Liberal Hypocrisy

When, for example, ‘radical’ academics demand full rights for immigrants and the opening of borders to them, are they aware that the direct implementation of this demand would, for obvious reasons, inundate the developed Western countries with millions of newcomers, thus provoking a violent racist working-class backlash that would then endanger the privileged position of these very academics? Of course they are, but they count on the fact that their demand will not be met—in this way, they can hypocritically retain their clear radical conscience while continuing to enjoy their privileged position. (The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, pp. 43-44)

Haiti needs the world's support

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/02/haiti-election-open-letter-noam-chomsky

Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Slavoj Žižek and others call on the US, France and Canada to keep out of Haiti's democratic process in an open letter to the Guardian

Over the next few years, much of Haiti will be rebuilt and much of its economy restructured. In response to last year's earthquake an unprecedented amount of money has been promised for reconstruction. It's more important than ever before that Haiti be governed by an administration that reflects the true will and interests of its people, rather than the concerns of foreign governments and corporations.

In 2004, the US, France and Canada, in alliance with members of Haiti's business community and demobilised soldiers of the Haitian army, overthrew the last Haitian government to enjoy genuine popular support: the party that led this government, Fanmi Lavalas, was elected with around 75% of the vote. This past November, these same powers imposed and funded an illegitimate electoral process in Haiti, one that blocked the participation of Fanmi Lavalas. Only 23% of Haitian voters participated, scarcely a third of the proportion who voted in the last presidential election.

In recent weeks, the US and its proxies have brazenly interfered in the interpretation of this election's first round of results. The flawed November vote was not only inconclusive and unrepresentative, its outcome was also unlawful. If the second round of these elections goes ahead as planned on 20 March, it is now sure to result in the unconstitutional selection of a president with closer ties to the powers that sponsored and manipulated them than to the people meant to participate in them.

At the same time, the powers that dominate Haiti have facilitated the return of the former dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier while discouraging the return of the twice-elected president (and Fanmi Lavalas leader) Jean-Bertrand Aristide. These powers, with their allies in the Haitian business community, have made it clear that they seek to delay Aristide's return until after 20 March. They will only allow Aristide to return after a suitably pliant new government has been installed, to preside over the imminent reconstruction process.

We the undersigned call on the Haitian government to make the security arrangements that will enable Aristide's immediate return, and we call on the international community to support rather than undermine these efforts. We call on the Haitian government to cancel the second-round vote scheduled for 20 March and to organise a new round of elections, without exclusions or interference, to take place as soon as possible.

Signed:

Marie-Célie Agnant, writer

Tariq Ali, writer

Andaiye, Red Thread, Guyana

Roger Annis, Canada Haiti Action Network

Reginald Antoine, PEVEP

Alain Badiou, Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris)

Brian Becker, National Co-ordination, Answer Coalition

Emile Wilnes Brumer, Mas Popilè Site Solèy

Jean-Claude Cajou, community activist

Sara Callaway, Women of Colour/Global Women's Strike, UK

Yves Camille, Haiti Liberté

Noam Chomsky, MIT

Ramsey Clark, former US attorney general

Brian Concannon, Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti

Dan Coughlin, executive director, Manhattan Neighborhood Network

Ezili Dantò, Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network

Mike Davis, UC Riverside

Castro Desroches, SUNY

Rea Dol, SODUPEP

Berthony Dupont, Haiti Liberté

Ben Dupuy, Haiti Progrès & Parti Populaire National

Darren Ell, Montreal-Haiti Solidarity Committee

Joe Emersberger, writer

Yves Engler, writer

Anthony Fenton, journalist

Weiner Kerns Fleurimond, Haiti Liberté

Pierre L Florestal, Fanmi Lavalas - NY

Daniel Florival, Tèt Kole Oganizasyon Popilè yo

Sara Flounders, International Action Center

Laura Flynn, Aristide Foundation for Democracy board

Danny Glover, actor & activist, board chair, TransAfrica Forum

Leah Gordon, photographer and curator

Manu Goswami, NYU

Greg Grandin, NYU

Thomas Griffin, lawyer

Bishop Thomas Gumbleton

Peter Hallward, Kingston University London

Georges Honorat, Haiti Progrès

Kim Ives, Haiti Liberté

Selma James, Global Women's Strike, UK

Dr G Carlo Jean, retired public school teacher

Marlène Jean-Noel, Fanmi Lavalas Baz NY

Tony Jean-Thénor, Veye Yo

Frantz Jerome, Coalition Against Occupation and Sham Elections

Evelt Jeudi, Fanmi Lavalas Miami

Mario Joseph, Office of International Lawyers (BAI)

Farah Juste, representative of Fanmi Lavalas for Florida & the Bahamas

Michelle Karshan, Aristide Foundation for Democracy

Katharine Kean, film-maker

Ira Kurzban, Counsel for the Republic of Haiti from 1991-2004

Pierre Labossière, Haiti Action Committee

Ray Laforest, International Support Haiti Network

Frantz Latour, Haiti Liberté

Andrew Leak, University College London

Didier Leblanc, Haiti Liberté

Jacques Elie Leblanc, Haiti Liberté

Maude Leblanc, Haiti Progrès

Richard Ledes, film director

Nicole Lee, President, TransAfrica Forum

Nina López, Legal Action for Women, UK

Gardy Lumas, PEVEP

Isabel Macdonald, journalist

Albert Maysles, film-maker

Yves Mésidor, Mas Popilè Site Solèy

Johnny Michel, Mas Popilè Site Solèy

Melinda Miles, Let Haiti Live

Georges Mompremier, Fanmi Lavalas Baz NY

Fednel Monchery, Jeunesse pour la République (JPR)

Joia S. Mukherjee, Chief Medical Officer, Partners In Health

Nick Nesbitt, Princeton University

Harry Numa, community activist

Vanel Louis Paul, Mas Popilè Site Solèy

Gladys Timmer Phillpotts, Fanmi Lavalas Baz St Francis

Fritzner Pierre, radio host of Dyalog Popilè

Wadner Pierre, Haitianalysis.com

Yves Pierre-Louis, Tèt Kole Oganizasyon Popilè yo

Kevin Pina, Haiti Information Project

Margaret Prescod, Women of Colour/Global Women's Strike, US

Jackson Rateau, Haiti Liberté

Roosevelt René, engineer

Claude Ribbe, author and filmmaker

Corey Robin, Brooklyn College & CUNY

William Robinson, UCSB

Nicolas Rossier, film-maker

Robert Roth, Haiti Action Committee

Jean Saint-Vil, writer

Alina Sixto, Radio Fanmi Lavalas New York

Mark Snyder, International Action Ties

Jeb Sprague, UCSB

Irwin Stotzky, University of Miami Law School

Lucie Tondreau, community activist

Eddy Toussaint "Tontongi", Revi Tanbou

Harold Valentin, Oganizasyon Jen Salomon (OJESA)

Burt Wides, former counsel to Haiti's constitutional government; Special Counsel to President Carter for oversight of all US Intelligence agencies

Cécile Winter, Collectif politique sida en Afrique

Slavoj Žižek, University of Ljubljana

Israel’s best hope lies in a single state

Source: New Statesman

http://www.newstatesman.com/middle-east/2011/03/jewish-girls-israel-arab-state

Slavoj Žižek

Published 04 March 2011

In East Jerusalem, vigilantes prowl, hunting for Jewish girls who consort with Arab men. Slavoj Žižek argues that what Israel needs is not segregation, but unity and free contact between its peoples.

In Israel, there is a growing number of initiatives - from official bodies and rabbis to private organisations and groups of local residents - to prevent interracial dating and marriage. In East Jerusalem, vigilante-style patrols work to stop Arab men from mixing with local Jewish girls. Two years ago, the city of Petah Tikva created a hotline that parents and friends can use to inform on Jewish women who mix with Arab men; the women are then treated as pathological cases and sent to a psychologist.

In 2008, the southern city of Kiryat Gat launched a programme in its schools to warn Jewish girls about the dangers of dating local Bedouin men. The girls were shown a video called Sleeping With the Enemy, which describes mixed couples as an "unnatural phenomenon". Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu once told a local newspaper that the "seducing" of Jewish girls is “another form of war" and a religious organisation called Yad L'Achim conducts military-style rescues of women from "hostile" Arab villages, in co-ordination with the police and army. In 2009, a government-backed television advertising campaign, later withdrawn, urged Israeli Jews to report relatives abroad who were in danger of marrying non-Jews.

It is no wonder that, according to a poll from 2007, more than half of all Israeli Jews believe that intermarriage should be equated with "national treason". Adding a note of ridicule late last year, Rabbi Ari Shvat, an expert on Jewish law, allowed for an exception: Jewish women are permitted to sleep with Arabs if it is in order to gather information about anti-Israel activity - but it is more appropriate to use unmarried women for this purpose.

The first thing that strikes one here is the gender asymmetry. The guardians of Jewish purity are bothered that Jewish girls are being seduced by Palestinian men. The head of Kiryat Gat's welfare unit said: "The girls, in their innocence, go with the exploitative Arab." What makes these campaigns so depressing is that they are flourishing at a time of relative calm, at least in the West Bank. Any party interested in peace should welcome the socialising of Palestinian and Jewish youth, as it would ease tensions and contribute to a shared daily life.

Until recently, Israel was often hit by terror attacks and liberal, peace-loving Jews repeated the mantra that, while they recognised the injustice of the occupation of the West Bank, the other side had to stop the bombings before proper negotiations could begin. Now that the attacks have fallen greatly in number, the main form that terror takes is continuous, low-level pressure on the West Bank (water poisonings, crop burnings and arson attacks on mosques). Shall we conclude that, though violence doesn't work, renouncing it works even less well?

If there is a lesson to be learned from the protracted negotiations, it is that the greatest obstacle to peace is what is offered as the realistic solution - the creation of two separate states. Although neither side wants it (Israel would probably prefer the areas of the West Bank that it is ready to cede to become a part of Jordan, while the Palestinians consider the land that has fallen to Israel since 1967 to be theirs), the establishment of two states is somehow accepted as the only feasible solution, a position backed up by the embarrassing leak of Palestinian negotiation documents in January.

What both sides exclude as an impossible dream is the simplest and most obvious solution: a binational secular state, comprising all of Israel plus the occupied territories and Gaza. Many will dismiss this as a utopian dream, disqualified by the history of hatred and violence. But far from being a utopia, the binational state is already a reality: Israel and the West Bank are one state. The entire territory is under the de facto control of one sovereign power - Israel - and divided by internal borders. So let's abolish the apartheid that exists and transform this land into a secular, democratic state.

Losing faith

None of this implies sympathy for terrorist acts. Rather, it provides the only ground from which one can condemn terrorism without hypocrisy. I am more than aware of the immense suffering to which Jews have been exposed for thousands of years. What is saddening is that many Israelis seem to be doing all they can to transform the unique Jewish nation into just another nation.

A century ago, the writer G K Chesterton identified the fundamental paradox facing critics of religion: "Men who begin to fight the Church for the sake of freedom and humanity end by flinging away freedom and humanity if only they may fight the Church . . . The secularists have not wrecked divine things but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them." Does the same not hold for the advocates of religion? How many defenders of religion started by attacking contemporary secular culture and ended up forsaking any meaningful religious experience?

Similarly, many liberal warriors are so eager to fight anti-democratic fundamentalism that they will throw away freedom and democracy if only they may fight terror. Some love human dignity so much that they are ready to legalise torture - the ultimate degradation of human dignity - to defend it. As for the Israeli defenders of Jewish purity: they want to protect it so much that they are ready to forsake the very core of Jewish identity.

From The Coming Insurrection

The full text is available for free online at:

http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/texts/the-coming-insurrection/

[....]

Seventh Circle

“We are building a civilized space here”

The first global slaughter, which from 1914 to 1918 did away with a large portion of the urban and rural proletariat, was waged in the name of freedom, democracy, and civilization. For the past five years, the so-called “war on terror” with its special operations and targeted assassinations has been pursued in the name of these same values. Yet the resemblance stops there: at the level of appearances. The value of civilization is no longer so obvious that it can brought to the natives without further ado. Freedom is no longer a name scrawled on walls, for today it is always followed, as if by its shadow, with the word “security.” And it is well known that democracy can be dissolved in pure and simple “emergency” edicts – for example, in the official reinstitution of torture in the US, or in France’s Perben II law.

In a single century, freedom, democracy and civilization have reverted to the state of hypotheses. Our leaders’ work from here on out will consist in shaping the material and moral as well as symbolic and social conditions in which these hypotheses can be more or less validated, in configuring spaces where they can seem to function. All means to these ends are acceptable, even the least democratic, the least civilized, the most repressive. This is a century in which democracy regularly presided over the birth of fascist regimes, civilization constantly rhymed – to the tune of Wagner or Iron Maiden – with extermination, and in which, one day in 1929, freedom- showed its two faces: a banker throwing himself from a window and a family of workers dying of hunger. Since then – let’s say, since 1945 – it’s taken for granted that manipulating the masses, secret service operations, the restriction of public liberties, and the complete sovereignty of a wide array of police forces were appropriate ways to ensure democracy, freedom and civilization. At the final stage of this evolution, we see the first socialist mayor of Paris putting the finishing touches on urban pacification with a new police protocol for a poor neighborhood, announced with the following carefully chosen words: “We’re building a civilized space here.” There’s nothing more to say, everything has to be destroyed.

Though it seems general in nature, the question of civilization is not at all a philosophical one. A civilization is not an abstraction hovering over life. It is what rules, takes possession of, colonizes the most banal, personal, daily existence. It’s what holds together that which is most intimate and most general. In France, civilization is inseparable from the state. The older and more powerful the state, the less it is a superstructure or exoskeleton of a society and the more it constitutes the subjectivities that people it. The French state is the very texture of French subjectivities, the form assumed by the centuries-old castration of its subjects. Thus it should come as no surprise that in their deliriums psychiatric patients are always confusing themselves with political figures, that we agree that our leaders are the root of all our ills, that we like to grumble so much about them and that this grumbling is the consecration that crowns them as our masters. Here, politics is not considered something outside of us but as part of ourselves. The life we invest in these figures is the same life that’s taken from us.

If there is a French exception, this is why. Everything, even the global influence of French literature, is a result of this amputation. In France, literature is the prescribed space for the amusement of the castrated. It is the formal freedom conceded to those who cannot accommodate themselves to the nothingness of their real freedom. That’s what gives rise to all the obscene winks exchanged, for centuries now, between the statesmen and men of letters in this country, as each gladly dons the other’s costume. That’s also why intellectuals here tend to talk so loud when they’re so meek, and why they always fail at the decisive moment, the only moment that would’ve given meaning to their existence, but that also would’ve had them banished from their profession.

There exists a credible thesis that modern literature was born with Baudelaire, Heine, and Flaubert as a repercussion of the state massacre of June 1848. It’s in the blood of the Parisian insurgents, against the silence surrounding the slaughter, that modern literary forms were born – spleen, ambivalence, fetishism of form, and morbid detachment. The neurotic affection that the French pledge to their Republic – in the name of which every smudge of ink assumes an air of dignity, and any pathetic hack is honored – underwrites the perpetual repression of its originary sacrifices. The June days of 1848 – 1,500 dead in combat, thousands of summary executions of prisoners, and the Assembly welcoming the surrender of the last barricade with cries of “Long Live the Republic!” – and the Bloody Week of 1871 are birthmarks no surgery can hide.

In 1945, Kojeve wrote: “The “official” political ideal of France and of the French is today still that of the nation-State, of the ‘one and indivisible Republic.’ On the other hand, in the depths of its soul, the country understands the inadequacy of this ideal, of the political anachronism of the strictly “national” idea. This feeling has admittedly not yet reached the level of a clear and distinct idea: The country cannot, and still does not want to, express it openly. Moreover, for the very reason of the unparalleled brilliance of its national past, it is particularly difficult for France to recognize clearly and to accept frankly the fact of the end of the ‘national’ period of History and to understand all of its consequences. It is hard for a country which created, out of nothing, the ideological framework of nationalism and which exported it to the whole world to recognize that all that remains of it now is a document to be filed in the historical archives.”

This question of the nation-state and its mourning is at the heart of what for the past half-century can only be called the French malaise. We politely give the name of “alternation” to this twitchy indecision, this pendulum-like oscillation from left to right, then right to left; like a manic phase after a depressive one that is then followed by another, or like the way a completely rhetorical critique of individualism uneasily co-exists with the most ferocious cynicism, or the most grandiose generosity with an aversion to crowds. Since 1945, this malaise, which seems to have dissipated only during the insurrectionary fervor of May 68, has continually worsened. The era of states, nations and republics is coming to an end; this country that sacrificed all its life to these forms is still dumbfounded. The firestorm caused by Jospin’s simple sentence “the state can’t do everything” allowed us to glimpse the one that will ignite when it becomes clear that the state can no longer do anything at all. The feeling that we’ve been tricked is like a wound that is becoming increasingly infected. It’s the source of the latent rage that just about anything will set off these days. The fact that in this country the obituary of the age of nations has yet to be written is the key to the French anachronism, and to the revolutionary possibilities France still has in store.

Whatever their outcome may be, the role of the next presidential elections will be to signal the end of French illusions and the bursting of the historical bubble in which we are living – and which makes possible events like the anti-CPE movement, which was puzzled over by other countries as if it were some bad dream that escaped the 1970s. That’s why, deep down, no one wants these elections. France is indeed the red lantern of the western zone.

Today the West is the GI who dashes into Fallujah on an M1 Abrams tank, listening to heavy metal at top volume. It’s the tourist lost on the Mongolian plains, mocked by all, who clutches his credit card as his only lifeline. It’s the CEO who swears by the game Go. It’s the young girl who chases happiness in clothes, guys, and moisturizing creams. It’s the Swiss human rights activist who travels to the four corners of the earth to show solidarity with all the world’s rebels – provided they’ve been defeated. It’s the Spaniard who couldn’t care less about political freedom once he’s been granted sexual freedom. It’s the art lover who wants us to be awestruck before the “modern genius” of a century of artists, from surrealism to Viennese actionism, all competing to see who could best spit in the face of civilization. It’s the cyberneticist who’s found a realistic theory of consciousness in Buddhism and the quantum physicist who’s hoping that dabbling in Hindu metaphysics will inspire new scientific discoveries.

The West is a civilization that has survived all the prophecies of its collapse with a singular stratagem. Just as the bourgeoisie had to deny itself as a class in order to permit the bourgeoisification of society as a whole, from the worker to the baron; just as capital had to sacrifice itself as a wage relation in order to impose itself as a social relation – becoming cultural capital and health capital in addition to finance capital; just as Christianity had to sacrifice itself as a religion in order to survive as an affective structure – as a vague injunction to humility, compassion, and weakness; so the West has sacrificed itself as a particular civilization in order to impose itself as a universal culture. The operation can be summarized like this: an entity in its death throws sacrifices itself as a content in order to survive as a form.

The fragmented individual survives as a form thanks to the “spiritual” technologies of counseling. Patriarchy survives by attributing to women all the worst attributes of men: willfulness, self-control, insensitivity. A disintegrated society survives by propagating an epidemic of sociability and entertainment. So it goes with all the great, outmoded fictions of the West maintaining themselves through artifices that contradict these fictions point by point.

There is no “clash of civilizations.” There is a clinically dead civilization kept alive by all sorts of life-support machines that spread a peculiar plague into the planet’s atmosphere. At this point it can no longer believe in a single one of its own “values”, and any affirmation of them is considered an impudent act, a provocation that should and must be taken apart, deconstructed, and returned to a state of doubt. Today Western imperialism is the imperialism of relativism, of the “it all depends on your point of view”; it’s the eye-rolling or the wounded indignation at anyone who’s stupid, primitive, or presumptuous enough to still believe in something, to affirm anything at all. You can see the dogmatism of constant questioning give its complicit wink of the eye everywhere in the universities and among the literary intelligentsias. No critique is too radical among postmodernist thinkers, as long as it maintains this total absence of certitude. A century ago, scandal was identified with any particularly unruly and raucous negation, while today it’s found in any affirmation that fails to tremble.

No social order can securely found itself on the principle that nothing is true. Yet it must be made secure. Applying the concept of “security” to everything these days is the expression of a project to securely fasten onto places, behaviors, and even people themselves, an ideal order to which they are no longer ready to submit. Saying “nothing is true” says nothing about the world but everything about the Western concept of truth. For the West, truth is not an attribute of beings or things, but of their representation. A representation that conforms to experience is held to be true. Science is, in the last analysis, this empire of universal verification. Since all human behavior, from the most ordinary to the most learned, is based on a foundation of unevenly formulated presuppositions, and since all practices start from a point where things and their representations can no longer be distinguished, a dose of truth that the Western concept knows nothing about enters into every life. We talk in the West about “real people,” but only in order to mock these simpletons. This is why Westerners have always been thought of as liars and hypocrites by the people they’ve colonized. This is why they’re envied for what they have, for their technological development, but never for what they are, for which they are rightly held in contempt. Sade, Nietzsche and Artaud wouldn’t be taught in schools if the kind of truth mentioned above was not discredited in advance. Containing all affirmations and deactivating all certainties as they irresistibly come to light-such is the long labor of the Western intellect. The police and philosophy are two convergent, if formally distinct, means to this end.

Of course, this imperialism of the relative finds a suitable enemy in every empty dogmatism, in whatever form of Marxist-Leninism, Salifism, or Neo-Nazism: anyone who, like Westerners, mistakes provocation for affirmation.

At this juncture, any strictly social contestation that refuses to see that what we’re faced with is not the crisis of a society but the extinction of a civilization becomes an accomplice in its perpetuation. It’s even become a contemporary strategy to critique this society in the vain hope of saving this civilization.

So we have a corpse on our backs, but we won’t be able to rid ourselves of it just like that. Nothing is to be expected from the end of civilization, from its clinical death. In and of itself, it can only be of interest to historians. It’s a fact, and it must be translated into a decision. Facts can be conjured away, but decision is political. To decide on the death of civilization, then to work out how it will happen: only decision will rid us of the corpse.

[....]

Proletarians, unite!

From The Idea of Communism, edited by Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek, (London and New York: Verso, 2010), pp. 225-226:

[....]

And the same goes for natural resources, the exploitation of which is one of the great sources of rent today, accompanied by the permanent struggle over who is to receive that rent -- the people of the Third World or Western corporations. The supreme irony is that in order to explain the difference between labour power (which, when put to work, produces surplus value over and above its own value) and other commodities (the value of which is consumed in their use and which thus involves no exploitation), Marx mentions as an example of an 'ordinary' commodity oil, the very commodity which is today a source of extraordinary 'profits'. Here also, it is meaningless to link the rise and fall of oil prices to rising or falling production costs or the price of exploited labour -- the production costs are negligible, the price we pay for oil is a rent we pay to the owners of this resource because of its scarcity and limited supply.

It is as if the three components of the production process -- intellectual planning and marketing, material production, the providing of material resources -- are more and more autonomized, emerging as three separate spheres. In its social consequences, this separation appears in the guise of the 'three main classes' of today's developed societies, which are precisely not classes but three fractions of the working class: intellectual labourers, the old manual working class, and the outcasts (unemployed, or living in slums and other interstices of the public space). The working class is thus split into three, each part with its own 'way of life' and ideology: the enlightened hedonism and liberal multiculturalism of the intellectual class, the populist fundamentalism of the working class, and the more extreme, singular forms of the outcast fraction. In Hegelese, this triad is clearly the triad of the universal (intellectual workers), particular (manual workers), and singular (outcasts). The outcome of this process is the gradual disintegration of social life proper, of a public space in which all three fractions could meet -- and 'identity' politics in all its forms is a supplement for this loss. Identity politics acquires a specific form in each of the three fractions: postmodern multicultural identity politics in the intellectual class, regressive populist fundamentalism in the working class, half-illegal initiatic groups (criminal gangs, religious sects, etc.) among the outcasts. What they all share is recourse to a particular identity as a substitute for the missing universal public space.

The proletariat is thus divided into three, each part played off against the others: intellectual labourers full of cultural prejudices against the 'redneck' workers; workers who display a populist hatred of intellectuals and outcasts; outcasts who are antagonistic to society as such. The old call 'Proletarians, unite!' is thus more pertinent than ever: in the new conditions of 'post-industrial' capitalism, the unity of the three fractions of the working class is already their victory.

For Egypt, this is the miracle of Tahrir Square

• 
• • Slavoj Žižek
  • guardian.co.uk, Thursday 10 February 2011 20.30 GMT

One cannot but note the "miraculous" nature of the events in Egypt: something has happened that few predicted, violating the experts' opinions, as if the uprising was not simply the result of social causes but the intervention of a mysterious agency that we can call, in a Platonic way, the eternal idea of freedom, justice and dignity.

The uprising was universal: it was immediately possible for all of us around the world to identify with it, to recognise what it was about, without any need for cultural analysis of the features of Egyptian society. In contrast to Iran's Khomeini revolution (where leftists had to smuggle their message into the predominantly Islamist frame), here the frame is clearly that of a universal secular call for freedom and justice, so that the Muslim Brotherhood had to adopt the language of secular demands.

The most sublime moment occurred when Muslims and Coptic Christians engaged in common prayer on Cairo's Tahrir Square, chanting "We are one!" – providing the best answer to the sectarian religious violence. Those neocons who criticise multiculturalism on behalf of the universal values of freedom and democracy are now confronting their moment of truth: you want universal freedom and democracy? This is what people demand in Egypt, so why are the neocons uneasy? Is it because the protesters in Egypt mention freedom and dignity in the same breath as social and economic justice?

From the start, the violence of the protesters has been purely symbolic, an act of radical and collective civil disobedience. They suspended the authority of the state – it was not just an inner liberation, but a social act of breaking chains of servitude. The physical violence was done by the hired Mubarak thugs entering Tahrir Square on horses and camels and beating people; the most protesters did was defend themselves.

Although combative, the message of the protesters has not been one of killing. The demand was for Mubarak to go, and thus open up the space for freedom in Egypt, a freedom from which no one is excluded – the protesters' call to the army, and even the hated police, was not "Death to you!", but "We are brothers! Join us!". This feature clearly distinguishes an emancipatory demonstration from a rightwing populist one: although the right's mobilisation proclaims the organic unity of the people, it is a unity sustained by a call to annihilate the designated enemy (Jews, traitors).

So where are we now? When an authoritarian regime approaches the final crisis, its dissolution tends to follow two steps. Before its actual collapse, a rupture takes place: all of a sudden people know that the game is over, they are simply no longer afraid. It is not only that the regime loses its legitimacy; its exercise of power itself is perceived as an impotent panic reaction. We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the cat reaches a precipice but goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. When it loses its authority, the regime is like a cat above the precipice: in order to fall, it only has to be reminded to look down …

In Shah of Shahs, a classic account of the Khomeini revolution, Ryszard Kapuscinski located the precise moment of this rupture: at a Tehran crossroads, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman withdrew; within hours, all Tehran knew about this incident, and although street fights went on for weeks, everyone somehow knew the game was over.

Is something similar going on in Egypt? For a couple of days at the beginning, it looked like Mubarak was already in the situation of the proverbial cat. Then we saw a well-planned operation to kidnap the revolution. The obscenity of this was breathtaking: the new vice-president, Omar Suleiman, a former secret police chief responsible for mass tortures, presented himself as the "human face" of the regime, the person to oversee the transition to democracy.

Egypt's struggle of endurance is not a conflict of visions, it is the conflict between a vision of freedom and a blind clinging to power that uses all means possible – terror, lack of food, simple tiredness, bribery with raised salaries – to squash the will to freedom.

When President Obama welcomed the uprising as a legitimate expression of opinion that needs to be acknowledged by the government, the confusion was total: the crowds in Cairo and Alexandria did not want their demands to be acknowledged by the government, they denied the very legitimacy of the government. They didn't want the Mubarak regime as a partner in a dialogue, they wanted Mubarak to go. They didn't simply want a new government that would listen to their opinion, they wanted to reshape the entire state. They don't have an opinion, they are the truth of the situation in Egypt. Mubarak understands this much better than Obama: there is no room for compromise here, as there was none when the Communist regimes were challenged in the late 1980s. Either the entire Mubarak power edifice falls down, or the uprising is co-opted and betrayed.

And what about the fear that, after the fall of Mubarak, the new government will be hostile towards Israel? If the new government is genuinely the expression of a people that proudly enjoys its freedom, then there is nothing to fear: antisemitism can only grow in conditions of despair and oppression. (A CNN report from an Egyptian province showed how the government is spreading rumours there that the organisers of the protests and foreign journalists were sent by the Jews to weaken Egypt – so much for Mubarak as a friend of the Jews.)

One of the cruellest ironies of the current situation is the west's concern that the transition should proceed in a "lawful" way – as if Egypt had the rule of law until now. Are we already forgetting that, for many long years, Egypt was in a permanent state of emergency? Mubarak suspended the rule of law, keeping the entire country in a state of political immobility, stifling genuine political life. It makes sense that so many people on the streets of Cairo claim that they now feel alive for the first time in their lives. Whatever happens next, what is crucial is that this sense of "feeling alive" is not buried by cynical realpolitik.

• Slavoj Žižek is co-editor of The Idea of Communism, published by Verso Books.

Why fear the Arab revolutionary spirit?

The western liberal reaction to the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia frequently shows hypocrisy and cynicism

يمكن قراءة هذا الموضوع بالعربية

• 
• • Slavoj Žižek
  • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 1 February 2011 09.00 GMT

What cannot but strike the eye in the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt is the conspicuous absence of Muslim fundamentalism. In the best secular democratic tradition, people simply revolted against an oppressive regime, its corruption and poverty, and demanded freedom and economic hope. The cynical wisdom of western liberals, according to which, in Arab countries, genuine democratic sense is limited to narrow liberal elites while the vast majority can only be mobilised through religious fundamentalism or nationalism, has been proven wrong. The big question is what will happen next? Who will emerge as the political winner?

When a new provisional government was nominated in Tunis, it excluded Islamists and the more radical left. The reaction of smug liberals was: good, they are the basically same; two totalitarian extremes – but are things as simple as that? Is the true long-term antagonism not precisely between Islamists and the left? Even if they are momentarily united against the regime, once they approach victory, their unity splits, they engage in a deadly fight, often more cruel than against the shared enemy.

Did we not witness precisely such a fight after the last elections in Iran? What the hundreds of thousands of Mousavi supporters stood for was the popular dream that sustained the Khomeini revolution: freedom and justice. Even if this dream utopian, it did lead to a breathtaking explosion of political and social creativity, organisational experiments and debates among students and ordinary people. This genuine opening that unleashed unheard-of forces for social transformation, a moment in which everything seemed possible, was then gradually stifled through the takeover of political control by the Islamist establishment.

Even in the case of clearly fundamentalist movements, one should be careful not to miss the social component. The Taliban is 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, The 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 creating, in the words of the New York Times "alarm about the risks to Pakistan, which remains largely feudal," what prevented liberal democrats in Pakistan and the US similarly "taking advantage" of this plight and trying to help the landless farmers? Is it that the feudal forces in Pakistan are the natural ally of liberal democracy?

The inevitable conclusion to be drawn is that the rise of radical Islamism was always the other side of the disappearance of the secular left in Muslim countries. When Afghanistan is portrayed as the utmost Islamic fundamentalist country, who still remembers that, 40 years ago, it was a country with a strong secular tradition, including a powerful communist party that took power there independently of the Soviet Union? Where did this secular tradition go?

And it is crucial to read the ongoing events in Tunisia and Egypt (and Yemen and … maybe, hopefully, even Saudi Arabia) against this background. If the situation is eventually stabilised so that the old regime survives but with some liberal cosmetic surgery, this will generate an insurmountable fundamentalist backlash. In order for the key liberal legacy to survive, liberals need the fraternal help of the radical left. [....]