Rogueish

06/07/12

I finally got round to watching the last two Harry Potter films last week; taken together, they make a pretty good four-and-a-half hour film, although the first film is probably better (the design of the Ministry of Magic is especially good). I thought this sequence was particularly impressive. It became very clear with the publication of the fifth book that Harry Potter is an attack on the crypto-fascism of neoliberalism, and New Labour in particular, but the visuals here, it seems to me, add something that isn’t in the books: don’t the streams of smoke hanging quietly in the sky that represent the Death Eaters bring to mind images of the white phosphorous bombardment of Fallujah? It’s a valuable reminder of the other legacy of Tony Blair’s government.

04/17/12

His relationship to his father and his guilt at not having fought in the Second World War have long been themes in Spielberg’s films, but they combine in a particularly creepy way in War of the Worlds. With the idea of a redemptive war for the natural/natal/familial community, Spielberg becomes something like a boomer Ernst Jünger.

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Casa Costanera

09/14/11

costapobre:

the distinction between right wing military dictatorship and bourgeois democracy which people like klein zinn chomsky et al cling to like a favorite blankie…

I read this and I went over to my bookshelf to find my copy of Jean Barrot’s Fascism/Anti-Fascism and then I realized it’s probably on the internet and indeed it is. A quote:

Public opinion does not condemn Nazism so much for its horrors, because since then other States - in fact the capitalist organisation of the world economy - have proven to be just as destructive of human life, through wars and artificial famines, as the Nazis. Rather Nazism is condemned because it acted deliberately, because it was consciously willed, because it decided to exterminate the Jews. No one is responsible for famines which decimate whole peoples, but the Nazis - they wanted to exterminate. In order to eradicate this absurd moralism, one must have a materialist conception of the concentration camps. They were not the product of a world gone mad. On the contrary, they obeyed normal capitalist logic applied in special circumstances. Both in their origin and in their operation, the camps belonged to the capitalist world…

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09/11/11

So, I knew that None Dare Call it Conspiracy was, along with Cleon Skousen’s The Naked Communist, one of the ur-texts of the Tea Party/Glenn Beck paranoid right. And indeed all the good stuff’s there: Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy theories about the Rothschilds, UN world government, politically and historically illiterate claims that Fascism is left wing, the gold standard, a stab-in-the-back myth about Vietnam, etc. What I didn’t realize, though, is that the book names, as front-man for this Illuminati plot, Richard Nixon. This actually makes some crazy sense: the initial attempt at a far-right takeover of the Republican party was Goldwater’s failed presidential run in 1964; as a response, in 1968 the Republican establishment chose Nixon as the anti-Goldwater, while Goldwater’s supporters retrenched and rallied behind Reagan, giving us, eventually, the far-right fringe of the Republican party today.

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