We used to hope that
politicians wouldn't be held back from pursuing their personal visions by
unnecessary bureaucracy and shadowy forces. Now we pray that they are
Slavoj Žižek
Addressing members of the
Russian parliament, Vladimir Putin said last week: “The missile's test launch
and ground trials make it possible to create a brand new weapon, a strategic
nuclear missile powered by a nuclear engine. The range is unlimited. It can
manoeuvre for an unlimited period of time.
“No one in the world has
anything similar,” he said to applause and concluded: “Russia still has the
greatest nuclear potential in the world, but nobody listened to us. Listen to
us now.”
Yes, we should listen to these
words, but we should listen to them as to the words of a madman joining the
duet of two other madmen.
Remember how, a little while
ago, Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump competed about buttons to trigger nuclear
missiles that they have at their disposal, with Trump claiming his button is
bigger than Kim’s? Now we got Putin joining this obscene competition – which
is, we should never forget it, a competition about who can destroy us all more
quickly and efficiently – with the claim that his is the biggest in turn.
Lately our media reports on
the more and more ridiculous exchange of insults between Kim and Trump. The
irony of the situation is that, when we get (what appears to be) two immature
men hurling insults at each other, our only hope is that there is some
anonymous and invisible institutional constraint preventing their rage from
exploding into all-out war. Usually, of course, we tend to complain that in
today’s alienated and bureaucratised politics, institutional pressures and
constraints prevent politicians from expressing their personal visions – now we
hope such constraints will prevent the expression of all too crazy personal
visions.
But does the danger really
reside in personal pathologies? Each side can, of course, claim that it wants
only peace and is only reacting to the threat posed by others – true, but what
this means is that the madness is in the whole system itself, in the vicious
cycle we are caught in once we participate in the system.
Although the differences
between North Korea and the US are obvious, one should nonetheless insist that
they both cling to the extreme version of state sovereignty (“North Korea
first!” versus “America first!”), plus that the obvious madness of North Korea
(a small country ready to risk it all and bomb the US) has its counterpart in
the US still pretending to play the role of the global policeman, a single
state assuming the right to decide which other state should be allowed to
possess nuclear weapons.
This global madness becomes
visible the moment we ask a simple question: how do the protagonists of nuclear
threats (Kim, Trump, Putin) imagine pressing the button? Are they not aware of
the almost 100 per cent certainty that their own country will also be destroyed
by retaliatory strikes? Well, they are aware and not aware at the same time:
although they know they will also perish, they talk as if they somehow stand
out of the danger and can strike at the enemy from a safe place.
This schizophrenic position
combines the two axioms of nuclear warfare. If the basic underlying axiom of
the Cold War was MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), today this axiom is
combined with the opposite one, that of NUTS (Nuclear Utilization Target
Selection), i.e. the idea that, by means of a surgical strike, one can destroy
the enemy's nuclear capacities while the anti-missile shield is protecting us
from a counterstrike. The very fact that two directly contradictory strategies
are mobilised simultaneously by the same superpower bears witness to the
fantastical character of this entire reasoning.
In December 2016, this
inconsistency reached an almost unimaginable ridiculous peak: both Trump and
Putin emphasised the chance for new more friendly relations between Russia and
the US, and simultaneously asserted their full commitment to the arms race – as
if peace among the superpowers can only be provided by a new Cold War. Alain
Badiou wrote that the contours of the future war are already drawn: “The United
States and their Western-Japanese clique on the one side, China and Russia on
the other side, atomic arms everywhere. We cannot but recall Lenin’s statement:
‘Either revolution will prevent the war or the war will trigger revolution.’”
There is no way to avoid the
conclusion that a radical social change – a revolution – is needed to civilise
our civilisations. We cannot afford the hope that a new war will lead to a new
revolution: a new war would much more probably mean the end of civilisation as
we know it, with the survivors (of any) organized in small authoritarian
groups. North Korea is not a crazy exception in a sane world but a pure
expression of the madness that drives our world.
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