Prof. Erle Frayne D. Argonza
Good evening!
It is night time as I write this piece. The prominent cloudless black night outside my window is akin to reality being concealed by subterfuge or ‘illusions’ (to use Freud’s term), so it may prove worthy for us to reflect on what is being concealed by the resort of the Liberal Party to moralistic jingoism in its latest poll campaigns.
It would be fitting to begin with the behavior of the presidential candidate Noynoy Aquino, who, just a couple of nights back, made a public declaration about the Ampatuan family’s support for the Noynoy presidency and his Liberal Party or LP. The Ampatuan family is being indicted for mass slaughter of political adversaries and media persons in Maguindanao province, besides that it had shown how it could cheat in the polls as support for a presidential candidate in 2004 (Gloria Arroyo).
That the LP is openly supported by a family with sociopathic, hostile, and/or antisocial members is indubitably confounding to the unsophisticated folks. However, to more knowledgeable observers, notably behavior analysts, it isn’t surprising for a sociopathic gang to converge in interest with Noynoy Aquino who, as per classified internal information now filtering out, suffers from psychological disorder conditions.
Gangster-type antisocial, hostile, sociopathy is the base of recruitment for fascist and racist movements. Hitler knew that formula well, so his ideologues hastened to recruit unreformed malefactors who would constitute the Nazi party’s mass membership and SS cadres.
Lenin himself revealed that the dividing line between liberalism and fascism is thin. Unfolding events proved him right in Europe, when the first fascist movement, led by Mussolini, seized power in Italy. To recall, the Italian fascists were rabidly moralistic in their campaigns, and bullied their way to power.
I wish Lenin were still alive, so I could argue with him that there really is no dividing line between liberalism and fascism, that the dividing line is merely an illusion. The philosophers Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze demonstrated, in the case of schizophrenics, that the dividing line between rationality and irrational (e.g. manic-depressive) behavior is non-existent, by using ‘schizoanalysis’ as their theoretical rampart.
If we were to follow Deleuze & Guattari well, we would say that, in the case of Noynoy Aquino and the criminal Ampatuans, the dividing line between the sane and the mad has been effectively erased. I would further advance that Noynoy is just but an infinitesimal representation of a much larger reality, the members of the Liberal Party, who are concealing their own authoritarian personality traits behind a mantle of moralism (i.e. good governance cliché) discourse.
To be fair to the LP officialdom, it would be more fitting an exercise to let the party top brass at least be tested for ‘authoritarian personality’ tendencies. In behavioral science we call this the Adorno Scale, developed by the late Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer and tested on very large samples in Europe and the Americas.
The Adorno Scale is available anytime for testing, it uses a very innovative approach to testing that combines quantitative and qualitative methods, and we have the experts (psychology, sociology, psychiatry) who can team up to administer the test on Drilon, Noynoy, Abad, Roxas, Gascon, and other party stalwarts. It would be much fairer if the stalwarts of other parties undergo the same test.
In my preliminary analysis, the Liberal Party will have the highest scores on Adorno Scale, indicating the ‘authoritarian personality’ type among its leaders and cadres. The result is as predictable as the sun would shine tomorrow. In layman’s parlance, ‘authoritarian personality’ means fascistic personality.
Fascism is on the rise again globally, and global fascism is not a remote phenomenon to ascend phoenix-like. Fascism often ascends at the tail end of an economic crisis—of a 60-year cycle called the Kondratieff Wave. In the early 19th century, Bonapartism emerged so suddenly as a scourge of Europe, while White racism (Ku Klux Klan) emerged before and after the American Civil War.
Fascism and Nazism occurred at the tail end of a K2 wave (Kondratieff wave’s downward end phase). The Weimar Republic (Germany was then the greatest industrial power) collapsed, hyper-inflation ate up the folks’ pockets, and lo and behold! Mussolini and Hitler arrived on the political terrain.
Moralistic inquisitionism, which employs good governance cliché to witch-hunt political adversaries today, is for me an indubitable sign of an underlying fascism, both individually (among leaders) and collectively in the Yellow Forces’ camp. It just takes a matter of provoking mass panic, e.g. poll failure, added to a Bogey Man, e.g. General Bangit declaring a coup, to ignite a hysteria that would find catharsis via social upheaval or equivalent.
With sociopaths and manic-depressives at the head of a party such as the LP, and with Noynoy and Mar Roxas winning the presidential and vice presidential posts, the country would surely be in trouble.
Mar Roxas was involved just some couples of years back in supporting Christian militias to counterveil against the Muslim rebels (MILF). He did made public statements about the matter, and he was among those legislators role-playing barriers to the signing of a peace concord between the GRP and MILF.
Christian militia members are terribly antisocial types, with so many who are borderline personalities (below average intelligence), who would become criminals if not trained to do productive work properly. The Tadtad, for instance, has a track record of genocidal massacres against simple Muslim folks, and they’re intact organizationally.
In case that a local fascist movement is bound to arise in this country, don’t ever search for them now among Erap’s forces or Villar and Red forces. Search for them inside the Yellows, particularly inside the LP leadership. Administer to them the Adorno Scale and see for yourself what I’m discoursing about.
Hardly have they won, and many LP candidates are already beginning to behave like medieval Inquisitors who would take down grafters very soon. Their faces look grim when they discourse, like the grim Nazi propagandists Goebbels and ideologues, or better still the Knights Templars and Teutonic Knights whose arrogance and hubris were so colossal and who were emulated by the Nazi leaders themselves.
Inside the LP think-tank/directorate are university professors, in like vein that university mentors formed the Nazi Party and molded Hitler & partisans into mad Nero-types. They are so low profile, the public wouldn’t even notice their presence. I do personally know some of them, know their levels of narcissism, egoism, arrogance, and authoritarianism, and they secretively are powerful inside the party.
When imbalanced personalities would lead a political party and flaunt inquisitionism so openly, we may be experiencing the ‘sign of the times’. Democracy may again take the back seat, as a new cycle of authoritarianism becomes ascendant. Such an authoritarianism, now gelling inside the Liberal camp, could converge with other fascisms toward a consolidated global fascism and the rise of a global Bonaparte.
[Philippines, 23 April 2010. See also: IKONOKLAST: http://erleargonza.blogspot.com; UNLADTAU: http://unladtau.wordpress.com.]
2 comments:
Nice cool piece. thanks Prof Erle!
Liberalism is as bad as Lenin had once said of it. It's the face of fascism, no more.
Post a Comment