Malaparte vs. de Beauvoir; Idi Amin and the Mamdanis' Antifascism
Reading, Watching 07.07.26
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In the New York Times Book Review today, I have a review of Maurizio Serra’s recently translated biography of fascist writer Curzio Malaparte:
“Fascism” is notoriously difficult to define. It insisted on conformism while attracting bohemians and subversives, fused manic idealism with brutal cynicism and combined elements of modernism and pastoral nostalgia. The critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin once wrote that “fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.” In “Malaparte,” Maurizio Serra’s outstanding biography of the Italian dandy, journalist, playwright, would-be diplomat and filmmaker Curzio Malaparte, the author makes clear that Benjamin was correct. Whatever else it was, 20th-century fascism was a project more of imagination than reason; it was driven by aspiring European elites who presented themselves as populists in their pursuit of grandeur and greatness.
….
The sociologist Michael Mann once wrote, “Fascism was a movement of the lesser intelligentsia,” but Malaparte was a first-rate talent as both journalist and fiction writer. Still, he struggled to put his creative energy to constructive use: He looked down on losers, but, in his misbegotten schemes and futile projects, he found himself among their ranks.
There is a pathetic aspect to Serra’s account of Malaparte’s life, a solipsism that despaired of finding anything worthwhile in life other than movement and adventure. The anti-intellectual intellectual, the macho man who wore makeup and sported perfectly coifed hair; physically courageous as a soldier and war correspondent but in politics and his personal life a moral coward; the militant anti-communist fascinated with Lenin’s Russia and, eventually, Mao’s China; the bourgeois snob who hated the bourgeoise and idealized both proletarians and aristocrats: Malaparte embodied, almost perfectly, the contradictory impulses of the fascist generation.
A couple of weeks ago, while working on the review, I happened to be looking at Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity, and I thought I recognized Malaparte in her famous existential typology. Her account of the “adventurer,” the type of man who treats human freedom as a game, sounds a lot like him:
The man we call an adventurer…is one who remains indifferent to the content, that is, to the human meaning of his action, who thinks he can assert his own existence without taking into account that of others. The fate of Italy mattered very little to the Italian condottiere; the massacres of the Indians meant nothing to Pizarro; Don Juan was unaffected by Elvira’s tears. Indifferent to the ends they set up for themselves, they were still more indifferent to the means of attaining them; they cared only for their pleasure or their glory. This implies that the adventurer shares the nihilist’s contempt for men. And it is by this very contempt that he believes he breaks away from the contemptible condition in which those who do not imitate his pride are stagnating. Thus, nothing prevents him from sacrificing these insignificant beings to his own will for power. He will treat them like instruments; he will destroy them if they get in his way. But meanwhile he appears as an enemy in the eyes of others. His undertaking is not only an individual wager; it is a combat. He can not win the game without making himself a tyrant or a hangman. And as he can not impose this tyranny without help, he is obliged to serve the regime which will allow him to exercise it. He needs money, arms, soldiers, or the support of the police and the laws. It is not a matter of chance, but a dialectical necessity which leads the adventurer to be complacent regarding all regimes which defend the privilege of a class or a party, and more particularly authoritarian regimes and fascism. He needs fortune, leisure, and enjoyment, and he will take these goods as supreme ends in order to be prepared to remain free in regard to any end. Thus, confusing a quite external availability with real freedom, he falls, with a pretext of independence, into the servitude of the object. He will range himself on the side of the regimes which guarantee him his privileges, and he will prefer those which confirm him in his contempt regarding the common herd. He will make himself its accomplice, its servant, or even its valet, alienating a freedom which, in reality, can not confirm itself as such if it does not wear its own face. In order to have wanted to limit it to itself, in order to have emptied it of all concrete content, he realizes it only as an abstract independence which turns into servitude. He must submit to masters unless he makes himself the supreme master. Favorable circumstances are enough to transform the adventurer into a dictator. He carries the seed of one within him, since he regards mankind as indifferent matter destined to support the game of his existence. But what he then knows is the supreme servitude of tyranny.
Hegel’s criticism of the tyrant is applicable to the adventurer to the extent that he is himself a tyrant, or at the very least an accomplice of the oppressor. No man can save himself alone. Doubtless, in the very heat of an action the adventurer can know a joy which is sufficient unto itself, but once the undertaking is over and has congealed behind him into a thing, it must, in order to remain alive, be animated anew by a human intention which must transcend it toward the future into recognition or admiration. When he dies, the adventurer will be surrendering his whole life into the hands of men; the only meaning it will have will be the one they confer upon it. He knows this since he talks about himself, often in books. For want of a work, many desire to bequeath their own personality to posterity: at least during their lifetime they need the approval of a few faithful. Forgotten and detested, the adventurer loses the taste for his own existence. Perhaps without his knowing it, it seems so precious to him because of others. It willed itself to be an affirmation, an example to all mankind. Once it falls back upon itself, it becomes futile and unjustified.
Since de Beauvoir was characterizing the war generation, it’s not surprising that a figure like Malaparte would fit in her schema. But I wonder if she might have had him literally in mind: After the war, he went to Paris, and he was certainly known to the existentialists—if not welcomed in their circle.
I spent a lot of July 4th weekend reading about Idi Amin and his expulsion of Uganda’s Asian population in 1972. This was, of course, spurred on by Zohran Mamdani: Mamdani was born in Uganda; his father returned to the country after the overthrow of the Amin regime.
Uganda was colonized by the British beginning in the 1880s and was a British protectorate from 1894 to 1962, when it gained independence. As part of their project of colonization, the British brought with them “Asians” (what we Americans would call Indians or South Asians) from the British Raj as colonial troops and as laborers to build the railroad. Many Asians stayed to work as small traders, selling goods in rural areas, and some became quite wealthy as cotton ginners or coffee merchants. As such, Asians became an important part of the development of capitalism in Uganda and the incorporation of the colony into the circuits of imperial trade.
The British created a class or even caste system that put different racial groups into different occupations and functions. As Mahmood Mamdani (Zohran’s father) wrote in his 1973 book, From citizen to refugee : Uganda Asians come to Britain,:
There was rigid racial compartmentalisation in the newly created colonial political economy. Laws hindered Africans from entering trade and Asians from owning land. In the economy that emerged, Africans were primarily peasants and workers; Asians primarily shopkeepers, artisans and petty bureaucrats; and Europeans were bankers, wholesalers and the administrative and political elite. Race coincided with class and became politicised.