Be Evil!

Some time ago 'Lenin' made the following speculation about Fascism - 'the fascist regime says "You May!" - you may oppress, vilify, rob, abuse etc. In this way, the supporters of fascism are libidinally bound to its order.' I drew his attention to a remark of Genet's about a sojourn in Nazi Germany. At the time I couldn't remember the source, but have now found it (the beautiful Thief's Journal), so here it is:

"'I had just gone through Nazi Germany where I had stayed for a few months. I walked from Breslau to Berlin. I would have liked to steal. A strange force held me back. Germany terrified all of Europe; it had become, particularly to me, the symbol of cruelty. It was already outside the law... I had the feeling that I was strolling around in a camp organized by bandits..I thought that the brain of the most scrupulous bourgeois concealed treasures of duplicity, hatred, meanness, cruelty and lust.

'It's a race of thieves,' I thought to myself. 'If I steal here, I perform no singular deed that might fulfil me. I obey the customary order; I do not destroy it. What I desired above all was to return to a country where the laws of ordinary morality were revered, were laws on which life was based."

Indicentally, It might be interesting to relate this to Zizek on the obscene Superego:


'Superego is the obscene "nightly" law that necessarily redoubles and accompanies, as its shadow, the "public" Law. This inherent and constitutive splitting in the Law is the subject of Rob Reiner's film A Few Good Men, the court- martial drama about two marines accused of murdering one of their fellow soldiers. The military prosecutor claims that the two marines' act was a deliberate murder, whereas the defense succeeds in proving that the defendants just followed the so-called "Code Red," which authorizes the clandestine night-time beating of a fellow soldier who, in the opinion of his peers or of the superior officer, has broken the ethical code of the marines. The function of this "Code Red" is extremely interesting: it condones an act of transgression- illegal punishment of a fellow soldier- yet at the same time it reaffirms the cohesion of the group, i.e. it calls for an act of supreme identification with group values. Such a code must remain under the cover of night, unacknowledged, unutterable- in public everybody pretends to know nothing about it, or even actively denies its existence.'