Memepark

I'm currently in the middle of Robert O. Paxton's excellent The Anatomy of Fascism. I was amused and slightly disturbed by this passage on the Marquis de Morés:

The term national socialism seems to have been invented by the French nationalist author Maurice Barrés, who described the aristocratic adventurer the Marquis de Morés in 1896 as the "first national socialist". Morés, after failing as a cattle rancher in North Dakota, returned to Paris in the early 1890s and organized a band of anti-Semitic toughs who attacked Jewish shops and offices. As a cattleman, Morés found his recruits among slaughterhouse workers in Paris, to whom he appealed with a mixture of anticapitalism and anti-Semitic nationalism. His squads wore the cowboy garb and ten-gallon hats that the marquis had discovered in the American West, which thus predate black and brown shirts (by a modest stretch of the imagination) as the first fascist uniform.

More ominously, I was struck by this passage, which recounts a political statement in the middle of the Dreyfus Affair that rings all too familiar in the midst of our current scandal over faked intelligence on Iraq:

Similar ingredients mingled in the popular emotions aroused in France after 1896 against Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish staff officer wrongly accused of spying for Germany. The case convulsed France until 1906. The anti-Dreyfus camp enlisted in defense of the authority of the state and the honor of the army both conservatives and some Leftists influenced by traditional anticapitalist anti-Semitism and Jacobin forms of nationalism. The pro-Dreyfus camp, mostly from Left and center, defended a universal standard of the rights of man. The nation took precedence over any universal value, proclaimed the anti-Dreyfusard Charles Maurras, whose Action Française movement is sometimes considered the first authentic fascism. When a document used to incriminate Dreyfus turned out to have been faked, Maurras was undaunted. It was, he said, a "patriotic forgery", a faux patriotique.

I've heard people defend the invasion of Iraq and the deceptions that made it possible by pointing to the utopic democratic paradise into which we've delivered the Iraqi people and stating that the ends justify the means. La plus ça change...