VIII: “Our Souls Are Broken” - Michelle Obama, Postmodern Fascist Ideologue 293‘On a conference call to prepare for a recent debate, Barack Obama brainstormed with his top
advisers on the fine points of his positions. Michelle Obama had dialed in to listen, but finally
couldn’t stay silent any longer. “Barack,” she interjected, “Feel — don’t think!” Telling her
husband his “over-thinking” during past debates had tripped him up with rival Hillary Clinton,
she said: “Don’t get caught in the weeds. Be visceral. Use your heart — and your head.”’
(Monica Langley, “Michelle Obama Solidifies Her Role in the Election,” Wall Street Journal,
February 11, 2008)
This advice spotlights another indispensable aspect of fascist ideology, and that is the rejection
of reason and of thinking in general in favor of irrational intuition. In the modern US Hollywood
culture, the irrational elements are so pervasive that the average person has a very hard time
remembering the insistence on mass irrationality on the part of all the European fascist movements
of the first half of the 20th century. In those days, fascist demagogues and international bankers
recommended that the masses think with their blood; “May the Force be with you” is a more recent
Hollywood version of something quite similar. German fascists lived in the world of Wagner’s
Ring cycle, and cultivated myth, superstition, astrology, and occult folklore. Over the past decades,
Hollywood has churned out The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and an avalanche of mummies,
vampires, witches, mutants, warlocks, super-heroes, and wizards. The latest Indiana Jones movie
now has the Russians as the enemy, just in time for the Brzezinski Plan. Those saturated in such
irrationalist banality have a very hard time resisting irrationality when it appears in political form.
Telling somebody to be visceral means telling them to think with their bowels or with their guts,
not with their head. This is very close to the classic fascist approach which is to tell them to think
with their blood. “Think with your blood” has come into English-speaking culture directly through
the translations of speeches by both Hitler, Mussolini, and their followers. It has also been
propagated by the works of a writer who is better known as a pornographer than as a fascist, but
who had very pronounced fascist sympathies which his literary promoters have found it convenient
to sweep under the rug: we mean of course D.H. Lawrence, the Nietzschean and fascist sympathizer
whose novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover was all the rage on American campuses a half century ago.
Lawrence was interested in the theme of blood consciousness especially as it related to erotic
mysticism and to his own pornographic vision in general. More important precursors of the theory
of blood consciousness which Michelle Obama seems to profess include first of all the Italian ultra-
nationalist provocateur and British agent Giuseppe Mazzini, who taught that the individual was in
the process of disappearing from world history to be replaced by a new protagonist in the form of
the ethnic or racial group, the popolo. Another important precursor was the German philosopher
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a contemporary of Napoleon Bonaparte. Fichte’s concept of the Volksgeist
meant that every national grouping had its own characteristic mental outlook and way of thinking
which was not commensurable with the mentalities of other ethnic groups. This tended to
undermine the notion of universal reason as a general human characteristic or potential. A third
precursor to Michelle’s outlook can be found in National Socialism, where it was claimed that the
positive content of world culture was uniquely the product of the Germanic race, and that the
method of thinking characteristic of all other ethnic groups was inherently inferior, destructive, and
worthy of extirpation.
For the fascist ideologues, blood consciousness meant something slightly different: blood for
them meant race, and blood consciousness accordingly indicated a mental outlook that was
determined by one’s own race-based existence. For these fascists, “think with your blood” was a
way of demanding that you think like a member of your own ethnic or racial tribe. But today, the
general US public knows almost nothing about the “think with your blood” side of fascism, perhaps