The Fake Revolt
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"When your wind-blown, electronic-ukelele toting, motorcycle-riding, marihuana-smoking "folksinger" or composer hears the word Intellect, he too reaches for the safety-catch of his automatic, as earlier remarked by Baldur von Schirach, head of the Hitler Jugend."--"The Fake Revolt" (1967) by Gershon Legman ". . . the psychopath is a rebel without a cause, an agitator without a slogan, a revolutionary without a program: in other words, his rebelliousness is aimed to achieve goals satisfactory to himself alone; lie is incapable of exertions for the sake of others. All his efforts, hidden under no matter what disguise, represent investments designed to satisfy his immediate wishes and desires . . . The psychopath, like the child, cannot delay the pleasures of gratification; and tins trait is one of his underlying, universal characteristics. He cannot wait upon erotic gratification which convention demands should be preceded by the chase before the kill: he must rape. He cannot wait upon the development of prestige in society: his egoistic ambitions lead him to leap into headlines by daring performances. Like a red thread the predominance of this mechanism for immediate satisfaction runs through the history of every psychopath. It explains not only his behavior but also the violent nature of his acts." --Rebel Without A Cause: The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath (1944) by Robert Lindner, epigraph "In this country where new millions of psychopaths are developed each year, stamped with the mint of our contradictory popular culture (where sex is sin and yet sex is paradise), it is as if there has been room already for the development of the antithetical psychopath who extrapolates from his own condition, from the inner certainty that his rebellion is just, a radical vision of the universe which thus separates him from the general ignorance, reactionary prejudice, and self-doubt of the more conventional psychopath." --"The White Negro" (1957) by Norman Mailer, epigraph |
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"The Fake Revolt" (1967) is an essay by Gershon Legman in which he lambasted the sexual revolution, hippies, drugs and 1960s counterculture. It cites "The Social History of the Hippies" by Warren Hinckle.
It compares the youth revolt of the 1960s to the 1930s rise of nazism. It criticizes the lumpen-intellectuals and the New Left as setting the stage for an Adolf Hitler to be elected president of the United States.
Fragments
- The inevitable relationship between sex and violence for the criminal or Nazi-hoodlum type of cool-cat (James Bond), is identical with the relationship between sex and mysticism for the beatnik or far-outnik, the dissociated or "quietist" type of cool-cat. The mandala Or Nirvana-nothingness courted by the beatnik IS the anal-sadistic Atom Bomb explosion set off by the spy. Both arrive at the identical nothingness, and are after nothing but nothingness, if by opposite paths: the infantile omnipotence in which both crawl with their pants full to the top of the world, and blow it all up in a mushroom-shaped fecal explosion. This is why they also have as their common denominators: violence (forced guiltily on the cops by the beatnik or hippie) and hallucinatory drugs. What drives the new kid criminals to the yé-yé nothingness of jail, where many are ending through their open provocation of the police, especially as to drugs, is that — as expert Roy Morser puts it — "They want to be controlled, to take them out of the impossible barrage of stimuli they are subject to: not finding a way through the jungle." This is exactly the conclusion of Erich Fromm's study of Nazi Germany, Escape from Freedom, which also exposes the ultimate resolution of the Lumpen "non-conformist's" contradiction in his embracing of the ruthless parental power of dictatorship, and in the Nadaist yearning for the death of the world.
- The main feeling one gets, picking one’s way through the sodden bodies and surly faces of the “flower children” in these psychedelic pads nowadays, is that of a terrible and empty sadness and meaninglessness. Mostly, the kids just sit around among the unwashed dishes, scratching their unwashed armpits, screwing, etc. (you want details? — subscribe to their poetry magazines), and work themselves up on drugs to writing newer and worse manifestos and poems, all in a bad imitation of the style of Walt Whitman’s bad imitation of the King James Bible, also a century ago, or rather three centuries ago, but this time all beginning: “My armpits were green when I woke up this morning.” Look, chump, you’re lucky you woke up at all, the way you hit that snakeroot. Also, where does it say that free speech for poetry, or for “love,” involves masturbating four- and five-year-old communally-held children for kicks? That used to be called the Black Mass. Now, all of a sudden, it’s a Human Be-In, and a private Love Event around the old pad. Ya wanna play sex-games with daddy? Pardon me while I puke. [p.17]
- ‘It is precisely this angry, grumbling, wildcat hostility to everything, that will make the Fake Revolt the chosen vehicle of the next Hitler … who will naturally require drug-addicted goon-squads and a Lumpen “Elite” (on motorcycles) to scare YOU, the yellow-belly public, into frightened silence and guilty connivance, exactly as happened once before in living memory…. Don’t imagine for a minute that I’m the only sorehead still remembering Hitler and the German Death Camps, laid out and suggested in Celine’s Bagatelles pour un Massacre and L'Ecole des Cadavres, works carefully omitted from this particular lunatic degenerate’s complete works, now again being plugged as “in.” The motorcycle hoodlums and surfers of the California coast, at least, want nothing more in life than big waves (of the Future?) and Nazi medals, German pilots’ crush-caps, and Hitler Jugend daggers to sport, and will pay any price to get them; will even trade hand-engraved idols of the surfers’ secret god, “Tiki,” for them…(Cross-cultural note: most Iron Crosses now being peddled in America are forged by two pop-sculptors in Los Angeles.) …. The New Left is essentially a front operation or “Social Democratic” Trojan Horse, intended to set up cadres to welcome the new Hitler when he comes. [p. 20]
- "The New Revolt nowadays consists of a bunch of inarticulate long-haired adolescents, without leadership and without a program, trying to mouth prepared goon-bait such as "existential" and "psychedelic," being shoved on them by psychological pushers that nobody can arrest. If that's your kids and you don't like it, just be thankful they aren't members of the same Fake Revolt one layer down: the motorcycle fags and hoodlums who peddle their bodies to homosexuals in public toilets for money to buy Nazi insignia, but who are scared of girls unless there are enough other hoodlums present to gang-bang them or pull out their front teeth with pliers, and throw them to their death from apartment-house roofs. The dirty girls available for this type of work do not require description -- either before or after. They are somebody's daughter, too, and were brought up on the "media," and hassled into frothing in their panties publicly over well-publicized pelvic crooners and other pop-culch offal. If you haven't had a little LSD dropout in your home, just wander up and down your local Freak-Out Bar area, not forgetting a side-trip to the "S. & M." (sado-masochistic) or "Sadie-Maisie" homosexual bars, such as those on New York's fashionable East Side, for the meaner types of homosexual gangsters -- also on motorcycles -- and businessmen-delinquents on their off hours, soft-shod rich boys, and art director types, who like to show what a super-cultured Elite they really are, by chewing dirty socks and beating each other to death. Pot, anyone?"
See also
- "The Social History of the Hippies" by Warren Hinckle
- The Revolt of Modern Youth
