic historical moment and situating her reading of his early career in response to the work of scholars who have retroactively dismissed or minimized the content of his far-right writing. She makes a similar analytic move in the following chapter on Céline, reading his antisemitic pamphlets as continuous with his literary work (especially Voyage au bout de la nuit [1932]) and as a piece of the “cultural discourses of difference and otherness” embraced by “the intellectual and literary far right” (p. 162). In both of these cases, Sanos reads canonical literary figures against the grain, illuminating provocative continuities between their 1930s writing and later literary production and, through careful historical exegesis, laying bare their intellectual and political affinities with the interwar far right more broadly.

Her chapter on Céline deals in part with his racist and hygienicist conception of social contamination, highlighting how colonial interaction with race and blackness in Africa caused his protagonist in the pamphlet, Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937), to grow acutely aware of pervasive Jewish influence on an abject society at home in France. This observation reflects another key element of Sanos’s argument, namely, that far-right figures in interwar France racialized Frenchness within the nation by linking strident denunciations of Jews to colonial ideologies that were enacted abroad in the empire (particularly, in Africa). This is an especially fascinating and provocative point; however, whereas she deals with it at some length in her reading of Céline, at other moments in the book she brings it up only briefly, and it remains unclear precisely how meaningful this turn to questions of empire was for members of the antisemitic French far right. This aspect of her argument is handled most directly in a several-page subsection of chapter 6 (on representations of race in the journal Je Suis Partout) that takes up how the journal approached the problem of colonialism. She points out that Martinican writers René Maran and Paulette Nardal actually produced articles for Je Suis Partout’s colonial affairs page, but she does not go so far as to synthetically historicize the unlikely and paradoxical relationship with far-right intellectuals that these figures must have experienced. Since Sanos refers to this aspect of her argument throughout the book, one expects a fuller and more synthetic treatment of the ways antisemitism was articulated through a racialized colonial grammar than what is actually provided. Such an idea merits extended attention, especially since discourses of race were so central to far-right intellectuals’ collective senses of masculinity and nationality.

The Aesthetics of Hate is nonetheless a rich, well-researched, and well-documented study that succeeds in complicating historical and literary approaches to what Sanos rightly identifies as the far-right ideological confluence of aesthetics and politics in interwar France. She evinces a keen sense of the debates in the field as well as of her work’s place in relation to them, which lends the book and her writing a sense of scholarly self-awareness that makes for engaging reading. Sanos’s analyses of journalistic and literary “fantasies of abjection” avoid the pathologizing logic against which she argues and instead shed convincing light on “a particular aesthetics where young far-right intellectuals reimagined nation, race, and bodies articulated in a gendered and sexual discourse of male identity, citizenship, and civilization” (p. 14).

Note

[1]. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004), 13.

Sandrine Sanos. The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. xi + 369 pages. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8047-7457-4.

Reviewed by Justin Izzo (Brown University)
Published on H-SAE (June, 2013)
Commissioned by Michael B. Munnik

Source: H-Net
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=38444
https://networks.h-net.org/node/21311/reviews/21626/izzo-sanos-aesthetics-hate-far-right-intellectuals-antisemitism-and

Nuestro ensayo “¿Qué era? ¿Qué es? El Fascismo” EN PDF GRATUITO

¿Qué era? ¿Qué es? El fascismo. Entre el legado de Franco y la modernidad de Le Pen (1975-1997), Destino, Barcelona, 1998, 94 pp. ISBN: 978-84-233-2999-1. Prólogo de Rosa Regás, pp. 11-14.

EN 1998 publicamos nuestro ensayo breve El fascismo, en la colección “¿Qué era? ¿Qué es?”, que entonces dirigía Rosa Regás en editorial Destino. Dado que el libro está descatalogado y hemos recibido peticiones de consulta, hemos decidido fotocopiarlo y escanearlo íntegramente para que sea accesible en PDF de modo gratuito. Para acceder al pdf íntegro del libro clicar aquí: El fascismo-Xavier Casals

Consideramos que pese al tiempo transcurrido ofrece una imagen de interés: una radiografía del universo de la ultraderecha española de la época, en la que se dibujaban entonces intentos de importación del lepenismo, pervivencia del neofranquismo y se apuntaban populismos protestatario emergentes.

En suma, desde nuestra perspectiva ofrece una radiografía asequible del universo de la extrema derecha española antes de que hiciera eclosión la Plataforma per Catalunya [PxC].

Sinopsis

Síntesis divulgativa sobre la evolución del fascismo hasta el momento de publicación del ensayo centrada en el caso de España. La primera parte (“Los herederos del fascismo”) expone cómo se conformó una extrema derecha en el seno del franquismo que constituyó un sector ideológicamente involucionista en las postrimerías del régimen y durante los albores de la Transición, el llamado “búnker”. La segunda (“La crisis del ‘búnker’, 1975-1982) analiza el papel y la trayectoria de Fuerza Nueva, del terrorismo ultraderechista en “los años del plomo” y del fracasado golpe de Estado del 23 de febrero de 1981. La tercera parte (“Entre la tradición y la innovación, 1983-1994)” constata la coexistencia de discursos ultraderechistas nostálgicos del franquismo con otros innovadores e importadores de la cultura política de este espectro entonces exitosa en Europa, siendo su referente principal el Front National francés. La cuarta y última (“Hacia una nueva extrema derecha, 1994…”), efectúa previsiones de futuro sobre la eventual existencia de un “lepenismo español”.

La conclusión final, a la luz de la década transcurrida, resultó acertada. Decíamos ayer (1998):

“En cuanto a la ultraderecha española, ésta todavía parece contar con un largo camino que recorrer antes de configurar una opción política de cierta solidez. Carece de líderes y cuadros políticos, los ejes ideológicos de su discurso actual son tan variados como -en ocasiones- contradictorios. La siglas que se agitan en este espectro son casi desconocidas, muy cambiantes y difícilmente valorables en cuanto a su capacidad de convocatoria. Los ditintos grupos o no concurren a las elecciones o, cuando lo hacen, sus resultados son insignificantes […]. Pero, sobre todo, la extrema derecha se enfrenta a un problema irresuelto: conciliar los valores de la ultraderecha ‘tradicional’ y los de la ‘postindustrial’, aunar el legado de Franco y la modernidad de Le Pen” (p. 89).

Source: Blog de Xavier Casals
https://xaviercasals.wordpress.com/2014/08/31/el-populismo-que-viene-86-asi-era-la-extrema-derecha-espanola-antes-de-anglada-descarguese-el-ensayo-el-fascismo-en-pdf-gratuitamente/

Un gran negocio llamado Franquismo

Último de los artículos publicados en el dossier del periódico Diagonal sobre el 40 aniversario de la muerte de Franco

El 21 de agosto de 1942 Franco dijo lo siguiente en un discurso en Lugo: “Nuestra Cruzada es la única lucha en la uqe lo ricos que fueron a la guerra salieron más ricos.”. Cierto es cuando comprobamos como grandes familias de este país (los Gómez-Acebo, Aguirre Gonzalo, Banús, Fierro, Oriol y Urquijo, etc.) medraron a la sombra del dictador. Pero no solo se benefició a esas familias. El propio Franco hizo su fortuna a partir del golpe de Estado contra la República. Como ha mostrado el historiador Ángel Viñas, Franco comenzó la Guerra con el sueldo congelado y la acabó con 32 millones de pesetas de la época (el equivalente actual a 388 millones de euros). Para Viñas esta fuente de riqueza podría venir por la donación de café que Gentulio Vargas (dictador brasileño) dio a Franco y éste se enriqueció personalmente en su venta.

Y es que el entramado de corrupteles y enriquecimientos del franquismo parte desde su origen. El golpe de Estado de julio de 1936 no habría sido posible sin la ayuda financiera que el baquero Juan March brindó a Franco. La compra de armamento, los negocios con nazis y fascistas, tuvieron a March como un protagonista. A cambio consiguió de Franco el monopolio bancario y financiero. La fortuna de Juan March creció durante el franquismo, con la fundación de empresas que medraron a la sombra del régimen y que aun existen. Los March siguen presentes en consejos de administración de empresas importante de España (ACS, Acerinox, Prosegur, etc.). March fundó en 1951 FECSA (Fuerzas Eléctricas de Cataluña), que se hizo con el monopolio de la producción eléctrica catalana. Sobrevivió al franquismo y fue una de las impulsoras de la central nuclear de Ascó hasta su absorción por parte de Endesa. Una empresa que reportó enormes beneficios a los March.

Junto a estos incrementos de riqueza hay que analizar como se realizaron algunas obras públicas del franquismo. Las imágenes de Franco inaugurando pantanos, pueblos reconstruidos, canales de riego o el faraónico Valle de los Caídos, tiene detras una triste historia. De una parte de concesiones de empresas adictas al régimen. De otra la utilización de mano de obra esclava de presos políticos.

Investigado por historiadores como José Luis Gutiérrez Molina, el Canal del Guadalquivir utilizó mano de obra esclava. Hasta 2000 presos políticos trabajaron en estas obras bajo el auspicio del llamado Patronato de Redención de Penas por el Trabajo, utilizado para aminorar las condenas. Mano de obra expuesta a un peligro vital, sin ningún tipo de garantía y que reportó al Estado enormes beneficios. Alrededor del Canal se instalaron autenticos campos de concentración, nada envidiable a la Alemania nazi. La Dirección General de Regiones Devastadas y Reparaciones también se benefició de esa mano de obra esclava.

Pero el monumento por excelencia que encarnó la utilización de presos políticos y que no solo benefició al Estado sino a empresas privadas, fue la construcción del Valle de los Caídos. Franco eligió el emplazamiento de Cuelgamuros para realizar una faraónica construcción donde hacer su propia tumba. La concesión de la construcción del Valle de los Caídos recayó sobre las siguientes empresas: San Román, filial de Agromán, Estudios y Construcciones Molán y Banús. Posteriormente se uniría Huarte y Cía.

Todas estas empresas utilizaron mano de obra esclava. Presos republicanos. El periodista Rafael Torres cifra en 20000 los presos republicanos que participaron en la construcción del Valle de los Caídos. Para el también periodista Fernando Olmeda en el Valle trabajaron 141 batallones de presos. Isaías Lafuente dio un paso más y cuantificó los beneficios del franquismo por la utilización de esa mano de obra: 130.000 millones de pesetas (unos 780 millones de euros). Esa mano de obra esclava fue la base del beneficio económico de las empresas. Si un trabajador les costaba 10,50, el preso político solo recibía 50 céntimos, tal como ha explicado en más de una ocasión Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz, que estuvo preso en el Valle de los Caídos en 1947 y que huyó de España.

Los grandes empresarios de esta construcción fundaron incluso entidades bancarias posteriores como el Banco Guipuzcoano de José María Aguirre Gonzalo, uno de los fundadores de Agromán. También José Banús que se benefició de distintas concesiones del régimen en construcciones como Puerto Banús. Allí todavía sus descendientes explotan el beneficio del turismo de alto standing (entre ellos la familia real saudí).

Muchas de estas empresas siguen existiendo hoy en día. Los beneficios que consiguieron en su momento beneficiándose de mano de obra esclava sigue cotizando en el IBEX-35. Durante el franquismo se inaugura las puertas giratorias. Ministros de Franco, que por las concesiones que hacían a determinas empresas, acababan sentados en los Consejo de Administración de esas mismas empresas. Algunos de esos ministros y altos cargos franquistas consiguieron también importantes puesto en la banca española.

En 1993, el periodista Jesús Hermida entrevistaba a la plana mayor del PP. Un PP pujante que apuntaba a la Moncloa. En ese programa televisivo se sacó la conclusión que dicho partido era una derecha moderna, sin vínculos con el franquismo. Allí se sentó José María Aznar, Mariano Rajoy, Rodrigo Rato, Javier Arenas, etc. Pero a pesar de ese intento de desvinculación del franquismo, lo cierto es que muchos de esos políticos habían crecido al calor del régimen y sus familias se beneficiaron las concesiones del mismo. Ramón Rato, padre de Rodrigo Rato, había fundado con Millán Astray y Dionisio Ridriejo, Radio Nacional de España, así como propietario del Banco del Norte y el Banco Murciano. Y el propio Aznar era nieto de Manuel Aznar, uno de los periodistas de cabecera del régimen franquista y que también formó parte del Banco Urquijo.

A todo esto habría que sumar los beneficios que la propia familia del dictador tuvo y tiene. Propiedad adquiridas durante la dictadura que hoy siguen reportando beneficio, ya sea por su explotación o su venta, a los descendientes del dictador.

El franquismo no solo fue una maquinaria represiva sino también una gran empresa y un negocio que la actualidad sigue reportando beneficios.

Source: Fraternidad Universal (blog)
http://fraternidaduniversal.blogspot.com.es/2015/11/un-gran-negocio-llamado-franquismo.html

Entrevista Ángel Viñas: Franquismo

Es el historiador más citado al hablar de cuestiones de dinero en la Guerra Civil desde que publicó sus pioneros estudios en 1979. Hace cinco años le llamó la atención un reportaje de Tiempo sobre las cuentas bancarias de Franco

Ángel Viñas

Está empeñado en desmontar los mitos que quedan sobre Franco. Su libro La otra cara del Caudillo (Crítica) descubre órdenes secretas que convertían a la persona de Franco en ley, ahonda en las querencias pronazis del dictador y escribe un relato desternillante de la situación del Ejército tras la guerra, además de hablar del dinero...

¿Qué añade a la historia saber que Franco tuvo a su disposición una fortuna de 34 millones de pesetas?

La fortuna de Franco es la manifestación de algo más profundo: que en la dictadura, digan lo que quieran todos los leguleyos franquistas que en el mundo han sido y que podrá haber, se aplicaba rígidamente el Führerprinzip, que venía a decir en lenguaje coloquial que lo que el Führer dice es ley. Que lo que Franco dice es ley.

¿Cómo lo hizo?

Eso tuvo consecuencias jurídicas. Se instrumentó durante la guerra. Franco sacó por lo menos hasta 52 decretos reservados, que no se publicaron en el Boletín Oficial del Estado.

¿Es la primera vez que sale a la luz?

Es la primera vez. Es muy curioso, porque luego sigue dictando decretos que siguen siendo secretos, pero que obligan a aquellos que tienen conocimiento de los mismos a ejecutarlos, hasta el año 1957. Franco lo aplica a temas organizativos, financieros, relaciones con el exterior, represión... y se salta tranquilamente su propio ordenamiento jurídico.

¿Y no eran ilegales?

En el ordenamiento jurídico franquista existen disposiciones como la Ley de Hacienda Pública, que es de 1911 y que, por tanto, no tiene nada que ver con la República, que no están derogadas, seguían surtiendo efecto. Pues Franco se las salta olímpicamente a través de una disposición reservada, aunque desde el punto de vista legal no se pueda decir que Franco las conculcaba. Por ejemplo, según la Ley de Hacienda Pública, los donativos, en la medida en que se hicieran al Estado, formaban parte de los caudales del Tesoro Público.

De hecho, en la posguerra hubo una Junta Liquidadora de los donativos para ingresarlos en el Tesoro, pero parece que Franco no lo hace.

Claro, la Junta liquidó solo una parte. Lo que quiero decir es que Franco conculcaba teóricamente la ley de Hacienda, pero como él era fuente del Derecho, podía hacerlo. ¿Firmó Franco algún decreto u orden reservada que le permitiera desviar fondos de la Suscripción Nacional a sus cuentas corrientes? Probablemente no, porque todo esto se hizo en el más absoluto secreto. Pero teóricamente podía hacerlo. En aquellos momentos no había una ley que regulara el estatuto personal del jefe del Estado. No hay uno, muy imperfecto, hasta 1966. Por consiguiente, había un vacío legal y Franco se aprovechaba para hacer lo que quisiera. Por eso no me atrevo a decir que Franco era un corrupto, porque desde el punto de vista del Derecho positivo no lo era. Claro que este Derecho es ilegítimo, es grotesco, es absurdo, pero es lo que tenían los nacionales.

¿Es la corrupción lo menos estudiado del franquismo?

Por supuesto, porque no hay documentación. Diré algo más en un próximo libro.

Ha recordado que Hitler corrompió su sociedad extendiendo favores.
¿Y Franco?

Es lo que hace Franco en la guerra con sus regalos de 10.000 cajetillas de tabaco a un par de generales. Yo no tengo pruebas de que las vendieran en el mercado negro, pero es obvio que no te puedes fumar 10.000 cajetillas de tabaco. Y no he encontrado albaranes (a lo mejor los hay) que indiquen que en un rasgo de generosidad el general Orgaz, que era un corrupto tremendo, distribuyera cigarrillos a sus tropas.

¿Por qué insiste en atacar lo que dicen el historiador Stanley G. Payne y Jesús Palacios?

Porque han escrito una biografía de Franco que es infame. Ellos dicen que es muy objetiva, pero es sesgadísima, franquista, que deja de lado centenares de cosas, que tergiversa, que manipula y que miente. A mí me indignó.

¿Cree que tienen éxito como para preocuparse por este tipo de biografías?

Tienen éxito. Las compra la derecha agradecida. Este libro va a ser la Biblia de la derecha en los próximos años, probablemente. Payne es un hombre conocido, catedrático eminente. Nadie dice nada de Palacios, que es un neonazi reconvertido. Me dije que era necesario darle una respuesta y reuní a un grupo de doce historiadores, que hemos publicado en un número de la revista Hispania Nova, donde le damos un repaso a Payne que se queda completamente planchado.

[Ver “Contra los benevolentes con Franco” y entrevista con Stanley G. Payne en las páginas 56-57]

¿Se le puede atribuir a Franco el mérito de la mejoría económica del Plan de Estabilización?

Nunca tuvo la menor idea. A Franco se le sacó con fórceps un plan en el que no creía, porque iba en contra de todos sus principios. Pero no había escapatoria. La única alternativa era pegar el cerrojazo a las importaciones y volver al gasógeno y cosas así. En el año 1958 eso no era de recibo. Además, ya encontré un documento de 1957 en el que Carrero Blanco, entonces ministro secretario del Consejo de Ministros, comunicaba las directrices en política económica. Era un canto a la autarquía.

¿Hay que insistir aún en estas cosas?

Sí, porque se niega. El mío es un libro que está escrito también para cierto tipo de historiadores que tratan de blanquear el franquismo, que no discuten su ilegitimidad de origen y que ensalzan la legitimidad de ejercicio. Y esto es absolutamente intolerable en la España de hoy. Pero no escribo de cosas sabidas. El führerprinzip es esencial para la dictadura y no lo había contado nadie. Aquí nos hemos parado en el modelo de Juan José Linz: que se trataba de un régimen autoritario. Eso lo dice la derecha, claro. La izquierda no, decimos que fue una dictadura pura y dura. Yo no tengo empacho en reconocer que soy de la izquierda. ¿Pero es que no puede uno ser antifranquista? Lo normal es que un historiador sea antifranquista. Lo anormal es que sea franquista.

¿Era Franco un conspirador inteligente o un oportunista?

Yo creo que fue un conspirador muy inteligente. Y que no se fiaba ni de su padre, algo muy útil en una conspiración. Y lo digo así teniendo en cuenta que nadie, ningún historiador ha localizado su correspondencia con Mola. Sabemos que existía, pero mientras no tengas eso... ¿Dónde puede estar?

¿No hay nada en el archivo personal de Franco?

No. Mola murió en un accidente de avión y Franco mandó un pelotón del Ejército a incautarse de sus papeles. Esto es sabido. Y me imagino que los destruyó. Si los conservó, los tiene la familia. Aquí aparece algo importante. Todos los papeles de Stalin están en los archivos estatales. Los papeles de Franco se los quedó la familia y habrá que esperar al acendrado espíritu patriótico de la familia de Franco... Y hay que diferenciar. Los papeles de Franco los tiene la familia. Lo que está en la Fundación Francisco Franco (y una copia en el archivo de Salamanca) son los papeles de la secretaría en la que se han deslizado algunos papeles personales.

En Salamanca no se puede acceder a documentos porque tienen el sello de “secreto”, a los que la familia Franco sí que tiene acceso. ¿Qué le parece?

Es que no lo entiendo. A mí también me han negado varios papeles.

Source: Tiempo (España)
http://www.tiempodehoy.com/entrevistas/angel-vinas2

Saudi Terror - Saudi Arabia sentences woman convicted of adultery to death by stoning - her male partner gets 100 lashes

Saudi Arabia sentences woman convicted of adultery to death by stoning - her male partner gets 100 lashes
Her single partner, also a Sri Lankan migrant worker, was given a lesser punishment of 100 lashes

Shihar Aneez, Ranga Sirilal
Saturday 28 November 2015 08:28 BST

Indonesian protesters demonstrate after the execution of an Indonesian maid in Saudi Arabia Getty

Sri Lanka has urged Saudi Arabia to pardon a domestic worker, sentenced to death by stoning after she admitted committing adultery while working in the Arab kingdom. An official from Sri Lanka’s Foreign Employment Bureau said the married 45-year-old, who had worked as a maid in Riyadh since 2013, was convicted of adultery in August.

Her single partner, also a Sri Lankan migrant worker, was given a lesser punishment of 100 lashes. A spokesman for the bureau said it had hired lawyers to file an appeal, while the Foreign Ministry was negotiating separately for her to be reprieved.

Some 1,000 Shia protesters gathered at a mosque in Awamiya, a largely Shia town in the oil-producing Eastern Province, to demand the release of activists on death row, after it emerged that officials planned to execute more than 50 prisoners in a single day. They include alleged al-Qaeda terrorists, but also at least five Shia protesters – among them Ali al-Nimr, who was only 17 when arrested in 2012 – who took part in anti-government protests against Sunni oppression.

Source: Independent (UK)
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/sri-lanka-asks-saudi-arabia-to-pardon-maid-sentenced-to-death-by-stoning-after-she-admitted-adultery-a6752196.html

"La sombra de Franco se ve en las memorias divididas y en el uso político de la Historia"

Recién cumplido el cuarenta aniversario de la muerte de Francisco Franco, una obra colectiva coordinada por Julián Casanova ofrece una síntesis sobre diversos aspectos de la dictadura. Su objetivo es, según Casanova, «ofrecer una visión crítica y rigurosa del franquismo, para un público amplio, de la política, la sociedad, la economía y la cultura, a través de análisis bien escritos, claros y sencillos de los mejores especialistas»

Enrique Clemente 23 de octubre de 2015. Actualizado a las 05:00 h.

Foto: Benito Ordóñez

Catedrático de Historia Contemporánea, con destacadas obras sobre la Guerra Civil, el franquismo o el anarquismo, Julián Casanova (Valdealgorfa, Teruel, 1956) ha reclutado a prestigiosos especialistas, entre ellos Paul Preston, José Carlos Mainer, Mary Nash, Ángel Viñas o Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, para analizar desde distintos ángulos la dictadura en 40 años con Franco.

-¿Las generaciones que no lo vivieron saben lo que fue el franquismo?

-Hay un déficit de educación sobre la dictadura y el siglo XX español en general por diferentes razones. Porque se tardó muchísimo en introducir esos contenidos en las escuelas, y en secundaria no se estudia Historia Contemporánea. Porque la derecha política española, a diferencia de otras europeas que surgieron de la derrota del fascismo, nunca ha tenido una mirada libre del pasado, y porque, además, hay un uso político de la Historia, mayor que en otros países. La propaganda política y las memorias familiares, donde el relato del abuelo prevalece sobre el histórico, dificultan el conocimiento del franquismo, Pero lo malo no es que haya debates entre historiadores, sino ignorancia.

-Varios libros recientes inciden en el apoyo popular que tuvo la dictadura. ¿Qué papel jugaron ese respaldo y la represión?

-Ninguna dictadura que se mantiene tanto tiempo puede prescindir de las bases sociales. Las bases iniciales de la dictadura fueron los vencedores, los excombatientes, la gente de orden, muy ideologizada, pero con el tiempo se ampliaron. Salvo los más reprimidos, perseguidos y silenciados, los vencidos se adaptaron gradualmente al régimen y, entre la apatía y el miedo, daban un apoyo pasivo al régimen. Mucha gente cree que las dictaduras desaparecen siempre por tensiones entre los gobernantes y los gobernados, pero la mayor parte de los historiadores y los politólogos que las han estudiado han llegado al acuerdo de que es muy importante el conflicto entre los gobernantes, que es lo que desintegró el franquismo. Por supuesto, no hay ninguna dictadura que muera en la cama que no tenga un ejército unido en torno a ella. También es importante el apoyo de la Iglesia a la Cruzada, que bendice el franquismo y la represión, aunque en los últimos años hay una disidencia. Pero el día que muere Franco, el clero le da su bendición. Yo analicé todas las homilías de las diócesis ese día y el 80 % parecen salidas del 18 de julio de 1936. La mayoría son combativas, de subordinación y de incienso absoluto a la persona que habían nombrado caudillo por la gracia de Dios.

-La represión fue muy cruenta en la posguerra.

-Hubo una voluntad de exterminio, con un escenario muy favorable para llevarlo a cabo con el nazismo en el poder en Alemania. Su voluntad era de exterminio, así se lo pedían los vencedores y la Iglesia. Eso se ve en qué conmemoran las fiestas, en la simbología, en los ritos. El rito del vencedor sobre el vencido está presente hasta el final en el franquismo.

-¿Cómo definiría a Franco?

-Franco es un militar golpista, que opta por el golpe para conquistar el poder y revertir la situación republicana, liberal, revolucionaria y masónica, qué el concebía en un mismo saco, que se fascistiza, y mucho, durante la II Guerra Mundial. Un dictador contrarrevolucionario, autoritario y sanguinario. El 1 de octubre de 1975, después de los fusilamientos, denuncia que todo es fruto de la conspiración judeo-masónica. Esa vuelta a los orígenes demuestra que tenía interiorizada la cultura de la represión y del enemigo. El hilo conductor del franquismo siempre fue la represión.

-Hay historiadores que aseguran que los dos grandes aciertos de Franco fueron mantener a España fuera de la Segunda Guerra Mundial y el desarrollo económico de España en los 60.

-Paul Preston y Ángel Viñas han desmontado esos mitos. Franco no entró en la guerra porque Hitler no le concedió lo que quería, no le hacía falta. Esto le permitió mantenerse, porque si no hubiera acabado en el 1945, como todos los dictadores de los países del Este. Franco se oponía al cambio de política económica que le proponían el FMI y el Banco Mundial y colocó a los tecnócratas a regañadientes.

-¿Cuál es el legado que ha dejado el franquismo?

-La sombra alargada de Franco se ve en las memorias divididas, que son un producto de la falta de educación sobre la Historia de España del siglo XX; en los usos políticos de la historia; en los símbolos que aún provocan un debate, empezando por el mayor que es el Valle de los Caídos, con el que aún no sabemos qué hacer, o en la cultura política de la derecha actual. Hay un revisionismo neofranquista muy importante, pero creo que queda más de Franco en el papel que en la sociedad civil. Hasta 1945 España siguió una trayectoria similar a la de otros países europeos. Pero en las tres décadas que van del 45 al 75, en las que las sociedades occidentales consolidan las democracias, el Estado benefactor y la sociedad civil fuerte, solo España y Portugal siguieron siendo dictaduras, lo que pesó como una losa sobre la transición y la cultura política. Dicho esto, los vicios actuales de la democracia, como la corrupción, el deterioro de la política o que los políticos no lean o no sepan inglés, no son culpa de la dictadura ni de la transición.

-¿Hizo algo bueno Franco?

-Hizo cosas muy buenas para una parte de la población. Es una tontería no decirlo. Pero el historiador no puede meterse solo en la piel de esos sectores de la población, tiene que buscar una fotografía completa, y esta dice que Franco fue un desastre para España, sin ninguna duda.

40 años con Franco. Varios autores. Coordinación de Julián Casanova. Crítica. 406 páginas. 20,90 euros

Source: La Voz de Galicia
http://www.lavozdegalicia.es/noticia/fugas/2015/10/21/sombra-franco-ve-memorias-divididas-uso-politico-historia/00031445432137855575995.htm

Max Wallace. The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich

On a recent flight to St. Louis (no less), while still reading the book under review, I was asked if I would recommend it. My neighbor, a self-professed history-buff, could not help notice the striking cover--Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford next to Auschwitz-Birkenau and a swastika--and the title that linked this "American Axis" to the rise of the Third Reich. What follows is my ambivalent endorsement.

The book was not written for an academic audience to whom it will yield few new insights--in spite of the somewhat sensationalist advertisement of new disclosures and revelations on the two protagonists. The author, Max Wallace, is an investigative journalist and this accounts for both the strength and the weakness of his story. His style is dramatic and captivating, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book. The narrative is organized exclusively around the two central figures with a gallery of secondary characters ranging from alleged Nazi spies and military attachés to slave labor victims in "supporting roles." The story of Ford's and Lindbergh's anti-Semitism and racism, and their deliberate as well as unwitting efforts to assist the Nazis is an important one and should be told to a wider audience. But the account is lacking in interpretative focus and occasionally in historical perspective.

The book weaves together the genesis of Ford's and Lindbergh's racial notions, their professional dealings with Germany and their private admiration for the Third Reich. Wallace uses the existing literature on his two fallen heroes as well as Lindbergh's private papers and the Ford Company archives. Yet his account is not a biographical one. Overall Lindbergh emerges as more of a complex, real-life character from these pages; Wallace's portrait of Anne Morrow Lindbergh is nuanced and at times even moving (p. 247ff.). By contrast Ford's personality remains vague and Wallace's explanation of how and why he acquired his anti-Semitic views is not entirely convincing. In 1920 Ford began serializing articles on the "Jewish Question" based on the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion in his newspaper the Dearborn Independent, outlining a worldwide sinister Jewish conspiracy as detailed in the forgery. Subsequently he published the collection as a pamphlet, The International Jew, and effectively distributed it through the Ford Company's national and international network of dealerships. Wallace reviews and rejects as deficient alternative explanations of how Ford--that "hitherto shy, gentle ... and in some respects quite enlightened" man (p. 16)--had come to adopt these malicious lies. The author instead introduces as the real culprit Ernest Gustav Liebold, a Detroit-born German-American, who became both the Dearborn Independent's general manager and Henry Ford's trusted personal secretary. A 1918 "most secret" military intelligence document reported that Liebold is "considered to be a German spy" (p. 25), although the investigation remained inconclusive. Over the next three hundred pages Liebold remains a shadowy figure. Wallace insinuates that Liebold is both responsible for Ford's anti-Semitism and for his company's attempts to prevent and undermine the American war effort in both World War I and World War II.

But Liebold is also shadowy in that Wallace neither develops his character and motivations (or the makeup of his anti-Semitism) nor the specific nature of his ties to Germany from 1918 through 1941. He has contacts with Franz von Papen (pp. 131, 225), Kurt Ludecke (the Nazis' "chief fund raiser" in the 1920s, p. 49ff) and perhaps Heinrich Albert, one of the members of the board of directors of German Ford Werke since the 1930s. By page 318 Liebold has evolved into "probably a Nazi spy" but the evidence remains shaky and confusing, and consists of a few official Nazi (p. 146) or older German contacts, the significance of which Wallace cannot fully illuminate. This never explicitly-made line of argumentation then would read as follows: during World War I an unconfirmed German spy set Henry Ford up to develop anti-Semitic views which, by the time of World War II, would lead the Ford Company to undermine the American military efforts against Nazi Germany. My problem is less with the validity of this interpretation than with the lack of specific and convincing evidence that it was Liebold who was behind all of this activity; too often the argument is based on conjecture (131ff., 144, 318f.). Rather than focusing on how Ford came to be an anti-Semite (as if anti-Semitism were a contagious disease one could only catch through close personal contact), it is the story of the public and political consequences of Ford's anti-Semitism that is really the more interesting one.

No less frustrating is the reversal of the above-outlined argument in chapter 2, "The Fuehrer's Inspiration." Much is made of Ford's portrait in Hitler's office in 1931 (p. 2) and Baldur von Schirach's defense at the Nuremberg trial: "If [Ford] said the Jews were to blame, naturally we believed him" (p. 42). Surely, the Nazis did not have to rely on Ford as a teacher of anti-Semitism? Here, too, the claim of Ford's influence on the Nazis is not contextualized.[1] Wallace instead offers the opinion by another historian emphasizing "the role that Russian émigrés played in laying the ideological groundwork for the Holocaust" (p. 63).[2] Wallace uses this point to explain the significance of the White Russian Boris Brasol who is the most direct link between Ford (via Liebold, of course) and the Nazis and also the conduit for a possible financial donation to the NSDAP. The driving force behind Wallace's account is the existence of links between people who move like chess figures across board. The author establishes far-flung connections between his two protagonists and Germany, but much of the context is missing. Occasionally, the reason for the lack of historical perspective is Wallace's unfamiliarity with important secondary literature on his subject. The reference for his account of American controversy over boycotting the Berlin Olympics in 1936 is a 2001 article on China in the National Review Online (p. 415f.). But the main problem of Wallace's book is not a failure to adhere to academic standards of referencing or source criticism. At issue is a broader concern that historians and journalists share: we tell a story in order to advance an argument, to give meaning to an otherwise confusing and chaotic assemblage of facts and events. It is in this endeavor that Wallace's meandering account falls somewhat short. Instead we learn intermittently some juicy tidbits that do not pertain to the author's immediate subject matter: for example, Kurt Vonnegut once wrote an admiring piece in a student paper on the isolationist "lonely eagle" (p. 275) and George W. Bush's maternal great-grandfather "has been described by a U.S. Justice Department investigator as 'one of Hitler's most powerful financial supporters in the United States'" (p. 349).

Later chapters explore the relationship between the Ford Company (Dearborn) and its German subsidiary Ford Werke during World War II. It is a story of "business as usual": the German profits were "placed in an escrow account for distribution to the American parent company after the war" (p. 329). These profits, Wallace rightly highlights, were in part based on forced labor.[3] Wallace is also correct in challenging the notion--offered as the conclusion of a recent investigation that Dearborn had conducted into the problem of wartime profits from its European, Nazi-dominated subsidiaries--that Ford "had to use labor provided by the German government" (p. 335). The German controlled Ford plants in Europe had, even before the outbreak of the war and with the consent of Dearborn, turned into "an arsenal of Nazism" (pp. 228f., 340).

The story of Lindbergh's misguided views and actions is also advanced through a narrative of secondary figures. Lindbergh--in spite of a father who is portrayed as more racist than ordinary white Americans at the time (p. 83)--acquired his racial views through his close association and friendship with the French scientist Alexis Carrel. The aviator's obsessions with racial purity were subsequently further bent in a direction of admiration for the Nazi project by the American military attaché to Germany, Truman Smith (pp. 104-111, 381). And it is the latter who invited Lindbergh and his wife "in the name of Göring" to visit the Third Reich at the time of the Olympic Games (p. 112ff.) Not surprisingly, Lindbergh was deeply impressed not only by "the organized vitality of Germany" but more importantly by a state that sought to realize his own ideals: "science and technology harnessed for the preservation of a superior race" (p. 118). As a result of the exclusive focus on the aviator, the dramatic and complex story of the Czechoslovak crisis is told with Lindbergh and his exaggerated reports on the German air force playing the decisive role in tilting British policy towards appeasement (pp. 165, 167-171). Wallace's chapter ignores the military, political and diplomatic reality of the British situation in 1938.[4]

Lindbergh, probably even more so than Ford, emerges at times in this book as an unsuspecting dupe of more sinister forces working in the background (p. 208). I am not convinced that this conspiratorial approach to history serves Wallace's endeavor to establish personal responsibility for politically damaging actions. The point to make about the problematic role of the two flawed heroes concerns the impact of their anti-Semitic, racist, pro-Nazi public activities, speeches or publications over the course of more than a decade on American public opinion. The Roosevelt administration, in the meantime, tried to rally the same public around a program of aid to Britain and subsequently in a heavily ideological mobilization characterized Nazism as an assault on civilization. Ford and Lindbergh in turn found this civilization not threatened by the Germans but by the Russians. The fact that both received a Nazi medal, which was evidently well-deserved, and that they refused to return them is telling. Particularly in the last chapter, Wallace tries hard to give the impression of a fair and balanced portrait of the "lonely eagle," defending him against Harold Ickes's public as well as Roosevelt's private accusations of being a "Nazi." This highlights one the book's more problematic aspects: the incongruity between the title and jacket design suggesting a crucial role of this "American Axis" in the rise of the Third Reich and the nuanced conclusion that the author "discovered no smoking gun proving that Lindbergh was motivated by anything but sincere--albeit misguided--motives for this prewar isolationist activities or that he was disloyal to America" (p. 378). Between title and conclusion lies the substance of the book: characterized by the absence of an explicitly stated argument, a detailed, yet narrowly focused narrative suggests that their racist convictions led Ford and Lindbergh to take a benevolent and admiring view of the Third Reich, and partly knowingly, partly unwittingly served Nazi interests.

From the dust jacket we learn that Wallace is a "Holocaust researcher" but he exhibits little scholarly background on the Third Reich itself. (To refer to Adolf Hitler as "another German philosopher" [p. 43] in the same sentence with Hegel is not helpful to his overall point.) He cites some relevant secondary literature on specific aspects of World War II, for example Nazi Fifth Column activities in the United States, anti-Semitism in the U.S. army, and forced labor in the German Ford Werke, but he does not use it to establish the urgently needed interpretive context for the events detailed in this book. Most sorely missing is a proper analysis of American anti-Semitism as a prerequisite for understanding how Americans confronted the Third Reich. Wallace, even though citing studies by Leonard Dinnerstein and Myron Scholnick, neither defines the nature of American anti-Semitism nor does he seem to understand the effect it had on the American public perception of and official responses to the Third Reich--a story told by Deborah Lipstadt, Richard Breitman, David Wyman and others. Its relevance lay in the role which even the mildest forms of social prejudice and, in particular, the Roosevelt administration's concern over these prejudices played in devising responses to Nazi Germany. Within the context of Wallace's narrower focus, it would have been helpful at least to clarify the difference between Ford's hatred fantasizing about a Jewish political-economic conspiracy and Lindbergh's obsession with racial purity. But for Wallace anti-Semitism is a monolithic, timeless, unchanging phenomenon.

Max Wallace has written a passionate, though sprawling, narrative that serves an important educational purpose: rather than continuing to admire these two deeply flawed individuals we should appreciate both the political impact of their racial beliefs and the nature of their misguided attraction to Nazi Germany. But his book is not yet a conclusive assessment of the historical role these two public figures played in German-American relations in the 1930s and 40s.

Notes

[1]. For an important primary source on Hitler's pre-1933 views of the United States, its automotive industry and his admiration for an immigration policy that produced "racially first-rate Americans" see Gerhard L. Weinberg, Hitler's Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler (New York: Enigma Books, 2003), pp. 107, 109, 111-118. For the development of "Fordism" during the Third Reich cf. Philipp Gassert, Amerika im Dritten Reich: Ideologie, Propaganda und Volksmeinung, 1933-1945 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1997).

[2]. The dissertation proposal on which this assertion is based, incidentally, turns into a dissertation only a few footnotes later, p. 408, n. 101, 106.

[3]. The essence of Wallace's argument with more historical context can also be found in Bernd Greiner, Die Morgenthau Legende. Zur Geschichte eines umstrittenen Plans (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1995), pp. 112f., 115f.; and Reinhold Billstein, Karola Fings, Antia Kugler and Nicholas Levis, Working for the Enemy: Ford, General Motors and Forced Labor in Germany during the Second World War (New York: Berghahn, 2000).

[4]. Gerhard L. Weinberg, The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany: Starting World War II, 1937-1939 (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1994), pp. 313-464.

*Max Wallace. The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2003. ix + 465 pp. $27.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-312-29022-1.

Reviewed by Michaela Hoenicke Moore (Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Published on H-German (May, 2004)

Source: H-Net
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=9274