Žižek on Private & Public Use of Reason

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Audio: Žižek and Badiou at Jack Tilton Gallery

From: http://www.imposemagazine.com/bytes/audio-badiou-zizek-jack-tilton-gallery

Žižek on Haiti and Jean-Bertrand Aristide

Find the full article online at:

http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2008/08/haiti-aristide-lavalas

[....]

Denounced by Talleyrand as "a horrible spectacle for all white nations", the "mere existence of an independent Haiti" was itself an intolerable threat to the slave-owning status quo. Haiti thus had to be made an exemplary case of economic failure, to dissuade other countries from taking the same path. The price - the literal price - for the "premature" independence was truly extortionate: after two decades of embargo, France, the old colonial master, established trade and diplomatic relations only in 1825, after forcing the Haitian government to pay 150 million francs as "compensation" for the loss of its slaves. This sum, roughly equal to the French annual budget at the time, was later reduced to 90 million, but it continued to be a heavy drain on Haitian resources: at the end of the 19th century, Haiti's payments to France consumed roughly 80 per cent of the national budget, and the last instalment was only paid in 1947. When, in 2003, in anticipation of the bicentenary of national independence, the Lavalas president Jean-Baptiste Aristide demanded that France return this extorted money, his claim was flatly rejected by a French commission (led, ironically, by Régis Debray). At a time when some US liberals ponder the possibility of reimbursing black Americans for slavery, Haiti's demand to be reimbursed for the tremendous sum the former slaves had to pay to have their freedom recognised has been largely ignored by liberal opinion, even if the extortion here was double: the slaves were first exploited, and then had to pay for the recognition of their hard-won freedom.

The story goes on today. The Lavalas movement has won every free presidential election since 1990, but it has twice been the victim of US-sponsored military coups. Lavalas is a unique combination: a political agent which won state power through free elections, but which all the way through maintained its roots in organs of local popular democracy, of people's direct self-organisation. Although the "free press" dominated by its enemies was never obstructed, although violent protests that threatened the stability of the legal government were fully tolerated, the Lavalas government was routinely demonised in the international press as exceptionally violent and corrupt. The goal of the US and its allies France and Canada was to impose on Haiti a "normal" democracy - a democracy which would not touch the economic power of the narrow elite; they were well aware that, if it is to function in this way, democracy has to cut its links with direct popular self-organisation.

It is interesting to note that this US-French co-operation took place soon after the public discord about the 2003 attack on Iraq, and was quite appropriately celebrated as the reaffirmation of their basic alliance that underpins the occasional conflicts. Even Brazil's Lula condoned the 2004 overthrow of Aristide. An unholy alliance was thus put together to discredit the Lavalas government as a form of mob rule that threatened human rights, and President Aristide as a power-mad fundamentalist dictator - an alliance ranging from ex-military death squads and US-sponsored "democratic fronts" to humanitarian NGOs and even some "radical left" organisations which, financed by the US, enthusiastically denounced Aristide's "capitulation" to the IMF. Aristide himself provided a perspicuous characterisation of this overlapping between radical left and liberal right: "Somewhere, somehow, there's a little secret satisfaction, perhaps an unconscious satisfaction, in saying things that powerful white people want you to say."

The Lavalas struggle is exemplary of a principled heroism that confronts the limitations of what can be done today. Lavalas activists didn't withdraw into the interstices of state power and "resist" from a safe distance, they heroically assumed state power, well aware that they were taking power in the most unfavourable circumstances, when all the trends of capitalist "modernisation" and "structural readjustment", but also of the postmodern left, were against them. Constrained by the measures imposed by the US and International Monetary Fund, which were destined to enact "necessary structural readjustments", Aristide pursued a politics of small and precise pragmatic measures (building schools and hospitals, creating infrastructure, raising minimum wages) while encouraging the active political mobilisation of the people in direct confrontation with their most immediate foes - the army and its paramilitary auxiliaries.

The single most controversial thing about Aristide, the thing that earned him comparisons with Sendero Luminoso and Pol Pot, was his pointed refusal to condemn measures taken by the people to defend themselves against military or paramilitary assault, an assault that had decimated the popular movement for decades. On a couple of occasions back in 1991, Aristide appeared to condone recourse to the most notorious of these measures, known locally as "Père Lebrun", a variant of the practice of "necklacing" adopted by anti-apartheid partisans in South Africa - killing a police assassin or an informer with a burning tyre. In a speech on 4 August 1991, he advised an enthusiastic crowd to remember "when to use [Père Lebrun], and where to use it", while reminding them that "you may never use it again in a state where law prevails".

Later, liberal critics sought to draw a parallel between the so-called chimères, ie, members of Lavalas self-defence groups, and the Tontons Macoutes, the notoriously murderous gangs of the Duvalier dictatorship. The fact that there is no numerical basis for comparison of levels of political violence under Aristide and under Duvalier is not allowed to get in the way of the essential political point. Asked about these chimères, Aristide points out that "the very word says it all.Chimères are people who are impoverished, who live in a state of profound insecurity and chronic unemployment. They are the victims of structural injustice, of systematic social violence [. . .] It's not surprising that they should confront those who have always benefited from this same social violence."

Arguably, the very rare acts of popular self- defence committed by Lavalas partisans are examples of what Walter Benjamin called "divine violence": they should be located "beyond good and evil", in a kind of politico-religious suspension of the ethical. Although we are dealing with what can only appear as "immoral" acts of killing, one has no political right to condemn them, because they are a response to years, centuries even, of systematic state and economic violence and exploitation.

As Aristide himself puts it: "It is better to be wrong with the people than to be right against the people." Despite some all-too-obvious mistakes, the Lavalas regime was in effect one of the figures of how "dictatorship of the proletariat" might look today: while pragmatically engaging in some externally imposed compromises, it always remained faithful to its "base", to the crowd of ordinary dispossessed people, speaking on their behalf, not "representing" them but directly relying on their local self-organisations. Although respecting the democratic rules, Lavalas made it clear that the electoral struggle is not where things are decided: what is much more crucial is the effort to supplement democracy with the direct political self-organisation of the oppressed. Or, to put it in our "postmodern" terms: the struggle between Lavalas and the capitalist-military elite in Haiti is a case of genuine antagonism, an antagonism which cannot be contained within the frame of parliamentary-democratic "agonistic pluralism".

[....]

Until Lambs Become Lions

World in Revolt: The Global Backlash Against Budget Cuts

by: Anthony DiMaggio, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

http://www.truth-out.org/world-revolt-the-global-backlash-against-budget-cuts63465

Americans should take a page from activists throughout the rest of the world if they're seriously interested in resisting the massive budget cuts afflicting this country. Effective social change only comes about through mass action - a lesson that has emerged after years of grassroots uprisings in the U.S. and throughout the world. Consider some of the evidence from various cases below.

The French: Don't Call Them Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys

Over a million French workers turned out in the streets this month to protest proposed government budget cutbacks by President Nicolas Sarkozy. The rallies were part of a 24-hour strike that shut down flights and railway services, in addition to closing schools throughout the country. Government plans to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62 motivated these protests, even though France already has one of the lower retirement rates throughout Europe. The opposition is also driven by resistance to plans to fire 7,000 teachers, the proposed lengthening of pay periods for public employees, and plans to cut pension benefits.

The mass turnout of a million people in France is the functional equivalent (after controlling for population differences) of seeing more than 4.5 million organize throughout the United States to protest state budget cuts and mass layoffs. Such a movement has not been seen among public sector workers, despite the fact that this segment of the economy traditionally benefits from the strongest worker organization through its continued reliance on mass unionization.

This is not the first protest in France either in recent years. Last June, nearly 1 million turned out nationwide to protest proposed budget cuts - a sign of a sustained national activist campaign that will not relent until the government backs down on its austerity measures. The case of France demonstrates that necessity doesn't have to be the mother of invention. Well-off people can organize to protect hard fought wage gains and other benefits, and we don't need to wait until we're on the verge of destitution (as Americans are doing) to be engaged in activism and protest. Of course, France's strong history of labor unionism has helped spur sustained rounds of resistance to budget cuts, whereas the American public has become increasingly divorced from working class unionism in recent decades (unions represent less than 15 percent of all American workers today).

Sweatshops are NOT Inevitable: The Case of Bangladesh

The people of Bangladesh most strikingly put to shame the elitist apathy that is sapping the collective will of the American people. With radically less, the poor people of Bangladesh have achieved so much more than Americans (at least in the last two years) in the areas of popular activism and protesting economic injustice. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party is leading a mass movement to protest the terrible working conditions and pay levels in sweatshops throughout the country. Demonstrations that took place this summer just outside of the country's capital of Dhaka protested the refusal of the national government to improve power and gas supplies, and the unwillingness to ease the suffering of those who are enduring increased food prices. 50,000 garment workers came together to demand the equivalent of $70 per month, a major increase from the estimated $14-23 per month they were receiving. The lower rates of pay they receive are below the national poverty line, and contribute to great unrest and instability among Bangladesh's workers.

The demand for increased pay represents a major challenge to the unimpeded profits of American companies (operating in country) such as Wal-Mart, Levi Strauss, and H&M, which have been happy to subjugate an entire nation to wage slavery. The protests were highly effective in drawing national and international attention to the plight of Bangladesh's working poor. At least 76 factories were forcibly shut down, in retaliation against the government's reneging on a promise to increase wages for the country's 2.5 million garment workers. The case of Bangladesh should be inspiring for all those throughout the world dealing with austerity measures, as it shows that even in the direst of circumstances, there is no such thing as "inevitability" of low pay. All workers retain the right to a living wage, and many are willing to fight for it. Of course, it also helps to have a political party (as those in Bangladesh do) which will fight for popular change.

Protests on the Forgotten Continent: Increasing Desperation in Mozambique and South Africa

Many Americans would be hard pressed to demonstrate any sort of knowledge of African politics. The continent is traditionally seen as outside of citizens' interests, as attention to global politics is a low priority for the American public (outside of following events in countries the U.S. is bombing). Still, increasing desperation throughout Africa has been accompanied by serious action on the part of the disadvantaged and desperate. Violent protests and riots in Mozambique this month were the result of increasing global food prices. Food costs increased dramatically in light of deteriorating global environmental conditions - most specifically the severe droughts in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Northern and Western Africa, which have exacted a terrible toll on global crop yields.

Prices for bread, electricity, and water have gone up by nearly a third in Mozambique, and were accompanied by looting throughout the nation's capital of Maputo. Public anger was further stoked by the government's refusal to intervene to help the poor deal with major increases in food and energy costs.

Strikes in South Africa are driven by public sector workers, who are demanding better benefits from the government. Strikes throughout the country this summer went on for weeks, and were accompanied by the forced closing of schools and the short-staffing of hospitals, as more than a million public servants refused to return to work until their demands for a 8.6 percent pay raise were met. Union activism succeeded in forcing the South African government to the negotiation table, in an effort to end the nation-paralyzing strikes.

Europe in Decline: Protesting the Decline of Living Standards in the U.K., Spain, and Greece

While Americans are overwhelmingly sitting back and accepting the "necessity" of massive budget cuts and mass layoffs that will inevitably make the economic crisis worse, union activists in Europe are taking the initiative in rejecting comparable efforts in their countries. This June saw the emergence of a national rebellion in Spain, where a day-long strike protested a 5 percent pay cut across the board directed against public sector teachers, firefighters, hospital workers, and other local government positions. The cuts were undertaken in the name of balancing budgets and protecting the prosperity of future children, ironically while assaulting the living standards of the parents and children of today. The rebellion in Spain was truly massive, with an estimated 75 to 80 percent of public workers - or more than 2.5 million people - taking part.

The Spanish government wants further cuts, with salaries frozen in 2011 and future pension funding that will not be adjusted for inflation. Spain's workers are sending the message that they won't go down without a fight. At a time when national unemployment is over 20 percent (with total unemployment at 4 million and underemployment reaching 40 percent of the population), Spain's workers are standing up and saying "no more!"

Summer protests in Greece were designed to draw attention to increasing national desperation. One in five now live below the poverty line, and the situation is certain to get worse as proposed austerity measures - including tax hikes, pay cuts, and pension freezes - are undertaken. By July 2010, Greece's public service workers had engaged in a half dozen strikes, forcing a shutdown of public transportation and closing down schools, courts, hospitals, and newspapers. The protests galvanized tens of thousands to turn out in cities across the country, prompting chants of "hands off our pensions" in opposition to draconian cuts directed against the country's working class.

In the United Kingdom, students, staff, and faculty across 100 universities came together to organize on-campus protests in June to resist planned government layoffs, salary cuts, and reductions in courses. The public was not fooled over the incremental nature of the cuts, which will be implemented over a number of years, but will affect three-quarters of the country's schools. The cuts are quite significant in scale - approximately 200 million pounds (or $300 million in U.S. dollars) across the country.

Protests in the U.S.: What are We Waiting For?

The United States is suffering under its own economic calamity over the last few years, too. Unemployment is consistently increasing, while massive state budget cuts are succeeding in throwing out countless public servants across the states in recent years. Underemployment is currently at over 20 percent, while unemployment benefits were barely extended in a bitter national debate between both parties this summer. To make matters worse, the economy is limping along, showing little sign of a real recovery, while the specter of future bank and financial failures loom in the background.

Many will wonder, why is there so much activism throughout the rest of the world, but comparatively much less in the United States in resisting neoliberalism and austerity-based budget cuts? Part of the explanation in the cases of resistance in Greece, Spain, Mozambique, South Africa, and Bangladesh is the fact that workers in those countries are comparatively much worse off than Americans when it comes to deteriorating pay, benefits, and other worker protections. Unemployment levels are often much higher than in the U.S., while pay levels have long been comparative lower. This explanation, however, is partial at best. The U.K. is characterized in many ways by a relatively stronger social welfare state (especially in relation to health care) than that seen in the U.S., and less extreme conditions for workers, with 7.8 percent unemployment compared to the United States' 9.6 percent official unemployment. Yet, British public sector workers are far more organized and intolerant of the gutting of public education. France has a similar level of unemployment to the U.S. at 10 percent and a far more advanced social welfare state, yet its workers have responded with a coordinated national campaign to protest budget cuts. In contrast, American protests against far larger austerity measures (in the form of mass layoffs and talk of serious pension cuts) are being met by scattered local protests at best. No salient national campaign is emerging across localities in this country, nor does it appear that one is on the horizon in the near future.

The relatively stronger position of labor unions throughout Western Europe also doesn't fully explain the weak level of protests in the U.S. Most of the strikes and protests discussed above were led by public sector workers, an area of the U.S. economy that has traditionally been characterized by strong unionization and organization. While only 7.2 percent of U.S. private sector workers are part of a union, the figure is at nearly 40 percent of public workers, and that figure actually grew from 2008 to 2009.

A major cause of U.S. apathy is likely the depoliticization of the American electorate and the lack of a collective working class consciousness. A majority of Americans distrust their political officials, while a growing number feel that they cannot rely upon the national government to improve their living standards. This latter trend should be particularly disturbing for those on the left who see the national government as the primary medium for promoting the improvement of living standards for the masses and for establishing and promoting collective goods. Establishing universal health care and universal funding for higher education, in addition to the strengthening of food stamps, head start, job training, Social Security, and a slew of other welfare programs will only be accomplished by increasing our support for, and reliance on the national government. These progressive victories will not emerge by "getting government out of our lives," or by turning our back on national politics.

Americans are incessantly bombarded by conservative propaganda stressing the theme that government is the problem, rather than part of the solution in terms of promoting American prosperity. Diversionary mass media direct public attention toward fashionable consumption and meaningless celebrity news, rather than toward important political and economic issues, such as whether Americans will have a job tomorrow as a result of massive budget cuts and a weakening economy. American educational institutions do a pitiful job in informing the young about the importance of social movements in bringing about positive social change. Finally, structural changes in the economy force Americans to work longer hours for less pay, leaving less time for political education and activism.

All of these forces come together to wreak havoc on the prospects for renewed progressive activism among the American public. Progressive change is further hindered by the emergence of faux "social movements" like the Tea Party, supplemented by "grassroots uprisings" in the form of birtherism and anti-Muslim racism. These "movements" are largely media-induced, fueled by right-wing Republican and punditry-based hatred, which seeks to take advantage of the very real economic grievances of Middle America. There is more than a bit of Nazi-esque race-baiting and scapegoating involved in this process, especially when looking at the equation of Muslims with Nazism (seen among many protesting the Manhattan Muslim Community Center).

Until we begin to address the structural problems that plague American society, we will see little progress in organizing the masses to oppose the reactionary assault on the populace. Without action, there will be little support for a progressive agenda for real change. Americans must realize that the only way forward is through a direct confrontation with political and economic elites. Positive progressive change is never willingly given up by elites - it must be forcibly taken from below. This is the most important lesson to take from the global backlash against neoliberalism.

Cashout-Fugazi

Zizek Biography

http://www.notablebiographies.com/supp/Supplement-Sp-Z/Zizek-Slavoj.html

Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek (born 1949) is an academic star, the "Elvis of Cultural Studies," according to one often-quoted journalistic formulation. His lectures, dealing in ideas that are often dense to the point of impenetrability, draw crowds numbering in the hundreds, with their mix of philosophical theory and topical political ideas, both often illustrated by examples drawn from American popular culture.

Zizek talks as fast as he thinks, and writes nearly as fast as he can talk (he has published as many as three books in the course of a single year), often making things even more difficult for the reader with a style of argument in which he often seems to contradict himself. James Harkin, writing in the London Guardian , called him "a one-man heavy industry of cultural criticism." Yet Zizek's fame rests on more than sheer mental agility. Consistent with his origins in Communist-era Yugoslavia, Zizek has espoused Marxist-Leninist ideas, which have remained current in academic circles even as they have lost ground in the wider political sphere. Zizek has reinvigorated Marxist-Leninist thought with an approach that brings together philosophy, psychology, film studies, humor, and engaging prose. His writing encompasses both political philosopher Karl Marx and film comedian Groucho Marx. Documentary filmmaker Astra Taylor, who made a film about Zizek, told Reyhan Harmaci of the San Francisco Chronicle that Zizek seems "to make intellectualism exciting and fun and vital in a climate of anti-intellectualism." In Zizek's own biography on the website of the European Graduate School, where he is a faculty member, he indicated that he "uses popular culture to explain the theory of [French philosopher] Jacques Lacan and the theory of Jacques Lacan to explain politics and popular culture."

Grew Up Under Communism

A native and lifelong resident of Ljubljana, Slovenia, Slavoj Zizek (SLAH-voy ZHEE-zhek) was born on March 21, 1949, when the small Alpine capital was part of Communist Yugoslavia. An only child, he grew up in the household of professional parents. Like many other young people in the former satellite states of the Soviet Union, he consumed Western popular culture avidly in preference to officially approved domestic television, books, and films. Much of his encyclopedic knowledge of Hollywood cinema was acquired during his teenage years, when he spent long hours at an auditorium that specialized in showing foreign films. The "Prague spring" reform movement of 1968 in Czechoslovakia during which Czechs agitated for greater freedom but were repressed by the Soviet Union, had an important effect on Zizek, even though he was not one of the demonstrators agitating in favor of greater freedom.

Zizek was in the Czech capital when Soviet troops invaded, and he observed the collision of totalitarian power with the aspirations of ordinary people. "I found there, on the central square, a café that miraculously worked through this emergency," he told Rebecca Mead of the New Yorker . "I remember they had wonderful strawberry cakes, and I was sitting there eating strawberry cakes and watching Russian tanks against demonstrators. It was perfect."

Not that Zizek was a supporter of Communist orthodoxy. As an undergraduate at the University of Ljubljana he read widely, not sticking to approved course lists. He spoke six languages, and immersed himself in the works of Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and other philosophers, mostly French, whose writings had found little favor in socialist circles. In the case of Lacan, that philosopher's work relied on psychology—a suspect science from a collectivist point of view because of its preoccupation with the self and the individual mind. Zizek would, in time, set out to reconcile that seeming dichotomy.

Zizek earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy and sociology in 1971, and then pursued a master's degree, also at the University of Ljubljana, writing his master's thesis on the French philosophers whose ideas he had been studying. The brilliance of his thesis stirred up interest among the university's philosophy faculty, but its ideologically suspect qualities were more troublesome. Finally, after being forced to add an appendix in which he outlined the divergences of his ideas from approved Marxist theory, Zizek was awarded a master's degree in philosophy in 1975. The taint on his reputation kept him from finding a teaching position. For several years Zizek depended on his work as a translator to pay his bills, but in 1977 he gave in to pressure and joined the Communist Party. This opened up government speechwriting jobs, as well as the chance to take a job as a researcher at the Institute of Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana in 1979. He retained that position for the next several decades, even after gaining international renown.

Worked as Speechwriter

In 1981 Zizek headed to Paris, where he studied with Lacan's son-in-law and was psychoanalyzed by him. He finished a dissertation and received his doctoral degree from the university that year. By that time Zizek had emerged as something of an expert on Lacan, and as the leader of a group of so-called Ljubljana Lacanians, contributing to a level of familiarity with Lacan in Slovenia that perhaps exceeded even that in France itself.

Zizek's playful side began to emerge during this period, when he wrote, under a pen name, a negative review of one of his own books. Sometimes during his career Zizek would seem to adopt one position and then switch to the exact opposite, but this tendency had roots in the dialectical tradition of philosophy in which his thought was rooted—the conviction that truth is ultimately obtained through the resolution of a series of opposites or conflicts. Zizek's first book published in the West was The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), which focused on the greatest of all the dialectical philosophers, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), through the prism of Lacan's thought. It was a daring combination; Zizek drew new links between philosophy and psychology by considering how these thinkers treated the idea of the Other—anything that is not part of the Self.

Zizek also cultivated his more public persona during the 1980s, a period during which Yugoslavia's Communist central government gradually began to lose control over the country's cultural life. He penned a popular newspaper column, and in 1990, when Slovenia was on the brink of independence from Yugoslavia (achieving it after a ten-day war in 1991), he entered the race to become part of the group of four leaders who would hold the country's joint presidency. Of the five candidates, he finished fifth, and was thus not elected. It was at this time that the impressive spurt in Zizek's productivity began. He was living alone; a marriage from the early 1970s, which produced a son, had ended, and his second and third marriages (the second produced another son) were still in the future. Zizek had few responsibilities other than to think and write. His post was that of researcher, and he rarely if ever taught classes.

Partly this kind of financial freedom for an academic was a holdover from the Communist system, in which intellectuals were considered an important part of the theoretical underpinning of the state, and were thus financially supported if they were seen to be making useful contributions. Zizek cherished this freedom. As his fame grew, he was frequently offered teaching positions in the United States, where he garnered a strong following in university cultural studies departments. He turned them all down, although he cheerfully accepted visiting scholar appointments and often spent much of the year traveling from one academic center to another. "When people ask me why I don't teach permanently in the United States," Zizek was quoted as saying in the Philadelphia Inquirer , "I tell them that it is because American universities have this very strange, eccentric idea that you must work for your salary. I prefer to do the opposite and not work for my salary."

Used Film to Illustrate Ideas

In any event, Zizek repaid his university's investment by bringing international intellectual attention to tiny Slovenia. He turned out books quickly, and they were translated into some 20 languages; in the United States many were published by Verso in New York, which profited from its association with Zizek, for the books sold well. Zizek communicated and expanded upon Lacan's difficult ideas about perception, desire, and aggression by illustrating them with examples drawn from decades of popular films that students and general readers knew well. Zizek's own books, such as Looking Awry; An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (1991) and Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (1992), were joined on bookstore shelves by collections of articles he edited, including Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) (1992).

Zizek's international fame grew after a 1997 essay written by the influential British literary critic Terry Eagleton was published in the London Review of Books . The essay reviewed several of Zizek's books and concluded, as quoted inContemporary Authors , that they "have an enviable knack of making [Continental philosophers] Kant or Kierkegaard sound riotously exciting; his writing bristles with difficulties but never serves up a turgid sentence." It was around this time that Zizek's lectures began to attract large crowds of young intellectuals. Police had to be called to a Zizek appearance at a Lower Manhattan art gallery after the shutout portion of an overflow crowd began banging on the building's windows, demanding admission. Nor was his fame confined to America and Europe; a documentary film, Zizek! , followed the philosopher to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where similar crowds awaited him.

Zizek's popularity was due partly to the dizzying virtuosity of his speeches, which were free form traversals of the history of philosophy, mixed with observations on anything from the Matrix film series to surfing, to world events, to theology (although an atheist, Zizek was fascinated by the figure of Saint Paul, seeing in him an analogue to early Soviet Communist leader Vladimir Lenin in terms of building an organization motivated by ideas). One audience member at a Zizek talk told Scott McLemee, author of the "Zizek Watch," a column published in the Chronicle of Higher Education , "I have no idea where we just went, but that was one wild trip." Another explanation of Zizek's success came from McLemee, who noted the theorist's continuing enthusiasm for American films. "One source of Slavoj Zizek's lasting appeal as a cultural theorist is that he provides a really good excuse to go to the video store," McLemee wrote.

Zizek also showed a knack for keeping himself in the headlines, at least those of intellectual journals. He broadened the focus of his writing to include current events, and he even contributed an essay to the staid U.S. journal Foreign Policy that examined the psychological motivations behind the failed U.S. search for weapons of mass destruction during the Iraq war. The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch's Lost Highway (2000) was one of several Zizek tomes on contemporary entertainment. With Welcome to the Desert of the Real!: Five Essays on 11 September and Related Dates , Zizek showed an uncharacteristic tendency to edit himself, recalling the book several times for revisions as it went through subsequent printings. Zizek's Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (2004) critiqued not only the rationale for war but also explored psychological factors involved in the restrictions placed on American civil liberties after the September 11 attacks.

Academic fashions come and go, but as of the mid-2000s the bearded Zizek had spent nearly a decade as what Carlin Romano of the Philadelphia Inquirer called "the ultimate hottie in recent years on the global intellectual circuit." In April of 2005 he married a 27-year-old Argentine model. He joined the faculty of the European Graduate School, an international institute of communications theory with locations in several countries, and he worked for an unusually long time on The Parallax View , a lengthy philosophical tract that attempted to redefine the dialectical idea itself, leaving room, as ever, for discussions of films, the war on terror, and hot topics such as neuroscience. By the time it was published, Zizek had moved on to a new book, In Defense of Lost Causes , in which he discussed the Christian legacy, class struggle, and problems in the world of theory itself. The book was slated for publication in the summer of 2007.

US Soldier Charged for Disclosing War Crimes

Charged for revealing the truth

http://socialistworker.org/2010/07/09/revealing-the-truth

ANALYSIS: ALAN MAASS

Alan Maass reports on the persecution of an Army private who has been accused of leaking video of a U.S. massacre of civilians in Iraq and other "classified information."

July 9, 2010

THE U.S. military is pressing criminal charges against a whistleblower for allegedly leaking information to the watchdog Web site WikiLeaks.org, including the video of an Apache helicopter strike in Baghdad [1] that killed at least 12 civilians and caused a scandal for the Pentagon.

Pfc. Bradley Manning faces eight charges, including espionage, and could go to jail for more than half a century if found guilty.

All for the "crime" of exposing the unacknowledged crimes of the American military.

Manning has also been accused of turning over at least 150,000 diplomatic cables from the State Department to WikiLeaks--as well as encrypted video of another air strike, this one in Granai, Afghanistan, which killed 140 civilians. WikiLeaks has so far published only one such embarrassing cable, and it has not released the Granai video.

The 22-year-old Manning, who was stationed at a U.S. base east of Baghdad, was arrested by military authorities in May and has been in detention in Kuwait since. He was fingered to the military by a computer hacker named Adrian Lamo. Lamo claims that Manning started communicating with him online, and admitted to being the source of the WikiLeaks exposé.

But there's reason to doubt Lamo's story--not least because he was convicted of hacking into news and corporate Web sites and served a sentence of house arrest and probation that could leave him vulnerable to pressure by authorities.

The attempts to convict Manning in the press are bound up with the military's ongoing campaign against WikiLinks, a Web site founded three years ago to expose government and corporate wrongdoing by publishing information from whistleblowers. In addition to the explosive video of the Baghdad massacre, the site has published documents about toxic waste dumping in Africa and the military's practices at the Guantánamo Bay prison camp.

As Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald pointed out in a Democracy Now! interview [2], the U.S. Army's counterintelligence division prepared a report in 2008 identifying WikiLinks as a "threat to national security" and detailing possible ways to silence the Web site.

The main thrust was that if WikiLeaks' sources were exposed--and the perception created that it was dangerous to associate with the site--whistleblowers could be intimidated from turning over information. As Greenwald said:

That's exactly what has happened here. Suddenly, a 22-year-old private, who supposedly has access to vast amounts of classified information, contacts someone who's a complete stranger and over the Internet...[and] confesses to crimes that could send him to prison for the rest of his life...It's exactly what the U.S. military described it wanted to do in order to destroy WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange drew similar conclusions about the Pentagon campaign in an April interview on Democracy Now! [3]. Assange pointed out that the 2008 report specifically uses the term "whistleblowers"--that is, people who leak classified information to expose an injustice--in identifying targets to investigate and prosecute. The aim, according to Assange, is to "destabilize us and destroy what [the Pentagon report] calls our 'center of gravity'--the trust that the public and sources have in us."

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AMID the speculation about Manning since his arrest and indictment--not to mention what he did and didn't say to hacker Adrian Lamo via Internet chat--the video of the massacre itself [4] has tended to fade into the background of mainstream news reports.

It shouldn't. The footage is a chilling--and undeniable--indictment of the brutality of the U.S. military machine and its occupation of Iraq. As Eric Ruder described it in a report for SocialistWorker.org [5]:

The video shows U.S. troops circling in a helicopter and focusing on a group of about 10 men, certain that the cameras slung over the reporters' shoulders are AK-47s and a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) launcher. "Fucking prick," one soldier says of the men with the camera.

After obtaining permission from commanding officers, one of the soldiers exclaims, "Light 'em all up," and the men are cut to pieces with a burst from the helicopter's 30mm machine gun. On the video, they disappear in a cloud of dust and smoke. "Look at those dead bastards," one pilot says. "Nice," responds another.

The helicopter continues to circle, watching as a van arrives, and a man jumps out to help the injured...to safety. One soldier remarks that the man from the van looks to be "picking up the wounded." But a few moments later, the troops again request--and receive--permission to open fire.

This is clearly a war crime--a violation of international law that forbids firing on people aiding the wounded.

After obliterating the van, ground troops are called in and quickly discover the camera belonging to the journalist, as well as two wounded children in the van. Their father, the van's driver, had just been killed by the soldiers in the Apache.

When they hear the report of children in the van, one of the soldiers renders a quick verdict: "Well, it's their fault for bringing their kids into a battle." Another replies, "That's right."

The July 12, 2007, attack wasn't the massacre committed by U.S. forces in Iraq. But it stayed in the spotlight at least in part because two Reuters reporters were killed in the attack, and the news agency spent several years trying to obtain the footage from the helicopter gunship. The military claimed it had "lost" its copy--and then "Collateral Murder" appeared via WikiLeaks.

Pentagon officials continue to claim that the video misrepresents what happened--and that U.S. forces were justified in responding to hostile forces. But the leaked video shows no combat at all.

In fact, when WikiLeaks published the video, two members of the company that was involved in the assault--one of them the man who rescued two wounded children from the vehicle that the gunship was attack--came forward and said that massacres like these were a regular occurrence of the Iraq occupation.

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GEORGE W. BUSH and his administration were notorious for their efforts to stop leaks of embarrassing information and silence whistleblowers--for example, the smear campaign, personally directed by Vice President Dick Cheney, against CIA agent Valerie Plame.

But the Obama administration has proven to be at least as aggressive against whistleblowers, if not more so.

In May, Shamai Leibowitz, a former linguist for the FBI, was sentenced to 20 months in prison for giving classified documents to an unidentified blogger--the longest sentence for any convicted leaker in U.S. history, according to the Politico Web site. One month earlier, Thomas Drake, a National Security Agency whistleblower, was charged by the Obama Justice Department with disclosing classified information that exposed details of a domestic spy program carried out by the Bush administration.

As Democracy Now! pointed out, the Obama White House has also targeted journalists who get classified information--for example, subpoenaing New York Times reporter James Risen to reveal the sources for parts of his book State of War.

Millions of people voted for Barack Obama because they hoped a Democrat in the White House would restore respect for civil liberties and curb the runaway powers of the federal government's executive branch. Those hopes have been disappointed. As Glenn Greenwald summarized the double standards for Salon.com:

-- If you torture people or eavesdrop on Americans without the warrants required by the criminal law, you receive "look-forward imperial immunity."

-- If you shoot and kill unarmed rescuers of the wounded while occupying their country and severely wound their unarmed children sitting in a van--or if you authorize that conduct--your actions are commended.

-- If you help wreck the world economy with fraud and cause hundreds of millions of people untold suffering, you collect tens of millions of dollars in bonuses.

-- If you disclose to the world evidence of war crimes, government lawbreaking or serious corruption, or otherwise embarrass the U.S., you will be swiftly prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and face decades in prison.

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Material on this Web site is licensed by SocialistWorker.org, under a Creative Commons (by-nc-nd 3.0) [6] license, except for articles that are republished with permission. Readers are welcome to share and use material belonging to this site for non-commercial purposes, as long as they are attributed to the author and SocialistWorker.org.

[1] http://socialistworker.org/2010/04/09/massacre-caught-on-video
[2] http://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/17/wikileaks_whistleblowers
[3] http://www.democracynow.org/2010/4/6/massacre_caught_on_tape_us_military
[4] http://www.collateralmurder.com/
[5] http://socialistworker.org/2010/04/09/massacre-caught-on-video
[6] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0