One
of the rarer of blogging pleasures is, for me at any rate, provoking
a reader to write a comment. Apart from family and friends, I have
only one such reader – who happens to be a fellow-blogger, Arthur
Bough, aka Boffy – an economist whose blog contains detailed Marxist exegesis and an excellent leftist blogroll.
He’s
been good enough to include me in his blogroll on which he clearly
keeps an eagle eye – ever ready to join battle. My last post on
Paul Mason’s latest
book on Fascism struck a nerve – with Boffy’s opening
shot being an accusation that the Ukraine
War seems to have revealed Mason in his true colours as a strong
supporter of NATO. As an old supporter of the Campaign for
Nuclear Disarmament this was (bad) news to me.
But
I take the line that we shouldn’t allow our prejudices about
authors to interfere with our judgement on the coherence of a book’s
argument (eg I have enjoyed Niall
Ferguson’s recent books). And I find Mason consistently worth
reading – not least for the breadth of his reading and the way he
integrates useful references into the body of his text.
And,
further, my post had actually been about Mason’s most recent book
on Fascism – not his earlier one on PostCommunism
which
Boffy had critiqued extensively (in a series) to which Boffy
refers again in his comments
Boffy’s
basic argument seems to be that Mason’s support these days for a
Popular Front is hypocritical as Stalin and the Comintern held the
line so strongly against any common front with Socialists
(although Mason reveals that, for some reason, Stalin conceded to
Georgy Dmitrov when the Bulgarian leader told him to his face that
this was unacceptable). But Mason was, of course, a Trotskyite and,
as such, always opposed to Stalinism. As always happens in leftist
disputes, I am therefore left a tad confused.
And
this is perhaps the point at which I should come totally clean - and
confess that I
have always had an inclination toward the liberal
rather than radical side of social democracy.
I may have been a regular reader of New
Left Review from its very first edition in 1960 but, when push
came to shove, it was Gaitskell and Crosland I supported in the
struggles for the soul of the Labour Party – although, in
1979, I appeared on platforms with
Tony Benn and never
shared the popular vilification of
Jeremy Corbyn – whose
2017 electoral platform electrified me. Perhaps
I’m simply becoming more radical as I grow older – but the way
Corbyn was vilified by the UK media (including The
Guardian) and put under military and MI5 surveillance proves to me
that UK democracy is non-existent. This is a revealing
and harrowing hour-long interview with Corbyn about that
experience from Declassified UK which has attracted
1400
views – so
much are voters starved of basic political power.
How can a country imagine it’s democratic when the duly elected
leader of the Opposition Party is the subject of sustained abuse from
the country’s newspapers? Basically the message is
“we
allow you to vote every 4-5 years – but only
if we agree with the harmless remedies your party supports”
If
I had my time again, I would return to the spirit I showed in 1977
when I penned a thoroughly critical
long article exposing the fragile foundations on which democracy
was built.
Fascism
Resource
Why
do I get the feeling that Fascism is pigeon-holed academically? There
seems to be something deviant about people who show interest in the
field – is this unfair?
Interview
with Paul Mason on
his latest book
Three
Faces of Fascism;
Ernst Nolte (1966) This
book by a German historian about
French, German and Italian fascism attracted a lot of criticism at
the time – for being too sympathetic
The regime
model of fascism (2000)
a long academic article
which compares Austrian, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Romanian
and Spanish forms of Fascism.
The
Anatomy of Fascism Robert Paxton (2004) as the title says
Studying
Fascism in a post-Fascist Age Roger Griffin (2011)
a fairly personal
article about the
academic field written a decade ago
Visualising
Fascism – the 20th
century rise of the global right ed
J Thomas and G Eley
(2020) A curious book
co- edited by an historian who has specialised in Germany which
focuses more on the aesthetic side of the subject.