Richard III as Fascist Archetype

In 1992 there was something about the South. This is odd as I was in
no way racist; at least not consciously. The cruelty and injustice of
slavery horrified me, yet it was something about the aesthetic of the
Confederate states, whether it was real or imagined; the mere
outpouring of propaganda, I don't know. Of course it was a
property-owning, middle class idealism, yet I'm not sure I recognized
this at the time - the yearning for 'old wine; old friends' - all this
had a profound effect upon me. I would become inebriated by what I
imagined was fine red wine and begin to imagine myself an
arch-reactionary, the partisan of White Armies everywhere and thus, an
enemy of historical 'progress', or at least progress as understood by
the western liberal mindset. The wine was usually Hungarian Bulls'
Blood, in homage to Admiral Horthy, who presided over a military
dictatorship in that country before retiring innocuously to the
Portuguese Riviera.

Two key cultural events coalesced in 1995. One was the massacre at
Srebrenica, the other my first experience of the film Taxi Driver. I'm
unsure why - perhaps it was the onset of a mild form of depression or
'Weltschmerz', but the sight of confident soldiers of the Armija BIH
climbing the hills around Sarajevo to lift the Serb siege of that great
city affected me enormously. During the subsequent days the news and
pictures of the events that followed began to filter through - the
crushing Serb victories; the rapes and hangings, the shooting and
throat-slitting of 4,000 captured BIH troops - the same young men who
appeared so cocksure a few days earlier - and of course, the murder of
a further 6,000 unarmed Muslim souls in that infamous enclave, under
the noses of Dutch UN observers. The story of Yugoslavia impressed
itself upon my psyche and deepened my feelings of alienation from other
human beings, chiefly those I perceived as bourgeois, vapid,
comfortable, self-obsessed and socially disinterested.

Taxi Driver was a depressing, harrowing experience yet it was probably
instrumental in introducing to me the key anti-hero of my political
life and in moments of extremist self-destruction, the ultimate goal -
the eternal outsider to whom mysterious grudges and unstable
irrationality are the norm; the Travis Bickle, Lee-Harvey Oswald,
Francis Parker-Yockey archetype. De Niro brought this sense of
alienation and murderous hatred for human mediocrity and depravity to
life superbly. Only some of us sympathize with him - through him we
transcend the gulf between theory and action and realize the full
brutal potential of the self-aware Nietzschean superman. No longer a
slave, we conclude that it is his destiny; he is right to kill; his
victims either deserve their fate or are simply undeserving of
consideration as separate living entities. He speaks the ultimate
truth.

Linked to this archetype are sufferers of what we might term the
Richard III syndrome - men who could with little effort accept the
constraints and moral boundaries of bourgeois society and rise to
positions of acceptance, even esteem. Yet they reject this wholly,
unambiguously, choosing not anonymity but alternative forms of success,
or anti-success. These are men who reject fame and seek notoriety, or
infamy, in its place. John Amery, son of a cabinet minister, a fascist
idealist hanged for treason in 1945; or Knut Hamsun, a Nobel prize
winner who already possessed the eternal respect of his peers but chose
to obliterate it by welcoming the Nazi invasion of Norway. And of
course, there is Ezra Pound, the modernist poet who self-destructed his
own reputation with gutter anti-Semitism on Rome Radio. What
psychological mechanism is it that drives these men? They are among the
remembered; not in the same way as say, Churchill or Orwell, yet they
are infamous to most and retain, against the odds, some appeal to those
individuals who still seek the quality of being outside the accepted
norms of the bourgeois. In this sense their so-called errors of
judgment, evils even, were the single wisest acts of their lives. Where
does this leave bourgeois morality?

We can experience this further for ourselves in the sympathy we feel
for other protagonists in popular and literary culture. We empathize
and romanticize with Philip K Dick's alpha male replicant Roy Batty;
indeed as Ridley Scott's creation he emerges from Blade Runner as
something of a twisted hero, despite the fact that he is a multiple
murderer. The bloodstained figure descending the Tyrell building is a
clear depiction of the Superman. The Michael Douglas figure in Falling
Down covers similar ground, albeit the relatively familiar territory of
present-day LA, enabling us to disturb ourselves by feeling at least
some of his postmodern helplessness and rage first hand. The man has a
daughter but is considered too much of a man to be a father, and this
cruel refusal of his biological destiny tears him apart. An ordinary
man transformed by circumstance into a raging psychopath, Falling Down
represents perhaps the key micro-sociological tragedy of postmodern,
post-industrial western civilization. Indeed, the decay of family life
under late capitalism is manifest in the way the man's wife regards him
as an object of fear, now he is outside her immediate control. But what
is perhaps more horrible still is the way in which he responds in kind,
adding menace and erratic violence to the equation.

Let us return, as it were, 'to source' and look at some of DH
Lawrence's poetical essays such as 'Mercury' and 'Pan in America'. They
portray a darker, 'quicker', more 'aesthetic', more 'spiritual'
culture, alluring in many ways, yet alluring primarily to the emotions,
which care not for rational sensibilities. One must I think retain a
measure of Judaeo-Christian doubt at Lawrence's apparent yearning for
the god we call Satan. It is essentially savagery that is called for,
savagery in all its forms:

"Aha! Tree! Who has triumphed now? I drank the heat of your blood into
my face and breast, and now I am drinking it into my loins and buttocks
and legs, oh tree! Fire is life, and I take your life for mine."

This stuff is in any case largely unreadable, and cannot be sustained
for any length of time. It quickly becomes tedious, and one is left all
along with the feeling that Lawrence is putting on this
nature-reverence. This is exactly the kind of highly emotive but at the
same time essentially meaningless rhetoric employed variously by
Hitler, Mussolini, Codreanu, Darre, Degrelle, Mosley, Drieu La Rochelle
and Primo De Rivera. Employed by tramps, prosperous middle class boys
and aristocrats alike. A highly charged, wholly instrumental rhetorical
style, aimed at the achievement of concrete 'results', usually counted
in human cadavers. The kind of writing the same vulnerable individual
can laude as visionary and enthralling while simultaneously decrying it
as spurious hot air; highly descriptive, beautiful prose which
signifies absolutely nothing. Take this paroxysm from
Gottfried Feder, one of the earliest members of the German Workers
Party:

"From out of the chaos the world came forth, from the subordinate came
order, from raw eddying energy the organic."

Beautiful words, but largely meaningless, designed wholly to illicit an
immediate and almost uncontrollable emotional response. In the words of
an anonymous Italian fascist: "Blood is stronger than
syllogisms."

This is what I have tried in vain to guard against in the evolution of
a political idiosyncrasy. Always extreme, always 'revolutionary' yet
ultimately confused, at turns yearning for union with everyone and with
no one. In the writings of many of the precursors and fellow-travelers
of pre-war 'classical fascism' there lies the 'aesthetic' impulse, the
willingness to ride roughshod over the traditional, the peaceful and
the rational. The primary thrust is that the 'beauty' of a particular
act is sacrosanct, its 'morality' is neither here nor there. Nietzsche
had with a neat rhetorical flick buried God, freeing those elitists who
wished to make their Faustian pact, their pact with Lawrence's Pan,
with the Devil. Indeed God has been dead for a hundred years. For a man
with a family who ought to empathize with other families, this is
surely a shameful impulse and a shameful battle. Yet the emotional link
is there, the desire remains. Whether this is a personal failing or
whether all men, even in these days of anaemic consumer liberalism,
secretly desire the terror and subjugation of others, I don't know. The
struggle continues. Lawrence's vitalistic nature-prose, as well as the
cultural impulses of men like Hamsun and Pound, led indirectly and by a
tortured, twisted path to the cellars of the Gestapo and the horrors of
Auschwitz. Yet all the while, at times emphatic and at others
apologetic, if asked to describe my position to others, I can think of
no other epithet than 'fascist'.