[Peace-discuss] Conservatives vs. Bushies

[C. G. Estabrook]

[To continue the theme of earlier posts today, here's an attack from
Buchanan's magazine on one of the real slugs under the neocon rock,
Michael Ledeen.  He holds the "Freedom Chair" [sic] at the American
Enterprise Institute.  He recently remarked, "Every ten years or so, the
United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw
it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business."  Comment
from the estimable Doug Henwood at LBO: "Actually, the U.S. had been
beating Iraq's head against the wall for a dozen years, with sanctions and
bombing. The sanctions alone killed over a million Iraqis, far more than
have been done in by weapons of mass destruction throughout history. But
Ledeen's indiscreet remark, delivered at an AEI conference and reported by
Jonah Goldberg in National Review Online, does capture some of what the
war on Iraq is about. And what is this 'business' Ledeen says we mean?
Oil, of course, of which more in a bit. Ditto construction contracts for
Bechtel. But it's more than that - nothing less than the desire, often
expressed with little shame nor euphemism, to run the world." --Regards,
CGE]

Flirting with Fascism

Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from
the American Right.

By John Laughland

On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering
neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding
father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was
"proud" to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other
future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially
Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman -- the latter a
conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron
Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But
there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political
odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with
another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the
20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon
theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the
American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review --
and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror
to include regime change in Iran.

Ledeen has gained notoriety in recent months for the following paragraph
in his latest book, The War Against the Terror Masters. In what reads like
a prophetic approval of the policy of chaos now being visited on Iraq,
Ledeen wrote,

"...Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society
and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to
science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the
law. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and
creativity, which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and
shames them for their inability to keep pace. Seeing America undo
traditional societies, they fear us, for they do not wish to be undone.
They cannot feel secure so long as we are there, for our very existence --
our existence, not our politics -- threatens their legitimacy. They must
attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our
historic mission..."

This is not the first time Ledeen has written eloquently on his love for
"the democratic revolution" and "creative destruction." In 1996, he gave
an extended account of his theory of revolution in his book, Freedom
Betrayed -- the title, one assumes, is a deliberate reference to Trotsky's
Revolution Betrayed. Ledeen explains that "America is a revolutionary
force" because the American Revolution is the only revolution in history
that has succeeded, the French and Russian revolutions having quickly
collapsed into terror. Consequently, "[O]ur revolutionary values are part
of our genetic make-up. ... We drive the revolution because of what we
represent: the most successful experiment in human freedom. ... We are an
ideological nation, and our most successful leaders are ideologues."
Denouncing Bill Clinton as a "counter-revolutionary" (!), Ledeen is
especially eager to make one point: "Of all the myths that cloud our
understanding, and therefore paralyze our will and action, the most
pernicious is that only the Left has a legitimate claim to the
revolutionary tradition."

Ledeen's conviction that the Right is as revolutionary as the Left derives
from his youthful interest in Italian fascism. In 1975, Ledeen published
an interview, in book form, with the Italian historian Renzo de Felice, a
man he greatly admires. It caused a great controversy in Italy. Ledeen
later made clear that he relished the ire of the left-wing establishment
precisely because "De Felice was challenging the conventional wisdom of
Italian Marxist historiography, which had always insisted that fascism was
a reactionary movement." What de Felice showed, by contrast, was that
Italian fascism was both right-wing and revolutionary. Ledeen had himself
argued this very point in his book, Universal Fascism, published in 1972.
That work starts with the assertion that it is a mistake to explain the
support of fascism by millions of Europeans "solely because they had been
hypnotized by the rhetoric of gifted orators and manipulated by skilful
propagandists." "It seems more plausible," Ledeen argued, "to attempt to
explain their enthusiasm by treating them as believers in the rightness of
the fascist cause, which had a coherent ideological appeal to a great many
people." For Ledeen, as for the lifelong fascist theoretician and
practitioner, Giuseppe Bottai, that appeal lay in the fact that fascism
was "the Revolution of the 20th century."

Ledeen supports de Felice's distinction between "fascism-movement" and
"fascism-regime." Mussolini's regime, he says, was "authoritarian and
reactionary"; by contrast, within "fascism-movement," there were many who
were animated by "a desire to renew." These people wanted "something more
revolutionary: the old ruling class had to be swept away so that newer,
more dynamic elements -- capable of effecting fundamental changes -- could
come to power." Like his claim that the common ground between Nazism and
Italian fascism was "exceedingly minimal" -- Ledeen writes, "The fact of
the Axis Pact should not be permitted to become the overriding
consideration in this analysis" -- Ledeen's careful distinction between
fascist "regime" and "movement" makes him a clear apologist for the
latter. "While 'fascism-movement' was overcome and eventually suppressed
by 'fascism-regime,'" he explains, "fascism nevertheless constituted a
political revolution in Italy. For the first time, there was an attempt to
mobilize the masses and to involve them in the political life of the
country." Indeed, Ledeen criticizes Mussolini precisely for not being
revolutionary enough. "He never had enough confidence in the Italian
people to permit them a genuine participation in fascism." Ledeen
therefore concurs with the fascist intellectual, Camillo Pellizi, who
argues -- in a book Ledeen calls "a moving and fundamental work" -- that
Mussolini's was "a failed revolution." Pellizzi had hoped that "the new
era was to be the era of youthful genius and creativity": for him, Ledeen
says, the fascist state was "a generator of energy and creativity." The
purest ideologues of fascism, in other words, wanted something very
similar to that which Ledeen himself wants now, namely a "worldwide mass
movement" enabling the peoples of the world, "liberated" by American
militarism, to participate in the "greatest experiment in human freedom."
Ledeen wrote in 1996, "The people yearn for the real thing -- revolution."

Ledeen was especially interested in the role played by youth in Italian
fascism. It was here that he detected the movement's most exciting
revolutionary potential. The young Ledeen wrote that those who exalted the
position of youth in the fascist revolution -- like those who argued in
favor of his beloved "universal fascism" -- were committed to exporting
Italian fascism to the whole world, an idea in which Mussolini was
initially uninterested. When he was later converted to it, Mussolini said
that fascism drew on the universalist heritage of Rome, both ancient and
Catholic. No doubt Ledeen thinks that the new Rome in Washington has the
same universalist mission. He writes that people around Berto Ricci -- the
editor of the fascist newspaper L'Universale, and a man he calls
"brilliant" and "an example of enthusiasm and independence" -- "called for
the formation of a new empire, an empire based not on military conquest
but rather on Italy's unique genius for civilization. ... They intended to
develop the traditions of their country and their civilization in such a
manner as to make them the basic tenets of a new world order." Ledeen
adds, in a passage that anticipates his later love of creative
destruction, "Clearly the act of destruction which would produce the
flowering of the new fascist hegemony would sweep away the present
generation of Italians, along with the rest." And Giuseppe Bottai, to whom
Ledeen attributes "considerable energy and autonomy," was notable for his
belief that "the infusion of the creative energies of a new generation was
essential" for the fascist revolution. Bottai "implored the young ... to
found a new order arising from the spontaneous activity of their
creation."

One of the greatest exponents of such youthful vitalism was the high
priest of fascism, the poet and adventurer Gabriele D'Annunzio, to whom
Ledeen devoted an enthusiastic biography in 1977. Years ago, I visited
D'Annunzio's house on the shores of Lake Garda: there is a battleship in
the garden and a Brenn gun in the sitting room. D'Annunzio was an
eccentric and militaristic Italian Nietzschean who "eulogized rape and
acts of savagery" committed by the people he called his spiritual
ancestors. The poet was also an early prophet of military intervention and
regime change: he invaded the Croatian city of Fiume (now Rijeka) in 1919
and held the city for a year, during which he put into practice his
theories of "New Order." In 1918, moreover, D'Annunzio had dropped
propaganda leaflets over Vienna promising to liberate the Austrians from
their own government, something Ledeen hails as "a glorious gesture."
D'Annunzio's watchword was "the liberation of human personality." "His
heroism during the war made it possible," Ledeen writes, "to bridge the
chasm between intellectuals and the masses. ... The revolt D'Annunzio led
was directed against the old order of Western Europe, and was carried out
in the name of youthful creativity and virility."

As Ledeen shows, the Italian fascists expressed their desire "to tear down
the old order" (his words from 2002) in terms that are curiously
anticipatory of a famous statement in 2003 by the Defense Secretary,
Donald Rumsfeld. In 1932, Asvero Gravelli also divided Europe into "old"
and "new" when he wrote, in Towards the Fascist International, "Either old
Europe or young Europe. Fascism is the gravedigger of old Europe. Now the
forces of the Fascist International are rising." It all sounds rather
prophetic.

____________________________________________________

John Laughland is a London-based writer and lecturer and a trustee of the
British Helsinki Human Rights Group.

June 30, 2003 issue

Copyright 2003 The American Conservative

  ==============================================================
  C. G. Estabrook, Ph.D., Visiting Scholar
  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [MC-190]
  109 Observatory, 901 South Mathews Avenue, Urbana IL 61801 USA
  office: 217.244.4105 mobile: 217.369.5471 home: 217.359.9466
  <www.carlforcongress.org>
  ===============================================================