[Peace-discuss] leaders when they are wrong
stuart tarr
stuarttarr at hotmail.com
Wed Mar 22 04:49:40 CST 2006
> >
> > >What I don't get is how human beings stop lieing to
> > themselves? I mean,
> > >sure, as human beings we all tell ourselves little
> > lies, but most of us later
> > >come to realize that we were wrong and at least
> > admit it to ourselves.
> >
> > Do we? I can think of many counter-examples from my
> > own life
> > experience. Of course, the stuff we do, and lie to
> > ourselves about,
> > doesn't impact as many lives as the actions of
> > government leaders.
> >
> >
> > >But how do we get to that point of honest personal
> > reflection?
> > >
> > >Then how do we get our leaders to do this and stop
> > their madness?
> >
> > These are excellent questions. These are questions
> > for the ages. I have
> > Biblical answers if anyone wants to hear them.
> > Otherwise I got nothin'. :-)
> >
> > John Wason
Questions that recalled to me an interview with Slavoj Zizek shortly after
the fall of Bhagdad. Sorry for the length, but some interesting and
prescient comments regarding these questions, particularly on the willful
refusal to know. Unfortunately, no good answers.
An interview with Slavoj Zizek
This is the edited version of an interview with the Slovenian philiosopher
and cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek originally broadcast on Doug Henwood's
radio show, April 17, 2003. Zizek combines Lacanian psychoanalysis and
Marxist political economy to analyze politics and culture.
What did you think as Saddam's statue was falling in Baghdad?
Strangely, my first association was the bombing of Buddha statues in
Afghanistan. I'm not implying that the U.S. is a new Taliban, the game where
both are fundamentalists is a little too easy. Nonetheless, if we take
statues as such, representing some kind of traditional culture, not so much
American bombs as the American capitalist model is a much more effective
destructive force than those poor Taliban bombs. My second reaction was, you
know, if there is a lesson to be learned from history, from the fall of
Communism ten years ago, is a deep distrust of this enthusiastic moment.
Yes, probably a majority of Iraqis was, to put it modestly, relatively
enthusiastic. Life was difficult under Saddam. Probably for an ordinary
Iraqi, it may get a little bit better. But these enthusiastic explosions are
just a moment; what matters to me is the day after. And there I'm a little
bit less enthusiastic than it may appear.
The first problem: the idea was, "Let's bring democracy to Iraq." A couple
of simple facts have to be mentioned here. First, for simple geopolitical
strategic interests, the U.S. cannot afford democracy in the Middle East
now. And I'm not playing any Marxist games about the illusions of bourgeois
democracy. I simply mean usual Western liberal democracy - multiparty
elections. This would assure that sooner or later, some kind of, if not
fundamentalist, then at least nationalist Arab regime would take over, and
would at least play some anti-American games with the oil. So that's the
first irony of the situation.
The second one is how open the game is becoming. William Kristol is blunt:
it's not really about Iraq, it's about the absolutely hegemonic role of the
U.S. And another point they are making clearly is best captured by the last
book by Fareed Zakaria, who now openly whines about "overdemocratization."
In the U.S. and the rest of the world democracy exploded too much, which
disturbs the normal run of things. The countries that have performed well
economically - Tawian, Chile, Singapore, Korea - a decade ago, all were
military dictatorships. He argues the U.S. should not bring democracy; it
should install a benevolent authoritarian regime under U.S. guidance. The
U.S. will decide when it's ready for democracy.
Within the U.S., this lesson is the same. There is too much popular
pressure. What we need is more power for experts. Zakaria is not designating
a new trend; it's effectively already going on for years. We have democracy
at this certain level of this false, for me, secondary choices. But key
questions about monetary politics, globalization, trade agreements and so on
- nobody votes about that. In the years to come, the system - the global
capitalist system - will have to directly curtail democracy. What we take
now for granted will be slowly taken from us. They'll say, "This is not a
thing to be discussed, it's a neutral knowledge expert rule or it's a matter
of security." What is going on now in the U.S. is typical: it's not simply
an emergency state, it's at the same time an emergency state and a normal
state. It's a strange state where at the same time we are at war and things
go on as normal.
And I think that this is not necessarily a bad thing, in the sense that the
system, if I may use this old-fashioned left term, will be more and more
obliged to break its own rules. This will open up a space for some leftist
conversation which will be able to catch the system at its own work, to
measure it by its own standards.
Let me change the subject a bit. In an article in the London Review of
Books, Perry Anderson wondered why the Bush war on Iraq had given rise to
such a large anti-war movement. He thought that there were many similarities
between Iraq and what the U.S. had done in the past, and didn't understand
why suddenly things were perceived as different. And he attributed it in
part to a cultural antipathy against the Bush administration. Now I think
cultural antipathy to the Bush administration is a very good thing, and I'm
very much in favor of it, but what do you think of Anderson's critique?
I don't find this difference as mysterious as it may seem. There's a shift
in legitimation, a real break here. First, there is, to use the old
Stalinist dialectical term, a clear jump of quantity into quality. To the
horror of many leftists, even I did show some understanding for the NATO
bombing of ex-Yugoslavia. Sorry, but this bombing did stop a terrible
conflict. Some kind of humanitarian effort was perceivable, and the action
had some kind of international legitimacy. Since then, a whole series of
shifts threw things into a different perspective. One of the key events was
the American dismissal of the Hague International Court. Although it may
appear just a minor judicial matter, it inscribed itself into people's
consciousness. And with Iraq, the U.S. wanted to do it alone. It was
absolutely clear already before the war that all the official justifications
- the al-Qaeda connection, the mythical status of the weapons of mass
destruction - did not work.
You've said that Bush's target was also in part the emancipatory
possibilities of American society.
Maybe I exaggerated it a little bit, but still I think that you simply
cannot also discount that factor. Not that Bush will use this as an excuse
to introduce some kind of half-military dictatorship. No! But the
imperceptible, unwritten rules of political life are changing gradually. My
eternal trump card is torture. Can you even imagine the topic of torture as
a legitimate topic two or three years ago? My biggest worry is this "soft
revolution," these imperceptible changes in normativity, the unwritten rules
about what is acceptable.
A large portion of the American population believes that Saddam was behind
September 11. Only about 17% of respondents to one poll could correctly say
that there were no Iraqis among the hijackers on September 11. Where do you
think these fantasy views come from? Also, there's a tendency of the
American left that thinks that all you have to do is get the facts out
there, and things will take care of themselves. How do fantasies figure in
politics and how do you counter them?
Now that's a good, big question. Big in the sense that I don't have good
answers to it. With all my admiration for Noam Chomsky, I partially disagree
with him. It's an underlying premise of his work that you don't have to do
any theory - just tell all the facts to the people. The way ideology works
today is much more mysterious - not more complex, one can always say this,
things are always more complex, it means nothing just to say this. People
just do not want to know too much. There's an active refusal to know. If you
ask average citizens with enough of their own worries, they'd say, "Don't
even tell me this. We pay taxes so the government can do all the dirty
things that I don't want to know about."
The question isn't of any real link between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi regime. I
remember a debate on TV where some viewers' calls made their point clear,
which is: we are not talking about empirical links. Both Saddam and al-Qaeda
hate the U.S.. That's enough of a link. You cannot really help by making
factual refutations. The key factor is not that people are duped - there's
an active will not to know. Remember the Reagan presidency, when the media
pointed out his factual mistakes. That only raised his popularity. This was
the point of identification. With Bush, you have an almost ideal image for
how things worth: a naïve, unknowing president, and a sinister figure of
knowledge, like Dick Cheney, the operative, who really controls him. This is
really quite a nice metaphor for how things work.
People like to identify themselves. "I can be stupid but I'm still at the
top. The wiseguy is my vice, he is doing all the dirty jobs for me." There
is something appealing in this, I think. Again, my basic position is drop
the point that people want to know; people don't want to know. I'm not
engaged in any conservative psychology of, you know, "People prefer
ignorance, it's only for us, the evolutionary or spiritual elite to lead
them." I'm not saying this is an eternal fact. I'm just describing how
specifically today's ideology works, through a direct appeal to the will of
ignorance.
So what should we do in the face of this embrace of ignorance? Challenge it?
Work with it? Ignore it?
I am still a naïve, enlightened person. One should challenge it, but without
illusions. Here I'm in a very tragic predicament. I'm not saying that I have
a blueprint for what to do today. My remaining hope is a very sad,
pessimistic hope. The ruling system of ideology created such high democratic
expectations that it cannot live up to them. Gradually, it will have to
violate them. Once people are given certain rights, even if they are purely
ideological, it's difficult to take these rights from them. It won't be easy
to discipline people, to say, "No, we promised you too much." If you combine
this with likely future economic upheavals.... My worry is not the worry of
many of my leftist friends, like, "Why are you dreaming about revolutions?
The system will just go on." No - I am almost tempted to say unfortunately,
because unstable pre-revolutionary situations are not a holiday of history.
They can be very unpleasant. But they will compel us to invent new political
forms. In a couple of years, we will be literally forced to reinvent new
ways.
What do you make of German and French opposition to the American war effort?
Is it the dying gasp of a displaced imperialism, or the birth of an EU
alternative to American power?
This dilemma that you present is inscribed into the very situation. It's
both. On the one hand, yes, there definitely is an imperial aspect within
Europe for Germany and France. They were worried by the expansion of the EU,
and they wanted to assert a leading role there - and they did it even in a
very arrogant way. We shouldn't have any illusions, especially about France.
The Rwanda massacre a couple of years ago, that that was pure France - pure
Mitterand, if anything. Now, then what the French are doing....
Congo-Brazzaville, my god, if the notion of neo-post-colonialist state has
any meaning at all today, it's Congo-Brazzaville. It's worse than even
Latin-American banana republics. It's Elf-Acquitaine, the big French oil
company (which incidentally has had much better relations with the Socialist
Party than with the right). It owns the country. It's interested only in
controlling the small piece of land close to the sea where the oil reserves
are and to bribe the ruling clique. The infrastructure is below the level of
forty years ago when it was still a colony. So, no idealization of France.
But, on the other hand, I think it's the basic historical dialectic: that
things which start as a narcissistic injury to some big party, things which
may explode and emerge for the wrong reason can, in the long term, start to
function on their own. They can start movements that are in themselves good.
If we say, yes much of Europe was against the U.S., but we should look at
the true roots and thereby dismiss it. No, I don't think this is the truth
of it. There was resistance, which is in itself positive.
Point two: even when people complain, "But this was a weak resistance, now
it's vanishing, now already Chirac is practically withdrawing," and so on,
how Europe really showed its weakness. Oh, but I would say, are people aware
how precisely by experiencing this as Europe's defeat, you at least set
certain standards? You become aware in a negative way of what should have
been done. My parallel here is with feminism. The first step of feminism is
not, "Women should win." It's that you become aware of how defeated women
are. You know, the first step towards liberation is, in a way, the awareness
of defeat.
Along the same lines, I think this is very good if we become aware of how
Europe failed. But, you know, if Europe failed, then it failed to do
something we at least know we should have done. And there will be other
changes and so on and so on. So, in the same way that I didn't have any big
illusions two, three months ago, that this would already be the start of the
big anti-American coalition, I am now not such a pessimist. Isn't this a
good thing that at least Europe is aware of its failure, that it's clearly
aware of its failure?
We saw the emergence very rapidly of a very large globally coordinated
antiwar movement, and one with substantial anti-imperialist content. Why do
you think it rose so quickly, and do you think it's going to continue to
grow beyond that? Is it going to grow into a real anti-imperialist movement,
or has it now been shattered by the results of the war in Iraq?
Of course now it's temporarily shattered. The reasons it grew is precisely
what we were talking about at the beginning of our talk. People are somehow
aware that more is at stake here than Iraq, that the whole new, implicit
rules of international order, which are pretty catastrophic if you
universalize them, are emerging. I think that was key.
And, second point: I do think more and more that, of course now there will
be a backlash but the logic of progressive movements is always from defeat
to defeat up to the final victory. There will be a next crisis, and
resistance will be better organized. Two years ago or more, who would have
expected such an explosion? It was incredible. Of course now we have this
deceptive moment of triumph, but wait a couple of months. In the short-term,
it may work. But, there will be other tensions with other countries,
probably renewed terror attacks. You know, the situation is so predictable,
that even if it would work in Iraq, by the very logic of their intervention,
they may be pushed into Syria, and so on, further and further. The situation
will get out of hand and this will trigger new protests and so on and so on.
So, no, no, no. What I'm really afraid of is that when we left-wingers ask,
"is America aware that in this way they are only creating new tensions?"
they miss the point. What if the aim is to introduce instability to the
entire region and then to brutally impose some kind of universalized
emergency state or new order? But even if the U.S. is consciously counting
on the global disorder, it will not be able to control it. My only hope is
that American interventions will give rise to some kind of resistance. My
big hope - as an atheist, praying night and day for it - is that the
resistance in the Middle East will not be simply kidnapped by the so-called
fundamentalists. That this resistance will have at least secular socialist
wing. And I think there is a fair chance at it. Look at Iran. There is hope.
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