The stupid person’s Richard Perle
Marx’s line about history repeating itself proves its utility once again. German fascism was pressaged by the work of, for example, Ernst Junger. American fascism, it seems, will have to make do with Tom Clancy. When I was talking earlier about splendid James Bond communism, I forgot to mention the related phenomenon that is Tom Clancy’s communism. There’s something pleasingly Hegelian about the constructive aufhebung of multiple negations going on here: Clancy constructs a manichean image of evil designed as the negative of his own values; we communists negate Clancy’s values and negate his negative image, thereby gaining access to a fictionally-existing communism that can mediate our own negation of actually-existing communism, allowing it to become a creative, rather than merely reactive (that is, bourgeois liberal) negation.
As with James Bond, the essentially fictional status of Clancy’s communism becomes more apparent after the end of the cold war. With actually existing communism no longer a credible dramatic threat, Clancy’s communism becomes ever more spectral, with each book in his saga constructing a more convoluted genealogy to explain how the threat-du-jour (Islamic terrorists, Japanese post-fascists) is in fact a cats-paw of the Evil Chinese.
Like PNAC, Clancy realises that, in the abscence of a real threat, the American right-wing narrative needs to create a threat — and, if you’re creating a threat, the more mythical (hence threatening and undefeatable) a threat the better. One difference is that Clancy is less imaginative than Richard Perle, and so rather than coming up with the all-new threat of Al Quaeda, is reduced to repeating the old anti-communist story in increasingly silly ways. The second difference, of course, is that Clancy is merely a bad novelist, and so does not have the power to make his fictions become real.
Conspiracy theories are a fundamentally bourgeois passtime (much like freemasonry), and so are rendered useless by the baggage of bourgeois notions of agency, causation, etc. It’s a conspiracy theory, and politically useless to boot, to suggest that Richard Perle or Paul Wolfowitz or any group of neo-cons are responsible for the September 11th attacks, for example. But it’s not a conspiracy theory to point out that the structural conditions which favour neo-con ascendency are precisely the ones that allow (in fact, require) something like September 11th to happen. Like the stoic dog running behind the cart, the neo-cons have been merrily tinkering around the edges of these structural conditions, smashing various parts of the world, and creating their twin myths of The New Perl Harbour and America As Peace Maker, and waiting for their fantasies to come true without intervention on their part.
I’m not sure how far to push this, but you could claim that the contemporary anti-imperialist left are in the same position as Perle and Clancy, their it’s-still-the-sixties praxis saved in the nick of time by the intrusion into reality of its required fictional imperialism (Micheal Hardt toys with this idea in an interview which is an excellent read for entirely separate reasons). The difference is, as anthrochica quite rightly says, that the neocons being exemplary post-modernists know that their enemy is their own shadowy creation and don’t care. Anti-imperialism, still hung up on proving that imperialism is really real, alienates it as some kind of objective reality, and thus precisely plays into the neocons’ game.
The problem with Straussianism is that, as it’s publicly committed to not telling the truth about itself (the celebrated esoteric/exoteric distinction), it’s natural to assume that its public face is a deception, and to imagine that it’s involved in a conspiracy. Thus, it manages to get away with conducting its non-conspiracy in plain sight. The more obviously fascist Clancy likes to fantasise about a secret intelligence organisation set up by the US president but unaccountable to any democracy (and if you think my talk of metaphorical jackboots is excessive, check out the literal jackboots on that cover). The post-fascist PNAC creates a public organisation that sets up its own president by taking advantage of an increasingly non-democratic democracy (’post-fascist’ is a useful term from Italian politics; it means ‘fascist’).
So, what’s the upshot of all this? I’m not exactly sure, except that it seems the world is a confusing place; and I hope I have managed to convey that adequately with this confusing post.
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Have you read this, Tim?
http://p205.ezboard.com/fthegodlesszone32008frm2.showMessage?topicID=763.topic
I know he’s an apostate now, but he could have had some good ideas once…
I’ve never read any Clancy so I wondered what you made of the review.
Comment by Alistair @ 11/23/2004 5:13 pm
Thanks, that’s a very good review. Particularly, he points out Clancy’s bizarre habit of presenting his villains as being evil for holding precisely the views he himself holds.
Comment by Tim @ 11/24/2004 7:11 pm
Is Richard Perle really a clever person’s Richard Perle?
Comment by Mark Elf @ 11/24/2004 10:09 pm