ENGLISH
Mass psychology of Palestinianism
I have begun re-reading Wilhelm Reich's classic (The Mass Psychology of Fascism), for the third or fourth time in my life (apart from the many other consultations).
You will say to me: «Bravo, but what does that matter to me?».
And yet it must matter to you. Not the fact that I am re-reading Reich's masterpiece, but because of its contents and the analytical tools contained therein.
Going by instinct and analysing the behavioural drifts of present-day antisemites/anti-Jews - the most visible or showy ones, those with the pro-Pal flag, eyes injected with anti-Israel hate and slogans in favour of Hamas, those who applaud Hamas for 25 minutes... - right from the first moment the memory was evoked in me of the Maoist hysteria that arose in the wake of '68, that is, when large youthful masses made their political irruption onto the scene in Italy and other Western societies. Not the cultured and polite Maoism (like Avanguardia operaia of Massimo Gorla, the Gauche prolétarienne of Alain Geismar, the Progressive Labor Party of the USA or the first phase of the Communist League of Great Britain) but the mystical and fanaticised kind, like Servire il Popolo (Unione dei comunisti italiani of Aldo Brandirali), new little groups here and there cheering Stalin and various Marxist-Leninists.
Well then, ever since the Palestinianist movement emerged so fiercely antisemitic/anti-Jewish and celebratory of Hamas's pogrom-like ferocity, my mind kept repeating to me that there was a link between the two forms of hysteria. I felt, however, that the connecting link was missing - only in my head, of course, and certainly not in reality, since these are two forms of mass hysteria that are historically different and not comparable.
Until, just today, the arrival of Martin Ebert's fine text on the «fascism» of Hamas (which I hope to send separately, with my premise that it is not fascism we are dealing with, but something far worse) that opened my eyes .
But of course, how could I not have thought of it! In 1969 I had in fact arrived at the conviction that Maoist hysteria was the emergence of a new form of irrational rebelliousness, erroneously definable with the term «red» fascism (which nonetheless conveyed the idea well), but always exasperatingly mystical and sadomasochistic in its characterological roots. And my analysis was already then based on Reich's book, which in some of its parts seemed to describe the exact image of the average militant animated by Maoist fanaticism («The fascist mentality is the mentality of the "man in the street", mediocre, subdued, eager to submit to an authority and at the same time rebellious»: Reich, preface of 1942).
But already in the very early '70s I had to abandon my definition (which had been more than anything an intuition later summarily taken up in my subsequent works) because the emerging process of Maoist «red fascism» had no follow-up. This was also thanks to the fact that in Italy, from 1969 onwards, the political and social intervention of the working class arrived providentially with its factory councils, its demand for autonomy, its need for theoretical analyses of the new industrial realities: Maoism vanished, even if in exchange workerism grew, another disastrous phenomenon typically Italian (but this is not the place to speak of it).
A second organic reading of Mass Psychology was necessary for me for the chapter on Reich in my Masse ribelli e protagonismo digitale. Per una storia della massologia [Rebellious masses and digital protagonism. For a history of massology]: a book conceived and written before the current anti-Jewish mass hysteria exploded. Even if, on looking closely, in that work of mine one could grasp some prodromes of what was about to happen and continues at the moment.
This new reading, therefore - of which I am unable to anticipate anything - is dictated by the need to understand the extent, the depth, the frequency of that «orgiastic aspiration conditioned by mystical deviation and by the inhibition of natural sexuality» that Reich placed at the basis of his analysis of the Nazi mass-man and subsequently also of the Stalinist one (in the new enlarged edition of his book). My theoretical experiment, in the new reading of the book, will consist in substituting for the term «Nazism/Nazi» of that time the term «anti-Jewishness/anti-Jews» as it today appears under the pseudo-cover of anti-Zionism and Palestinianism.
It will certainly be a comparison that will provoke new hysterical reactions - I am thinking of all those who have so far asked to be deleted from my address list for fear of being able to be convinced by my texts and by those of others engaged in a rational battle against antisemitic/anti-Jewish irrationalism - but no one will be obliged to take note of it. What matters, after all, is not to be right, but not to let oneself be convinced.
APPENDIX. One of the theoretical questions that sooner or later we will have to resolve is why in their irrational rebelliousness also sectors of the new generations are so strongly attracted by the mystique of dictatorships, especially the most ferocious and totalitarian ones (first and foremost the bloodthirsty Iranian regime and its proxies such as Hamas, Hezbollah etc.), as had moreover happened to the avant-gardism of movements that later became Fascist, Nazi, partly Francoist etc., despite having started in their nascent state [statu nascenti] from positions of revolt and of proto-capitalist anti-capitalism. Reich had in part answered this question, but since then the psychosocial sciences have moved on. And if one can presume that Hannah Arendt's book on The Origins of Totalitarianism has been read by almost everyone (almost everyone?!, the Palestinianists would not seem to have...), there are excellent works on the subject that have not had the same diffusion.
I am thinking for example of Totalitarian dictatorship and autocracy of 1965 by C.J. Friedrich and Z.K. Brzezinski (yes, precisely the sorcerer's apprentice who was Carter's adviser, and who in 1965 was 37 years old) in which are listed and developed the six main characteristics of a regime definable as totalitarian. Nowadays one would have no difficulty in recognising therein first of all the traits of the Iranian regime, while however leaving open the question of why the irrational rebel youths of the current anti-Jewish movements regard it with sympathy: only because it is anti-Jewish? or what else?
I will try to answer as soon as I am able to (so not now). We can therefore take our leave with the admonitory words of Friedrich-Brzezinski, comprehensible only to those who have it clear (and unfortunately it is not only the Palestinianists who have not understood it) that the Iranian mullahs and Hamas are waging against the Israeli Jews a war that is first of all religious, fanatically religious, and only very secondarily political or economic:
«The totalitarian communist ideology [substitute with «Palestinianist anti-Jewish» or «anti-Westernist» (author's note)] consists in an official doctrine that radically rejects the existing society while chiliastically [=millenarianistically] offering a new one. It contains strongly utopian elements, like paradise on earth, and this chiliastic and utopian vision confers on totalitarian ideologies a pseudo-religious character: they in fact often provoke in their followers less endowed with a critical sense a profound conviction and a fervent devotion that are generally found only in persons animated by a transcendent faith».
Shalom
Roberto
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