Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 23:58:11 +0200
To: bhaskar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
From: Jan Straathof <janstr@xxxxxxx>
Subject: BHA: FW: Slavoj Zizek "AGAINST THE DOUBLE BLACKMAIL"
[dear friends, this arrived through Moscow and Vienna yesterday; a shorter
German translation was published in Die Zeit, 31 March 1999. Greetings, -i]
AGAINST THE DOUBLE BLACKMAIL
Slavoj Zizek
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 caseof 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.
***** Part 1.*****
To: bhaskar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
From: Jan Straathof <janstr@xxxxxxx>
Subject: BHA: FW: Slavoj Zizek "AGAINST THE DOUBLE BLACKMAIL"
[dear friends, this arrived through Moscow and Vienna yesterday; a shorter
German translation was published in Die Zeit, 31 March 1999. Greetings, -i]
AGAINST THE DOUBLE BLACKMAIL
Slavoj Zizek
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 caseof 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.
***** Part 1.*****