Eso’s Chronicles 304 / 3  
A Suicidal Civilization
© Eso A.B.
All comments appearing within brackets [ ] are editorial in origin. This series begins with 288.
 
WHY CALL ON FASCISM?

The link begins with the observation that: “Mussolini and Hitler…” http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/202210/fascism/219391/Intellectual-origins : “... did not invent fascist ideology. Indeed, fascism was neither a 20th-century creation nor a peculiarly Italian or German one. Originating in the 19th century, fascist ideas appeared in the works of…” I will follow the poster’s lead.

The number of writers and perspectives interested in elaborating on fascism are so numerous that it is difficult to grasp in a moment what was so attractive about fascist ideas. Why did the ideas find such an immediate echo among the voters in so many countries?

As the link elaborates: “Many fascist ideas derived from the reactionary backlash to the progressive revolutions of 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1871 and to the secular liberalism and social radicalism that accompanied these upheavals. De Maistre condemned the 18th-century Enlightenment for having subverted the dominance of traditional religion and traditional elites and paid homage to the public executioner as the protector of a divinely sanctioned social hierarchy.”

At the same time, the link reveals its bias in the use of the word ‘progressive’. What is ‘progressive’ about the revolutions (particularly that of 1789) are that as Napoleon said: “No man could oppose it. Blame lies neither with those who perished, nor with those who survived. There was no individual force capable of changing its elements or of preventing events which arose from the nature of things and from circumstances”. http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/two_revolutions_in_france

Napoleon was right. However, as in the event of the Russian Revolution of 1917, Napoleon’s—as much as Lenin’s—perspectives were limited by the perspective of the ‘progressive’ (and untested) Zeitgeist. Today, we see that what was believed to be ‘progressive’ has inverted itself and become ‘regressive’, with the ‘digital technics’ of our time forecasting a replacement of the human brain by the computing machine.

From the perspective of this writer, the ‘regressive’ elements of our ‘progressive’ times (yet believed to be such by most) are what I take to be signs of a catastrophic implosion of what once was called the Industrial Age. Beginning with the 19^th century, the Industrial Age has stripped our planet not only of its animal and plant life, but turned the human habitat from wood to that of a desert city. And yet ‘digital technology’ plays on, and a herd of hominids with its ‘brain’ scraped smooth lives on without any notion that there is no escape to the moon and that the very absence of the wood and its life has changed its way of thinking and blinded it to the immanent Death facing it.

Peculiar as it may seem, it is this Death, the immanence of which the hominids appear not to be aware of, that signals the next Revolution. This is to say, while the disaster of war will be brought by humans and suffered by them, the recovery will be made by trees and, possibly, yet unknown life forms. Such a turn of events, may be the result of Marx (and most everyone at the time) being so overwhelmed, even struck dumb, by the seemingly sudden seizure of the reigns of materialist orientation, that the clown and glove became more convincing than the hand manipulating it.

Many people realized that the bursting of the bounds of industry had already precipitated the French Revolution and sent Napoleon’s Army to Moscow, which at the time still had wood about to inhibit the general’s attempts to forage food for his army—the wood was not an oak thicket to provide home for wild pigs, while the gardens of the farmers were a little thin on vegetables. Yet few are able to resist not mentioning that the uniforms of Napoleon’s La Grande Army were factory made and signaled rapid advancements in military hardware from the time onward—as the American Civil War illustrated http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_weapons_in_the_American_Civil_War . The Industrial Age also introduced major geopolitical changes, which had begun with the ‘Age of Discovery’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_colonialism and colonial expansion in the 15^th century.

In spite of all of the ‘progressive’ and revolutionary changes, the change least emphasized in today’s schools or media is the catastrophic expansion of the urban environment, which has resulted not only in the expansion of cities and the pollution of most countries shores, but the denuding of the countryside of its woods, wild life, and, not least, people. When we speak today of the unemployed in so called ‘developed’ countries, we need to realize that such unemployment is not for lack of growth, but for replacement of human beings with machines, at the same time as machines have encouraged an expansion of socialist order and dependency on government in liberal capitalist countries. Of all things expanding and growing is the armaments industry. This year alone China increased its military expenditures by 12%, which is more than 5% above GDP.

In short, there is no significant difference between capitalist and socialist countries in terms of production, and no difference from the perspective of the damage done to the planet. All post-Industrial Age countries are destroying life (animal and vegetable) on Earth as intensely as any scraped smooth brain would. If we think about it, a brain can be smoothed only when the shell of the cranium surrounding it is torn off, just as the agony of life in flesh is best revealed by ripping off the skin off the back of a still living dog or goat.

While the transition from the wood to the horror scene (blog 303) took nearly a thousand years to reach us, the Romanian artist Constantine Brancusi covered in one life-time. Trained as a carpenter and stone mason, Brancusi, beginning with sculptures as rough in texture as bone of wood http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/artwork/666 , ended up polishing the hominid brain http://www.yatzer.com/assets/Article/3348/images/b-Brancusi-in-New-York-1913-2013-Paul-Kasmin-Gallery-ASSOULINE-Francois-Halard-yatzer.jpg to receive praises from art dilletantes.

It is also what has happened to the community. Beginning with life in the wood and the intimacy of one’s own back yard, the majority of hominids were marched by the head apes of their clans to where today all are devoured for a never to happen regurgitation by an Amrican government sponsored agency NSA (National Security Agency), which sits somewhere in the State of Utah and awaits the explosion of an electro-magnetic device to wipe its brain clean of all records.