Monday, October 27, 2014
Sunday, October 26, 2014
Sunday, October 12, 2014
JOKES
http://www.karlremarks.com/p/three-dictators-walk-into-bar.html
[BELOW ARE SOME JOKES]
Joke #1: So, these
three moon-landing deniers walk into a bar. But it could have been a secret
studio in Texas fitted out to look like it's a bar.
Joke #2: And the
bartender says, "So, why are you all dressed this way?"
So, these three
time-travelers walk into a bar.
Joke #3: So, these
three postmodernists walk into a bar. There are several competing punchlines
that problematize a neat and tidy resolution of this joke.
Joke #4: So, these three
conspiracy-theorists walk into a bar. Do you honestly believe that was nothing
but a coincidence??!!
Joke #5: So, Gaddafi and
Mubarek walk into a bar. After they left, the Muslim Brotherhood won the
elections, banned alcohol, and closed the bar.
Joke #6: Three Arab
post-colonialists walk into a bar. But then they refuse to continue the joke
because it's based on White Man stereotypes.
Joke #7: So a Muslim, a
Christian & a Jew walk into a bar. According to new guidelines on religious
tolerance, they enjoy a mutually respectful time.
Joke #8: So three
post-structuralists walk into a bar. It's impossible to articulate what
happened to them individually in one coherent punchline.
Joke #9: So three Jordanians
walk into a bar. The king removes the Prime Minister & dissolves the
parliament. That's how all stories finish in Jordan.
Joke #10: So a minimalist
walks into a bar.
Joke #11: So three poets
walked into a bar. But they drove away in an automobile. Because modern poetry
doesn't have to rhyme.
Joke #12: The Pope, the
Ayatollah and the Grand Sheikh walk into a bar, but they can't agree on how
best to oppress the lady bartender.
Joke #13: So three Iranian
presidential candidates walk into a bar. We're waiting for the Supreme Leader
to issue the punchline.
Joke #14: So Žižek and
Chomsky walk into a bar. Chomsky said the punchline is empirically wrong. Žižek
used a Lacanian metaphor about Chomsky's mother.
Joke #15: So three EU
commissioners walk into a bar. The punchline is utterly incomprehensible but
available in 24 languages.
Joke #16: So three French
thinkers walk into a bar. But they refuse to continue the joke because the
format represents Anglo-Saxon cultural hegemony.
Joke #17: So a Maronite, a
Sunni, a Shiite, a Druze, a Greek Orthodox, a Greek Catholic, an Armen... Oh never
mind; there's not enough space for a Lebanese bar joke.
Thursday, October 9, 2014
Sunday, October 5, 2014
Saturday, October 4, 2014
Sunday, September 28, 2014
Friday, September 26, 2014
song "Roosevelt Room," Conor Oberst and The Mystic Valley Band (with lyrics)
Hey there, Son of Adam
Hey there, Daughter of Eve
Help me sing this tear gas riot song
To some fresh faced police
They won't even know what hit them
When they lift their Roman shades
And the people's song comes pouring in
On a brand new day
You who damn the river
You who changed our mountain's name
First we want denali back
Then we're taking on Washington's states
You give death as a consolation
You know only hate and rage
You paid a dowry for your child's rights
Now she's living like a slave
A prayer came down the wire
It was all in the enemy's code
You couldn't figure out what mercy meant
So you did like you were told
When they finally sent the doctors
Once the fireball went out
There was nothing left but the cockroaches
In a movie with no sound
What good, what good are you?
With your cynical flag and your Roosevelt room
What good, what good are you?
With your Cherokee trail and your unattended tomb
Go ask Hunter Thompson
Go ask Hemingway's ghost
It all catches up with you
Once you get just a little too old
Take a hard look in the mirror
It's a thing that you cannot see
Your shadows alone but the day is young
It just wasn't meant to be
There's no blankets for the winter
There's no oil in the lamp
And I'd like to write my congressman
But I can't afford the stamp
You want me to pay my taxes
So you can propagate your lie
While there's barefoot dudes down in New Orleans
Looking like they're gonna die
Yeah, you who quote the legends
You who poisoned all of my dreams
You pinned all of the medals on
All the boys from Omaha Beach
Hope you haven't got too lazy
I know you like your apple pie
Cause the working poor you've been pissing on
Are doing double shifts tonight
What good, what good are you?
With your cynical flag and your Roosevelt room
What good, what good are you?
With your Cherokee trail and your unattended tomb
Hey there, Daughter of Eve
Help me sing this tear gas riot song
To some fresh faced police
They won't even know what hit them
When they lift their Roman shades
And the people's song comes pouring in
On a brand new day
You who damn the river
You who changed our mountain's name
First we want denali back
Then we're taking on Washington's states
You give death as a consolation
You know only hate and rage
You paid a dowry for your child's rights
Now she's living like a slave
A prayer came down the wire
It was all in the enemy's code
You couldn't figure out what mercy meant
So you did like you were told
When they finally sent the doctors
Once the fireball went out
There was nothing left but the cockroaches
In a movie with no sound
What good, what good are you?
With your cynical flag and your Roosevelt room
What good, what good are you?
With your Cherokee trail and your unattended tomb
Go ask Hunter Thompson
Go ask Hemingway's ghost
It all catches up with you
Once you get just a little too old
Take a hard look in the mirror
It's a thing that you cannot see
Your shadows alone but the day is young
It just wasn't meant to be
There's no blankets for the winter
There's no oil in the lamp
And I'd like to write my congressman
But I can't afford the stamp
You want me to pay my taxes
So you can propagate your lie
While there's barefoot dudes down in New Orleans
Looking like they're gonna die
Yeah, you who quote the legends
You who poisoned all of my dreams
You pinned all of the medals on
All the boys from Omaha Beach
Hope you haven't got too lazy
I know you like your apple pie
Cause the working poor you've been pissing on
Are doing double shifts tonight
What good, what good are you?
With your cynical flag and your Roosevelt room
What good, what good are you?
With your Cherokee trail and your unattended tomb
Thursday, September 25, 2014
Eve of Destruction, Barry McGuire (original version, with lyrics)
The eastern world it is exploding
Violence flarin’, bullets loadin’
You're old enough to kill but not for votin’
You don’t believe in war but what’s that gun you're totin’?
And even the Jordan River has bodies floatin’
But you tell me
Over and over and over again my friend
Ah, you don’t believe
We're on the eve of destruction
Don’t you understand what I'm tryin’ to say
Can’t you feel the fears I'm feelin’ today?
If the button is pushed, there's no runnin’ away
There’ll be no one to save with the world in a grave
Take a look around you boy, it's bound to scare you boy
And you tell me
Over and over and over again my friend
Ah, you don't believe
We’re on the eve of destruction
Yeah my blood’s so mad feels like coagulating
I'm sitting here just contemplatin’
I can’t twist the truth; it knows no regulation
Handful of senators don't pass legislation
And marches alone can't bring integration
When human respect is disintegratin’
This whole crazy world is just too frustratin’
And you tell me
Over and over and over again my friend
Ah, you don’t believe
We're on the eve of destruction
Think of all the hate there is in Red China
Then take a look around to Selma, Alabama
You may leave here for four days in space
But when you return it's the same old place
The pounding of the drums, the pride and disgrace
You can bury your dead but don't leave a trace
Hate your next door neighbor, but don’t forget to say grace
And tell me
Over and over and over and over again my friend
You don’t believe
We're on the eve of destruction
No, no, you don’t believe
We’re on the eve of destruction
Violence flarin’, bullets loadin’
You're old enough to kill but not for votin’
You don’t believe in war but what’s that gun you're totin’?
And even the Jordan River has bodies floatin’
But you tell me
Over and over and over again my friend
Ah, you don’t believe
We're on the eve of destruction
Don’t you understand what I'm tryin’ to say
Can’t you feel the fears I'm feelin’ today?
If the button is pushed, there's no runnin’ away
There’ll be no one to save with the world in a grave
Take a look around you boy, it's bound to scare you boy
And you tell me
Over and over and over again my friend
Ah, you don't believe
We’re on the eve of destruction
Yeah my blood’s so mad feels like coagulating
I'm sitting here just contemplatin’
I can’t twist the truth; it knows no regulation
Handful of senators don't pass legislation
And marches alone can't bring integration
When human respect is disintegratin’
This whole crazy world is just too frustratin’
And you tell me
Over and over and over again my friend
Ah, you don’t believe
We're on the eve of destruction
Think of all the hate there is in Red China
Then take a look around to Selma, Alabama
You may leave here for four days in space
But when you return it's the same old place
The pounding of the drums, the pride and disgrace
You can bury your dead but don't leave a trace
Hate your next door neighbor, but don’t forget to say grace
And tell me
Over and over and over and over again my friend
You don’t believe
We're on the eve of destruction
No, no, you don’t believe
We’re on the eve of destruction
Saturday, September 20, 2014
Thursday, August 28, 2014
Wednesday, August 27, 2014
Saturday, August 16, 2014
Leaving Democracy to the Experts
http://inthesetimes.com/article/17048/freedom_and_democracy_to_the_experts
TISA’s secret trade
negotiations quietly restructure our global economy.
BY SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK
On June 19, the second
anniversary of Julian Assange’s confinement to the Ecuadorian embassy in
London, WikiLeaks
rendered public the secret draft text for the Trade in Services
Agreement (TISA) Financial Services Annex. The document was classified not only
during TISA negotiations, but for five years after it enters into force.
While the TISA negotiations
have not been censored outright, they have been barely mentioned in the media—
a marginalization and secrecy that are in stark contrast with the
world-historical importance of the TISA agreement. TISA would effectively serve
as a kind of legal backbone for the restructuring of the world market, binding
future governments regardless of who wins elections and what the courts say. It
would impose a restrictive framework on public services, making it more
difficult both to develop new ones and protect existing ones.
Is this discrepancy between
politico-economic importance and secrecy really surprising? Is it not rather a
sad but precise indication of where we in Western liberal-democratic countries
stand with regard to democracy? A century and half ago, in Das Kapital,
Karl Marx characterized
the market exchange between worker and capitalist as “a very Eden of
the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and
Bentham.”
For Marx, the ironic
addition of Jeremy Bentham, the philosopher of egotist utilitarianism, provides
the key to what freedom and equality effectively mean in capitalist society. To
quote The
Communist Manifesto: “By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois
conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying.” And by equality
is meant the legal formal equality of buyer and seller, even if one of them is
forced to sell his labor under any conditions, like today’s precarious workers.
Today, freedom means the free flow of capital, as well as of the financial and
personal data (both flows guaranteed by TISA). But what about democracy?
The main culprits of the
2008 financial meltdown now impose themselves as experts who can lead us on the
painful path of financial recovery, and whose advice should therefore overcome
parliamentary politics. Or, as former Italian prime minister and EU technocrat Mario
Monti put it: “If governments let themselves be fully bound by the
decisions of their parliaments without protecting their own freedom to act, a
breakup of Europe would be a more probable outcome than deeper integration.”
Which, then, is the higher
force whose authority can suspend the decisions of the democratically elected
representatives of the people? As early as 1998, the answer was provided by
Hans Tietmeyer, then the governor of the Deutsches Bundesbank, who held up
“the permanent plebiscite of global markets” as superior to the “plebiscite of
the ballot box.” Note the democratic rhetoric of this obscene statement: Global
markets are more democratic than parliamentary elections, since the process of
voting goes on in them permanently, rather than every four years, and globally,
rather than within the limits of a nation-state. The underlying idea: When
separated from this higher control of markets (and experts),
parliamentary-democratic decisions are “irresponsible.”
This, then, is where we
stand with regard to democracy. The TISA agreements are a perfect example. The
key decisions concerning our economy are negotiated in secrecy, out of our
sight, with no public debate. And such decisions set the coordinates for the
unencumbered rule of capital. This severely limits the space for the decisions
of democratically elected political representatives, leaving the political
process to deal predominantly with issues toward which capital is indifferent,
like the outcome of cultural wars.
Consequently, the release of
the TISA draft marks a new stage in the WikiLeaks strategy. Until now, its
activity has focused on making public how our lives are monitored and regulated
by intelligence agencies of the state—the standard liberal concern of
individuals threatened by oppressive state apparatuses. Now, another
controlling force appears—capital—that threatens our freedom in a much more
twisted way, perverting our very sense of freedom.
Since our society elevates
free choice into a supreme value, social control and domination can no longer
appear to be infringing on subject’s freedom. Un-freedom, then, is cloaked in
the guise of its opposite: When we are deprived of universal healthcare, we are
told that we are given a new freedom to choose our healthcare provider; when we
no longer can rely on longterm employment and are compelled to search for a new
precarious work every couple of years, we are told that we are given the
opportunity to reinvent ourselves and discover new unexpected creative
potentials that lurked in our personality; when we have to pay for the
education of our children, we are told that we become “entrepreneurs of the
self,” free to invest in our own—and our children’s—personal growth and
fulfillment.
Constantly bombarded by
these imposed “free choices,” forced to make decisions for which we are mostly
not even properly qualified or informed, our “freedom of choice” increasingly
becomes a burden that deprives us of true freedom of choice—the choice (or
rather, decision) to move beyond market-freedom into the freedom of
collectively organizing and regulating the process of production and exchange.
It is more and more becoming clear that only in this way will humanity be able
to cope with antagonisms that threaten its very survival (ecology, biogenetics,
“intellectual property,” the rise of the new class of those excluded from
public life).
Perhaps this paradox throws
a new light on our obsession with the ongoing events in Ukraine—events
extensively covered by the media, in clear contrast to the predominant silence
on TISA. What fascinates us in the West is not the fact that people in Kiev
stood up for the mirage of the European way of life, but that they—seemingly,
at least—simply stood up and tried to take their fate into their own hands.
They acted as a political agent enforcing a radical change—something that, as
the TISA negotiations demonstrate, we in the West no longer have the choice to
do
Slavoj Žižek, a Slovenian
philosopher and psychoanalyst, is a senior researcher at the Institute for
Advanced Study in the Humanities, in Essen, Germany. He has also been a
visiting professor at more than 10 universities around the world. Žižek is the
author of many other books, including Living in the End Times, First
As Tragedy, Then As Farce, The Fragile Absolute, and Did
Somebody Say Totalitarianism? He lives in London.
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
Sunday, August 10, 2014
Saturday, August 9, 2014
Thursday, August 7, 2014
Monday, August 4, 2014
Sunday, August 3, 2014
Friday, August 1, 2014
Thursday, July 31, 2014
Monday, July 14, 2014
Tuesday, July 8, 2014
"Reluctance," by Robert Frost
Reluctance
Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended.
The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
When others are sleeping.
And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last lone aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question ‘Whither?’
Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?
— Robert Frost
Thursday, June 26, 2014
Slavoj Žižek: Only a radicalised left can save Europe
Austerity is not “too
radical”, as some leftist critics claim, but, on the contrary, too superficial,
an act of avoiding the true roots of the crisis, says Slavoj Žižek.
After the electoral triumph
of the anti-immigrant eurosceptic parties in countries like France and UK, many
liberals expressed their shock and worry. However, there was something of a
feigned naivety in their surprise and indignation, in their wonder at how the
victory of the populist right was possible. What one should wonder about is why
it took the anti-immigrant right so long to make a decisive breakthrough.
When Jean-Marie Le Pen made
a tasteless gas-chamber joke about a French Jewish pop singer – “we’ll do an
oven load next time” (Le Pen denies this
was intended to be anti-Semitic) – his daughter Marine Le Pen publicly
criticised him, thereby promoting her image as her father’s human face. It is
irrelevant if this family conflict is staged or real – the oscillation between
the two faces, the brutal one and the civilised one, is what defines today’s
populist right. Beneath the civilised public face, there lurks its obscene,
brutal underside, and the difference concerns only the degree to which this
underside is openly admitted. Even if this obscene underside remains totally
out of sight, even if it there are no slips in which it breaks through, it is
there as a silent presupposition, as an invisible point of reference. Without
her father’s spectre, Marine Le Pen doesn’t exist.
There is no surprise in Le
Pen’s message: the usual anti-elitist working class patriotism which targets
trans-national financial powers and the alienated Bruxelles bureaucracy. And,
effectively, Le Pen forms a clear contrast to the sterile European technocrats:
addressing the worries of ordinary people, she brings passion back to politics.
Even some disoriented leftists succumbed to the temptation to defend her: she rejects
the non-elected Bruxelles financial technocrats who brutally enforce the
interest of the international financial capital, prohibiting individual states
prioritising the welfare of their own population; she thus advocates a politics
that would be in contact with worries and cares of the ordinary working people
– her party’s fascist outbursts are a thing of the past. . . What unites Le Pen
and the European leftists who sympathise with her is their shared rejection of
a strong Europe, and the return to the full sovereignty of nation states.
The problem with this shared
rejection is that, as they say in a joke, Le Pen is not looking for the causes
of the distresses in the dark corner where they really are, but under the
light, because one sees better there. It begins with the right premise: the
failure of the austerity politics practised by the Bruxelles experts. When the
Romanian leftist writer Panait Istrati visited Soviet Union in the 1930s, the
time of the big purges and show trials, a Soviet apologist tried to convince
him of the need for violence against enemies, evoking the proverb “You can’t
make an omelette without breaking eggs”, to which Istrati tersely replied: “All
right. I can see the broken eggs. Where’s this omelette of yours?” We should
say the same about the austerity measures imposed by the Bruxelles technocrats:
“OK, you are breaking our eggs all around Europe, but where’s the omelette you
are promising us?”
The least one can say is
that the economic crisis of 2008 offers large proofs of how is it not the
people but these experts themselves who, in their large majority, don’t know
what they are doing. In western Europe, we are effectively witnessing a growing
inability of the ruling elite – they know less and less how to rule. Look at
how Europe is dealing with the Greek crisis: putting pressure on Greece to
repay debts, but at the same time ruining its economy through imposed austerity
measures and thereby making it sure the Greek debt will never be repaid. At the
end of December 2012, the IMF itself released research showing that the
economic damage from aggressive austerity measures may be as much as three
times larger than previously assumed, thereby cancelling its own advice on
austerity in the eurozone crisis. Now, the IMF admits that forcing Greece and
other debt-burdened countries to reduce their deficits too quickly would be
counterproductive… now, after hundreds of thousands of job have been lost
because of such “miscalculations”.
It is as if the providers
and caretakers of debt accuse the indebted countries of not feeling enough
guilt – they are accused of feeling innocent. Recall the ongoing EU pressure on
Greece to implement austerity measures – this pressure fits perfectly what
psychoanalysis calls superego. Superego is not an ethical agency proper, but a
sadistic agent which bombards the subject with impossible demands, obscenely
enjoying the subject’s failure to comply with them; the paradox of the superego
is that, as Freud saw it clearly, the more we obey its demands, the more we
feel guilty. Imagine a vicious teacher who gives his pupils impossible tasks,
and then sadistically jeers when he sees their anxiety and panic. This is what
is so terribly wrong with the EU’s demands and commands: they don’t even give a
chance to Greece, because Greek failure is part of the game.
Therein resides the true
message of the “irrational” popular protests all around Europe: the protesters
know very well what they don’t know, they don’t pretend to have fast and easy
answers, but what their instinct is telling them is nonetheless true – that
those in power also don’t know it. In Europe today, the blind are leading the
blind. Austerity politics is not really science, not even in a minimal sense;
it is much closer to a contemporary form of superstition – a kind of gut
reaction to an impenetrable complex situation, a blind common sense reaction of
“things went wrong, we are somehow guilty, we have to pay the price and
suffers, so let’s do something that hurts and spend less…”. Austerity is not
“too radical”, as some leftist critics claim, but, on the contrary, too
superficial, an act of avoiding the true roots of the crisis.
However, can the idea of a
united Europe be reduced to the reign of the Bruxelles technocrats? The proof
that this is not the case is that the US and Israel, two exemplary nation
states obsessed with their sovereignty, at some deep and often obfuscated level
perceive European Union as the enemy. This perception, kept under
control in the public political discourse, explodes in its underground obscene
double, the extreme right Christian fundamentalist political vision with its
obsessive fear of the New World Order (Obama is in secret collusion with the
United Nations, international forces will intervene in the US and put in
concentration camps all true American patriots – a couple of years ago, there
were already rumors that Latino American troupes are already in the Midwest
planes, building concentration camps. . .). This vision is deployed in
hard-line Christian fundamentalism, exemplarily in the works of Tim LaHaye et
consortes – the title of one of LaHaye’s novels points in this direction: The
Europa Conspiracy. The true enemy of the US are not Muslim terrorists,
they are merely puppets secretly manipulated by the European secularists, the
true forces of the anti-Christ who want to weaken the US and establish the New
World Order under the domination of the United Nations… In a way, they are
right in this perception: Europe is not just another geopolitical power block,
but a global vision which is ultimately incompatible with nation-states, a
vision of a transnational order that guarantees certain rights (welfare, freedom,
etc). This dimension of the EU provides the key to the so-called European
“weakness”: there is a surprising correlation between European unification and
its loss of global military-political power.
So what is wrong with the
Bruxelles technocrats? Not only their measures, their false expertise, but even
more their modus operandi. The basic mode of politics today is a
depoliticised expert administration and coordination of interests. The only way
to introduce passion into this field, to actively mobilise people, is through
fear: fear of immigrants, fear of crime, fear of godless sexual depravity, fear
of the excessive state itself, with its burden of high taxation, fear of
ecological catastrophe, fear of harassment (Political Correctness is the exemplary
liberal form of the politics of fear). Progressive liberals are, of course,
horrified by populist racism; however, a closer look soon reveals how their
multicultural tolerance and respect for (ethnic, religious, sexual) others
shares a basic premise with anti-immigrants: the fear of others clearly
discernible in the liberals’ obsession with harassment. The other is fine, but
only insofar as his presence is not intrusive, insofar as this other is not
really other. . .
No wonder the topic of
“toxic subjects” is gaining ground recently. While this notion originates from
popular psychology that warns us against the emotional vampires who prey on us
out there, this topic is expanding much further than immediate interpersonal
relations: the predicate “toxic” covers a series properties which belong to
totally different levels (natural, cultural, psychological, political). A
“toxic subject” can be an immigrant with a deadly disease who should be
quarantined; a terrorist whose deadly plans should be prevented and who belongs
to Guantanamo, the empty zone exempted from the rule of law; a fundamentalist
ideologue who should be silenced because he is spreading hatred; a parent,
teacher or priest who abuses and corrupts children. What is toxic is ultimately
the foreign neighbour as such, so that the ultimate aim of all rules governing
interpersonal relations is to quarantine or at least neutralise and contain
this toxic dimension.
On today’s market, we find a
whole series of products deprived of their malignant property: coffee without
caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol. . . And the list goes on:
what about virtual sex as sex without sex, the Colin Powell doctrine of warfare
with no casualties (on our side, of course) as warfare without warfare, the
contemporary redefinition of politics as the art of expert administration as
politics without politics, up to today’s tolerant liberal multiculturalism as
an experience of the other deprived of its otherness – the decaffeinated other
who dances fascinating dances and has an ecologically sound holistic approach
to reality, while features like wife beating remain out of sight. . .
Is this detoxification of
the immigrant Other not the main point of Nigel Farage’s Ukip programme? Farage
repeatedly emphasises that he is not against the presence of foreign workers in
the UK, that he highly appreciates the hard-working Poles and their
contribution to the British economy. When he was asked on LBC about why he said
that people wouldn't like to have Romanians living in the appartment next to
their own, the contrast was immediately drawn with German neighbours – what
worried him, he said, were people with criminal records being allowed to enter
the UK. This is the stance of the “civilised” anti-immigrant right: the
politics of the detoxified neighbour – good Germans versus bad Romanians or
Roma. This vision of the detoxification of the Neighbour presents a clear
passage from direct barbarism to barbarism with a human face. In what
conditions does it arise?
Walter Benjamin’s old thesis
that behind every rise of fascism there is a failed revolution not only still
holds today, but is perhaps more pertinent than ever. Rightist liberals like to
point out similarities between left and right “extremisms”: Hitler’s terror and
camps imitated Bolshevik terror, the Leninist party is today alive in al-Qaeda
– does this not rather indicate how fascism replaces (takes the place of) a
failed leftist revolution? Its rise is the left’s failure, but simultaneously a
proof that there was a revolutionary potential, a dissatisfaction which the
left was not able to mobilise. And does the same not hold for today’s so-called
“islamo-fascism”? Is the rise of radical Islamism not correlative to the
disappearance of the secular left in Muslim countries? Today, when Afghanistan
is portrayed as the utmost Islamic fundamentalist country, who still remembers
that, 30 years ago, it was a country with strong secular tradition, up to a
powerful Communist party which took power there independently of the Soviet Union?
As Thomas Frank has shown, the same goes for Kansas, the homegrown US version
of Afghanistan: the very state which was till the 1970s the bedrock of radical
leftist populism, is today the bedrock of Christian fundamentalism. And the
same goes for Europe: the failure of the leftist alternative to global
capitalism gives birth to anti-immigrant populism.
Even in the case of clearly
fundamentalist movements, one should be careful not to miss the social
component. The Taliban are regularly presented as a fundamentalist Islamist
group enforcing its rule with terror – however, when, in the spring of 2009,
they took over the Swat Valley in Pakistan, New York Times reported
that they engineered “a class revolt that exploits profound fissures between a
small group of wealthy landlords and their landless tenants”. If, by taking
advantage of the farmers’ plight, the Taliban are “raising alarm about the
risks to Pakistan, which remains largely feudal”, what stops liberal democrats
in Pakistan as well as the US similarly “taking advantage” of this plight and
trying to help the landless farmers? The sad implication of this fact is that
the feudal forces in Pakistan are the “natural ally” of the liberal democracy.
. . And, mutatis mutandis, the same goes for Farage and Le Pen: their rise
is the obverse of the demise of the radical left.
Thursday, June 19, 2014
How WikiLeaks opened our eyes to the illusion of freedom
by Slavoj Žižek
Julian Assange, who went
into exile in the Ecuadorean embassy two years ago, has blown apart the myth of
western liberty
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/19/hypocrisy-freedom-julian-assange-wikileaks
We remember anniversaries
that mark the important events of our era: September 11 (not only the 2001 Twin
Towers attack, but also the 1973 military coup against Allende in Chile),
D-day, etc. Maybe another date should be added to this list: 19 June.
Most of us like to take a
stroll during the day to get a breath of fresh air. There must be a good reason
for those who cannot do it – maybe they have a job that prevents it (miners,
submariners), or a strange illness that makes exposure to sunlight a deadly
danger. Even prisoners get their daily hour's walk in fresh air.
Today, 19 June, marks two
years since Julian Assange was deprived of this right: he is permanently
confined to the apartment that houses the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Were he
to step out of the apartment, he would be arrested immediately. What did
Assange do to deserve this? In a way, one can understand the authorities:
Assange and his whistleblowing colleagues are often accused of being traitors,
but they are something much worse (in the eyes of the authorities).
Assange designated himself a
"spy for the people". "Spying for the people" is not a
simple betrayal (which would instead mean acting as a double agent, selling our
secrets to the enemy); it is something much more radical. It undermines the
very principle of spying, the principle of secrecy, since its goal is to make
secrets public. People who help WikiLeaks are no longer whistleblowers who
denounce the illegal practices of private companies (banks, and tobacco and oil
companies) to the public authorities; they denounce to the wider public these
public authorities themselves.
We didn't really learn
anything from WikiLeaks we didn't already presume to be true – but it is one
thing to know it in general and another to get concrete data. It is a little
bit like knowing that one's sexual partner is playing around. One can accept
the abstract knowledge of it, but pain arises when one learns the steamy
details, when one gets pictures of what they were doing.
When confronted with such
facts, should every decent US citizen not feel deeply ashamed? Until now, the
attitude of the average citizen was hypocritical disavowal: we preferred to
ignore the dirty job done by secret agencies. From now on, we can't pretend we
don't know.
It is not enough to see
WikiLeaks as an anti-American phenomenon. States such as China and Russia are
much more oppressive than the US. Just imagine what would have happened to
someone like Chelsea Manning in a Chinese court. In all probability, there
would be no public trial; she would just disappear.
The US doesn't treat
prisoners as brutally – because of its technological priority, it simply does
not need the openly brutal approach (which it is more than ready to apply when
needed). But this is why the US is an even more dangerous threat to our freedom
than China: its measures of control are not perceived as such, while Chinese
brutality is openly displayed.
In a country such as China
the limitations of freedom are clear to everyone, with no illusions about it.
In the US, however, formal freedoms are guaranteed, so that most individuals
experience their lives as free and are not even aware of the extent to which they
are controlled by state mechanisms. Whistleblowers do something much more
important than stating the obvious by way of denouncing the openly oppressive
regimes: they render public the unfreedom that underlies the very situation in
which we experience ourselves as free.
Back in May 2002, it was
reported that scientists at New York University had attached a computer chip
able to transmit elementary signals directly to a rat's brain – enabling
scientists to control the rat's movements by means of a steering mechanism, as
used in a remote-controlled toy car. For the first time, the free will of a
living animal was taken over by an external machine.
How did the unfortunate rat
experience its movements, which were effectively decided from outside? Was it
totally unaware that its movements were being steered? Maybe therein lies the
difference between Chinese citizens and us, free citizens of western, liberal
countries: the Chinese human rats are at least aware they are controlled, while
we are the stupid rats strolling around unaware of how our movements are
monitored.
Is WikiLeaks pursuing an
impossible dream? Definitely not, and the proof is that the world has already
changed since its revelations.
Not only have we learned a
lot about the illegal activities of the US and other great powers. Not only
have the WikiLeaks revelations put secret services on the defensive and set in
motion legislative acts to better control them. WikiLeaks has achieved much
more: millions of ordinary people have become aware of the society in which
they live. Something that until now we silently tolerated as unproblematic is
rendered problematic.
This is why Assange has been
accused of causing so much harm. Yet there is no violence in what WikiLeaks is
doing. We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the character reaches a
precipice but goes on running, ignoring the fact that there is no ground
underfoot; they start to fall only when they look down and notice the abyss.
What WikiLeaks is doing is just reminding those in power to look down.
The reaction of all too many
people, brainwashed by the media, to WikiLeaks' revelations could best be
summed up by the memorable lines of the final song from Altman's film Nashville:
"You may say I ain't free but it don't worry me." WikiLeaks does make
us worry. And, unfortunately, many people don't like that.
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