AGAINST THE DOUBLE BLACKMAIL/part2
Slavoj Zizek
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 (which 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
lessonof 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
sacrificingthe 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.)
So, precisely as a Leftist, my answer to the dilemma "Bomb or not?" is:
not yet ENOUGH bombs, and they are TOO LATE. 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. 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 forces repeat all the time that they are not fighting the
Serbian 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 man
Slavoj Zizek
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 (which 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
lessonof 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
sacrificingthe 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.)
So, precisely as a Leftist, my answer to the dilemma "Bomb or not?" is:
not yet ENOUGH bombs, and they are TOO LATE. 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. 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 forces repeat all the time that they are not fighting the
Serbian 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 man