[Reader-list] anti-war campaign

[Rana Dasgupta]

Thanks Jeebesh for great posting.  The discourse about
this conflict seems to fall naturally into the kind of
binary oppositions that the US is often blamed for
("are you with us or are you with Bin Laden?").  

--there are pacifists and humanists that think
powerful nation states should not engage in force and
emphasise the deleterious effects of US imperialism.

--there are those who think that nothing is an excuse
for terrorism and call for punishment for the hatred
and cruelty inherent in the attack.

causation is simplistic in both models.  the former is
more credible to me just because its model of
causation is bigger and more historical.  but by
giving all power to the US - even in creating its own
nemesis - it erases lots of other histories, and is
therefore a characteristically american approach.

we need to complicate such appeals to first movers
that are held to explain everything.  i think the
zizek essay (attached) is one attempt to do this which
is of great relevance to the current moment.  he says
(with respect to kosovo):

>However, what if one should reject this double
>blackmail (if you are against NATO strikes, you are
>for Milosevic's proto-Fascist regime of ethnic
>cleansing, and if you are against Milosevic, you
>support the global capitalist New World Order)? What
>if this very opposition between enlightened
>international intervention against ethnic
>fundamentalists, and the heroic last pockets of
>resistance against the New World Order, is a false
>one? 

enjoy, and comment.

R

^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^

Slavoj Zizek: AGAINST THE DOUBLE BLACKMAIL

(You can also catch this at
http://www.lacan.com/kosovo.htm)
 
The top winner in the contest for the greatest blunder
of 1998 was a Latin-American patriotic terrorist who
sent a bomb letter to a US consulate in order to
protest against the American interfering into the
local politics. As a conscientious citizen, he wrote
on the envelope his return address; however, he did
not put enough stamps on it, so that the post returned
the letter to him. Forgetting what he put in it, he
opened it and blew himself to death - a perfect
example of how, ultimately, a letter always arrives at
its destination. And is not something quite similar
happening to the Slobodan Milosevic regime with the
recent NATO bombing? It is interesting to watch in the
last days the Serbian satellite state TV which targets
foreign public: no reports on atrocities in Kosovo,
refugees are mentioned only as people fleeing NATO
bombing, so that the overall idea is that Serbia, the
island of peace, the only place in ex-Yugoslavia that
was not touched by the war raging all around it, is
not irrationally attacked by the NATO madmen
destroying bridges and hospitals... For years,
Milosevic was sending bomb letters to his neighbors,
from the Albanians to Croatia and Bosnia, keeping
himself out of the conflict while igniting fire all
around Serbia - finally, his last letter returned to
him. Let us hope that the result of the NATO
intervention will be that Milosevic will be proclaimed
the political blunderer of the year.

And there is a kind of poetic justice in the fact that
the West finally intervened apropos of Kosovo - let us
not forget that it was there that it all began with
the ascension to power of Milosevic: this ascension
was legitimized by the promise to amend the
underprivileged situation of Serbia within the
Yugoslav federation, especially with regard to the
Albanian "separatism." Albanians were Milosevic's
first target; afterwards, he shifted his wrath onto
other Yugoslav republics (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia),
until, finally, the focus of the conflict returned to
Kosovo - as in a closed loop of Destiny, the arrow
returned to the one who lanced it by way of setting
free the spectre of ethnic passions. This is the key
point worth remembering: Yugoslavia did not start to
disintegrate when the Slovene "secession" triggered
the domino-effect (first Croatia, then Bosnia,
Macedonia...); it was already at the moment of
Milosevic's constitutional reforms in 1987, depriving
Kosovo and Vojvodina of their limited autonomy, that
the fragile balance on which Yugoslavia rested was
irretrievably disturbed. From that moment onwards,
Yugoslavia continued to live only because it didn't
yet notice it was already dead - it was like the
proverbial cat in the cartoons walking over the
precipice, floating in the air, and falling down only
when it becomes aware that it has no ground under its
feet... From Milosevic's seizure of power in Serbia
onwards, the only actual chance for Yugoslavia to
survive was to reinvent its formula: either Yugoslavia
under Serb domination or some form of radical
decentralization, from a loose confederacy to the full
sovereignty of its units. 

It is thus easy to praise the NATO bombing of
Yugoslavia as the first case of an intervention - not
into the confused situation of a civil war, but - into
a country with full sovereign power. Is it not
comforting to see the NATO forces intervene not for
any specific economico-strategic interests, but simply
because a country is cruelly violating the elementary
human rights of an ethnic group? Is not this the only
hope in our global era - to see some internationally
acknowledged force as a guarantee that all countries
will respect a certain minimum of ethical (and,
hopefully, also health, social, ecological) standards?
However, the situation is more complex, and this
complexity is indicated already in the way NATO
justifies its intervention: the violation of human
rights is always accompanied by the vague, but ominous
reference to "strategic interests." The story of NATO
as the enforcer of the respect for human rights is
thus only one of the two coherent stories that can be
told about the recent bombings of Yugoslavia, and the
problem is that each story has its own rationale. The
second story concerns the other side of the
much-praised new global ethical politics in which one
is allowed to violate the state sovereignty on behalf
of the violation of human rights. The first glimpse
into this other side is provided by the way the big
Western media selectively elevate some local "warlord"
or dictator into the embodiment of Evil: Sadam
Hussein, Milosevic, up to the unfortunate (now
forgotten) Aidid in Somalia - at every point, it is or
was "the community of civilized nations against...".
And on what criteria does this selection rely? Why
Albanians in Serbia and not also Palestinians in
Israel, Kurds in Turkey, etc.etc? Here, of course, we
enter the shady world of international capital and its
strategic interests. 

According to the "Project CENSORED," the top censored
story of 1998 was that of a half-secret international
agreement in working, called MAI (the Multilateral
Agreement on Investment). The primary goal of MAI will
be to protect the foreign interests of multinational
companies. The agreement will basically undermine the
sovereignty of nations by assigning power to the
corporations almost equal to those of the countries in
which these corporations are located. Governments will
no longer be able to treat their domestic firms more
favorably than foreign firms. Furthermore, countries
that do not relax their environmental, land-use and
health and labor standards to meet the demands of
foreign firms may be accused of acting illegally.
Corporations will be able to sue sovereign state if
they will impose too severe ecological or other
standards - under NAFTA (whic is the main model for
MAI), Ethyl Corporation is already suing Canada for
banning the use of its gasoline additive MMT. The
greatest threat is, of course, to the developing
nations which will be pressured into depleting their
natural resources for commercial exploitation. Renato
Ruggerio, director of the World Trade Organization,
the sponsor of MAI, is already hailing this project,
elaborated and discussed in a clandestine manner, with
almost no public discussion and media attention, as
the "constitution for a new global economy." And, in
the same way in which, already for Marx, market
relations provided the true foundation for the notion
of individual freedoms and rights, THIS is also the
obverse of the much-praised new global morality
celebrated even by some neoliberal philosophers as
signalling the beginning of the new era in which
international community will establish and enforce
some minimal code preventing sovereign state to engage
in crimes against humanity even within its own
territory. And the recent catastrophic economic
situation in Russia, far from being the heritage of
old Socialist mismanagement, is a direct result of
this global capitalist logic embodied in MAI. 

This other story also has its ominous military side.
The ultimate lesson of the last American military
interventions, from the Operation Desert Fox against
Iraq at the end of 1998 to the present bombing of
Yugoslavia, is that they signal a new era in military
history - battles in which the attacking force
operates under the constraint that it can sustain no
casualties. When the first stealth-fighter fell down
in Serbia, the emphasis of the American media was that
there were no casualties - the pilot was SAVED! (This
concept of "war without casualties" was elaborated by
General Collin Powell.) And was not the counterpoint
to it the almost surreal way CNN reported on the war:
not only was it presented as a TV event, but the Iraqi
themselves seem to treat it this way - during the day,
Bagdad was a "normal" city, with people going around
and following their business, as if war and
bombardment was an irreal nightmarish spectre that
occurred only during the night and did not take place
in effective reality? 

Let us recall what went on in the final American
assault on the Iraqi lines during the Gulf War: no
photos, no reports, just rumours that tanks with
bulldozer like shields in front of them rolled over
Iraqi trenches, simply burying thousands of troops in
earth and sand - what went on was allegedly considered
too cruel in its shere mechanical efficiency, too
different from the standard notion of a heroic face to
face combat, so that images would perturb too much the
public opinion and a total censorship black-out was
stritly imposed. Here we have the two aspects joined
together: the new notion of war as a purely
technological event, taking place behind radar and
computer screens, with no casualties, AND the extreme
physical cruelty too unbearable for the gaze of the
media - not the crippled children and raped women,
victims of caricaturized local ethnic "fundamentalist
warlords," but thousands of nameless soldiers, victims
of nameless efficient technological warfare. When Jean
Baudrillard made the claim that the Gulf War did not
take place, this statement could also be read in the
sense that such traumatic pictures that stand for the
Real of this war were totally censured... 

How, then, are we to think these two stories together,
without sacrificing the truth of each of them? What we
have here is a political example of the famous drawing
in which we recognize the contours either of a rabbit
head or of a goose head, depending on our mental
focus. If we look at the situation in a certain way,
we see the international community enforcing minimal
human rights standards on a nationalist neo-Communist
leader engaged in ethnic cleansing, ready to ruin his
own nation just to retain power. If we shift the
focus, we see NATO, the armed hand of the new
capitalist global order, defending the strategic
interests of the capital in the guise of a disgusting
travesty, posing as a disinterested enforcer of human
rights, attacking a sovereign country which, in spite
of the problematic nature of its regime, nonetheless
acts as an obstacle to the unbriddled assertion of the
New World Order. 

However, what if one should reject this double
blackmail (if you are against NATO strikes, you are
for Milosevic's proto-Fascist regime of ethnic
cleansing, and if you are against Milosevic, you
support the global capitalist New World Order)? What
if this very opposition between enlightened
international intervention against ethnic
fundamentalists, and the heroic last pockets of
resistance against the New World Order, is a false
one? What if phenomena like the Milosevic regime are
not the opposite to the New World Order, but rather
its SYMPTOM, the place at which the hidden TRUTH of
the New World Order emerges? Recently, one of the
American negotiators said that Milosevic is not only
part of the problem, but rather THE problem itself.
However, was this not clear FROM THE VERY BEGINNING?
Why, then, the interminable procrastination of the
Western powers, playing for years into Milosevic's
hands, acknowledging him as a key factor of stability
in the region, misreading clear cases of Serb
aggression as civil or even tribal warfare, initially
putting the blame on those who immediately saw what
Milosevic stands for and, for that reason, desperately
wanted to escape his grasp (see James Baker's public
endorsement of a "limited military intervention"
against Slovene secession), supporting the last
Yugoslav prime minister Ante Markovic, whose program
was, in an incredible case of political blindness,
seriously considered as the last chance for a
democratic market-oriented unified Yugoslavia,
etc.etc.? When the West fights Milosevic, it is NOT
fighting its enemy, one of the last points of
resistance against the liberal-democratic New World
Order; it is rather fighting its own creature, a
monster that grew as the result of the compromises and
inconsistencies of the Western politics itself. (And,
incidentally, it is the same as with Iraq: its strong
position is also the result of the American strategy
of containing Iran.) 

In the last decade, the West followed a Hamlet-like
procrastination towards Balkan, and the present
bombardment has effectively all the signs of Hamlet's
final murderous outburst in which a lot of people
unnecessarily die (not only the King, his true target,
but also his mother, Laertius, Hamlet himelf...),
because Hamlet acted too late, when the proper moment
was already missed. We are clearly dealing with a
hysterical acting out, with an escape into activity,
with a gesture that, instead of trying to achieve a
well-defined goal, rather bears witness to the fact
that there is no such goal, that the agent is caught
in a web of conflicting goals. So the West, in the
present intervention which displays all the signs of a
violent outburst of impotent aggressivity without a
clear political goal, is now paying the price for the
years of entertaining illusions that one can make a
deal with Milosevic: with the recent hesitations about
the ground intervention in Kosovo, the Serbian regime
is, under the pretext of war, launching the final
assault on Kosovo and purge it of most of the
Albanians, cynically accepting bombardments as the
price to be paid. 

When the Western powers repeat all the time that they
are not fighting the Serb people, but only their
corrupted leaders, they rely on the (typically
liberal) wrong premise that Serbs are victims of their
evil leadership personified in Milosevic, manipulated
by him. The painful fact is that the Serb aggressive
nationalism enjoys the support of the large majority
of the population - no, Serbs are not passive victims
of nationalist manipulation, they are not Americans in
disguise, just waiting to be delivered from the
nationalist spell. On the other hand, this
misperception is accompanied by the apparently
contradictory notion according to which, Balkan people
are living in the past, fighting again and again old
battles, perceiving recent situation through old
myths... One is tempted to say that these two cliches
should be precisely TURNED AROUND: not only are people
not "good," since they let themselves be manipulated
with obscene pleasure; there are also no "old myths"
which we need to study if we are really to understand
the complex situation, just the PRESENT outburst of
racist nationalism which, according to its needs,
opportunistically resuscitates old myths. To
paraphrase the old Clintonian motto: no, it's not the
old myths and ethnic hatreds, it's the POLITICAL POWER
STRUGGLE, stupid! 

So, on the one hand, we have the obscenities of the
Serb state propaganda: they regularily refer to
Clinton not as "the American president," but as "the
American Fuehrer"; two of the transparents on their
state-organized anti-Nato demonstrations were
"Clinton, come here and be our Monica!" (i.e. suck
our...), and "Monica, did you suck out also his
brain?". This is where the NATO planners got it wrong,
caught in their schemes of strategic reasoning, unable
to forecast that the Serb reaction to bombardment will
be a recourse to a collective Bakhtinian
carnivalization of the social life... And the Western
counterpoint to this obscenity is the more and more
openly racist tone of its reporting: when the three
American soldiers were taken prisoners, CNN dedicated
the first 10 minutes of the News to their predicament
(although everyone knew that NOTHING will happen to
them!), and only then reported on the tens of
thousands of refugees, burned villages and Pristina
turning into a ghost town. Where is the
so-much-praised Serb "democratic opposition" to
protest THIS horror taking place in their own
backyard, not only the - till now, at least,
bombardments with relatively very low casualties? 

The atmosphere in Belgrade is, at least for the time
being, carnivalesque in a faked way - when they are
not in shelters, people dance to rock or ethnic music
on the streets, under the motto "With music against
bombs!", playing the role of the defying heroes (since
they know that NATO does not really bomb civilian
targets). Although it may fascinate some confused
pseudo-Leftists, this obscene carnivalization of the
social life is effectively the other, public, face of
ethnic cleansing: while in Belgrade people defiantly
dance on the streets, three hundred kilometers to the
South, a genocide of African proportions is taking
place. 

It is interesting to watch in the last days the Serb
satellite state TV which targets foreign public: no
reports on atrocities in Kosovo, refugees are
mentioned only as people fleeing the NATO bombing; the
overall idea is that Serbia, the island of peace, the
only place in ex-Yugoslavia that was not touched by
the war raging all around it, is attacked by the NATO
madmen destroying bridges and hospitals... So when, in
the nightime, crowds are camping out on the Belgrade
bridges, participating in pop and ethnic music
concerts held there in a defiantly festive mood,
offering their bodies as the live shield to prevent
the bridges from being bombed, the answer to this
faked pathetic gesture should be a very simple one:
why don't you go to Kosovo and make a rock carnival in
the Albanian parts of Pristina? 

In the recent struggle of the so-called "democratic
opposition" in Serbia against the Milosevic's regime,
the truly touchy topic is the stance towards Kosovo:
as to this topic, the large majority of the
"democratic opposition" unconditionally endorses
Milosevic's anti-Albanian nationalist agenda, even
accusing him of making compromises with the West and
"betraying" Serb national interests in Kosovo. In the
course of the student demonstrations against the
Milosevic's Socialist Party falsification of the
election results in the Winter of 1996, the Western
media who closely followed the events and praised the
revived democratic spirit in Serbia, rarely mentioned
the fact that one of the regular slogans of the
demonstrators against the special police forces was
"Instead of kicking us, go to Kosovo and kick out the
Albanians!". In today's Serbia, the absolute sine qua
non of an authentic political act would thus be to
unconditionally reject the ideological topos of the
"Albanian threat to Serbia." 

In the last years, the Serb propaganda is promoting
the identification of Serbia as the second Israel,
with Serbs as the chosen nation, and Kosovo as their
West Bank where they fight, in the guise of "Albanian
terrorists," their own intifada. Thew went as far as
repeating the old Israeli complaint against the Arabs:
"We will pardon you for what you did to us, but we
will never pardon you for forcing us to do to YOU the
horrible things we had to do in order to defend
ourselves!" The hilariously-mocking Serb apology for
shooting down the stealth bomber was: "Sorry, we
didn't know you are invisible!" One is tempted to say
that the answer to Serb complaints about the
"irrational barbaric bombing" of their country should
be: "Sorry, we didn't know you are a chosen nation!"
One thing is for sure: the NATO bombardment of
Yugoslavia will change the global geopolitic
coordinates. The unwritten pact of peaceful
coexistence (the respect of each state's full
sovereignty, i.e. non-interference in internal
affairs, even in the case of the grave violation of
human rights) is over. However, the very first act of
the new global police force usurping the right to
punish sovereign states for their wrongdoings already
signals its end, its own undermining, since it
immediately became clear that this universality of
human rights as its legitimization is false, i.e. that
the attacks on selective targets protect particular
interests. The NATO bombardments of Yugoslavia also
signal the end of any serious role of UN and Security
Council: it is NATO under US guidance that effectively
pulls the strings. Furthermore, the silent pact with
Russia that held till now is broken: in the terms of
this pact, Russia was publicly treated as a
superpower, allowed to maintain the appearance of
being one, on condition that it did not effectively
act as one. Now Russia's humiliation is open, any
pretense of dignity is unmasked: Russia can only
openly resist or openly comply with Western pressure.
The further logical result of this new situation will
be, of course, the renewed rise of anti-Western
resistance from Eastern Europe to the Third World,
with the sad consequence that criminal figures like
Milosevic will be elevated into the model fighters
against the New World Order. 

So the lesson is that the alternative between the New
World Order and the neoracist nationalists opposing it
is a false one: these are the two sides of the same
coin - the New World Order itself breeds monstrosities
that it fights. Which is why the protests against
bombing from the reformed Communist parties all around
Europe, inclusive of PDS, are totally misdirected:
these false protesters against the NATO bombardment of
Serbia are like the caricaturized pseudo-Leftists who
oppose the trial against a drug dealer, claiming that
his crime is the result of social pathology of the
capitalist system. The way to fight the capitalist New
World Order is not by supporting local proto-Fascist
resistances to it, but to focus on the only serious
question today: how to build TRANSNATIONAL political
movements and institutions strong enough to seriously
constraint the unlimited rule of the capital, and to
render visible and politically relevant the fact that
the local fundamentalist resistances against the New
World Order, from Milosevic to le Pen and the extreme
Right in Europe, are part of it? 

What all this means is that the impasse of the NATO
intervention in Yugoslavia is not simply the result of
some particular failure of strategic reasoning, but
depends on the fundamental inconsistency of the very
notion of which this intervention relies. The problem
with NATO acting in Yugoslavia as an agent of
"militaristic humanism" or even "militaristic
pacifism" (Ulrich Beck) is not that this term is an
Orwellian oxymorom (reminding us of "Peace is war"
slogans from his 1984) which, as such, directly belies
the truth of its position (against this obvious
pacifist-liberal criticism, I rather think that it is
the pacifist position - "more bombs and killing never
brings piece" - which is a fake, and that one should
heroically ENDORSE the paradox of militaristic
pacifism); it is neither that, obviously, the targets
of bombardment are not chosen out of pure moral
consideration, but selectively, depending on
unadmitted geopolitic and economic strategic interests
(the obvious Marxist-style criticism). The problem is
rather that this purely humanitarian-ethic
legitimization (again) thoroughly DEPOLITICIZES the
military intervention, changing it into an
intervention into humanitarian catastrophy, grounded
in purely moral reasons, not an intervention into a
well-defined political struggle. 

Furthermore, what we are witnessing today is the
strange phenomenon of the blurred line of separation
between private and public in the political discourse:
say, when the German defense minister Rudolph
Scharping tried to justify the NATO bombing of
Yugoslavia, he did not present his stance as something
grounded in a clear cold decision, but went deep into
rendering public his inner turmoil, openly evoking his
doubts, his moral dilemmas apropos of this difficult
decision, etc. So, if this tendency will catch on, we
shall no longer have politicians who, in public, will
speak the cold impersonal official language, following
the ritual of public declarations, but will share with
the public their inner turmoils and doubts in a unique
display of "sincerity." Here, however, the mystery
begins: one would expect this "sincere" sharing of
private dilemmas to act as a counter-measure to the
predominant cynicism of those in power: is not the
ultimate cynicist a politician who, in his public
discourse, speaks in a cold dignified language about
the high politics, while privately, he entertains a
distance towards his statements, well aware of
particular pragmatic considerations that lay behind
these high principled public statements? It thus may
seem that the natural counterpoint to cynicism is the
"dignified" public discourse - however, a closer look
soon reveals that the "sincere" revealing of inner
turmoils is the ultimate, highest form of cynicism.
The impersonal "dignified" public speech counts on the
gap between public and private - we are well aware
that, when a politician speaks in the official
dignified tone, he speaks as the stand-in for the
Institution, not as a psychological individual (i.e.
the Institution speaks THROUGH him), and therefore
nobody expects him to be "sincere," since that is
simply NOT THE POINT (in the same way a judge who
passses a sentence is not expected to be "sincere,"
but simply to follow and apply the law, whatever his
sentiments). On the other hand, the public sharing of
the inner turmoils, the coincidence between public and
private, even and especially when it is
psychologically "sincere," is cynical - not because
such a public display of private doubts and
uncertainties is faked, concealing the true privacy:
what this display conceals is the OBJECTIVE
socio-political and ideological dimension of the
decisions, so the more this display is psychologicaly
"sincere," the more it is "objectively" cynical in
that it mystifies the true social meaning and effect
of these decisions. 

The crucial feature of the postmodern ethnic
fundamentalism is thus double: on the one hand, it is
"reflexive" nationalism, a reflexively CHOSEN one, no
longer the immediate relating to a national substance;
on the other hand, it does designate the return to
absolute immediacy - but, as Hegel would have put it,
as the result of a long process of mediation - say,
the stupid skinhead who beats up foreigners just for
the fun of it IS the restored immediacy, the result of
the total reflexivization of our daily lives. 

The ultimate paradox of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia
is thus not the one about which Western pacifists
complain (by bombing Yugoslavia in order to prevent
ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, NATO effectively triggered
a large-scale cleansing and thus created the very
humanitarian catastrophy it wanted to prevent), but a
deeper paradox involved in the ideology of
victimization: the key aspect to take note of if
NATO's privileging of the now discredited "moderate"
Kosovar faction of Ibrahim Rugova against the
"radical" Kosovo Liberation Army (not only does KLA
get no help, but even its financial assets are
blocked, so that they cannot buy the arms and are thus
exposed to the onslaught of much better equipped Serb
army and slowly decimated). What this means is that
NATO is actively blocking the only and obvious
alternative to the ground intervention of Western
military forces: the full-scale armed resistance of
the Albanians themselves. (The moment this option is
mentioned, fears start to circulate: KLA is not really
an army, just a bunch of untrained fighters; we should
not trust KLA, since it is involved in drug
trafficking and/or is a Maoist group whose victory
would led to a Khmer Rouge or Taliban regime in
Kosovo...) In short, while NATO is intervening in
order to protect the Kosovar victims, it is at the
same time well taking care that THEY WILL REMAIN
VICTIMS, not an active politico-military force capable
of defending itself: even if NATO will eventually
occupy the entire Kosovo, it will be a devastated
country with victimized population, not a strong
political subject. What we encounter here is again the
paradox of victimization: the Other to be protected is
good INSOFAR AS IT REMAINS A VICTIM (which is why we
are bombarded with pictures of helpless Kosovar
mothers, children and elder people, telling moving
stories of their suffering); the moment it no longer
behaves as a victim, but wants to strike back on its
own, it all of a sudden magically turns into a
terrorist/fundamentalist/drug-trafficking Other... 

A report by Steven Erlanger on the suffering of the
Kosovo Albanians in The New York Times (May 12 1999,
page A 13) renders perfectly this logic of
victimization. Already its title is tell-taling: "In
One Kosovo Woman, An Emblem of Suffering" - the
subject to be protected (by the NATO intervention) is
from the outset identified as a powerless victim of
circumstances, deprived of all political identity,
reduced to the bare suffering. Her basic stance is
that of excessive suffering, of traumatic experience
that blurs all differences: "She's seen too much, Meli
said. She wants a rest. She wants it to be over." As
such, she is beyond any political recrimination - an
independent Kosovo is not on her agenda, she just
wants the horror over: "Does she favor an independent
Kosovo? 'You know, I don't care if it's this or that,'
Meli said. 'I just want all this to end, and to feel
good again, to feel good in my place and my house with
my friends and family.'" Her support of the foreign
(NATO) intervention is grounded in her wish for all
this horror to be over: "She wants a settlement that
brings foreigners here 'with some force behind them.'
She is indifferent about who the foreigners are."
Consequently, she sympathizes with all the sides in an
all-embracing humanist stance: "There is tragedy
enough for everyone, she says. 'I feel sorry for the
Serbs who've been bombed and died, and I feel sorry
for my own people. But maybe now there will be a
conclusion, a settlement for good. That would be
great." - Here we have the ideological construction of
the ideal subject-victim to whose aid NATO intervenes:
not a political subject with a clear agenda, but a
subject of helpless suffering, sympathizing with all
suffering sides in the conflict, caught in the madness
of a local clash that can only be pacified by the
intervention of a benevolent foreign power, a subject
whose innermost desire is reduced to the almost animal
craving to "feel good again"... 

Therein resides the falsity of the otherwise admirable
Tariq Ali's essay on the NATO interventionin
Yugoslavia: "The claim that it is all Milosevic's
fault is one-sided and erroneous, indulging those
Slovenian, Croatian and Western politicians who
allowed him to succeed. It could be argued, for
instance, that it was Slovene egoism, throwing the
Bosnians and Albanians, as well as non-nationalist
Serbs and Croats, to the wolves, that was a decisive
factor in triggering the whole disaster of
disintegration." The correct insight and the
incredible naivety are here closely intermingled. It
certainly is true that the main responsibility of
others for Milosevic's success resides in their
"allowing him to succeed," in their readiness to
accept him as a "factor of stability" and tolerate his
"excesses" with the hope of striking a deal with him;
and it is true that such a stance was clearly
discernible among Slovene, Croat and Western
politicians (for example, there certainly are grounds
to suspect that the relatively smooth path to Slovene
independence involved a silent informal pact between
Slovene leadership and Milosevic, whose project of a
"greater Serbia" had no need for Slovenia). However,
two things are to be added here. First, this argument
itself asserts that the responsibility of others is of
a fundamentally different nature than that of
Milosevic: the point is not that "they were all
equally guilty, participating in nationalist madness,"
but that others were guilty of not being harsh enough
towards Milosevic, of not unconditionally opposing him
at any price. Secondly, what this argument overlooks
is how the same reproach of "egoism" can be applied to
ALL actors, inclusive of Muslims, the greatest victims
of the (first phase of the) war: when Slovenia
proclaimed independence, the Bosnisn leadership OPENLY
SUPPORTED the Yugoslav intervention in Slovenia
instead of risking confrontation at that early date,
and thus contributed to their later sad fate. So the
Muslim strategy in the first year of the conflict was
also not without opportunism: its hidden reasoning was
"let the Slovenes, Croats and Serbs bleed each other
to exhaustion, so that, in the aftermath of their
conflict, we shall gain for no great price an
independent Bosnia"... (It is one of the ironies of
the Yugoslav-Croat war that the legendary Bosnian
commander who successfully defended the besieged Bihac
region against the Yugoslav army, commanded two years
ago the Yugoslav army units which were laying a siege
to the Croat coast city Zadar!). 

There is, however, a more crucial problem that one
should confront here: the uncanny detail that cannot
but strike the eye in the quote from Tariq Ali is the
unexpected recourse, in the midst of a political
analysis, to a psychological category: "Slovene
egoism" - why the need for this reference that clearly
sticks out? On what ground can one claim that Serbs,
Muslims and Croats acted LESS "egotistically" in the
course of Yugoslavia's disintegration? The underlying
premise is here that Slovenes, when they saw the
(Yugoslav) house falling apart, "egotistically" seized
the opportunity and fled away, instead of - what?
Heroically throwing THEMSELVES ALSO to the wolves?
Slovenes are thus imputed to start it all, to set in
motion the process of disintegration (by being the
first to leave Yugoslavia) and, on the top of it,
being allowed to escape without proper penalty,
suffering no serious damage. Hidden beneath this
perception is a whole nest of pseudo-Leftist
prejudices and dogmas: the secret belief in the
viability of Yugoslav self-management socialism, the
notion that small nations like Slovenia cannot
effectively function like modern democracies, but
necessarily regress to a proto-Fascist "closed"
community... 

So what should the Serb "democratic opposition" do?
Let us recall Freud's late book on Moses and
Monotheism: how did he react to the Nazi anti-Semitic
threat? Not by joining the ranks of the beleaguered
Jews in the defense of their legacy, but by targetting
its own people, the most precious part of the Jewish
legacy, the founding figure of Moses, i.e. by
endeavouring to deprive Jews of this figure, proving
that Moses was not a Jew at all - this way, he
effectively undermined the very unconscious foundation
of the anti-Semitism. And is it not that Serbs should
today risk a similar act with regard to Kosovo as
their precious object-treasure, the craddle of their
civilization, that which matters to them more than
everything else and which they are never able to
renounce? Therein resides the final limit of the large
majority of the so-called "democratic opposition" to
the Milosevic regime: they unconditionally endorse
Milosevic's anti-Albanian nationalist agenda, even
accusing him of making compromises with the West and
"betraying" Serb national interests in Kosovo. For
this very reason, the sine qua non of an authentic act
in Serbia today would be precisely to RENOUNCE the
claim to Kosovo, to sacrifice the substantial
attachment to the privileged object. (What we have
here is thus a nice case of the political dialectic of
democracy: although democracy is the ultimate goal, in
today's Serbia, any direct advocacy of democracy which
leaves uncontested nationalistic claims about Kosovo
is doomed to fail - THE issue apropos of which the
struggle for democracy will be decided is that of
Kosovo.) 

In NATO-Yugoslav war, we thus have a double
Realitaetsverleugnung: on the one hand, NATO fantasy
of war without casualties, surgical operation; on the
other hand, the faked carnivalization totally
disconnected from the reality of what goes on down in
Kosovo. 

When the Western powers repeat all the time that they
are not fighting the Serb people, but only their
corrupted regime, they rely on the typically liberal
wrong premise that the Serbian people are just victims
of their evil leadership personified in Milosevic,
manipulated by him. The painful fact is that Serb
aggressive nationalism enjoys the support of the large
majority of the population - no, Serbs are not passive
victims of nationalist manipulation, they are not
Americans in disguise, just waiting to be delivered
from the bad nationalist spell. 

More precisely, the misperception of the West is
double: this notion of the bad leadership manipulating
the good people is accompanied by the apparently
contradictory notion according to which, Balkan people
are living in the past, fighting again old battles,
perceiving recent situation through old myths... One
is tempted to say that these two notions should be
precisely TURNED AROUND: not only are people not
"good," since they let themselves be manipulated with
obscene pleasure; there are also no "old myths" which
we need to study if we are really to understand the
situation, just the PRESENT outburst of racist
nationalism which, according to its needs,
opportunistically resuscitates old myths... 

So, on the one hand, we have the obscenities of the
Serb state propaganda: they regularily refer to
Clinton not as "the American president," but as "the
American Fuehrer"; two of the transparents on their
state-organized anti-Nato demonstrations were
"Clinton, come here and be our Monica!" (i.e. suck
our...), and "Monica, did you suck out also his
brain?". The atmosphere in Belgrade is, at least for
the time being, carnavalesque in a faked way - when
they are not in shelters, people dance to rock or
ethnic music on the streets, under the motto "With
poetry and music against bombs!", playing the role of
the defying heroes (since they know that NATO does not
really bomb civilian targets and that, consequently,
they are safe!). This is where the NATO planners got
it wrong, caught in their schemes of strategic
reasoning, unable to forecast that the Serb reaction
to bombardment will be a recourse to a collective
Bakhtinian carnivalization of the social life... This
pseudo-authentic spectacle, although it may fascinate
some confused Leftists, is effectively the other,
public, face of ethnic cleansing: in Belgrade people
are defiantly dancing on the streets while, three
hundred kilometers to the South, a genocide of African
proportions is taking place... And the Western
counterpoint to this obscenity is the more and more
openly racist tone of its reporting: when the three
American soldiers were taken prisoners, CNN dedicated
the first 10 minutes of the News to their predicament
(although everyone knew that NOTHING will happen to
them!), and only then reported on the tens of
thousands of refugees, burned villages and Pristina
turning into a ghost town. Where is the
so-much-praised Serb "democratic opposition" to
protest THIS horror taking place in their own
backyard, not only the - till now, at least,
bombardments with relatively very low casualties? 

In the recent struggle of the so-called "democratic
opposition" in Serbia against the Milosevic's regime,
the truly touchy topic is the stance towards Kosovo:
as to this topic, the large majority of the
"democratic opposition" unconditionally endorses
Milosevic's anti-Albanian nationalist agenda, even
accusing him of making compromises with the West and
"betraying" Serb national interests in Kosovo. In the
course of the student demonstrations against the
Milosevic's Socialist Party falsification of the
election results in the Winter of 1996, the Western
media who closely followed the events and praised the
revived democratic spirit in Serbia, rarely mentioned
the fact that one of the regular slogans of the
demonstrators against the special police forces was
"Instead of kicking us, go to Kosovo and kick out the
Albanians!". In today's Serbia, the absolute sine qua
non of an authentic political act would thus be to
unconditionally reject the ideological topos of the
"Albanian threat to Serbia." 

One thing is for sure: the NATO bombardment of
Yugoslavia will change the global geopolitic
coordinates. The unwritten pact of peaceful
coexistence (the respect of each state's full
sovereignty, i.e. non-interference in internal
affairs, even in the case of the grave violation of
human rights) is over. However, the very first act of
the new global police force usurping the right to
punish sovereign states for their wrongdoings already
signals its end, its own undermining, since it
immediately became clear that this universality of
human rights as its legitimization is false, i.e. that
the attacks on selective targets protect particular
interests. The NATO bombardments of Yugoslavia also
signal the end of any serious role of UN and Security
Council: it is NATO under US guidance that effectively
pulls the strings. Furthermore, the silent pact with
Russia that held till now is broken: in the terms of
this pact, Russia was publicly treated as a
superpower, allowed to maintain the appearance of
being one, on condition that it did not effectively
act as one. Now Russia's humiliation is open, any
pretense of dignity is unmasked: Russia can only
openly resist or openly comply with Western pressure.
The further logical result of this new situation will
be, of course, the renewed rise of anti-Western
resistance from Eastern Europe to the Third World,
with the sad consequence that criminal figures like
Milosevic will be elevated into the model fighters
against the New World Order. 

So the lesson is that the alternative between the New
World Order and the neoracist nationalists opposing it
is a false one: these are the two sides of the same
coin - the New World Order itself breeds monstrosities
that it fights. Which is why the protests against
bombing from the reformed Communist parties all around
Europe, inclusive of PDS, are totally misdirected:
these false protesters against the NATO bombardment of
Serbia are like the caricaturized pseudo-Leftists who
oppose the trial against a drug dealer, claiming that
his crime is the result of social pathology of the
capitalist system. The way to fight the capitalist New
World Order is not by supporting local proto-Fascist
resistances to it, but to focus on the only serious
question today: how to build TRANSNATIONAL political
movements and institutions strong enough to seriously
constraint the unlimited rule of the capital, and to
render visible and politically relevant the fact that
the local fundamentalist resistances against the New
World Order, from Milosevic to le Pen and the extreme
Right in Europe, are part of it? 

SORRY, WE DID NOT KNOW YOU ARE THE CHOSEN NATION!
CARNIVAL IN THE EYE OF THE STORM

The standard topic of critical psychiatry is that a
"madman" is not in himself mad, but rather functions
as a kind of focal point in which the pathological
tension which permeates the entire group (family) to
which he belongs finds its outlet. The "madman" is the
product of the group pathology, the symptomatic point
in which the global pathology becomes visible - one
can say that all other members of the group succeed in
retaining (the appearance of) their sanity by
condensing their patholoogy in (or by projecting it
onto) the sacrificial figure of the madman, this
exception who grounds the global order of group
sanity. However, more interesting that this is the
opposite case, exemplified by the life of Bertrand
Russell: he lived till his death in his late 90s a
long normal life, full of creativity and "healthy"
sexual satisfactions, yet all people around him, all
members of his larger family, seemed to be afflicted
with some kind of madness - he had love affairs with
most of the wives of his sons, and most of his sons
and other close relatives committed suicide. It is
thus as if, in a kind of inversion of the standard
logic of group sanity guaranteed by the exclusion of
the "madman," here, we have the central figure who
retained (the appearance of) his sanity by way of
spreading his madness all around him, onto all his
close relatives. The task of a critical analysis is
here, of course, to demonstrate how the TRUE point of
madness of this social network is precisely the only
point which appears "sane," its central paternal
figure who perceives madness everywhere around
himself, but is unable to recognize IN HIMSELF its
true source. 

And does the same not hold for the predominant way the
Serbs perceive their role today? On the one hand, one
can argue that, for the West, Serbia is a symptomal
point in which the repressed truth of a more global
situation violently breaks out. On the other hand,
within ex-Yugoslavia, Serbs behaves as an island of
sanity in the sea of nationalist/secessionist madness
all around them, refusing to acknowledge even a part
of responsibility. It is eye-opening to watch in the
last days the Serb satellite state TV which targets
foreign public: no reports on atrocities in Kosovo,
refugees are mentioned only as people fleeing the NATO
bombing; the overall idea is that Serbia, the island
of peace, the only place in ex-Yugoslavia that was not
touched by the war raging all around it, is attacked
by the NATO madmen destroying bridges and hospitals...


No wonder, then, that the atmosphere in Belgrade is,
at least for the time being, carnivalesque in a faked
way - when they are not in shelters, people dance to
rock or ethnic music on the streets, under the motto
"With music against bombs!", playing the role of the
defying victims (since they know that NATO does not
really bomb civilian targets). Although it may
fascinate some confused pseudo-Leftists, this obscene
carnivalization of the social life is effectively the
other, public, face of ethnic cleansing: while in
Belgrade people defiantly dance on the streets, three
hundred kilometers to the South, a genocide of African
proportions is taking place. So when, in the nightime,
crowds are camping out on the Belgrade bridges,
participating in pop and ethnic music concerts held
there in a defiantly festive mood, offering their
bodies as the live shield to prevent the bridges from
being bombed, the answer to this faked pathetic
gesture should be a very simple one: why don't you go
to Kosovo and make a rock carnival in the Albanian
parts of Pristina? And when people are wearing papers
with a "target" sign printed on them, the obscene
falsity of this gesture cannot but strike the eye: can
one imagine the REAL targets years ago in Sarajevo or
now in Kosovo wearing such signs? 

In what is this almost psychotic refusal to perceive
one's responsibility grounded? During a recent visit
to Israel, a friend told me a hilarious joke about
Clinton visiting Bibi Netanyahu: when, in Bibi's
office, Clinton saw a mysterious blue phone, he asked
Bibi what this phone is, and Bibi answered that it
allows him to dial Him up there in the sky. Upon his
return to the States, the envious Clinton demanded of
his secret service to provide him such a phone at any
cost. In two weeks, they deliver it and it works, but
the phone bill is exorbitant - two million dollars for
a one minute talk with Him up there. So Clinton
furiously calls Bibi and complains: "How can you
afford such a phone, if even we, who support you
financially, cannot? Is this how you spend our money?"
Bibi calmly answers: "No, it's not that - you see, for
us, Jews, that call counts as a local call!" The
problem with Serbs is that, in their self-perception,
they tend more and more to imitate Jews and identify
themselves as the people for whom the phone call to
God counts as a local call... 

When the Western powers repeat all the time that they
are not fighting the Serb people, but only their
corrupted leaders, they rely on the (typically
liberal) wrong premise that Serbs are victims of their
evil leadership personified in Milosevic, manipulated
by him. The painful fact is that the Serb aggressive
nationalism enjoys the support of the large majority
of the population - no, Serbs are not passive victims
of nationalist manipulation, they are not Americans in
disguise, just waiting to be delivered from the
nationalist spell. On the other hand, this
misperception is accompanied by the apparently
contradictory notion according to which, Balkan people
are living in the past, fighting again and again old
battles, perceiving recent situation through old
myths... I am tempted to say that these two cliches
should be precisely TURNED AROUND: not only are people
not "good," since they let themselves be manipulated
with obscene pleasure; there are also no "old myths"
which we need to study if we are really to understand
the complex situation, just the PRESENT outburst of
racist nationalism which, according to its needs,
opportunistically resuscitates old myths. To
paraphrase the old Clintonian motto: no, it's not the
old myths and ethnic hatreds, it's the POLITICAL POWER
STRUGGLE, stupid! 

So where, in all this, is the much praised Serb
"democratic opposition"? One shouldn't be too harsh of
them: in the present situation of Serbia, of course,
any attempt at public disagreement would probably
trigger direct death threats. On the other hand, one
should nonetheless notice that there was a certain
limit that, as far as I know, even the most radical
Serb democratic opposition was never able to trespass:
the farthest they can go is to admit the monstrous
nature of Serb nationalism and ethnic cleansing, but
nonetheless to insist that Milosevic is ultimately
just on in the series of the nationalist leaders who
are to be blamed for the violence of the last decade:
Milosevic, Tudjman, Izetbegovic, Kucan, they are
ultimately all the same... I am not claiming, agains
such a vision, that one should put all the blame on
Serbs - my point is just that, instead of such
pathetic-apolitical generalizations ("they are all
mad, all to blame"), one should, more than ever,
insist on a CONCRETE POLITICAL ANALYSIS of the power
struggles that triggered the catastrophe. And it is
the rejection of such an analysis that accounts for
the ultimate hypocrisy of the pacifist attitude
towards the Kosovo war: "the true victims are women
and children on all sides, so stop the bombing, more
violence never helped to end violence, it just pushes
us deeper into the vortex..." 

There is nonetheless another, more disturbing aspect
to be discerned in this false carnivalization of the
war in the Serb media. The usual Serb complaint is
that, instead of confronting them face to face, as it
befits brave soldiers, NATO are cowardly bombing them
from distant ships and planes. And, effectively, the
lesson here is that it is thoroughly false to claim
that war is made less traumatic if it is no longer
experienced by the soldiers (or presented) as an
actual encounter with another human being to be
killed, but as an abstract activity in fron of a
screen or behind a gun far from the explosion, like
guiding a missile on a war ship hundreds of miles away
from where it will hit its target. While such a
procedure makes the soldier less guilty, it is open to
question if it effectively causes less anxiety - one
way to explain the strange fact that soldiers often
fantasize about killing the enemy in a face to face
confrontation, looking him into the eyes before
stabbing him with a bayonet (in a kind of military
version of the sexual False Memory Syndrome, they even
often "remember" such encounters when they never took
place). There is a long literary tradition of
elevating such face to face encounters as an authentic
war experience (see the writings of Ernst Juenger, who
praised them in his memoirs of the trench attacks in
World War I). So what if the truly traumatic feature
is NOT the awareness that I am killing another human
being (to be obliterated through the "dehumanization"
and "objectivization" of war into a technical
procedure), but, on the contrary, this very
"objectivization," which then generates the need to
supplement it by the fantasies of authentic personal
encounters with the enemy? It is thus not the fantasy
of a purely aseptic war run as a video game behind
computer screens that protects us from the reality of
the face to face killing of another person; it is, on
the opposite, this fantasy of a face to face encounter
with an enemy killed in a bloody confrontation that we
construct in order to escape the trauma of the
depersonalized war turned into an anonymous
technological apparatus. So is not the Serb
carnivalization of the daily life also ein
Abwehr-Mechanismus gegen die Kriegsmachinerie? 

 


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