We interrupt this narrowcast... Yes, yes, I was going to post the next bit of Gonzo Marketing today (and maybe I still will, who knows the inner workings of time and fate?), but I came across this killer piece by Umberto Eco, the guy in the hat (Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, Kant and the Platypus, &ct.), and just had to show it to those of you who've been following my konceptual Kondratieff-wave thinking on the larger Pinchonesquely connected themes that have occupied (not to say obsessed) me since Gonzo.

So it seems Umberto put together another book -- dude's got a million of em -- called Five Moral Pieces, one piece of which is titled "Ur Fascism." Here's a context-setting clip. Pay no mind to the platypus. She's just a bit nosy. Be glad it's not Kant.

In his introduction Eco explains that "these five occasional pieces" sprang from talks and articles on current affairs in the last decade... "Ur-Fascism" was a speech delivered at Columbia University in 1995, shortly after the Oklahoma City bombing....

The wide-ranging implications in "Ur-Fascism" make this piece a most thought-provoking warning to any nation that sees itself as the greatest, most powerful, most important, et cetera. Eco puts into historical perspective the meaning and ideology of fascism (not just Mussolini's) and reminds us that "Mussolini had no philosophy. All he had was rhetoric." The author goes on to list fourteen characteristics of ur-fascism that seem to apply to the mentality of many powerful modern nations.

from: Umberto Eco. Five Moral Pieces (Book Review)
by Rocco Capozzi
source: World Literature Today, 22 June 2002
Copyright © 2002 University of Oklahoma

This is how Eco begins his enumeration. You'll see why I was so excited to find this when you hit the last graf. In what follows, btw, the grafiks, links and emphasis are mine.

1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition. Traditionalism is of course much older than fascism. Not only was it typical of counter-revolutionary Catholic thought after the French revolution, but it was born in the late Hellenistic era, as a reaction to classical Greek rationalism. In the Mediterranean basin, people of different religions (most of them indulgently accepted by the Roman Pantheon) started dreaming of a revelation received at the dawn of human history. This revelation, according to the traditionalist mystique, had remained for a long time concealed under the veil of forgotten languages—in Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the Celtic runes, in the scrolls of the little known religions of Asia.

This new culture had to be syncretistic. Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, "the combination of different forms of belief or practice"; such a combination must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a silver of wisdom, and whenever they seem to say different or incompatible things it is only because all are alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth.

As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.

One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements. The most influential theoretical source of the theories of the new Italian right, Julius Evola, merged the Holy Grail with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, alchemy with the Holy Roman and Germanic Empire. The very fact that the Italian right, in order to show its open-mindedness, recently broadened its syllabus to include works by De Maistre, Guenon, and Gramsci, is a blatant proof of syncretism.

If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled as New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge—that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.

If you're interested, you can read more bits of the piece that Utne Reader excerpted from its original appearance (22 June 1995) in The New York Review of Books. But if you hit that last link, you gotta pay. Ain't it a bitch?

Here's one last hit on the same subject that you don't have to pay for. Yet. I know where you all live, though, and if you don't subscribe soon, you're gonna get a little personal visit from another Italian guy I know, name of Vinnie.

Another essay with a... more distinctly Italian coloring than the other four, is titled "Ur-fascism"... In 1942 at age 10, Mr. Eco won a first prize for young Italian fascists (officially all the boys and girls were), but the next year when partisans took Milan in April, he learned "that freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric." He finds fascism, in Italy and elsewhere, dictatorial without being thoroughly totalitarian. Benito Mussolini in his view was without any philosophy at all.

The Ur-fascism Mr. Eco is warning about is that which still bubbles up today in Italian electoral politics and other European countries (France, Austria). While not the same as the old fascism, it continues to trade in a traditionalism that rejects the modern, tilts toward pagan mythology and irrationalism, and is hostile to dissent and diversity. It employs Newspeak and is at home on TV and in "internet populism." In other words, a phenomenon still worth keeping an eye on.

from: Ethics questions for the 21st century
by Colin Walters
source: The Washington Times, 11 November 2001
Copyright © 2001 News World Communications, Inc.