The Bullet's Song: Romantic Violence and Utopia - Hardcover

Pfaff, William

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684809079 ISBN 13: 9780684809076

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2004

Synopsis

A hidden moral history of the twentieth century unfolds in William Pfaff's fascinating story of writers, artists, intellectual soldiers, and religious revolutionaries implicated in the century's physical and moral violence. They were motivated by romanticism, nationalism, utopianism -- and the search for transcendence. To our twenty-first century, already plunged -- once again -- into visionary terrorism and utopian quests, they leave a warning....
The account begins with Italy's Futurists, who glorified war as "the world's only hygiene"; painted speed, action, and noise; invented "found sound" and chromatic pianos; thought violence sublime; and demanded "reconstruction of the universe."
Gabriele D'Annunzio, poet, playwright, and nationalist buccaneer, created a revolutionary utopia in a Dalmatian city stolen in 1919 from Woodrow Wilson and the Versailles Treaty makers. In doing so, he invented the political style and rituals of Fascism, as well as Third World liberation. T.E. Lawrence, archaeologist and spy, guided the Arab revolt against the Turks, becoming both "Uncrowned King of Arabia" and masochist secular saint. Ernst Jünger, artist and scientist, the German army's most decorated hero of World War I, made heroism a political ideology and became intellectual leader of the National Cause. Hitler was a follower. In World War II Jünger plotted Hitler's assassination and survived to become a symbol of Franco-German reconciliation. Willi Münzenberg, Lenin's propaganda genius and an original member of the Comintern, invented the political "front" organization, created the Sacco and Vanzetti case, and seduced a generation of "innocents" to the Communist cause before becoming a dissident himself. He wasstrangled by Soviet agents in a French forest. André Malraux, fantasist "Byron of the 1930s," world-famous novelist, emulator of T.E. Lawrence, and make-believe leader of the Chinese revolution, discovered "that daydreaming gives rise to action." He created and led an air squadron for Republican Spain, wrote himself into the script of the French Resistance as a hero -- and became one. Arthur Koestler, the most famous scientific journalist in Europe, was a Comintern spy in Spain; condemned to death there, he abandoned the cause and wrote Darkness at Noon, the most influential anti-Communist work of its time, before committing suicide in 1976.
Others with roles in The Bullet's Song are Benito Mussolini, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Che Guevara, Charles de Foucauld, Simone Weil, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Europe's terrorists of the 1970s, and "Popski" -- Vladimir Peniakoff -- the honorable man who found happiness in leading his private army to war.

About this title

About the Author

William Pfaff is a political columnist for The International Herald Tribune, London's The Observer, and other newspapers. A political essayist for The New Yorker from 1971 to 1992, he is the author of eight previous books, including Barbarian Sentiments: How the American Century Ends, a National Book Award finalist and winner of the City of Geneva's Prix Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He lives in Paris.

From The Washington Post

In this dense, ambitious and sometimes tangled book, William Pfaff considers the poisonous legacy of utopian violence that runs like a bloody thread through 20th-century history. A longtime Paris-based columnist for the International Herald Tribune and the author of several works on international politics, Pfaff combines biography and philosophical speculation in his studies of artists, ideologues and adventurers who sought redemption in political struggle.

Pfaff's gallery of exemplary figures includes T.E. Lawrence, whose dashing exploits in Arabia influenced a generation of would-be heroes and sundry guerrilla movements; man of action and revolutionary enthusiast André Malraux; Gabriele D'Annunzio, the Italian dandy turned swashbuckling generalissimo; proto-fascist German writer Ernst Jünger; and communist activist Willy Muzenberg, a propaganda master and an expert in the arts of manipulation. These figures, writes Pfaff, illuminate the "inner history of the modern crisis," and their "tragic illusions" contain a lesson that we ignore at our own peril: The fusion of idealism and political romanticism can have lethal consequences on a large scale.

The Bullet's Song makes for depressing reading. The ideas and tendencies that engulfed the 20th century are still very much with us, Pfaff warns: "It is essential to recognize the possibility that the disordered and morally catastrophic century in which the persons in my book lived might represent our future and not only our past." A Jeremiah, he writes with the arrogant authority of someone who has seen the light -- the rest of us, presumably, are merely shuffling around in the dark -- but he offers some hope. Only by reacquainting ourselves with a tradition of anti-utopian skepticism can we avoid the disasters of the last century.

The serpentine twists of Pfaff's arguments bear careful scrutiny. Central to his claims is the obliteration of the chivalric code during World War I. Chivalry had sanctioned violence and war as a legitimate way of redressing an offense against national or individual honor, but the confusion and meaningless slaughter on the Western Front rendered it a worthless creed for the age of total war. The Great War gave rise to a crisis in values that has not yet been resolved; the extremity of the war paved the way for extreme solutions and wide-eyed schemes for the renovation of society. Pfaff thinks that the human species hardly ever craves peace; thus, violent impulses find an outlet "through codes of individual transcendence and collective will on the one hand, and on the other by utopias based on historical fictions." Jünger, a veteran of the trenches, was a hinge figure: He tried to salvage what was left of chivalry, transforming it into a creed that celebrated the purifying rites of violent struggle. His call for a new warrior caste and a charismatic figure to lead the way to a new order proved hugely influential in Germany (though Jünger himself eventually turned against Hitler). Others, such as the gloriously bombastic D'Annunzio, undertook extravagant ideological projects. In 1919, he seized the disputed city of Fiume (a former possession of the Austro-Hungarian Empire claimed by Italy), setting up a bizarre, short-lived republic where free love and paganism reigned. D'Annunzio and Jünger were harbingers of the bloodshed to come.

At heart, The Bullet's Song is an extended essay on the dangers of political messianism and "the idea of total and redemptive transformation of human society through political means." To Pfaff, few notions could be more ridiculous; the lofty goal of total social overhaul, he writes, is "the most influential myth of modern Western political society from 1789 to the present day." He also savages the idea of progress, which he thinks little more than a delusion, one that is deeply implicated in the rise of both fascism and communism. These "barbarian forms of unreasonableness" were the offspring of a utopian belief that mankind could be remade. Pfaff makes some intriguing observations on fascism's and communism's shared traits, reminding us that fascists also thought they were advancing a progressive cause. Each ideology promised a version of heaven on earth -- one based on a racially exclusive homeland, the other on a universal fraternity of mankind -- but foundered because they attempted the impossible. "Utopianism defies tragedy -- and fails," Pfaff intones.

If communism and fascism are today discredited ideologies, Pfaff is alarmed to find utopianism alive and well in the Bush administration's crusading zeal. He has nothing but contempt for "the hard-eyed parochials of modern American neo-conservatism" and what he considers their fantasies about the global spread of liberty. (In a 2003 column, Pfaff denounced neo-conservatives as "fanatics [who] believe it worth killing for unproven ideas.")

Pfaff has a lot on his mind in The Bullet's Song, and some will greet his sweeping dismissals and pointed comments with skepticism. His arguments can be frustratingly diffuse; his intellectual portraiture does not always hook up with his grandiose attacks on modernity. Moreover, he is overly fond of thunderous perorations: "To sacrifice living human beings to make 'a better world' is an act of totalitarian morality and is also futile. There is no collective solution to the human condition." He wants us to accept the world in all its imperfection, and to embrace limits and seek the balm of virtue. "The only thing we can remake," he concludes, "is ourselves."

Pfaff belongs to a tradition that includes Isaiah Berlin and Lionel Trilling, who mused on "that paradox of our natures [which] leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our widsom, ultimately of our coercion."

You won't find anything as eloquent as that in The Bullet's Song, which by its end, becomes wildly unmodulated. Pfaff himself is something of an extremist. His implication is clear: To believe in any notion of progress is the symptom of a personality disorder. But this ignores meliorist versions of creeds that seek a better world. There is a perfectly honorable -- and reasonable -- tradition of utopian thinking: Consider the American civil rights movement, or the evolution of international human rights doctrine, which has universalist aspirations. Pfaff is right to point out the dangers of messianic political ideologies, but the road to utopia does not inevitably lead to Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot.

Reviewed by Matthew Price
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0684809079
• ISBN 13: 9780684809076
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 384