Customer Reviews

The Voice of Modern Hatred: Tracing the Rise of Neo-Fascism in Europe

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It intends to be the kind of book that is very much needed: a guide to and intelligent interpretation of the current extreme-Right movements in Europe. The Front National in France, the neo-Nazis in Germany, the National Front in England -- we need to know more about these. But this book is woefully superficial. My disappointment began when I saw that there is no index. Can you imagine, a book that purports to give information on all these phenomena without an index ? After that, beginning my reading of the text, I soon learned that the author's information is shallow at best. I have read a few other books on the subject and I found really nothing that I did not already know from these other works. On many details this author is quite wrong. On important matters, for instance the really significant split in the Front National of France, he says so little that he might as well have said nothing. His asides and psychological observations, now and then, rarely, give a little something. But then this author is so annoyingly pretentious that even the occasional apercu must be taken with a pound of salt. His disquisition on French grammar, error-ridden, will earn him a well-deserved F in that department.

I can't say I recommend this book. While the subject of political extremism in Europe is a very interesting one, it was still a bit of a lousy read. Fraser spends far too much time trying to express disgust for the extremism that he runs into, and too little time relating things in an intelligent, analytical manner. He also works hard at psycholanalyzing the extremists he encounters, which is uninteresting and overly petty(Yes Fraser, they're bad, but stop focusing on your disgust). He also makes fun of them at times, which I guess is fun if you're in grade school, however I think this is a very grave topic which deserves seriousness and perspicacity, not Fraser's weak, overly emotional, shrill analysis.

The Voice of Modern Hatred as a whole is a little less than mediocre. However, some sections are not so bad, and are probably worth reading if you are very interested in this subject, as I am. Since it is important to be educated about political extremism in my opinion, I give this book 3 stars, although outside of this context it wouldn't deserve that many.

"This book centers in what we call a 'Propaganda Model', an analytical framework that attempts to explain the performance of the U.S. media in terms of the basic institutional structures and relationships within they operate. It is our view that, among their other functions, the media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful social interests that control and finance them.... In our view the...underlying power sources that own the media and fund them as advertisers, that serve as primary definers of the news, and that produce flak and proper thinking experts, also play a key role in fixing basic principles and the dominant ideologies. We believe that what journalists do, what they see as newsworthy, and what they take for granted...are...well explained by the incentives, pressures, and constraints incorporated into such a structural analysis."

Noam Chomsky (MIT)
and Edward Herman (Wharton Business School)
MANUFACTURING CONSENT
From the Introduction

"Those looking for a modern anti-hero could also find one here. On 13 September 1987 (French National Front Leader and racist anti-Semite Jean-Pierre) Le Pen appeared during an electoral campaign on an RTL radio show. Asked about Holocaust denial, he replied thus: '...I feel it's a detail in the history of World War Two...' The word 'detail' in French was ambiguous but LePen's voice made it clear in what sense it was used... His cynicism was accomplished--breathtakingly so. Over the years, it seemed that political rhetoric had ceased to reveal, or indeed to even conceal, ideas. Spin doctors had appeared to render political speech more accessible, but they had increased the blandness. If there was a crisis in contemporary politics its origins lay in the progressive decay of political speech, and the likelihood that henceforth politics might tell us nothing about ourselves or our destiny. Meanwhile a politician like LePen could, through his revolt against the rules of the game, depict himself as an honest man. You might not agree with him, he was saying, but you could at least acknowledge that he believed what he said. And yet LePen's real message was somewhat different. He was telling people that it didn't really matter. You could believe whatever you wanted to about gas chambers, just as you might feel free to entertain the thought that blacks were inferior or that the moon was made of green cheese. The truth was that nothing mattered very much."

Nicholas Fraser
THE VOICE OF MODERN HATRED
From Chapter Six, "To the Front and Back"

I would give this book five stars for Fraser's writing style and the plethora of authors--both literary and journalistic/historical--he quotes and refers to from the European tradition. His rendering of the European racist/anti-Semitic Id, underneath its cosmopolitan/democratic Superego, makes the revealing of its tortured collective Ego-continuously wounded by the presence of unrepentant fascism in its small towns and cities-all the more profound. If only such skills were enough to reveal truth to the world to the extent that it needs revealing.

As soon as Fraser quotes Noam Chomsky as a "leftist thinker" and linguist in one chapter, regarding his ironic support of the freedom of expression of racist demagogues in Europe, Fraser begins to remind me, ironically, of the Frasier on NBC-TV, who dispenses psychological insights to radio listeners while staying willfully oblivious to the truly fundamental issues that make his own life and that of others so often absurd. Is it possible that the well-read Fraser, despite the many books he quotes and the hundreds more he's obviously read, did NOT read FATEFUL TRIANGLE of Noam Chomsky (which puts a whole new spin on the political economy of Anti-Semitism)? Or Chomsky and Edward Herman's MANUFACTURING CONSENT, the critical analysis of his discipline as practiced in the US (often with European complicity)? Or Edward Herman's THE TERRORIST INDUSTRY; or ORIENTALISM of Edward Said...or FOR YOUR OWN GOOD of that Galileo of modern psychology Alice Miller (with its psychological analysis of the German family structure that could only have produced not just Hitler but the otherwise inexplicable support of him by much of pre-World War Two Europe)? Or Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed's THE WAR ON FREEDOM? Or even THE BEST DEMOCRACY MONEY CAN BUY by his brother-in-investigative journalism, the expatriate American Britisher Greg Palast? Has he nothing specific to say about the European slave trade of the 15th through 19th centuries (he never quotes cutting-edge history books like SLAVERY AND CAPITALISM, only the more psychological Zola-esque novels like GERMINAL)? The ghost of Madrid and the Spanish Empire? The advent of the oil industry in the 19th century? Or the nightmare of World War *One*? What does he believe is the specific, psycho-architectural legacy all of the above has left on the European view of Africans, Caribbeans, Hispanics and Arabs today, if any? Fraser seemingly still wants to pretend that fascism is a plague like Ye Olde bubonic, i.e., essentially cured, as opposed to accepting it as the cancer that has long since been out of remission and is quietly eating up all of our democratic institutions as we speak. This is the message of the very thinkers like Chomsky he mentions more than once-without, conspicuously, ever mentioning any of his books.

Fraser's analysis of the destructive power of cynicism in general and the postmodern weaknesses of the far right in Europe in particular is both intellectually strong and deeply personal. But in America, this concept is old; everyone knows it wasn't the Ku Klux Klan that Martin Luther King or Malcolm X was afraid of, and the KKK weren't responsible for either of their assassinations. Knowing what Fraser has purposely left out of his reflections, it leads me to wonder who in the end is more dangerous: the essentially politically impotent man of evil with dangerous ideas, or the intellectual good person who has inadvertently taught us how to do nothing in the face of TRUE evil, until it stands ready to overtake us all?

A good book-but only when read in the proper context.