Masculinities of the far right

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Re: Masculinities of the far right

Postby American Dream » Tue Feb 07, 2017 12:39 pm

Freud, Fascism and the Death Instinct

The Origins of Violence and Aggression

In the most arresting remark of C&ID Freud writes: "I know that in sadism and masochism we have always seen before us manifestations of the destructive instinct (directed outwards and inwards), strongly alloyed with eroticism; but I can no longer understand how we can have overlooked the ubiquity of non-erotic aggressivity and destructiveness and can have failed to give it its due place in our interpretation of life"16.


ImageFreud unflinchingly exposed the barely suppressed aggression woven into the very fabric of society. For Freud, civilisation’s history merely confirmed the truth of the Roman playwright Plautus’s dictum: "Man is a wolf to man." From Genghis Khan, to the Crusades and the First World War, the sombre truth was that civilisation was constantly threatened with dissolution due to chronic aggression. A high level of energy was expended curbing aggressive instincts utilising psychical reaction formations and the aim-inhibited relations of love. Unsurprisingly Freud was sceptical that communism could usher in a new pacific social order because although the abolition of private property would deprive aggression of "one of its instruments", aggression had pre-dated the institution of private property and would surely survive its abolition17. Similarly the abolition of the family and the ‘liberation’ of Eros were unlikely to spell real inroads into human nature’s most indestructible feature.



EXCURSUS: The Economic Problem of Masochism (1924)

The existence of masochism is a mystery given the ascendancy of Eros over psychical life. Masochism implies pain can be an aim and that it is not merely reducible to providing warnings of possible harm. Freud accepted the major principle ruling psychical life was the ‘tendency towards stability’ or what Barbara Low called the Nirvana principle where the psychical structure tried to reduce the level of free flowing energy. On this view, pleasure was derived from lowering stimuli and unpleasure from the increase in stimuli thus increasing tension29.

ImageBut Freud realised such a picture could not be entirely accurate. Death’s aim was to relieve life of life. If Eros simply aimed to lower the flow of instinctual energy it would be rendered a servant of the Death instinct. But sexual arousal was only the most obvious example where Eros increased stimuli. So the distinction between pleasure-unpleasure on the basis of the quantity of energy present, could not be the whole picture. Eros and the Nirvana principle should not be treated as one. Freud suggested the three major principles, Eros (libido), Nirvana (as an expression of the Death instincts) and the Reality principle coexisted and, occasionally, conflicted with Eros retaining the dominant role over life30.



Conclusion

Freud’s portrait of the Death instincts, masochism and sadism, of the ubiquity of aggression and violence rooted in the instinctual realm of human nature, is profound and provocative. Clearly, in light of many millennia of barbarism and class society, the violent rise of capitalism, the ravages of imperialism and the fury of fascism, Freud’s views have the merit of realism. This is perhaps the answer to those instinctively repelled by Freud’s apparently chilly weltanschauung. Certainly, Arthur Schopenhauer, admired by Freud, was a major influence as many Freudian staples – about death and the impossibility of reconciling our desires and civilisation and so on – were anticipated by Schopenhauer. Similarly with Nietzsche – many pointed to the parallels in the thought of the two thinkers, not least Freud’s own students who continuously tried to draw Freud’s attention to Nietzsche. But unlike Schopenhauer, Freud resisted reading Nietzsche chiefly because he wanted to arrive at his scientific insights independently32.

ImageIn a thought provoking essay on evil (2010) - the lower case is significant – Terry Eagleton makes the case for the reality of evil - a this worldly, secular and banal evil; an evil that is never less than evil despite the case that Eagleton wishes to make as a Marxist, that evil has social and historical roots, has roots in a psychical constitution intelligible from the standpoint of Freudian theory. Evil, then, is not theological (though theologicians, unsurprisingly, generally have the most interesting things to say about Evil). Such a position does not deny the "terrifying positivity" of evil or diminish the gravity of the Nazi concentration camps. Rather psychoanalytic theory, Eagleton suggests would allow "us to maintain that evil is a kind of deprivation while still acknowledging its formidable power. The power in question...is essentially that of the death drive, turned outward so as to wreak its insatiable spitefulness on a fellow human being. Yet this furious violence involves a kind of lack – an unbearable sense of non-being, which must...be taken out on another"33.


http://www.whomakesthenazis.com/2010/11 ... tinct.html
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Re: Masculinities of the far right

Postby brekin » Wed Feb 08, 2017 4:05 pm

Am going to have to pull out vol. 1 and try and crack it again.
Great summation of the book(s) below.

Pseudo-Conservatism, the Soldier Male, and the Air Horn
By Elizabeth Schambelan

APRIL 18, 2016

KLAUS THEWELEIT’S MALE FANTASIES is a peculiar chimera, at once cultural history, critical theory, and gory, Gothic prose poem. The book, published in German in 1978 and in English a decade later, clocks in at 1,052 pages split into two marginally wieldy volumes. On a bookshelf, with its title emblazoned on each spine in the über-Teutonic font known as “blackletter,” it is liable to be mistaken for an exhaustive S/M manual. The book is in fact a weird and brilliant study of fascist masculinity. As of this writing, it is the only thousand-page poststructuralist study of fascism that can claim a cult following, but it is no mere Continental curio. To the contrary, as a psycho-political investigation of authoritarian manhood in extremis, it offers a powerful heuristic for our present situation. And by our present situation, I mean Donald Trump.

“Surreal” means over or above the real, but, even as Trump’s campaign has achieved hypoxic altitudes of preposterousness, it has also notoriously traveled into depths of the base and the crude. The devolution of the March 3 debate into what most regard as a dick-measuring contest was widely seen as the apotheosis of this vulgarity. But maybe we should be thinking about it the other way around — maybe the vulgarity is the byproduct of an unreconstructed and uncouth machismo. The old-school American macho man — cowboy, frontiersman, working-class hero — has no regard for polite sensibilities. Trump may look like a rancid creampuff in a Brioni suit, but his crass language serves the function of a ripped physique in a ripped T-shirt, projecting a Stanley Kowalskian virility. However, even Marlon Brando’s Stanley, with his parabolic swagger, might be scandalized by Trump’s uninhibited dominance displays.

Respectable aggression, the kind that could be considered “presidential,” channels testosterone into martial rectitude. It maintains a stony game face and aims for gravitas. But Trump always just seems to be blatantly, mortifyingly in rut. It is difficult to imagine a more priapic character. Flushed and pouting, boasting and strutting, oscillating between hoarse shouts (“Get ’im out!”) and harrowingly intimate murmurs (“It’s gonna be great, it’ll be so great…”), he appears too inflamed to even try to sublimate the libidinal thrust of his ambition. His supporters frequently claim that their candidate says what everybody else thinks but cravenly refuses to verbalize. Allegorically speaking, Trump the populist is a brute who ravishes the hypocrisies of a liberal-leftie haute bourgeoisie. His penchant for NC-17 insults (this one’s “a pussy,” that one got “schlonged”) and, more generally, his rhetorical recourse to the body, its extremities and effluents, might be understood as the trappings of a flamboyant gender performance that directly assaults PC pieties.

Asked in a recent interview about the appeal of the presumptive nominee, journalist Mark Leibovich said, “Political correctness is an incredibly powerful bogeyman.” Trump’s supporters tend to be emphatically anti-PC. Some more than others. Consider the Tillies, a family of ardent Trumpists recently profiled on the PBS show NewsHour. In the segment, we see family members manning the phone banks and thanking “Father God” for Trump’s existence. Standard human-interest fare, except that, while mom Grace Tilly explains her newfound interest in the electoral process, the NewsHour team blithely ignores the neo-Nazi tattoos waving around on her earnestly gesticulating hands. PBS was roundly chastised for this lapse, and everybody moved on to the next abomination, having drawn an increasingly redundant moral from the story: racism is rampant among Trump supporters. But the cross of Odin on Grace Tilly’s hand is not only a symbol of white supremacy — it’s also a symbol of patriarchy, consecrating the Aryan nation to a Father God who underwrites the prerogatives of mortal men (of Scandinavian extraction). I am not suggesting that all Trump voters are neo-Nazis. My point is simply, while it’s certainly true that Trump emits many racist dog whistles, his gleefully essentialist, stridently phallic masculinity is a dog whistle, too. Really, it’s more like an air horn. Male Fantasies helps us to attend to that signal, to parse its frequencies, and to consider its message.

¤

Theweleit’s focus is the Freikorps, the ultra-right-wing militias that coalesced across Germany in the wake of World War I. Largely composed of veterans who felt lost and humiliated by the outcome of the war, the Freikorps fought Bolshevism wherever it reared its head, putting down the Spartacist revolt in 1919, helping to destroy the Bavarian Soviet Republic, and crushing communist stirrings in the Baltic states. These busy men, many of whom would become prominent officials of the Third Reich, also found time to write. A lot. Theweleit assembles excerpts from a vast corpus of Freikorps literature and subjects these materials to eccentric exegesis. He finds that imagery suggestive of intimacy, hybridity, or the breaching of boundaries — dirt, disorder, fluidity, flux — is associated in Freikorps writing with terror and deep revulsion. To him, this suggests that the fascist man’s obsessive misogyny and hypervigilant machismo are rooted in the traumatic severing of the “symbiosis” between mother and infant son. In his view, the “soldier male” (Theweleit’s term for the archetype of fascist manhood) is the product of a catastrophic reaction formation. But one need not subscribe to this Freudian-Deleuzian etiology to find Theweleit’s elucidation of the fascist imagination persuasive. His sprawling and darkly visionary survey convinces the way art convinces — it possesses the quality that in novels is referred to as inevitability, an internal coherence that strongly suggests things could not be otherwise. And as he pivots from the dream-logic of the subconscious to the public sphere, extrapolating from the soldier male’s inner life to his existence as a political and historical agent, the unnerving implications of his theories grow ever more apparent.

“The most urgent task” of the soldier male, Theweleit writes, “is to pursue, to dam in, and to subdue any force that threatens to transform him back into the horribly disorganized jumble of flesh, hair, skin, bones, intestines, and feelings that calls itself human — the human being of old.” Of all of these malign forces, femininity, or rather femaleness, is paramount, representing a noisome tarn, a swamp in which the ego will flounder and drown. Though sometimes suppressed in idealized visions of an ever-virginal “white woman,” the rage that Theweleit’s soldier males express toward the opposite sex is more often frankly homicidal. “When confronted with women, by contrast, their impulse is to pierce the facade of female ‘innocence,’ to display the whole morass […]. It is a shot or a rifle butt blow that extracts the evidence.” Sex, though it may be keenly desired, is revolting and dangerous: “Pleasure, with its hybridizing qualities, has the dissolving effect of a chemical enzyme […].” In flight from this lethal dissolution, the soldier male seeks “the conservative utopia of the mechanized body,” laboring to construct a self that is inorganic, adamantine, and wholly masculine.

Within the fascist’s primary social unit, the troop, he bonds intensely with his brothers-in-arms, and in so doing fuses with the “macromachine,” a fractal-like magnification of the rigid and phallic “totality formation” that is the fascist body. Hierarchy is essential to the functioning of the macromachine — it is the crystalline structure that holds liquidation at bay. Beyond this hierarchy, the soldier male acknowledges no authority: “All others belong only ‘under’ him — never alongside, behind, or in front.” But with lines of authority clearly drawn, the macromachine can pursue its raison d’être: war.

For the soldier male, battle is “a mechanism of self-maintenance.” He “survives by differentiating himself as killer, in opposition to whatever he perceives as threatening.” Over and over in Freikorps literature, Theweleit finds imagery of enemies transformed into what he calls the “bloody miasma” — a red cloud, a formless pulp — as the soldier male visits upon his adversary the feminizing dissolution that is his own worst fear. The red miasma then gives way to “a white totality,” a void where the enemy, the “swarthy rabble,” has previously stood. This hygienic zone of purity correlates with the ideal of the “white woman”; by displacing the tainted, teeming rabble, the white totality also displaces womanly filth. Race and gender are conflated. Theweleit dryly jokes that if you had asked a member of the Freikorps to note his sex on a form, he would have written “German.” To be German is to be Aryan, but also to be masculine. Nationalism forges whiteness and maleness into a single property, an indivisible, invincible identity within the “totality formation” that is Germany itself.

Any kind of social flux or leveling in the body politic is as threatening as flux within the soldier male’s own body, for such upheaval fractures the nationalist totality. Theweleit argues that the Freikorps engaged in endless civil war, unflagging combat against the “swarthy rabble,” because

the fascist identifies the existence of classes with the existence of the repressed in his own body; if the repressed has a life as class, then it gains a right to existence. If it is class, then everything he has banished to the lower regions, including woman, has a right to defend itself. None of this must be, for this man needs subordinates if he is to live.

In Freikorps literature, enemies in civil combat are “the micromasses, the bacillae of social diseases […].” They appear in a variety of grotesque incarnations: “the bellicose Communist, the lascivious Jew […]. The demons may equally be women — as agents of the flesh or ‘trapdoors into nothingness.’” Such base and pestilent creatures may be exterminated by any means available. The Freikorps had a highly developed conception of honorable combat, but its rules applied only to worthy rivals. Civil war was no holds barred, “since here the opponent’s aspirations are immediately presumed to be presumptuous and illegitimate.” Male Fantasies offers many, many glimpses of the tactics that might be deployed against a “presumptuous” enemy. Here, for example, are a few lines from Ernst von Salomon’s autobiographical novel The Outlaws (1930): “We smashed our way into startled crowds, raging and shooting and beating and hunting. We drove the Latvians across the fields like frightened hares […]. We hurled the corpses into wells and threw grenades in after them.”

¤

“She had blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her … wherever.” The line could easily have been lifted from one of Theweleit’s excerpts. In fact, of course, it was said by Donald Trump, about Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly. He seems to be describing the cataclysmic end stage of a hemorrhagic fever, only here the lethal mechanism is not a virus but a menstrual cycle run amok. Trump’s bizarre allusions to Kelly’s bleeding “wherever” and Hilary Clinton’s bathroom break indicate that he is both fixated upon and disgusted by women’s bodily functions. His rhythmic emission of shocking comments and tweets about women and their appearance is clearly compulsive. He is definitely not what Theweleit would identify as a soldier male, but, for Theweleit, that archetype is just the most extreme incarnation of pathological, constitutively misogynist masculinity. “I consider it unjustified to see the ‘fascist’ male as an isolated case,” he writes. “His development is part of a wider history” — specifically, the history of “the ways the European male ego develops in opposition to woman.” Theweleit seems positive about what is causal here — everything flows from fear and loathing of women. This seems too neat, just as “European” seems too narrow. But I think his basic point is correct, and crucial, insofar as it urges us to think about our own historical moment in terms of this longer durée.

In his 2013 book Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era, sociologist Michael Kimmel quotes a gun enthusiast named Rick:

Just look around. There’s illegals everywhere. There’s Wall Street screwing everybody. And now we got a goddamn […]. Oh, fuck it. I don’t care if it is politically incorrect. We got a fucking nigger in the White House. We’re all screwed. Nobody gives a shit about us guys anymore.

While acknowledging that plenty of women fulminate against “illegals,” minorities, and even “feminazis,” Kimmel proposes that the rage fueling groups like the Tea Party stems from the sense of “aggrieved entitlement” harbored by some white men. These men are well aware that they are being screwed by “Wall Street” and the economic system it represents. But they assign at least as much blame to “illegals,” minorities, and women as to the real agents of precarity. And women, by Kimmel’s reckoning, are the primordial adversary, the original illegitimate enemy, the template of insolent insubordination.

The men of the Freikorps also found themselves losing privilege in a time of instability. And it enraged them. Von Salomon, the writer quoted above, concludes his reminiscences with this peroration:

We had built a funeral pyre to burn dead matter; but more than this, we burned our hopes and longings, codes of civil conduct, the laws and values of civilization, the whole burden of fusty verbiage we carried, our belief in the things and ideas of a time that had rejected us.

The overwrought tone and bathetic cadence suggest that the author is trying to convey an emotion of real intensity, a genuine hatred for the ossified codes, laws, and values of civilian society. This is a hatred that von Salomon shared with his comrades. The men of the Freikorps believed that a cabal of leftists and Jews had orchestrated the signing of the Versailles treaty, which they considered an unnecessary capitulation and a total national humiliation. Perhaps worst of all, Germany had agreed to a demobilization that, as Freikorps soldiers saw it, consigned brave warriors to lives of ignoble boredom. For soldier males, the prospect of being “chained for life to the office” aroused the deepest resentment imaginable. Nothing was more outrageous to them than the notion of combat veterans returning from the exaltations of battle only to be offered “the princely sum of eight hundred marks monthly to rot away for fifty working hours in work that offends their very nature.” The old guard that perpetuated this offensive system deserved no mercy: “[We] voiced our common desire to stand the whole older generation against the wall and shoot them.”

Theweleit’s authors yearn for “the whole noxious world to burst in one great explosion.” Nothing less than tabula-rasa destruction is indicated: “Everything must change … Everything must be destroyed … The world will shatter around us but we shall march onward …” While locked in mortal combat against those who sought to destabilize the social order, they themselves desired nothing more than to watch that order die a violent death, not in collapse, but in an all-consuming conflagration that would leave nothing but cinders behind — cinders, and the steely, unmeltable totality of their own power. Freikorps writers are very hazy on the details of this post-apocalyptic society. Certainly, however, its hierarchies would accord not with Marx’s economic tiers, but with the Great Chain of Being, a natural order of superiority with themselves at the top. The soldier males of interwar Germany had no interest whatsoever in maintaining the class structure, per se — indeed, according to Theweleit, the very concept of class was anathema to them. They weren’t defending the interests of capital — they were defending that familiar avatar of privilege, the white male. Their leftist enemies might have been fighting a class war, but the Freikorps were fighting what we, today, might call a culture war. You could say they were practicing identity politics by other means.

Male Fantasies prompts us to contextualize two culture wars — past and present, hot and cold — within a “wider history” of masculinity that, in turn, could be seen as coterminous with another history: that of pseudo-conservatism. As theorized by Theodor Adorno, pseudo-conservatism is a political orientation that blends radical and reactionary impulses in contradictory ways but ultimately seeks the institution of an authoritarian regime. The hard-right Tea Party populism efflorescing under Trump is not fascism. But when fascism and Trump’s populism are juxtaposed under the rubric of pseudo-conservatism, certain ominous resonances do suggest themselves. Instead of overt militarism, we have the paramilitary fetishes of Minutemen and hunters who shoot bears with assault rifles. Instead of expansionist nationalism, we have a revanchism within our own borders, a drive to “make America great again” by retaking territory lost to minorities, women, immigrants, etc. Instead of — or, I guess, in addition to — a vast population of traumatized veterans, we have a vast ghost-army of workers traumatized by economic instability; and instead of being enraged by the prospect of humiliating, low-paying desk jobs, they are enraged by the prospect of humiliating, low-paying service-industry jobs. Adorno finds that the yearning to blow up “the whole noxious world” is present in American pseudo-conservatism as well: “The pseudo-conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition,” he writes in The Authoritarian Personality (1950). “The most extreme concept of the tradition of American democracy is summoned by the pseudo-conservative way of political thinking: the concept of revolution.” This revolutionary impulse, however, is just that: an impulse, with no political program behind it. “There is only a vague idea of violent change, without any concrete reference to the people’s aims involved — moreover, of a change which has in common with revolution” — i.e., true revolution — “only the aspect of a sudden and violent break.

Since the publication of The Authoritarian Personality, no “sudden and violent break” in American history has taken place. There’s no reason to assume that our future holds such an event, and no reason to assume it doesn’t. One of the hazards we are currently facing is the risk that we will acclimate to our circumstances, tell ourselves that what we’re experiencing is just another episode in the mundane craziness of American political life, soothe ourselves with the thought that a Trump presidency is highly implausible.

Among its other virtues, Theweleit’s book militates against such tendencies, offering a salutary reminder of the anarchic contingency of history. Anything can happen, and, in Germany, anything did happen. Those who banked on the plausible in Weimar Germany were proven naïve, even if they constantly adjusted their definition of plausibility to accommodate the latest bizarre occurrence. There was, finally, a rupture that nobody could have seen coming. If it should come to pass that America’s pseudo-conservatives initiate a sudden and violent break, scholars will debate the cause of the upheaval for many decades. Historians who posit a single decisive factor will be rightly chided for oversimplifying, whether the proposed trigger is outraged privilege, or the growing realization that “neoliberalism has well and truly failed” (to quote Thomas Frank’s widely read Guardian article on the motives of Trump voters), or something else entirely. But those who read Male Fantasies may well come to feel that we shouldn’t underestimate the power of aggrieved entitlement as a sociopolitical force. Theweleit’s soldier males — narrating their exploits with implacable rage, hair-raising relish, and, always, grandiose machismo — make a very vivid case against complacency.
¤
Elizabeth Schambelan is a writer and critic and a senior editor of Artforum.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/pse ... -air-horn/
If I knew all mysteries and all knowledge, and have not charity, I am nothing. St. Paul
I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind. Eric Hoffer
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Re: Masculinities of the far right

Postby American Dream » Wed Feb 08, 2017 4:24 pm

Thanks, brekin- that is so devastatingly on point.
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Re: Masculinities of the far right

Postby brekin » Wed Feb 08, 2017 5:24 pm

American Dream » Wed Feb 08, 2017 3:24 pm wrote:Thanks, brekin- that is so devastatingly on point.


Yeah, I was thinking of Male Fantasies last night and wondered if anyone had done a linking piece.
I think this is a good template of what is going on.

“The most urgent task” of the soldier male, Theweleit writes, “is to pursue, to dam in, and to subdue any force that threatens to transform him back into the horribly disorganized jumble of flesh, hair, skin, bones, intestines, and feelings that calls itself human — the human being of old.” Of all of these malign forces, femininity, or rather femaleness, is paramount, representing a noisome tarn, a swamp in which the ego will flounder and drown.


Makes the chant, "Build The Wall!, Build The Wall!, Build The Wall!" take on new meaning.
And informs us on these old nuggets.

(CNN)Donald Trump had an "absolute meltdown" when a lawyer requested a break from a 2011 deposition to pump breast milk.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/29/politics/ ... statement/

"He got up, his face got red, he shook his finger at me and he screamed, 'You're disgusting, you're disgusting,' and he ran out of there," attorney Elizabeth Beck told CNN's Alisyn Camerota on Wednesday morning.
Will Trump campaign's rape comments hurt GOP?

The incident was described in a letter from Jared Beck, Elizabeth's co-counsel and husband, obtained by CNN and first reported Tuesday by the New York Times.
Trump's attorney Allen Garten, who was present for the deposition, does not dispute that Trump called Beck "disgusting."
Trump slammed Beck's interview in a tweet to CNN Politics on Wednesday morning:
"Lawyer Elizabeth Beck did a terrible job against me, she lost (I even got legal fees). I loved beating her,she was easy," he tweeted.
Garten, executive vice president and general counsel at The Trump Organization, said Trump called Beck "disgusting" because she was about to use her breast pump in the middle of the deposition room."She was disgusting," Garten said in a phone interview with CNN. "She was attempting to breast feed -- to pump in the middle of a deposition, in a deposition room with five lawyers and was not excusing herself."
Garten said Beck started to assemble the pump in the deposition room and "started to move the breast pump toward her breast."
He claimed Beck orchestrated the stunt because "she ran out of questions and she didn't know what to do."
"This is not about breastfeeding ... it's just not," Garten insisted.
Beck painted a very different picture, saying Trump was the one whose behavior was "unprofessional" and displayed a "lack of self-control."
"What kind of a leader of the United States would that be? Is he going to behave that way when he's negotiating treaties with China or Russia?" she said.
Beck insisted that the breast-pumping break was set to coincide with a pre-scheduled lunch break at 12:30, but that Trump decided at the last minute he did not want a break. An email exchange between Beck and a law firm representing Trump shows a lunch order was made and set to arrive around noon.
Garten disputed that, insisting the only pre-scheduled break was one set for 3 p.m. for Beck to pump breast milk privately in a separate room.

And Trump was intent on proceeding through the deposition without any additional breaks, according to a transcript of the deposition CNN obtained through public records.
He even refused to take a break when one of his attorneys requested to go to the bathroom, instead insisting another lawyer could take over and allow the deposition to continue.
Trump's testimony stemmed from a lawsuit over a failed real estate project in Florida in which the Becks represented clients who claimed they lost tens of thousands of dollars each.

The breast-pumping incident wasn't the only time Trump insulted the attorney during the deposition, according to a transcript of the deposition obtained by CNN.
After first calling Beck's questions "very stupid," Trump then questioned Beck's competence.
"Do you even know what you're doing?" he asked her at one point.
In the end, the Becks lost one of their cases against Trump and are appealing.
News of the "disgusting" remark came on the heels of another rhetorical controversy swirling around Trump.
Facing questions about a decades-old rape accusation against Trump, one of his top aides and attorneys Michael Cohen told the Daily Beast that legally "you cannot rape your spouse." In fact, marital rape has been illegal in all 50 states for more than two decades.
Trump distances himself from aide's rape comment
Cohen apologized Tuesday for the remark, calling his comments "inarticulate" but insisting that he had been enraged by the reporter's "gall" to ask a question about the accusation.
The rape claim stems from an accusation Trump's then-wife Ivana Trump leveled at her husband during divorce proceedings in the early 1990s, an allegation she walked back Tuesday.
If I knew all mysteries and all knowledge, and have not charity, I am nothing. St. Paul
I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind. Eric Hoffer
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Re: Masculinities of the far right

Postby American Dream » Wed Feb 08, 2017 6:38 pm

Misogyny may take various forms for various fascoid dudes but it does seem to be a constant theme for them.

Case in point: there is not much room at all for women in today's Alt Right.
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Re: Masculinities of the far right

Postby American Dream » Wed Feb 08, 2017 7:54 pm

The fascist superego

posted by Richard Seymour

There is a traditional way of talking about the fascist superego as, essentially: monarchical, masculine, militaristic. It is the censorship of the id, and the protection the ego from its drives which are canalised into minimal reproductive activity. It is the repression of sexuality and the feminine. Whereas the modern, rational ego would negotiate with the id to allow pleasure its say, the premodern superego can only treat the claims of the id as a threat to be crushed.

But if we take seriously the idea that there is an incipient fascist potential in Trumpism, we might want to query this conception, or at least update it. The description above sounds a lot more like a Christian reactionary like Ted Cruz, or perhaps a right-wing Islamist, than a right-wing populist like Trump. The man who brags about pussy-grabbing and 'smart' predatory practices, whose garish casinos and towers exude sumptuary extravagance, is many things, but not a puritan. Indeed, there's a sense in which he is more permissive than his rivals, allowing people to feel less guilty about bigotry, back-stabbing, ecological despoliation, casual sexual assault, and hoarding of property.

In fact, even the Nazi regime, despite its sexually repressive propaganda, ran a voluptuary ship, encouraging young men and women and boys and girls involved in the Nazi movement to engage in pre-marital sex. The rate of sexually transmitted infections and pregnancies soared. Despite the formal disapproval of sex workers, moreover, it encouraged and protected the existence of regulated brothels and red-light districts on grounds of national health. In crude propaganda terms, fascism extols heroic self-sacrifice over pleasurable indulgence, and directs all of the surplus libidinal energy into paraphilia (fetishism of uniforms and medals), aggressivity (war) and father worship (fuhrer). In its practical record, fascism needed people to fuck for pleasure, as if for the collective pleasure of the nation.


More at: http://www.leninology.co.uk/2017/01/the ... erego.html
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Re: Masculinities of the far right

Postby Karmamatterz » Wed Feb 08, 2017 11:10 pm

Nice work in the continuing effort to associate masculinity with fascism. What a crock of shit.
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Re: Masculinities of the far right

Postby American Dream » Wed Feb 08, 2017 11:31 pm

Misogyny and fascism

Hitler made an explicit link between "liberal" feminist and suffrage movements -- which even then were working to undermine the traditional disempowerment of women -- and Jews shortly after obtaining the chancellorhood in 1933. The next year he denounced the so-called New Woman as the "invention of Jewish intellectuals." He also urged German women to reject as unnatural the "overlapping of the spheres of activity of the sexes" as embodied in "Jewish intellectualism."

Hitler was fond of complaining about "feminized" Christianity and consistently prescribed a vision of Christ as "a fighter" and of the faith as "manly" and "hard." The Nazis' Christian wing, the Deutsche Christen, likewise railed against how "feminized" the church had become, and argued for a "virile" vision of the faith.

After Hitler's defeat, this pathology again slithered to the fringes. Mostly you could find complaints about "feminized" Christianity from folks like Identity pastor Pete Peters and Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler. The former, in fact, was fond of describing the source of the "feminization" thus:

The Jewish leaders believe they already control America. Recently, one of them stated publicly: "We have castrated Gentile society, through fear and intimidation. It's manhood exists only in combination with a feminine outward appearance. Being so neutered, the populace has become docile and easy to rule. As all geldings are by nature, their thoughts are not concerned with the future, or their posterity, BUT ONLY WITH THE PRESENT and the next meal." What a perfect "word picture of modern American society. It is the attitude of Christians, who don't want to be involved, and allow Jews, to control the school and often the church. We MUST break these fatal bonds, if we are to remain free.


Since Sept. 11, 2001, however, a lot of this talk -- as well as the vision of the "warrior Jesus" -- has returned with some intensity to the mainstream, though there had already been some seepage from the far right in the previous decade. Much of it, in fact, is closely associated with the increasing prevalence of pseudo-fascist thought as part of our political discourse. As we've well established by now, any American fascism is going to be wrapped in a flag and thumping on a Bible, extolling the virtues of "tradition" that includes sex and gender roles. And that's what we're getting.

It cannot be a mere coincidence, in fact, that while this is occurring, we're seeing more psychotic murders by controlling males whose chief mission seems to be to bring women under control and to avenge the damage done to their own twisted souls.


More at: http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2006/10/mi ... scism.html
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Re: Masculinities of the far right

Postby brekin » Thu Feb 09, 2017 1:07 am

Karmamatterz » Wed Feb 08, 2017 10:10 pm wrote:Nice work in the continuing effort to associate masculinity with fascism. What a crock of shit.


Please disassociate and disabuse us of this notion.
If I knew all mysteries and all knowledge, and have not charity, I am nothing. St. Paul
I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind. Eric Hoffer
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Re: Masculinities of the far right

Postby Searcher08 » Thu Feb 09, 2017 7:44 am

Karmamatterz » Thu Feb 09, 2017 3:10 am wrote:Nice work in the continuing effort to associate masculinity with fascism. What a crock of shit.


I got up to

Within the fascist’s primary social unit, the troop, he bonds intensely with his brothers-in-arms, and in so doing fuses with the “macromachine,” a fractal-like magnification of the rigid and phallic “totality formation” that is the fascist body. Hierarchy is essential to the functioning of the macromachine — it is the crystalline structure that holds liquidation at bay.


I thought this was an interesting notion that related somewhat to the ideas of dialectic sublimations.

Dialectic Sublimations: Pretextual narrative, feminism and submaterial
theory
John M. V. Scuglia

1. Eco and pretextual narrative
“Class is used in the service of capitalism,” says Lacan; however, according
to McElwaine[1] , it is not so much class that is used in
the service of capitalism, but rather the stasis of class. It could be said
that Foucault uses the term ‘textual deappropriation’ to denote the bridge
between society and class. Humphrey[2] suggests that we have
to choose between precultural semanticism and dialectic deappropriation.

However, Lyotard uses the term ‘textual deappropriation’ to denote not
narrative per se, but subnarrative. The subject is interpolated into a
pretextual paradigm of discourse that includes culture as a whole.
In a sense, the premise of pretextual narrative implies that consciousness
is part of the paradigm of reality. If textual deappropriation holds, we have
to choose between pretextual narrative and cultural semioticism.

Therefore, the subject is contextualised into a subpatriarchialist
desituationism that includes consciousness as a totality. Long[3] holds that we have to choose between textual deappropriation and postcapitalist material theory.

2. Subpatriarchialist desituationism and subdialectic feminism

In the works of Eco, a predominant concept is the distinction between
without and within. Thus, Bataille promotes the use of pretextual narrative to
attack and analyse society. The characteristic theme of Reicher’s[4] essay on textual deappropriation is the absurdity, and thus the fatal flaw, of semantic class.
In a sense, if subdialectic feminism holds, the works of Eco are not
postmodern. Sartre suggests the use of pretextual narrative to deconstruct
sexism.

Thus, Baudrillard’s model of subdialectic feminism suggests that narrativity
is used to disempower the proletariat, given that the premise of precapitalist
conceptualism is invalid. The primary theme of the works of Eco is the
difference between society and sexual identity.

1. McElwaine, Z. H. G. ed. (1977)
Pretextual narrative in the works of Madonna. And/Or Press

2. Humphrey, O. B. (1985) The Iron Door: Pretextual
narrative and textual deappropriation. University of Massachusetts
Press

3. Long, I. ed. (1998) Textual deappropriation and
pretextual narrative. And/Or Press

4. Reicher, A. N. (1981) The Stasis of Sexual identity:
Feminism, modern poststructuralist theory and pretextual narrative.
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Re: Masculinities of the far right

Postby American Dream » Thu Feb 09, 2017 10:33 am

What is fascism?
By AUTONOM ORGANISERING


The gendered nation state

The nation is always gendered, it is a virgin or a mother. In Sweden, the nation is “Moder Svea” (Mother Sweden). This symbolic woman needs the protection of her men, from other men that threaten to symbolically rape her. In nationalist thought this is connected with war (all nationalism is not fascism, but fascism grows out of nationalism): rape is a weapon to demoralize and insult the enemy men.

Image
The text is a fascist tweet saying: “To all you who support #inteerkvinna: There is no one who would want to defend you from being raped. You deserve it.” The hashtag #inteerkvinna (which translates to “#notyourwoman”) was an antifascist and feminist social media reaction to antimigrant attacks in Stockholm where fascist assailants claimed to be protecting Swedish woman from rape and sexual harassment(by foreigners).

Here, rape isn’t really about women, and it is especially not about sexual pleasure: it is about men dominating other men. Woman are as in all sexist thought only instruments to be used in relationships between men. In fascism’s case it is the threat of rape by a foreign power, above all the immigrant, that is a further development on this train of thought. This type of thinking is pronounced in the quote from twitter above, but is thus more clarified by the quote below, from the fascist forum motgift.nu.
“But there is something darker behind this behaviour. Something as elemantary as biology. Since women, biologically, are the more valuable sex they won’t be killed in the same extent. So if one wants to end up as high up in the conqueror’s hierarchy as possible and enjoy their security, one should prove oneself loyal from the start. What #inteerkvinna expresses is nothing other than the desire to be conquered, even if they do not likely realize this themselves. No one loves a weak man, not even the weak man himself. Unpleasant to speak of? Yes. But to ignore the fact will make it even more unpleasant in the end.Don’t take the woman for their word, but for their actions. None of them live in multicultural areas, or have especially many immigrant acquaintances I assume. They want a safe, Swedish and white existence, they know it and so do we. When men act like men, than women will start acting like women.” From “When Father Government had a sex-change“


The quote from motgift.nu illustrates the point well. Here, the position of women is biologically pre-determined in that they strive to be in the good graces of the “conquerors” who take on the role of an enemy army. Sexism isn’t, as many routinely think, a prejudice that can be unlearned through education. Sexism is the ascription of characteristics to people based on their gender, e.g. such as in the quote above in which women are supposed to be more caring. Fascists always amplify these preexisting societal tendencies and clarify them. For fascists biology is central and all actions that go against (their view of) it are based on “brain washing”. Any agency in feminist resistance to fascism is written off, as in quotes above in their hatred of the feminist and antifascist #inteerkvinna hashtag.

In the quote we find a very specific view of masculinities. These thoughts are developed even further by other fascists:

“Despite repeated abuse against our women and children the men of Europe are embarassingly quiet and idle. We can’t accept this any more. In older western litterature (as well as in certain modern literature and film) the basic theme is simple and traditional. The men that finally cross the line do it because their women and children – their famelies- are threatened. Often this is the great mistake of the villain, to attack someone’s wife. Just read Lönn’s Der Wehrwolf or von Kleist’s Kohlhaas or watch Mel Gibson’s Braveheart. The men put up with a lot for their own sake, but when their families were threatened the shit hit the fan. This of course was back in the day when the man was the provider and protecter. This is no longer a given, neither for men nor for women since this tradional order of things has come inte question and under ridicule and in other ways been put aside.” – Magnus Söderman “Manna Upp och Beskydda Våra Kvinnor för Bövelen”(translation: “Man up and defend our women for god’s sake”)

Image


Here we see that men too are brainwashed if they are not willing to live up to fascist ideals. For fascism masculinity entails a type of parodic Hollywood demeanor, a fantasy which is unattainable for a regular person. It is also definitely a jail for men. Fascists also always seem to falsify history: the society they yearn for is a product of capitalist relations after 1880 where the nuclear family becomes the main node in societal organization. Earlier the working class lived in extended family situations. The ways in which femininity and masculinity have been done has varied greatly throughout the millennia and between geographies.


More at: https://autonomorganisering.noblogs.org ... s-fascism/
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Re: Masculinities of the far right

Postby brekin » Thu Feb 09, 2017 1:15 pm

I think it bears repeating that the Radical Left, as well as the Radical Right, can facilitate the fascist "mega-machine" alluded to.
The Radical Right seeks to champion and ascend the authoritarian father to supremacy supposedly to keep the family unit together against hostile cultural forces.
But when authoritarian fathers get in control of the country the family is subverted to the State which seeks to take it apart and make every member loyal to the leader and State first.
The Radical Left seeks the same end goal, but less inadvertently, as it sees the authoritarian father as already suspect so wants to skip to the mega-machine as fast as possible to "rescue" children and women from the family, which they see as merely/mostly a capitalistic and consumer creation. Because everyone in the machine is equal (except the machines operators, designers and managers of course) and is in service to the State, all is well. Trump obviously is a manifestation of the toxic masculine and misogynist strain of fascism. But there is nothing to say that a Radical Left orientated fascism couldn't develop, and may even be the long term counter development of Trump's presidency if conditions worsen economically and culturally under Trump.
If I knew all mysteries and all knowledge, and have not charity, I am nothing. St. Paul
I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind. Eric Hoffer
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Re: Masculinities of the far right

Postby American Dream » Thu Feb 09, 2017 1:27 pm

I would say that your point about the "Radical Left" (which is not a monolith), does apply to some pro-State factions, of which Stalinism is one of the most notorious examples.

It doesn't seem to apply to the more libertarian tendencies within that "Radical Left", excepting those who most dogmatically eschew social organization, which thus provides a set up for more machiavellian forces to take over...
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Re: Masculinities of the far right

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Thu Feb 09, 2017 2:08 pm

Brandon Darby was a godsend to clarify tangles like that. Almost every group photo of his activist days is a striking contrast, he's got an athletic physique and that's...just not common in those circles.

Furthermore, his MO as an agent was being assertive and aggressive, imposing a combative masculinity on both group and individual dynamics. In meetings, he would embody and project power -- in recruiting fall guys, he would physically dominate them and insult their manhood.

And he did it all to retire to a farm and do right wing podcasts. What a perfect synecdoche for this whole thread.
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Re: Masculinities of the far right

Postby American Dream » Thu Feb 09, 2017 2:28 pm

Brandon Darby is a Managing Director for Breitbart. What a delicious irony! I have to wonder exactly when he started working with the Feds, too.

Also, there are plenty of "manarchists" like him- ask a feminist who runs in those circles.

He qualifies as a major creep by any reasonable standard:




FBI Informant Brandon Darby : Sexism, Egos, and Lies



Why Misogynists Make Great Informants: How Gender Violence on the Left Enables State Violence in Radical Movements
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