[lbo-talk] Zizek at his crystal clearest

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Fri Jan 5 05:53:26 PST 2007


[and quite enjoyable]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/05/opinion/05zizek.html

The New York Times

January 5, 2007

Op-Ed Contributor

Denying the Facts, Finding the Truth

By SLAVOJ ZIZEK

London

ONE of the pop heroes of the Iraq war was undoubtedly Muhammad Said

al-Sahhaf, the unfortunate Iraqi information minister who, in his

daily press conferences during the invasion, heroically denied even

the most evident facts and stuck to the Iraqi line. Even with American

tanks only a few hundred yards from his office, he continued to claim

that the televised shots of tanks on the Baghdad streets were just

Hollywood special effects.

In his very performance as an excessive caricature, Mr. Sahhaf thereby

revealed the hidden truth of the normal reporting: there were no

refined spins in his comments, just a plain denial. There was

something refreshingly liberating about his interventions, which

displayed a striving to be liberated from the hold of facts and thus

of the need to spin away their unpleasant aspects: his stance was,

Whom do you believe, your eyes or my words?

Furthermore, sometimes, he even struck a strange truth when confronted

with claims that Americans were in control of parts of Baghdad, he

snapped back: They are not in control of anything they dont even

control themselves!

What, exactly, do they not control? Back in 1979, in her essay

Dictatorship and Double Standards, published in Commentary, Jeane J.

Kirkpatrick elaborated the distinction between authoritarian and

totalitarian regimes. This concept served as the justification of the

American policy of collaborating with right-wing dictators while

treating Communist regimes much more harshly: authoritarian dictators

are pragmatic rulers who care about their power and wealth and are

indifferent toward ideological issues, even if they pay lip service to

some big cause; in contrast, totalitarian leaders are selfless

fanatics who believe in their ideology and are ready to put everything

at stake for their ideals.

Her point was that, while one can deal with authoritarian rulers who

react rationally and predictably to material and military threats,

totalitarian leaders are much more dangerous and have to be directly

confronted.

The irony is that this distinction encapsulates perfectly what went

wrong with the United States occupation of Iraq: Saddam Hussein was a

corrupt authoritarian dictator striving to keep his hold on power and

guided by brutal pragmatic considerations (which led him to

collaborate with the United States in the 1980s). The ultimate proof

of his regimes secular nature is the fact that in the Iraqi elections

of October 2002 in which Saddam Hussein got a 100 percent endorsement,

and thus overdid the best Stalinist results of 99.95 percent the

campaign song played again and again on all the state media was

Whitney Houstons I Will Always Love You.

One outcome of the American invasion is that it has generated a much

more uncompromising fundamentalist politico-ideological constellation

in Iraq. This has led to a predominance of the pro-Iranian political

forces there the intervention basically delivered Iraq to Iranian

influence. One can imagine how, if President Bush were to be

court-martialed by a Stalinist judge, he would be instantly condemned

as an Iranian agent. The violent outbursts of the recent Bush politics

are thus not exercises in power, but rather exercises in panic.

Recall the old story about the factory worker suspected of stealing:

every evening, when he was leaving work, the wheelbarrow he rolled in

front of him was carefully inspected, but the guards could not find

anything, it was always empty. Finally, they got the point: what the

worker was stealing were the wheelbarrows themselves.

This is the trick being attempted by those who claim today, But the

world is nonetheless better off without Saddam! They forget to factor

into the account the effects of the very military intervention against

him. Yes, the world is better without Saddam Hussein but is it better

if we include into the overall picture the ideological and political

effects of this very occupation?

The United States as a global policeman why not? The post-cold-war

situation effectively called for some global power to fill the void.

The problem resides elsewhere: recall the common perception of the

United States as a new Roman Empire. The problem with todays America

is not that it is a new global empire, but that it is not one. That

is, while pretending to be an empire, it continues to act like a

nation-state, ruthlessly pursuing its interests. It is as if the

guiding vision of recent American politics is a weird reversal of the

well-known motto of the ecologists act globally, think locally.

After 9/11, the United States was given the opportunity to realize

what kind of world it was part of. It might have used the opportunity

but it did not, instead opting to reassert its traditional ideological

commitments: out with the responsibility and guilt with respect to the

impoverished third world we are the victims now!

Apropos of the Hague tribunal, the British writer Timothy Garton Ash

pathetically claimed: No Führer or Duce, no Pinochet, Amin or Pol Pot,

should ever again feel themselves protected from the reach of

international law by the palace gates of sovereignty. One should

simply take note of what is missing in this series of names which,

apart from the standard couple of Hitler and Mussolini, contains three

third world dictators: where is at least one name from the major

powers who might sleep a bit uneasily?

Or, closer to the standard list of the bad guys, why was there little

talk of delivering Saddam Hussein or, say, Manuel Noriega to The

Hague? Why was the only trial against Mr. Noriega for drug

trafficking, rather than for his murderous abuses as a dictator? Was

it because he would have disclosed his past ties with the C.I.A.?

In a similar way, Saddam Husseins regime was an abominable

authoritarian state, guilty of many crimes, mostly toward its own

people. However, one should note the strange but key fact that, when

the United States representatives and the Iraqi prosecutors were

enumerating his evil deeds, they systematically omitted what was

undoubtedly his greatest crime in terms of human suffering and of

violating international justice: his invasion of Iran. Why? Because

the United States and the majority of foreign states were actively

helping Iraq in this aggression.

And now the United States is continuing, through other means, this

greatest crime of Saddam Hussein: his never-ending attempt to topple

the Iranian government. This is the price you have to pay when the

struggle against the enemies is the struggle against the evil ghosts

in your own closet: you dont even control yourself.

Slavoj Zizek, the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for

the Humanities, is the author, most recently, of The Parallax View.



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