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Alexander Reid Ross is right that he attended my anti-civ discussion group at Dry River Anarchist Collective several years ago. It's about all he gets right in either of his recent pieces insinuating sinister affinities between fascism and post-left anarchists. But then, he always had the attention span of a flea-hop.
I'm also one of the writers identified as post-left in “Egomania,” along with Fredy Perlman, John Zerzan, and others.
It's the inclusion of Fredy Perlman in that group that I find interesting. Because it's the last reference to him in either piece by Ross. He is conspicuous by his absence.
The reason would be obvious to anyone less vulgar than Ross. How plausible would all the creepiness he finds in the post-left milieu with its endless “equivocations” be if he properly acknowledged that the most prominent of post-left thinkers, to whom we all owe an immense debt, is a Jewish writer who escaped the Nazis when he left Czechoslovakia at the age of twelve?
A writer, moreover, who is the explicit intellectual link for many of us between anti-fascism of the past and support for indigenous resistance today. Against His-Story, Against Leviathan, “Anti-Semitism and the Beirut Pogrom” and “The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism” continue to appeal to those who, unlike Ross, do not confuse reading and writing with thinking.
Like Adolf Hitler, Ross suffers from flatulence. That does not make him a fascist by any standard other than his own, but indeed by that debased standard the common “nodality” (a word to which our professor is inordinately devoted) of flatulence at least gives off a whiff (sorry) of fascism.
Nietzsche aspired to philosophize with a hammer. Ross actually philosophizes with a jackhammer. He aspires to be anti-fascist, but his piss-ant pedantry is actually reminiscent of phrenology, another sort of creeping, that of fingers across the skull, finding patterns of meaning from the shapes and sizes of nodules.
How crude is Ross? He speaks with a straight face of something called “Situationism,” never noting at all the repeated references of disdain to such by the Situationist International. By itself, this discredits any pretense of his to credible scholarship.
. . . As does his central narrative, which turns on its head the true nature of where fascism originated, which is not in paganism, as he suggests, but in the centuries-long struggle of the Baltic, or Northern, Crusades to suppress the last pagans in Europe, largely successful by the 16th century. Critical to this process was the emergence of the infamous Teutonic Knights, a Christian monastic order which Himmler hoped to reincarnate in the SS.
The decorous, high-minded progressive sensibility of Ross is mightily offended by any association with Feral House. And indeed its catalog is hardly calculated to be found edifying by such dainty souls as his. It's where one might find a book devoted to that “tacky little pamphlet in your daddy's bottom drawer,” Zappa sang about.
Our professor is devoted to “humanism, the Enlightenment tradition, and democracy.” Indifferent to these as I am, I daresay my novel Hunting Seasons, the first narrative, alliterative poem since Beowulf, published (by me—no dubious associations here!) under the pen name Lang Gore, enriches humanism somewhat more than the confused scribblings of this salaried “thinker.”
Problematic for Ross is the green anarchist “ . . . synthesis of individualism and collectivism that rejected left, right and center in favor of a deep connection with the earth and more organic tribal communities.” Would those “more organic tribal communities” be actual traditional indigenous people actually supported by John Zerzan?
Around the time Ross was with the Earth First! Journal in Tucson Zerzan spoke there at the Dry River Anarchist Collective to support traditional Tohono O'odham. That is how Zerzan understood and expressed his favor for a deep connection with the earth, not through “equivocations” only witless twits would find fascist-friendly.
Someone should tell Ross that “unto the pure, all things are pure, but unto them that are defiled and unbelieving is nothing pure: but even their mind and conscience is defiled” (Titus 1:15). Simone Weil looked at the Iliad—a brutal, patriarchal poem thoroughly offensive to modern, let alone post-modern sensibilities—and derived inestimable radical insight from her study. But that was anti-fascism then, and now, thanks to Ross, we know that it's today . . . .
Dan Todd
http://anarchistnews.org/content/left-overs-how-fascists-court-post-left-0
http://anarchistnews.org/content/egomania-response-my-critics-post-left