My Theory of the Brontosaurus

Postwar, part II

Communism is appealing to the intellectual because it combines absolute rejection of the status  quo--the non implication that the intellectual needs--with action. Albeit the action of the necessary murder. Communism staked out the far edge: it said we are not waiting for history; we have the courage of our convictions. The intellectual should be the avatar of the harm principle, and disdain action; but if he does act, it will be to destroy, to kill. No man, no problem. Communism cannot prove that its violence will be redeemed by the new society: it gave up on proof. The party's monopoly is violence: the denial of freedom of thought. Judt notes that the collapse of the regimes included the removal of the clause from the constitutions dictating the leadership of the communist party. Communism was force: the question is how Gorbachev could not have known this; how the cynicism of the show trials and the invasions of Budapest and Prague (Yuri Andropov played a role in both; by the time he got to the top of the greased pole he was too old to enjoy it). Perhaps he, and even the Stalin circle that ruled for 30 years after Joe's death, needed to believe, to save something of their souls. The horizontal difference of the exile-intellectual becomes the vertical difference of the future. Communism is a kind of theodicy: the future will redeem the present. The intellectual opposes authority, until it can be authority itself, authority with no self interest, no self: ie communism, is, like the intellectual. absolute refusal. (of past eg). The mimicry of the church, the offer of eternity, but within history: how many divisions does the pope have indeed. For fascism there is one man, for communism one idea, but for both hubris of humanity. Gorbachev believed the lie. He let up on force, and then couldn;t respond with force. He was post Stalinist in the sense of having grown up in it, not one of those who made it. The lie that we are building a new society. We kemosabe? If soc, then we, but if vanguard, not society. Ie when does the society come, when can the vanguard relax? The vanguard acts for a majority that doesn’t yet exist. There is a spatial metaphor, but the issue is temporal. Capitalism is limited government, protecting capital/prop. from government, from the proles. It is incomplete government. Communism is the total state, even in its lack of law. Communism needs war abroad, and thus Iron curtain, because revolution at home is beginning of revolution abroad: they are always already at war with the illegitimate regimes of the world. Russia and communism never completely merge (that Churchill thought of SU as Russia, and Stalin content to leave Atlantic to Britain, repeating Great Game). Gorbachev's faith in communism should be understood as analogous to the Pope's idea of the church: there may be bad men in any given office, but the church itself cannot be wrong, cannot do wrong: it is the magisterium, the guardian and enforcer of the truth. Judt insists that the soviet regime could only fall from within; not because Iron Curtain countries fall, but because Gorbachev created perestroika, appealing to a public, beyond the sclerotic party apparatus, that had not in fact heretofore existed. In creating it, he doomed the project. The Chinese had no compunction about resorting to violence in Tiananmen, even with the publicity of TV. Did Gorbachev believe the regime could survive without violence: that there was a silent majority? The communist countries were in debt to the west. The red army had been humiliated in Afghanistan. Chernobyl had shocked the regime, and it was unable to keep it secret from the west. The necessary murder is not the punishment of the law but the demand of the law, the law seeking itself, its realization. A perversion of the question of legitimacy.

Postwar, part I

Reading Judt's Postwar inspires a lot of thought, mostly about the Holocaust and communism. I will split this into two posts. Judt wanted to write a book about the emergence of Europe, from the war and the communist abduction of the eastern states that was a consequence of the war (the red army stayed where it reached in chasing the Germans). In undertaking a history of Europe after the war after the liberation of the east, he has a very polemical purpose; yet his tool is history, which he distinguishes from memory. History is what actually happened. But attention to history is a political act. His history is a long essay, or a long  series of essays. The material is forged in his consciousness. He is not sure which side to take in the historians debate: if the Holocaust is a crime that rises above history, and refuses to subside into history. For Judt the important lesson is the concept of Europe itself; not its bureaucratic embodiment in the EU, but the principles of Europe, the welfare state and internationalism. This legacy is being challenged by immigration. Immigration will be the test of whether Europe really learned the lesson of the Holocaust. To confront Europe with its history is to create Europe. Reappraisals has the explicit purpose of fighting the tendency to disconnect from the history of the 20th C. The moral imperative for cosmopolitanism is the crime of the Holocaust. But the danger here is to understand Europe as the grave of the Jews. He remarks, apparently favorably, the designation of the Berlin memorial as for the Jews of Europe. What if the Holocaust really was an example of the cunning of reason? Is this a thought that Adorno could not encompass, thus doubting the possibility of metaphysics (and poetry)? If Napoleon was history on a horse, couldn’t Hitler be history on a panzer? On the other side, the Israeli state, with its universal conscription, looks like the perfect Hegelian state. But Hegel might also say that the sheer violence of the Hitlerian solution is indicative of its not being the work of spirit. That working toward Hitler is precisely the kind of individualism he argues against; indeed, government of one man, the destruction of government to empower one man, cannot be the rule of sitt. And the world extent of his war, his subjection of other states to his one state, which was necessary to bring all the Jews of Europe into his ambit, is evidence of the death dealing individuality of his rule, posing as general will. If Hitler were Hegelian, then Derrida's remark re Heidegger, of the need for a more Nazi Nazism, would become clearer: spirit could encompass the Holocaust, it would be imperative to drive it out of our thought, and Heidegger's diagnosis of technology as the failure of metaphysics would be the solution. In any event, we see the difficulty of distinguishing humanity's plasticity before spirit from its plasticity to itself. Note that Hegel identifies the monarch with the power of the pardon. Yet if the Holocaust is not history--the paradox that history is history--then is it a question of law? But a law of history, subjecting history to law, is precisely the mistake Hegel admonishes: the idea of crimes against humanity is the idea of humanity, is the question of legitimacy: the perspective of the individual that stops the progress of history. Judt refers to Derrida as a literary critic, probably a deliberate swipe. His paragraphson "theory" could have been culled from a bitchy faculty lounge (is that a redundancy?).