[lbo-talk] Chomsky v Marko

Etienne tim_boetie at fastmail.fm
Sun Nov 20 00:55:26 PST 2005


On Sat, 2005-11-19 at 23:41 -0700, Michael Pugliese wrote: [Quoting Ian Williams]


> The war in Kosovo split the American left. However, it did not create the
> fissures, rather it revealed that beneath the spurious unity of support for
> socialism, there were two very different conceptions of politics. One put
> humanitarian concerns and human rights as, not only the first item on the
> agenda, but the reason for having an agenda at all. The other saw such
> concerns as occasionally and expediently useful rallying calls for struggles
> against imperialism and the ruling class.

This is true, I think, although Williams draws precisely the wrong conclusions. What wasn't obvious at the time of the Kosovo war (or not to me, anyway), but is clear now, is that the "humanitarian" position is necessarily not a left one: "human rights" is the official ideology of contemporary capitalism. Note how Williams _simply assumes_ that "humanitarian concerns" necessarily override class-struggle or anti-imperialist politics. This is one of Žižek's favorite themes:


>From http://www.lacan.com/zizviol.htm

Recall, in the early 1990s, the three-years-long siege of Sarajevo, with the population starving, exposed to permanent shelling and snipers' fire. The big enigma here is: although all the media were full of pictures and reports, why did not the UN forces, NATO or the US accomplish just a small act of breaking the siege of Sarajevo, of imposing a corridor through which people and provisions could circulate freely? It would have cost nothing: with a little bit of serious pressure on the Serb forces, the prolonged spectacle of encircled Sarajevo exposed to ridiculous terror would have been over. There is only one answer to this enigma, the one proposed by Rony Brauman himself who, on behalf of the Red Cross, coordinated the help to Sarajevo: the very presentation of the crisis of Sarajevo as "humanitarian," the very recasting of the political-military conflict into the humanitarian terms, was sustained by an eminently political choice, that of, basically, taking the Serb side in the conflict. Especially ominous and manipulative was here the role of Mitterand:

The celebration of 'humanitarian intervention' in Yugoslavia

took the place of a political discourse, disqualifying in

advance all conflicting debate. /.../ It was apparently not

possible, for Francois Mitterand, to express his analysis of the

war in Yugoslavia. With the strictly humanitarian response, he

discovered an unexpected source of communication or, more

precisely, of cosmetics, which is a little bit the same

thing. /.../ Mitterand remained in favor of the maintenance of

Yugoslavia within its borders and was persuaded that only a

strong Serbian power was in the position to guarantee a certain

stability in this explosive region. This position rapidly became

unacceptable in the eyes of the French people. All the bustling

activity and the humanitarian discourse permitted him to

reaffirm the unfailing commitment of France to the Rights of Man

in the end, and to mimic an opposition to Greater Serbian

fascism, all in giving it free rein.


>From this specific insight, one should make the move to the general
level and render problematic the very depoliticized humanitarian politics of "Human Rights" as the ideology of military interventionism serving specific economico-political purposes. As Wendy Brown develops apropos Michael Ignatieff, such humanitarianism "presents itself as something of an antipolitics - a pure defense of the innocent and the powerless against power, a pure defense of the individual against immense and potentially cruel or despotic machineries of culture, state, war, ethnic conflict, tribalism, patriarchy, and other mobilizations or instantiations of collective power against individuals." However, the question is: "what kind of politicization /those who intervene on behalf of human rights/ set in motion against the powers they oppose. Do they stand for a different formulation of justice or do they stand in opposition to collective justice projects?" Say, it is clear that the US overthrowing of Saddam Hussein, legitimized in the terms of ending the suffering of the Iraqi people, not only was motivated by other politico-economic interests (oil), but also relied on a determinate idea of the political and economic conditions that should open up the perspective of freedom to the Iraqi people (Western liberal democracy, guarantee of private property, the inclusion into the global market economy, etc.). The purely humanitarian anti-political politics of merely preventing suffering thus effectively amounts to the implicit prohibition of elaborating a positive collective project of socio-political transformation."

--

How can they fail to understand that no | Tim

rebellion is ever vanquished? What can it | http://huh.34sp.com/

possibly mean, to vanquish a rebellion? |

-- Frantz Fanon | ------------------------------------------------- tim_boetie at fastmail.fm



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