Rule 11 — High Noon

Rule #1 :

Stand up straight with your shoulders back

Rule #2 :

Treat yourself like you would someone you are responsible for helping

Rule #3 :

Make friends with people who want the best for you

Rule #4 :

Compare yourself with who you were yesterday, not with who someone else is today

Rule #5 :

Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them

Rule #6 :

Set your house in perfect order before you criticise The World

Rule #7 :

Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)

Rule #8 :

Tell The Truth – or, at least, don’t lie.

Rule #9

Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t

Rule #10 :

Be precise in your speech

Rule #11 : 

Do not bother children when they are skate-boarding

Rule #12 :

Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street

" Some might call that stupid. Maybe it was. But it was brave, too. I thought those kids were amazing. I thought they deserved a pat on the back and some honest admiration. Of course it was dangerous. Danger was the point. They wanted to triumph over danger. They would have been safer in protective equipment, but that would have ruined it. They weren’t trying to be safe. They were trying to become competent—and it’s competence that makes people as safe as they can truly be."
 

" The boys who shot up Columbine High School, whom we discussed earlier, had appointed themselves judges of the human race—like the TEDx professor, although much more extreme; like Chris, my doomed friend. For Eric Harris, the more literate of the two killers, human beings were a failed and corrupt species.

Once a presupposition such as that is accepted, its inner logic will inevitably manifest itself. If something is a plague, as David Attenborough has it, or a cancer, as the Club of Rome claimed, the person who eradicates it is a hero— a veritable planetary saviour, in this case. 

A real messiah might follow through with his rigorous moral logic, and eliminate himself, as well. This is what mass murderers, driven by near-infinite resentment, typically do. Even their own Being does not justify the existence of humanity. In fact, they kill themselves precisely to demonstrate the purity of their commitment to annihilation. No one in the modern world may without objection express the opinion that existence would be bettered by the absence of Jews, blacks, Muslims, or Englishmen.

Why, then, is it virtuous to propose that the planet might be better off, if there were fewer people on it? I can’t help but see a skeletal, grinning face, gleeful at the possibility of the apocalypse, hiding not so very far behind such statements.

And why does it so often seem to be the very people standing so visibly against prejudice who so often appear to feel obligated to denounce humanity itself?

I have seen university students, particularly those in the humanities, suffer genuine declines in their mental health from being philosophically berated by such defenders of the planet for their existence as members of the human species. It’s worse, I think, for young men. 

As privileged beneficiaries of the patriarchy, their accomplishments are considered unearned. As possible adherents of rape culture, they’re sexually suspect. Their ambitions make them plunderers of the planet. They’re not welcome. At the junior high, high school and university level, they’re falling behind educationally. 

When my son was fourteen, we discussed his grades. He was doing very well, he said, matter-offactly, for a boy. I inquired further. Everyone knew, he said, that girls do better in school than boys. His intonation indicated surprise at my ignorance of something so self-evident. 

While writing this, I received the latest edition of The Economist. The cover story? “The Weaker Sex”—meaning males. In modern universities women now make up more than 50 percent of the students in more than two-thirds of all disciplines.

Boys are suffering, in the modern world. They are more disobedient—negatively—or more independent—positively—than girls, and they suffer for this, throughout their pre-university educational career. They are less agreeable (agreeableness being a personality trait associated with compassion, empathy and avoidance of conflict) and less susceptible to anxiety and depression, at least after both sexes hit puberty. 

Boys’ interests tilt towards things; girls’ interests tilt towards people. 

Strikingly, these differences, strongly influenced by biological factors, are most pronounced in the Scandinavian societies where gender-equality has been pushed hardest: this is the opposite of what would be expected by those who insist, ever more loudly, that gender is a social construct.

It isn’t. 

This isn’t a debate. 

The data are in. "

Do male crustaceans oppress female crustaceans?

Should their hierarchies be upended?

Gentleman's Relish : The City of Big Temptation

In the early years of the nineteenth century, refugees from war-torn Europe began arriving in New York in great numbers. Many were remnants of the crumbling French aristocracy, forced to seek refuge abroad from the dread "Monsieur Guillotine." Arriving here without funds or friends, many of these were forced to survive, as one contemporary put it, "by their wits or worse."

One of these, arriving in late 1803 or early 1804, was Mlle. Evelyn Claudine de Saint-Évremond. Daughter of a noted courtier, wit, and littérateur, and herself a favorite of Marie Antoinette, Evelyn was by all accounts remarkably attractive: beautiful, vivacious, and well-educated, and she was soon a society favorite. For reasons never disclosed, however, a planned marriage the following year to John Hamilton, son of the late Alexander Hamilton, was called off at the last minute. Soon after, with support from several highly placed admirers, she established a salon -- in fact, a brothel -- in a substantial house that still stands at 42 Bond Street, then one of the city's most exclusive residential districts.

Evelyn's establishment quickly won, and for several decades maintained, a formidable reputation as the most entertaining and discreet of the city's many "temples of love," a place not only for lovemaking, but also for elegant dinners, high-stakes gambling, and witty conversation. The girls, many of them fresh arrivals from Paris or London, were noted for their beauty and bearing. More than a few of them, apparently, were actually able to secure wealthy husbands from among the establishment's clientele.

When New Yorkers insisted on anglicizing her name to "Eve," Evelyn apparently found the biblical reference highly amusing, and for her part would refer to the temptresses in her employ as "my irresistable apples." The young men-about-town soon got into the habit of referring to their amorous adventures as "having a taste of Eve's Apples." This knowing phrase established the speaker as one of the "in" crowd, and at the same time made it clear he had no need to visit one of the coarser establishments that crowded nearby Mercer Street, for instance. The enigmatic reference in Philip Hone's famous diary to "Ida, sweet as apple cider" (October 4, 1838) has been described as an oblique reference to a visit to what had by then become a notorious but cherished civic institution.

The rest, as they say, is etymological history.

The sexual connotation of the word "apple" was well known in New York and throughout the country until around World War I. The Gentleman's Directory of New York City, a privately published (1870) guide to the town's "houses of assignation," confidently asserted that "in freshness, sweetness, beauty, and firmness to the touch, New York's apples are superior to any in the New World or indeed the Old." Meanwhile, various "apple" catch-phrases -- "the Apple Tree," "the Real Apple," etc. -- were used as synonyms for New York City itself, which boasted (if that is the term) more houses of ill repute per capita than any other major U.S. municipality.

William Jennings Bryan, though hardly the first to denounce New York as a sink of iniquity, appears to have been the first to use the "apple" epithet in public discourse, branding the city, in a widely reprinted 1892 campaign speech, as "the foulest Rotten Apple on the Tree of decadent Federalism." The double-entendre -- i.e., as a reference to both political and sexual corruption -- would have been well understood by voters of the time.

The term "Big Apple" or "The Apple" had already passed into general use as a sobriquet for New York City by 1907, when one guidebook included the comment, "Some may think the Apple is losing some of its sap." Interestingly, the phrase had also become pretty well "sanitized" in the process, thanks to a vigorous campaign mounted just after the turn of the century by the Apple Marketing Board, a trade group based in upstate Cortland, New York. Alarmed by sharply declining sales, the Association launched what some believe to be the earliest example of what would now be called a "product positioning campaign."

By devising and energetically promoting such slogans as "An apple a day keeps the Doctor away" and "as American as apple pie!" the A.M.B. was able to successfully "rehabilitate" the apple as a popular comestible, free of unsavory associations. It is believed that the group also distributed apples to the poor for sale on the city's streets during the Great Depression (1930-38). No convincing documentary evidence has been produced to support this, however.

-- Society for New York City History,

Education Committee

“He’s fat, and scant of breath”

Fat people are not inhuman, they are fat.

"I suggest, finally, that the inclusion of the line “He’s fat, and scant of breath” in similar productions has the potential to encourage the audience to feel, and finally to interrogate, the dehumanizing implications of our fatphobic constructs."

No it doesn't.

Hamlet is fat, unhappy and over-privileged; young, white and 21.

And there is no such word as "fatophobic"

The play is about how Hamlet's Pride and Sense of Entitlement causes him to utterly destroy himself, everyone he loves, his entire birthright bequeathed to him by his late father, the Kingdom of Denmark - after having been given just the tiniest nudge to get it started by The Devil pretending to be the ghost of his dead father, who spins him a tissue of lies which are precisely what he wants to hear. Because he is proud, and immodest.

It's autobiographical.

Of *course* Hamlet is fat - he expects to win this final, epic duel to the death with this man who is not his enemy (Laertes is his foil, not his enemy or his Nemesis), not through skill or athletic ability, but by God's Grace and favour and the Divine Right of Kings.

“He’s fat, and scant of breath”: The Rise of a Modern Fatphobia in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Commentary on Hamlet

Abstract: This essay examines the extensive critical commentary on a single line of Hamlet — “He’s fat, and scant of breath” (5.2.287) — in order to trace the emergence of a modern understanding of the fat body. Unremarkable in the eighteenth century, the line becomes the center of debate in the nineteenth century at precisely the period in which fat bodies come to be seen as having an essential nature, assumed to be cowardly, lazy, and undisciplined. Attributed to Goethe and developed by a German Shakespeare tradition, Hamlet’s supposed weakness of character is explained by his fat character. In response, English-speaking Shakespeare critics develop scholarly methods to distance Hamlet from “fat” altogether, initially by offering bibliographical arguments for emending the word and finally by offering etymological arguments that redefine it to mean anything other than corpulent. The final section of this essay considers the extent to which this same understanding of the fat body was employed in responses to Simon Russell Beale’s performance of Hamlet. I suggest, finally, that the inclusion of the line “He’s fat, and scant of breath” in similar productions has the potential to encourage the audience to feel, and finally to interrogate, the dehumanizing implications of our fatphobic constructs.

§

This essay offers a reading of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century responses to a single line of Hamlet. The line, present in the First Folio, the Second Quarto, and all modern critical editions, has Queen Gertrude, when watching her son, Hamlet, fence with Laertes, cry out with motherly concern, “He’s fat, and scant of breath” (5.2.287).¹Most today find the line incongruous: why, after all, would Gertrude call her son fat? Such a response, I argue, has a history. The line, unremarkable in the eighteenth century, inspired intense scholarly scrutiny in the Victorian period, when understandings of “fat” take on a modern form. Fat is now seen as an outward sign of an inner, essential nature, where the fat person is assumed to be cowardly, lazy, and undisciplined. Only with the emergence of this modern understanding of fat does it become “ludicrous” and “impossible” for most to accept that the heroic Hamlet — “The glass of fashion and the mould of form” (3.1.153) — could be fat. Such an understanding of fat gains central importance in the period in which the play is increasingly seen through the character of Hamlet and his interiority (de Grazia). The modern understanding of fat can explain what comes to be seen as the central problem of the play: namely, what in Hamlet’s character accounts for his failure to act (Dixon, “Line”).² In an 1887 lecture, James Russell Lowell gives voice to this new modern sentiment when he confidently asserts that “A fat Hamlet is as inconceivable as a lean Falstaff” (189).³

This essay participates in what I term in The Culture of Obesity in Early and Late Modernity a “fat history,” a scholarly project to excavate past responses to the fat body in order to better understand and critique our own contemporary understandings of, and widespread stigmatization of, the fat body (Levy-Navarro 1-34). Much like presentism in Shakespeare studies, a fat history does not reject historicism per se, but only a historicism that does not explicitly situate itself in the present historical moment. A fat history acknowledges that, as Hugh Grady argues, “there is no historicism without a latent presentism” (115). In The Culture of Obesity, I focus on early modern moralistic constructions of fat, especially those found in “puritan” narratives. I turn here to Victorian responses to Hamlet in order to examine an understanding of fat even more immediately relevant today. What Frederic Jameson has described as the overdeveloped West is significantly indebted to the essentialist construction of fat that emerges in the Victorian period, albeit interpreted through a moralistic framework that has a much longer legacy (xviii). Joyce L. Huff made this point well over a decade ago (“Horror,” 42).⁴ I would now add that this modern understanding of fat — whereby the fat person is assumed to have a nature that is weak-willed, unhealthy, and out of control — is even more hegemonic in this post-9/11 world where national and international agencies are involved in what is frequently characterized as a “war against obesity.” In these terms of warfare, the disembodied “obesity” is often described as a detrimental force, whether a “terror within” or a “disease” that threatens to destroy society (Levy-Navarro, Culture 1-19). Those who have the misfortune to be labeled “obese” or “overweight” are increasingly subject to surveillance, whether from their employers, physicians, insurance companies, or, indeed, themselves.⁵ With this growing cultural panic concerning “obesity,” the constructions surrounding “fat” need more scholarly attention. Precisely because these constructions have become so pervasive, however, it is particularly difficult to see them as anything other than transhistorical and natural conditions.⁶

Shakespeare criticism has for the most part remained silent on the issue of body size, even as it admirably explores many other aspects of embodiment, including those of gender, sexuality, and race. Because it solicited so much scholarly analysis from the middle of the nineteenth century until the middle of the twentieth century, criticism of the line “He’s fat, and scant of breath” offers us a convenient way to document this silence. The year 1951 marks a useful turning point, after which “The rest is silence.” Three articles on the line appeared that year in scholarly journals, but subsequently, the topic went underground, discussed in brief but important editorial footnotes and in more informal academic venues like the academic listserv (Dickson; Stoll; Maxwell).⁷ This silence does not result from resolution to the ostensible problems the line presents. As editors observe, no evidence has been found to rid us of “fat Hamlet”; nonetheless, we remain convinced that Hamlet must not be fat. I therefore contend that our current silence on the matter results from our own fatphobia, which makes a fat Hamlet increasingly “inconceivable” despite what Gertude plainly says. One sign of the extent to which it is inconceivable is the widespread tendency to omit the line in productions, thereby preserving intact our cultural assumption that Hamlet must be thin.

The lone voices breaking this silence belong, in fact, to the editors, whose sustained attention to the critical debate around the line makes them more likely to recognize some of the assumptions evident in previous criticism. The editors of the Arden 3 Hamlet, Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, note, “This word ['fat'] has been much discussed by commentators who do not want it to mean ‘overweight’” (5.2.269n). Gone from this note are all attempts to argue that the word “fat” is a printer’s error, as well as the obsessive insistence that the character of Hamlet cannot possibly be fat (and thus must presumably be thin). Even those editors who continue in the critical tradition of glossing “fat” as anything other than corpulent acknowledge that there is no real evidence for such a reading. T.J.B. Spencer begins his note by observing that the word “fat” is “incongruous,” only to admit, “There is slight evidence that it could mean ‘sweaty,’ but the usual meaning was the same as today” (5.2.281n). Harold Jenkins, editor of Arden 2, concludes that “no certain and authenticated parallel has been given for fat as an epithet for the condition, rather than the cause of the sweating” (5.2.290LN). The editor of the New Cambridge Shakespeare, Philip Edwards, similarly agrees that the word, “fat” must mean “sweaty” or “out of training,” even as he admits that both interpretations are “not properly attested” (5.2.264n). Outside of these important exceptions, Shakespeare scholars have tended not to take a fat Hamlet seriously, and thus not to reflect on or historicize their own attitudes about body size.

I. Fat Hamlet and the Essential Fat Identity

Before the nineteenth century, the line excited little to no commentary. Eighteenth-century editors showed virtually no interest in the line. Insofar as they discussed it at all, they did so to take up issues concerning the theatrical history of the play, and gradually those concerning theatrical decorum. The line is first singled out for notice by John Roberts in his 1729Answer to Mr. Pope’s Preface to Shakespear. (The question Roberts raises subsequently enters into the Second Variorum commentary.) Roberts cites the line to support his contention that John Lowin, a fat man, was the “original Hamlet”: “That he was Sizeable to play Henry the Eighth, and yet perform’d the Part of Hamlet is reconciled by observing the Queen says, in the fighting Scene between Him and Laertes, ‘He is FAT and scant of Breath’” (36). Roberts, proudly self-identified on the title page as a “strolling Player,” is interested in the performance history of Shakespeare, having written An Answer to counter Pope’s purely poetic analysis. As an actor with a considerable knowledge of theater history, Roberts understands that actors’ bodies do not always ideally match the audience’s expectations. His use of the word “sizable” is likely to strike the contemporary reader as a euphemism, but notably, the word need not so much signify “large” as suitably or appropriately proportioned (OED “sizeable,” adj.). Although there is apparently some discussion about whether Lowin is less than “sizable” (appropriately sized) for the role of Hamlet, there seems to be no sense in this discussion that fatness indicates of a flawed or cowardly nature. 

Variorum editors use the line to answer the same question about the identity of the original Hamlet, first arguing that it was John Lowin (initially suggested by John Roberts), then Joseph Taylor (added to the list of possibilities by George Steevens and supported by Edmund Malone, who explicitly rejects Lowin), and then finally, in Malone and Boswell’s Third Varorium, Richard Burbage.⁸ Later commentators accept the final verdict that Burbage did, in fact, originate the role (the evidence being further developed by John Payne Collier in 1843), but they begin to focus attention increasingly on the general question of whether, as Steevens notes in his 1778 edition, the “words are employed, with reference to the obesity of the actor” (Johnson-Steevens 408 n.7).⁹ Editors place increasing attention on theatrical decorum, or the issue of which shapes and sizes of bodies are appropriate to what roles. Even more than Roberts, Steevens focuses on the unsuitability of Lowin for the role, and thus the unsuitability of the fat body for a role such as Hamlet. As he conjectures, Shakespeare added the line to “apologize” for the fatness of the actor: 

If he [John Lowin] was adapted, by the corpulence of his figure, to appear with propriety in the two former of these characters [Falstaff and Henry VIII], Shakespeare might have put this observation into the mouth of her majesty, to apologize for the want of such elegance of person as an audience might expect to meet with in the representation of the youthful Prince of Denmark, whom Ophelia speaks of as “the glass of fashion and the mould of form.” (408n.7)

Steevens imagines here an audience who expects certain bodies to play certain roles. A fat actor, then, would ideally play a clown or an older king, but not ideally a young royal, especially one who is seen as a suitor. Such an understanding of body types and sizes is certainly fatphobic: it assumes the fat body has a “want of such elegance.” But this fatphobia is largely based on a certain understanding of theatrical decorum. The idea of a fat Hamlet is not something that is ludicrous, inconceivable, or monstrous, but simply theatrically inconvenient.

A more dangerous form of fatphobia emerges in the nineteenth century, when the fat body comes to be seen as having a certain innate character. Such a modern understanding of fat becomes useful during the period in which, as de Grazia has argued, the play is read through the lens of Hamlet’s (flawed) character. Thus, his supposed failure to act can be linked to his own nature by drawing on the new understanding of fat. Pat Rogers, in his masterful “Fat is a Fictional Issue,” demonstrates how by the second half of the nineteenth century in England, “corporeal codes became easier and easier to read as more of personal identity became lodged in physical shape” (31). Sharrona Pearl argues similarly that artists of all kinds could rely on a widespread popular “physiognomical literacy,” where body shape and size signify certain essential character types.¹⁰So pervasive do these ideas become that artists can use a few words or a few lines to summon up these character types for the audience. 

The argument that Hamlet was fat and that his fatness explains his weakness of character was initially ascribed to Goethe through a particular (mis)reading of his influential bildungsroman, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. The importance of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship on the century’s Shakespeare criticism cannot be overestimated. Horace Howard Furness, the American editor of the New Variorum edition of Hamlet(1877), acknowledged the central significance of the commentary: “Goethe’s interpretation, [is] everywhere as widely known as the play itself” (xiii). For English readers, Goethe’s interpretation was known through translation by the great Victorian critic Thomas Carlyle. First published in 1824 and reissued throughout the nineteenth century, Carlyle’s translation of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeshiphad, as Russell Jackson notes, “the status Proust’s masterpiece enjoys with us – it was the book everyone hoped you thought they had read – and knowing citation of the Hamlet comments was obligatory” (113).¹¹

Goethe’s text, then, was mediated by Carlyle’s translation, and by a German critical tradition that ascribed to Goethe the genius of having invented “constitutional criticism.”¹² An examination of the German criticism lies outside the confines of this study, but ubiquitous in English criticism are references to German critics and to Goethe as the German critic of the first order.¹³ In Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Hamlet (translated in 1882), for instance, Karl Elze draws on Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister to argue that “It is a masterly stroke of the poet to bring Hamlet’s indecision and inertness, his melancholy and heartache, into connexion [sic] with his physique, so as to account physiologically for his turn of mind and character” (246n). This German “insight” into Hamlet also introduces into English criticism a connection between fat and what is called variously “nature,” naturelle, “constitution,” or “non-executive or lymphatic temperament.”¹⁴ In the 1862 American Civil War, pro-Union, and abolitionist periodical The Continental Monthly, Edward C. agrees with what he takes to be Goethe’s remarks: “if the theory is true, the enigma of Hamlet’s character can be solved through calculations of his pinguitude” (571). The British actor and editor Thomas Wade, in a published lecture on Hamlet, interrupts his train of thought to “reflect upon this singular fact in Hamlet’s physical history” (31).¹⁵ That Hamlet had become fat by the time he fenced Laertes is taken as a sign of his degeneration of character – in effect the reverse process of our cultural view of slimming today or Bantingism in the period. In a more recognizably scientific vein, E. Vale Blake, in Popular Science Monthly, argues that Hamlet offers a “celebrated case” of “fatty degeneration” (61). As he writes, “a redundance of adipose matter essentially weakens and impedes the power of the will,” thereby explaining Hamlet’s infamous failure to act decisively to avenge his father (61).

Despite the influence of these German Hamlets, most critics writing in English reject a reading in which the supposed failure of Hamlet’s character is explained through a specific reading of the fat body. Many critics, however, both implicitly and explicitly offer counter-arguments to the reading that is ascribed to the massive figure of Goethe. What critics did not see at the time is that Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeshipactually offers three very different, competing interpretations of Gertrude’s line – by Wilhelm; Serlo, the actor-manager; and Aurelia, Serlo’s sister – and conceivably any of them could be given the weight of Goethe’s authority. Their interpretations, moreover, are in dialogue with one another, with no single interpretation winning the day. The fact that Wilhelm’s interpretation was taken up by critics as Goethe’s own suggests the degree to which bodies were predisposed to be read as suggestive of character types.

Much like the eighteenth-century Roberts, Serlo considers roles in terms of the exigencies of theater, and thus he understands that roles are played by all types of bodies, even if some of those bodies might be less than ideal for the role. When Wilhelm insists that he is not suitable for the role of Hamlet because “in my whole form and physiognomy, there is not one feature such as Shakespeare meant for Hamlet,” Serlo offers the perfect actor-manager response that surely “the actor fits himself to his part as he can, and the part to him as it must” (Goethe 2:290). Serlo finds Wilhelm’s physiognomic character criticism impertinent insofar as it insists on a singular and stable sense of character that exists independently of any specific theatrical production. Whereas Wilhelm believes in the existence of a character, Hamlet, as Shakespeare intended him, Serlo looks rather to a Hamlet that is a product of particular productions, where actors, actor-managers, and audiences work to co-create character. According to this view, the theatrical company is not constrained to reproduce the so-called authentic Hamlet as Shakespeare intended him.

Even as Serlo rejects Wilhelm’s reading as impertinent, Aurelia rejects it as ugly. Shakespeare’s intention or Hamlet’s character type do not matter to Aurelia; all that matters is what pleasure the play can provide the audience. Regardless as to how compelling a physiognomic interpretation may seem, the players are not so straight-jacketed. Aurelia thus counters Wilhelm’s reading of Hamlet’s character with her own aesthetic criticism:

“In the first place," answered Wilhelm, “he is fair-haired.”

“That I call far-fetched,” observed Aurelia. “How do you infer that?”

“As a Dane, as a Northman, he is fair-haired and blue-eyed by descent.”

“And you think Shakespeare had this in view?”

“I do not find it specially expressed; but, by comparison of passages, I think it incontestable. The fencing tires him; the sweat is running from his brow; and the Queen remarks, He’s fat and scant of breath. Can you conceive him to be otherwise than plump and fair-haired? Brown complexioned people, in their youth, are seldom plump. And does not his wavering melancholy, his soft lamenting, his irresolute activity, accord with such a figure? From a dark-haired young man, you would look for more decision and impetuosity.”

“You are spoiling my imagination,” cried Aurelia: “away with your fat Hamlets! Do not set your well-fed Prince before us! Give us rather a succedaneum that will move us, will delight us. The intention of the author is of less importance to us than our own enjoyment, and we need a charm that is adapted for us.” (2:290)

Aurelia initially seems to concede that Wilhelm’s argument is rationally sound, yet she does so in a manner that critiques his stabilizing approach. The question that Wilhelm insists should be paramount — namely, what physiognomic type did Shakespeare intend? — is irrelevant because what matters is “our” (fatphobic) desires. Aurelia does not argue, as later English-speaking commentators do, that Shakespeare could not have intended a fat Hamlet. Instead, she shifts the ground of the argument entirely away from Shakespeare’s intention to what the contemporary audience — and indeed, she herself — desires. Contemporaries should create Hamlets (and Hamlets) that have a “charm that is adapted for us.” At the same time, Aurelia exposes Wilhelm’s own supposedly rationally sound reading as expressive of his own particular desires and needs. Her exclamation “Away with your fat Hamlets!” underscores the fact that it is, after all, “your” fat Hamlet that is the problem. Both Wilhelm and Aurelia display fatphobic assumptions, but ones that operate by a different understanding of the fat body. Aurelia sees the fat body as ugly and undesirable, but she does not insist, as Wilhelm does, that fat is associated with a certain character type. Her critique of Wilhelm’s remarks is leveled more at his stabilizing, essentialist interpretation, which would insist that the Hamlet we construct (and love) must be limited to the Hamlet Shakespeare intended. 

Wilhelm’s remarks wielded quite a bit of authority in English and German criticism simply because they were ascribed to Goethe. Yet they also generated anxiety insofar as they were seen as commenting on the shared racial identity of the “Northman.” In the German critical tradition, Wilhelm’s remarks were used to explain the continual delay in German unification. Most famously, German poet Ferdinand Freiligrath, in a poem translated into English, wrote that “Germany is Hamlet.” Focusing on Germany’s inability to act, Freiligrath expands upon Wilhelm’s diagnosis:

It comes from dawdling overmuch — 
Lounging and reading, — tired to death, — 
Sloth holds him in its iron clutch. 
He's grown too ‘fat and scant of breath.’ 
He spun his learned yarn away, 
His best of action was but thinking,
Too long in Wittenberg his stay. 
Employed with lectures — or with drinking. (105) 

Subsequently, the German critical tradition would see some essential weakness in the character of the Germanic race, a weakness that would apply to the British race as well.

G.G. Gervinus, whose Hamlet criticism appeared in English translation in 1877, offered a simple binary whereby the Northman was characterized by his fat body, the “dark-haired” southerner by his thin one. The fat body brought with it an essential character that was indecisive, irresolute, and thus inactive, whereas the thin body was characterized by “impetuosity” (565). Citing the infamous line, Gervinus sums up this critical tradition with the following remark: Hamlet “lacked, therefore, says Goethe, the external strength of the hero, or we might say, more simply, the strength of a practical and active nature” (561). Hamlet’s fat body is a sign of “faintheartedness,” “anxious-uneasiness and weakness” (561). Gervinus’s criticism of Hamlet’s character is revealed, ultimately, to be a criticism of the “German race,” for as Gervinus later insists, “Hamlet is a type of our German race at the present day” (575).¹⁶Gervinus uses Hamlet for his own political purposes; the two Nordic races, Germany and Britain, are overburdened by their modern existence. Their active natures are made passive, rendered weak by their modernity, and their passive modernity in turn, as Hillel Schwartz elsewhere demonstrates, is associated with obesity ( “Three Body”). Gervinus looks to two opposing body types: the lean body of Prince Hal associated with the active (imperialist) nature, and the fat body of Prince Hamlet associated with the passive one. Referring to Hamlet’s promise to avenge his father, Gervinus explains that “Hamlet, a master in intelligence, can only utter this principle; he cannot carry it out, as that [King] Henry [from Shakespeare’s Henry V] did who is a master in life and action” (573). Hamlet embodies the character of the modern man, who cannot rise to the challenges of the time – an “age in which everything hinges upon physical power and the desire for action” (573). Thus, “our modern sensibility is anticipated, as it were, by two centuries in Hamlet” (574). His “superabundant emotion of his soul” has in the “last century spread like an epidemic in England and Germany” (573).

Unlike Gervinus, most English critics simply assert that Hamlet is not fat, and thus does not have a fat constitution. Why they might be so vociferous in their insistence, however, can be seen if we consider the response to this line of criticism found in the essays of the popular writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton. A man involved in the British empire, both in his financial dealings with the Crown Colony of British Columbia and as Secretary of State for the Colonies under the government of Lord Derby (1858-1859), Bulwer-Lytton engages at some length with Wilhelm’s remarks in his essay “On the Moral Effect of Writers.” Bulwer-Lytton accepts that “intricate moral character” is revealed by a “physical clew” such as body shape and size, and he accepts as well that there is a general racial type like Wilhelm’s Northman (120). He only takes issue with the characterization of the Northman as having an innate fat character. In contrast, he insists, the Northmen, especially in their British incarnation, are characterized by a thin body and the concomitant thin character type. As he explains, 

The dogmas conveyed in this criticism are neither historically nor physiologically correct. If, as Wilhelm Meister had just before asserted, “Hamlet must be fair-haired and blued-eyed — as a Dane, as a Northman,” certainly, of all the populations of the earth, the Dane, the Northman, has ever been the least characterized by “wavering melancholy” or “soft lamenting.” The old Scandinavian Vikings did not yield to dark-haired warriors “in decision and impetuosity.” To this day, those districts in England, wherein the old Danish race left their descendants — where the blue eyed and the light sandy hair are most frequently seen . . . the superior activity, the practical long-headedness, the ready adaptation of shrewd wit to immediate circumstance — in short, all the attributes most opposed to the character of Hamlet, are proverbially evident. Nor is it true that the fair-haired children of the North are more inclined in youth to be plump than the dark-haired inhabitants of the same climate. The Yorkshireman and Lowlander are generally high cheek-boned and lean. But is it clear that the Queen’s remark is intended to signify that Hamlet is literally fat? (121)

Bulwer-Lytton does not dispute that a “pinguous temperament” brings with it “wavering melancholy” and “soft lamenting,” or that Hamlet is a type of a the Danish race. He argues only that Wilhelm’s conclusion is "neither historically nor physiologically correct." That is, the Northman, especially its English descendents, is not characterized by the fat body and thus not by the fat character type. Historically, Bulwer-Lytton insists, the Northman possessed an “active” nature, that of a warrior; and physiologically, he is characterized by a “lean” body. One sees in his characterization, then, that Bulwer-Lytton accepts a corporeal code that reads innate personality traits in fat and thin bodies: the fat body is associated with an innate cowardliness, the lean body with an active conquering nature. Those committed to the British empire thus had good reasons to reject the German critical tradition, which used Hamlet to argue that the shared Germanic race was characterized by a fat nature.

II. Cutting the Fat, or Scholarly Emendation

Bulwer-Lytton adopts the solution preferred among English-speaking Shakespeareans. Rather than directly engaging with the argument attributed to Goethe, English Shakespeareans seek out a scholarly solution to the ostensible problem posed by Gertrude’s line. Initially, that solution involves a call for a textual emendation, where it is proposed that the word must be a printer’s error. Shakespeare must have written “hot,” “faint,” or “fey.”¹⁷ The basis for this argument is simply that it is inconceivable that Shakespeare would have meant to apply the word "fat" to Hamlet. Those who recommend an emendation, then, often prove to be offended by the word. John Bulloch illustrates this point when he recommends the emendation of “fey” because “The idea that Hamlet, the young man, the avenger of his father’s murder could have grown fat, is contrary to all likelihood” (240). Another commentator recommends the emendation of “hot” because “we are quit of the most unsympathetic fat Hamlet” (Leo 108). In 1885, Matthias Mull prefaces his own suggestion that the word “fat” is a printer’s error for “faint” with the following tirade: 

The accepted reading, it seems to me, is as gross in the mouth of the Queen as it is repugnant to the situation of the facts. The coarseness of the word fat well befits the stupidity of the mutilation. "The mould of form" corpulent! (lix) 

“Fat” becomes a (textual and corporeal) mutilation that must be trimmed; just as the text must be trimmed of the word to restore the true authorial intention, so too must Hamlet’s body be trimmed to its rightful (fighting) form.

The call for such emendations ends by the beginning of the twentieth century when advances in bibliography make the argument untenable: the word “fat” has the witness of the Second Quarto and the First Folio. One of the last published arguments in favor of textual emendation came in 1919, and its author, editor Elmer Edgar Stoll, apologizes: “That is not sound textual criticism, I know; but if ever an emendation seemed imperative it is here” (67n.8). As early as 1866, W.G. Clark, J. Glover and W.A. Wright, editors of the first Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Hamlet, offer the suggested emendations as “conjectural” (5.2.274n).¹⁸ The new way to rid the text of the unwanted fat was to offer a reading of the word that would make it mean anything other than corpulent. A number of the most prominent Shakespeare scholars rushed to find parallel texts from the early modern period that would offer some authority for such a reading, but ultimately, as contemporary editors conclude, no such passage was found. The two glosses suggested in the first half of the twentieth century are still assumed today. George Lyman Kittredge offered “out of training” (5.2.298LN), and J. Dover Wilson “sweaty” (5.2.285n).¹⁹ Although scholars would search for parallel texts, the arguments were largely designed to appeal to a shared common sense. Both Kittredge and Wilson refer to present-day meanings, as when Kittredge explains that the word “fat” means “out of training,” or “A modern trainer might use the same word, or he might say that Hamlet is ‘rather soft.’ Fat does not here mean ‘corpulent’” (5.2.298LN).

J. Dover Wilson makes a similar argument. In an audacious note, Wilson sets as his goal nothing less than to put down the entire Variorum tradition whereby the word “fat” was ever read as a comment on the corpulence of the original Hamlet. His argument depends less on any scholarly evidence, however, than on a fatphobia he assumes he shares with his readers:

The argument that “fat” refers to the corpulence (entirely hypothetical) of Richard Burbadge [sic], the actor who first played Ham., really cuts the other way; for if Burbadge in 1601 was getting over-stout for the part of a young student, Sh. would hardly deliberately call attention to the fact. (Wilson 5.2.285n) 

The idea that the adjective referenced Burbage’s corpulence was of course not illogical to a century of readers from Roberts through Collier. Yet Wilson draws on the reader’s own internalized sense that “fat” is an epithet, and thus a word that genteel company would never apply to their friends, at least “deliberately.”

Even in the subjunctive universe in which Wilson momentarily imagines Burbage to have become fat, he cannot bring himself to apply the word to him. Thus, Wilson performs the very courtesy he imagines Shakespeare would have performed for the fat Burbage by using the euphemism “over-stout.” Given that Wilson is generally quite carefully attentive to the etymology and meaning of words, it is striking that he employs a euphemism more proper to the twentieth century than to the early seventeenth (OED “stout,” adj. and adv., 12a). By using the term “over-stout” as a euphemism for “fat,” Wilson draws on his reader’s shared sense that it is impolite to use the word “fat” as a mere descriptor, especially of one’s friends. Those readers who have internalized this form of fatphobia will feel with Dover, as with other twentieth-century critics, that it is “illogical” that Shakespeare would have used the word in this way (Keyes 90). Such an argument, I want to underscore, does not rely on parallel texts from the early modern period, but on our own sense that there is a transhistorical shame attached to the fat body. 

Even the most brilliant Shakespeareans scholars of the early twentieth century proved unable to find early modern examples of the use of “fat” as “an epithet for the condition, rather than the cause of the sweating.” Perhaps they even knew such use never existed, as they began to quote proverbial, folksy Americans for examples of parallel usage. Kittredge asserts, “Nobody who remembers how fat was used by old people in New England sixty years ago will be misled by this adjective” (5.2.298LN). Others turn to the American Midwest, offering various versions of a Midwestern farmwife exclaiming upon seeing perspiring students, “how fat you all are!” (Dunn 375).²⁰

III. Simon Russell Beale's Fat Hamlet

The line "He's fat, and scant of breath" may have been restored to critical editions of the play, but it has yet to be included in most performances. The theatrical tradition from the nineteenth century on has for the most part conformed to Aurelia’s taste of featuring Hamlets that are beautiful, or at least thin. Hamlets have fallen into two recognizable body types: some have had the shorter and muscular frame of Derek Jacobi or Richard Burton, and some have had the taller and leaner frame of a Laurence Olivier or Peter O’Toole. In being confronted with a “fat” Hamlet, these differences seem to fade away into the conviction that the conventional theatrical Hamlet must be thin, or at least not fat. Yet our own perceptions about Hamlet have recently been challenged by an “unconventional” Hamlet: Simon Russell Beale's in the 2000 production mounted by the Royal National Theatre and directed by John Caird. Although the play was almost universally praised, reviewers nonetheless had to remind us that Beale was an unconventional Hamlet because he was too old and too fat.

Responses to Beale’s body underscore the extent to which we labor under a fatphobia informed by essentialist constructions that emerged in the Victorian period. Insofar as the play is still seen as presenting a problem of consciousness, such conceptions of fatness serve for many to explain Hamlet’s presumed limitations. Reviewers focus on Beale’s fat body, even as they refuse to use the word “fat.” He has been variously called “soft,” “chunky,” “stocky,” “plump,” “pudgy,” “portly,” “rounded of figure,” “one of the plumpest Hamlets on record,” or simply “not slim” (Gamerman; Kissel; Gale; Dezell; Taylor; Speirs; Lamb). For some, the fat joke seems irresistible; however, it is often offered delicately by quoting Beale’s own remarks that, in turn, often quote with some distinct irony fatphobic responses to his body. After describing Beale’s body in a somewhat joking manner, one reviewer quotes Beale as making the quip “Tubby or not tubby,” itself a quote from the headline of one of the initial reviews (Lamb). Beale had to go on what seems like an apology tour, in which he repeatedly responded to the fatphobic expectations of the interviewer. One reviewer seems to have called Beale up only (it would seem) to ask him to comment on his unconventional fat body. Beale is quoted, then, as saying the following: “Yes, yes, overweight and too old. . . . Awfully sorry about that” (Gale). Another interview with two unconventional Hamlets — Beale alongside the black British actor Adrian Lester — begins with the same inevitable question about their supposed divergence from the Hamlet of tradition (something that Beale insists is non-existent). Once again, Beale must finally comment on his own fat body: “(Sighs) Tubby or not tubby, which is my dreadlock. Oh, the fat thing. Yes” (Beale).

From the perspective of this article, responses to the fat body seem oddly familiar, if anything having hardened into unexamined doxa. In a review of the American run, the critic of the New York Daily Newsobserves that Beale’s “short and chunky” Hamlet deviates from the conventional Hamlets, characterized by him as “trim, Byronic young men.” He argues that the fatness of Beale’s body is part of the brilliance of the production: 

But that may account for why he’s hanging out in a German college town with dolts like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern . . . at the advanced age of 30 instead of staying in Elsinore and taking on the responsibilities of a ruler. It may also account for why he’s so waspish and meditative and, more important, why he’s so reluctant to take on his evil uncle, Claudius. It wouldn’t be such a problem for a prince who’s combat-ready. (Kissel)

All of this is recognizable in that the fat person is seen as innately idle, cowardly, indulgent, whereas the thin person is implicitly seen as more active, responsible, and “combat-ready.” Another American reviewer operates by a similar assumption, now assuring the reader “How right it seems that Hamlet’s depression would leave him pudgy and unkempt. It’s easy to imagine him moping around the palace in a funk, getting up at two in the afternoon and snacking on the medieval Danish equivalent of Doritos all day” (Gammerman). It is so “easy” or “right” to make this set of associations because the ideological associations with the fat body that began in the Victorian period have hardened into an unquestioned truth today.

This production and responses to it have done quite a bit toward promoting the possibilities of a fat Hamlet, and showing some of the usefulness of having a “fat” actor play the role. I want to suggest, however, that the word “fat,” and thus the line “He’s fat, and scant of breath,” needs to be reintroduced into productions of the text. In some ways, our knowing insistence on omitting and ignoring the line underscores our own unwillingness to consider the ramifications of our targeted use of fatphobic constructions. Euphemisms and jokes allow us to draw upon the deleterious associations of these constructions without ever reflecting on their significance. Simon Russell Beale clearly offends many as Hamlet insofar as his body registers as “fat,” and yet somehow we avoid the word. Some think that the most polite response would be to allow that he somehow transcended his body because “the role is not about body type or age but about, to borrow from Spike Lee, how to ‘Do the Right Thing’” (Lamb). The critical tradition examined here suggests that this is far from the case: there has been a concerted effort to distance “Hamlet” from “fat,” one very literally seen in efforts to excise the line “He’s fat, and scant of breath” from the play or to redefine “fat” as meaning anything else but fat.

The offense is not in having a fat man play the role, but in having a fat man who owns his fatness play the role. Those who did not want Beale to play the role do not want the word “fat” associated with their Hamlet. Much like Lowell, they insist that “A fat Hamlet is as inconceivable as a lean Falstaff,” but it is only inconceivable, it would seem, with some hard work in eliminating or explaining away the line “He’s fat, and scant of breath.” No wonder, then, a famed American theater critic and producer dismisses the “portly” Beale and the line simultaneously: “While always clear-spoken and intelligent, Beale is obviously too portly for the role (yes, Gertrude mentions that Hamlet is ‘fat and scant of breath,’ but this is ridiculous)” (Brustein 65-6). His remarks remind us of how easily the line has been omitted in productions — including the production with Simon Russell Beale!

I want to end by imagining a production very much like this one that also included the line “He’s fat, and scant of breath.” One reviewer has argued that the line should have been included, offering the speculation that it was omitted because it might elicit laughter from the audience. As he explains, “Fearing laughter, perhaps, the ‘fat’ word is cut from the National production but they should have had more courage” (Johnstone). I have little doubt that some in the audience would laugh, and others would feel the urge to laugh as well. The courage in such a production would come from allowing for the laughter. Those who laugh, and those who feel the laugh coming on and understand the “instinct,” are subsequently faced with the realities of the sweating, laboring, and finally dying body of Hamlet. Some, at least, will feel something of the meanness of the inhumanity behind the laughter, and the inhumanity of a construction that sees the fat body before it as “ridiculous.” Perhaps Simon Russell Beale has understood part of this, as someone who has had to work through this laughter. In fact, he sees the whole play as coming down to the final scene, and the “Let be” soliloquy: “There’s this rather amazing moment, if you’re lucky enough to play Hamlet, when you realize that people have followed you for three hours through this terrible story, and you just say to them: ‘Look this is me. I’m worth watching, and I’m a human being’” (Beale). Such a moment becomes all the more humanizing if the audience member realizes that just moments before she was laughing at the very same human being. For a moment, the viciousness of the construction is uncovered, and some can come to realize that the limitations lie not in the fat body in and of itself, but in the emaciating constructions we apply to it.

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE - BRITISH ASSET

 John Bull bringing Bony's nose to the grindstone, 21 March 1814

Exit libertè a la Francois!—or—Buonaparte closing the farce of Egalitè, at St. Cloud near Paris Novr. 10th. 1799 / Js. Gillray inv' & f'.

British satire shows Napoleon with his grenadiers driving the members of the Council of Five Hundred from the Orangery at St. Cloud at bayonet point. A drum is labeled "Vive la Liberte," and papers under foot read "Resignation des Directoires" and "Un liste de Membres du Conseil des Cinque Cents." On November 10, 1799, in a move known as the Coup d'État of Eighteenth Brumaire, Napoleon seized control of the French government and installed himself as First Consul, thereafter governing as a dictator. James Gillray was the dominant caricaturist of his period, producing popular savage cartoons of the English court of George III and later of Napoleon and the French Revolution.

Death of the Corsican fox--Scene the last of the Royal-Hunt

London: pubd. by H. Humphrey, 1803 July 20th. 

King George III as a huntsman, holds up to a pack of hounds a fox with the head of Napoleon. Hounds' collars inscribed with names of navall leaders "Nelson," "Sydney S. Gardner," "Cornwallis." Men on horseback led by William Pitt, gallop towards King.

 From Napoleon to Nashville 2. Project Democracy: The Fascist Corporate State, April 1987. 

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE - BRITISH ASSET 

This address was part of the "Napoleon to Nashville" panel of the ICLC Conference held in northern Virginia over the Labor Day weekend of 1996. It was published in New Federalist, September 23, 1996

Napoleon's family background is that his father and mother were part of a Corsican liberation movement which was an asset of British intelligence and the British Admiralty. The leader of this Corsican liberation front controlled by London was Pasquale Paoli, a celebrated figure of the British-controlled Enlightenment. Napoleon's father, Carlo Buonaparte, was the secretary and right-hand man of Pasquale Paoli. For about twenty years after the close of the War of the Austrian Succession in 1748, Corsica was that the island remained a nominal possession of Genoa, but there were French garrisons in all the coastal cities. The mountainous interior of the island was controlled by Pasquale Paoli and his pro-British liberation front. Carlo Buonaparte was so devoted to Paoli that in 1767 he brought his entire family, including wife Letizia, to live in Paoli's mountain stronghold and capital of Corte. Letizia Buonaparte, Napoleon's mother, was the prettiest woman present when Paoli received an envoy of the Bey of Tunis. By the middle of of the seventeen hundreds, Horace Walpole, the brother of the British prime minister, was paying close attention to Corsica. Paoli was presented to Europe as the greatest statesman and constitutionalist of the age. 

Frederick the Great of Prussia lionized Paoli and his "little handful of brave men" who were fighting for liberty. Voltaire joined in this chrous of praise. Voltaire and Rousseau like Corsica because they saw the shepherds in its mountains as semi-civilized. Brigandage and robbery were widespread. Murders and vendettas accounted for 800 homicides per year. The Corscians were closer to the state of nature and therefore better, thought Rousseau. 

The leading publicity man for Pasquale Paoli was James Boswell, the most famous biographer in the English language and, to put it mildly, a British agent. Boswell visited at the time that the Buonaparte family was living in Paoli's mountain stronghold; little Napoleon had not yet been born. Boswell's Account of Corsica was published with the help of David Hume in 1768, and it caused a sensation. It was in the same year that French Foreign Minister Choiseul ordered French forces to wipe out Paoli. Napoleon Buonaparte was born the same year. Paoli fled to London where he lived comfortably among the oligarchs for the next twenty years; he went back for the revolution. 

Corsica was thus a laboratory for social experiments by the main operatives of the Anglo-Venetian Enlightenment. Rousseau revealed something important when he wrote in his Social Contract of 1762 that he had "a presentiment that this little island will one day astonish Europe." 

Napoleon's father worked for a British agent. 

And in Corsica, family is everything. 

Napoleon's family were members of the petty nobility - the level of a British squireen. On Napoleon's father's side, the Buonaparte family claimed to descend from Genoese mercenaries who came to Corsica soon after 1490 or 1492. Note that by this time Genoa was a junior partner of Venice. On Napoleon's mother's side, the Ramolino claimed to be descended also from a Venetian, the Count of Coll'Alto. 

The Buonaparte and Ramolino families had intermarried with other families of the Corsican nobility, including the family variously called Paravisino, Paravisini, Paravicino, Paraviccini, Pallavicino, or Pallvicini. There were also Pietrasanta, Bozzi, and Ornano. The Pozzo di Borgo lived on the top floor of Napoleon's house; father Carlo once sued the Pozzo di Borgo for emptying a chamber pot on him. Later Pozzo di Borgo, as a Russia czarist minister, would help rule Paris after Napoleon's fall. The Buonaparte family strategy was the seizure of political power in an independent Corsica that had kicked out the French while working in alliance with the British. 

To this Napoleon added the results of his own studies. He was fascinated by Plutarch. Indeed, old Paoli once told Napoleon that he, Napoleon, was not a modern man, but a rebirth from the age of Plutarch. 

Napoleon's model of the good society was the dictatorship of Sparta. 

Napoleon believed that man had no rights. 

Napoleon's intense dislike of the French was increased by his experience at school in France, at Brienne, where he made his famous pledge to cause the French all the harm he possibly could. When the French Revolution broke out, Napoleon first sought to use his rank of lieutenant of artillery to take over Corsica. He tried to take over by getting himself elected commander of the new Corsican national guard. He came in second. During this time he wrote to his superior officers in Paris and talked of France as "your nation." 

Since he could not take power by the ballot box, on Easter Sunday 1792 Napoleon tried a military coup, leading Corsican forces against a fort flying the French flag. He failed. His third attempt was to use the Jacobin Clubs of Corsica, which were controlled by his brothers, to get Paoli -- who was back in power -- arrested for high treason. 

Napoleon, now under a French flag, failed for a second time to take the citadel, and failed a third time to take power. His whole family had to flee to France to escape Paoli's vendetta. Napoleon made headway by his willingness to use his cannons against the mob. Napoleon exalted the revolution and raved "Marat and Robespierre, those are my saints." (DS14) 

When Robespierre and the other terrorists fell, Napoleon shifted to Barras. Soon Napoleon got a command in Italy, and began to win victories against the inept Austrians with the armies Carnot had created. The post-1795 Directory was a weak and hated government. There was a lower house called the Five Hundred and an Upper House called the Ancients, and an executive of 5 Directors. One Director was Carnot. Another Director was Napoleon's protector, the stockjobber Barras. 

The Directory regime was a storm cellar for very unpopular regicides and terrorists who knew that if the King came back, they would be executed. 

The discredited Directory, fearing royalist restoration, needed the gripping exploits of a victorious general. Of these there was soon only one: Bonaparte. 

The regicides wanted war, and Bonaparte could be relied on to deliver. With the treaty of Campo-Formio in October, 1797, Austria dropped out of the war and England stood alone against France. The First Coalition was over, and the British predicament resembled that of May, 1940: a cross-Channel invasion was on the agenda. 

The British were very vulnerable. Pitt had financed the First Coalition against France with loans, and prices began to inflate. In February 1797 the Bank of England defaulted on gold payments to private citizens. Crops were bad, and bread was scarce and expensive. At this time Britain became permanently dependent on imported food. Famine threatened, and there were mutinies in the Royal Navy.

 There was also a rebellion brewing in Ireland under the leadership of the United Irish Society and Theobald Wolf Tone. The French had actually gotten 15,000 men to Ireland's Bantry Bay in 1796, but had not landed because of bad weather. At the end of 1797 and the beginning of 1798 the Irish met with Bonaparte and Talleyrand, appealing for the help of a French Army. A French landing would have led to a general uprising and the ouster of the British. Pitt recognized there was no military way to stop such a landing. At the same time, the Directory named Napoleon the commander of the Army of England massing in the channel ports for a cross-channel invasion. The crucial period is the end of 1797 and the first months of 1798. Napoleon reported that he was having trouble finding enough ships to transport the invasion force. At this point Talleyrand came forward with his idea of dropping the cross-channel invasion, and invading Egypt instead. At this time there were no British in Egypt, and no Suez canal. Talleyrand claimed the idea was to take Egypt as a way of getting to India. Napoleon supported Talleyrand's Egyptian plan, and reported that the cross-channel invasion was impossible. Despite important opposition in the Directory, the decision was made in early March, 1798 to send a fleet and an army not to England or Ireland, but to Egypt. Two months later, in May, tens of thousands of Irish patriots, Catholics and Protestants, rose against the hated British. The Irish were slaughtered; they never had enough guns, and no sufficient French forces ever landed, although a small French force did show how pathetic the British land forces were before it was surrounded. In Egypt, Nelson destroyed the French fleet at the battle of the Nile, and Napoleon abandoned his army there, where it surrendered in 1801. One fleet and one army lost, and nothing gained. But much more was lost: Turkey and Russia joined together against the intruder Napoleon, and the French defeats encouraged Russia and Austria to join with the British to form the Second Coalition. The Egyptian fiasco had led to a strategic disaster. It had saved the British from possible destruction. But it helped Napoleon's career: after he had shown that he had no intention of fighting the British, he was groomed by Talleyrand for his seizure of power in November, 1799 -- the coup of Brumaire. Napoleon later brought Talleyrand into his government. Talleyrand was a renegade Catholic bishop, mad for money and power. He was pro-British in the way that every oligarch as, and more. Talleyrand began working against Napoleon as an agent of the Czar of Russia by 1808. Talleyrand lasted far longer than Napoleon. He was still in power in 1831, when he created modern Belgium for the British. To reassure the old Jacobins, Napoleon brought in Joseph Fouche'. At one point in the revolution, the Terror had demanded the wiping out of the city of Lyon in the same way that Hitler ordered the destruction of Warsaw in World War II. Fouche had directed the massacres. Fouche stayed in power until 1820. Napoleon also got support in coup from the veteran revolutionary Abbe Sieyes, a regicide and the theoretician of the Third estate. Napoleon was named First Consul for 10 years. Soon he held a referendum to get himself named First Consul for life. Then, in 1804, he won a plebiscite saying that "the government of the republic is confided to an Emperor." At his coronation, Napoleon forced the Pope to attend, but he crowned himself with a pagan crown of golden laurel. He had one hand on his sword-hilt to show that his regime was based on military force. After this Napoleon went off the deep end of his megalomania. At Tilsit In February, 1807 he attempted to divide Europe with Czar Alexander of Russia. In the same year he committed the folly of invading Spain and Portugal. Around this same time Napoleon launched his Continental System, which forbad the importation of British goods into any French-controlled or French-allied part of Europe. The British responded with blockade. And without railroads, it was impossible to run the European economy by land transportation alone. Despite de facto help from Thomas Jefferson's embargo policy, the Continental System backfired. Every time Napoleon conquered a European country, the British seized its colonies. Napoleon defeated Russia, Austria and Prussia, all sometime enemies of the British, while the British conquered the world outsuide of Europe. But Napoleon got to marry a Hapsburg archduchess. Napoleon ousted Pope Pius VII as head of the papal states. Pius VII then excommunicated Napoleon. Napoleon then jailed the pope in Savona, northern Italy. For a time Napoleon toyed with the idea of forcing the papacy to relocate to the imperial capital, Paris. 

Napoleon built up a totalitarian police state based on conscription - the draft. He always needed soldiers. His anti- feudal, anti-union and anti-guild policies reduced populations to an atomized mass which could not resist. Serfs cannot be drafted. Napoleon freed serfs so they could be. 

Napoleon created a new imperial nobility. Talleyrand was made the Prince of Benevento. Fouche, the Hebertist of the Terror, was now solemnly addressed as the Duke of Otranto. Napoleon placed his parvenu relatives on the thrones of Europe. His sister Pauline married Prince Borghese; she was a nymphomaniac. His sister Elisa became Grand Duchess of Tuscany; she patronized Paganini and made money through mass production of marble busts of Napoleon. Paranoid and syphilitic brother Louis was made King of Holland; Louis drifted off to a spa and the kingdom was liquidated in 1810. Napoleon III was Louis's son. Gen. Murat married Napoleon's sister Caroline, and they were made monarchs of Naples. Murat fought well in battle but by 1813 he had betrayed Napoleon to Metternich; he was angry he had not been made King of Poland. General Bernadotte married Napoleon's old girlfriend Desiree Clary. To console the jilted Deesiree, Napoleon made Bernadotte King of Sweden. His failure to bring Swedish troops into Napoleon's 1812 invasion of Russia helped to doom that campaign. Josephine's son Eugene became Viceroy of northern Italy. Jerome Bonaparte became King of Westphalia, in Germany. Jerome was a hedonist; his nickname was Fifi. Jerome commanded one wing of the Russian invasion; his bungling was another key factor in Napoleon's disaster. Westphalia collapsed in 1813. Elder brother Joseph was made King of Naples, and later King of Spain, where his incompetent meddling guaranteed that the Duke of Wellington and the guerrilla would defeat the French. In 1814 Joseph sealed Napoleon's doom by surrendering Paris. Napoleon called him a "coglione" and a "pig." 

Mother Letizia never learned French; she went around saying "Longo mai" in her Corsican dialect. Longo mai meant, let's hope it lasts. 

In case it didn't Napoleon built up a stash of 500 million gold francs under the Tuileries. 

Napoleon coined the term United States of Europe. When Fouche had warned Napoleon not to attack Russia while the Spanish campaign was going poorly. Napoleon replied: "I need 800,000 troops and I have them. I can drag all Europe after me and in these days I regard Europe as a rotten old whore who has to do my pleasure when I possess such an army...There must be one legal code, one court of appeals and one currency for all Europe. The European nations must be melted into a single nation and Paris must become capital of the world. Can I help it if so much power is sweeping me on to a world dictatorship ?" (DM129) 

Adolphe Thiers wrote in his History of the Consulate and the Empire of "the cry rising up from every family in Paris as in the remotest provinces" was "'He wants to sacrifice all our children to his mad ambition.'" In 1813 Metternich told Napoleon that his soldiers were children. Napoleon raged that he "grew up on battlefields and didn't mind if he lost a million men." 

Napoleon viewed the French as a vehicle for his ambition, much as the Austrian Hitler viewed the Germans. 

Napoleon was a one-world imperialist and anti-nationalist whose disagreement with the British was only a matter of WHERE the capital of the world empire would be -- London or Paris, a mere detail. As his marshals told him, the distance from Madrid to Moscow turned out to be too far. Napoleon sought to build a world empire based on the Reign of Terror. 

This aspect is captured in Abel Gance's 1927 silent film on the early career of Napoleon, in the scene in which Napoleon visits the deserted hall of the French National Convention which had been the seat of the reign of Terror a few years before. The ghosts of the now-dead Terrorists, Danton, Robespierre, Marat, St. Juste, appear and demand that Napoleon pledge his loyalty to their heritage of inhuman madness. Napoleon's lines as you will read them in the film are a direct quote, but the concluding part is missing. 

Napoleon's conclusion is as follows: "The first impetus has been given; and after the fall and the disappearance of my system, it seems to me that the only way in which an equilibrium can be achieved in Europe is through a league of nations." 

So spoke Napoleon almost one century before Woodrow Wilson, Versailles, and the League of Nations

PROJECT DEMOCRACY'S PROGRAM: THE FASCIST CORPORATE STATE The following article by Tarpley appeared as Chapter V of the EIR Special Report entitled Project Democracy: The "Parallel Government Behind the Iran-Contra Affair," issued in April 1987. Even in an epoch full of big lies like the late 20th century, it is ironic that the financiers of the Trilateral Commission should have chosen the name "Project Democracy" to denote their organized efforts to install a fascist, totalitarian regime in the United States and a fascist New Order around the world. It is ironic that so many of the operatives engaged, in the name of "democracy" in this insidious, creeping coup d'état against the United States Constitution should be firstand second- generation followers of the Soviet Russian universal fascist, Nikolai Bukharin. It is ironic that Israel, the country in the modern world singled out more than any other by Project Democracy as a model of the triumph of democratic values, should turn out to be a corporate state with marked similarities to Mussolini's Italy. Though ironic, all these propositions are indeed true. Project Democracy is fascist, designed to culminate in the imposition of fascist institutions on the United States, institutions that combine the distilled essence of the Nazi Behemoth and the Bolshevik Leviathan. Project Democracy is high treason, a conspiracy for the overthrow of the Constitution. An organization whose stock in trade is the destabilization and the putsch in so many countries around the world can hardly be expected to halt its operations as it returns to the U.S. border. For Project Democracy, it can happen here, it will happen here. The greatest obstacle to understanding the monstrous purpose that lurks behind Project Democracy's bland and edifying label is the continued ignorance on the part of the American public of the real nature of 20th-century totalitarian regimes. Despite the fact that Stalin deliberately helped bring Hitler and the Nazis to power, despite the Nazi-Communist alliance of 1939-41 under the Hitler- Stalin Pact, despite Mussolini's close ties to Moscow, despite the deep affinity between Nazi-fascists and communists demonstrated repeatedly in many countries by mass exchanges of membership between political organizations of the two persuasions, the average American still sees communism and Nazism-fascism as polar opposites. The expression "fascist" exists only as a strongly derogatory but very vague epithet, empty of any precise political content. In reality, Bolshevism and fascism, Bukharin and D'Annunzio, are products of the Capri School, Siamese twins conceived in the Isle of Capri's Grotto of Matromania by Venetian and Benedictine cultural- political gamemasters. This can be shown by briefly examining Nazi- communist ideology and economics. But in addition to ideology and economics, there exist specifically Nazi-communist, totalitarian institutional forms which can be objectively identified. A review of the institutions of the corporate state as exemplified by D'Annunzio, Mussolini, and Bukharin is an excellent preparation for recognizing the corporate state in present-day Israel, and for discerning the outlines of the ongoing Trilateral-Project Democracy fascist transformation of the United States. Nazi-communism is 20th-century totalitarianism. Although some writers attempt to trace the origins of totalitarianism to models of the Protestant Reformation or the French Jacobins, the search for the roots of totalitarian regimes takes us totally outside of the confines of Western, Augustinian civilization, outside of the world of Latin Christendom. The model from which Western totalitarianism derives is to be found in the separate, Byzantine-Orthodox civilization of Eastern Europe. Byzantine-Orthodox civilization has been not just autocratic and militaristic, but specifically totalitarian also, since no later than the reign of the Emperor Diocletian in the second century A.D. Although Hannah Arendt and her school never recognized it, Soviet communism is only the form of totalitarian rule associated with the Bolshevik dynasties of the Russian Empire. "Totalitarianism" is much more than just a dictatorship or authoritarian state. The totalitarian state seeks to dictate the behavior of its inmates down to the most minute detail, and creates for this purpose institutions that will allow that total surveillance and total control. In Byzantine-Orthodox civilization and in the Western totalitarianism copied from it, all departments of human endeavor, including economics, religion, sports, marriage, and even thinking are conceived of as departments of the state. Appropriate institutions are required to mediate totalitarian control in each of these areas. The starting point of Western civilization, as for example in the writings of St. Augustine, is the God-like, creative individual, the most precious resource of the society as a whole. Western civilization seeks the highest development of the individual and the highest development of the state as complementary objectives. The United States Constitution is the finest instrument yet devised for pursuing these inseparable goals. Western civilization in our era knows the state as the constitutional republic, wherein the rights of the individual are guaranteed. Within that framework the organizations of society, the political parties, business enterprises and companies, trade unions, churches, associations, societies, universities, local governments, and families enjoy their independent existence. That is what a democratic republic means. In totalitarianism, by contrast, both the individual and society disappear into the maw of the all-consuming Moloch, the state. A Definition of Nazi-communism Starting from these premises, it is possible to furnish a rough definition of modern fascism or Nazi-communism, the regime toward which Project Democracy is working. That definition contains the following elements: 1) Totalitarian fascism is a system which seeks to mutilate, mortify, and crush the Augustinian conception of the individual. As in the writings of Mussolini's ideologue, Giovanni Gentile, or in the ravings of Michael Ledeen, the aspirations of the individual are rigidly subordinated to the exigencies of the regime. 2) The fascist regime is a government controlled in practice by a single party--a one-party state. 3) Fascist ideology, whatever its specific predicates, repudiates human reason and exalts irrationalism and irrationalist violence, often in the form of wanton military aggression and imperialism. A fascist mass movement is the most aggressive form of militant irrationalism. From Mussolini's Romanita through Hitler's Herrenvolk to the Great Russian master race conception of "Moscow the Third Rome," fascist ideology is based on notions of racial superiority and race hatred, extreme chauvinism, and blood and soil mysticism. Fascism is neo-pagan and ferociously hostile to Augustinian Christianity, as can be shown from Mussolini's early career and from Hitler's private conversations. This same neo-paganism is perfectly expressed in the predilection of Russian totalitarianism for the Russian Orthodox Church. In the Western world, fascism can be correctly called the politics of cultural despair. 4) Fascist economics is the murderous austerity associated with the names of Hitler's finance minister, Hjalmar Schacht, and Mussolini's finance minister, Count Giovanni Volpi di Misurata. The final logic of fascist economics is the concentration camp, the labor camp, the Gulag. Fascist irrationalism cannot tolerate scientific rationality on a broad scale, and is therefore correlated with hostility to technological innovation, and permanent peasant backwardness in agriculture. 5) The institutions through which totalitarian control of economic life is mediated merit special attention. In Eastern totalitarianism, this is accomplished by making each branch of the state-owned industries subject to the Council of Ministers and the state planning authority, and thus to the party. At the same time, the trade unions are the passive "transmission belt," in Lenin's phrase, for party control. In totalitarian regimes in the Western world, masses of labor have often been simply dragooned through institutions such as Dr. Ley's Nazi Labor Front. But the characteristic institutions of fascism in the West are those of the so-called corporate state. In the fascist regime of Italy, Vichy France, and many others, it was the corporations which were to bring together ownership and employees, management and labor under the direct control of the one-party state for the purpose of extending totalitarian domination into the nooks and crannies of everyday economic life while at the same time fragmenting potentially rebellious workers along the lines of branches of industry. The corporatist principle This corporatist principle in fascism is so neglected and misunderstood that it merits our special attention, especially because the form of fascist totalitarianism which Project Democracy aims at is of a corporatist variety. The word corporation here has nothing to do with its usual English meaning of a joint-stock company. "Corporation" here means, approximately, a guild. For present purposes it is enough to recall that corporatism emerged as an irrational, solidarist opposition to capitalism and the United States Constitution during the period of the reactionary Holy Alliance after the end of the Napoleonic wars. Corporatism asserted that the way to overcome the tensions between labor and capital was not through the broad national community of interest prescribed by Alexander Hamilton's American System of dirigist political economy, but rather through the artificial creation of medieval guild organizations, based on the pretense that capitalists were masters, and workers were journeymen and apprentices, all functioning together in "organic" unity. Thus, Mussolini advertised his fascist regime as the stato corporativo or corporate state, proclaiming that Oil fascismo sara corporativo o non sara (fascism is corporative or it is nothing). In German, the equivalent for stato corporativo is Standestaat, wherein Stand has the meaning of social position in the sense of aristocracy, clergy, and bourgeoisie, the three "estates" of pre-revolutionary France. Hitler's National Socialist German Workers Party was corporatist from the very beginning: point 25 of the "unalterable" program of the Nazis as adopted on Feb. 25, 1920 included the "creation of corporative and professional chambers" (Odie Bildung von Stande--und Berufskammern zur Durchfuhrung der vom Reiche erlassenen Rahmengesetze in den einzelnen Bundesstaaten.) [Note- 1] For a certain period after Hitler's seizure of power in 1933, his regime referred to itself prominently as a Standestaat, or corporate state. When Marshal P;aaetain and Pierre Laval created their Nazi puppet-state in Vichy, P;aaetain announced that one of the principal goals of his "national regeneration movement" was the creation of an ordre corporatif. Other fascist regimes, especially the many that were directly modeled on the Italian one, also stressed corporatism, so that corporatism emerges as the charactersitic institutional structure of fascism. Theories of the corporate state can be traced back to Germans like Pesch and Kettler, or to the "guild socialism" of the Englishman William Morris. An early attempt to actually create a corporate state came in 1919, with the filibustering expedition to Fiume of Gabriele D'Annunzio, the protofascist of our epoch. D'Annunzio as seen by Ledeen The corporate state D'Annunzio attempted to create during his Fiume adventure is of double relevance to an analysis of the fascism of Project Democracy. On the one hand, D'Annunzio's 16- month tenure as dictator in Fiume was the model and dress rehearsal for Mussolini's March on Rome. On the other hand, D'Annunzio's activities in Fiume have been the subject of a lengthy treatise by the most overt and blatantly fascist ideologue of Project Democracy, Michael Ledeen. Ledeen's discussion of D'Annunzio in Fiume is to be found in his book, The First Duce. Ledeen celebrates the poetaster D'Annunzio as the founder not only of fascism, but of 20th-century politics in general, through his creation of a Nazi-communist mass movement of irrationalism: Virtually the entire ritual of Fascism came from the "Free State of Fiume: the balcony address, the Roman salute, the cries of "aia, aia, alala," the dramatic dialogues with the crowd, the use of religious symbols in a new secular setting, the eulogies of the "martyrs" of the cause and the employment of their "relics" in political ceremonies. Moreover, quite aside from the poet's contribution to the form and style of fascist politics, Mussolini's movement first started to attract great strength when the future dictator supported D'Annunzio's occupation of Fiume. (p. viii) D'Annunzio's political style--the politics of mass manipulation, the politics of myth and symbol--have become the norm in the modern world. All too often we have lost sight of the point of departure of our political behavior, believing that by now ours is the normal political universe and that the manipulation of the masses is essential in the political process. D'Annunzian Fiume seems to have marked a sort of watershed in this process, and that is perhaps the explanation for the fascinating symbiosis between themes of the "Right" and the "Left" in the rhetoric of the comandante. It is of the utmost importance for us to remind ourselves that D'Annunzio's political appeal ranged from extreme Left to extreme Right, from leaders of the Russian Revolution to arch-reactionaries. (p. 202) Ledeen is especially fascinated by D'Annunzio's ability to re- create an "organic" unity out of the disparate elements of modern society: "At the core of D'Annunzian politics was the insight that many conflicting interests could be overcome and transcended in a new kind of movement." (p. ix) For Ledeen, the key institutional feature of the D'Annunzian fascist order is the corporate state. The city of Fiume at the southern base of the Istrian peninsula was in 1919 a former territory of the newly defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire under dispute between Italy and the new nation of Yugoslavia, where the town is located today under the name of Rieka. Italy, having participated in the victorious cause of the Allies, desired to annex Fiume as it had the other Austro-Hungarian port of Trieste, but the weak Nitti ministry hesitated to do so because of the opposition of France. France at that time was determined to emerge as the protector of the new states created in the Balkans by the Peace of Paris, and therefore supported the Yugoslav claim to Fiume, which the Yugoslavs saw as a key port. In order to force the hand of Nitti, D'Annunzio, starting from Venice, gathered a force of arditi, veterans of the elite shock troops of the Italian army, and seized Fiume in September 1919, demanding that Italy annex it. D'Annuzio's regime, which he sometimes called a Regency, organized acts of terrorism and piracy. In November 1920, with the Treaty of Rapallo, Fiume was made a free city. D'Annunzio refused to accept this solution and Italian troops dispersed his "legions" some time later. The Fiume expedition was a classic example of Venetian cultural- political warfare, designed as a pilot project for fascist movements and coups in the aftermath of the hecatomb of the First World War. The centerpiece of the operation was the so-called Charter of Carnaro (Carta del Carnaro), the corporatist guild constitution for Fiume as an independent state written by D'Annunzio in collaboration with the anarcho-syndicalist agitator Alceste de Ambris. The Carta del Carnaro was reminiscent of certain features of the Venetian Republic. Legislative power was vested in a bicameral legislature. One house was called the Consiglio degli Ottimi, or Council of the Best, and was elected on the basis of universal direct suffrage with one councilor per every thousand inhabitants. The Ottimi were to handle legislation regarding civil and criminal justice, police, the armed forces, education, intellectual life, and were also to govern the relations between the central government and subdivisions or states called communes. The corporate chamber of the Fiume parliament was to be the Consiglio dei Provvisori, a kind of economic council. The Consiglio dei Provvisori was composed of representatives of nine guilds or corporations whose creation was also provided for in the document. These included the industrial and agricultural workers, the seafarers, and the employers, with 10 representatives each; the industrial and agricultural technicians, private bureaucrats and administrators, teachers and students, lawyers and doctors, civil servants, and cooperative workers, with five representatives from each group, for a grand total of 60. The Consiglio dei Provvisori was responsible for all laws regarding business and commerce. The Consiglio dei Provvisori also decided all matters touching labor, public services, transportation and the merchant marine, tariffs and trade, public works, and medical and legal practice. The Ottimi served for a term of three years, and the Provvisori for two years. A third legislative body was prescribed, formed through the joint session of the Ottimi and Provvisori: This was called the Arengo del Carnaro, and was to deal with treaties with foreign states, the budget, university affairs, and amendments to the constitution. The Provvisori were chosen by nine corporations. Membership in one of these corporations was obligatory for all citizens, and was posited in the Carta del Carnaro as an indispensable precondition for citizenship. The article on corporations states that "only the assiduous producers of the common wealth and the assiduous producers of the common strength are complete citizens of the Regency, and with it constitute a single working substance, a single ascendant fullness." (Ledeen, p. 166) D'Annunzio's corporations are horizontal, similar to the estates, and are not organized according to vertical branches or cycles of economic activity, as Mussolini's corporations were to be. The Carta del Carnaro provides for a 10th corporation, which seems to have been reserved for geniuses, prophets, and assorted supermen. D'Annunzio's conception of the corporation is almost tribal, as the text of the constitution shows. He stipulated that each corporation was to "invent its insignia, its emblems, its music, its chants, its prayers; institute its ceremonies and rites; participate, as magnificently as it can, in the common joys, the anniversary festivals, and the maritime and terrestrial games; venerate its dead, honor its leaders, and celebrate its heroes." (Ledeen, p. 168) The executive power was normally vested in seven rectors or ministers (including foreign affairs, treasury, education, police and justice, defense, public economy, and labor). For periods of emergency, it was provided that the Arengo could appoint a dictator or comandante for a specified term, as was the custom in the Roman Republic. There was also a judiciary, with communal courts (Buoni uomini, or good men), a labor court (giudici del lavoro), civil courts (giudici togati, of judges in toga), a criminal court (giudici del maleficio), and a supreme court called the Corte della Ragione, or court of reason. For Ledeen, D'Annunzio assumes the status of Nazi-communist prophet of the mass irrationalism of the 20th century. For Ledeen, the Carta del Carnaro sums up the "essence of European radical socialism." From the point of view of Ledeen's universal fascism, D'Annunzio is located in the same tradition as the classics of Marxism and historical materialism, since his writings "conjure up the Karl Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. The young Marx, like many other heirs of Hegelianism, had been engaged in the search for a way to end human "alienation," and D'Annunzio saw the structure created by the Carta as a means of organizing a society in which human creativity would blossom in a way rarely seen in the story of mankind. It is by no means accidental that he employed the language of the Comunes in his new constitution, for he wished to recreate in the regency of Fiume the ferment of activity that had produced the Renaissance. He hoped that this constitution would produce a new, unalienated man." (Ledeen, pp. 168- 9) In reality, D'Annunzio was a degenerate monster, a coprophile, pervert, and psychopath--qualities that may have helped to determine Ledeen's compulsive affinity for this hideous figure. The Venetian operative D'Annunzio, the "John the Baptist" of fascism in this century, must bear a great share of the responsibility for opening the door to the Nazi-communist chamber of horrors in the epoch during and after the First World War. Ledeen's commitment to the creation of a universal fascist yoke has found its appropriate organizational expression in Project Democracy. Mussolini's corporate state After the March on Rome in 1922, and especially after the consolidation of a full-blown dictatorship through the coup d';aaetat of l925, the Kingdom of Italy saw the creation of the fascist corporate state. The promise of creating corporations figured prominently in Mussolini's demagogy from the beginning of his campaign for the seizure of power, but the creation of the corporations and the transformation of the parliament in order to include them was a long and drawn-out process that was completed only in the late thirties at the eve of the outbreak of the Second World War. One of the reasons it took so long to found the corporations was the lack of agreement about what these artificial creations might in fact be, since they had to be invented ex novo. Mussolini in the end settled on the idea that each corporation was to represent, not a stratum of society, but rather a branch of industry. The essence of the fascist corporations was that they were a support and appendage of the personal rule of Il Duce, and thus of the one-party fascist state. As one historian has observed: "The fundamental truth, however, is that the Fascist State claims the right to regulate economic as well as other aspects of life, and has aimed at accomplishing the former through the Corporate organization. The Dictatorship is the necessary rack and screw of the Corporate system; all the rest is subordinate machinery." [Note 2] Mussolini rejected both the Marxist idea of class conflict as well as what he called economic liberalism. The corporate system was designed, in his view, to overcome the class struggle of the one and the exaggerated economic individualism of the other. All of this was supposed to mobilize and focus national energies in the service of the superior interest of the state as the overarching collectivity. In one speech, Il Duce summed up the three elements of revolutionary corporatism as a single party, a totalitarian state, and "the highest ideal tension." In fact, Mussolini danced to the tune of Venetian financiers like Volpi di Misurata, Cini, and others. Mussolini situated the need for corporations in the context of the dissolution of the world capitalist system--an interesting parallel to the corporatist fascism of Project Democracy and the Trilateral Commission, which are explicitly proposed as necessities for a post-industrial era of scarce and diminishing resources. In 1933, Mussolini announced that the world depression (or the "American crisis," as he also called it) had become a total crisis of the world capitalist system. He went on to distinguish three periods in the history of capitalism: "the dynamic, the static, and the declining." According to Mussolini, the dynamic era of capitalism extended from the introduction of the widespread use of the steam engine to the opening of the Suez Canal in 1870; this period he saw as the time of unfettered free enterprise. After 1870, came a static phase, with the growth of trusts, the end of free competition, and smaller profit margins. The third or decadent phase is described by Mussolini as a kind of state capitalism. The outcome is the necessity for corporatism: Today we are burying economic liberalism, and the Corporation plays that part in the economic field, which the Grand Council and the Militia ;obthe squadristi;cb do in the political. Corporativism means a disciplined, and therefore a controlled economy, since there can be no discipline which is not controlled. Corporativism overcomes Socialism as well as it does liberalism: it creates a new synthesis. (Finer, pp. 501- 502) The juridicial basis for the fascist corporations is established in the Charter of Labor of 1927, whose sixth article states: The corporations constitute the unitary organization of production and represent completely its interests. In view of this complete representation, the interests of production being national interests, the corporations are recognized by law as organs of the State. [Note-3] The regime created fascist labor unions for workers, which had the monopoly of representation of labor in the negotiation of the national labor contract for each category or branch of economic activity. The Confindustria was created as the sole syndicate of the employers. No labor contract was considered valid until it had been approved by the Ministry for Corporations. In 1934, Mussolini finally issued a decree-law creating 22 corporations for the principal sectors of the Italian economy. Each corporation was given a council, which was composed of equal numbers of representatives of the fascist labor union and the fascist employers' organization for that sector, plus representatives of the National Fascist Party, the Ministry of Corporations, and consulting technocrats. The president of each corporation was generally a top official of the government or of the Fascist Party. The leading task of each corporation was the reconciliation of disputes between labor and management. Each corporation represented a "productive cycle" rather than an occupational category. A first group of corporations included agricultural, industrial, and commercial elements. These were the corporations for: 1) cereals; 2) garden products, flowers, and fruits; 3) vineyards and wine; 4) oils; 5) beets and sugar; 6) animal industries and fishing; 7) wood; and 8) textile products. A second group of eight corporations included only commercial and industrial elements. These were: 1) metallurgy and mechanics; 2) chemical industries; 3) clothing and accessories; 4) paper and the press; 5) building construction; 6) water, gas, and electricity; 7) extractive industries; and 8) glass and ceramics. A third group of corporations made up the service sector: 1) insurance and credit; 2) professions and arts; 3) sea and air transportation; 4) internal communications; 5) show business; and 6) tourism and hotels. In the early stages of the regime, corporate representatives were brought together at the national level in a National Council of Corporations, and a National Assembly of Corporations, which were later superseded by a Central Corporate Committee. All of these contained additional party and government representatives in addition to the corporate delegates. In addition, Councils of Corporate Economy were set up in each province as a kind of fascist chamber of commerce, with all the corporations of the province plus local governments being represented. In 1938, after having proclaimed that he considered the Chamber of Deputies, which until that time had been the lower house of the Italian Parliament, as belonging to the alien residue of liberalism, Mussolini replaced that Chamber with the Chamber of the Fasces and Corporations (Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni). This was composed of a number of delegates appointed by each of the corporations, plus other delegates appointed by the National Fascist Party. Mussolini summed up these institutional transformations with the following words: "We have constituted a Corporative and Fascist State, the State of national society, a State which concentrates, controls, harmonizes, and tempers the interests of all social classes, which are thereby protected in equal measure. Whereas, during the years of demo-liberal regime, labor looked with diffidence upon the State, and was, in fact, outside the State and against the State, and considered the State an enemy of every day and every hour, there is not one working Italian today who does not seek a place in his Corporation or syndical federation, who does not wish to be a living atom of that great, immense living organization which is the national Corporate State of Fascism." (Field, p. 16) After the cataclysm of the Mussolini regime, former members of the fascist hierarchy who considered themselves in the syndicalist- corporate tradition, such as Giuseppe Bottai, accused Mussolini of having been instinctively inclined to preserve his personal dictatorship, rather than transform that dictatorship into a true corporatist system. From beginning to end, the corporations were in fact the merest paraphernalia of Il Duce's one-party state. Although he actually functioned as a malleable puppet of Volpi di Misurata and the Venetian financiers, in the eyes of the world Mussolini stood atop the fascist edifice as Duce of Fascism and Head of Government, and the secretary of the National Fascist Party served at his pleasure. An important organ of this totalitarian dictatorship was the Grand Council of Fascism (Gran Consiglio del Fascismo), primarily an expression of the fascist party, but in its makeup a mixed organ composed of top officials of the National Fascist Party, government ministers, the Presidents of the Senate and the Chamber, the commander of the squadristi, and others. As long as the Chamber of Deputies lasted, it was the Grand Council which made up the single nationwide list of Fascist candidates which the voters were called upon to accept or reject as a single unitary slate. The Grand Council was also responsible for submitting to the King the names of persons who might be selected as Head of Government. It was this Grand Council which, in July 1943, decided to oust Mussolini. As will be shown later, the National Endowment for Democracy is not only corporatist, but its board of directors is intended to function as a kind of informal Grand Council of Fascism in the totalitarian one-party state that Project Democracy seeks to create in the United States. After seizing power, Mussolini institutionalized and domesticated his storm troopers, the squadristi, under the name of the Voluntary National Security Militia, which was an organ of the Fascist Party. To combat political resistance to his regime, Mussolini then set up Special Tribunals whose judges were all high officers of the squadristi militia. Perhaps Ledeen or other Project Democracy theorists can take this as a starting point for the reform of the U.S. federal judiciary. Mussolini claimed to justify his regime through the need for efficiency and getting things done effectively. The Second World War revealed the overwhelming logistical and military weakness of the fascist corporate state. Despite the failure of corporatism in its declared aims of generating economic and military power, corporatist forms have exercised an almost hypnotic fascination over certain financier cliques in times of grave economic crisis. One such financier was Bernard Baruch, whose wholly controlled operative, Gen. Hugh Johnson, was the leader of the National Recovery Administration during the first administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The organizations that were supposed to be created in each sector of production around the NRA code for that sector were a very transparent copy of the fascist corporations. Many of the brain-trusters in the first New Deal were declared admirers of Mussolini, and even went so far as to prepare a summary report on the fascist corporate state for President Roosevelt. As we will see, the Trilateral Commission is committed to a neo-corporate order for the United States. At this point in the argument, certain readers may become impatient with an argument that seems to them to be incongruous. Can it be that the business-suited bankers of the Trilateral Commission, the shirt-sleeve bureaucrats of the AFL-CIO, or even such figures as Oliver North share decisive elements of their ideology with a black- shirted, jack-booted, strutting fascist like Mussolini, with fez, dagger, and club, with jaw jutting over the balcony of Palazzo Venezia? Are not the present-day figures of Project Democracy too bland to qualify as fascists? Are they not just American pragmatists with views that may happen to differ from our own? It may come as a surprise to many that Mussolini himself was a professed follower of American pragmatism. Among the thinkers who had made the greatest contribution to his own intellectual formation, Il Duce numbered first of all William James, the classic exponent of American pragmatism, whom he knew especially through the Italian writer Papini. Then came Machiavelli (certainly not a pragmatist and clearly not understood by Il Duce), followed by Nietzsche, who must be considered as representing a slightly different school of pragmatism. Then came the French anarcho- syndicalist, Georges Sorel, the theorist of purgative violence and also a declared pragmatist. All pragmatists are not necessarily fascists, but in the 20th century many have been, and there is no doubt that all fascists are pragmatists. In a crisis of civilization like the one of the 1980s, the fascists constitute the fastest-growing component of the pragmatic school. This makes it possible for individuals like Oliver North and Carl Gershman to embrace fascism as a simple practical expedient. In one of his speeches, Mussolini remarked: "The second foundation stone of Fascismo is represented by anti-demagogism and pragmatism." William Yandell Elliott of Harvard University remarks in his study of post-World War I political irrationalism, entitled The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics: "For pragmatism, a myth is true so long as it works. Mussolini offers himself as the new Caesar.... If he can capture the imagination of Italians and inflame them with his dream, he feels that he can govern with consent." (p. 341) Elliott, it should be recalled, was one of the principal teachers of Henry Kissinger. William James had posited this "working test of truth," which was also reflected in Mussolini's celebrated contempt for programs. When asked for a program, he replied: "Our program is simple: We wish to govern Italy. They ask us for programs, but there are already too many of them." For Mussolini, program was a part of liberalism's "government by talk," which he was determined to extirpate. In 1932, Mussolini wrote: La mia dottrina era stata la dottrina dell'azione. Il fascismo nacque da un bisogno d'azione e fu azione. (My doctrine had been the doctrine of action. Fascism was born of the need for action, and was action.) Oliver North would presumably agree. Bukharin's universal fascism In his pamphlet on "The Foreign Policy of America," the later chairman of the National Endowment for Democracy, Carl Gershman, describes the origins of AFL-CIO foreign policy activism in the international department of David Dubinsky's International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) during the 1930s. He notes that Dubinsky was surrounded by a "large group of dedicated antitotalitarians, some of them refugees from European fascism, others veterans of the political battles against communism on the American left. Of this latter group, the outstanding figure was Jay Lovestone, an immensely informed, resourceful, and controversial individual who had gained first-hand knowledge of communist strategy since he himself had served as general secretary of the American Communist Party until ousted in 1929 on Stalin's orders. Lovestone is among the most interesting figures of American political life in this century. A classic example of the communist-turned-devout- anticommunist, his influence has been far-reaching. For almost four decades until his retirement in 1974, he served as the chief executor of American labor's foreign policy, the author of countless AFL and AFL-CIO statements and resolutions, and a man exceedingly well-connected with key government officials and trade unionists in America and abroad. It is often assumed by those who underestimate Meany's influence that Lovestone has been personally responsible for American labor's foreign policy over the years. Still, the fact that this is a common misunderstanding is a measure of the role Lovestone has played and the mark he has left. " Gershman then describes how two of Lovestone's close associates, Irving Brown and Serafino Romualdi, were the key operatives for the AFL-CIO in Europe and in Latin America, respectively. (pp. 8-9) Lovestone was removed from his post as leader of the American Communists by Stalin because Lovestone was an ally and asset of Stalin's factional adversary in the Soviet Bolshevik Party, Nikolai Bukharin. Bukharin had been one of the principal half-dozen leaders among the Bolsheviks, and in the early twenties he had been the central figure of the left-wing Communists. Later in the 1920s, he joined with Stalin to dominate the party, and then passed into Right Opposition. Bukharin was the theoretician who argued that Soviet socialism could "creep at a snail's pace." He was purged and later executed by Stalin. A very significant part of the network that has been organized into Project Democracy is made up of social-democratic right-wingers and syndicalists whose ideology and, in some cases, whose careers can be traced back to Bukharin. This lineage is especially significant because of the tendency of the Gorbachov leadership of the Soviet Union to rehabilitate Bukharin as the archetype of policies to be implemented today in order to accelerate the all-out mobilization of the Soviet economy for war. So, the question arises, who was Bukharin? Bukharin was a universal fascist, irrationalist, and agent of the East-West financiers' cabal known as the Trust. If allowance is made for the fact that he was operating within the a priori totalitarian universe of Soviet Russia, his world outlook and policies will be seen as remarkably similar to those of a Mussolini, a Strasser, or a Roehm. In the days of his Moscow youth, Bukharin was friendly with Ilya Ehrenburg, who later spewed out the murderous ideology of the Great Russian master race in the pages of Pravda during the Second World War. He was a student of Bogdanov, the irrationalist "empiriomonist" who had emerged from the Venetian- Benedictine school on the island of Capri. Bukharin was an avid reader of European and American sociology, including Max Weber and Thorsten Veblen. Bukharin traveled extensively in Europe and visited the United States, but his favorite base outside of Russia was Lausanne, Switzerland. The young Bukharin was a leftish anarchosyndicalist, like so many of his fascist brethren in Germany, Italy, and other countries. The first point on his program was the need to smash the "contemporary imperialist robber state, an iron organization which envelops the living body of society in its tenacious, grasping paws. It is a new Leviathan, before which the fantasy of Thomas Hobbes seems child's play." [Note-4] Compare this to the young Mussolini's attacks on the "Moloch state." Bukharin, just like Mussolini, argued that the enemy of the revolution was "state capitalism." He felt that the prospects for revolution against such an order would depend in all likelihood on the advent of a general war. Thus, Bukharin's early program for the workers' movement was centered on the need "to emphasize strongly its hostility in principle to state power" and to "destroy the state organization of the bourgeoisie," to "explode it from within." (Cohen, p. 34) Bukharin's credentials as a universal fascist include his early contention that nationalism could never be a progressive force. During the First World War, Bukharin joined with his fellow Trust operative Karl Radek to attack Lenin's Imperialism because of its positive view of nationalism in the colonial world. Bukharin and Radek rejected the slogan of national self-determination as un- Marxist. During the civil war that followed the Bolshevik coup of October 1917, Bukharin was the spokesman for a Left-Communist faction that he referred to as "We, the young, the left." (Cohen, p. 64) During the period of Lenin's War Communism policy, Bukharin created the Supreme Economic Council, an instrument designed to promote totalitarian state control of all economic activity. War communism was a policy of dragooning labor, wholesale nationalization of industry, requisitioning of agricultural and industrial products, and confiscations and labor camps for those who did not go along. Bukharin, who was considered one of the few trained economists among the Bolshevik leaders, was responsible to Lenin for "socialist policies in the areas of finance and economics." (Cohen, p. 62) Bukharin became the leading theoretician of the coercive aspects of the war communism policy. During this same period, Bukharin strongly opposed the peace treaty with Germany signed at Brest-Litovsk, and preached a revolutionary "holy war" against the European bourgeoisie. (Cohen, p. 63) For Bukharin, the process of world revolution would necessarily be an apocalyptic one: "Sometimes I am afraid the struggle will be so bitter and so long drawn out that the whole of European culture may be trampled underfoot." (Cohen, p. 99) Stephen Cohen, a leading American academic admirer of Bukharin, describes the War Communism years of 1918-21 and the "statization" of economic life as follows: "The state grasped every economic lever within reach, and a vast, cumbersome bureaucracy mushroomed into being. Cooperatives, trade unions, and the network of local economic soviets were transformed into bureaucratic appendages of the state apparatus. The Supreme Economc Council, now responsible for virtually all industrial production, created sub-agency upon sub- agency." (p. 79) In the midst of this statization and militarization was Bukharin, proclaiming that "the republic is an armed camp" and that "one must rule with iron when one cannot rule with law." Bukharin during these years was very specific that totalitarian control must be extended into economics by the Soviet state, in a kind of national corporatism: "If the proletariat's state power is the lever of economic revolution, then it is clear that "economics" and politics must merge into a single whole. Such a merging exists under the dictatorship of finance capital ... in the form of state capitalism. But the dictatorship of the proletariat reverses all the relations of the old world--in other words, the political ditatorship of the working class must inevitably be its economic dictatorship." (Cohen, p. 86) During the civil war, the Bolshevik Party engaged in a debate about the proper role of trade unions. A group around Trotsky proposed the militarization of the workers into labor armies in an appeal to the most extreme totalitarian control. This was initially supported by Lenin, who later moderated his own stand somewhat under his slogan of making the unions into "schools of communism" as well as "transmission belts" for the imperatives of the party. The trade union leaders themselves, like Tomskii, later a close factional ally of Bukharin, argued in favor of union control and management of industry. For a time, Bukharin supported the program for the militarization of labor, but then assumed a middle position between Lenin and Trotsky. He was in favor of the statization of labor unions, but in a milder way than Trotsky. Some of Bukharin's statements in this controversy are most illuminating: "We have proclaimed a new sacred slogan--workers' democracy, which consists in the fact that all questions are discussed not in narrow collegiums, not in small meetings, not in some sort of corporation of one's own, but that all questions are carried to wide meetings." (Cohen, p. 103) Bukharin thought that the unions could be instruments of the "technical administrative apparatus" and schools of communism at the same time. He argued for a syndicalist-corporatist conception of the Soviet state: "If the general progressive line of development is the line of fusing the trade unions ;obwith the state;cb, then from the other side this same process is a process of "unionizing" the state. Its logical and historical end will not be the absorption of the unions by the proletarian state, but the disappearance of both categories, state and union, and the creation of a third--the communistically organized society." (Cohen, p. 104) Bukharin later became the principal spokesman for and defender of the so-called New Economic Policy (NEP), which was introduced on orders from Lenin in 1921, as the civil war was ending, and which was pursued as the official policy of the Soviet state until the initiation of forced collectivization and of breakneck industrialization under Stalin in 1928-29. During the mid-1920s, the NEP was administered jointly by Stalin and Bukharin acting as the duumviri of the Kremlin. Today, the Soviet Cultural Fund and the Gorbachov regime are attempting to depict their reforms as a return to the NEP, which they claim to have been the most advanced result of Lenin's political thought. In the process, the rehabilitation of Bukharin is on the agenda. The debates about the NEP and the proper industrialization strategy for the Soviet state exhibit another aspect of Bukharin's fascism, his economic views. Bukharin was an economist in the tradition of Thomas Malthus, who had argued that "a church with a capacious maw is best" when it came to providing sustained demand for the artifacts of capitalist production. In Bukharin's view, it was the peasants, including the wealthier ones, called kulaks, whose consumerist maw would stimulate the growth of the Soviet industrial economy. "Accumulation in socialist industry cannot occur for long without accumulation in the peasant economy," Bukharin argued. "The greater the buying powers of the peasantry, the faster our industry develops." "Kopeck accumulation in the peasant economy is the basis for ruble accumulation in socialist industry." (Cohen, p. 175) Although the thesis is patently absurd, it is not so different from the nostrums that were advocated as a solution to the Great Depression some years later by another fascist economist, John Maynard Keynes, also a follower of Malthus. Bukharin expressed many of his arguments in polemics against the demands of Trotsky and Preobrazhenskii for a policy of primitive accumulation against the peasants, to be accomplished by setting the prices of industrial goods at very high levels and the prices of farm commodities at very low levels. Bukharin rejected this, maintaining that accumulation against the peasants would undermine the alliance or smychka between urban workers and peasants. Bukharin demanded instead a "union of workers and peasants." "The revolution of 1905 was a failure because there was not a smychka between the urban movement and the agrarian-peasant movement." (Cohen, p. 166). Bukharin was something of a Maoist ante literam, since he saw the developed cities as being surrounded by a vast countryside. He argued that "the proletariat ... constitutes an insignificant minority" while the peasants of the Orient and and in other agrarian zones, "are the huge majority on our planet." The peasant in his view "will become--is becoming--the great liberating force of our time." (Cohen, pp. 168-69) For these peasant liberators, Bukharin had a simple message: Get rich! (We must say to the whole peasantry, to all its strata, enrich yourselves, accumulate, develop your economy.) (Cohen, p. 177) Bukharin's approach to organizing the peasants was a typically solidarist-corporatist one: His "wager on the cooperatives" as the appropriate form of peasant economy. In this, Bukharin was tapping the tradition of Aksakov, Kiriyevsky, and the other slavophiles of the 19th-century Russian Empire, who had been fascinated by the mir, the primitive communalist Russian peasant village. For Bukharin the mir-like peasant cooperative was the royal road to socialism: "The basic network of our cooperative peasant organization will consist of cooperative cells not of a kulak but of a 'laboring' type, cells growing into the system of our general state organs and thus becoming links in a single chain of socialist economy." (Cohen, p. 198) Bukharin's economic method was to proceed from consumption and circulation back to production, while his opponents were arguing for the creation of new branches of industry through a deliberate political decision to accumulate against the peasantry and invest. Bukharin's program moved "from circulation (money, prices, trade) to production." (Cohen, p.177) All economic activity, according to Bukharin, must always "end with the production of means of consumption ... which enter into the process of personal consumption." (Cohen, p. 174) He laid special stress on the question of consumption, arguing that the satisfaction of the material needs of the masses "was the real lever of development, that it generates the most rapid tempos of economic growth." "Our economy exists for the consumer, not the consumer for the economy. (Cohen, p. 173) At the same time, he incessantly stressed the need to stoke up the process of circulation by "unleashing commodity turnover," which he thought would automatically and without any further state intervention lead to socialist economic expansion: "We will come to socialism here through the process of circulation, and not directly though the process of production; we will come there through the cooperatives." (Cohen, p. 196) Bukharin's idea was most emphatically that buying and selling would by themselves lead to industrialization: "First, if commodity turnover grows, this means that more is produced, more is bought and sold, more is accumulated: this means that our socialist accumulation is accelerated, i.e., the development of our industry." (Cohen, p. 179) It is not surprising that Bukharin's factional adversaries ridiculed him as the Soviet Manchester school of political economy. The essence of his argument is that even under a communist dictatorship, Adam Smith's invisible hand is still at work. As Bukharin's repeated references to the mysterious role of the market in guaranteeing development make clear, he was a cultist of the "magic of the marketplace. Out of this irrationalist, eclectic mix of Malthusianism, fascism, physiocratic doctrine, and Bolshevism, there emerged an approximation of the zero-growth, post-industrial ideology of the type later associated with the Club of Rome: "Capitalist industrialization--this is the parasitism of the city in relation to the countryside, the parasitism of a metropolis in relation to colonies, the hypertrophic, bloated development of industry, serving the ruling classes, along with the extreme comparative backwardness of agricultural economics, especially peasant agricultural economics." (Cohen, p. 170) If Project Democracy is not destroyed, the world will shortly be dominated by a clique of fascist Bukharinite irrationalists in Moscow, whose hegemony shall have been validated by a New Yalta accord with their counterparts, the Bukharinite corporatists of the United States. Israel as a corporate state One of the hallmarks of Project Democracy's demagogic public face is its glorification of the State of Israel as an exemplary democratic nation. The present head of the National Endowment for Democracy, Carl Gershman, writing with Irving Howe in the introduction to a collection of essays entitled Israel, the Arabs, and the Middle East, asserts: "The survival of Israel is a major priority for everyone who cares about democracy; it should be a special obligation for people on the democratic left to speak out--passionately yet not uncritically--in behalf of the social innovations and achievements of Israeli society...." (p. 1) The same neo-Bukharinite Gershman, in his The Foreign Policy of American Labor, goes on to say: "American labor's relationship with Israel and its labor movement, the Histadrut, deserves separate treatment. This relationship has been of such an intimate nature for so long that one labor journalist, writing in the wake of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, observed that 'no comparable relationship has ever flowered between U.S. unions and any other nation at any time. Gershman adds: "American labor leaders generally express their support of Israel in terms of labor solidarity and democratic ideals. The Histadrut is universally admired within the American labor movement and Israel is viewed as a model society." (pp. 63-64) A model society? If so, then Project Democracy has chosen for a model a country whose founding fathers included a substantial number of professed admirers of Mussolini, a country which has no constitution, whose party structure is highly authoritarian, where 90% of the land cannot be bought because it is owned by a consortium of international financiers, and where a very large fraction of the working people find that the boss they work for and the union that is supposed to defend their interests are identical. The corporatist character of Israel is rooted in the Histadrut, the labor federation that was founded in Palestine in 1920 during the British mandate. If viewed as a trade union, the Histadrut counts upward of 1.5 million members, equivalent to 80% of the workforce, more than one-half of the entire adult population, and three-quarters of the total voting population. The Histadrut therefore exerts the dominant influence on questions of collective bargaining in Israel, and negotiates the contracts for the employees of the government and the state sector with the finance minister. The Histadrut has always been controlled by the leadership of the Labour Party. The Labour Party's control of the Histadrut is facilitated by a hierarchical system of voting, which is also typical of the Israeli political parties. The characteristic feature here is that each level of representation elects the next highest level, and so forth. Whatever can be said of this system, democratic it is not. In 1981, more than 825,000 Histadrut members elected 1,501 delegates to the 14th Histadrut convention. The Histadrut council, elected by the convention, had 501 members; the executive committee, elected by the council, had 195 members. The executive committee meets regularly and is parallel to a Histadrut parliament. From it emerges the central committee (42 members), which can be likened to the Histadrut government. [note-5] All of the key positions of power are in the hands of the Labour Party. But in addition to being a trade union, the Histadrut is also the capitalist for more than one-third of the entire Israeli economy. In its role as entrepreneur, the Histadrut is in fact the largest single employer in the entire country. The only difference is that when Histadrut is acting as employer, it calls itself Hevrat Ovdim, which is constituted as a holding company. In the words of Noah Malkosh of the Histadrut: "In the case of the economic enterprises owned directly by the collective membership of Histadrut, Hevrat Ovdim is incorporated as the Histadrut holding company, and in this way is able to control their policies." "The Convention and Council of Histadrut are the highest policy-making authorities of Hevrat Ovdim. On the completion of general Histadrut business those organs sit specifically as organs of Hevrat Ovdim. In the same way the executive committee of Histadrut is constituted as the executive of Hevrat Ovdim, and sits in this capacity when matters relating to the labor sector of the economy arise for decision." (Malkosh, pp. 62-63) The Hevrat Ovdim economic enterprises include Sollel Boneh, which carries out 20% of the building activities in the country and employs more than 17,000 workers. Then there is Koor, with 100 industrial firms, 100 commercial firms, and 50 financial firms including pension funds. Koor is Israel's largest heavy industrial firm and largest exporter, and is listed among Fortune magazine's list of the 500 largest companies in the world. Other Hevrat Ovdim companies include Bank Hapoalim, Shikun Ovdim, Hasneh, and others. Histadrut also owns companies providing service to the cooperative economy, including Hamashbir Hamerkazi, the central wholesale society of the consumers' cooperative movement, which runs a chain of department stores. Histadrut controls Tnuva, the central marketing agency of the agricultural settlements, which is linked to a chain of supermarkets. The Histadrut runs the country's largest sick fund, the Kupat Holim, with 3 million persons insured and 29,000 employees, plus pension plans and social welfare funds. One-third of the country's hospital beds are in Histadrut hospitals. Histadrut owns the newspapers Davar and the Jerusalem Post. Finally, the Histadrut controls the cooperative economy, including the kibbutzim and moshavim with 21,000 workers, and Egged and Dan, which move 80% of the passengers inside the country. As Arian sums it up, "The economic power of the Histadrut is a major factor in the Israeli economy. When it and the government are controlled by the same group, the potential political and economic power is awesome--and that was the case between 1948 and 1977." (p. 30) If the resulting structure is compared with the features of the Italian fascist corporate state summarized above, a striking similarity obtains. For a very large part of the Israeli economy, labor and capital are indeed joined in organic unity, through the same executive committee alternating its existence as Histadrut the trade union with that of Hevrat Ovdim the mammoth group of companies. For those who work for Hevrat Ovdim, and they are the majority of all Israelis who work, the boss and the shop steward are ultimately the same titanic entity. For those who work in the state- owned third of the economy, the picture hardly changes. Their employer is the government, which has generally meant a government dominated by the Labour Party or at least including it, and their trade union representation is the Histadrut, ultimately under the control of the same Labour Party. Even in the third of the Israeli economy that is privately owned, wages tend closely to follow the standards that obtain in the Histadrut sector. If, in addition, we consider that the worker whose boss and union are the Histadrut also depends on that same power center for his medical insurance and his pension, the totalitarian force that confronts each such individual in the society is plainly manifest--and indeed "awesome. Apologists for the Histadrut are of course uncomfortably aware of the problems posed by "Labour Zionist ideology." Malkosh writes: "The fact that Histadrut, a labor and trade union organization, is also the largest employer of labor in the country, is often found to be a considerable stumbling block to the understanding of the movement by labor leaders and sympathizers from other countries.... The question is often posed: how can the worker in the Histadrut- owned enterprises be assured of adequate trade union protection, when his employer is also his trade union? The answer given is as follows: In the case of a dispute within a Histadrut plant, what is involved is a temporary failure of the federal machinery of Histadrut, rather than a genuine conflict of interest. The ruling of the executive committee is binding, whether it favors the mangerial interpretation or the trade union interpretation or, as is more likely, produces a practical compromise fully acceptable to both. Both sides have their spokesmen in the Histadrut executive, and in that forum, they find themselves governed by the most authoritative interpretation of the body of legislation approved by the whole membership of Histadrut. (Malkosh, pp. 79-80) Malkosh goes on to say that what is really important about Histadrut is its characteristic ideology: "A correct picture of normal labour relations within Hevrat Ovdim must deal with the philosophic foundation of the labor sector. Economic objectives apart, the foremost purpose of Histadrut's economic operations is to develop a form of industrial democracy." "Histadrut envisages the development of a democratic structure within its economic enterprises, comparable to the democratic spirit pervading all other branches of its activity." This structure has now been created, so that each Histadrut member now votes not only for the national convention, for the city or regional workers' council, the trade union council for each craft or profession, but also for the workers' committee in the place of employment. It should be stressed again that Israeli parties are all based on so-called "indirect representation." The members of the Labor Party in 1979 elected a national convention of 3,000 delegates, which chose a center of 880 members, which in turn elected a leadership bureau of 61 members, which then selected an even smaller executive body. One student of Israeli political affairs finds that the country's governing process is an excellent illustration of what he calls the "iron law of oligarchy." (Arian, p. 118) His conclusion is that "Israeli political life, as exemplified by its parties, its organizations, the Knesset, and the government is highly oligarchical and hierarchical. Israel has no written constitution. The Knesset was convened in 1949 as the constituent assembly to produce a constitution, but no progress was made on this point. The place of the constitution is to be filled by the accretion of a series of precedents, in imitation of the British model. As a result, there is no Bill of Rights, and the relations among the various branches of government are determined by mere statutory law. Israeli statutory law shows substantial influence from the law of the Ottoman and British empires. Israel's landlord is yet another very powerful organization, in many ways a monopoly. This is the Jewish National Fund, or Keren Kayemeth. The Fund traces its origins back to a proposal made by Theodore Herzl at the Fifth Zionist Conference in Basel, Switzerland: "A fund must be established by the Jewish people of the world to redeem the soil of Eretz Yisrael." Today the Jewish National Fund owns about 90% of the land inside Israel's 1967 borders. According to the rules of the fund, this land cannot be sold, but only leased for 49-year cycles, after which the lease must be renegotiated. According to the fund, this is an expression of the Mosaic law, which it says discourages "large, monopolistic land holdings." Since 1960, the Jewish National Fund has been designated by the government as the sole agency for land development in Israel, and the land is under the administration of the Israel Lands Authority, a government agency. As a result, the Israeli government administers the quasi-totality of the land in the country, which can be leased for usufruct, but not bought. In practice, the Jewish National Fund is in the orbit of international financiers and money launderers. For example, the board of directors of the Jewish National Fund of Greater New York included as of 1983 Michael J. Lazar, since indicted by a federal grand jury in the Parking Violations Bureau scandal that continues to rock the administration of New York City Mayor Ed Koch. Lazar was the 1985 recipient of the JNF annual Tree of Life Award. The Trilaterals' U.S. corporate state From the moment of its inception about a dozen years ago, the operational network known today as Project Democracy has had as its goal the subversion of the United States constitutional order in favor of a one-party, totalitarian and corporatist fascist regime, combining the horrors of the historical precursors depicted so far. One aspect of these efforts by Project Democracy has involved the creation of an extensive and lawless invisible government, as has already been made clear in this report. But beyond all this, Project Democracy aims at definite changes in the structure of the government and institutions of the United States, of a kind so extensive that they could not be accomplished without a virtual obliteration of the Constitution. The starting point for this totalitarian plan was the Trilateral Commission, an organization created for the purpose of executing the policy of oligarchical and financier groupings making up the American, European, and Japanese branch of the broader East-West finance oligarchy known as the Trust. The Trilateral Commission was founded in the wake of Watergate and the oil crisis of 1973, events which the future Trilateral commissars had connived to create. One of the earliest projects of the Trilateral Commission was a study on the "ungovernability" of modern democracy in an era of economic crisis and social upheaval. This project was directed by Zbigniew Brzezinski, then the director of the Trilateral Commission. One of the results of this project that later came into the public domain was a book entitled The Crisis of Democracy by Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntingon, and Joji Watanuki. It is to be assumed that the published version of this study and its appendices is a very diluted rendering of the discussions that went on among the rapporteurs and the Trilateral commissars. The Crisis of Democracy was a part of the agenda at the yearly meeting of the Trilateral Commission that took place in Tokyo, Japan on May 31, 1975. This was the same Trilateral meeting at which the former governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, was presented by FIAT chief Gianni Agnelli, and appointed by the commissars to be the next President of the United States. The starting point of The Crisis of Democracy is the collapse of such economic progress as had characterized the 1960s, and the advent of the post-industrial society. Brzezinski's introduction compares the atmosphere of 1975 with the early 1920s, when Oswald Spengler published his mystical Untergang des Abendlandes,, The Decline of the West. The three authors start off their analysis by quoting Willy Brandt, as he was about to step down as German Federal Chancellor in 1974, saying, "Western Europe has only 20 or 30 more years of democracy left in it; after that it will slide, engineless and rudderless, under the surrounding sea of dictatorship, and whether the dictation comes from a politburo or a junta will not make that much difference." Then there is a quote fron an unnamed senior British official to the effect that if the United Kingdom fails to solve the problem of simultaneous inflation and economic depression, "parliamentary democracy would ultimately be replaced by a dictatorship." There is also a warning from Prime Minister Takeo Miki that "Japanese democracy will collapse" unless the confidence of the people in their political leaders can be restored. This is all related by the authors to the economic dimension of the crisis: "This pessimism about the future of democracy has coincided with a parallel pessimism about the future of economic conditions. Economists have discovered the fifty-year Kondratieff cycle, according to which 1971 (like 1921) should have marked the beginning of a sustained economic downturn from which the industrialized capitalist world would not emerge until the end of the century. The implication is that just as the political developments of the 1920s and 1930s furnished the ironicand tragic- aftermath of a war fought to make the world safe for democracy, so also the 1970s and 1980s might furnish a similarly ironic political aftermath to twenty years of sustained economic development designed in part to make the world prosperous enough for democracy." (pp. 2- 3) Added to this obvious implication that economic depression would prove fatal to democratic forms by creating the necessary preconditions for fascist mass movements was the related idea that the United States Constitution could be overthrown in the aftermath of military defeat by the Soviet Union or perhaps by another power. The Trilateral meeting in question, it should be recalled, was taking place just a few weeks after the fall of Saigon. The Trilateral authors make this point as follows: "With the most active foreign policy of any democratic country, the United States is far more vulnerable to defeats in that area than other democratic governments, which, attempting less, also risk less. Given the relative decline in its military, economic, and political influence, the United States is more likely to face serious military or diplomatic reverses during the coming years than at any previous time in its history. If this does occur, it could pose a traumatic shock to American democracy." (p. 5) In addition to these crisis factors, the study also points to dynamics considered internal to the political process which are generating instability: "Yet, in recent years, the operations of the democratic process do indeed appear to have generated a breakdown of traditional means of social control, a delegitimation of political and other forms of authority, and an overload of demands on government exceeding its capacity to respond."(p. 8) The study itself makes clear that the three Trilateral commissars are especially concerned about the economic demands made upon elected representatives by constituency groups which may contradict the austerity and primacy of debt service demanded by oligarchical financier factions. This theme dominates the chapter on the United States contributed by Samuel P. Huntington, who at various times has been a manager of the Harvard Center for International Affairs, the international network associated with Henry Kissinger. Huntington writes according to the canons of empirical social science, but the basic dictatorial intent nevertheless shines through. He describes the two great leaps in the expenditures of the U.S. federal government, the Defense Shift of the 1950s and the Welfare Shift of the 1960s. He concludes that after these two shifts had vastly increased federal spending, the student revolt of the 1960s plus Watergate combined to produce "a substantial increase in government activity and a substantial decrease in governmental authority. By the early 1970s Americans were progressively demanding and receiving more benefits from their government and yet having less confidence in their government than they had a decade earlier." "The expansion of government activities produced doubts about the economic solvency of government; the decrease in governmental authority produced doubts about the political solvency of government." (p. 64) Reading ex contrario, it emerges that Huntington's ideal government would be an authoritarian regime capable of imposing drastic austerity. His problem is his despair that the U.S. government will fill the bill. Increased government spending is leading to high deficits, even as public confidence in government declines, says Huntongton. He is especially concerned about the "decay of the party system," with the decline in clear party identification by the majority of the citizenry, the rise of split-ticket voting, and a decrease in party loyalty from one election to the next. As for the political parties themselves, Huntington's finding is that "the popular attitude towards parties combines both disapproval and contempt." (p. 87) Huntington also sees a decline in the mass base of the parties, plus a decline in the power of party organization. This raises the spectre of a successful political challenge to the power of people like the members of Trilateral Commission: "The lesson of the 1960s was that American political parties were extraordinarily open and extraordinarily vulnerable organizations, in the sense that they could be easily penetrated, and even captured, by highly motivated and well- organized groups with a cause and a candidate." (p. 89) Had Huntington been writing today, he would have crystallized his fears on this score with a single word: "LaRouche. Huntington is willing to explore the alternative that the political parties may have to be done away with: "It could be argued that political parties are a political form peculiarly suited to the needs of industrial society and that the movement of the United States into a post-industrial phase hence means the end of the party system as we have known it." "In less developed countries, the principal alternative to party government is military government. Do the highly developed countries have a third alternative?" (p. 91) Huntington sees the entire government in crisis, with congressmen falling prey to the rising expectations of their constituents while the presidency is in decline. Part of the latter problem is that a presidential candidate needs to assemble an electoral coalition of voters in order to win the White House, but must then assemble a governing coalition of various power brokers. Huntington views the two processes as perhaps antithetical. The recommendations that conclude the analysis of the crisis in U.S. democracy include such pablum as "moderation in democracy," more authoritarianism, and the need for greater apathy on the part of the population. "Democracy is more of a threat to itself in the United States," writes Huntington. The real conclusions reached by the Trilateral Commission were doubtless more far-reaching, as can be inferred from the appendices of the book. When the Crozier-Huntington-Watanuki study was presented to the commission, it was introduced by Ralf Dahrendorf, the head of the London School of Economics. The chief threat running through Dahrendorf's remarks was that Huntington had neglected corporatist elements in his prescription. Dahrendorf's argument deserves to be quoted at some length: "Democratic governments find it difficult to cope with the power of extraparliamentary institutions which determine by their decisions the life chances of as many (or in some cases more) people as the decisions of governments can possibly determine in many of our countries. Indeed, these extraparliamentary institutions often make governmental power look ridiculous. When I talk about extraparliamentary institutions, I am essentially thinking of two powerful economic institutions--giant companies and large and powerful trade unions. The greater demand for participation, the removal of effective political spaces from the national to the international level, and the removal of the power to determine people's life chances from political institutions to other institutions are all signs of what might be called the dissolution of the general political public which we assumed was the basis of real democratic institutions in the past. Instead of there being an effective political public in democratic countries from which representative institutions emerge and to which representative institutions are answerable, there is a fragmented public and in part a nonexistent public. There is a rather chaotic picture in the political communities of many democratic countries. My main point here is that as we think about a political public in our day, we cannot simply think of a political public of individual citizens exercising their common sense interests on the marketplace, as it were. In rethinking the notion of the political public, we have to accept the fact that most human beings today are both individual citizens and members of large organizations. We have to accept the fact that most individuals see their interests cared for not only by an immediate expression of their citizenship rights (or even by political parties which organize groups of interests) but also by organizations which at this moment act outside the immediate political framework and which will continue to act whether governments like it or not. And I believe, therefore, somewhat reluctantly, that in thinking about the political public of tomorrow we shall have to think of a public in which representative parliamentary institutions are somehow linked with institutions which in themselves are neither representative nor parliamentary. I think it is useful to discuss the exact meaning of something like an effective social contract, or perhaps a "Concerted Action" or "Conseil ;aaeconomique et social" for the political institutions of advanced democracies. I do not believe that free collective bargaining is an indispensable element of a free and democratic society. I do believe, however, that we have to recognize that people are organized in trade unions, that there are large enterprises, that economic interests have got to be discussed somewhere, and that there has got to be a negotiation about some of the guidelines by which our economies are functioning. This discussion should be related to representative institutions. There may be a need for reconsidering some of our institutions in this light, not to convert our countries into corporate states, certainly not, but to convert them into countries which in a democratic fashion recognize some of the new developments which have made the effective political public so much less effective in recent years. For a reader who has followed the exposition up to this point, not much comment is necessary. Despite his very explicit disclaimer, Dahrendorf is indeed talking about a covert and overt institutional transformation toward a corporate state. We have seen several previous attempts to accomplish exactly what he is proposing here. One was D'Annunzio's Consiglio dei Provvisori, and another was Mussolini's Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni. But the Trilateral Commission still needed a means of transition to corporatist rule. It was momentarily to propose it in the form of Project Democracy. The appendix to The Crisis of Democracy also contains a series of formal concluding statements by the Trilateral Commission at the close of debate on the ungovernability report. At a certain point, the text turns toward question of workers' self-management, co-determination (Mitbestimmung) as practiced in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the need for new modes of organization to alleviate the tensions that characterize post-industrial society. At that point, a new heading is introduced, as follows: "7. Creation of New Institution for the Cooperative Promotion of Democracy" The effective working of democratic government in the Trilateral societies can now no longer be taken for granted. The increasing demands and pressures on democratic government and the crisis in governmental resources and public authority require more explicit collaboration. One might consider, therefore, means of securing support and resources from foundations, business corporations, labor unions, political parties, civic associations, and, where possible and appropriate, government agencies, for the creation of an institute for the strengthening of democratic institutions. The purpose of such an institute would be to stimulate collaborative studies of common problems involved in the operations of democracy in the Trilateral societies, to promote cooperation among institutions and groups with common concerns in this area among the Trilateral regions, and to encourage the Trilateral societies to learn from each other's experience how to make democracy function more effectively in their societies. There is much which each society can learn from the others. Such mutual learning experiences are familiar phenomena in the economic and military fields; they must also be encouraged in the political field. Such an institute could also serve a useful function in calling attention to questions of special urgency, as, for instance, the critical nature of the problems currently confronting democracy in Europe." (p. 187) With that, Project Democracy was unleashed against the world. In the final discussion that followed Dahrendorf's remarks, the task of the new institute was made clearer. One participant suggested that Dahrendorf's idea of associating non-parliamentary groups with the parliamentary process ought to be seen in relation to international political systems, and not just in a national framework. At the close, "one Commissioner ;obWas it David Rockefeller?;cb expressed his support 'very concretely' for the proposed institute for the strengthening of democratic institutions." (p. 203) Transforming the political parties Project Democracy is thus by pedigree an international fascist- corporatist organization designed to supplant democratic constitutional republics with veiled and overt fascist regimes. It is a kind of bankers' Comintern--the Comintern of Bukharin, to be sure. As some of the citations adduced here suggest, it appears that one of the first tasks contemplated for the nascent Project Democracy network was the fomenting of coups d';aaetat in Western Europe, as was also indicated by abundant empirical evidence manifest at that time. What is the nature of Project Democracy's planned institutional transformation for the United States? Project Democracy intends to complete the evolution of the Republican and Democratic parties, especially the Democrats, away from their previous status as mass- based political machines responsive to the demands of constituencies and regional and local interests. Under the pretext of increasing the cohesion and responsibility of the parties, they are to acquire dictatorial control over the votes and opinions of elected officials, as for example, congressmen. The two parties are to become increasingly remote from the citizenry, and subjected to an increasingly authoritarian top-down control. Candidates are to become more and more like party functionaries, and are to be chosen by a tiny group of party leaders acting in synergy with the finance oligarchs. This will include presidential candidates most emphatically. Primary elections are to be gradually abolished in favor of a fascist-corporatist smoke-filled room. The specifically corporatist dimension of such a system in evolution from authoritarianism to totalitarianism is provided by the merger of the AFL-CIO top bureaucracy with the fused Democratic and Republican National Committees and fundraising apparatus. Despite the decline in the relative weight of trade unions in the U.S. workforce, the AFL-CIO is still by far the largest membership organization in the United States. This kind of troika is accurately reflected on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy. The AFL-CIO, by virtue of its close interfaces with the State Department, the Agency for International Development, the Labor Department, the Commerce Department, the Special Trade Representative, and the intelligence community, is virtually a government agency, precisely in the way that Bukharin wanted trade unions to be. By closely controlling the financing of candidates, access to the media, party endorsement, candidate debates, and the related election apparatus, the backers of Project Democracy think that they can in effect choose the Congress and choose the President. In this proposed silent putsch by Project Democracy, the RNC/DNC/AFL-CIO lockstep would acquire sovereignty over the U.S. federal government, in much the same way that the Soviet Politburo and Central Committee Secretariat control the Soviet Council of Ministers and Supreme Soviet. For Project Democracy, it is much more convenient for sovereignty to be located in an informal combine of private organizations, which cannot be subjected to government oversight, Freedom of Information Act demands, or financial audit and accountability, but which can and do receive large amounts of official government funding, as well as the largesse conduited through Oliver North's Swiss bank accounts. At the same time, Project Democracy is well aware of the value of maintaining a facade of respect for constitutional forms during the time in which the passage from authoritarianism to totalitarianism is being negotiated. It can be recalled that it took Mussolini some three years to go from head of the government to dictator, and still longer for the full institutional panoply of the totalitarian state to be set forth. In that transition, the suppression of opposition political groups and publishing enterprises was carried out gradually by squadristi and secret police. Today, these functions are assigned to the William Welds and the Oliver Revells. In the meantime, Project Democracy will find ways to denigrate and vilify the United States Constitution, even while going through the pretense of celebrating its anniversary. Realizing the design The following examples will document the ongoing attempts to realize this design. Project Democracy as the Trilateral Comintern. Samuel Huntington, as Harvard professor and director of Kissinger's Center for International Affairs, appears to have found a special niche as scorekeeper for Project Democracy's series of international coups. In a recent volume entitled Global Dilemmas, there appears Huntington's essay, "Will more Countries become democratic?" Huntington, the theorist of democratic ungovernability, starts off with a ringing endorsement of Project Democracy: "The Reagan administration moved far beyond the Carter administration's more limited concern with human rights and first launched 'Project Democracy' and 'The Democracy Program' to promote democratic institutions in other societies, and then persuaded Congress to create a 'National Endowment for Democracy' to pursue this goal on a permanent basis. In the early 1980s, in short, concern with the development of new democratic regimes has been increasing among academics and policymakers." (p.253) Huntington is in touch with Freedom House, another node of the Project Democracy network, and cites Freedom House's yearly survey of how many people live under democratic conditions around the world. In January 1984, for example, Freedom House found that 36% of the world's people were living in democracies, a level that was about equal to that of 10 years earlier. This corresponded to 52 free countries. Huntington prefers to describe democracy as "polyarchy," a neologism coined by one of his fellow academics. For Huntington, democracy is most highly correlated with Protestantism. The article concludes with a hit list, leading off with the "bureaucratic-authoritarian" regimes of Ibero- America, including Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile. Then come the East Asian "newly industrializing" countries, like South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Then come the Philippines, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, and El Salvador. In general, Huntington concludes that "the limits of democratic development in the world may well have been reached." (p. 276) Corporatism In early 1975, Nicholas von Hoffman devoted his column in the Washington Post to revelations that certain prime financial supporters of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party have a "hidden agenda for American politics ... a planned economy ... state capitalism ... fascism without lampshade factories." Hoffman stated that the then- President of the United Auto Workers, Leonard Woodcock, was "willing to surrender the economic planning to the megacorporations." In March 1975, Challenge magazine carried an article entitled "The Coming Corporatism," by R.E. Pahl and J.T. Winkler. The article stated in part: "Corporatism is a distinct form of economic structure. It was recognized as such in the 1930s by people of diverse political backgrounds, before Hitler extinguished the enthusiasm which greeted Mussolini's variant. The fact that our blinkered political vocabulary now sees the alternative pure forms of economy as simply "capitalism" or "socialism" is a consequence of the fact that the Axis powers lost the Second World War. This "corporatism" is a comprehensive economic system under which the state intensively channels predominantly privately owned business towards four goals, which have become increasingly explicit during the current economic crisis: Order, Unity, Nationalism, and "Success." Those, then, are the four aims. Let us not mince words. Corporatism is fascism with a human face. What the parties are putting forward now is an acceptable face of fascism; indeed a masked version of it, because so far the more repugnant political and social aspects of the German and Italian regimes are absent or only present in diluted form. The same year saw the creation of an Initiative Committee for National Economic Planning with a press conference attended by Woodcock, Robert Roosa, and Wassily Leontieff. Among the sponsors of ICNEP were J.K. Galbraith and Robert McNamara. At the same time, officials of the Swedish, German, British, and Italian parties of the Second International were expressing the idea that, whereas in the last depression, the financiers had turned to fascist mass movements to impose corporatism and austerity, this time the social democrats could survive by showing that they were the most efficient agency for corporatist austerity. Corporatism in 1988. Signs are multiplying that with the present acceleration of economic collapse, corporatist agitation may become more widespread. One harbinger of such a trend is the highly ideologized candidacy of former Arizona Gov. Bruce Babbitt. In declaring his candidacy for President, Babbitt proposed a "gain-sharing" plan under which he claimed that by 1996 "two-thirds of American workers would directly share in the profits and losses of their own business." When asked whether such a policy were not a return to corporatism, Babbitt answered that he preferred to call it "competitiveness" or "futurism," and later admitted that he was not sure of the meaning of corporatism. Babbitt's candidacy is designed to expose broad strata of the population to various parts of the Trilateral ideological inventory. The 1980 presidential candidacy of Trilateral Commission member Rep. John Anderson was also a vehicle for spewing out Malthusianism and anti-constitutional propaganda. Anderson's platform charged that despite the advent of post-industrial society, the Republicans and Democrats were still too "consumption-oriented." The platform stated: "The traditional parties were reasonably effective mechanisms for distributing the dividends of economic growth. But during a period in which the central task of government is to allocate burdens and orchestrate sacrifices, these parties have proved incapable of making the necessary hard choices. We are prepared to tell the American peopple what we must do, and allocate the burden in a manner sensitive to both economic efficiency and social equity." Babbitt's current rhetoric is strikingly similar. Cutler vs. the Constitution. A leading part in the Trilateral-Project Democracy effort to overthrow the Constitution is played by Lloyd Cutler and his Committee on the Constitutional System. Cutler had begun assaulting the Constitution in late 1980, when he published an article urging "changes in our Constitution" in Foreign Affairs. There he argued that the present form of government is ill-suited to facing difficult choices of the kind that it is increasingly called upon to make. Cutler's remedies of 1980 included limiting the President to a single six-year term, to make him more remote from political demands; concurrent terms for President, Vice President, Senators, and Congressmen, to increase the chances that the same party will dominate in all these offices; and the ability of the President to dissolve Congress and call new elections as a way out of a deadlock of the executive and the legislative branches. In January 1987, the Committee on the Constitutional System took the same point of departure: "Changes in the Constitution should not be shunned, however, if critical modern problems cannot be solved by other means." The CCS indicated among the signs of strain in the present order "the mounting national debt, fueled anew each year by outsized and unsustainable deficits that defy the good intentions of legislators and Presidents." Part of the cause is attributed to factors which "weaken the parties and undermine their ability to draw the separated parts of government into coherent action." For the CCS, the "weakening of the parties in the electoral arena has contributed to the disintegration of party cohesion among the officials we elect to public office." The decline of party cohesion and party accountability is the main point addressed by the CCS proposals for "strengthening" the parties. Among the remedies offered are a policy of packing Presidential nominating conventions with party nominees and office holders, optional or even obligatory straight-ticket voting, and public financing of congressional campaigns with the party getting half of the take to assure "cohesion." The CCS is for federal elections every four years, permitting members of Congress to serve in the cabinet, easier ratification of arms control and other treaties in the Senate, presidential appearances in Congress to answer questions, a shadow cabinet for the party out of power, and a mechanism for dissolving Congress in the event of a deadlock. It is evident that these measures would amount to the introduction of a parliamentary system, in which congressmen would be subjected to the merciless discipline of party whips. In such a parliamentary system, the party that wins a majority also elects the executive, an idea that has been repeatedly proposed by former Sen. J. William Fulbright. Although the resemblance to the British parliamentary system is marked, it should be recalled that the Israeli Knesset is, if anything, a more extreme or "pure" form of parliamentary arrangement. The Cutler proposals to subvert the separation-of-powers and checks-and-balances features of the U.S. Constitution are simply a blueprint for exactly the tyranny that the framers of the Constitution sought to rule out. The sympathies of Cutler and his Trilateral co-thinkers go out to Israel, where there is no constitution. Chairman Kirk the Totalitarian. As the 1988 presidential elections approach, the signs of party dictatorship in the election process multiply. In March 1986, after the victory of two associates of Lyndon LaRouche in the Illinois Democratic primary elections for lieutenant governor and secretary of state, New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote an op-ed in the New York Times in which he called for the abolition of primary elections, and the choosing of candidates by the party leadership. Later, Fabian Palomino, a political aide to New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, who directed the operations of throwing "non- endorsed" Democratic candidates off the September primary ballot, was quoted as saying that "the best primary is no primary." Chairman Paul Kirk of the Democratic National Committee and Chairman Frank Fahrenkopf of the Republican National Committee are acting together increasingly to police the presidential election process. Kirk and Fahrenkopf more and more resemble the duumviri of a single party, like Stalin and Bukharin during the middle 1920s. Is there a dime's worth of differnce between Kirk's Democrats and Fahrenkopf's Republicans? Comparing the Carter and Reagan administrations, we observe a remarkable continuity on such policies as Volcker austerity economics and support for Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, to name just two. The direction is clear: Apart from the activities of a maverick like LaRouche, America is well on its way to becoming a one-party state. Thus, the Kirk-Fahrenkopf tandem have arrogated to themselves the organization of the 1988 presidential debates, a matter that up to now has been handled by the individual candidates in negotiation with the League of Women Voters. Kirk and Fahrenkopf reply that they are seeking to "institutionalize" the debates and strengthen the role of the parties in the political process. Kirk has announced his intention to exclude the LaRouche campaign from consultation and debates, and it is clear that third-party candidates will have no chance. Kirk has also announced a set of "rules" for the 1988 presidential contest, and says he will enforce obedience to this code on the candidates. We thus have the singular spectacle of the party chairmen, who used to be relatively anonymous hacks, now disciplining a gaggle of presidential aspirants like a classroom of unruly schoolboys. Future Presidents must first be taught to obey. The idea of concentrating a very large number of state presidential primary elections on a single day (like the so-called Southern Super Tuesday of March 15, 1988), is also a step away from federalism and toward a one-party state. The traditional February to June "long season" of primary elections gave a determined outsider the ability to parlay an early success into later momentum through an extended series of almost weekly engagements. "Super Tuesday" means that big bucks, like those provided by Impact 88, the consortium of Democratic money-bags, will be at a premium from the outset. At the same time, there is an effort to de-emphasize the primary contests altogether. Since the candidate will be chosen by the party bosses anyway, why traipse through the proverbial thousand living rooms of such places as New Hampshire and Iowa? This is the advice of former Virginia Gov. Charles Robb to Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn. Robb recommends a kind of institutional campaign, waged in Nunn's case from the chairman's seat of the Senate Armed Services Committee, thus guaranteeing maximum media visibility and virtually no contact with the vulgar masses. In the same way, it may be that former Sen. Howard Baker's disclaimer of presidential ambition after his assumption of the post of White House chief of staff is disingenuous to the degree that the White House may be seen as the "bully pulpit" for running for the presidency. The Future? Samuel Huntington, in his recent book American Politics, develops a perspective for the future development of the American political system in the framework of conflict between increasingly authoritarian and ultimately totalitarian state control, on the one hand, and an underlying American value system and world-outlook-- which he calls the "American Creed--on the other. In Huntington's view, there is no doubt that the regime will become more oppressive: "An increasingly sophisticated economy and active involvement in world affairs seem likely to create stronger needs for hierarchy, bureaucracy, centralization of power, expertise, big government specifically, and big organizations generally." (p. 228) But this will conflict with the ideological American Creed, based on liberty, equality, individualism, and democracy and rooted in "seventeenth-century Protestant moralism and eighteenth-century liberal rationalism." (p. 229) Something has to give, says Huntington. On the one hand, there is a possibility that the American Creed could be junked, and "there are some signs that values are changing." "In the 1960s and 1970s in both Europe and America, social scientists found evidence of the increasing prevalence of 'postbourgeois' or postmaterialist' values, particularly among younger cohorts. In a somewhat similar vein, George Lodge foresaw the displacment of Lockean, individualistic ideology in the United States by a 'communitarian' ideology, resembling in many aspects the traditional Japanese collective approach. Huntington predicts that the conflict between individualistic values and the centralized regime may explode early in the coming century specifically between 2010 and 2030, in a period of ferment and dislocation like the late 1960s: "If the periodicity of the past prevails, a major sustained creedal passion period will occur in the second and third decades of the twenty-first century." At this time, he argues, "the oscillations among the responses could intensify in such a way as to threaten to destroy both ideals and institutions." (p. 232) Such a process would be acted out as follows: "Lacking any concept of the state, lacking for most of its history both the centralized authority and the bureaucratic apparatus of the European state, the American polity has historically been a weak polity. It was designed to be so, and the traditional inheritance and social environment combined for years to support the framers' intentions. In the twentieth century, foreign threats and domestic economic and social needs have generated pressures to develop stronger, more authoritative decision-making and decision-implementing institutions. Yet the continued presence of deeply felt moralistic sentiments among major groups in American society could continue to ensure weak and divided government, devoid of authority and unable to deal satisfactorily with the economic, social and foreign challenges confronting the nation. Intensification of this conflict between history and progress could give rise to increasing frustration and increasingly violent oscillations between moralism and cynicism. American moralism ensures that government will never be truly efficacious; the realities of power ensure that government will never be truly democratic. This situation could lead to a two-phase dialectic involving intensified efforts to reform government, followed by intensified frustration when those efforts produce not progress in a liberal- democratic direction, but obstacles to meeting perceived functional needs. The weakening of government in an effort to reform it could lead eventually to strong demands for the replacement of the weakened and ineffective institutions by more authoritarian structures more effectively designed to meet historical needs. Given the perversity of reform, moralistic extremism in the pursuit of liberal democracy could generate a strong tide toward authoritarian efficiency. (p. 232) Huntington then quotes Plato's celebrated passage on the way that the "culmination of liberty in democracy is precisely what prepares the way for the cruelest extreme of servitude under a despot." The message is clear: sooner or later, all roads lead to Behemoth. Fascism as an aftermath of defeat. Nous sommes trahis! cried the French in 1870 as they recoiled from defeat in war. For the Germans of 1918, it was the Dolchstosslegende, the stab in the back of the fighting army by the surrender of the politicians. For D'Annunzio and Mussolini, it was the vittoria mutilata, the inability of Orlando to impose Italy's territorial and colonial demands in the imperialist haggling of Versailles. Each of these reproaches, whatever their historical merits might have been, became vital factors in engendering mass fascist mentality and mass fascist movements. Parallels exist between such figures as Oliver North and the arditi who accompanied D'Annunzio to Fiume. According to former National Security Council director Robert McFarlane, "Lt. Col. Oliver North's experiences in the Vietnam War may have led him to secretly channel proceeds from the Iran arms sales to the Nicaraguan rebels while he was an NSC aide," according to an article published in the Washington Times in March 1987. The article quotes McFarlane, interviewed while recovering from a suicide attempt, as follows: "For people who went through that, and Colonel North surely did, you come away with the the profound sense of very intolerable failure. That is, a government must never give its word to people who may stand to lose their lives and then break faith. And I think it's possible that in the last year we've seen a commitment made to human beings in Nicaragua that is being broken. As we have seen, the filibustering expedition of D'Annunzio to Fiume was a kind of dress rehearsal for Italian fascism. In post- World War I Germany, it was a similar kind of filibustering activity, the military campaigns of the Baltic Freikorps against the Bolsheviks, that created a significant part of the fascist potential which later aggregated in the Nazi Party. For the fascism of Project Democracy, the close historical parallel is the filibustering in Central America around the Contra war. BIBLIOGRAPHY 1) See Ralph H. Bowen, German Theories of the Corporate State, p. 2 2) Finer, Mussolini's Italy, p. 499 3) G. Lowell Field, The Syndical and Corporative Institutions of Italian Fascism,p. 137 4) Cited in Stephen Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, p. 30 5) Asher Arian, Politics in Israel,p. 206 End