There should be no
“deeper understanding” of the ISIS terrorists (in the sense of “their
deplorable acts are nonetheless reactions to European brutal interventions”);
they should be characterized as what they are: the Islamo-Fascist counterpart
of the European anti-immigrant racists.
In the first half of
2015, Europe was preoccupied by radical emancipatory movements (Syriza and
Podemos), while in the second half the attention shifted to the “humanitarian”
topic of the refugees. Class struggle was literally repressed and replaced by
the liberal-cultural topic of tolerance and solidarity. With the Paris terror
killings on Friday, November 13, even this topic (which still refers to large
socio-economic issues) is now eclipsed by the simple opposition of all
democratic forces caught in a merciless war with forces of terror.
It is easy to
imagine what will follow: paranoiac search for ISIS agents among the refugees.
(Media already gleefully reported that two of the terrorists entered Europe
through Greece as refugees.) The greatest victims of the Paris terror attacks
will be refugees themselves, and the true winners, behind the platitudes in the
style of je suis Paris, will be simply the partisans of total war on
both sides. This is how we should really condemn the Paris killings: not
just to engage in shows of anti-terrorist solidarity but to insist on the
simple cui bono (for whose benefit?) question.
There should be no
“deeper understanding” of the ISIS terrorists (in the sense of “their
deplorable acts are nonetheless reactions to European brutal interventions”);
they should be characterized as what they are: the Islamo-Fascist counterpart
of the European anti-immigrant racists—the two are the two sides of the same
coin. Let’s bring class struggle back—and the only way to do it is to insist on
global solidarity of the exploited.
The
deadlock that global capitalism finds itself in is more and more palpable. How
to break out of it? Fredric Jameson recently proposed global militarization of society as a mode of
emancipation: Democratically motivated grassroots movements are seemingly
doomed to failure, so perhaps it’s best to break global capitalism’s vicious
cycle through “militarization,” which means suspending the power of
self-regulating economies. Perhaps the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe
provides an opportunity to test this option.
It is at least clear
that what is needed to stop the chaos is large-scale coordination and
organization, which includes but is not limited to: reception centers near to
the crisis (Turkey, Lebanon, the Libyan coast), transportation of those granted
entrance to European way stations, and their redistribution to potential
settlements. The military is the only agent that can do such a big task in an
organized way. To claim that such a role for the military smells of a state of
emergency is redundant. When you have tens of thousands of people passing
through densely populated areas without organization you have an emergency
state—and it is in a state of emergency that parts of Europe are right now.
Therefore, it is madness to think that such a process can be left to unwind
freely. If nothing else, refugees need provisions and medical care.
Taking control of
the refugee crisis will mean breaking leftist taboos.
For instance, the
right to “free movement” should be limited, if for no other reason than the
fact that it doesn’t exist among the refugees, whose freedom of movement is
already dependent on their class. Thus, the criteria of acceptance and
settlement have to be formulated in a clear and explicit way—whom and how many
to accept, where to relocate them, etc. The art here is to find the middle road
between following the desires of the refugees (taking into account their wish
to move to countries where they already have relatives, etc.) and the
capacities of different countries.
Another taboo we
must address concerns norms and rules. It is a fact that most of the refugees
come from a culture that is incompatible with Western European notions of human
rights. Tolerance as a solution (mutual respect of each other’s sensitivities)
obviously doesn’t work: fundamentalist Muslims find it impossible to bear
our blasphemous images and reckless humor, which we consider a part of our
freedoms. Western liberals, likewise, find it impossible to bear many
practices of Muslim culture.
In short, things
explode when members of a religious community consider the very way of life
of another community as blasphemous or injurious, whether or not it
constitutes a direct attack on their religion. This is the case when Muslim
extremists attack gays and lesbians in the Netherlands and Germany, and it is
the case when traditional French citizens view a woman covered by a burka as an
attack on their French identity, which is exactly why they find it impossible
to remain silent when they encounter a covered woman in their midst.
To curb this
propensity, one has to do two things. First, formulate a minimum set of norms
obligatory for everyone that includes religious freedom, protection of
individual freedom against group pressure, the rights of women, etc.—without
fear that such norms will appear “Eurocentric.” Second, within these limits,
unconditionally insist on the tolerance of different ways of life. And if norms
and communication don’t work, then the force of law should be applied in all
its forms.
Another taboo that
must be overcome involves the equation of any reference to the European
emancipatory legacy to cultural imperialism and racism. In spite of the
(partial) responsibility of Europe for the situation from which refugees are
fleeing, the time has come to drop leftist mantras critiquing Eurocentrism.
The lessons of the post-9/11
world are that the Francis Fukuyama dream of global liberal democracy is at an
end and that, at the level of the world economy, corporate capitalism has
triumphed worldwide. In fact, the Third World nations that
embrace this world order are those now growing at a spectacular rate. The mask
of cultural diversity is sustained by the actual universalism of global
capital; even better if global capitalism’s political supplement relies on
so-called “Asian values.”
Global capitalism
has no problem in accommodating itself to a plurality of local religions,
cultures and traditions. So the irony of anti-Eurocentrism is that, on behalf
of anti-colonialism, one criticizes the West at the very historical moment when
global capitalism no longer needs Western cultural values in order to smoothly
function. In short, one tends to reject Western cultural values at the very
time when, critically reinterpreted, many of those values (egalitarianism, fundamental
rights, freedom of the press, the welfare-state, etc.) can serve as a weapon
against capitalist globalization. Did we already forget that the entire idea of
Communist emancipation as envisaged by Marx is a thoroughly “Eurocentric” one?
The next taboo worth
leaving behind is that any critique of the Islamic right is an example of
“Islamophobia.” Enough of this pathological fear of many Western liberal
leftists who worry about being deemed guilty of Islamophobia. For example,
Salman Rushdie was denounced for unnecessarily provoking Muslims and thus
(partially, at least) responsible for the fatwa condemning him to death.
The result of such a stance is what one can expect in such cases: The more
Western liberal leftists wallow in their guilt, the more they are accused by
Muslim fundamentalists of being hypocrites who try to conceal their hatred of
Islam.
This constellation
perfectly reproduces the paradox of the superego: The more you obey what the
pseudo-moral agency that the sadistic and primitive superego demands of you,
the more guilty you are of moral masochism and identification with the
aggressor. Thus, it is as if the more you tolerate Islamic fundamentalism, the
stronger its pressure on you will be.
And one can be sure
that the same holds for the influx of immigrants: The more Western Europe will
be open to them, the more it will be made to feel guilty that it did not accept
even more of them. There will never be enough of them. And with those who are
here, the more tolerance one displays towards their way of life, the more one
will be made guilty for not practicing enough tolerance.
The political
economy of the refugees: Global capitalism and military intervention
As a long-term
strategy, we should focus on what one cannot but call the “political economy of
refugees,” which means focusing on the ultimate causes underlying the dynamics
of global capitalism and military interventions. The ongoing disorder should be
treated as the true face of the New World Order. Consider the food crisis now
plaguing the “developing” world. None other than Bill Clinton made it clear in
his comments, at a 2008 UN gathering marking World Food Day, that the food
crisis in many Third World countries cannot be put on the usual suspects like
corruption, inefficiency and state interventionism—the crisis is directly
dependent on the globalization of agriculture. The gist of Clinton’s speech was
that today’s global food crisis shows how “we all blew it, including me when I was president,”
by treating food crops as commodities instead of as a vital right of the
world’s poor.
Clinton was very
clear in putting blame not on individual states or governments but on U.S. and
EU long-term global policies carried out for decades by the World Bank, the
International Monetary Fund and other international economic institutions. Such
policies pressured African and Asian countries into dropping government
subsidies for fertilizer, improved seed and other farm inputs. This allowed the
best land to be used for export crops, which effectively compromised the
countries’ self-sufficiency. The integration of local agriculture into global
economy was the result of such “structural adjustments,” and the effect was
devastating: Farmers were thrown out of their land and pushed into slums fitted
for sweat-shop labor, while countries had to rely more and more on imported
food. In this way, they are kept in postcolonial dependence and became more and
more vulnerable to market fluctuations. For instance, grain prices skyrocketed
last year in countries like Haiti and Ethiopia, both of which export crops for
biofuel and consequently starve their populations.
In order to approach
these problems properly, one will have to invent new forms of large-scale
collective action; neither the standard state intervention nor the much-praised
local self-organization can do the job. If the problem will not be solved, one
should seriously consider that we are approaching a new era of apartheid in
which secluded, resource-abundant parts of the world will be separated from the
starved-and-permanently-at-war parts. What should people in Haiti and other
places with food shortages do? Do they not have the full right to violently
rebel? Or, to become refugees? Despite all the critiques of economic
neo-colonialism, we are still not fully aware of the devastating effects of the
global market on many local economies.
As for the open (and
not-so-open) military interventions, the results have been told often enough:
failed states. No refugees without ISIS and no ISIS without the U.S. occupation
of Iraq, etc. In a gloomy prophecy made before his death,
Col. Muammar Gaddafi said: “Now listen you, people of NATO. You’re bombing a
wall, which stood in the way of African migration to Europe and in the way of
al Qaeda terrorists. This wall was Libya. You’re breaking it. You’re idiots,
and you will burn in Hell for thousands of migrants from Africa.” Was he not
stating the obvious?
The Russian story, which basically elaborates Gaddafi,
has its element of truth, in spite of the obvious taste of pasta putinesca.
Boris Dolgov of the Moscow-based Strategic Culture Foundation told TASS:
That the refugee
crisis is an outcome of US-European policies is clear to the naked eye. … The
destruction of Iraq, the destruction of Libya and attempts to topple Bashar
Assad in Syria with the hands of Islamic radicals—that’s what EU and US
policies are all about, and the hundreds of thousands of refugees are a result
of that policy.
Similarly, Irina
Zvyagelskaya, of the oriental studies department at the Moscow State Institute
of International Relations, told TASS:
The civil war in
Syria and tensions in Iraq and Libya keep fueling the flow of migrants, but
that is not the only cause. I agree with those who see the current events as a
trend towards another mass resettlement of peoples, which leave the weaker
countries with ineffective economies. There are systemic problems that cause
people to abandon their homes and take to the road. And the liberal European
legislation allows many of them to not only stay in Europe, but also to live
there on social benefits without seeking employment.
And Yevgeny
Grishkovets, the Russian author, playwright and stage director, writing in in
his blog agrees:
These
people are exhausted, angry and humiliated. They have no idea of European
values, lifestyles and traditions, multiculturalism or tolerance. They will
never agree to abide by European laws. … They will never feel grateful to the
people whose countries they have managed to get into with such problems,
because the very same states first turned their own home countries into a
bloodbath. … Angela Merkel vows modern German society and Europe are prepared
for problems. … That’s a lie and nonsense!
However, while there
is some general truth in all this, one should not jump from this generality to
the empirical fact of refugees flowing into Europe and simply accept full
responsibility. The responsibility is shared. First, Turkey is playing a
well-planned political game (officially fighting ISIS but effectively bombing
the Kurds who are really fighting ISIS). Then we have the class division in the
Arab world itself (the ultra-rich Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and Emirates
accepting almost no refugees). And what about Iraq with its tens of billions of
oil reserves? How, out of all this mess, does there emerge a flow of refugees?
What we do know is
that a complex economy of refugee transportation is making millions upon
millions of dollars profit. Who is financing it? Streamlining it? Where are the
European intelligence services? Are they exploring this dark netherworld? The
fact that refugees are in a desperate situation in no way excludes the fact
that their flow into Europe is part of a well-planned project.
Sure, Norway exists
Let me address my
so-called leftist critics who find my breaking of the above-mentioned taboos in
articles published in the London Review of Books and In These Times problematic. Nick Riemer, writing in Jacobin,
condemns the “reactionary nonsense” I am “promoting”:
It should be obvious
to Zizek that the West can’t intervene militarily in a way that avoids the
“neocolonial traps of the recent past.” Refugees, for their part, aren’t
wayfarers on someone else’s soil, present only under sufferance and, as such,
the objects of “hospitality.” Regardless of the customs they bring with them,
they should enjoy the same rights as the members of the diverse communities
that make up Europe—a pluralism entirely ignored in Zizek’s astonishing
reference to a unique “Western European way of life.”
The claim that underlies this view is
much stronger than Alain Badiou's qui est ici est d'ici (those who are
here are from here)—it is more something like qui veut venir ici est d'ici (those
who want to come here are from here). But even if we accept
it, it is Riemer who entirely ignores the point of my remark: of course “they
should enjoy the same rights as the members of the diverse communities that
make up Europe,” but which exactly are these “same rights” refugees should
enjoy?
While Europe is now fighting for full gay and woman's rights
(the right to abortion, the rights of same-sex married couples, etc.), should
these rights also be extended to gays and women among the refugees even if they are in
conflicts with “the customs they bring with them” (as they often obviously
are)? And this aspect should in no way be dismissed as marginal: from Boko
Haram to Robert Mugabe to Vladimir Putin, the anti-colonialist critique of the
West more and more appears as the rejection of the Western “sexual” confusion,
and as the demand for returning to the traditional sexual hierarchy.
I am, of course,
well aware how the immediate export of Western feminism and individual human
rights can serve as a tool of ideological and economic neocolonialism (we all
remember how some American feminists supported the U.S. intervention in Iraq as
a way to liberate women there, while the result is exactly the opposite). But I
absolutely reject to draw from this the conclusion that the Western Left should
make here a “strategic compromise,” and silently tolerate “customs” of
humiliating women and gays on behalf of the “greater” anti-imperialist
struggle.
Along with Jürgen
Habermas and Peter Singer, Reimer then accuses me of endorsing “an elitist
vision of politics—the enlightened political class versus a racist and ignorant
population.” When I read this, I again could not believe my eyes! As if I
hadn’t written pages and pages on criticizing precisely European liberal
political elite! As for “racist and ignorant population,” we stumble here upon
another Leftist taboo: Yes, unfortunately, large parts of the working class in
Euroope is racist and anti-immigrant, a fact which should in no way be
dismissed as as the result of the manipulation of an essentially
“progressive” working class.
Riemer's final
critique is: “Zizek’s fantasy that refugees pose a threat to the ‘Western’ ‘way
of life’ that may be remedied by better kinds of military and economic
‘intervention’ abroad is the clearest illustration of how the categories in
which analysis is conducted can open the door to reaction.” As for the danger
of military interventions, I am well aware of it, and I also consider a
justified intervention almost impossible. But when I speak of the necessity of
radical economic change, I of course do not aim at some kind of “economic
intervention” in parallel with military intervention, but of a thorough radical
transformation of global capitalism that should begin in the developed West
itself. Every authentic leftist knows that this is the only true
solution—without it, the developed West will continue to devastate Third World
countries, and with fanfare mercifully take care of their poor.
Along similar lines,
Sam Kriss’ critique is especially
interesting in that he also accuses me of not being a true Lacanian:
It’s even possible
to argue that the migrants are more European than Europe itself. Zizek mocks
the utopian desire for a Norway that doesn’t exist, and insists that migrants
should stay where they’re sent. (It doesn’t seem to occur to him that those
trying to reach a certain country might have family members already there, or
be able to speak the language, that it’s driven precisely by a desire to integrate.
But also—isn’t this precisely the operation of the objet petit a [the
unatainable object of desire]? What kind of Lacanian tells someone that they
should effectively abandon their desire for something just because
it’s not attainable? Or are migrants not worthy of the luxury of an unconscious
mind?) In Calais, migrants trying to reach the United Kingdom protested against
their conditions with placards demanding “freedom of movement for all.” Unlike
racial or gender equality, the free movement of peoples across national borders
is a supposedly universal European value that has actually been
implemented—but, of course, only for Europeans. These protesters put the lie to
any claim on the part of Europe to be upholding universal values. Zizek can
only articulate the European “way of life” in terms of vague and transcendent
generalities, but here it is in living flesh. If the challenge of migration is
one of European universalism against backwards and repressive particularism,
then the particularism is entirely on the part of Europe. … “The Non-Existence
of Norway” isn’t a theoretical analysis, it’s a gentle word of heartfelt advice
in the ear of the European bureaucratic class, one that’s not particularly
interested in Lacan. For all his insistence on “radical economic change,” this
epistolary structure ensures that such a change is, for the time being,
entirely off the table. Hence the insistence that there is not, and can never
be, a Norway. The capitalists do not intend to make one, and Zizek does not
intend to address those that could. To which the Marxist response must be that
if there is no Norway, then we’ll have to build it ourselves.
“Migrants are more
European than Europe itself” is an old leftist thesis that I too have often
used, but one has to be specific about what it means. In my critic’s reading,
it means migrants actualize the principle—“freedom of movement for all”—more
seriously than Europe. But, again, one has to be precise here. There is
“freedom of movement” in the sense of freedom to travel, and the more radical
“freedom of movement” in the sense of the freedom to settle in whatever country
I want. But the axiom that sustains the refugees in Calais is not just the
freedom to travel, but something more like, “Everyone has the right to settle
in any other part of the world, and the country they move into has to provide
for them.” The EU guarantees (sort of, more or less) this right for its members
and to demand the globalization of this right equals the demand to expand the
EU to the entire world.
The actualization of
this freedom presupposes nothing less than a radical socio-economic revolution.
Why? New forms of apartheid are emerging. In our global world, commodities
circulate freely but not people. Discourse around porous walls and the threat
of inundating foreigners are an inherent index of what is false about
capitalist globalization. It is as if the refugees want to extend the free,
global circulation of commodities to people as well, but this is presently
impossible due to the limitations imposed by global capitalism.
From the Marxist
standpoint, “freedom of movement” relates to the need of capital for a “free”
labor force—millions torn out of their communal life to be employed in
sweatshops. The universe of capital relates to individual freedom of movement
in an inherently contradictory way: Capitalism needs “free” individuals as
cheap labor forces, but it simultaneously needs to control their movement since
it cannot afford the same freedoms and rights for all people.
Is demanding radical
freedom of movement, precisely because it does not exist within the existing
order, a good starting point for the struggle? My critic admits the
impossibility of the refugee’s demand, yet he affirms it on account of its very
impossibility—all the while accusing me of a non-Lacanian, vulgar pragmatism.
The part about objet a as impossible, etc., is simply ridiculous,
theoretical nonsense. The “Norway” I refer to is not objet a but a
fantasy. Refugees who want to reach Norway present an exemplary case of
ideological fantasy—a fantasy-formation that obfuscates the inherent
antagonisms. Many of the refugees want to have a cake and eat it: They
basically expect the best of the Western welfare-state while retaining their
specific way of life, though in some of its key features their way of life is
incompatible with the ideological foundations of the Western welfare-state.
Germany likes to
emphasize the need to integrate the refugees culturally and socially.
However—and here is another taboo to be broken—how many of the refugees really
want to be integrated? What if the obstacle to integration is not simply
Western racism? (Incidentally, fidelity to one’s objet a in no way
guarantees authenticity of desire—even a brief perusal of Mein Kampf
makes it clear that Jews were Hitler’s objet a, and he certainly
remained faithful to the project of their annihilation.) This is what is wrong
with the claim “if there is no Norway, then we’ll have to build it
ourselves”—yes, but it will not be the fantasmic “Norway” refugees are dreaming
about.
Ritualized violence
and fundamentalism
Along these lines,
in his attack on me, Sebastian Schuller raises the question:
“Is Zizek now going over to PEGIDA [Patriotic Europeans Against the
Islamization of the Occident]?”
Schuller's blog post
even attributes a statement to me that, of course, I never made: “I no longer
know any classes, only Europeans.” What we must do is move beyond the cliché of
refugees as proletarians with “nothing to lose but their chains” invading
bourgeois Europe: There are class divisions in Europe as well as in the Middle
East, and the key question is how these different class dynamics interact.
This brings us to
the reproach that, while I call for a critique of the dark underside of the
Islamic right, I remain silent about the dark underside of the European world:
“And what about Crosses in the school? What about the church tax? What about
the diverse Christian sects with absurd moral ideas? What about the Christians
who announce that gays will be barbecued in hell?” This is a weird reproach—the
parallel between Christian and Muslim fundamentalism is a topic over-analyzed
in our media (as well as in my books).
Be that as it may,
let’s recall what happened in Rotherham, England: At least
1,400 children were subjected to brutal sexual exploitation between 1997 and
2013; children as young as 11 were raped by multiple perpetrators, abducted,
trafficked to other cities, beaten and intimidated; “doused in petrol and
threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness
brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone,
as the official report put it.” There had been three previous inquiries into
these goings on that led to nothing. One inquiry team noted a fear among
council staff that they’d be labelled “racist” if they pursued the matter. Why?
The perpetrators were almost exclusively members of Pakistani gangs and their
victims—referred by the perpetrators as “white trash”—were white schoolgirls.
Reactions were
predictable. Mostly through generalization, many on the Left resorted to all
possible strategies in order to blur facts. Exhibiting political correctness at
its worst, in two Guardian articles the
perpetrators were vaguely designated as “Asians.” Claims were made. This wasn’t
about ethnicity and religion but rather about domination of man over women. Who
are we with our church pedophilia and Jimmy Saville to adopt a high moral
ground against a victimized minority? Can one imagine a more effective way to
open up the field to UKIP and other anti-immigrant
populists who exploit the worries of ordinary people?
What is not
acknowledge is that such anti-racism is in effect a form of covert racism since
it condescendingly treats Pakistanis as morally inferior beings who should not
be held to normal human standards.
In order to break
out of this deadlock, one should begin with the very parallel between the
Rotherham events and pedophilia within the Catholic Church. In both cases, we
are dealing with organized—ritualized even—collective activity. In the case of
Rotherham, another parallel may be even more pertinent. One of the terrifying
effects of the non-contemporaneity of different levels of social life is the
rise of systematic violence against women. Violence that is specific to a certain
social context is not random violence but systematic—it follows a pattern and
transmits a clear message. While we were right to be terrified at the gang
rapes in India, as Arundhati Roy pointed out, the cause of the
unanimous moral reaction was that the rapists were poor and from lower strata.
Nonetheless, the world-wide echo of violence against women is suspicious, so,
perhaps, it would be worthwhile to widen our perception and include other
similar phenomena.
The serial killings of women in Ciudad Juarez at
the border are not just private pathologies, but a ritualized activity, part of
the subculture of local gangs and directed at single young women working in new
assembling factories. These murders are clear cases of macho reaction to the
new class of independent working women: The social dislocation due to fast industrialization
and modernization provokes a brutal reaction in males who experience this
development as a threat. And the crucial feature in all these cases is that the
criminally violent act is not a spontaneous outburst of raw brutal energy which
breaks the chains of civilized customs, but something learned, externally
imposed, ritualized and part of the collective symbolic substance of a
community. What is repressed for the “innocent” public gaze is not the cruel
brutality of the act, but precisely its “cultural,” ritualistic character as
symbolic custom.
The same perverted
social-ritual logic is at work when Catholic Church representatives insist that
these intercontinental cases of pedophilia,
deplorable as they are, are the Church’s internal, problem, and then display
great reluctance to collaborate with police in their investigation. Church reps
are, in a way, right. The pedophilia of Catholic priests is not something that merely
concerns the persons who accidentally (read: privately) happened to choose the
profession of a priest. It is a phenomenon that concerns the Catholic Church as
an institution, and is inscribed into its very functioning as a socio-symbolic
institution. It does not concern the “private” unconscious of individuals, but
the “unconscious” of the institution itself. It is not something that happens
because the institution has to accommodate itself to the pathological realities
of libidinal life in order to survive, but something that the institution
itself needs in order to reproduce itself. One can well imagine a “straight”
(not pedophiliac) priest who, after years of service, gets involved in
pedophilia because the very logic of the institution seduces him into it. Such
an institutional unconscious designates the disavowed
underside that, precisely as disavowed, sustains the public institution. (In
the U.S. military, this underside consists of the obscene sexualized hazing rituals that help
sustain the group solidarity.) In other words, it is not simply that, for
conformist reasons, the Church tries to hush up the embarrassing pedophilic
scandals: In defending itself, the Church defends its innermost obscene secret.
Identifying oneself with this secret side is key for the very identity of a
Christian priest: If a priest seriously (not just rhetorically) denounces these
scandals he thereby excludes himself from the ecclesiastic community. He is no
longer “one of us.” Similarly, when a US southerner in the 1920s denounced the
KKK to the police he excluded himself from his community by betraying its
fundamental solidarity.
We should approach
the Rotherham events in exactly the same way since we are dealing with the
“political unconscious” of Pakistani Muslim youth. The kind of violence at work
is not chaotic violence but ritualized violence with precise ideological
contours. A youth group, which experiences itself as marginalized and
subordinated, took revenge at low-class girls of the predominant group. It is
fully legitimate to raise the question of whether there are features in their
religion and culture which open up the space for brutality against women without
blaming Islam as such (which is in itself no more misogynistic than
Christianity). In many Islamic countries and communities one can observe
consonance between violence against women, the subordination of women and their
exclusion from public life.
Among many
fundamentalist groups and movements strict imposition of hierarchical sexual
difference is at the very top of their agenda. But we should simply apply the
same criteria on both (Christian and Islamic fundamentalist) sides, without
fear of admitting that our liberal-secular critique of fundamentalism is also
stained by falsity.
Critique of
religious fundamentalism in Europe and the United States is an old topic with
endless variation. The very pervasiveness of the self-satisfactory way that the liberal intelligentsia make fun of
fundamentalists covers up the true problem, which
is its hidden class dimension. The counterpart of this “making-fun-of” is the
pathetic solidarity with the refugees and the no less false and pathetic
self-humiliation of our self-admonition. The real task is to build bridges
between “our” and “their” working classes. Without this unity (which includes
the critique and self-critique of both sides) class struggle proper regresses
into a clash of civilizations. That’s why yet another taboo should be left
behind.
The worries and
cares of so-called ordinary people affected by the refugees are oft dismissed
as an expression of racist prejudices if not outright neo-Fascism. Should we
really allow PEGIDA & company to be the only way open to them?
Interestingly, the
same motif underlies the “radical” leftist critique of Bernie Sanders: What
bothers his critics is precisely his close contact with small farmers and other
working people in Vermont, who usually give their electoral support to
Republican conservatives. Sanders is ready to listen to their worries and
cares, not dismiss them as racist white trash.
Where does the
threat come from?
Listening to
ordinary people’s worries, of course, in no way implies that one should accept
the basic premise of their stance—the idea that threats to their way of life
comes from outside, from foreigners, from “the other.” The task is rather to
teach them to recognize their own responsibility for their future. To explain
this point, let’s take an example from another part of the world.
Udi
Aloni’s new film Junction 48 (upcoming
in 2016) deals with the difficult predicament of young “Israeli Palestinians”
(Palestinians descended from the families that remained in Israel after 1949),
whose everyday life involves a continuous struggle at two fronts—against
Israeli state oppression as well as fundamentalist pressures from within their
own community. The main role is played by Tamer Nafar, a well-known
Israeli-Palestinian rapper, who, in his music, mocks the tradition of the “honor
killing” of Palestinian girls by their Palestinian families. A strange thing
happened to Nafar during a recent visit to the United States. At UCLA after
Nafar performed his song protesting “honor killings,” some anti-Zionist
students reproached him for promoting the Zionist view of Palestinians as
barbaric primitives. They added that, if there are any honor killings, Israel
is responsible for them since the Israeli occupation keeps Palestinians in
primitive, debilitating conditions. Here is Nafar’s dignified reply: “When you
criticize me you criticize my own community in English to impress your radical
professors. I sing in Arabic to protect the women in my own hood.”
An important aspect
of Nafar’s position is that he is not just protecting Palestinian girls from
family terror he is allowing them to fight for themselves—to take the risk. At
the end of Aloni’s film, after the girl decides to perform at a concert against
her family’s wishes, and the film ends in a dark premonition of honor killing.
In Spike Lee’s film on Malcolm X there is a wonderful detail: After Malcolm X gives a talk at a
college, a white student girl approaches him and asks him what she can do to
help the black struggle. He answers: “Nothing.” The point of this
answer is not that whites should just do nothing. Instead, they should first
accept that black liberation should be the work of the blacks themselves, not
something bestowed on them as a gift by the good white liberals. Only on the
basis of this acceptance can they do something to help blacks. Therein resides
Nafar’s point: Palestinians do not need the patronizing help of Western
liberals, and they need even less the silence about “honor killing” as part of
the Western Left’s “respect” for Palestinian way of life. The imposition of
Western values as universal human rights and the respect for different
cultures, independent of the horrors sometimes apart of these cultures, are two
sides of the same ideological mystification.
In order to really
undermine homeland xenophobia against foreign threats, one should reject its
very presupposition, namely that every ethnic group has its own proper
“Nativia.” On Sept. 7, 2015, Sarah Palin gave an interview to Fox News
with Fox and Friends host Steve Doocey:
“I love immigrants.
But like Donald Trump, I just think we have too darn many in this country.
Mexican-Americans, Asian-Americans, Native-Americans—they’re changing up
the cultural mix in the United States away from what it used to be in the
days of our Founding Fathers. I think we should go to some of these groups and
just ask politely: “Would you mind going home? Would you mind giving us our
country back?”
“Sarah you know I
love you,“ Doocey interjected, “And I think that’s a great idea with regards to
Mexicans. But where are the Native Americans supposed to go? They don’t really
have a place to go back to do they?”
Sarah replied: “Well
I think they should go back to Nativia or wherever they came from. The liberal
media treats Native Americans like they’re gods. As if they just have some sort
of automatic right to be in this country. But I say if they can’t learn to
get off those horses and start speaking American, then they should be sent home
too.”
Unfortunately, we
immediately learned that this story—too good to be true—was a hoax brilliantly
performed by Daily Currant. However, as they say, “Even if it’s not
true, it is well conceived.” In its ridiculous nature, it brought out the
hidden fantasy that sustains the anti-immigrant vision: In today’s chaotic
global world there is a “Nativia” to which people who bother us properly
belong. This vision was realized in apartheid South Africa in the form of
Bantustans—territories set aside for black inhabitants. South African whites
created the Bantustans with the idea of making them independent, thereby
ensuring that black South Africans would loose their citizenship rights in the
remaining white-controlled areas of South Africa. Although Bantustans were defined
as the “original homes” of the black peoples of South Africa, different black
groups were allocated to their homelands in a brutally arbitrary way.
Bantustans amounted to 13 percent of the country’s land carefully selected not
to contain any important mineral reserves—the resource-rich remainder of the
country would then be in the hands of the white population. The Black Homelands Citizenship Act of 1970
formally designated all black South Africans as citizens of the homelands, even
if they lived in “white South Africa,” and cancelled their South African
citizenship. From the standpoint of apartheid, this solution was ideal: Whites
possessed most of the land while blacks were proclaimed foreigners in their own
country and treated as guest workers who could, at any point, be deported back
to their “homeland.” What cannot but strike the eye is the artificial nature of
this entire process. Black groups were suddenly told that an unattractive and
infertile piece of land was their “true home.” And today, even if a Palestinian
state were to emerge on the West Bank, would it not be precisely such a
Bantustan, whose formal “independence” would serve the purpose of liberating
the Israeli government from any responsibility for the welfare of the people
living there.
But we should also
add to this insight that the multiculturalist or anti-colonialist’s defense of
different “ways of life” is also false. Such defenses cover up the antagonisms
within each of these particular ways of life by justifying acts of brutality,
sexism and racism as expressions of a particular way of life that we have no
right to measure with foreign, i.e. Western values. Zimbabwe President Robert
Mugabe’s talk at the UN general assembly is a typical anti-colonialist defense used as a justification for brutal
homophobia:
Respecting and
upholding human rights is the obligation of all states, and is enshrined in the
United Nations charter. Nowhere does the charter arrogate the right to some to
sit in judgment over others, in carrying out this universal obligation. In that
regard, we reject the politicization of this important issue and the
application of double standards to victimize those who dare think and act
independently of the self-anointed prefects of our time. We equally reject
attempts to prescribe “new rights” that are contrary to our values, norms,
traditions, and beliefs. We are not gays! Cooperation and respect for each
other will advance the cause of human rights worldwide. Confrontation,
vilification, and double-standards will not.
What can Mugabe’s
emphatic claim “We are not gays!” mean with regard to the fact that, for
certain, there are many gays also in Zimbabwe? It means, of
course, that gays are reduced to an oppressed minority whose acts are often
directly criminalized. But one can understand the underlying logic: The gay
movement is perceived as the cultural impact of globalization and yet another
way globalization undermines traditional social and cultural forms such that
the struggle against gays appears as an aspect of the anti-colonial struggle.
Does the same not
hold for, say, Boko Haram? For certain Muslims the liberation of women appears
as the most visible feature of the destructive cultural impact of capitalist
modernization. Therefore, Boko Haram, which can be roughly and descriptively
translated as “Western education [of women specifically] is forbidden,” can
perceive itself as a way of fighting the destructive impact of modernization
when it imposes hierarchic regulation between the two sexes.
The enigma is thus:
Why do Muslim extremists, who were undoubtedly exposed to exploitation, domination,
and other destructive and humiliating aspects of colonialism, target what is
(for us, at least) the best part of the Western legacy—our egalitarianism and
personal freedoms? The obvious answer could be that their target is
well-chosen: What makes the liberal West so unbearable is that they not only
practice exploitation and violent domination, but that, to add insult to
injury, they present this brutal reality in the guise of its opposite—of
freedom, equality and democracy.
Mugabe’s regressive
defense of particular ways of life finds its mirror-image in what Viktor Orban,
the rightwing Prime Minister of Hungary, is doing. On Sept. 3, 2015, he justified
closing off the border with Serbia as an act of defending Christian Europe
against invading Muslims. This was the same Orban who, back in July 2012, said that in
Central Europe a new economic system must be built: “And let us hope that God
will help us and we will not have to invent a new type of political system
instead of democracy that would need to be introduced for the sake of economic
survival. … Cooperation is a question of force, not of intention. Perhaps there
are countries where things don’t work that way, for example in the Scandinavian
countries, but such a half-Asiatic rag-tag people as we are can unite only if
there is force.”
The irony of these
lines was not lost on some old Hungarian dissidents: When the Soviet army moved
into Budapest to crush the 1956 anti-Communist uprising the message repeatedly
sent by the beleaguered Hungarian leaders to the West was: “We are defending
Europe here.” (Against the Asiatic Communists, of course.) Now, after Communism
collapsed, the Christian-conservative government paints as its main enemy
Western multi-cultural consumerist liberal democracy for which today’s Western
Europe stands, and calls for a new more organic communitarian order to replace
the “turbulent” liberal democracy of the last two decades. Orban already
expressed his sympathies towards cases of “capitalism with Asian values” like
Putin’s Russia, so if the European pressure on Orban continues we can easily
imagine him sending the message to the East: “We are defending Asia here!“
(And, to add an ironic twist, are, from the West European racist perspective,
today’s Hungarians not descendants of the early medieval Huns—Attila is even
today a popular Hungarian name.)
Is there a
contradiction between these two Orbans: Orban the friend of Putin who resents
the liberal-democratic West and Orban the defender of Christian Europe? There
is not. The two faces of Orban provide the proof (if needed) that the principal
threat to Europe is not Muslim immigration but its anti-immigrant, populist
defenders.
So what if Europe
should accept the paradox that its democratic openness is based on exclusion.
In other words, there is “no freedom for the enemies of freedom,” as
Robespierre put it long ago? In principle, this is, of course, true, but it is
here that one has to be very specific. In a way, Norway’s mass murderer Andres
Breivik was right in his choice of target: He didn’t attack the foreigners but
those within his own community who were too tolerant towards intruding
foreigners. The problem is not foreigners—it is our own (European) identity.
Although the ongoing
crisis of the European Union appears as a crisis of economy and finances, it is
in its fundamental dimension an ideological-political crisis.
The failure of referendums concerning the EU constitution a couple of years ago
gave a clear signal that voters perceived the European Union as a
“technocratic” economic union, lacking any vision which could mobilize people.
Till the recent wave of protests from Greece to Spain, the only ideology able
to mobilize people has been the anti-immigrant defense of Europe.
There is an idea
circulating in the underground of the disappointed radical Left that is a
softer reiteration of the predilection for terrorism in the aftermath of the
1968 movement: the crazy idea that only a radical catastrophe (preferably an
ecological one) can awaken masses and thus give a new impetus to radical
emancipation. The latest version of this idea relates to the refugees: only an
influx of a really large number of refugees (and their disappointment since,
obviously, Europe will not be able to satisfy their expectations) can
revitalize the European radical Left.
I find
this line of thought obscene: notwithstanding the fact that such a development
would for sure give an immense boost to anti-immigrant brutality, the truly
crazy aspect of this idea is the project to fill in the gap of the missing
radical proletarians by importing them from abroad, so that we will get the
revolution by means of an imported revolutionary agent.
This, of course, in
no way entails that we should content ourselves with liberal reformism. Many
leftist liberals (like Habermas) who bemoan the ongoing decline of the EU seem
to idealize its past: The “democratic” EU the loss of which they bemoan never
existed. Recent EU policies, such as those imposing austerity on Greece, are
just a desperate attempt to make Europe fit for new global capitalism. The
usual Left-liberal critique of the EU—it’s basically OK, except for a
“democratic deficit”— betrays the same naivety as the critics of ex-Communist
countries who basically supported them, except for the complaint about the lack
of democracy: In both cases, the “democratic deficit” is and was a necessary
part of the global structure.
But here, I am even
more of a skeptical pessimist. When I was recently answering questions from the readers of Süddeutsche Zeitung,
Germany’s largest daily, about the refugee crisis, the question that attracted
by far the most attention concerned precisely democracy, but with a
rightist-populist twist: When Angela Merkel made her famous public appeal
inviting hundreds of thousands into Germany, which was her democratic
legitimization? What gave her the right to bring such a radical change to
German life without democratic consultation? My point here, of course, is
not to support anti-immigrant populists, but to clearly point out the limits of
democratic legitimization. The same goes for those who advocate radical opening
of the borders: Are they aware that, since our democracies are nation-state
democracies, their demand equals suspension of—in effect imposing a gigantic
change in a country’s status quo without democratic consultation of its
population? (Their answer would have been, of course, that refugees should also
be given the right to vote—but this is clearly not enough, since this is a
measure that can only happen after refugees are already integrated into the
political system of a country.) A similar problem
arises with the calls for transparency of the EU decisions: what I fear is
that, since in many countries the majority of the public was against the Greek
debt reduction, rendering EU negotiations public would make representatives of
these countries advocate even tougher measures against Greece.
We encounter here
the old problem: What happens to democracy when the majority is inclined to
vote for racist and sexist laws? I am not afraid to conclude: Emancipatory
politics should not be bound a priori by formal-democratic
procedures of legitimization. No, people quite often do NOT know what they
want, or do not want what they know, or they simply want the wrong thing. There
is no simple shortcut here.
We definitely live
in interesting times.
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