Regarding Zizek's brilliant paper, maybe "unabridged" was too soft a qualifier.... Here's one more scrap from the Uncensored Zizek:
So what should the Serb "democratic opposition" do? Let us recall Freud's late book on Moses and Monotheism: how did he react to the Nazi anti-Semitic threat? Not by joining the ranks of the beleaguered Jews in the defense of their legacy, but by targetting its own people, the most precious part of the Jewish legacy, the founding figure of Moses, i.e. by endeavouring to deprive Jews of this figure, proving that Moses was not a Jew at all - this way, he effectively undermined the very unconscious foundation of the anti-Semitism. And is it not that Serbs should today risk a similar act with regard to Kosovo as their precious object-treasure, the craddle of their civilization, that which matters to them more than everything else and which they are never able to renounce? Therein resides the final limit of the large majority of the so-called "democratic opposition" to the Milosevic regime: they unconditionally endorse Milosevic's anti-Albanian nationalist agenda, even accusing him of making compromises with the West and "betraying" Serb national interests in Kosovo. For this very reason, the sine qua non of an authentic act in Serbia today would be precisely to RENOUNCE the claim to Kosovo, to sacrifice the substantial attachment to the privileged object. (What we have here is thus a nice case of the political dialectic of democracy: although democracy is the ultimate goal, in today's Serbia, any direct advocacy of democracy which leaves uncontested nationalistic claims about Kosovo is doomed to fail - THE issue apropos of which the struggle for democracy will be decided is that of Kosovo.)
In NATO-Yugoslav war, we thus have a double Realitaetsverleugnung: on the one hand, NATO fantasy of war without casualties, surgical operation; on the other hand, the faked carnivalization totally disconnected from the reality of what goes on down in Kosovo.
When the Western powers repeat all the time that they are not fighting the Serb people, but only their corrupted regime, they rely on the typically liberal wrong premise that the Serbian people are just victims of their evil leadership personified in Milosevic, manipulated by him. The painful fact is that Serb aggressive nationalism enjoys the support of the large majority of the population - no, Serbs are not passive victims of nationalist manipulation, they are not Americans in disguise, just waiting to be delivered from the bad nationalist spell.
More precisely, the misperception of the West is double: this notion of the bad leadership manipulating the good people is accompanied by the apparently contradictory notion according to which, Balkan people are living in the past, fighting again old battles, perceiving recent situation through old myths... One is tempted to say that these two notions should be precisely TURNED AROUND: not only are people not "good," since they let themselves be manipulated with obscene pleasure; there are also no "old myths" which we need to study if we are really to understand the situation, just the PRESENT outburst of racist nationalism which, according to its needs, opportunistically resuscitates old myths...
So, on the one hand, we have the obscenities of the Serb state propaganda: they regularily refer to Clinton not as "the American president," but as "the American Fuehrer"; two of the transparents on their state-organized anti-Nato demonstrations were "Clinton, come here and be our Monica!" (i.e. suck our...), and "Monica, did you suck out also his brain?". The atmosphere in Belgrade is, at least for the time being, carnavalesque in a faked way - when they are not in shelters, people dance to rock or ethnic music on the streets, under the motto "With poetry and music against bombs!", playing the role of the defying heroes (since they know that NATO does not really bomb civilian targets and that, consequently, they are safe!). This is where the NATO planners got it wrong, caught in their schemes of strategic reasoning, unable to forecast that the Serb reaction to bombardment will be a recourse to a collective Bakhtinian carnivalization of the social life... This pseudo-authentic spectacle, although it may fascinate some confused Leftists, is effectively the other, public, face of ethnic cleansing: in Belgrade people are defiantly dancing on the streets while, three hundred kilometers to the South, a genocide of African proportions is taking place... And the Western counterpoint to this obscenity is the more and more openly racist tone of its reporting: when the three American soldiers were taken prisoners, CNN dedicated the first 10 minutes of the News to their predicament (although everyone knew that NOTHING will happen to them!), and only then reported on the tens of thousands of refugees, burned villages and Pristina turning into a ghost town. Where is the so-much-praised Serb "democratic opposition" to protest THIS horror taking place in their own backyard, not only the - till now, at least, bombardments with relatively very low casualties?
In the recent struggle of the so-called "democratic opposition" in Serbia against the Milosevic's regime, the truly touchy topic is the stance towards Kosovo: as to this topic, the large majority of the "democratic opposition" unconditionally endorses Milosevic's anti-Albanian nationalist agenda, even accusing him of making compromises with the West and "betraying" Serb national interests in Kosovo. In the course of the student demonstrations against the Milosevic's Socialist Party falsification of the election results in the Winter of 1996, the Western media who closely followed the events and praised the revived democratic spirit in Serbia, rarely mentioned the fact that one of the regular slogans of the demonstrators against the special police forces was "Instead of kicking us, go to Kosovo and kick out the Albanians!". In today's Serbia, the absolute sine qua non of an authentic political act would thus be to unconditionally reject the ideological topos of the "Albanian threat to Serbia."
One thing is for sure: the NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia will change the global geopolitic coordinates. The unwritten pact of peaceful coexistence (the respect of each state's full sovereignty, i.e. non-interference in internal affairs, even in the case of the grave violation of human rights) is over. However, the very first act of the new global police force usurping the right to punish sovereign states for their wrongdoings already signals its end, its own undermining, since it immediately became clear that this universality of human rights as its legitimization is false,
i.e. that the attacks on selective targets protect particular interests. The NATO bombardments of Yugoslavia also signal the end of any serious role of UN and Security Council: it is NATO under US guidance that effectively pulls the strings. Furthermore, the silent pact with Russia that held till now is broken: in the terms of this pact, Russia was publicly treated as a superpower, allowed to maintain the appearance of being one, on condition that it did not effectively act as one. Now Russia's humiliation is open, any pretense of dignity is unmasked: Russia can only openly resist or openly comply with Western pressure. The further logical result of this new situation will be, of course, the renewed rise of anti-Western resistance from Eastern Europe to the Third World, with the sad consequence that criminal figures like Milosevic will be elevated into the model fighters against the New World Order.
So the lesson is that the alternative between the New World Order and the neoracist nationalists opposing it is a false one: these are the two sides of the same coin - the New World Order itself breeds monstrosities that it fights. Which is why the protests against bombing from the reformed Communist parties all around Europe, inclusive of PDS, are totally misdirected: these false protesters against the NATO bombardment of Serbia are like the caricaturized pseudo-Leftists who oppose the trial against a drug dealer, claiming that his crime is the result of social pathology of the capitalist system. The way to fight the capitalist New World Order is not by supporting local proto-Fascist resistances to it, but to focus on the only serious question today: how to build TRANSNATIONAL political movements and institutions strong enough to seriously constraint the unlimited rule of the capital, and to render visible and politically relevant the fact that the local fundamentalist resistances against the New World Order, from Milosevic to le Pen and the extreme Right in Europe, are part of it?
SORRY, WE DID NOT KNOW YOU ARE THE CHOSEN NATION! CARNIVAL IN THE EYE OF THE STORM
The standard topic of critical psychiatry is that a "madman" is not in himself mad, but rather functions as a kind of focal point in which the pathological tension which permeates the entire group (family) to which he belongs finds its outlet. The "madman" is the product of the group pathology, the symptomatic point in which the global pathology becomes visible - one can say that all other members of the group succeed in retaining (the appearance of) their sanity by condensing their patholoogy in (or by projecting it onto) the sacrificial figure of the madman, this exception who grounds the global order of group sanity. However, more interesting that this is the opposite case, exemplified by the life of Bertrand Russell: he lived till his death in his late 90s a long normal life, full of creativity and "healthy" sexual satisfactions, yet all people around him, all members of his larger family, seemed to be afflicted with some kind of madness - he had love affairs with most of the wives of his sons, and most of his sons and other close relatives committed suicide. It is thus as if, in a kind of inversion of the standard logic of group sanity guaranteed by the exclusion of the "madman," here, we have the central figure who retained (the appearance of) his sanity by way of spreading his madness all around him, onto all his close relatives. The task of a critical analysis is here, of course, to demonstrate how the TRUE point of madness of this social network is precisely the only point which appears "sane," its central paternal figure who perceives madness everywhere around himself, but is unable to recognize IN HIMSELF its true source.
And does the same not hold for the predominant way the Serbs perceive their role today? On the one hand, one can argue that, for the West, Serbia is a symptomal point in which the repressed truth of a more global situation violently breaks out. On the other hand, within ex-Yugoslavia, Serbs behaves as an island of sanity in the sea of nationalist/secessionist madness all around them, refusing to acknowledge even a part of responsibility. It is eye-opening to watch in the last days the Serb satellite state TV which targets foreign public: no reports on
atrocities in Kosovo, refugees are mentioned only as people fleeing the NATO bombing; the overall idea is that Serbia, the island of peace, the only place in ex-Yugoslavia that was not touched by the war raging all around it, is attacked by the NATO madmen destroying bridges and hospitals...
No wonder, then, that the atmosphere in Belgrade is, at least for the time being, carnivalesque in a faked way - when they are not in shelters, people dance to rock or ethnic music on the streets, under the motto "With music against bombs!", playing the role of the defying victims (since they know that NATO does not really bomb civilian targets). Although it may fascinate some confused pseudo-Leftists, this obscene carnivalization of the social life is effectively the other, public, face of ethnic cleansing: while in Belgrade people defiantly dance on the streets, three hundred kilometers to the South, a genocide of African proportions is taking place. So when, in the nightime, crowds are camping out on the Belgrade bridges, participating in pop and ethnic music concerts held there in a defiantly festive mood, offering their bodies as the live shield to prevent the bridges from being bombed, the answer to this faked pathetic gesture should be a very simple one: why don't you go to Kosovo and make a rock carnival in the Albanian parts of Pristina? And when people are wearing papers with a "target" sign printed on them, the obscene falsity of this gesture cannot but strike the eye: can one imagine the REAL targets years ago in Sarajevo or now in Kosovo wearing such signs?
In what is this almost psychotic refusal to perceive one's responsibility grounded? During a recent visit to Israel, a friend told me a hilarious joke about Clinton visiting Bibi Netanyahu: when, in Bibi's office, Clinton saw a mysterious blue phone, he asked Bibi what this phone is, and Bibi answered that it allows him to dial Him up there in the sky. Upon his return to the States, the envious Clinton demanded of his secret service to provide him such a phone at any cost. In two weeks, they deliver it and it works, but the phone bill is exorbitant - two million dollars for a one minute talk with Him up there. So Clinton furiously calls Bibi and complains: "How can you afford such a phone, if even we, who support you financially, cannot? Is this how you spend our money?" Bibi calmly answers: "No, it's not that - you see, for us, Jews, that call counts as a local call!" The problem with Serbs is that, in their self-perception, they tend more and more to imitate Jews and identify themselves as the people for whom the phone call to God counts as a local call...
When the Western powers repeat all the time that they are not fighting the Serb people, but only their corrupted leaders, they rely on the (typically liberal) wrong premise that Serbs are victims of their evil leadership personified in Milosevic, manipulated by him. The painful fact is that the Serb aggressive nationalism enjoys the support of the large majority of the population - no, Serbs are not passive victims of nationalist manipulation, they are not Americans in disguise, just waiting to be delivered from the nationalist spell. On the other hand, this misperception is accompanied by the apparently contradictory notion according to which, Balkan people are living in the past, fighting again and again old battles, perceiving recent situation through old myths... I am tempted to say that these two cliches should be precisely TURNED AROUND: not only are people not "good," since they let themselves be manipulated with obscene pleasure; there are also no "old myths" which we need to study if we are really to understand the complex situation, just the PRESENT outburst of racist nationalism which, according to its needs, opportunistically resuscitates old myths. To paraphrase the old Clintonian motto: no, it's not the old myths and ethnic hatreds, it's the POLITICAL POWER STRUGGLE, stupid!
So where, in all this, is the much praised Serb "democratic opposition"? One shouldn't be too harsh of them: in the present situation of Serbia, of course, any attempt at public disagreement would probably trigger direct death threats. On the other hand, one should nonetheless notice that there was a certain limit that, as far as I know, even the most radical Serb democratic opposition was never able to trespass: the farthest they can go is to admit the monstrous nature of Serb nationalism and ethnic cleansing, but nonetheless to insist that Milosevic is ultimately just on in the series of the nationalist leaders who are to be blamed for the violence of the last decade: Milosevic, Tudjman, Izetbegovic, Kucan, they are ultimately all the same... I am not claiming, agains such a vision, that one should put all the blame on Serbs - my point is just that, instead of such pathetic-apolitical generalizations ("they are all mad, all to blame"), one should, more than ever, insist on a CONCRETE POLITICAL ANALYSIS of the power struggles that triggered the catastrophe. And it is the rejection of such an analysis that accounts for the ultimate hypocrisy of the pacifist attitude towards the Kosovo war: "the true victims are women and children on all sides, so stop the bombing, more violence never helped to end violence, it just pushes us deeper into the vortex..."
There is nonetheless another, more disturbing aspect to be discerned in this false carnivalization of the war in the Serb media. The usual Serb complaint is that, instead of confronting them face to face, as it befits brave soldiers, NATO are cowardly bombing them from distant ships and planes. And, effectively, the lesson here is that it is thoroughly false to claim that war is made less traumatic if it is no longer experienced by the soldiers (or presented) as an actual encounter with another human being to be killed, but as an abstract activity in fron of a screen or behind a gun far from the explosion, like guiding a missile on a war ship hundreds of miles away from where it will hit its target. While such a procedure makes the soldier less guilty, it is open to question if it effectively causes less anxiety - one way to explain the strange fact that soldiers often fantasize about killing the enemy in a face to face confrontation, looking him into the eyes before stabbing him with a bayonet (in a kind of military version of the sexual False Memory Syndrome, they even often "remember" such encounters when they never took place). There is a long literary tradition of elevating such face to face encounters as an authentic war experience (see the writings of Ernst Juenger, who praised them in his memoirs of the trench attacks in World War I). So what if the truly traumatic feature is NOT the awareness that I am killing another human being (to be obliterated through the "dehumanization" and "objectivization" of war into a technical procedure), but, on the contrary, this very "objectivization," which then generates the need to supplement it by the fantasies of authentic personal encounters with the enemy? It is thus not the fantasy of a purely aseptic war run as a video game behind computer screens that protects us from the reality of the face to face killing of another person; it is, on the opposite, this fantasy of a face to face encounter with an enemy killed in a bloody confrontation that we construct in order to escape the trauma of the depersonalized war turned into an anonymous technological apparatus. So is not the Serb carnivalization of the daily life also ein Abwehr-Mechanismus gegen die Kriegsmachinerie?
Tariq Ali, "Springtime for NATO," New Left Review 234 (March-April 1999), p. 70. |
