The power of 'radical' thought

A brief overview of a genius:

Slavoj Žižek: interview

The Marxist provocateur and bestselling philosopher on communism, poststructural theory and his reluctance to play poster boy for the fashionable European left

The Observer, Sunday 27 June 2010 

The large lecture hall of the French Institute in Barcelona is full to overflowing. People line the walls, sit in the aisles and stand three-deep at the back. There are a few middle-aged, smartly dressed people in attendance as well as a handful of old leftists with long hair and caps, but the majority of the audience are young and stylishly dishevelled, the kind of people one would expect to see at a Hot Chip or Vampire Weekend gig.

They have gathered here to listen to a 61-year-old Slovenian philosopher called Slavoj Žižek, whose critique of global capitalism now stretches to more than 50 books translated into more than 20 languages. Žižek describes himself as "a complicated communist" and, as if to complicate things further, he deploys the psychoanalytical theories of the late French thinker Jacques Lacan to illustrate the ways in which capitalist ideology works on the collective imagination. "I don't give clear answers to even the simplest, most direct questions," Žižek says. "I like to complicate issues. I hate simple narratives. I suspect them. This is my automatic reaction."

Žižek's book titles reflect his playful and often self-contradictory theoretical thrust. They include: The Ticklish Subject, which deals with "the spectre of the Cartesian subject in western thought"; The Plague of Fantasies, which analyses the ways in which "audiovisual media clouds the ability to reason and understand the world"; and the wonderfully titled Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?, a fierce critique of "the liberal-democratic consensus".

He seems drawn to taking unfashionable stances that make him unpopular with traditionalists of whatever political hue. A recent book, In Defence of Lost Causes, argued that, in philosophical-political terms, Heidegger's fascist sympathies and Foucault's support of the Iranian revolution were "right steps in the wrong direction". Rebecca Mead, writing in the New Yorker, dubbed him "the Marx Brother" and described his approach thus: "His favoured form of argument is paradox, and his favoured mode of delivery is a kind of vaudevillian overstatement, buttressed by the appearance of utter conviction." That just about nails it – except that it overlooks the seriousness of Žižek's thinking and the way he has managed to bring dialectics into the mainstream.

"Slavoj is unique in that he operates between two different and, for the most part, exclusive, places," says the film-maker Sophie Fiennes, who directed him in The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema, a documentary that is as provocative as its title suggests, but in a strictly intellectual way. "He has been incredibly successful in taking theory out of the ivory tower of academia and into the world. He challenges the current fear of words like 'ideology' and, correctly in my view, sees this fear as a product of our information culture. It is also, he argues, a fear of what real, deep political thinking might generate in terms of unrest and discontent."

Žižek, though, is also a political provocateur and an absurdist prankster. For one of his books, he wrote a (rejected) fictional autobiographical blurb: "In his free time, Žižek likes to surf the internet for child pornography and teach his small son how to pull the legs off spiders."

As an avowed atheist, he sees no contradiction in arguing, as he did in The Fragile Absolute: Or Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?, for a world in which Christians and Marxists unite against "the contemporary onslaught of vapid spirituality". This kind of thing does not sit well with traditional analytical philosophers. Neither does his tendency to roam freely through high and low culture, illuminating the Lacanian undercurrents in Hitchcock as well as Hegel, Leibniz and David Lynch. (In his new book, Living in the End Times, there is a serious, and seriously funny, essay on Kung Fu Panda, the recent DreamWorks animation, which Žižek insists is "a somewhat naive, but nonetheless basically accurate, illustration of an important aspect of Lacanian theory.")

Despite, or perhaps because of, his iconoclasm, his tendency to contradict himself, and his general political incorrectness – which may, one suspects, be more mischievous than heartfelt – Žižek is to today what Jacques Derrida was to the 80s: the thinker of choice for Europe's young intellectual vanguard. This fills him with dismay. Unlike Derrida, though, he is determinedly left wing, if not in the traditional sense.

"I am what you might call abstractly anti-capitalist," he says. "For instance, I am suspicious of the old leftists who focus all their hatred on the United States. What about Chinese neo-colonialism? Why are the left silent about that? When I say this, it annoys them, of course. Good! My instinct as a philosopher is that we are effectively approaching a multicentric world, which means we need to ask new, and for the traditional left, unpleasant questions."

Unlike the dapper Derrida, Žižek is a sight for sore eyes: pale to the point of sallow, bearded, overweight and effortlessly eccentric. In the 2005 documentary, Žižek!, he gives director Astra Taylor a tour of his kitchen, opening drawers and cupboards containing not cutlery and china, but his socks, underpants, trousers and shirts. His day-to-day style – if that is not too extravagant a word – consists of several dull variations on the proletarian outfit of ill-fitting T-shirt, baggy jeans, free airline socks – "Lufthansa are the best" – and lumpen footwear surely sold exclusively by a Slovenian shoeshop that has somehow missed the collapse of the Soviet bloc. (A Slovenian friend claims she recently saw him striding though Ljubljana in a T-shirt bearing the slogan "I Am Beautiful"; it's difficult to imagine any other philosopher doing that.)

When he speaks, or writes, Žižek comes alive and his thoughts flow out in what seem like uncontrollably tangential torrents. His message, at least what one can decipher of it from his scattergun approach, is both politically pessimistic and philosophically elusive.

"If you ask me if I am an optimist, I would have to say no. I am not one of those old-fashioned communists who says, with that old tragi-comic Marxist satisfaction, at least history is on our side. No. If anything, the train of history is hurtling towards a precipice. The task of the leftist thinker today is, to quote Walter Benjamin, not to ride the train of history, but to pull the brake."

In the jam-packed auditorium of the French Institute in Barcelona, Žižek speaks for more than two-and-a-half hours without once pulling the brake. His central thesis, also explored in his new book, Living in the End Times, is that "the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero point." Žižek, though, regards the idea of a central thesis in much the same way that the great jazz saxophonist John Coltrane regarded a melody – as something to riff off, extemporise on, and return to only when all associated sub-themes have been exhausted. This approach has its problems, not least the sense that a single Žižek riff could perhaps more profitably be extended into an entire lecture that might be both deeper and more illuminating. Tonight, for instance, he barely addresses the reason why he resolutely believes in communism despite its shredded reputation.

"I don't see any continuity with old-style communism in my approach. So why do I then call it communism?" he says when I ask him about it later. "As to its contents, though, the problem is always the same. It's the enclosure of the commons. Marx was talking about land and property when he wrote about this, but today intellectual property is our commons, information is our commons. Something that Marx could not have predicted is taking place today: we are witnessing a strange regression to the same kind of enclosure of the commons, and people having to pay rent to people like Bill Gates for intellectual property."

He seems a slave to the speed of his thoughts, his motor-mouth delivery barely keeping pace with the frenetic motion of his overcrowded mind. Silence, even a pause for breath, seems to make him intensely uncomfortable. So, too, does the company of strangers. "I avoid other people if I can. The ultimate nightmare for me is a party in my honour in the United States. Having to mix and talk, to strangers, maybe 20 or 30 people who want to have a debate or, even worse, polite conversation. My God, I hate this above all, but it is the nature of my tragic life."

To witness Žižek in full flight is a wonderful and at times alarming experience, part philosophical tightrope-walk, part performance-art marathon, part intellectual roller-coaster ride. Most startling of all are the nervous tics that accompany his every utterance: the constant wiping of his beard and lips, the incessant dabbing of his furrowed brow, the closed eyes, clenched fists and the strange gutteral noises that punctuate his speech. Then, there's his lisp and his odd mispronunciations – in Barcelona, he kept using the term "a dollar cent", which I assumed was an example of fiscal insider jargon until I realised he actually meant "adolescent".

In my notebook, I map out the contours of his lecture in a series of headings. He begins with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the inevitable, in his view, rebirth of some kind of post-digital global communism, before touching on the writings of his beloved Hegel via the thoughts of Pascal. Suddenly though, in the first of many conceptual swerves, he is comparing the fall of communism to the end of the silent movie era which leads him into a riff on ideology as represented by "the disembodied voice" in Chaplin's City Lights and Hitchcock's Psycho. From there, we learn how the scene in Fight Club where Brad Pitt's character punches himself in the face is a metaphor for revolution – "Before you beat the bosses, you must first beat yourself."

By this point, the faithful are enthralled, the curious baffled and the traditionalists utterly bemused. Žižek, though, is just warming up. On and on he roams, through the French and Haitian revolutions, the Iraq war, Rumsfeld's famous speech about "known unknowns". (What about the "unknown knowns?", asks Žižek. "This is exactly how capitalist ideology works; you follow an illusion without even knowing it.") He cites the myth of Santa Claus as a supreme example of ideological indoctrination, dismisses Hollywood's love of the Dalai Lama and "all this vague, insipid Buddhist bullshit". He tells us how cynicism has become western culture's current default mode, what Christianity can teach communism, and why God is essentially a narcissist. He touches on biogenics by way of the inevitable Richard Dawkins – "This kind of extreme atheism misses the point of religion entirely" – and illustrates how science has lost its monopoly on truth. Eventually he realises there is a limit to the collective power of the audience's concentration, and he ends, as he began, with the communist revolution, informing us that the next one will succeed only if it embraces the essentially Christian, conservative social etiquette of politeness and deference. About 155 minutes after he started, he suddenly stops, drenched in sweat and bathed in applause. On cue, an old Trotskyist stands up and takes him to task for betraying the cause….

"I hate these civilised debates followed by the questions from the audience," he tells me the next morning. "So I keep going to subvert this boring ritual, but always there will be one old unreconstructed leftist who will stand up and accuse me of being a Stalinist. This," he says, sighing, "is how it goes."

The son of Slovenian communists, Žižek was born on 21 March 1949 in what was then Yugoslavia. His father was a state economist, his mother an accountant for a state-run business. I ask him if, growing up by the sea in Portorož, he had a happy childhood. "No. You could say, in a vulgar Freudian way, that I am the unhappy child who escapes into books. Even as a child, I was most happy being alone. This has not changed."

As a teenager, living in the capital Ljubljana, he read voraciously and, he says, "did pretty well at high school though I completely ignored the curriculum". At 15, he wanted to be a "movie director" but soon realised that his love of theory surpassed even his passion for film. At university in the 1960s, he was seduced by the new wave of French post-structuralist theorists – Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva and, above all, Jacques Lacan. His postgraduate thesis was initially rejected for being too critical of Marx, and even though he amended it, he was deemed unfit to teach philosophy. "It is very ironic how professors who attacked me for not being a Marxist have now turned nationalist and attack me for being a Marxist. But, really, I don't care."

In the 1970s, Žižek made a living by translating works of philosophy and, at one point, took himself off to France for four years. He also did four years' national service in the Yugoslavian army. He has no bitterness about that. "My formative experience was Yugoslav self-management socialism," he says, "but Slovenia had communist rule without an official philosophy so it was superficially better than anywhere else."

In 1978, he finally landed a job at what he calls" a marginal research institute". It was, he says, "a kind of banishment but also a wonderful post. Just pure research." He made contacts with philosophy institutions in France and the US, which stood him in good stead when he finally published his breakthrough book, 1989's The Sublime Object of Ideology. "Without the communist oppression," he says, quite seriously, "I am absolutely sure I would now be a local stupid professor of philosophy in Ljubljana."

In 1990, he baffled his leftist friends and supporters by standing for election as a Liberal Democratic party candidate. He came fifth. "Politics is my tragedy," he tells me dolefully. "It shadows me."

When not travelling or teaching in America or Europe – he has held posts at Columbia, Princeton and is international director of humanities at Birkbeck College, London – Žižek lives alone in Ljubljana in a small apartment full of books, DVDs, classical music CDs – "I am a committed Wagnerian and, this will shock you, I even like Elgar." Depending on whom you believe, he has been married and divorced two or three times. He is not saying. On April Fool's day, 2005, he famously wed a 27-year-old former lingerie model and Lacanian scholar from Argentina. He has two sons, one in his early 30s, the other nine years old. When I leave him, he heads off to find an iPad as a present for his youngest child. "I am a hypocritical communist, no?"

In the flesh, Žižek is, if anything, more demonic and unhealthy-looking than his photographs, his matted hair and greying beard surrounding a face that looks like it's never seen sunlight. He suffers from diabetes, a condition not helped by his nomadic lifestyle and manic disposition. "I have exploited you," he says by way of greeting, "in order to have a few hours free from the duties these Spanish leftists expect me to perform."

He seems both eager and uncomfortable and ushers me quickly upstairs to the apartment that is his temporary home. As a cleaner flits about, I ask him if he is surprised at his popularity, particularly among the young.

"My God, I am the last person to know the answer to these questions," he says, looking genuinely dismayed. "But, really, I am now thinking there is so much pressure on me to perform. I am getting really bored with it. I am a thinker, but people all the time want this kind of shitty political interventions: the books, the talks, the discussions and so forth." He sighs and closes his eyes and seems to deflate before my eyes. "I will tell you my problem openly and for this my publisher will hate me. All the talk and the writing about politics, this is not where my heart is. No. I have been sidetracked. I really mean this."

He opens a copy of Living in the End Times, and finds the contents page. "I will tell you the truth now," he says, pointing to the first chapter, then the second. "Bullshit. Some more bullshit. Blah, blah, blah." He flicks furiously through the pages. "Chapter 3, where I try to read Marx anew, is maybe OK. I like this part where I analyse Kafka's last story and here where I use the community of outcasts in the TV series Heroes as a model for the communist collective. But, this section, the Architectural Parallax, this is pure bluff. Also the part where I analyse Avatar, the movie, that is also pure bluff. When I wrote it, I had not even seen the film, but I am a good Hegelian. If you have a good theory, forget about the reality."

Why, then, given that he does not like most of his books and does not have any enthusiasm for the lecture circuit, does he not call a stop to the Žižek show? "I am doing that right now!" he shouts. "I am writing a mega-book about Hegel with regard to Plato, Kant and maybe Heidegger. Already, this Hegel book is 700 pages. It is a true work of love. This is my true life's work. Even Lacan is just a tool for me to read Hegel. For me, always it is Hegel, Hegel, Hegel," he says, sighing again. "But people just want the shitty politics."

Reviewing In Defence of Lost Causes, the British Marxist critic Terry Eagleton concluded that it was "a frenetic, eclectic parody of intellectual scholarship, by one so assured in his grasp of the finer points of Kafka or John le Carré that he can afford to ham it up a little." Only time will tell if Žižek is serious about becoming utterly serious, but if he devotes the rest of his brilliant, brainy, slightly bonkers, utterly singular life to Hegel, and Hegel alone, it will be a great gain for pure philosophy and a great loss to radical, risk-taking political theory.

"He is very much a thinker for our turbulent, high speed, information-led lives," says Sophie Fiennes, "precisely because he insists on the freedom to stop and think hard about who you are as an individual in this fragmented society. We need a radical hip priest and Slavoj is that in many ways." The very thought, I suspect, would have him quaking in his proletarian boots – and free airline socks.

Living in the End Times is published on 5 July by Verso, £20. To order a copy for a special price go to observer.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6847. Žižek appears at the London literature festival, Southbank Centre, London SE1 on 5 July, 7.30pm.

Slavoj ŽiŽek Life in brief

1949 Born in Ljubljana, Slovenia (at that time part of Yugoslavia), to atheist communist parents. Spends his childhood in the seaside town of Portorož, developing an interest in philosophy and popular culture in its relatively free cultural environment. In his teens the family returns to Ljubljana.

1967 Studies philosophy and sociology at the university of Ljubljana, completing his PhD on German idealism by 1981. Writes for Slovenian dissident political and philosophical journals. Becomes renowned for playing devil's advocate with outrageous and colourful theories that combine Lacanian theory with Marxism, and for using popular culture to illustrate complex philosophical theory.

1981-1985 Moves to Paris to study under Lacanian psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller. Writes for French and other European intellectual journals (by this point he is multilingual).

1989 His first English-language book, The Sublime Object of Ideology, launches his international reputation as a cultural and critical theorist. Other popular works follow such as For They Know Not What They Do and The Ticklish Subject follow in the 90s.

2000s Starts to realise his ambition of being involved in film-making, with documentaries about himself – The Reality of the Virtual and Žižek! – and, with Sophie Fiennes, The Pervert's Guide to Cinema. Octavia Morris

Video (5min 37sec), 'Things cannot go on the way they are'

(Source: guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010)

Click on the image to watch the video.

No pasarán!(?) - the Left today

Thanks to the dissemination of silly Fukuyama's equally silly central thesis, we are all fed up with, and take for granted, the notion of the 'end of ideologies' -- capitalism excepted, bereft of its 'ideological trappings', at the very least up to the crisis of 2008.
Another worn-out cliché is the need to reinvent capitalism and the inevitability of profound reforms to the present European model of the social or welfare State.

A commonly-held standpoint of political and economic observers entertains the idea that all and any changes must be inward-looking and self-serving, to preserve the essence of capitalism as the 'lesser of all economic evils', just as representative democracy is -- rightly -- purported to be the 'lesser of all political evils'. 

Whichever paths capitalism might take, the widespread conviction -- an intuitive, irrational and desired one -- is that such economic system and its right-wing superstructure shall successfully adapt and evolve, until the next cyclical crises force further transformations down the road. 

An unforgiving dialectic? Certainly not a harmful genetic mutation of an organism perceived as autopoietic, or self-contained, rather the confirmation, most feel, of capitalism's destiny as the 'chosen' system, the one deemed to be the best and fittest through Darwinian natural-historical selection.

The outlook for the Left is far from promising.

The traditional working class has either disappeared or has become the recipient of sporadic crumbs fallen from the table of capitalism, a mirage in a desert with few oases. Those in the middle class just want to keep on spending beyond their means and only dream of becoming rich. Whereas the wealthy do not care one bit about the rest of society.

Conditions for social mobilization against rapidly increasing unfairness and inequality are lacking, and without active resistance it is difficult to foresee any erosion of the edifice of injustice, the veritable 21st century counterpart of the 'pyramid of exploitation', a symbol of the Industrial Age.

The examples of contemporary political struggle -- such as the anti-globalization movement and others, mostly restricted to single issues -- are still in their infancy, most being insufficient and some alas misguided or misdirected. Let us not forget that the Green movement had to wait for over 30 years before its message of environmental awareness became accepted.

A new political -- and ideological -- project is sorely needed. One that is truly progressive, libertarian and free from accommodations, stripped of complacency and immune to hybrid or 'third' ways. A project which aims to destroy capitalism insofar as to -- perhaps even -- 'save it from itself', in a fashion not dissimilar to that famous incident during the Vietnam War, when a Viet Cong village was 'destroyed in order to be saved'.

I am not stating anything new.

What project might this be? The current mainstream Left has no idea, nor does it seem to want to have one, a situation aggravated by the silent majority's refusal to contemplate changes to the status quo.

There is nothing innovative in this assertion either.

Unfortunately, as most serious political critics -- Noam Chomsky* comes to mind immediately, as the doyen of 'radical' thinkers who forgo momentary intellectual dalliances and genuinely attempt to create a systemic discourse within a coherent worldview and in the context of a hitherto untested alternative paradigm -- are generally ignored and frowned upon, we are rewarded with a panoply of so-called, or self-labeled, Left-leaning 'experts' and political 'commentators', who excel at pseudo-analysis and at what I might call 'mitigation theory': proposing austerity measures as necessary palliatives to the recurrent 'ailments' of capitalism, in their minds an otherwise healthy system.

Action has been replaced by illusion, and the future is being postponed, inasmuch as the will to think of, and to achieve, a better tomorrow is being thwarted. The politics of progress are more often than not completely subdued by the politics -- and policies -- of 'realism'.

I believe that unqualified respect is something that only those with the courage to act upon their convictions should be entitled to, those who practice what they say, who follow their utterances with deeds. If one does not possess such courage, or the capacity to act in accordance, then one should refrain from communicating grandiloquently in the public sphere.

Enough, I say, of talking heads and opinion makers elevated to positions of influence by the masses, wrongly convinced, poor folk, that they are listening to people with an iota of social conscience and the desire to lessen suffering.

Earnest resignation by the humble in the face of a tough reality is preferable to the self-righteous indignation of those who falsely claim to know how to effect change.

We may still console ourselves with the fact that the West enjoys a relatively free and democratic form of capitalism.

I hope that the unfathomable future does not follow a route in emulation of the Russian or East Asian forms of authoritarian capitalism.
In any event, we must theorize about new ways to confront capitalism. New revolutionary politics (of the non-violent persuasion, I should stress) are required.

*I do not mean to exclude other progressive public intellectuals. My apologies to, inter alia, Naomi Klein.

About the title: 'No pasarán!' ("They shall not go forward!") was coined by Dolores Ibárruri, 'La Pasionaria', a heroic figure of the Spanish Left. It was a powerful rallying cry of the Republicans during the Siege of Madrid by the Fascist forces of Franco.

A 'new' Left?

Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, on the rebuilding of the Left:

When is enough really enough?

Christopher Hitchens, lucid as ever:

"A Call for Earthly Justice

Holding the Catholic Church accountable for its crimes.

By Christopher Hitchens

 Posted to Slate, Monday, Sept. 13, 2010, at 11:16 AM ET

Reading Diarmaid MacCulloch's extraordinary and limpid new work Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (a history informed by a general, if Anglican, sympathy for its subject), I came across the following passage from Cardinal John Henry Newman's classic statement of belief, his Apologia Pro Vita Sua:

The Catholic Church holds it better for the Sun and Moon to drop from Heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die from starvation in extremest agony … than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one wilful untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse.

In a few days, Joseph Ratzinger will make one of the most portentous voyages of his papacy, landing in Britain to announce the beatification of the author of those remarkable words. I am not writing about Catholic dogma today, and in any case do not have the space to discuss the hysterical, totalitarian fanaticism of Newman's statement, coming as it does from a learned man celebrated for his relative "moderation." I thought I would simply ask how the church would emerge if anything remotely like Newman's criterion were to be applied to it.

As we have recently been forcibly reminded, the Roman Catholic Church holds it better for the cries of raped and violated children to be ignored, and for the excuses and alibis of their rapists and torturers indulged, and for a host of dirty and wilful untruths to be manufactured wholesale, and for the funds raised ostensibly for the poor to be paid out in hush money and shameful bribery, rather than that one tiny indignity or inconvenience be visited on the robed majesty of a man-made church or any limit set to its self-proclaimed right to be judge in its own cause.

Earlier this year, as Roman Catholic authorities from Ireland to Germany to Australia to Belgium to the United States were being confronted with the fallout of decades of sexual assault and subsequent denial, I asked a simple question in print. Why was this not considered a matter for the police and the courts? Why were we asking the church to "put its own house in order," an expression that was the exact definition of the problem to begin with? Why had almost no offending priest or bishop faced justice, and even then usually after a long period of protection from the church's own "courts"? I followed this up with a telephone call to Geoffrey Robertson, a British barrister with a second-to-none record in international human rights cases. (If it matters, the last time we had both cooperated was in a campaign against the British Act of Succession, an archaic piece of legislation that explicitly discriminates against Catholics.) This was one of the best dimes I have ever dropped. After a group of generous humanists and atheists agreed to pay his extremely modest fee, Robertson produced a detailed legal brief against the papacy and has made it widely available for the use of all interested or aggrieved parties. Titled The Case of the Pope: Vatican Accountability for Human Rights Abuse, it has just been published in the United Kingdom by Penguin Books. (It will be available in the United States in October.)

As if almost timed to coincide with its publication, and with the impending arrival of Ratzinger on British soil, the recent disclosures of the putrid state of the church in Belgium have thrown the whole scandal into an even sharper relief. Consider: The now-resigned bishop of Bruges, Roger Vangheluwe, stands revealed by his own eventual confession as being guilty of incest as well as rape, having regularly "abused" his male nephew between the ages of 5 and 18. The man's superior as head of the Belgian church, Cardinal Godfried Danneels, has been caught on tape urging the victim to keep quiet. A subsequent official report, commissioned by the country's secular authorities, has established that this level of morality was the rule throughout the hierarchy, with the church taking it upon itself to "forgive" the rapists and to lean upon their victims. Very belatedly, a few months ago, the Belgian police finally rose from their notorious torpor and raided some ecclesiastical offices in search of evidence that was being concealed. Joseph Ratzinger, who had not thus far found a voice in which to mention the doings of his Belgian underlings, promptly emitted a squeal of protest — at the intervention of the law.

Robertson's brief begins with a meticulous summary of the systematic fashion in which child-rape was covered up by collusion between local Catholic authorities and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome, an office that under the last pope was run by Ratzinger himself. (So flagrant was this obstruction of justice that many senior Catholic apologists have now started to blame the deceased pontiff in an effort to excuse his deputy and successor, all the while continuing to put forward Pope John Paul II as a candidate for sainthood!) The brief continues with a close examination of the Vatican's claim to be a state, and its related claim that statehood confers legal immunity on the pope, even in gross cases of abuse of human rights. Without undue difficulty, Robertson shows both claims to be laughably void and based, furthermore, on a history of disgraceful collaboration with dictatorship and sheltering of wanted criminals.

Cardinal Newman himself was rather dubious about the late-19^th-century proclamation of papal infallibility. He also asked to be buried in the same grave as his lifelong companion, Ambrose St. John. The Catholic authorities have now rudely disinterred the bodies, finding nothing that had survived decay or could serve as a relic. This is grotesque enough, but not as grotesque as the air of persecuted innocence that they wear when confronted with their obscene offenses. Now at last there is a careful guide to legal redress, which can be taken up either by a victim or by a prosecutor and used to bring a man-made outfit, and its chief executive, within the rule of law. The sun and moon don't need to fall and the species doesn't have to die in agony in order to expiate this sin—a little application of simple earthly justice is all that is required. Will it really continue to be withheld?".

Sarkozy and the Roma people (II)

Come here for an in-depth analysis, by the French daily Libération, of the host of issues surrounding the deportation of the Roma from France.

Sarkozy and the Roma people (I)

From The New Republic:

What Can France Teach Us About Botched Immigration Policies? 

David A. Bell

September 3, 2010 | 12:00 am

On both sides of the Atlantic, it has been an uncomfortable summer for immigrant groups. Here in the United States there have been the quarrels over the "Ground Zero Mosque," “anchor babies,” and Arizona’s new illegal immigrant bill (not to mention yet more calls for the deportation of our “Muslim” president to his “native” Kenya by the surprisingly large proportion of the Republican Party that seems to have taken up permanent residence on Planet Zorg). Meanwhile, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, faced with removal from office by the voters in 2012, has continued to push legislation outlawing the wearing of the burqa in public and acted to expel several hundred Roma to Romania and Bulgaria. This last move in particular has earned him widespread criticism from the media, and widespread support from the French public.
Sarkozy’s actions and France’s continuing struggles with the immigration issue have gotten relatively little coverage in the United States. They are worth taking a closer look at, however, because they starkly illustrate many of the issues that arise from the world-wide movement of populations—issues that the United States will be confronting more and more over the coming decades.
In its attitudes toward foreigners and “immigrant-origin populations” (i.e. both immigrants and the children and grandchildren of immigrants), the French government is increasingly trying to establish French “values” as a basis for policy. For instance, earlier this summer, Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux ordered the deportation of Egyptian Islamist imam Ali Ibrahim El Soudany, claiming that he “despised the values of our society,” and that his message of religious hatred “had nothing to do with religious liberty.” The ban on the burqa is similarly justified by reference not only to human rights, but more nebulously to values such as the importance of face-to-face contact. In this shift, France has followed the lead of countries like the Netherlands, where would-be citizens must now watch a film that shows two men kissing, and a topless woman on a beach, so as to understand Dutch “values.”
This all raises the obvious problem of how national “values” can possibly be defined. Sixty years ago, by most present-day definitions, a large majority of the French (like a large majority in most countries on earth) held homophobic and bigoted attitudes. So should national values depend on shifting majority opinion? If not, who decides their content? Perhaps Sarkozy’s new “Ministry of Immigration, Integration and National Identity”? Moreover, if the values of “the French” can be so neatly packaged, why can the same not be done with other groups, whose values might be judged fundamentally antithetical to “French” ones? What of “Muslim” values, for instance?
Meanwhile, the expulsion of the Roma illustrates the tensions between the politics of immigration and citizenship on the one hand, and the realities of population movements on the other. Sarkozy, in an Arizonan vein, describes the people expelled as threats to public order who, as foreigners, had no right to stay on French soil. Yet, in practice, like most Western countries, France has many categories of resident foreigners (legal immigrants, temporary workers, asylum-seekers, citizens of other EU countries, etc.) who enjoy a wide variety of rights. The Roma expelled this summer are mostly citizens of EU member states Bulgaria and Romania, and, while France had the right to expel them, under EU law, the Roma had the right to re-enter the country the day after their expulsion.
The point, in both cases, is that nationality is not a single, rigidly bounded thing, defined by a particular set of values or a single legal rule. French officials, of all people, should have no trouble understanding this point. In recent years, they have repeatedly changed French nationality law (introducing complex special provisions, for instance, for children born on French soil to foreign parents). And, during the long history of the French overseas empire, their predecessors created a bewildering variety of categories of what amounted to partial or quasi-citizenship, so as to distinguish certain groups under French rule (e.g. Algerian Muslims) from others, and to limit their rights and movement.
Yet, in politics, the temptation is always to divide the world neatly into two parts: “citizens” and “non-citizens,” “us” and “them.” This is hardly, by itself, a bad thing. Democracy requires a clearly bounded community of citizens. And, arguably, elite civil servants in France, with their concern for the construction of a complex, technocratic European super-state, have only fueled populist anger by giving this point too little importance in past years and equating all opposition (including the 2005 referendum vote against the proposed European Constitution) with xenophobia.
Pushing too hard in the other direction, however, quickly devolves into sheer demagoguery. Modern nations are not hermetically walled, ideologically and ethnically homogenous little city states. The complexities of population movements and cultural diversity have to be respected. And Nicolas Sarkozy would do well to remember that strife over “immigrant-origin populations” does not only, or even principally, arise because of conflicts over “values” or an ambiguous legal status. It arises when these groups are actively made to feel alien and unwelcome. Some American politicians could use a refresher on this point as well.

David A. Bell, a contributing editor to The New Republic, teaches history at Princeton.

Finkelstein on Gaza

From Counterfire.org:

Norman Finkelstein, This Time We Went Too Far

Written by Alistair Cartwright

Published just over a year after Israel’s 2008 attack on Gaza and drawing on a wealth of evidence Finkelstein's book is first and foremost a stunning indictment of that attack.

Norman Finkelstein, This Time We Went Too Far (OR Books 2010), 208pp

Norman Finkelstein is an academic who has written and spoken widely on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Along with Noam Chomsky he has been one of America’s most outspoken critics of Israel. Published just over a year after Israel’s 2008/9 attack on Gaza this book is first and foremost a stunning indictment of that attack. Finkelstein presents a mass of evidence drawn from reports by human rights organisations, soldiers’ testimonies, statements from Israeli officials, news reports, UN documents and in particular the Goldstone report.

Altogether the effect is an onslaught of undeniable condemnation. In this respect This Time We Went Too Far does two things: it blasts away any remaining shred of apology for Israel, and it condenses, out of the evidence, a powerful lament for a great human tragedy. The titles of the two chapters which contain the bulk of the indictment testify to the first part: Whitewash and Of Human Shields and Hasbara (the Hebrew word for propaganda). A quotation from Gandhi at the end of the book indicates the second: ‘Massacre of innocent people is a serious matter. It is not a thing to be easily forgotten. It is our duty to cherish their memory’.

The balance sheet of operation ‘Cast Lead’ is one of massive, disproportionate destruction:
‘On the basis of extensive field research, nongovernmental organisations put the total number of Palestinians killed at nearly 1400, of whom up to four-fifths were civilians and 350 children. On the other side, total Israeli casualties amounted to ten combatants (four killed by friendly fire) and three civilians… Israel destroyed or damaged 58,000 homes… 280 schools and kindergartens,… 1,500 factories and workshops…’

There was no real resistance; Israeli soldiers’ experiences ranged from boredom and casual sadism to surprise at the extraordinary firepower deployed, uncommon even to members of the IDF: ‘IDF testimonies recalled ‘the hatred and the joy’ , and ‘fun’ and ‘delight’ of killing Palestinians.’ Another soldier said: ‘there was a point where D-9s were razing areas. It was amazing. At first you go in and see lots of houses. A week later, after razing, you see the horizon further away, almost to the sea’.

Individual atrocities were widespread, and Finkelstein is able to document that Palestinian civilians, ‘including women and children, were shot at short range when posing no threat to the lives of the Israeli soldiers’. The destruction was deliberately intended, with the design of the operation coming from the highest levels. Finkelstein quotes an exchange between a BBC reporter observing that Israel ‘imposed 100 times more casualties on Gaza in three weeks than they did on you’ and Interior Minister Sheerit responding: ‘that’s the idea of the operation, what do you think?’. Just after the ceasefire Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni ‘bragged that “Israel demonstrated real hooliganism during the course of the recent operation, which I demanded”.’

This exhaustive factual account is the core of the book but, as Finkelstein acknowledges, it isn’t enough in itself. Finkelstein wishes the book to be more than a ‘lament’, since he sees the attack on Gaza as a turning point in world public opinion, such that ‘the prospects have never been more propitious for galvanising the public not just to mourn but also to act.’

The rest of the book, sandwiched around his account of the attack itself, is dedicated to explaining the strategic logic behind Cast Lead and the tensions leading up to it. Finkelstein offers a picture of the recent shift in public opinion, the growing movement for Palestinian solidarity, and gives advice on how to continue and extend these developments. Within this agenda there are three main touchstones around which Finkelstein orientates his arguments: 1. international law; 2. liberal Jewish opinion, particularly in the US; and 3. the idea that the scale of destruction unleashed by Cast Lead effectively shocked people into action. While all three are important aspects of the forces at play, raising them up to the point where they become the principal bases of the Palestinian cause, as Finkelstein seems to do, is problematic.

Finkelstein is not uncritical of international law. At one point he goes as far as saying that ‘in a rational world the locution “laws of war” would make as much sense as “etiquette of cannibals”.’ Yet he still places a somewhat disproportionate emphasis on the importance of UN resolutions, international legal bodies like the ICJ and most of all the Goldstone report. He criticises US and Israeli exceptionalism in the face of international law but never quite makes the essential point. The US and Israel go unchecked in their disregard for the rules because international law has a certain degree of US dominance built into it. This itself flows from the dynamics of imperialism. International law is not a neutral field, a simple set of rules, but an institution that has formed within an imperialist system.

US dominance can effectively neutralise international law, and just as easily manipulate it. To take an example from the book, Finkelstein recounts how the US and Israel were able to put pressure on the Palestinian Authority (PA) over its support of the Goldstone Report’s recommendations: ‘Acting on direct instruction from President Mahmoud Abbas, the PA representative on the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) effectively acquiesced in killing consideration of the Goldstone Report’. The PA had to reverse its stance later, but this episode underlines the fact that the reasons to cite international law are essentially tactical. International law is a contested space that includes a strong bias towards the US and other imperial powers.

It is certainly worth trying to make use of international law in the right circumstances, but only with a clear understanding of its limitations. The danger is that far from serving to unify people as Finkelstein intends, reliance on the processes of international law could have a profound demobilising effect. The recent UNHRC resolution endorsing the Goldstone Report is a small victory on the way to something bigger, but we should still expect the US to block action on it at the Security Council. And of course just because we support the findings and recommendations of the Goldstone report doesn’t mean we shouldn’t wholeheartedly oppose UN sanctions on Iran or the UN-supported occupation of Iraq.

International law (or universal human values) is not the only reason Finkelstein puts such high store in the Goldstone report. He sees in Goldstone a welcome return to a ‘classical’ Jewish liberalism that ends an era of ‘blanket Jewish support for Israel’. Moreover, ‘because of Goldstone’s credentials, Israel could not credibly play its usual cards – ‘anti-Semite’, ‘self-hating Jew’, ‘Holocaust denier’. . . In effect his persona neutralised the ideological weapons Israel has honed over many years to ward off criticism.’ For Finkelstein the wider shift in Jewish opinion makes the prospects of the Palestinian cause and a ‘just and lasting resolution’ of the whole conflict better now than they ever have been.

The shifts in Jewish opinion with regard to Israel, particularly in America, that Finkelstein documents are revealing and important. But in describing liberal Jewish opinion as the key to any movement for a just peace (presumably a movement for solidarity with the people of Palestine) Finkelstein confuses cause and effect. The turning of the tide within this particular section of international public opinion is symptomatic of a much larger movement. Broadly speaking this is the global antiwar movement. The Palestinian cause now has a higher profile because the issue of Palestine has been swept up in the war on terror. The corresponding shift in public opinion is due largely to the way in which this political connection has been made and reinforced by the movement against the war.

An implication of Finkelstein’s title, ‘this time we went too far’, well reflected in the text, is  that what was decisive about Israel’s attack on Gaza was simply the level of destruction. The massive destruction of Cast Lead made it an event from which people couldn’t turn their eyes. However, one only has to look at comparable violent moments in Israel’s history, like the war on Lebanon in 1982, to see that the widespread outrage surrounding Cast Lead involved other factors apart from the level and nature of the violence itself. Significantly in 1982 the largest protests against that war were in Israel itself, with one protest bringing hundreds of thousands of Israelis out onto the streets of Tel Aviv. While international solidarity campaigns like the PSC here in the UK were founded around the events of 1982 they did not yet have the mass appeal they have now.

In effect Finkelstein recognises this when he notes that ‘it is not so much that Israel’s behaviour is worse than it was before, but rather that the record of that behaviour has finally caught up with it’. But why did the record catch up now? The global protests around Gaza in 2008/9 were part of a chain of decisive moments from the Jenin massacre in 2002 to the second war on Lebanon in 2006. Israel’s repression of the second Intifada was swept up in the discourse of the war on terror due to the clear support of the Bush administration. The fate of the Palestinians became visibly tied to US intentions for the whole of the Middle East, including its plans to attack Iraq. Palestine became a cause of common struggle for a large number of those opposing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The global antiwar movement has been a rising sea lifting the Palestinian cause.