Everybody
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The block was an armoured mass, drilled and disciplined, violently cut to shape in order to fit the representative units of the soldier, the army, the race, the nation . . . On the other hand, there was the swarm, a mass not yet dammed up and disciplined and whose presence threatened to dissolve the hierarchic units of the fascist order. This was the Jewish mass and the Gypsy mass or the mass of hysteric females and irremediable communists, all of them associated with miscegenation, transgression, femininity, and egalitarianism.
This division of ordinary people into two distinct groups is what Reich glimpsed on 15 July. The transformation happened right before his eyes. The rhetoric of the swarm soon served to bolster the identity of the Nazis, facilitating their route to power. Characterising undesirable bodies as insects, vermin, degenerate trash is a mode of thinking that led directly to the Holocaust, and it also informs more recent genocidal acts. Take Rwanda, where the cry ‘exterminate the cockroaches’, inyenzi, broadcast on private RTLM radio in the spring of 1994, was the signal to begin the murder of over one million Tutsis, killed by their Hutu neighbours with machetes, guns and nail-studded clubs. Many of the killings were carried out by militias, organised blocks, among them the Interahamwe (‘Those Who Attack Together’) and the Impuzamugambi (‘Those Who Have the Same Goal’).
But the language of the swarm is not just confined to twentieth-century atrocities. In the past decade, it has once again infiltrated mainstream politics. During a discussion about the situation on the Calais border in the summer of 2015, the then-Prime Minister David Cameron spoke of ‘a swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean, seeking a better life, wanting to come to Britain because Britain has got jobs.’ The concept of the swarm is prevalent in the rhetoric of the Brexiteers and axiomatic of the thinking that has driven the hostile environment, government policy since 2012, which has seen thousands of refugees and asylum seekers deported, refused visas or held in indefinite detention in for-profit immigration removal centres like Yarl’s Wood and Morton Hall.
In America, Trump too regularly uses terms like ‘animals’ to describe immigrants. He claims migrants ‘pour into and infest’ America, that it is a ‘monstrosity’, and has said of the Mexican border: ‘You look at what is marching up, that’s an invasion.’ Against this so-called invasion he has deployed the paramilitary force of ICE to separate the children of the migrants from their desperate parents and to pen them in cages, likewise run for profit, where they sleep on concrete in filthy overcrowded rooms, where the lights are never turned off, where there is no medicine or soap or toothbrushes, no bedding and not enough food to eat. Five hundred bodies in a windowless warehouse, two thousand eight hundred children in a tent city in the Texan desert.
Invasion, killer, animal, insect, predator. The same old fantasies perpetuate themselves, the trigger terms about dirt and pollution, unbridled sexuality and unstoppable disease. They are coming: mysterious, invasive, contaminating, taking what is yours, infecting you with what is not (of course Trump would dub Covid-19 ‘the Chinese virus’). Freedom of movement is reconceptualised as burglary, yes, but also as an assault on purity: the terror of miscegenation, of different kinds of bodies mixing too freely. In this atmosphere of hostility, it’s easy to believe that Freud was right, that civilisation is buckling once again under the deliberate stirring of aggression, the delicious libidinal thrill of hate.
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What drives the block? What motivates them? On 11 August 2017, around five hundred white supremacists, Klansmen, Neo-Nazis and militias began to gather in Charlottesville, Virginia for the Unite the Right rally the following day, nominally organised as a protest against the removal of Confederate statues in southern cities by Black Lives Matter activists. That night, they marched across the University of Virginia campus with tiki torches, chanting ‘Jews will not replace us’ and ‘Blood and soil’. They attacked a tiny group of counter-protestors, who had locked arms around a statue of Thomas Jefferson, and knocked down a journalist asking questions about the event.
The next morning protestors and counter-protestors, who now outnumbered them two to one, gathered in Lee Park, the site of a statue of the Confederate commander and slave-owner Robert E. Lee. The rally was mostly male: white men in button-down shirts and MAGA hats, white men carrying swastikas and wearing wraparound shades and helmets. Since Virginia is an open carry state, many of them carried weapons, most visibly the groups of militiamen in combat gear and backpacks, who stood menacingly on street corners and outside synagogues, clutching semi-automatic rifles.
Violence quickly broke out in the park, with counter-protestors punched, choked and attacked with pepper spray (some maintained a non-violent response, while others fought back). At eleven o’clock, an hour before the rally was due to start, the city declared a state of emergency, and an hour later police began clearing the park. During this chaotic process, which forced the two sides into close proximity, a twenty-year-old counter-protestor was dragged into a parking garage and beaten with poles and metal pipes by members of the Fraternal Order of the Alt-Knights, the Traditionalist Workers Party and the League of the South.
At 13:45, a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of counter-protestors, smashing into people and then reversing at speed to hit more. In the news footage, you can see bodies flung entirely into the air, accompanied by a litter of stray shoes. He killed a young woman, Heather Heyer, and injured nineteen people. Later that day, the President condemned what he described as the ‘egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides.’ In his refusal to single out white supremacists, the President was ‘the opposite of cuck’ (alt-right slang for cuckold, meaning emasculated liberal), the editor of the Nazi website Daily Stormer approvingly concluded.
Like millions of people, I watched these events unfold in real-time on Twitter. The same photographs of the torchlight procession kept resurfacing: a snake of light, the fanatical young faces shining in the dark, arms raised in Nazi salutes. The block was back, fetishistic in its hatreds, incandescent at the notion that its privileges might be rescinded, that feminists should revoke access to sex, that people of colour might have the jobs or houses or cars to which they were surely entitled by birth. Most of the marchers were younger than I am: white boys with tidy haircuts and polo-shirts, their faces exultant, surfing the thrill that comes from making yourself the source of terror, converting your body into an ugly threat.
In the unsettled weeks that followed, an image kept resurfacing in my mind, of three Klansmen riding in a black car. City Limits, 1969, by the abstract expressionist painter Philip Guston. It looked like a joke, like a Krazy Kat version of the aftermath of a massacre. The car was ridiculous, clonking along on fat tractor tyres that didn’t even pretend to be the same shape or size. The three pointy-headed figures were packed in like clowns, dressed in patched and tattered white hoods with worrying red flecks. One of them was puffing on a stogie, held in a fat gloved hand. They all looked straight ahead, their eyeholes a slick, unreflecting black. Apart from these small regions of black paint, the entire canvas was flooded, really drenched with turbulent strikes and swipes of filthy pink and oozing red. The phrase ‘rivers of blood’ came to mind.
In other paintings from the same series, the hoods drove around deserted towns in their cartoon jalopies, clutching their cigars, little flatulent speech bubbles of smoke floating overhead. Two stood neck-deep in a pool of black water, their hands bright red. Sometimes they were accompanied by weapons: lumpy bricks like baked potatoes, homemade crosses and guns, lengths of wood with nails sticking out, like those deployed in the Rwandan genocide. In 1970’s Bad Habits, a Klansman scratched his back with a whip, his hood delicately spattered with carmine flecks. There were never any people around. Piles of discarded shoes kept cropping up (it might have been these shoes that subliminally called Guston to mind when I saw the photographs from Charlottesville), often with the lower legs still attached. Green trousers, meaty pink ankles, the post-match litter o
f some unspeakable event.
The lavish, juddery colours weren’t new for Guston, but the figures were. They’d emerged from out of a crisis, one of those breaches in time, like the riots in Charlottesville and Vienna, that leave people stunned, certain the deck’s been reshuffled in a malign, occluded way. On 4 April 1968, Martin Luther King was shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. All spring there were riots. In August, Guston was watching the anti-Vietnam protests at the Democratic Convention in Chicago on TV: ten thousand protestors, mostly peaceful, mostly young, getting beaten down with billy clubs by twenty-three thousand police and National Guardsmen.
That summer, while Agnes Martin was camping in the wilderness, he was in Woodstock, glued to the news. What he saw made him question the value of his exquisite abstract paintings. ‘What kind of man am I,’ he asked, ‘sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything – and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?’ Forget purity and its alchemical allure for the hyper-rich (around the same time he said that whenever he saw an abstract painting he smelled mink coats). Like Reich, he’d seen something he couldn’t ignore, a vision of brutality he felt compelled to understand. He wanted to find out what it was like to be a body that fights not for freedom, but to take it away.
People laughed when they saw the Klan paintings, but Guston wasn’t making light of the threat they represented. He knew the Klan of old. They’d haunted his childhood in Los Angeles, a mysterious, evil force. He’d been born in Montreal in 1913, the seventh and youngest child of immigrant Jews. The family’s move to L.A. in 1919 coincided with the resurgence of the Klan, a white supremacist group that had been active during the Civil War and then died out. Like a zombie army, they were reanimated in 1915, inspired by D. W. Griffith’s glamorising silent epic Birth of a Nation, which presented the Klan as American heroes. By the mid-1920s, there were around 4.5 million Klan members in the USA. They believed in an ‘alliance of degeneracy’ between Jews and African-Americans (degeneracy, another term that will not die), and they were figures of terror for Guston’s family.
One of the most frightening things about this second incarnation of the Klan was that they normalised hatred and violence, making them palatable, domestic, even cosy. Alongside the beatings and burning crosses, the murders and lynchings, the tarring and feathering of prostitutes, vagrants and doctors who carried out abortions, this army of middle American vigilantes organised picnics and sponsored baseball teams. At the same time that they were attacking women like Louise Little, Malcom X’s pregnant mother, or lynching her husband and placing his body on the streetcar tracks, they were also running charity drives and performing in bands at state fairs.
Guston’s first personal run-in with the Klan was in their guise as strike-breakers (union organisers and communists were among their most frequent non-racial targets). As a boy from a poor, working-class family, he took a series of menial jobs to support himself while he became an artist, including delivery truck driver and machinist. There were no unions, and workers were often expected to put in fifteen-hour days. When he was seventeen, Guston joined a strike and witnessed the force with which the Klan broke it up. That same year, 1930, he made a drawing called Conspirators, in preparation for a painting that has since been lost. It depicted a gathering of Klansmen, huddled together against a city wall, their gowned backs turned from the viewer. On the other side of the wall was the evidence of their hellish work: a crucifixion (the figure has a human body but a weird, wormy stump of a head) and a lynched black man hanging from a leafless tree. In the foreground of this new Golgotha, a solitary Klansman bows his head, penitential or in deep thought, fingering with his gloved white hands a thick dark rope.
By the time he was eighteen, Guston was deeply involved with radical politics. A year younger than Bayard Rustin, and on the opposite coast, he participated in many of the same struggles. In 1931, both joined communist groups that were protesting the racist imprisonment of the Scottsboro boys, nine African-American teenagers who’d been wrongfully accused of raping two white women. Guston was commissioned to produce murals inspired by the Scottsboro case for the Hollywood branch of the John Reed Club, a communist-affiliate organisation. He made a series of portable frescoes on cement, all depicting violence against African-Americans. On 12 February 1933, the infamous Captain William F. Hynes of the LAPD Red Squad – a police intelligence unit established to break up strikes and spy on unionists and left-wing radicals – came in and smashed the murals with lead pipes. To Guston’s lasting disquiet, one of the Red Squad took a rifle and shot every single black body in his paintings through the eyes and genitals. That same year he had a painting show at the Stanley Rose Gallery, an artistically-minded Hollywood bookstore. It depicted Klan activity, and a group of Klansmen swung by and slashed two of the pictures.
In the 1930s, Guston had believed art was a force that could change the world as directly as marching or protesting. By 1968, when he was watching National Guardsmen beating anti-Vietnam protestors on live TV, he’d long since relinquished that particular dream, but that didn’t mean the artist was en-titled to turn his back. You have to bear witness, he kept saying, but he meant more than simply documenting events as they unfolded. Unlike Rustin, who sought to uncover the good in everyone, even racist prison guards, what Guston wanted to do was find out what it felt like to live alongside your own brutality, peering out at the world through slits in cloth.
He understood instinctively that one of the sources of the Klan’s power was their anonymity. Their robes and hoods defend them against recognition, but concealing individuality also has a second, more significant role. Uniformed, disciplined, identical, any single Klansman automatically stands for the whole, just as a soldier, a stormtrooper or a National Guardsman is the metonymic embodiment of the entire force. This is the uncanny multiplicatory nature of the block, which is composed not of individual people but of identical, perpetually replaceable units. It’s no coincidence that Guston’s hoods, as he called them, look like cartoon ghosts or Hallowe’en costumes. To don the robes is to undergo a temporary death as an individual, to abnegate the identity of a creature with a face, which can empathise and be appealed to, in favour of a tool in an inhumane army, the ‘stupid idiotic automaton’ that Reich had witnessed in Vienna, endlessly capable of regeneration and replacement.
The white robes are also sexless, while the hoods have no mouths, which is to say no appetite. Everything about them is designed to attest to purity, to differentiate the Klansmen from the animal bodies of the swarm. It’s funny how often this dynamic recurs, in racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, homophobia, hatred of the poor and the disabled. The enemy body is always portrayed as being fashioned from grosser material, obscenely sexual or avaricious, greedy, primitive, uncontrolled, infectious, spilling over, barely human, a kind of disgusting fleshy jelly. It makes me wonder if what drives prejudice is at root horror of the body itself. After all, as Sade observed, the body can be a terrifying place: open and insatiable, helpless and dependent. Hatred is a way of displacing this annihilating fear onto other bodies, asserting a magnificent autonomy, a freedom from the sullying, hopelessly interdependent life of flesh.
One of the things that Guston was doing in his Klan paintings was refusing this aspect of the block’s power, as ready a source of terror as the weapons they used. He didn’t humanise them in the sense of making them likeable, so much as strip them of their projective power, the sinister glamour of their masks. His hoods are tattered and paunchy, manifestly not in control of their own base appetites. They puff away, they’re surrounded by butts and stubs, ashes and empty bottles. They look, in fact, a lot like the hard-drinking, chain-smoking Guston himself. As he explained in 1974, the paintings were self-portraits.
I perceive myself as being behind the hood . . . My attempt was really not to illustrate, to do pictures of the KKK, as I had done earlier. The idea of evil fascinates me, rather like Isaac Babel who had joined the Cossac
ks, lived with them, and written stories about them. I almost tried to imagine that I was living with the Klan. What would it be like to be evil? To plan, to plot.
This is such an unusual, risky thing to do. Was he disguising himself as his potential assailants in order to understand them, or was he trying to gauge his own potential for violence? ‘In masking himself as his would-be persecutor,’ the critic Aaron Rosen observes, ‘the victim gains a unique understanding of the aggressor, but at the cost of humanizing – perhaps even being seduced by – this role.’ It’s a dangerous game to play, using art as a court in which you take the role of victim and perpet-rator, judge and jury.
As Guston says, there was a precedent for this work. The Russian writer Isaac Babel travelled with the anti-Semitic Cossacks as a correspondent during the Soviet–Polish War, disguising his identity as a Jew. He rode with them on their sorties, drank with them after battles, slept among them in a smelly litter of sabres and saddles. He documented everything he saw, the shtetls torched, the villagers raped, filling his 1926 short-story collection Red Cavalry with a jumbled baggage of violence, boredom and courage. In 1930, Guston had dedicated his painting Conspirators to ‘I.B.’ He admired Babel’s ironic restraint, the grim detachment with which he set down horrors.