'The Lacanian Real' converted into Persian

http://www.ibna.ir/vdcayin6y49nuy1.tgk4.html

Slavoj Zizek's "The Lacanian Real: Television" is converted into Persian by Mahdi Salimi. According to Zizek, television vacates us of meaning and even disarms us of the ability to weep or laugh.

IBNA: This book is a complete translation of a seminar by Slavoj Zizek on television made in 1987 in New York.

Referring to the Zizek's rereading of Jacques Lacan (French philosopher, physician and psychoanalyst), he said: "Despite its brevity, this text offers a very good idea of different stages of Lacan's thought. For instance, the text familiarizes the reader with the concept of 'The Real' in three phases of Lacan's thought. Besides, Zizek's keen view of everyday reality through popular phenomenon of television once again proves his loyalty to Slovenian School of psychoanalysis."

Salimi continued: "Followers of Slovenian School make political readings of psychoanalysis and meantime draw on everyday phenomena for illustrating their opinions. Following this strategy Zizek probes into political and philosophical aspects of Lacan's theory of psychoanalysis and comes up with a radical political reading of Lacan. For doing so he also cites Jacques-Alain Miller's reading of Lacan."

He went on to say that this Slovenian theoretician always finds an appropriate thought model for describing phenomena; in fact, the models are exploited out of the phenomena under survey.

Salimi continued: "Zizek has a good theoretical background and never takes the meanest aspects of everyday life for granted. I mean that although he sometimes is trapped into populism and simplicity, his clear thought system and strategies make him an outstanding and autonomous critic."

For instance, he added, he illustrates his ideas of The Real with an example from the television. It usually broadcasts short comedies that are immediately followed with a laugher sound.

Zizek states that even in Greek tragedies there was a chorus in charge of the comic or tragic effect. In Zizek's opinion, by doing so sometimes the television frees us of the charge of laughing or crying and actually empties us of all meanings – the meanings that we could have extracted from the scenes by ourselves.

This act means infusion of ideas upon the audiences and by doing so, the television is attempting to omit the great Other.

In fact Zizek's main goal in this speech is not to illustrate Lacan's ideas with the phenomenon of television, but rather to defamiliarize a well-known and popular phenomenon known as television.

The first issue of "The Lacanian Other" is published in 1150 copies and 94 pages by Roshd Amouzesh.

Id: 126444
Topic url: http://www.ibna.ir/vdcayin6y49nuy1.tgk4.html
Iran Book News Agency (IBNA)
http://www.ibna.ir

Rick Santorum Protects the Freedom of Con-Men

By Charles P. Pierce

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/rick-santorum-freedom-6633251

Rick Santorum, papist nutter and GOP It Boy of the moment, is well and truly energized by his recently demonstrated ability to get 25,000-odd Iowans to show up and write his name on a piece of paper. The way you know this is because his stump answers are no longer stumps. They are fully blossomed trees, ripe with pious arrogance, vicious social policies camouflaged with luxurious rhetorical foliage within which the bullshit birds sing their sweet songs of "dependency" and "freedom," and low-hanging hypocrisy just so ever-ripe for the picking. No kidding. The crazy is in full flower in this one.

Begin simply with the place last night's even took place. It was an assisted-care facility/nursing home run by Rockingham County here in the southern part of New Hampshire. It has disabled residents on Medicaid and it has 200 people in its nursing-home section, almost all of whom are on Medicare. It is a government-run facility, and a very well-regarded one, which is impossible because, as we all know, the government has no business interfering with the health-care "market." The facts about this facility will become important later on. Stay with us.

You can also tell he's energized because he's back to being the legendary dick he's always been reputed to be by those who knew him best in Washington. A kid from Haverhill, Mass., got up to ask a question, and Santorum hung him out to dry for the benefit of his assembled fans from New Hampshire. While discussing President Obama's recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, which the president made because the congressional Republicans refused to give his nominees a hearing, because the congressional Republicans don't want the NLRB — a fully legitimate agency of the federal government — to work, the grandson of a coal miner sneered, "I'm suurrrre they'll be soooo friendly and hospitable to American business." His entire pitch now is an extended nyah-nyah in the general direction of whatever White House exists at the moment in his imagination.

"You can't be trusted with freedom."
"He believes you are incapable of freedom."

"The president believes you need him. He'll solve all your problems. Remember all those people at the rallies in 2008? People would say, 'Oh, Mr. President, I know you'll help me with this.' He convinced Americans that they needed to believe in a president. You want a president who believes in you."
(I use italics because there is no "Seventh Grade Sarcasm" function on this computer. Sorry.)

You can also tell he's energized because he's not at all shy about taking his more outre views out for a walk. Take Iran, for a moment. Did you know that the Iranians are building their nuclear weapons in Qom? (Santorum couches a lot of his answers this way, in the manner of a middle-school civics teacher who's read Time twice this month.) Do you know why? Well, he's going to tell you. Qom is a holy city to the Shi'a population of Iran. (The return of the 12th Imam is mixed up in this somewhere, too. Listening to Santorum on Iran is like accidentally tuning in one of those ancient astronaut documentaries on the History Channel.) "It is a very important town dealing with the end times for Shi'a Islam," he says.

In other words, Rick Santorum believes that the current Iranian regime is building a nuclear weapon not merely as leverage for power in that region and the world, and not merely to defend itself, and not merely, as he himself says, "to protect itself from retaliation while it engages in acts of terrorism." He believes it is building a bomb, and is more than likely to use it, in order to bring on the end times and the return of the 12th Imam.

(And you are not incorrect in wondering at this point how he feels about those millions of evangelical Christians over here who encourage belligerence on the part of Israel because of their desire to see the big show open on the plains of Megiddo, starring the famous Disemboweling Christ, action hero of the Left Behind novels. Rather not have those folks influencing nuclear policy myself.)

But he doesn't really reach full bloom until he's talking about ethics, and decency, and "living a moral life." It is here where his sanctimony, his hypocrisy, and his carefully refined dickitude truly burst forth in interesting ways. He was asked last night about the recent revelations of "insider trading" among members of Congress. He began his answer carefully, parsing the legitimate difference between actual insider trading of the kind that takes place on Wall Street, and the kind of thing in Congress most recently exposed by 60 Minutes in which members of the Congress trade on information concerning pending laws that might effect certain industries.

Forgive me for a moment if I now bring out the tin drum again and point out that, as one of Jack Abramoff's primary rentboys in the Senate, Santorum is well qualified to make this Jesuitical distinction. But then he goes on to make a learned simpleton's disquisition on why we have of laws in our society, and we move deeply into the upper branches, the lush green canopy, that overarches his entire purpose in public life, at least as he sees it.

"The point is, this is something we shouldn't even have to have a law for," he says. "People should behave ethically. When people don't behave as they should, we gotta pass laws. Now we have a law, and it has to be enforced, and that means someone has to hire staff to enforce it, and these are people that you pay for, and all because people don't live decent moral lives like they should. If people don't live good decent moral lives, government is going to get bigger."

(As with so many things, Mr. Madison said it better: "If men were angels, no government would be necessary.")

Let us unpack this, shall we? First we have the mournful condemnation of the various members of Congress who did these dastardly but altogether legal deeds, which is very rich coming from a guy — tin-drum alert — whose brief on behalf of one of the greatest scams in the history of the Republic included:

Every week, the lobbyists present pass around a list of the jobs available and discuss whom to support. Santorum's responsibility is to make sure each one is filled by a loyal Republican--a senator's chief of staff, for instance, or a top White House aide, or another lobbyist whose reliability has been demonstrated. After Santorum settles on a candidate, the lobbyists present make sure it is known whom the Republican leadership favors. "The underlying theme was [to] place Republicans in key positions on K Street. Everybody taking part was a Republican and understood that that was the purpose of what we were doing," says Rod Chandler, a retired congressman and lobbyist who has participated in the Santorum meetings. "It's been a very successful effort."

His efforts on behalf of the K Street Project, which eventually redounded to the great benefit of Abramoff, landed Santorum on a watchdog group's list of the Most Corrupt Members of Congress in 2006. And thus did Rick Santorum enable people to avoid living decent moral lives and, by his own logic, thus is Rick Santorum a primary architect of big government in this regard. Ron Paul Is Right!!!!

Even Santorum's unremarkable contention that, if it weren't for criminals, we wouldn't need laws, is wholly reminiscent of the preacher caught out behind the barn with a sheep. Like every other Republican candidate, Santorum favors repeal of the Dodd-Frank law, which was passed as a rather pale attempt to rein in the excesses of the financial industries. He calls it "job-killing." Just last night, he announced his support for a lawsuit contemplated by the Senate Republican leadership to fight President Obama's recess appointment of Richard Cordray to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, another appointment held up by those same Republicans because they do not approve of a law duly passed by Congress and signed by the president. Santorum doesn't like that law, either. Last night, he made quite a show of not remembering the name of the CFPB.

But, wait. Don't we need this law? Don't we need a law because a bunch of Wall Street pirates declined to live "good, decent moral lives" as they were stealing most of the national economy and wrecking what was left? Don't we need a law because those people, declining to live good, decent, moral lives, looted pensions, cheated people on mortgages, and left one poor county in Alabama in hopeless debt from now until the 12th Imam really does come back? Aren't the people behind credit-default swaps and collateralized debt obligations and all the rest of the vehicles of exotic economic pillage the real reason why government had to expand its power in this area? Here, alas, possibly with the sound of Jack Abramoff's voice echoing softly in his ear, Rick Santorum wants people to live "good, decent moral lives" and, yet, if they don't, well, that's just the way it goes.

Let us all be free again to be swindled the same way.

Rick Santorum is yet another example of a conservative to whom "freedom" means protecting the free speech rights of con-men. That's how he managed, during his demi-victory speech in Iowa, to compare much of the social safety net to the actual fascism his grandfather fled Italy to avoid. He treats caveat emptor as a basic principle of human freedom. Toward the end of the evening, he got into a long wrangle about health-care and announced his support for "the Ryan plan," the Medicare phase-out designed by zombie-eyed granny-starver Paul Ryan. Remember now where he said it — in a well-regarded government-run nursing home containing 200 patients, all of whom depend on Medicare for one reason or another. Rick Santorum believes that these people are not free. If they were, they'd get up tomorrow morning and shop for the best deal they could find on an open market, which naturally would be run by people in the insurance industry who are living good, decent moral lives, especially in their business practices. It was about here where I fell out of the tree.

Have the Super-Rich Seceded from the United States?

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/01/05/have-the-super-rich-seceded-from-the-united-states/

The Joke is on the Rest of Us

Have the Super-Rich Seceded from the United States?
by MIKE LOFGREN

It was in 1993, during congressional deliberation over the North American Free Trade Agreement. I was having lunch with a staffer for one of the rare Republican members of Congress who opposed the policy of so-called free trade. I distinctly remember something my colleague said: “The rich elites of this country have far more in common with their counterparts in London, Paris, and Tokyo than with their own fellow American citizens.”

That was just the beginning of the period when the realities of outsourced manufacturing, financialization of the economy, and growing income disparity started to seep into the public consciousness, so at the time it seemed like a striking and novel statement.

At the end of the cold war many writers predicted the decline of the traditional nation state. Some looked at the demise of the Soviet Union and foresaw the territorial state breaking up into statelets of different ethnic, religious, or economic compositions. This happened in the Balkans, former Czechoslovakia, and Sudan. Others, like Chuck Spinney, predicted a weakening of the state due to the rise of Fourth Generation Warfare, and the inability of national armies to adapt to it.

The quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan lend credence to that theory. There have been hundreds of books about globalization and how it would break down borders. But I am unaware of a well-developed theory from that time about how the super-rich and the corporations they run would secede from the nation state.

I do not mean secession in terms of physical withdrawal from the territory of the state, although that happens occasionally. It means a withdrawal into enclaves, a sort of internal immigration, whereby the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well-being except as a place to extract loot. Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; if one owns a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension – and viable public transportation doesn’t even show up on the radar screen. With private doctors on call, who cares about Medicare?

To some degree the rich have always secluded themselves from the gaze of the common herd; for example, their habit for centuries has been to send their offspring to private schools. But now this habit is exacerbated by the plutocracy’s palpable animosity towards public education and public educators, as Michael Bloomberg has demonstrated. To the extent public education “reform” is popular among billionaires and their tax-exempt foundations, one suspects it is as a lever to divert the more than one-half trillion dollars in federal, state, and local education dollars into private hands, meaning themselves and their friends. A century ago, at least we got some attractive public libraries out of Andrew Carnegie. Noblesse oblige like Carnegie’s is presently lacking among our seceding plutocracy.
In both world wars, even a Harvard man or a New York socialite might know the weight of an army pack. Now the military is for suckers from the laboring classes whose subprime mortgages you just sliced into CDOs and sold to gullible investors in order to buy your second Bentley or rustle up the cash to employ Rod Stewart to perform at your birthday party. Courtesy of Matt Taibbi, we learn that the sentiment among the super-rich towards the rest of America is often one of contempt rather than noblesse; Bernard Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot, says about the views of the 99 percent: “Who gives a crap about some imbecile?”

Steven Schwarzman, the hedge fund billionaire CEO of the Blackstone Group who hired Rod Stewart for his $5-million birthday party, believes it is the rabble who are socially irresponsible. Speaking about low-income citizens who pay no income tax, he says: “You have to have skin in the game. I’m not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system.” But millions of Americans who do not pay federal income taxes pay federal payroll taxes. These taxes are regressive, and the dirty little secret is that over the last several decades they have made up a greater and greater share of federal revenues. In 1950, payroll and other federal retirement contributions constituted 10.9 percent of all federal revenues; by 2007, the last “normal” economic year before federal revenues began falling, they made up 33.9 percent. By contrast, corporate income taxes were 26.4 percent of federal revenues in 1950; by 2007 they had fallen to 14.4 percent. Who has skin in the game now?

As is well known by now, Schwarzman benefits from the “Buffett Rule:” financial sharks typically take their compensation in the form of capital gains rather than salaries, thus knocking down their income tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent. But that’s not the only way Mr. Skin-in-the-Game benefits: the 6.2-percent Social Security tax and the 1.45-percent Medicare tax apply only to wages and salaries, not capital gains distributions. Accordingly, Schwarzman is stiffing the system in two ways: not only is his income tax rate less than half the top marginal rate, he is shorting the Social Security system that others of his billionaire colleagues like Pete Peterson say is unsustainable and needs to be cut.

This lack of skin in the game may explain why Willard Mitt Romney is so coy about releasing his income tax returns. It would also make sense for someone with $264 million in net worth to joke that he is “unemployed,” as if he were some jobless sheet metal worker in Youngstown, when he is really saying in code that his income stream is not a salary subject to payroll deduction. The chances are good that his effective rate for both federal income and payroll taxes is lower than that of many a wage slave.

The real joke is on the rest of us. After the biggest financial meltdown in 80 years – a meltdown caused by the type of rogue financial manipulation that Romney embodies – and a consequent long, steep drop in the American standard of living, who is the putative front-runner for one of the only two parties allowed to be competitive in American politics? None other than Mitt Romney, the man who says corporations are people. Opposing him, or someone like him, will be the incumbent president, Barack Obama, who will raise up to a billion dollars to compete in the campaign. Much of that loot will come from the same corporations, hedge fund managers, merger and acquisition specialists, and leveraged buyout artists the president will denounce in pro forma fashion during the campaign.

The super-rich have seceded from America even as their grip on its control mechanisms has tightened.

MIKE LOFGREN retired in June 2011 after 28 years as a Congressional staffer. He served 16 years as a professional staff member on the Republican staff of the House and Senate Budget Committees.

Obama versus civil liberties

Far from being the exception, the undermining of constitutional rights is standard operating procedure under capitalism, regardless of which politicians are in charge.

http://socialistworker.org/2012/01/04/obama-versus-civil-liberties

THE U.S. military can indefinitely detain U.S. citizens without trial--that's the latest of our supposedly "inalienable rights" sacrificed by the Democratic former constitutional law professor who currently inhabits in the White House.
After promising during his campaign to roll back the abuses of the Bush administration, Barack Obama has spent the last three years pushing through attacks on civil liberties that Republicans could only dream about. He is eliminating all doubts that the Democrats are as firmly committed as the GOP to strengthening the national security state at the expense of our rights.

As part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) signed into law by Obama on December 31, the military--under the authority of the president--is empowered to hold anyone "who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners...without trial until the end of hostilities."
According to legal scholar Jonathan Turley [2], the NDAA represents "one of the greatest rollbacks of civil liberties in the history of our country."

Even the liberal New York Times, which regularly praises the Democratic Obama administration, described Obama's announcement that he would sign the bill [3] as "a complete political cave-in, one that reinforces the impression of a fumbling presidency."

The ACLU's Laura Murphy pointed out that the last time Congress passed indefinite detention legislation was the Internal Security Act of 1950, passed during the McCarthy era. Then-President Harry Truman vetoed the Internal Security Act of 1950, but Congress overrode the veto.

As Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald wrote [4], the Internal Security Act:
authorized the imprisonment of Communists and other "subversives" without the necessity of full trials or due process (many of the most egregious provisions of that bill were repealed by the 1971 Non-Detention Act, and are now being rejuvenated by these "war on terror" policies of indefinite detention). President Obama, needless to say, is not Harry Truman. He's not even the Candidate Obama of 2008, who repeatedly insisted that due process and security were not mutually exclusive, and who condemned indefinite detention as "black hole" injustice.
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IN THE New York Times, Andrew Rosenthal wrote [5], "It's stunning that the president is willing to sign a bill that might effectively turn the right of habeas corpus into a mere privilege--even for citizens."
But it's not so "stunning" once you compare this measure with the Democrats' record on civil liberties over the past several years--from capitulation to the Bush administration on the USA PATRIOT Act and similar abuses to their own measures during the Obama years.

Beyond Obama's failure to honor his promise to close the U.S. prison camp at Guantánamo Bay--thus embracing the idea of indefinite detention of foreign nationals suspected of terrorism--his administration has overseen a vast expansion of executive power and attacks on rights that includes: failing to prosecute war crimes, whether committed by U.S. soldiers or former Bush administration officials; continuing the use of warantless surveillance; actively prosecuting Bradley Manning and other whistleblowers who have exposed war crimes; carrying out unlawful detentions on U.S. soil [6] and repressive, illegal treatment of those accused of "materially aiding" terrorists; massively expanding the use of unmanned drones to attack and kill so-called "terrorists" (and, often, innocent civilians who happen to get in the way); carrying out extra-judicial assassinations of foreign nationals and at least one U.S. citizen (Anwar al-Awlaki); defending the right of the president to do so free from oversight by invoking "state secrets"; continuing the prosecution of Arabs and Muslims in the U.S. on the flimsiest of evidence for crimes like "material support" of terrorism.
In other words, the Obama administration has shown its willingness at every step to trample civil liberties in the service of expanding executive power--and justify it by invoking the "war on terror."

Obama did attach a "signing statement" to the NDAA, proclaiming that he doesn't wantto use the massive power which he was granting to not only his own, but to successor, administrations. "I have signed this bill despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation and prosecution of suspected terrorists," he wrote.

But then why enshrine such heinous power into law? The answer is that Obama is only too happy to have such a weapon at his disposal.

Even more laughable was Obama's assertion that his administration's so-called accomplishments in the "war on terror" have "respected the values that make our country an example for the world."

Maybe an example of the ruthless pursuit of power. But not respect for civil liberties or human rights.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THE QUESTION some might be asking is how Obama--the former law professor who promised to uphold the rule of law and protect civil liberties--could have so fully embraced the policies he has?
The answer isn't a personal failing on Obama's part, but that he and the Democratic Party are as committed as the Republicans to expanding and upholding U.S. power around the globe as the Republicans. Part of ensuring that is strengthening of the national security state to silence and repress any perceived threats to that power--whether at home or abroad.

In the 1950s, such attacks were aimed at socialists and communists. Today, the Obama administration claims its repressive laws are aimed at "terrorists." But combined with developments like an expansion of FBI spying [7], they can and will be used to silence dissent at home.
Consider Obama's former chief of staff and the current mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel. In preparation for planned protests against the NATO/G8 summit in Chicago in May, Emanuel is seeking permanent changes to city ordinances that would: raise fees for violations of parade regulations from the current $50 to a minimum of $1,000 per violation; double fines for protesters accused of resisting or obstructing police; restrict to two hours the time period for permitted demonstrations; restrict gatherings at public parks and beaches; and allow Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy to "deputize law enforcement personnel" and forge agreements with state, federal and local law enforcement agencies.
Or remember the many instances over the past months in which peaceful Occupy protesters were harassed, beaten, pepper-sprayed and summarily arrested from coast to coast--for even attempting to exercise their right to speak out against the system.

Far from being the exception, this is how the state operates in a bourgeois democracy. Violence and coercion are used when necessary, and stated principles of democracy are continuously undermined, regardless of which party is in charge.

We're encouraged to believe that the state stands above society as an impartial arbiter. But at heart, the state in a capitalist society protects those at the top--the 1 percent whose wealth dominates and directs the way the state is run.
The war on our rights at home is connected to U.S. wars abroad--and the pursuit of U.S. imperial interests around the globe.

Politicians from both sides of the aisle will claim to support and uphold the Constitution, but as soon as ordinary people begin to exercise our constitutional rights and agitate for change in a way that might actually impact the system, our "rights" become expendable.

That's why Obama's decision to sign the NDAA into law was not surprising in the end. But it's important in the coming months for activists to hold Obama accountable for his actions.

As Jonathan Turley rightly points out [8], beyond Obama's specific shredding of civil liberties, there is a broader danger--that those who might otherwise speak out against such measures will keep quiet because the Republicans, on the surface, seem so much more awful:

[P]erhaps the biggest blow to civil liberties is what [Obama] has done to the movement itself. It has quieted to a whisper, muted by the power of Obama's personality and his symbolic importance as the first Black president as well as the liberal who replaced Bush...In time, the election of Barack Obama may stand as one of the single most devastating events in our history for civil liberties.
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Published by the International Socialist Organization.
Material on this Web site is licensed by SocialistWorker.org, under a Creative Commons (by-nc-nd 3.0) [9] 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/department/Opinion/Editorials
[2] http://jonathanturley.org/2012/01/02/final-curtain-obama-signs-indefinite-detention-of-citizens-into-law-as-final-act-of-2011/
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/opinion/politics-over-principle.html
[4] http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/obama_to_sign_indefinite_detention_bill_into_law/singleton/
[5] http://loyalopposition.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/more-rubble-from-the-military-detention-cave-in/
[6] http://www.thenation.com/article/165334/unlawful-detention-us-soil
[7] http://socialistworker.org/2011/06/22/picking-up-where-bush-left
[8] http://articles.latimes.com/2011/sep/29/opinion/la-oe-turley-civil-liberties-20110929
[9] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0

Negativity in Hegel and Freud

Good Interview from 2004

http://www.believermag.com/issues/200407/?read=interview_zizek

I. WHY STALINISM WAS MORE
PERVERSE THAN NAZISM

THE BELIEVER: You have raised many eyebrows with your controversial rethinking of today’s accepted positions in philosophy. For example, you have said that Stalinism is worse than Nazism, despite the grand spectacle of the Holocaust. Can you describe your interest in Stalin here and why you think that his regime is a greater problem philosophically than Nazism?

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: It was typical in philosophy after World War II to evoke Nazism and the Holocaust as the most radical evil. You cannot comprehend it with any rational strategy. The idea is also that the experience of the Holocaust is something which undermines the entire traditional philosophy, which was basically the divine regulation, the idea that even if things appear thwarted, failed, and so on, ultimately, in some kind of rational totality, all of these tragedies are relativized as part of a harmonious project. It can be a divine plan; it can also be the development of humanity or whatever. The idea is that the Holocaust cannot be rationalized philosophically here.

Of course, I think that the Holocaust was horrific (my god, it is gross to even have to say that), but for me, Stalinism was even a greater philosophical problem than Nazism. For example, there is a basic difference between Stalinist and Nazi victim status, from a simple phenomenological approach. Under Nazism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed, no questions asked, you had nothing to prove. You are guilty for who you are, you are a Jew, you are killed, that’s it. Under Stalinism, of course, most [victims] were on trial for false accusations; most of them were not traitors. Nonetheless, there is one interesting feature: that they were tortured or through some kind of blackmail forced to confess to being traitors.

BLVR: So your line of questioning is of the functioning of the system?

SŽ: Yes. Why this strange need to make them confess? And why the total absence of this in Fascism? In Fascism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed. Nobody had the idea of arresting Jews and torturing them to confess the Jewish plot. Because in Fascism, you are guilty for your whole being. The very fact that you had to confess makes Stalinism paradoxical and perverse. The idea is that, in a strange way, it admits that you are still a free human being, you had a choice. You are guilty, you have to confess. This does not make Stalinism cause any less suffering; nonetheless, this pure quarrel of radical objectivization, “You are a Jew, you are guilty for who you are,” was absent in Stalinism. In a totally perverted, thwarted, and twisted way, some margin of human freedom was acknowledged under Stalin. So the result is that in Stalinism, everybody was potentially a victim in a totally contingent way.

BLVR: So your interest is not to forget Nazism, but to reexamine Stalinism.

SŽ: To put it in simplistic terms, Fascism is relatively easy to explain. It is a reactionary phenomenon. Nazism was some bad guys having some bad ideas and unfortunately succeeding in realizing them. In Stalinism the tragedy is that its origin is some kind of radical emancipatory project. In the origins you had a kind of workers’ uprising; the true enigma is how this project of emancipation went so wrong. This is a much greater enigma. The most representative orientation of Marxism in the twentieth century—critical theory of the Frankfurt school—obsessed over Fascism, anti-Semitism, and so on, and simply ignored the topic of Stalinism. Sure, there are a couple of small books, but there is no systematic theory of what Stalinism is. So for me, the key phenomenon to be accounted for in the twentieth century is Stalinism. Because again, Fascism is simple, conservative reaction going wrong. The true enigma is why Stalinism or communism went wrong.

BLVR: Any conclusions?

SŽ: It is very difficult; I am still working on it. My conclusions are not some kind of conservative or liberal vision according to which Stalinism should be pointed out as kind of a logical demonstration of any project of our so-called post-political era: the idea that the time for projects is over, all we can do is accept capitalist world-market economy, globalism, and so on. Today, whenever somebody tries to risk something politically, you immediately get, “Oh, didn’t you learn the lesson from history, this will end up in Holocaust.” This is the eternal topic of modern liberal-conservative skeptics, that the lesson of the twentieth century is that every radical attempt at social change ends up in mass murder. Their idea is a return to pragmatism, “Let’s strictly distinguish politics from ethics, politics should be limited, pragmatic, only ethics can be absolute.” What I aim at in my rethinking of all of these problems is precisely not to draw this conclusion.

II: THE END OF LIBERAL MODESTY

BLVR: So you obviously strongly disagree with this liberal reading of the ideology behind World War II. This leads me to think about how in your work you are known to criticize liberalism, as it is manifested in political correctness, pragmatism, American academia, etc. So would this be your criticism of this way of thinking?

SŽ: First of all, I don’t have any big problems with liberalism. Originally, liberalism was quite a noble project if one looks at how it emerged. Today it is a quite fashionable criticism, with feminists, anti-Eurocentric thinkers, etc., to dismiss liberalism in principle for preaching the equality of all people, but in reality privileging the white males of certain property, addressing automatic limitations.

The next usual accusation is that liberalism is ultimately founded in what the American moral-majority religious Right likes to call secular humanism: the idea is that there is no Supreme Being or mystery in the universe. Their criticism is that this idea—that the ultimate prospect of humankind is to take over as master of his own destiny—is man’s arrogance, criticizing that it always misfires and so on.

First, I don’t think it is as simple as that, for two reasons. It is a historic fact that at the beginning, the idea of human rights and all of those liberal notions, effectively in a coded way implied the exclusion of certain people. Nonetheless, in this tension between appearance and reality (appearance: everyone has human rights; reality: many, through an implicit set of sub-rules, are excluded), a certain tension is set in motion where you cannot simply say that appearance is just a mask of the reality of oppression. Appearance acquired a social emancipatory power of its own. For example, of course at the beginning, women were excluded, but then very early on, women said, “Sorry, why not also us?” Then blacks said, “Why not us?” And workers, and so on. My point being that all of these groups that criticize liberalism emerged out of these early bourgeois liberal traditions. It set certain rules—this tradition of universality of human rights and so on—and in this way it opened up the space. So that is the first thing to say for liberalism.

BLVR: So even though liberalism was started by a limited few, built inside of it is the ability for all others to use it to their benefit?

SŽ: Yes. The second thing to say for liberalism is that originally it was not an arrogant attitude, but it was quite a modest, honest attitude of confronting the problem of religious tolerance after the Thirty Years’ War. In the seventeenth century, all of Europe was in a shock, and then out of this traumatic experience, the liberal vision came. The idea was that each of us has some existential or religious beliefs, but even if these are our fundamental commitments, we will not be killing each other for them. To create a coexistent social structure, a space where these inherently different commitments can be practiced. Again, I don’t see anything inherently bad in this project.

BLVR: Neither do I. But last year I attended a lecture you gave in which you vehemently attacked liberalism. Can you help clarify this for me?

SŽ: The problem that I find today, with liberalism, not economic liberalism, but radical human-rights liberalism, is the philosophical approach. The saddest thing to happen in the last thirty years is the loss of the belief that we had in communism, and even in the social-democratic welfare states of the West, the accepted fact that the fate of humanity is not simply an anonymous fate. This belief that some blind fate does not control us, that it is possible, through human collective action, to steer development, is gone. I think what happened in recent years is that this logic of blind fate returned. Global capitalism is simply accepted as a fact that you cannot do anything about. The only question is, Will you accommodate yourself to it, or will you be dismissed and excluded? A certain type of question, and it needn’t be put in the old-fashioned Marxist way as class struggle, but the general anticapitalist question, basically has disappeared.

BLVR: Generally speaking, yes. But I disagree, as would I think a number of others, that everyone accepts global capitalism. What about the antiglobalism movements that have been taking place all over the world in the last decade? Seattle, Genoa, etc. What do you think of these groups?

SŽ: Now with the antiglobalism movement, they are still, in a limited way, reemerging. But the idea is that the fundamental conflicting areas are no longer those of vertical up-vs.-down social struggle, but more horizontal differences between me and you, between different social groups: the problem of tolerance; the problem of tolerance of other races, religious minorities, and so on. So then the basic problem becomes that of tolerating differences. I am not saying this is bad, of course we should fight for this, but I don’t think that this horizon—within which the ultimate ethical value is then that of tolerating difference—is the fundamental place for question. My problem with liberalism is in principle. This move of the new Left, or new radicals, towards a problem of identity politics (minority politics, gay rights, etc.) lacks a certain more radical insight into the basically antagonistic character of society. This radical questioning has simply disappeared.

For example, take my friend Judith Butler. Of course from time to time, she pays lip service to some kind of anticapitalism, but it’s totally abstract, what it’s basically saying is just how lesbians and other oppressed sexual minorities should perceive their situation not as the assertion of some kind of substantial sexual identity, but as constructing an identity which is contingent, which means that also the so-called straight normal sexuality is contingent, and everybody is constructed in a contingent way, and so on, and in this way, nobody should be excluded. There is no big line between normality identity and multiple roles. The problem I see here is that there is nothing inherently anticapitalist in this logic.

But even worse is that what this kind of politically correct struggling for tolerance and so on advocates is basically not only not in conflict with the modern tendencies of global capitalism, but it fits perfectly. What I think is that today’s capitalism thrives on differences. I mean even naïve positivist psychologists propose to describe today’s subjectivity in terms like multiple subject, fixed-identity subject, a subject who constantly reinvents itself, and so on. So my big problem with this is the painting of the enemy as some kind of self-identified stable substantial patriarch to which these multiple identities and constant reinventing should be opposed. I think that this is a false problem; I am not impressed by this problem. I think that this is a certain logic, totally within the framework of today’s capitalism, where again, capitalism, in order to reproduce itself, to function in today’s condition of consumption society, the crazy dynamics of the market, no longer needs or can function with the traditional fixed patriarchal subject. It needs a subject constantly reinventing himself.

III: ORGANIC FOOD, NEW-AGE
SPIRITUALITY, AND NEW CARS

BLVR: OK, so you think that these antiglobalist movements aren’t asking the right questions and this can be really dangerous. I can see what you’re saying. This reminds me of the example that you gave in On Belief about the health-food market. How purchasing organic food, though seemingly good in intention, can really be a bad thing because of how it is appropriated. Can you explain what you meant by that?

SŽ: More and more crucial today are specialized markets, and in this sense, I think that it’s even more interesting to see how trends which were originally meant to be subversive or critical can be perfectly reappropriated and sold for consumption. Ecological food, organic food, green products, and so on—this is one of the key niche markets today. Let’s take a typical guy who buys organic food: he doesn’t really buy it in order to be healthy; he buys it to regain a kind of solidarity as the one who really cares about nature. He buys a certain ideological stance. It’s the same way as if you have stonewashed jeans, you don’t really buy it for the jeans, but you buy it to project a certain image of your social identity. So again, you are not buying a product, you are buying a certain social status, ideology, and so on.

BLVR: Does this also include your model of “Western Buddhism” as new-age philosophy being a product that can be purchased in capitalism (true Buddhism not being able to exist outside of the East)?

SŽ: Yes, you know why? Because this basic Buddhist insight that there is no permanent self, permanent subject, just events and so on, in an ironic way perfectly mirrors this idea that products are not essential, essential is this freedom of how you consume products and the idea that the market should no longer focus on the product. It is no longer: this car has this quality blah blah blah. No, it’s what you will do with the car. They are trying as directly as possible to sell you experiences, i.e. what you are able to do with the car, not the car as a product itself. An extreme example of this is this existing economic marketing concept, which basically evaluates the value of you as a potential consumer of your own life. Like how much are you worth, in the sense of all you will spend to buy back your own life as a certain quality life. You will spend so much in doctors, so much in beauty, so much in transcendental meditation, so much for music, and so on. What you are buying is a certain image and practice of your life. So what is your market potential, as a buyer of your own life in this sense?

BLVR: OK, so ironically, when Westerners buy into a Buddhist mentality, then they set themselves up to be perfect consumers in contemporary capitalism. It is kind of sad and funny at the same time. While looking for spirituality or God, they become ideal consumers to marketing executives. Sounds like science fiction.

IV: THE DANGERS OF EASTERN
SPIRITUALITY IN THE WEST AND
THE REVOLUTION OF ST. PAUL’S
CHRISTIANITY, ALL THROUGH
THE EYES OF AN ATHEIST.

BLVR: Do you believe in God?

SŽ: No, I am a complete atheist.

BLVR: Your book The Puppet and the Dwarf deals with St. Paul. In fact, it celebrates St. Paul’s Christianity in contrast to other forms of spirituality, i.e. gnosticism, new-age spiritualities, etc. So why would an atheist defend Christianity?

SŽ: Today, spirituality is fashionable. Either some pagan spirituality of tolerance, feminine principle, holistic approach against phallocentric Western imperialist logic or, within the Western tradition, we have a certain kind of rehabilitation of Judaism, respect for otherness, and so on. Or you are allowed to do Christianity, but you must do a couple of things which are permitted. One is to be for these repressed traditions, the early Gnostic gospels or some mystical sects where a different nonhegemonic/patriarchal line was discernible. Or you return to the original Christ, which is against St. Paul. The idea is that St. Paul was really bad, he changed Christianity into this patriarchal state, but Jesus, himself, was something different.

What I like is to see the emancipatory potential in institutionalized Christianity. Of course, I don’t mean state religion, but I mean the moment of St. Paul. I find a couple of things in it. The idea of the Gospel, or good news, was a totally different logic of emancipation, of justice, of freedom. For example, within a pagan attitude, injustice means a disturbance of the natural order. In ancient Hinduism, or even with Plato, justice was defined in what today we would call almost fascistic terms, each in his or her place in a just order. Man is the benevolent father of the family, women do their job taking care of the family, worker does his work and so on. Each at his post; then injustice means this hubris when one of the elements wants to be born, i.e. instead of in a paternal way, taking care of his population, the king just thinks about his power and how to exploit it. And then in a violent way, balance should be reestablished, or to put it in more abstract cosmological terms, you have cosmic principles like yin and yang. Again, it is the imbalance that needs to establish organic unities. Connected with this is the idea of justice as paying the price as the preexisting established order is balanced.

But the message that the Gospel sends is precisely the radical abandonment of this idea of some kind of natural balance; the idea of Gospels and the part of sins is that freedom is zero. We begin from the zero point, which is at least originally the point of radical equality. Look at what St. Paul is writing and the metaphors he used. It is messianic, the end of time, differences are suspended. It’s a totally different world whose formal structure is that of radical revolution. Even in ancient Greece, you don’t find that—this idea that the world can be turned on its head, that we are not irreducibly bound by the chains of our past. The past can be erased; we can start from the zero point and establish radical justice, so this logic is basically the logic of emancipation. Which is again why I find any flirting with so-called new-age spiritualities extremely dangerous. It is good to know the other side of the story, at least, when you speak about Buddhism and all of these spiritualities. I am sorry, but Nazis did it all. For Hitler, the Bhagavad Gita was a sacred book; he carried it in his pocket all the time. In Nazi Germany there were three institutes for Tibetan studies and five for the study of different sects of Buddhism.

BLVR: That is a really interesting point. I’m not religious at all, but when it comes to religions, I’ve always really distrusted new-age spiritualities.

SŽ: I agree. So let’s at least be clear of where in the West this fascination with Eastern spirituality originated. Of course when I advocate Christian legacy, I make it very clear that this legacy today is not alive in the Catholic or any Christian Church. Here I am kind of a vulgar Stalinist; churches should either be destroyed or turned into cultural homes or museums for religious horrors [laughs]. No no no, it’s not that, but nonetheless, a certain logic of radical emancipation exploded there. And all original emancipatory movements stopped there. This should be admitted. So the point is not to return to the Church, to rehabilitate Christianity, but to keep this certain revolutionary logic alive. I mean this is the good news that the Gospel means: you can do it, take the risk.

V: IDENTIFICATION WITH FICTIONAL
MOVIES, WITH MURDERS

BLVR: So then is your problem with the rest of Christianity the ideology of institutionalized religion?

SŽ: This is not ideology. Ideology for me is a very specific term. Ideology, in a classical Marxist way, has nothing to do with what we usually take as an ideological project. The project of radically changing social orders, this is not, per se, ideology. The most conformist, modest empirical attitude can be ideology. Ideology is a certain unique experience of the universe and your place in it, to put it in standard terms, which serves the production of the existing power relations and blah blah blah. I claim that the minimum necessary structuring ingredient of every ideology is to distance itself from another ideology, to denounce its other as ideology. Every ideology does this. Which is why, the worst ideology today is post-ideology, where they claim we are entering a new pragmatic era, negotiations, plural interests, no longer time for big ideological projects.

BLVR: So even post-ideology is ideological?

SŽ: For me, ideology is defined only by how the coordinates of your meaningful experience of the world, and your place within society, relate to the basic tensions and antagonisms of social orders. Which is why for me no attitude is a priori ideological. You can be an extreme materialist, thinking that economic development ultimately determines everything; then you are truly ideological. You can be a fanatical millennialist religious mystic, and you are, in a certain way, not outside of ideology. Your position can be that of perfectly describing the data and nonetheless your point is ideological.

For example, I would like to use the wonderful model of Lacan. Let’s say that you are married and you are pathologically jealous, thinking that your wife is sleeping around with other men. And let’s say that you are totally right, she is cheating. Lacan says that your jealousy is still pathological. Even if everything is true it is pathological, because what makes it pathological is not the fact that is it true or not true, but why you invest so much in it—what needs does it fulfill? It’s the same with the Jews and the Nazis. It is not a question that they attributed false properties to the Jews; the point is why did the Nazis need the figure of the Jew as part of their ideological project? It is clear why: their project was to have capitalism without individualism, without tensions, capitalism which would magically maintain what they thought previous eras shared, a sense of organic community and so on, so in order to have this, you must locate the source of evil not in capitalism as such, but in some foreign intruder, that through its profiteering just introduces imbalance and disturbs the natural cooperation between productive capital and labor.

BLVR: So there is no escaping ideology? We are always participating in it?

SŽ: I would say that this just brings about a certain tendency that was here all the time. Like if I go to a more general phenomenon like reality TV, the lesson of it is much more ambiguous, because the charm of it is a certain hidden reflexivity. It is not that we are voyeurs looking at what people are really doing. The point is that we know that they know that they are being filmed. The true reality TV would be to plant cameras and really shoot people unaware of their being watched.

BLVR: That exists already.

SŽ: I wonder if they would be able to go beyond that level, because it’s basically the same as snuff movies. I claim that the way we identify with fictional movies, with murders, is not that we identify it, no: the awareness that it’s not true is part of our identification. Even when we cry and so on. Because, imagine watching a detective story, and someone is shot. If you were to learn that he was really shot, it would ruin your identification with the story. There was this Polish movie from the mid-sixties, a historical spectacle about a pharaoh that has a scene where they sacrifice a horse. And the way that it is shot, they throw lances at the horse, and you can see bleeding. It’s obvious that they are really killing the horse. And it was a dramatic point, people in Poland protested, people in the West didn’t want to see the movie. So you see how much more refined identification in the movie is.

BLVR: We have a strong identification with fiction.

SŽ: My point is this: the problem is that of acting. I think that there is only one radical conclusion here, with reality soaps, that we are seeing people acting themselves. And the conclusion that I would draw is that it is not so much that it is fake, but that in everyday lives, we act already, in the sense that we have a certain ideal image of ourselves and we act that persona.

VI: NOSTALGIA AND
IRRATIONAL POWER

BLVR: What do you think of the fact that California has an actor for governor?

SŽ: What I would like to avoid here is precisely this cheap conservative cultural criticism that this shows the decadence of our times. As if at some point politicians were substantially better—I don’t believe that. The fact that Bush is president is worse for me, because he is not even a good actor, and probably not much more intelligent. You never know what will happen. Schwarzenegger has advisors around him and they may give him good advice. I never quite agreed with the simple dismissal that there is no substance; when was there substance in politicians? The duty of a politician for me is to be a representative: a politician is not an expert, experts are experts, hired for their expertise and so on. A politician is more of…

BLVR: An actor that mediates?

SŽ: Yes, there is a dimension of identification of a master figure and so on. And for all that, it doesn’t matter if an actor does it. The problem for me is not that Schwarzenegger is governor, but the extent to which even politicians who are not actors are functioning like actors. But even this I am tempted not to simply dismiss as a bad phenomenon. Here I agree with Habermas, who made a very intelligent remark. It’s not so much that times are worse today, but that imperceptibly our standards are higher. For example, we don’t have feminism today because women are exploited only today, but they became much more sensitive to it today. The paradox is the following one, if you look, for example, at the typical genesis of a revolution: the terror never became so bad that the people exploded. No, it was always a kind of spiritual revolution, which raised the standards. And then usually those in power began to lose their nerves and accept these new standards silently. Out of this loss of legitimization, it exploded.

For example, recently I read a wonderful text by Bernard Williams that deals with David Mamet’s Oleanna, the harassment play, that made a nice point. If you look closely, Mamet is a little more refined than people usually think. The point is not that the young student is complaining about harassment, but that what she is complaining about is that she came to him as a student, she wanted guidance from him and so on. And basically, he was too liberal, not giving her any authentic guidance as an authority, and precisely because he renounced his authority, his power which remained as a professor appeared as irrational power. So paradoxically, it is precisely when the professor renounces his standard authority and behaves like we are all the same that, between the lines, he keeps his power (he can grade you and so on). At the moment when he pretends to be tolerant, you experience his power in all of its irrationality.

BLVR: That’s like your example of the employee and the boss. You said that when the boss claims to be buddies with the employee, he is actually exploiting the employee more, in that he is covering up all of his power, though in actuality, it still exists.

SŽ: Yes, these are the problems for me. The fact that something appears as irrational unjustified power, it’s not simply that it’s horrible authority. It is precisely when authority declines and you have the first steps towards a more equal tolerant attitude. So again, my lesson here is kind of a pessimistic one, but not pessimistic in the sense that nothing can be done. Pessimistic in the sense that maybe the first step towards really opening up the space to change something is to admit the extent to which there is no easy way out, nothing can be simply changed. Often, the worst way to become prisoner of a system is to have a dream that things may turn better, there is always the possibility of change. Because it is precisely this secret dream that keeps you enslaved to the system.

At this level, I quite liked a modest movie, The Shawshank Redemption. The guy who doesn’t accept that he is in prison and dreams to get out, when he is let out, he hangs himself. And the guys who accept that they are really there, they are the ones who can really break out. So there are alternatives and in alternatives, a certain sense of false opening, in that it’s not necessarily so bad, maybe luck is around the corner, we can change things; those are the ideal ideological tools to keep you enslaved. The system functions through the idea that it can be changed at any point. So maybe the first step is to see that it can’t be changed, that it’s pretty closed.

VII: LACAN AND
FASHION CATALOGUES

BLVR: I would like to go back to the problem of people acting as personas of themselves. This sounds very Lacanian, in the sense that we do not experience the world directly, but by interpretation. The real is itself, mediated (in this case through acting as a persona). Could you describe for me your basic insight into Lacan’s work and what you think is his idea of philosophy?

SŽ: Lacan was a French psychoanalytic theorist, who despised philosophy officially. For Lacan, the discourse of philosophy is of a complete worldview which fills in all of the gaps and cracks. And Lacan’s idea is that precisely what we learn in psychoanalysis is how cracks and inconsistencies are constitutive of our lives. So officially he was against philosophy, but the paradox is that Lacan was constantly in dialogue with philosophy. In his work, there are even more references to Plato and Hegel than to Freud himself.

BLVR: So even though Lacan didn’t want to define the world concretely, he was a kind of philosopher himself?

SŽ: Obviously, Lacan was playing philosophy against itself. The idea being very simply that in our experience of the reality of the world, we always stumble upon some fundamental crack, incompleteness. What appears as an obstacle, the fact that we cannot ever really know things, is for Lacan itself a positive condition of meaning. There is a kernel of philosophy here, what philosophers call ontological difference; this is this experience of a rupture as a fundamental constituent of our lives. So to cut a long story short, for Lacan (and I try to further develop this idea, based on his insight), to properly grasp what Freud was aiming at with the death drive (the fundamental libidinal stance of the human individual for self-sabotaging; the basic idea of psychoanalysis is the pursuit of unhappiness, people do everything possible not to be happy), is to read it against the background of negativity, a gap as fundamental to human subjectivity, so in other words to philosophize psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis in this way is no longer just a psychiatric science which develops a theory of how we can cure certain diseases; it’s kind of a mental and philosophical theory of the utmost radical dimensions of human beings.

BLVR: So Lacan was reading Freud’s death drive, the desire to self-destruct, as a good thing, philosophically speaking. Incompleteness and cracks, themselves being the place where difference is created.

SŽ: Exactly.

BLVR: You wrote some Lacanian-style quotations for last fall’s Abercrombie & Fitch catalog. How did that come about?

SŽ: Oh yes, I was helping someone who helped me once. It was easy, he sent me a series of provocative images, and I just wrote silly Lacanian statements about them. My critics have attacked me, saying how can you conscientiously accept money from such a company? I said, with less guilt than accepting money from the American university system.

Congress is Signing its own Arrest Warrants

How Congress is Signing its own Arrest Warrants in the NDAA Citizen Arrest Bill
Naomi Wolf

http://naomiwolf.org/2011/12/how-congress-is-signing-its-own-arrest-warrants-in-the-ndaa-citizen-arrest-bill/

I never thought I would have to write this: but—incredibly—Congress has now passed the National Defense Appropriations Act, with Amendment 1031, which allows for the military detention of American citizens. The amendment is so loosely worded that any American citizen could be held without due process. The language of this bill can be read to assure Americans that they can challenge their detention — but most people do not realize what this means: at Guantanamo and in other military prisons, one’s lawyer’s calls are monitored, witnesses for one’s defense are not allowed to testify, and one can be forced into nudity and isolation. Incredibly, ninety-three Senators voted to support this bill and now most of Congress: a roster of names that will live in infamy in the history of our nation, and never be expunged from the dark column of the history books.

They may have supported this bill because—although it’s hard to believe—they think the military will only arrest active members of Al Qaida; or maybe, less naively, they believe that ‘at most’, low-level dissenting figures, activists, or troublesome protesters might be subjected to military arrest. But they are forgetting something critical: history shows that those who signed this bill will soon be subject to arrest themselves.

Our leaders appear to be supporting this bill thinking that they will always be what they are now, in the fading light of a once-great democracy — those civilian leaders who safely and securely sit in freedom and DIRECT the military. In inhabiting this bubble, which their own actions are about to destroy, they are cocooned by an arrogance of power, placing their own security in jeopardy by their own hands, and ignoring history and its inevitable laws. The moment this bill becomes law, though Congress is accustomed, in a weak democracy, to being the ones who direct and control the military, the power roles will reverse: Congress will no longer be directing and in charge of the military: rather, the military will be directing and in charge of individual Congressional leaders, as well as in charge of everyone else — as any Parliamentarian in any society who handed this power over to the military can attest.

Perhaps Congress assumes that it will always only be ‘they’ who are targeted for arrest and military detention: but sadly, Parliamentary leaders are the first to face pressure, threats, arrest and even violence when the military obtains to power to make civilian arrests and hold civilians in military facilities without due process. There is no exception to this rule. Just as I traveled the country four years ago warning against the introduction of torture and secret prisons – and confidently offering a hundred thousand dollar reward to anyone who could name a nation that allowed torture of the ‘other’ that did not eventually turn this abuse on its own citizens — (confident because I knew there was no such place) — so today I warn that one cannot name a nation that gave the military the power to make civilian arrests and hold citizens in military detention, that did not almost at once turn that power almost against members of that nation’s own political ruling class. This makes sense — the obverse sense of a democracy, in which power protects you; political power endangers you in a militarized police state: the more powerful a political leader is, the more can be gained in a militarized police state by pressuring, threatening or even arresting him or her.

Mussolini, who created the modern template for fascism, was a duly elected official when he started to direct paramilitary forces against Italian citizens: yes, he sent the Blackshirts to beat up journalists, editors, and union leaders; but where did these militarized groups appear most dramatically and terrifyingly, snapping at last the fragile hold of Italian democracy? In the halls of the Italian Parliament. Whom did they physically attack and intimidate? Mussolini’s former colleagues in Parliament — as they sat, just as our Congress is doing, peacefully deliberating and debating the laws. Whom did Hitler’s Brownshirts arrest in the first wave of mass arrests in 1933? Yes, journalists, union leaders and editors; but they also targeted local and regional political leaders and dragged them off to secret prisons and to torture that the rest of society had turned a blind eye to when it had been directed at the ‘other.’ Who was most at risk from assassination or arrest and torture, after show trials, in Stalin’s Russia? Yes, journalists, editors and dissidents: but also physically endangered, and often arrested by militarized police and tortured or worse, were senior members of the Politburo who had fallen out of favor.

Is this intimidation and arrest by the military a vestige of the past? Hardly. We forget in America that all over the world there are militarized societies in which shells of democracy are propped up — in which Parliament meets regularly and elections are held, but the generals are really in charge, just as the Egyptian military is proposing with upcoming elections and the Constitution itself. That is exactly what will take place if Congress gives the power of arrest and detention to the military: and in those societies if a given political leader does not please the generals, he or she is in physical danger or subjected to military arrest. Whom did John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, say he was directed to intimidate and threaten when he worked as a ‘jackal’, putting pressure on the leadership in authoritarian countries? Latin American parliamentarians who were in the position to decide the laws that affected the well-being of his corporate clients. Who is under house arrest by the military in Myanmar? The political leader of the opposition to the military junta. Malalai Joya is an Afghani parliamentarian who has run afoul of the military and has to sleep in a different venue every night — for her own safety. An on, and on, in police states — that is, countries with military detention of civilians — that America is about to join.

US Congresspeople and Senators may think that their power protects them from the treacherous wording of Amendments 1031 and 1032: but their arrogance is leading them to a blindness that is suicidal. The moment they sign this NDAA into law, history shows that they themselves and their staff are the most physically endangered by it. They will immediately become, not the masters of the great might of the United States military, but its subjects and even, if history is any guide — and every single outcome of ramping up police state powers, unfortunately, that I have warned for years that history points to, has come to pass — sadly but inevitably, its very first targets.
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