The law of killing: a brief history of Indian fascism // Fascism as a Mass Movement // A Subaltern Fascism ? (on V.D. Savarkar & the Hindu Mahasabha)
The life-impulse can exist without fascism, but fascism cannot exist without the life-impulse. Fascism is the vampire leeched to the body of the living, the impulse to murder given free rein, when love calls for fulfilment in spring.. Wilhelm Reich in The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933):
The essays below are part of a printed volume Fascism: Essays on Europe and India Edited by Jairus Banaji (Three Essays Collective: 2013) . Some introductory extracts are presented in this post. For more information on the hard copy of the book see:
http://www.threeessays.com/books/fascism-essays-on-europe-and-india/
The essays below are part of a printed volume Fascism: Essays on Europe and India Edited by Jairus Banaji (Three Essays Collective: 2013) . Some introductory extracts are presented in this post. For more information on the hard copy of the book see:
http://www.threeessays.com/books/fascism-essays-on-europe-and-india/
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by Dilip Simeon
The
permanent militarisation of society requires a permanent enemy
Hoodbhoy & Nayyar
Politics is the plastic art of the state, just as painting
is the plastic art of colour. This is why politics without the people or even
against the people, is sheer nonsense. To form a People out of the masses, and
state out of the People, this has always been the deepest sense of a true
politics: Joseph Goebbels in his novel Michael
(1929)
The nation-state, incapable of providing a law for those who
had lost the protection of a national government, transferred the whole matter
to the police: Hannah Arendt in 1948
Introduction
Is the term “fascism”
relevant to India India
In some ways the movement and its ideas count for
more than the regime, because fascist activity depends upon overt or covert
official support for its successes, and its complete or partial control of
organs of state power only accentuates tendencies that were already present
beforehand. These tendencies – dynamism, the substitution of ideas by
propaganda, the constant deployment of violence, the worship of power and a
capacity for self-destruction – can lead the state itself towards
disintegration. Which political interests benefit from this? Why does society
allow this to happen? How are these matters related to Indian political
reality? These are complex questions, admitting of no easy answers.
The notion that fascism may be properly
recognised only when it seizes absolute power is dangerously misleading. This
is because its hold on power arises primarily from intimidation and ideological
influence, and is exhibited at the very first moment that organs of state
tolerate or enable illegal and violent activities of fanatical cadre or crowds.
Fascism invades the public sphere with controlled mobs. It represents an
assault on politics, a replacement of democratic dialogue by violent
intimidation, spectacular acclamation and automatic behaviour patterns. It is a
cult of struggle, violence and war; a perversion of democracy towards
‘directed’ and theatrical activism in which charismatic leadership, perpetual
motion and myth are essential ingredients.
A further peculiarity is that fascist
ideology is a mixture of archaic and modern elements - but nevertheless, one that could arise
only within mass democratic politics. This politics faces the question of
legitimation in an age when the state is no longer grounded in the notion of
divine right. Any state that appeals to this (divine) concept of sovereignty is
faced with the problem of defining the agent who ‘properly’ represents divine
law. Such an agent will automatically be above and beyond the control of the
demos, or people, and hence such a polity will be something less than a
democracy.
In the absence of divine legitimation, conservative politics can
take a populist turn which seemingly embraces democracy, but perverts it by
means of a mythic ideal of the People, of the Nation, seen as a monolith with a
unique world mission. Nationalism here takes on the aspect of prayer. The more
it assumes such an aspect, the more it, too, moves away from democracy.
Historically speaking, fascist leaders have tended to be those who are
successful at deploying myths and sentiments as a means of defining the Nation.
Such myths are generally militarist in nature and interpret history as a saga
of victories and defeats. Nationalism,
then, is the principal ideological ground of fascism. In an era of
nation-states, fascism has emerged as an immanent tendency – not always
successful – of so-called nation-building projects.
Download the full article:
Download the full article:
See also: Fascism, AAP & the Left. Jairus Banaji at the P.A.D.S. Convention, February 27
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Jairus Banaji's translation of Rosenberg's theory of fascism:-
Arthur Rosenberg was a major historian and Communist Reichstag deputy best known for his booksThe Birth of the German Republic, 1871–1918 (1928) and A History of Bolshevism (1932). The three broad phases of his life as a Marxist are the years from 1919 to April 1927, when he played an active part in the KPD Left, the period from May 1927 to March 1933, following his resignation from the KPD (the years that best define him as a ‘Communist without a party’), and the tragic final decade of his life when he fled Germany along with his family, would find himself stripped of German citizenship, and lead an impoverished life as a tutor in Brooklyn College , New York England . All of Rosenberg ’s major works stem from the last period of his life, except for The Birth of the German Republic, which he published in 1928.
Extract from Jairus Banaji's introduction to the essay: Fascism as a Mass Movement is an essay about the origins and growth of fascism, not fascism in power. Though much of the humongous bibliography that has grown up around the subject particularly since the late sixties deals overwhelmingly with the latter (with Neumann’s Behemoth as an early and outstanding example of the kind of issues that would dominate subsequent historiography), the essential themes of Rosenberg’s argument stand fully vindicated by recent scholarship. ‘The error of the Italian Communist Party lies mainly in the fact that it sees fascism only as a military-terrorist movement, not as a mass movement with deep social roots’, Clara Zetkin warned in 1923. It is this conception – of the capacity of the Right to mobilise mass-support – that forms the central thread of Rosenberg’s essay, where the key to its interpretation lies both in the political defeat of liberalism and its rapid retreat across most of Europe in the nineteenth century and in the virulent nationalisms that emerged to buttress the rule of traditional élites against the threat of democracy and Marxist socialism.
If the singular brutality of the Nazi genocide remains a watershed in the history of the modern world, one that Rosenberg could scarcely have anticipated in 1933, the racial myth of the Volksgemeinschaft that paved the way for it was far from novel, its roots firmly embedded in the ‘integral nationalism’ of Treitschke and Maurras and the visions of national redemption preached by Schönerer and Lueger (against both Slavs and Jews) to pan-German constituencies in Austria that Weiss has described as ‘one of the most anti-Semitic publics west of Russia’. Thus the argument, cited above, that ‘the ideology which is today called “fascist” was already fairly widespread throughout Europe before the War’ is thoroughly convincing. It is a major insight into why the fascist movements could expand so rapidly, both in Italy and in Germany (in the early and late twenties respectively), against the background of war-hysteria and assaults on the Left (in Italy) and of a powerful nationalist Right in Germany that prepared the ground for the Nazis.
The centrality of racism to Nazism in particular emerges more forcefully in Rosenberg’s essay than any other Marxist writing of the twenties and early thirties. So does the argument that the success of the fascists depended crucially on the connivance or active complicity of the existing state-authorities, many of whom would of course have been active members of the PNF and NSDAP. This was starkly obvious in Italy where the squadristi ‘succeeded because they could always count on the state’, but no less so in Germany where, as Neumann noted, not one of the conspirators in the right-wing Kapp Putsch of 1920 had been punished even 15 months later, ‘the Weimar criminal courts were part and parcel of the anti-democratic camp’, and the ‘courts invariably became sounding-boards for [Nazi] propaganda’; and where, as Rosenberg points out, ‘a whole series of government-officials, especially in the army, . . . maintained close contact with the Freikorps and [other] counter-revolutionaries’.
Finally, a major part of the essay sets out to discredit the so-called ‘middle-class theory’ of fascism. Rosenberg was convinced that fascism was not a petty-bourgeois movement nor was the mass-base of the fascist parties confined to the petty bourgeoisie... Even if fascism today is not and will not be the return of old-style fascism but more eclectic and variegated versions of extreme-Right politics, Rosenberg’s essay loses none of its relevance for us. In particular, the increasing support drawn from the working class by parties of the extreme Right in countries such as France, Austria, Denmark and Norway, or the ability of the Sangh Parivar in India (the RSS/BJP combine) to create mass-mobilisations based on hate-campaigns and strategies of tension should be some of the more pressing reasons why the Left needs to return to the issue of fascism in a central way... Read more:
If the singular brutality of the Nazi genocide remains a watershed in the history of the modern world, one that Rosenberg could scarcely have anticipated in 1933, the racial myth of the Volksgemeinschaft that paved the way for it was far from novel, its roots firmly embedded in the ‘integral nationalism’ of Treitschke and Maurras and the visions of national redemption preached by Schönerer and Lueger (against both Slavs and Jews) to pan-German constituencies in Austria that Weiss has described as ‘one of the most anti-Semitic publics west of Russia’. Thus the argument, cited above, that ‘the ideology which is today called “fascist” was already fairly widespread throughout Europe before the War’ is thoroughly convincing. It is a major insight into why the fascist movements could expand so rapidly, both in Italy and in Germany (in the early and late twenties respectively), against the background of war-hysteria and assaults on the Left (in Italy) and of a powerful nationalist Right in Germany that prepared the ground for the Nazis.
The centrality of racism to Nazism in particular emerges more forcefully in Rosenberg’s essay than any other Marxist writing of the twenties and early thirties. So does the argument that the success of the fascists depended crucially on the connivance or active complicity of the existing state-authorities, many of whom would of course have been active members of the PNF and NSDAP. This was starkly obvious in Italy where the squadristi ‘succeeded because they could always count on the state’, but no less so in Germany where, as Neumann noted, not one of the conspirators in the right-wing Kapp Putsch of 1920 had been punished even 15 months later, ‘the Weimar criminal courts were part and parcel of the anti-democratic camp’, and the ‘courts invariably became sounding-boards for [Nazi] propaganda’; and where, as Rosenberg points out, ‘a whole series of government-officials, especially in the army, . . . maintained close contact with the Freikorps and [other] counter-revolutionaries’.
Finally, a major part of the essay sets out to discredit the so-called ‘middle-class theory’ of fascism. Rosenberg was convinced that fascism was not a petty-bourgeois movement nor was the mass-base of the fascist parties confined to the petty bourgeoisie... Even if fascism today is not and will not be the return of old-style fascism but more eclectic and variegated versions of extreme-Right politics, Rosenberg’s essay loses none of its relevance for us. In particular, the increasing support drawn from the working class by parties of the extreme Right in countries such as France, Austria, Denmark and Norway, or the ability of the Sangh Parivar in India (the RSS/BJP combine) to create mass-mobilisations based on hate-campaigns and strategies of tension should be some of the more pressing reasons why the Left needs to return to the issue of fascism in a central way... Read more:
Download the full text of Jairus Banaji's Introduction and Rosenberg’s essay below:
http://www.sacw.net/article2756.html
http://www.sacw.net/article2756.html
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This is an
examination of certain aspects of the history of the Hindu
Mahasabha and the political career of its sometime leader, Vinayak
Damodar Savarkar. By the time he came to head the Mahasabha in 1937 it had
been in existence for two decades, but his agenda
directly opposed to the Congress and the Muslim League and to the
national movement for independence. A former revolutionary terrorist,
Savarkar had been incarcerated in the Andamans Cellular Jail
after being sentenced in December 1910 to transportation for life and
forfeiture of property for masterminding the conspiracy to
assassinate A.M.T Jackson ICS, Collector of Nasik in Bombay
Presidency in December 1909 and conveying the revolver employed for
that purpose.
In prison he became persuaded that the enemy
was not the British but the Muslims and accordingly won increasing
privileges. Released from imprisonment to detention, he
asked for and was paid a pension, and was permitted to conduct
anti-Muslim propaganda. Released from detention by the provincial
Congress Government, he headed the Mahasabha from 1937 to
1942, when it set out a programme to arm Hindus against Muslims
by recruiting them to the Indian army, promoting military education, influencing
the administration of the princely states including
their armies, gaining access to weaponry from their state
forces to harass Muslims, obtaining arms licenses from sympathetic
Congress ministers, attempting to set up a munitions factory at Gwalior
None
of this was discouraged by the British, who at the very same time
suppressed anti-Nazi propaganda by left and liberal organisations.
Despite its earlier praise for Mussolini and Hitler the Mahasabha
hailed the proclamation of the new state of Israel
Savarkar’s
exemplary conduct in jail won him favour. When World War One
began, he protested his desire to serve the war effort and asked for
amnesty:
The
siding of Turkey Germany England India India
To combat this
he proposed a new British union with her imperial subjects
where, from Ireland India
an empire
would emerge from the process, which can no longer be the British
Empire . Until it assumed any other suitable name, it might well be called “The
Aryan Empire”.
Savarkar’s
petition of 30 March 1920 claims that
since he was ‘without
danger to the State’, he should be granted a reprieve; for, far from
espousing
the militant
school of the Bukanin (sic) type...I do not contribute even to the peaceful
and philosophical anarchism of a Kropotkin or a Tolstoy.
Accordingly,
he promised that his release would be
a new birth
and would touch my heart, sensitive and submissive to kindness, so deeply as
to render me personally attached and politically useful in future
George Lloyd,
Governor of Bombay, later Lord Lloyd, an influential British imperialist who
later administered Egypt
To
disarm any suspicion that may yet linger in the Government Quarters, the
petitioner begs to solemnly pledge his word of honour that he shall
cease to take any part in politics whatever.
Thus Savarkar
is said to have renounced all
methods
of violence resorted to in days gone by and I feel myself duty bound
to uphold law and a constitution to the best of my powers and am
willing to make the reform a success in so far as I may be allowed to
do so in future.
A
new politics
He was
released on 4th January
1924 . He then published the lessons of his
experience in the Andamans, which were that through his struggles
he had managed to overcome every humiliation inflicted by the Muslim staff and
prisoners and persuaded the prison management to appoint him to run the key
operations of the prison and subordinate the Muslims to him, thus creating ‘Hindu
rule’...
download the full article: http://www.sacw.net/IMG/pdf/A_subaltern_fascism.pdf
Also see:
“I as a German prefer much more to see India under British Government than under any other...I must not connect the fate of the German people with these so-called ‘oppressed nations’ who are clearly of racial inferiority” (Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 747)
RememberingGehal Singh, who gave his life for communal harmonyHannah Arendt: Reflections on Violence (1969)
Rethinking Secularism by Bhagwan Josh, Dilip Simeon, and Purushottam Agrawal
Mohammed Hanif: How to commit blasphemy in Pakistan
On 'revolution' - Closing the Circle - Frontier Aug-Sept 2012
An Open Letter to the world on the Bangladesh crisis of 1971
Policing Belief: The Impact of Blasphemy Laws on Human Rights
On 'revolution' - Closing the Circle - Frontier Aug-Sept 2012
An Open Letter to the world on the Bangladesh crisis of 1971
Policing Belief: The Impact of Blasphemy Laws on Human Rights
