Horizon

Seems like a less-popular version of "rough men" or "when a man believes nothing...". The only non-Buchanan reference I can find via Google is probably someone who lifted it from the Buchanan article.

The article also talks a bit about how noxious the term "Christian fascism" would be -- but that's not too far away from "clerico-fascism" used to describe Austria before the Anschluss.

One nitpick with your broader point: how much nativism or scapegoating was part of Italian or Spanish fascism? I seem to remember reading that Italian fascism, centered on the glories of Rome, was far from xenophobic.

Yes, I think it can't be word-for-word accurate because I flatter myself that I'd remember any Orwell use of the name "Smith" outside *1984*. But did he even say anything approaching this sentiment that could be paraphrased thus as a stretch?

As for the Italian and Spanish fascists, I think you're focusing on whether they were as obsessed as the Nazis with uniformity of physical appearance. If not, well, they were certainly religious bigots and national identity chauvinists. Ghastly enough anyway.

BTW did you ever read Camille Paglia's glorifications of "the Western eye" in art and literature? Awful lot of anti-democratic glories-of-Rome reverberations in that stuff. I'd like to ask her some time if she actually believes in democracy or not.

> I'd like to ask her [Camille Paglia] some time if she
> actually believes in democracy or not.

I think you'd be lucky to get a straight answer.

After reading her columns in Salon and other writings on the web, I was intrigued several years ago when I saw that she was going to be on the Tim Sebastian BBC interview programme 'Hard Talk'. I tuned in ... only to find an inarticulate, incoherent babbler. Really amusing to see someone who writes fairly well completely unable to express herself, even in response to Sebastian's 'softball' questions.

cheers,

Henry

I'm curious: what flavor of incoherent?

I've always thought that Paglia and Victor David Hanson provided a valuable public service -- there should always be someone clearly articulating the notion that the US should be more like ancient Sparta. Prevents that sort of thing from sneaking up behind you, if it's marching with a brass band.

Orwell makes his later thoughts on the subject fairly clear in the March 24, 1944 As I Please. If the Smith quote were to show up anywhere you'd think it'd be here, but it doesn't.

On the other hand, this quote does sound very familiar somehow. I'll keep poking around.

Whether or not there is such a specific quote, I think Buchanan in this case could fairly claim that he was paraphrasing. As for whether he was accurately representing Orwell's view - What is Fascism? is the most explicit statement on the subject. It suggests that he was half right and half wrong.

"It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.

Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.

But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword."

Thanks, Alan. That's the passage I didn't remember clearly enough to find.

And, yes, Buchanan turns out to be half right and half wrong -- the most persuasive kind of liar. Difference being in part that even the vague "anti-liberal and anti-working-class" is too specific to help either Rove or Buchanan. Difference being further that Orwell, as I thought I remembered, found the word too important to dissolve in vagueness.

Now, what'd he mean by "making admissions"? Possible I wouldn't like the answer but can't help wondering.

I've got to get back to Orwell, been too long away. I never did get around to reading more than bits of the Bowker and Taylor biographies. Anyone else interested?

I might be -- also, there was an article yesterday on a new book "Orwell at the Tribune" at Drink Soaked Trotskyites for War yesterday.