Historically, the aim of Western-styled democracy has aimed at making as few laws as possible, and these largely aimed at enforcing contracts. This allowed for the maximum amount of personal liberties. But the more we in democratic republics hand over control of infrastructure to the government, and the more we use law to govern human behavior, the closer we get to Plato’s republic, or worse, the Reich.
If we value personal liberties and having a say in how things are run, then we need to insist on fewer laws and legislation, and get power back in the hands of people. If we value Plato’s republic, we should insist the more on an increase in just laws and policies. Of course, it’s not as simple as all this.
What should the state do about hungry children or corporate corruption? This is a difficult question, indeed; especially in a democratic republic. In Plato’s republic, you just make more laws and policies. Actually, for the one who values democratic republics, the question is not first and foremost what the state should do, but what the citizens should do about hungry children and corporate corruption. Personal liberty comes with responsibility for communities and the persons in them.
Nothing has been settled, but there’s plenty to think about!1
1 Many of the ways I interpret Plato are debated. I am very grateful to Antony Hatzistavrou. My interpretations of Plato and government are heavily influenced by him, though any mistakes are entirely my own, and the claim that Plato’s Republic is not ideal is my claim, not Antony’s. I would also like to thank Will Gamester and Erika Hawkins for helpful comments and criticisms.
7
What if Your Hero Is a Fascist?
BRUCE KRAJEWSKI
Thus, my real idol is Hitler.
—PHILIP K. DICK, In Pursuit of Valis, p. 140
The marker for a cultural moment took place on The Late Show in November of 2015 when the host of that program, Stephen Colbert, brought out a blackboard to illustrate something about the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump. Colbert ended up drawing a swastika on the blackboard.
Swastikas in New York City had caused a stir a few months earlier when Amazon’s show The Man in the High Castle, based on the Philip K. Dick novel, was about to appear. The people at Amazon decided to place posters in the subways of New York City, and those posters advertising The Man in the High Castle led to complaints. According to a 24th November 2015 article in The Guardian, the mayor of New York City requested that Amazon remove the advertising. Mayor de Blasio said the advertising was “irresponsible and offensive to World War II and Holocaust survivors, their families, and countless other New Yorkers.” Immediately after the mayor’s request, the posters were pulled.
Everything “Alt” Is New Again
Based on that quotation, what disturbs de Blasio is not the repackaging of Nazism and totalitarianism in a capitalist context in which a company is aiming to make a profit from an ongoing entertainment series about National Socialist domination during a time when groups friendly to the ideology of National Socialism are finding new welcome mats in the United States. De Blasio’s complaint is rooted in some notion of PTSD—that seeing such old symbols will bring back memories, mainly to groups of people who might have suffered during World War II. De Blasio’s reaction seems blind to the appeal of National Socialist ideology to another audience—those with no first-hand memory of World War II.
Numerous reports from a variety of sources in the past few years have chronicled the rise of far right groups in the United States, and mainstream media outlets have been willing to comment that part of that rise can be linked to Donald Trump’s participation in the presidential election. Colbert’s use of a swastika to provide a map of how we arrived at Trump is no accident, nor is it a cultural oddity. We are now in the era of the alt-Right. That’s appropriate in its German meaning, because “Alt” means old in German, so we are really talking about the return of the repressed, the old Right, a Right that has threatened before.
While the swastika was not invented by the National Socialists, its multiple meanings can have an unsettling effect. Its use by people both for and against right wing ideology means that all concerned parties need to be careful with any analysis of its symbolism. Part of my purpose for using that symbolism as a starting point is to encourage recognition of the swastika as a capitalist tool. It has been unquestionably used in the promotion of a television series called The Man in the High Castle. It’s also employed in the promotion of this book, The Man in the High Castle and Philosophy.
Capitalism has colonized the swastika, and made it a brand, a product, a tool that helps to sell something, in this case an ideology. This was also the case during the National Socialist period in Germany, as we can learn from the research of Pamela Swett at McMaster University. Fascism is not a separate entity, apart from capitalism. The two have a brotherly relationship that goes mostly unacknowledged, especially by people who depend on capitalism for a livelihood, and who have been prevented from imagining an alternative. With The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick has contributed to that prevention.
Danger, Will Robinson!
Despite novels like Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night, published in 1937, which offers an alternative world with many similarities to Philip Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, Burdekin’s work has remained marginal in comparison to the continued posthumous surge in interest that Philip Dick’s works enjoy. Dick is a Hollywood pet. My thesis can be injected here. The spinoffs from Dick’s works, from Blade Runner to Minority Report to Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle have been viewed almost universally in the same celebratory light as Dick’s primary texts. In short, people miss the evidence that Dick and his works promote fascism rather than provide a warning about its return. Dick aligned himself and his works explicitly with fascism. It might matter to some that the Italian strain of fascism via Mussolini attracted Dick’s admiration. Here’s the proof text in Dick’s own words:
Lem & the party experts saw correctly that in my writing I was handing over weapons (secrets) of power to the disenfranchised of the capitalist west; their appraisal of me is correct. Over & over in my books (1) power is studied; (2) who has it; & (3) how those denied it manage to get it. Although not appearing left wing my training is really Fascistic—not “Fascistic” as Marxist rhetoric defines it but as Mussolini defined it: in terms of the deed & the will, with reality de-ontologized, reduced to mere stuff on which the will acts in terms of deed. Since few living people correctly understand (genuine) Fascism, my ideology has never been pejoratively stigmatized by the left, but those to whom I appeal are in essence the core-bulk of latent masses, the fascist mob. I speak of & for the irrational & the anti-rational, a kind of dynamic nihilism in which values are generated as mere tactics. Thus my real idol is Hitler, who starting out totally disenfranchised rose to total power while scorning wealth (aristocracy) plutocracy to the end. My real enemy is plutocracy; I’ve done my [fascistic] homework . . . my fascistic premise is: “There is not truth. We make truth; what we (first) believe becomes objectively true. Objective truth depends on what we believe, not the other way around.” This is the essence of the Fascist epistemology, the perception of truth as ideology imposed on reality—mind over matter. (In Pursuit of Valis, p. 140)
As Geoff Waite has noted about this passage from Dick, regardless of whether defenders of Dick wish to invoke “irony” or “insanity” to protect Dick here, the content of Dick’s message is to transform any Left for the sake of an actual Right. My sense is that the vast majority of Philip K. Dick fans do not view themselves as crypto-fascists, but they might want to rethink the matter. Stay with me. More shocks are on the way.
Now You See It, Now You Don’t, but It’s Still There
Part of the Fascist homework that Dick has done includes Fascism’s fear of communism, and that’s a structuring absence in The Man in the High Castle. If you’re not familiar with what a structuring absence is, you actually do know what it is, but perhaps not by that phrase.
At Thanks
givings past, my grandmother would set a place at the dining room table for my grandfather, only my grandfather had been dead for over a decade. My grandfather was a structuring absence in that our Thanksgiving table was literally set for a missing person, some might say by a missing person. Some missing entity (thing or person) influences how the future gets put together, how it is lived. In many cases, structuring absences are not as easy to see as the Thanksgiving place setting for my expired grandfather. Another way to think about a structuring absence is as a central matter that goes unspoken, because the point is to avoid that matter. It’s like a by-pass, a road constructed specifically to avoid a place, but which only exists because of that place (Cormack, Ideology, p. 31). What we have, according to most accounts of The Man in the High Castle, is a projection of a fascist future for the United States, and a structuring absence in communism. Think of the Russians during World War II as one of the main forces fighting against fascism. For my purposes, it is important to recall the virulent hatred many fascists had for communists during that time.
Projection needs to be addressed before a structuring absence. Projection in a psychoanalytic sense might best be understood through its analogy to Plato’s Cave and to our experience with movies. As Slavoj Žižek relates in his book Looking Awry: “Fantasy space functions as an empty surface, as a kind of screen for the projection of desires.” This sounds like a version of “We see what we want to see,” and that might be an accurate accounting of what Žižek wants us to learn. I might illustrate this better by temporarily putting aside projection and turning to the concept of the overlay. A shifting of ideological positions might occur more smoothly if the imagery doesn’t need to be altered in a way that draws attention to itself.
The very first object to appear in the opening credits to the Amazon show is a functioning projector. Later in that same montage of opening credits, the American bald eagle is overlaid with the National Socialist eagle as if they were a match, as if interchangeable. Note also the earlier poster used for advertising the series, in which capitalists at Amazon decided that the raised arm of the Statue of Liberty might as well be a case of mimicking the Nazi salute. The people at Amazon had ads for The Man in the High Castle with such an image. They also had one in which an electronic billboard in Times Square displays a swastika. The advertising spaces in Times Square are overlaid with National Socialist symbols and propaganda. The Times Square image reinforces the notion that Fascist ideology is similar to capitalist advertising. Other examples of overlaying can be found, including the shadows of what looks to be a military operation involving paratroopers superimposed on one of the figures of Mount Rushmore, and a map of the United States that has on top of it both the Japanese flag and the National Socialist eagle perched on top of a swastika.
Perhaps the most important overlay is a musical one, a new version of the tune “Edelweiss” made famous in The Sound of Music. While the original music exists in many viewers’ memories, The Man in the High Castle version of “Edelweiss” sung by the Swedish artist Jeanette Olsson gives the song a quite different mood with her raspy rendition along with some key changes to the lyrics. There’s an utterly incoherent account of the song used for the Amazon series in The Atlantic magazine. At one point in the article, the author claims the song is one of desperation, and then by the end of the article, the new version of “Edelweiss” is part of some triumphant vision of homeland, in which the US is the homeland. You can’t miss the German-ness of the title “Edelweiss.” You can’t miss the whiteness of “Edelweiss,” even if you didn’t know that “Weiss” is “white” in German. And for those who keep the layer of The Sound of Music in mind, “Edelweiss” conjures up a story about a conflicted, wealthy Austrian who doesn’t know what to do about his homeland in the face of a takeover by Fascism. Sound familiar? No one can miss that the “homeland” line raises the problem of nationalism that partially makes National Socialism what it is. In the play and movie The Sound of Music, the character of the Captain uses the song as a way to focus nationalistic feeling. You might think of the way “La Marseillaise” is used in Casablanca.
The structuring absence of communism is anti-nationalistic and does not involve a God or anyone else who will provide a blessing, as the lyrics in “Edelweiss” suggest. “We’d be living under Red rule now, if it wasn’t for Germany. We’d be worse off,” says Joe Cinnadella in the novel The Man in the High Castle. While Communists were the primary enemies of fascism before and during World War II, economically and politically, Dick’s novel makes it clear that life under communism is imaginatively a worse proposition than the oppressive occupying force of the Greater Nazi Reich in the former USA. In the Amazon series, suburban life on the East Coast has easily morphed into Aryan Gemütlichkeit (coziness—and this before there was COZI TV). The fascist option is merely a version of the capitalism that already ruled the day in the United States at the time of the Second World War. SS Obergruppenführer John Smith’s neighborhood as depicted in Amazon’s series could just as easily be substituted in as the setting for a Leave It to Beaver episode, or an installment of Desperate Housewives.
The Desperate Hours
According to one famous definition of fascism, it is merely capitalism in desperation. It is in a sense, even without Thomas Piketty’s recent book, the world we have now in the United States. We live in a time of a declining middle class, a small wealthy class wanting more political control, and a growing fear that what was great about America has been lost (the slogan of the 2016 Republican presidential campaign). Many Americans live in fear of foreign workers and immigrants as potential colonizers who will change the American way of life.
The success of The Man in the High Castle TV series serves as evidence that Philip Dick’s projected world in that novel has, in important ways, come to pass in the United States, as some parts of the populace become entrenched in white supremacy, nationalism, and attempts at identifying “outsiders” who provoke fear. This led recently to Newt Gingrich’s suggestion that the House Un-American Activities Committee be resurrected. While Gingrich himself seems confused about the purpose of that committee, its main purpose was to investigate people’s connections to communism. Dick himself identifies his audience as “the fascist mob” (In Pursuit of Valis). Is it surprising then that Amazon has produced a work in which the fascists have come to power in the United States?
What ought to be disturbing is Dick’s popularity with the Left in the US, while his esoteric, or secret, philosophy, of which The Man in the High Castle counts as a major installment is engaged for the benefit of a fascist Right. Part of the evidence for the secrecy can be linked to the way characters deal with The Grasshopper Lies Heavy in Dick’s novel.
What awaits us is not a version of what Zeev Sternhell has labeled “Spiritual Fascism.” Sternhell uses that phrase for French fascism before and during World War II. Sternhell goes out of his way to combat a view of fascism as an out-growth of capitalism. In short, Sternhell does not provide us with any tools to deal with Dick’s fascism in any of its manifestations—movies, graphic novels, TV series. When thinking about Philip Dick, it is important to remember that Dick’s admiration for fascism is not rooted in France, but in Italy, particularly Benito Mussolini. Dick writes:
In some ways I was quite an admirer of Mussolini . . . I think Mussolini was a very, very great man. But the tragedy for Mussolini was he fell under Hitler’s spell. But then so did many others. In a way you can’t blame Mussolini for that. (Philip K. Dick: In His Own Words, p. 153)
Mussolini might have been a better Hitler, from Dick’s viewpoint.
Geoff Waite, an academic who has been careful about his reading of Dick’s works, calls Philip Dick “America’s greatest science-fiction writer.” Given that “fascism” is a now a common word in North American political conversations, due to the events surrounding the 2016 presidential runoff, it seems we are at an opportune moment to address the greatest science-fiction writer in a new way, and to provide a re
sponse to the question of why Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle is making its appearance in America now. Peter Schmidt, who teaches at Swarthmore, has done some of the preliminary homework on the novel and the television series. He writes: “High Castle was Dick’s counter-factual history experiment, imagining what might have happened if Japan and Germany had won World War II and divided up the US. It was inspired in part by postwar sources like William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, as well as by events like the McCarthy era’s paranoid inquisitions to root out traitors. Inspirational too for Dick may have been another literary precedent, Sinclair Lewis’s best-selling, scathing prewar novel about America’s romance with fascism, It Can’t Happen Here.”
I’m Shocked, Shocked to Find that Gambling, I Mean Fascism, is Going on in Here!
Some overt elements of fascism in the past few years have “shocked” some US citizens, who behave as if the Right had nothing to do with fascism prior to the presidential candidacies of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. (People forget the attempted fascist overthrow of FDR, as described in Sally Denton’s The Plots against the President. That coup was intended “to save the capitalistic system.”) For others, the 2016 presidential season made public what had been hidden in America before, such as the episode in the previous election when Mitt Romney’s “forty-seven percent speech” was secretly videotaped and made public. Of course, WikiLeaks documents addressed by The New York Times in the fall of 2016 reveal that Hillary Clinton thought out loud in front of Wall Street backers about the necessity of having “both a public and a private position” on politically contentious issues. In other words, capitalism has been conducted in a way that we have our leaders speaking in public (exoterically) as if one set of policies is in place while secretly (esoterically) carrying out quite the opposite. It’s not as if democracy has been the guiding light for our leaders in the US.
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