Fascist means, green ends

in ,

In ‘What is Fascism?’ (1944), George Orwell complained that the word ‘fascist’ had been applied to so many groups, (including conservatives, socialists, communists and Catholics), beliefs and even species (dogs!) that it had been reduced to something close to meaninglessness. And yet, he observed:

‘Fascism is…a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it?… To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any color, are willing to make.’

That was true then, and it’s true in 2021 — except that we should now add some of today’s harder-edged greens to Orwell’s list. A good number of their precursors in interwar Europe would not have been so diffident.

Read More

Still Free and Alive

in ,

Never judge a book by its cover. And never, probably, begin a review by quoting that line. But I think it’s appropriate here. For as I gazed at the cover of Francesco Boldizzoni’s “Foretelling the End of Capitalism: Intellectual Misadventures Since Karl Marx ” and noticed the presence of the Grim Reaper, I prepared myself for a detailed discussion of the millenarianism that has characterized leftist thinking, not only since Marx but indeed long before him.

Read More

Counting the Shareholder Out: When the Ruling Class Changes the Rules

in ,

It comes as no surprise that Bloomberg News, which includes a section called Bloomberg Green, also features another called Good Business — a venue dedicated to “sustainable finance and leadership for a changing world.” His presidential campaign aside, Mike Bloomberg tends to get what he pays for.

It’s also not a surprise that Bloomberg journalist, Saijel Kishan, has written a piece for Good Business headlined “How Wrong Was Milton Friedman? Harvard Team Quantifies the Ways.” In this context, the target of the Harvard correction squad is, above all, Friedman’s 1970 article for The New York Times Magazine on shareholder primacy, the one in which, Kishan relates:

Friedman . . . declared that a corporation choosing social responsibility over maximizing profits was practicing socialism — a “fundamentally subversive doctrine,” he called it in 1970. In a free society, Friedman said, “there is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”

Kishan gives herself only a few lines to describe that piece, which may explain why it is unclear whether Friedman was labeling socialism or a “corporation choosing social responsibility” as “fundamentally subversive.” Friedman had no fondness for socialism (#understatement), but in this case, he was referring to “social responsibility,” a notion he thought had implications far beyond the corporate sphere, none of them good.

Read More

The Great Reset: If Only It Were Just a Conspiracy

in ,

Writing for The Spectator US, Ben Sixsmith gets to grips with “the Great Reset” now being proposed by the World Economic Forum (“Davos”).

And yes, despite a name that sounds as if it were conjured up in some of conspiracism’s danker fever swamps, the Great Reset really exists:

“The World Economic Forum, which organizes the annual conference Davos, has launched an initiative called, yes, ‘the Great Reset’. It has its own website.”

Indeed it does.

But, after noting the involvement of “partners” such as Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, IBM, IKEA, Lockheed Martin, Ericsson and Deloitte, Sixsmith doubts whether the Great Reset can be seen, as some like to suggest (even allowing for a bit of hype) as “socialist Left Marxist” or a “global communist takeover plan.”

Fair enough, not least because the Great Reset is, in essence, corporatist, not communist. The participation of companies of the type that Sixsmith mentions is, in reality, the participation of certain members of their senior management, using shareholder funds for purposes that have nothing to do with the bottom line and everything to do with the wielding of power within a system akin to a concert, with the state — if not necessarily the government — acting as the conductor.

Read More

The Slow & the Dead & Other Authors

in ,

There’s something suitable, in this year gone awry, that the best novel I have read in 2020 purports to be an autobiography written from beyond the grave (“I am not exactly an author recently deceased, but a deceased man recently an author”) and that it was first published in 1881 (after appearing in installments in the Revista Brazileira). With 2020 being 2020, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas) has been rendered from Portuguese into English not once, but twice, even if it has been read by me not twice, but once.1The New Criterion arranged for me to be sent a copy of the Penguin Classics version, which has been translated by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux and boasts a perceptive foreword by Dave Eggers. That this is a paperback, and a rival (translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson) was only available in hardback was, I am sure, merely a coincidence.

Read More

A Useful Pandemic: Davos Launches New ‘Reset,’ this Time on the Back of COVID

in ,

COVID-19 is a bad disease that has been used to breathe new life into bad ideas. And so it comes as no surprise that the World Economic Forum (“Davos”) is deploying the pandemic as an argument for what it labels, with characteristic modesty, “The Great Reset” initiative:

There is an urgent need for global stakeholders to cooperate in simultaneously managing the direct consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. To improve the state of the world, the World Economic Forum is starting The Great Reset initiative.

Even if we pass over the presumption of the reset’s name, this is a small classic of the prose of soft authoritarianism. There is an “urgent need” that must be met. There is to be cooperation and management, the world is to be “improved,” and all of this is to be put in place by “global stakeholders,” — a conveniently vague phrase, with more than a suggestion of democracy bypassed about it.

Read More

The Point of No Return

in ,

Barely two months before the opening of the Nuremberg trials, British prime minister Clement Attlee wrote to President Truman about the “displaced persons”—the DPs—of numerous nationalities stranded in the fallen Reich. Attlee explained that British forces would continue to “avoid treating [the Jewish DPs] on a racial basis. . . . One must remember that within these camps were people from almost every race in Europe and there appears to have been very little difference in the amount of torture and treatment they had to undergo.”

As David Nasaw devastatingly illustrates in “The Last Million,” there was widespread reluctance among the victorious Allies to confront the true nature of the Holocaust, so it’s just possible that Attlee (no anti-Semite but no Zionist either) believed what he wrote. Whatever his motive, he undoubtedly didn’t want to see “the Jews [placed] in a special racial category at the head of the queue.” Much of the reason was Palestine, then under British control: “We have the Arabs to consider as well.” Attlee’s worry, evident in the letter if never explicitly spelled out, was that defining the Jewish DPs as a distinct group, unable to return “home,” would bolster the argument that they be permitted to immigrate to Palestine, in which, and about which, tensions were running dangerously high. Attlee warned that “the whole Middle East” could be “set aflame.”

Read More

Lockdown Lunacies

in ,

COVID-19 is again advancing in Europe, “despite” (I will get to those scare quotes later) earlier lockdowns.

CNBC (from Monday):

European countries are likely to impose more restrictions on public life in the coming days as the number of daily coronavirus infections rises rapidly, analysts said.

France reported 10,569 new cases Sunday (down from more than 13,000 new cases reported the day before), Reuters reported, while the U.K. reported almost 4,000 new cases on Sunday. Italy saw close to 1,000 new infections and Germany reported 1,345 new cases Sunday, and a further 922 cases Monday. Spain has yet to post its weekend case tallies, but reported almost 4,700 new cases Friday.

On Monday, German Health Minister Jens Spahn said rising coronavirus infection numbers in countries like France, Austria and the Netherlands were “worrying” and that Germany would sooner or later import cases from there, Reuters reported. He added that countries like Spain had infection dynamics “that are likely out of control.”

“Despite” because the initial lockdowns were never going to suppress the virus, not in the longer term.

Read More

Markets: Remember, Remember the Third of November

in ,

Writing in the Financial Times on September 1, Robin Wrigglesworth reported that markets are signaling unease about what may lie ahead in the first week of November. It is not so much the election that’s causing agita as the fear that Election Night might not resolve the result. Investors do not appreciate uncertainty, and if everything is still unresolved by, say, late the next day, the only certainty will be uncertainty.

Read More

True lies

in ,

Curzio Malaparte, born Kurt Erich Suckert (1898–1957), was a fabulist, a trickster, and a master of obfuscation, talents that served him well on the page and, as he slid away from his fascist past, in later life too. It is thus not inappropriate that the first English-language edition of the “diary”—I’ll get to those scare quotes in due course—of his time in early post-war Paris draws on two differing predecessors.1 The first (Diario di uno straniero a Parigi) came out in Italy in 1966, the second in France the following year. Stephen Twilley, who has now translated the Diary into English, notes that the typewritten manuscript delivered to the Italian publisher by Malaparte’s family was in chaos. The French editors complemented chaos with carelessness and—when Malaparte was less than respectful about some members of France’s cultural establishment—censorship.

Twilley thinks that “there must be at least two versions of more than half of the Diary.” With no access to primary sources, his version is a “sort of hybrid.” It involved reconciling (and sometimes supplementing or correcting) the two earlier editions, neither of which is “particularly authoritative.”

Read More