As you might imagine, this oligarchy that speaks French and sells its produce to Great Britain, is alliedphile. Also, coherently enough, like any owner class conscious of its interests, it is rabidly anticommunist. They are, however, united. Here, the oligarchy and the communists, fight in the name of liberty against the “Axis powers”. That’s how they like to call us. Both groups pronounce things without shame, incurring the ridicule of absolute repetitiveness, mishandling them, emptying them of all meaning, the concepts of liberty and democracy. The middle classes come and go, especially from office.

I must speak to you of the army. They’re from the golpe del 43. They’re as pathetic as the oligarchy. They are so National Socialist that to march, they use the goosestep. It doesn’t suit them as well as it does SS formations, but they try. Their helmets are ours. They have copied them with indubitable merit. Not only are they not alliedphiles, they don’t act like they are, nor do they even pretend. They haven’t declared war on us yet. When they do they will be declaring it on a defeated country, event that will grant that decision all sorts of explanations minus that of courage. They like to talk of the steel industry, of the tall furnaces, of heavy industry. I think they are irredeemably stupid.

I must speak of the lower classes. They are many. And for some time they have been slipping out of the country to the city. The crisis of the English (who provided the oligarchy with every product, to which they only had to add a screw) led by the lazy landowners to face the unusual adventure of industry. They substituted the imports that the empire of Mr. Churchill could no longer provide them with. This (only, solely, this, Martin) fired off a powerful industrial and urban development. There arrived, to work in the new factories, men from the interior of the country. A region the oligarchy has forgotten, has erased from itself with astonishing effectiveness. Now it’s falling on them. And they, who, instead of a country, built a beautiful city, have to suddenly house, in between their Parisian palacettes, the armies of backwardness, the hungry, the scruffy. Can anyone receive them, shelter them, listen and understand what they say, what they want? Does anyone in this ostentatious city know the dialect of hunger?

Allow me my enthusiasm, Martin! Allow the secret paths that are un-hidden by my writing to dazzle me. (They are, you know, my last enthusiasms, my final bedazzlements.) What a demented country! Observe this panorama: the alliedphiles are democrats, feverish adherents to liberty. They are the antithesis of Nazism. But they are racists, Martin. They don’t hate the Jews. (No sane mind would say they held them in any esteem.) They hate that which they call the blacks. These blacks are not the Negroes from Africa. They’ve come from the distant union between Indians and Spaniards. They are, perhaps, mestizos. They’ve been named black heads. A pejorative yet appropriate name, given they have hard, greasy hair, of an inveterate negritude. Who will take care of them?

The oligarchy? Never! They are blacks, peons of the poor ranches in the country’s unappreciated interior. Or from the powerful ranches whose bosses they flee? The middle classes? Neither! They fear them. They are so many. Something they must take, without a doubt. The communists? Even less! Those aren’t proletarians! Does some lost page or footnote from Capital consider them? They are pre-capitalism. They have no experience with unions. The National Socialist military that dreams of steel works and marches with the goosestep? No! They want industries, military development, the triumph of the Reich, and even, some will dream, of Aryan workers, with Viking technicians.

I don’t know what solution this will have.

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 2:05 AM