🚀 go-pugleaf

Kevin Alfred Strom <kevin.strom@revilo-oliver.com> wrote in message news:<40299C2C.1E4EAAFD@revilo-oliver.com>...
> http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=1974
> 
> Fantasizing Fascism
> Books; Posted on: 2004-02-07 03:54:34 [ Printer friendly ]
>  
> 
>  by Michael J. Polignano (pictured)
>  
> 
> Sylvia Plath once wrote that "Every woman adores a Fascist." I wish
> this were true. It is true, however, that a lot of women fantasize
> about fascists. These fantasies need not be sexual either.
> 
> A case in point is Alice Kaplan, a professor of French whose book
> French Lessons was published by the University of Chicago Press in
> 1993. Kaplan recalls childhood experiences that had a profound
> effect on her view of the world. She also describes a number of
> fantasies she had throughout her life. Although she herself makes no
> link between her fantasies and her childhood experiences, close
> examination shows that her experiences shaped her fantasies, and her
> fantasies influenced her behavior in later life.
> 
> Nowhere is this clearer than in her fascination with two French
> fascist writers, Louis-Ferdinand C line and Maurice Bard che.
> Ultimately Kaplan's interest stems from childhood experiences
> connected with her father, a lawyer in the Nuremberg tribunals, and
> the fantasies that arose from these experiences. (The cover of this
> book, ostensibly about one woman's romance with the French language,
> is a picture from the Nuremberg tribunals.)
> 
>  Kaplan's first fantasy (relevant to her later interest in fascism)
> occured as she grew up in a Republican, gentile neighborhood. The
> previous owners of the house are said to have left a detective's
> report lying on the dining room radiator, apparently to remind the
> Kaplan family that their neighbors didn't want any more Jews in the
> neighborhood. This, Kaplan claims, is her first exposure to
> anti-Semitism, and it made a profound impression on her: "This
> episode sat in the back of my mind as I grew up. I watched us. We
> were on trial, being upright for the neighborhood."
> 
> This all seems implausible. What, exactly, were the detectives hired
> to investigate? Did the goyim need a detective to determine that a
> family named Kaplan was Jewish? This is a child's vague
> understanding of detective work, which is why I label the episode a
> fantasy.
> 
> Later, while searching through her father's drawers, Kaplan
> discovered photographs of concentration camp victims. Her first view
> of dead bodies made a lasting impression. "They didn't look human,"
> she says. She fantasized about shocking her classmates with the
> photos, even the most gruesome, because, says Kaplan, "I missed my
> father. I was trying to do what he would do, be like him." (Kaplan
> will be delighted to know that small children all over the world are
> now forced to view such gruesome photos in mandatory Holocaust
> education programs.)
> 
> The death of Kaplan's father played an important role in her
> identity formation. She recalls going fishing with him just before
> he died, and her brother having told her: "Daddy knows the places in
> the lake where the fishes like to go." Kaplan mentions her brother's
> remark because it serves as a metaphor for her father's involvement
> in Nuremberg: he went to Germany to catch the Nazis responsible for
> the crimes depicted in the photographs.
> 
> When Kaplan asks her mother what happens to people after they die,
> her mother responded, "Jews do not believe in an afterlife. We
> believe people live on through their achievements." This sets off a
> number of fantasies about "living on" and being reunited with her
> father. This spurred her to complete sixty book reports for her
> third grade class that year. Her lifelong interest in French
> language and culture, and her attempts to understand French fascists
> and literary geniuses (in C line's case they were one and the same),
> also seem shaped by fantasies of "living on" through her
> achievements.
> 
> Another noteworthy fantasy in Kaplan's childhood occurs after her
> father chases down and kills a bat in the family's summer home. Her
> father "saves" her from the bat, ultimately by squashing it against
> a wall. After the bat was dead, Kaplan told her mother she wanted to
> see it. Her mother replied: "Now why in the world would you even
> want to see such a thing? Bats carry horrible diseases."
> Recollecting the split second when she saw the bat, Kaplan tells us
> "it had a human face."
> 
>  
> 
> Of course Kaplan didn't really see a human face on the bat. This is
> just a fantasy. But this fantasy influences her later studies of the
> French literary fascists C line and Bard che. Although her peers
> told her that C line, like the bat, carried the "horrible disease"
> of anti-Semitism and thus should not be studied (unlike the corpses
> of the presumed-to-be-Jewish concentration camp victims), Kaplan
> wanted to see C line's human face. She was convinced he had a human
> face because, of course, the bat had a human face. There are many
> reasons to study C line, who is one of the great writers of the
> twentieth century and one of the many great minds attracted to
> fascism, but this is surely the strangest on record.
> 
> Yet for all his genius, C line still has evil, bat-like qualities.
> Kaplan tells of Milton Hindus, a fellow Jew and a professor of
> literature, who was also fascinated with C line. In the last letter
> Hindus received from C line, he jokes about having sex with Jewish
> girls at Brandeis: "They'd be in the clouds, those Brandeis girls,
> getting screwed by a Nazi, even an old one . . . just like in
> Buchenwald."
> 
> Personally, I would like to see this letter before believing it. Was
> it real, or just a fantasy? I don't doubt that C line could write
> such things. His anti-Semitic books of the 30s and 40s were so
> extreme that even the Nazis banned them. But I would like to see the
> context. I very much doubt that Nazis screwed Jews in the
> concentration camps. The whole point of Nazism was to prevent the
> mingling of Aryan and non-Aryan genes. There were strict rules
> against sex with Jews, and harsh punishments for transgressors. But
> I don't doubt that Jews fantasized about being screwed by Nazis and
> not just for purposes of anti-Nazi propaganda and I wonder if C line
> was referring to those fantasies. Seeing the quote in context could
> clear that up.
> 
> Kaplan as a Jew, as the daughter of a Nuremberg lawyer, and as the
> discoverer of shocking photographs in her daddy's drawer was
> predictably revolted by C line's alleged statements. She was torn,
> because C line is the kind of man her father sent to the gallows in
> Nuremberg, yet she also admired his literary genius. Interestingly,
> Kaplan's response to this conflict is to shoot the messenger. She
> got angry at Hindus, whom she believed provoked C line to anger. In
> her eyes, it was Hindus, not C line, who was responsible for the
> letter that destroyed her fantasy image of C line's perfection as a
> writer. (Hindus may well have been responsible, which is why I would
> love to see the letter.)
> 
>  
> 
> In the early 1980s, Kaplan interviewed Maurice Bard che. She was
> surprised at Bard che's cordiality and kindness, and even laughed
> with him a few times. In her mind, however, she imagined how her
> father would advise her to treat Bard che. She tried to interview
> him the way her father interviewed Nazis at Nuremberg. (She does not
> mention the use of torture.) Still, she did not discuss her Jewish
> identity in order not to destroy her fantasy of Bard che as Hindus
> destroyed her fantasy of C line. Likewise, Bard che did not bring
> the topic up out of politeness. By the end of the interview,
> "Bard che had ceased to be the person whose most deeply felt ideas
> horrified me."
> 
> Unfortunately, this fantasy too was shattered by a letter where
> Bard che frankly discussed his anti-Semitic views. Bard che tried
> the soften the blow, telling her "I am afraid that [my letter] might
> cause you pain . . . I have much sympathy and confidence in you . .
> . you must try to understand." Perhaps Bard che was simply an old
> man who wanted an honest biography written about himself and his
> ideas, and who hoped that Kaplan could see past their ideological
> differences.
> 
> If so, he was mistaken. Kaplan's reaction was a flashback to the
> concentration camp photos she saw as a child, a memory "so powerful
> in my imagination that I often think it the basis of my entire sense
> of history." Again, she recalls the image of her father killing
> "bats." Deeply offended and hurt by Bard che's frank anti-Semitism,
> Kaplan retaliated by portraying him as "evil and monstrous" in her
> book on fascism. Later she fantasized about going back to Bard che's
> home and telling him off.
> 
> It is hard to fathom why the University of Chicago Press deemed
> Alice Kaplan's memoir worthy of publication. She is an educated
> woman, but no intellectual giant or innovator, just a professor of
> French. Kaplan's lack of intellectual rigor and objectivity is
> remarkable. So too is the brazenness with which she flaunts them.
> She seems to lack a scholar's conscience altogether. One can only
> conclude that her other writings are worthless. But if Kaplan is a
> typical case, then French Lessons is at least valuable for
> documenting the extreme subjectivism and penchant for fantasies some
> of them quite colorful, but most of them just banal or sick that
> vitiate Jewish discussions of fascism.
> 
> ---
> 
> The writings of Michael J. Polignano, a graduate of Emory
> University, may be found at http://michaeljpolignano.com/ and are
> published at NationalVanguard.org with the permission of the author.
> 
>  
> 
> Source: Author  
> 
Interesting.

Hank
>  
> 
> 
> 
> 
> http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=1974