Anti-Racist Education 13: Post Modernism's Fascist Antecedents

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Subject: Anti-Racist Education 13: Post Modernism's Fascist Antecedents
Date: 24 Aug 1996 06:27:03 GMT
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Origins of Anti-Racist Post-Modernism

Since the publication of *The Closing of the American Mind*, fortuitously
there has been fresh attention to the Nazism of Heidegger, more and more
widely recognized as the most intelligent figure contributing to the
post-modernist movement. At the same time the late Paul de Man, who as a
professor at Yale introduced deconstructionism into the U.S., was revealed
to have written, as a young man in his native Belgium, pro-Nazi articles
for a collaborationist newspaper. In reading these articles I was struck
by the fact that if one suppresses the references to Hitler and Hitlerism,
much of it sounds like what one reads in advanced literary reviews today.

The lively debate around these issues has not been very helpful, for it
focuses more on questions of personal guilt than on the possible relation
of Heidegger's or de Man's thought to the foulest political extremism. The
fact that de Man had become a leftist after settling in America proves not
a thing. He never seems to have passed through a stage where he was
attracted to reason or liberal democracy. Those who chose culture over
civilization, the real opposition, which we have forgotten, were forced to
a position beyond good and evil, for to them good and evil were products
of cultures.

From Alan Bloom, "Western Civ--And Me," *Commentary* August 1990

An Early Publication by a Leading Anti-Racist

Vulgar anti-Semitism readily considers postwar cultural phenomena (after
the war of 1914-1918) as degenerate and decadent because Judaized
[enjuive]. Literature hasn't escaped this lapidary judgement: it is
enough to have discovered several Jewish writers under Latinized
pseudonyms for all contemporary production to be considered polluted and
harmful. This conception entails some rather dangerous consequences. In
the first place, it condemns a priori an entire literature that in no way
deserves this fate. Moreover, from the moment one agrees to assign some
merit to the literature of our day, it would be an unflattering estimation
of Western writers to reduce them to being mere imitators of a Jewish
culture that is foreign to them.

The Jews themselves have contributed to this myth. Often, they have
glorified themselves as leaders of the literary movements that
characterize our era. But the mistake has, in reality, a deeper cause. The
very prevalent opinion, according to which modern poetry and the modern
novel were only monstrous outgrowths of the world war, is at the root of
the thesis of a Jewish takeover. Since the Jews have, in fact, played an
important role in the phoney and disordered existence of Europe since
1920, a novel born in that atmosphere would deserve, up to a certain
point, the description *enjuive*.

. . . . .

We could not have much hope for the future of our civilization if it had
let itself be invaded, without resistance, by a foreign force. In keeping
its originality and its character intact, despite Semitic interference in
all aspects of European life, our civilization has shown that its
fundamental nature is healthy. What's more, one can thus see that a
solution to the Jewish problem that would lead to the creation of a Jewish
colony isolated from Europe [ie. the Madagascar Plan] would not have, for
the literary life of the West, regrettable consequences. It would lose, in
all, some personalities of mediocre worth and would continue, as in the
past, to develop according to its higher laws of evolution.

From Paul De Man, "Jews in Contemporary Literature," *Le Soir* 4 March
1941; translated in David Lehman, *Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and
the Fall of Paul de Man* (New York: Poseidon Press, 1991), 269-71

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