8/16/2023 0 Comments Enzo traverso fire and bloodThe deep national roots of the conflagration were intertwined with continental-wide battles: between modernity and conservatism concerning regional autonomies and imperial tradition pitting the urban proletariat and peasantry against capital and landed property and civil wars within civil wars triggered by the triangulated relationships among Communism, liberal democracy and fascism.Ī principal incentive for Traverso’s new embrace of the argument is to contest those scholars and popularizers who evaluate the brutalities of the period by accentuating near-metaphysical totalitarian evils of the fascist Right and Marxist Left, the dangers of ideology, and the virtues of absolute liberal principles. This is a construct often associated with Paul Preston’s The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution, and Revenge (2007). That amplified structure is the controversial theory of Europe as the site of a prolonged, continental-wide conflict, involving far more than just hostile states, but repeated confrontations by adversarial population components of an overarching “European civil war.” In eight chapters divided into two parts, Fire and Blood provides a larger framework and perspective on the epoch as a whole. He has contributed an article on “the European Cataclysm” to Against the Current (issue 176, ). Several of his previous books - especially The Marxists and the Jewish Question: The History of a Debate (1990 English translation, 1994) and Understanding the Nazi Genocide: Marxism After Auschwitz (1999) - addressed in detail Marxist approaches to the problem of anti-Semitism as history marched toward the 1941-45 slaughter of the European Jews. Traverso, an Italian-born former Parisian professor now teaching at Cornell University, throws down the gauntlet to the current academic and public treatment of these earlier decades. We are in an exceptionally new situation, but elements of older experiences may clarify our vision if one finds the proper means of access. Rather, it commends a model and method for how to analyze a disaster that profoundly affected all that came after the point of the book is how this past with a genetic link to our present is remembered and interpreted. Are we facing the latest staging of a persistently revived historical drama?Īs a mirror held up to the present, the non-fiction horror story that is Fire and Blood has the merit of never pretending to offer prophetic forecasts or conclusory admonitions there are no ready-made answers for the new millennium. New systems of violence are unleashed, and talk of the deportation and even annihilation of populations marked by religio-ethnic difference is being heard again. Reactionaries now as then traffic in a political imaginary of noxious aliens in their midst - non-Aryans, non-Christians, immigrants - and rally around a mythologized distinctiveness of their national cultures and threatened traditions. The most menacing revenant from this “Age of Extremes” (as Eric Hobsbawm called it) comes to us in the shape of a spectacular growth of the Right across most of the same continent, with counterparts in the United States not hard to find. His principal topic is the hell that was the center of Europe’s two world wars climaxing in a deluge of totalitarianism and genocide, and the devil is back today. Fire and Blood fashions events happening seventy-five-to-one-hundred years ago to feel as lively and pertinent as political debates taking place at present. Pages +293, $26.95 hardback.ĮNZO TRAVERSO HAS pulled off the rare reconstruction of a past epoch that pulsates with electric immediacy. Rejecting commonplace notions of “totalitarian evil,” he rediscovers the feelings and reinterprets the ideas of an age of intellectual and political commitment when Europe shaped world history with its own collapse.Fascinating Antifascism | Solidarity Fascinating Antifascism Utilizing multiple sources, Enzo Traverso depicts the dialectic of this era of wars, revolutions and genocides. It was a time of both unchained passions and industrial, rationalized massacre. During these three decades of deepening conflicts, a classical interstate conflict morphed into a global civil war, abandoning rules of engagement and fought by irreducible enemies rather than legitimate adversaries, each seeking the annihilation of its opponents. It opened with conventional declarations of war and finished with “unconditional surrender.” Proclamations of national unity led to eventual devastation, with entire countries torn to pieces. Its overture was played out in the trenches of the Great War its coda on a ruined continent. Fire and Blood looks at the European crisis of the two world wars as a single historical sequence: the age of the European Civil War (1914–1945).
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