Thinking Through A Failed Coup with the Lord of Failed Coups, Yukio Mishima
It all seems eerily prescient now. Last Fall, my students and I discussed Yukio Mishima’s failed coup — which concluded with his ritual suicide — alongside why an aesthetics always accompanies fascism, and how certain ways of formulating art, culture, and tradition leaves one open to such an ideology. As someone who can’t be further from him politically, Mishima is still endlessly alluring, and dare one say pleasurable — because of the coherence and refinement of his vision and sheer aesthetic output. I might place him on a far-diverged, more modern/radical branch that split from a particularly erudite, conservative trunk of Asian intellectuals such as Liang Qichao, Tagore, and Al-Afghani, sans their humanism. Coming back to the event, the riot-coup that transpired yesterday at the Capitol Hill was much blunter, the nadir of elegance, and utterly incompetent, but in ways far more dangerous than what Mishima attempted in 1970. While my students and I made jokes on how “the likes of Richard Spencer wish they had Mishima’s style, suave, and talent”, the material grounds upon which the two coups happened are fundamentally different.
Mishima extravagantly ended his life in the twilight years of postwar embedded liberalism, which oversaw the largest distribution of wealth and prosperity over a burgeoning global middle class, and so it wasn’t a surprise that the Japanese didn’t pay any heed to him (although his performance of death gave him a powerfully fecund global afterlife in the mind of both his admirers and critics); 50 years later, yesterday’s Trumpo-fascist coup occurred after 5 decades of neoliberal re-accumulation of capital, class revanchism, austerity politics, deepened inequality and immiseration, shredding of multiple forms of societal safety nets, and to top off this noxious cocktail, you add the antagonistic bitters of systemic racism and its deep denial, cellaring for centuries in the underbelly of the American psyche. So as long as the rot in the soil isn’t dealt with, there is all the reason to believe that rather than the end, this is just the beginning of homegrown American fascism.
As always, we ought to pose the question, out of duty or necessity or habit — what is to be done?
1.) On the conventional political channels, sign a petition, write a letter to or call your representatives in both the House and Senate to either activate the 25th Amendment or begin the impeachment process of Donald Trump. If one of your representatives or congresspersons contributed to the narrative of election fraud, even better — sign on Congresswoman Cori Bush’s drive for disciplinary action/expulsion towards the GOP individuals who have emboldened the riot-coup. While I don’t think these actions have a particularly good chance of fruition, the pressure it can generate is just one thing amongst others.
2.) With local, national and transnational organizations you trust and work with, stay vigilant, organize, and strategize. Build broader coalitions and keep the struggle intersectional. Educate while you agitate, and avoid burnout. Georgia has shown that the grassroots left can win at the electoral level, but policy and the streets need victories too.
3.) By defeating the fascists, I also partly mean to convert, convince, and dislodge them from their virulent structures of belief. The means may vary, but as an educator I refuse to believe that one can’t outgrow bad ideas, challenge one’s own inimical beliefs, and confront the sources of one’s emotional and economic distress that lead one there. Although it is tremendously difficult to get people to that starting line, let alone to begin the hard work of self-criticism and reflection.
There’s probably much much more that you can think of that I haven’t. Good luck now — solidarity will get us through this.
p.s. So this brings me to the oddball but fun question of What Would Mishima Say about the 1/6 Coup? I think he would actually snidely chastise the mob for their lack of discipline, resolve (coming from someone who planned and committed seppuku), and grace of action. That unlike the Zenkyotou leftist students, whom he could talk with in a friendly manner as an enemy, he would only have animosity and disdain toward these supposed friends.
