Archive
Wikileaks’ war logs and the true extent of our disempowerment
The leaking of some 90,000 military files, detailing US and coalition prosecution of the war in Afghanistan, presents a stark lesson in the extent to which our government is not accountable for its actions.
Reading the Guardian this morning, there were several key points that contributed to this. The capricious treatment of the relatives of civilians killed by coalition forces is high on my list.
The war logs document that occasionally relatives would be paid some sort of compensation for the death of a family member; in other cases they were ignored or bullied into silence.
Assassination as a tactic employed by our government should also concern us. The matter of its legality to one side, it puts an enormous amount of power into the hands of people who aren’t accountable. It’s done in secret. The only reason we’re finding out about it – or finding out about the number of spectacularly botched attempts at it, often with the cost of many civilian lives – is because someone broke the law to bring us this information.
How can we talk about democracy and accountability when we’re killing people in secret?
Exposé after exposé has documented how the intelligence and PR arms of the military have tried to control the flow of information. The clear evidence of misinformation provided by the activities of US Task Force 373 (and a lesser UK equivalent) surely raises questions about how the people of this country can make an informed decision on the war, which is (according to the democratic theory) supposed to filter out through elections.
It is my firm belief that we cannot trust our government to wage any war – and that therefore we should never go to war so long as government and its executive arms are the preserve of a narrow clique, hedged around with secrecy.
As Duncan points out yesterday, as regards the death of Ian Tomlinson at the hands of the police (and as is the case in deaths-in-custody or deaths during police restraints too), our media and politicians are all too ready to offer justification and explain away official mistakes, to dismiss the idea of blame and accountability. It’s no different in war abroad than in the policing of political dissent at home.
One of the Trotskyist reasons for opposing an endorsement of Chamberlain’s government and its participation in World War II was that Trotsky and others believed that the British ruling class would capitulate if they could get terms favourable to British imperialism and capitalism. The bottom line was that, despite all the rhetoric about ‘national unity’, the ruling class was out for its own interests and would interpret the national interest however it liked.
We haven’t moved on terribly far from that position.
There’s no doubt that our armed forces are propping up an oppressive, dictatorial, nepotistic regime in Afghanistan; talk of peace with the Taliban surely provides the last kick in the teeth to anyone who genuinely believed the US-UK coalition were invading for truth, justice and the American way. They’re ignoring civilian deaths, condoning assassination and deliberately misinforming domestic media.
Faced with a gap between reality and rhetoric, our governments (whether Democratic or Republican in the US, Labour or Conservative in the UK) have chosen to interpret their original mission statement to suit their immediate needs. Bugger democracy, or women’s rights; a puppet government of whatever political orientation will do nicely. Never mind not moving on from World War II, we haven’t moved on from Lord Auckland.
Whether one thinks in terms of class, cliques, power elites or another system of sociological division, the government is self-interested. Labour quite happily sat on most of these secrets and the Conservatives have, in a stunning display of political cowardice, refused to comment. William Hague simply stayed on message: “We are working hard with our allies in Afghanistan on improving security on the ground, in increasing the capacity of the Afghan government.”
This makes sense. Answering questions about these problems highlights that actually the Tories have been behind the invasions from day one, and might open the door to more serious questions about what the hell we’re doing in Afghanistan at all. Apart from letting Pakistan’s intelligence service try and play the Taliban off against India, or destabilising northern Pakistan and extending the reach of Islamic extremism in Central Asia.
And what can we do about any of this? The answer is not a lot – and that enrages me.
Foreign policy news stories – whether about the use of chemical weapons at Fallujah in Iraq, about the assassination of trades unionists by groups supplied by the coalition, the oppression of women by the same groups or the brazen incompetence of the armed wings of the pro-coalition Afghan government – arrive, have an effect on opinion polls and then leave. Their practical effect is essentially zero.
NGOs like Human Rights Watch will appear in the newspapers to denounce the behaviour of the coalition armed forces. Opinion pieces will be fielded by the political Right to the effect that we’re fighting against an enemy that’s much worse (as though moral relativism is any justification). The majority of people will quietly be disgusted, David Cameron will make some platitudinous remark about troops coming home and the status quo will continue.
Disempowerment doesn’t get much more complete than that.
Will you give your vote?
I was approached yesterday on twitter and asked whether or not I had heard of the Give Your Vote campaign. I hadn’t. So I looked into it, and apparently both Time and our own Liberal Conspiracy have covered it. The concept is fairly simple: people in the UK should sign up to pass their vote to someone in one of thee third world countries. They then get texted on election day as to how they should vote and vote accordingly.
As a result of nation-states not having an equal say in global affairs, the democracies of America, Britain, etc are infinitely more powerful than the countries that GYV is attempting to pass our vote to: Ghana, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, symbolic, I suppose, of poverty, climate change and war. One on level, it’s a fair point; our elected officials make decisions that affect people who don’t vote for them – no taxation without representation and all that.
I don’t buy it though, and the reasons for this are as complex and multifarious as the reasons people have got involved with the project. Below, as an attempt to contribute to and publicise a debate I didn’t even know was ongoing, I’ve detailed why I’m not convinced – though I remain open to argument.
If the idea is that we surrender our votes to others, regardless of how they vote, then that contradicts a mission statement of Give Your Vote, which is supposed to be a way of ‘taking action against…global political inequality’, even if they acknowledge that their method of engagement won’t solve such problems. Except that people voting for the Conservatives, Lib-Dems or Labour isn’t necessarily taking action against global political inequality.
In their own ways, these three main parties have furthered that inequality. Moreover, they’re all paid up members of the capitalist club, so regardless of how nice their manifestos sound, they’re actively contributing to that inequality. In order for me to believe that, by surrendering my vote to someone in a foreign country, who will vote for one of these parties, I’m taking action against global political inequality, I have to suspend my own political views.
Obviously I’m not willing to do that, and GYV quite rightly say people who feel they want to vote for their own idea should do so. But the point is, it’s only from the point of view of people who think the three parties represent solutions to global poverty, climate change and war rather than support for the status quo that the whole GYV initiative makes sense. The organisation has political bias built into its method.
This isn’t corrected by including more than three parties either. If anyone votes Tory, for example, it’s still doesn’t count as taking action against global political inequality.
Second, there’s the question of who this sort of politics appeals to, who it is inclusive of.
As the Time article puts it,
“For residents of the U.K., dealing with climate change means accepting a higher price on everything from gasoline to electricity. In crowded, low-lying Bangladesh, it means trying to avoid catastrophic flooding.”
There are two nations; they have divergent interests. By surrendering our vote, we graciously acknowledge the interests of the other nation by sacrificing our own. I contend that this will appeal to well-off liberals who can afford to sacrifice their own interest but not to those of us who can’t.
Just because Brits aren’t facing catastrophic flooding doesn’t mean we have no immediate concerns that are important to our survival and well-being. Most of us have to pay attention to such material concerns.
Most of us will vote on the basis of who is likely to tax us less, or who is more trusted to provide the sort of public services we rely on and so forth. This is a stronger set of motivations than sympathy with the Third World – but the two don’t have to be mutually exclusive, if the correct (anti-capitalist) political interpretations are drawn.
Absent from the GYV set-up is the realisation that the problem goes deeper than a democratic deficit between nations; it goes to the heart of the global economic system and the distribution of wealth within and between nations. Instead GYV permits the ambiguity and potential contradiction between the interests of ‘people’ in the West and people elsewhere, which should actually be aligned by socialist ideas.
In any case, a national election will not fix matters, regardless of what sporadic engagement or attention can be garnered on the part of third world populations or the western media.
It’s also concerning that large swathes of people in the chosen nations will inevitably be excluded. The least enfranchised in Ghana, Afghanistan and Bangladesh are excluded because they are unlikely to own mobile phones. On the other hand, the most apathetic and disengaged in the UK are also not going to be brought into the fold because they’ll never hear about GYV and, if they do, won’t really care.
It might influence some who are disposed to sympathy with the Third World, but who aren’t ‘political’ enough to have made up their own minds or are young enough to be caught up in an idealistic enthusiasm about empowering others. The sort of people who wear Make Poverty History bracelets and think Bono is a hero, worthy of emulation, and that our leaders aren’t just bastards but really did have the interests of the world at heart in their G8 announcements.
I’m sure this is a caricature – and probably an unfair one at that – but on the other hand, having spent time on knocking on doors for a political party, people who when asked say they don’t vote are either very cynical or just don’t care, for whatever reason. It’s a different world to university campuses and coffee shops full of young professionals – and it’s a world that Give Your Vote is unlikely to reach.
Say it did, however. Say it reached as many people as the Make Poverty History campaign. What then? What’s the next step? There isn’t one – and that’s objection number three.
A lot of political commentators from the last fifteen years like to see the era of party politics as being over. Parties can be influenced from outwith by campaign groups that combine the maximum of visibility in the press with a ‘mass’ support – demonstrated by petitions, one-off marches and concerts. It would be easy to see Give Your Vote as part of this trend, since it does not pin its colours to any particular mast.
This is more a commentary on the sad and emaciated state of formerly mass parties than on the potential for pressure groups and single issue politics. My contention is that we’ll get no satisfactory solutions to problems like global inequality until we reverse the decline of mass politics and the consistent engagement of millions of people with organisations that have their hands directly on the levers of power: the trade unions and a workers’ party.
Laurie Penny, in her write up at Liberal Conspiracy, dismisses this objection in the following manner:
Give Your Vote’s impact will remain small, and they will doubtless be dismissed by everyone as a bunch of idealistic, utopian, lunatic do-gooders, which is precisely what they are. But so were the first suffragettes; so were the early civil rights activists; so were the Diggers, the Levellers, and all the weirdos and fringe gangs in this country and elsewhere who dared to dream of a freer, fairer world.
Suffragettes are an excellent example to compare Give Your Vote to: based on stunts with no consistent form of political engagement, the suffragettes were a spectacular political failure. They didn’t exist in a vacuum and there were achievements for women whilst suffragettes campaigned on the issue, but the period was also one in which the entire political order was being contested. So attributing the right to vote to the suffragettes is a bit disingenuous.
In fact, the Labour Party had already gone further in demands for universal suffrage than the WSPU by 1908. By 1917, through the very madness inspired by being a tiny pressure group, controlled by an unelected clique with bright ideas and no accountability, the WSPU destroyed themselves and what meaningfully survived were groups advocating mass engagement through the Labour Party and the Communist Party.
Civil rights activists, on the other hand, were part of a mass organisation that in many instances acted like a political party – regular and mass meetings, a clear political programme from a definite point of view, with well-known legislative demands. They may have started out as isolated kooks, but their relationship to the mass organisations of labour, to the Democratic Party mechanisms and their attitude to organising made them much more than that.
That they didn’t take this to its conclusion is part of the reason the movement fell apart.
These are attitudes nowhere evident in Give Your Vote, nor in many of the other pressure groups that have crossed our paths. For my part, I don’t see a future for this beyond the odd newspaper headline from a gushing columnist or two, infatuated with the thought of a vote beind had by a tiny proportion of the starving millions and reassured that they themselves aren’t being called on to do or advocate anything terribly radical.
What exactly is Conservative foreign policy?
"The name's Hague. William Hague."
William Hague’s recent remarks in an FT interview, and in a speech to the Royal United Services Institute give us some idea of the purposes and shape of Conservative foreign policy, in the aftermath of a Tory election win. In short, it is exactly the same sort of interventionist twaddle spouted by New Labour, overlaid with the same veneer of humanitarian concern that Blair liked to bathe in.
In my mind, therefore, the correct response to the great challenge of Britain accounting for a smaller proportion of the world’s economic activity is not to retreat into our shell with ever few embassies and consulates and armed forces whose power cannot be projected in the world; it is to make our efforts in international affairs more ingenious, more productive, better organised and unashamedly devoted to making the most of advantages we already possess.
The economic opportunity of our own citizens requires our engagement with world affairs to be enhanced and more effective, but the clinching argument is that so does their future security. We should always be optimists about human nature and we should always try to overcome great difficulties in foreign affairs with peaceful diplomacy. But even while maintaining such innate optimism, it is necessary to recognise that the world may well become more dangerous in the decades to come. We face the increased prevalence of state failure in countries vulnerable to terrorist networks, private armies and organised crime and the increasingly transnational dimension of terrorism which has brought rapidly multiplying threats to our own national security and that of our allies: coupled with these factors is the changing character of conflict from conventional to irregular warfare which makes it harder for states to assert and protect themselves. Chronic poverty in the developing world leaves many countries open to these dangerous trends.
And on top of all of this come two central challenges which are particularly momentous in the danger they represent because once they are allowed to take root they cannot be uprooted at least for generations to come.
One of these is the onset of climate change, manifesting itself in foreign affairs as environmental degradation and an increased risk of conflict.
The second such force is the spread of nuclear science, bringing not only the benefit of civil nuclear energy but the growing risk of the spread of nuclear weapons and the shattering of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, a fundamental cornerstone of human security for more than forty years. If Iran’s nuclear programme leads to a nuclear arms race in the Middle East then the world’s most unstable region will increasingly be populated with the world’s most destructive weapons.
The imminence and scale of such threats to British and indeed global security will have a major bearing on our approach to foreign policy. In addition, however, they add to the need for Britain to work harder to exert her influence rather than to accept a decline in it. (Source)
All the recent talk about whether or not British troops have been given the equipment they need reflects a fundamental problem in British politics: all of the main parties accept Britain’s intervention in Afghanistan, and, to a lesser extent, Iraq. William Hague’s speech gives every indication that a Tory government will continue, and risk expanding, Britain’s military presence abroad.
Some of the rhetoric Hague escapes with is simply shameless. For thirteen years, Gordon Brown’s regulation-slashing approach has been remarked upon across the Press, in all sorts of articles about the Masters of the Universe / Square Mile, about PPP-PFI, about non-dom status etc. But a future Labour government will be a repository of trade union power, of “70s-style” attitudes opposed to modernisation.
Oh would that it were so! Perhaps William Hague has missed this Labour government’s propaganda war against every union that declares a strike? Public sector workers are threatening the recovery. Teachers are putting their students at risk. The railway workers are making a nuisance of themselves to commuters. And so on; a litany of clichés employed against men and women struggling to pay the bills.
Hague, unsurprisingly, also repeats the meme about Britain’s credit rating being a worry, citing the ‘recent’ Fitch warning about the loss of the triple-A rating. I say ‘recent’ because Fitch has been carping about this since last year, so a new press release about it is hardly serious news. What makes this interesting is that Hague is all about the deficit reduction…and yet continuously talks up “Britain’s role” abroad.
With what equipment, in this Tory-led deficit-free utopia? Spitballs and paper aeroplanes?
Far better, surely, that Britain does step back from foreign engagements. Getting rid of the new naval carriers and the nuclear deterrent are the first steps, but cutting back the armed forces drastically should be a high priority all across the board, not just with the latest toys.
Contra the moralising about what equipment the troops did and didn’t get in Afghanistan or Iraq, it isn’t spending issues which have caused problems. Ask the Americans, who have spent nearly US $1 trillion, compared to the piffling billions of the United Kingdom. It is being there in the first place, when the government was warned of the consequences, creating conditions that exacerbated ‘terrorism’ until now it threatens nearby states.
It’s not the contradiction of a pushy but low-spending Britain, or the silly Tory rhetoric about Labour and the unions that makes the clearest impression however. It’s the interpretation of economic performance as merely a gateway to Britain being able to punch its weight in ‘world affairs’, rather than both economic performance and that weight in world affairs being tools to securing jobs, homes, healthcare and education at home.
One of the most challenging of these forces is the shrinking of the British economy relative to the rest of the world. To some extent this is inevitable: the economic rise of such nations as China, India and Brazil necessarily reduces the share of world output of more established, slower growing industrial economies, but it will be the tragic legacy of the current Labour government that it will have accelerated and intensified the reduction in our relative economic weight with all that means for the clout we carry in world affairs. According to a report in December by the Centre for Economics and Business Research, the UK will drop out of the world’s top ten economies by 2015, falling behind not only China, Brazil, Russia and India but also our neighbours France and Italy. Furthermore, in taking Britain downwards not only in relative economic size but also in every league table of competitiveness, and dramatically so in every league table of the attractiveness of our tax and regulatory system to the rest of the world, the Brown government has done serious damage to the perception of Britain as a home for enterprise, wealth creation, new ideas and opportunity. While Tony Blair happily strode the world on the back of the British economic reputation burnished under Margaret Thatcher and John Major, those who come after Gordon Brown will have to work harder to lift this country up after the thirteen years that he has spent diminishing its economic status.
President Obama recently argued that “Our prosperity provides a foundation for our power. It pays for our military. It underwrites our diplomacy. It taps the potential of our people, and allows investment in new industry…Over the past several years…we failed to appreciate the connection between our national security and our economy.” He was right. And his argument which indeed I made in my speech last July, applies to this country too, and it makes the restoration of our economic fortunes under a new government, with lower deficits, simpler taxes and the opening up of Britain as the natural home for international business the indispensable foundation stone of the construction of effective foreign policy.
In essence, this is high politics at its worst – talk of leaders and prestige, of power and the military rather than jobs and homes. Interestingly, Hague insinuates a future Tory government is prepared to invest in the military, to build new industries…but what about investment in higher education and research for the same purposes?
At the Times Higher Education debate back in February, Tory David Willetts was all about the euphemistic “rebalancing” of higher education, with more focus on students, and no reversals of Labour’s cuts to the teaching block grants, capital budgets or research. Hence Labour won the vote, at the end of the day, on which party had the best policy.
So we return to a bonfire of regulations and taxes, to encourage private investment to come to the UK, to shoulder the burden which the Tory state wants to shed. But of course there’s no talk of retreating public services, and when there is, it’ll be blamed not on Tory economic orthodoxy but on the failures of the Labour government. Which, in this hypothetical, future rhetorical encounter, will no doubt have been ‘in hock to the unions’.
But hey, don’t worry! Though people may want for their basic needs, our army will still be free to kill johnny foreigner when he doesn’t do as ordered.
Liberalism and the radical Left: properly engaging with Žižek
Courtesy of Chris Dillow’s oft-excellent ‘Top Blogging’ selections of material from around the Interwebz, always posted on the right of his own blog, I noticed that Norman Geras has an article up entitled “Liberalism and the radical Left” in which Professor Geras roundly berates Slavoj Žižek for a bunch of different offenses. I often like what Žižek writes: if nothing else the man delivers a new perspective on time-worn dilemmas in an engaging way. I tend to simply ignore the Lacanian baggage that he carries with him – and often he is quite intelligible without it.
On this occasion, however, I think Professor Geras is massively mistaken in some of his attacks – and quite ungentlemanly, it must be said. As I have noticed in the past, this seems to be a regular feature of Žižek’s reviewers: they don’t much like to engage with him on his own terms, preferring instead to read out of context and ridicule without substantive engagement. Norm focusses on the following paragraph from a Žižek essay (note, the numbering is down to Norm – but it’s handy as his subsequent criticisms are directed by the numbers):
[1] “The difference between liberalism and the radical Left is that, although they refer to the same three elements (liberal center, populist Right, radical Left), they locate them in a radically different topology: for the liberal center, radical Left and Right are the two forms of appearance of the same “totalitarian” excess, while for the Left, the only true alternative is the one between itself and the liberal mainstream, with the populist “radical” Right as nothing but the symptom of… liberalism’s inability to deal with the Leftist threat. [2] When we hear today a politician or an ideologist offering us a choice between liberal freedom and fundamentalist oppression, and triumphantly asking a (purely rhetorical) question “Do you want women to be excluded from public life and deprived of their elementary rights? Do you want every critic or mocking of religion to be punished by death?”, what should make us suspicious is the very self-evidence of the answer – who would have wanted that? The problem is that such a simplistic liberal universalism long ago lost its innocence. [3] This is why, for a true Leftist, the conflict between liberal permissiveness and fundamentalism is ultimately a false conflict – a vicious cycle of two poles generating and presupposing each other. [4] One should accomplish here a Hegelian step back and put in question the very measure from which fundamentalism appears in all its horror. Liberals have long ago lost their right to judge. [5] What Horkheimer had said should also be applied to today’s fundamentalism: those who do not want to talk (critically) about liberal democracy and its noble principles should also keep quiet about religious fundamentalism.”
I want to respond to Norman Geras’ attacks: as Norm has numbered the paragraph in order to better specify which bit he is attacking, I’ll follow the same formula. Anyone wishing to play the game should read Norm’s article first, then read mine.
[1] What Žižek is saying here is neither new nor remarkable. For liberals, radical Left and Right are two forms of the same totalitarian excess. I have to use Žižek’s words because they are so well chosen. How many times do socialists come up against the argument that Fascist tyranny and Soviet tyranny were the same thing? One doesn’t even have to engage with the Trotskyist idea of deformed and degenerated workers’ states to see that, whether or not their methods were similar (and in his In Defence of Lost Causes, Žižek makes a good case that at the semiotic level, the methods weren’t the same) , the two represented different configurations of social forces.
One was born of stalled workers’ struggle, the other was given birth to crush that struggle – and this is true whatever one thinks of the subsequent behaviour of the new Soviet Russian elite. Similarly, for the Left, the major opponent is liberalism. I give liberalism the lower-case ‘l’ as a means to note that this is not the list of policies held by one political party or another, but the ideology which underpins the whole system of capitalism and the basic prejudices of all three major parties of the British parliamentary system: Right, Centre and Left. I don’t see anything startling here – nor any reason for Professor Geras to dismiss it as idiocy.
When Žižek subsequently says that “the populist “radical” Right [is] nothing but the symptom of…liberalism’s inability to deal with the Leftist threat”, again, he is saying nothing new. The conception of fascism as the reaction to the global eruption of militant class struggle around the world following WWI is not new. On a smaller level, I was saying something similar myself in my previous article: the populist Right latch on to solutions to symptoms of the problem rather than the problem itself (e.g. immigration rather than a free labour market).
Capitalism creates two interests, liberalism only has room for one. Under capitalism, the first interest is that of the worker, who would prefer if cheaper labour could not be used to supplant his own or drive down his wages. The second interest is that of the employer, who has the opposing interest. Liberalism, the defence of the equal rights of the individual, stands with the employer: individuals should be able to move around unrestricted, which is an implicit justification of capitalist practice. To assert otherwise is to constrict the liberty of some.
Thus politicians, caught between pressure from below, which is angry at one of the natural practices of capitalism, and the natural and logical extension of their own liberalism, adopt Right-populist slogans and concepts: the restriction of immigration, British Jobs for British Workers etc. Here it is the rhetoric which is important: the practical effect of such measures is to produce scapegoats rather than to actually halt immigration; all the draconian immigration laws in the world don’t stop the free flow of labour – as witnessed if we compare the actual practices which caused the Lindsey Oil Refinery Strike versus the number of laws New Labour have passed to tighten up immigration.
Professor Geras contends that by asserting all this, that Žižek elides a bunch of differences between Right-populism and liberalism: I don’t think this is so. I think Žižek simply recognizes the deficiencies of liberalism and the circumstances under which liberalism will be transformed into Right-populism by its inability to reconcile popular disaffection with the results of capitalism and the first principles of liberalism itself. I’m sure all of this is open to challenge – but it’s hardly fitting for Norman Geras to go about calling it ‘political idiocy’.
[2] The next attack launched is that Žižek is trying to eliminate the distinction offered by the notional politician he creates. Said politician asks, “Do you want women to be excluded from public life and deprived of their elementary rights? Do you want every critic or mocking of religion to be punished by death?” Obviously the expected answer is “No”, and the implication is that only liberalism can deliver on that “No”, whilst a whole host of fundamentalisms will happily deliver the organised suppression of women and the censure and execution of free-thinkers.
Agree or disagree with him, Žižek’s point (a more extended version of which can be found in his book Violence) is that actually the distinction is a false one. Liberalism delivers for Western Europe (relatively) empowered women and the right to say what we want – but as a result of our liberal system, our armed forces are off doing the work of totalitarians and fundamentalists in foreign countries. Indeed the same rhetorical cover has been used for such military interventionism since the days of slavery and beyond.
We can want different freedoms etc, but so long as these remain on a liberal basis, they come at the expense of coercing other nations to be just like us. Which sounds fine: a few broken eggs to create a global liberal democratic omelette. But the reality, when the rhetoric is stripped away, is that ‘just like us’ simply means that countries are open to foreign investment, that their State has the same attitude towards opening up public services to private profiteering and so on and so forth. This is what happened in Iraq: it will no doubt happen in Afghanistan.
Bottom line: I don’t think Žižek is minimizing the real differences in quality of living between British people and people living under fundamentalist regimes – and this is what I take from Žižek’s remarks, though I have the advantage of having read quite a portion of other work. What Žižek is attempting to do is show that these freedoms and differences in quality of life aren’t abstract and politicians who counterpose the differences as a means to defend liberalism (muscular or otherwise) ignore the global effects of this ideology, denuded of its innocence.
[3] Again the liberalism-fundamentalism distinction. I agree with Professor Geras that those things he lists – e.g. throwing acid at girls for attending school – are barbaric. But the opposite of ‘barbarism’ is certainly not liberalism. See the above comments on our ‘liberal’ involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq – and they are not the first. The only thing added to the discussion is that Žižek contends that liberalism generates fundamentalism; if Žižek had said ‘capitalism’ in place of liberalism I think he’d have been more accurate – but even still, all is not lost.
Liberalism is the dominant discourse of capitalism; the doctrine of rights, which are inalienable to the individual. Export of liberalism is part and parcel of capitalism, breaking down moral economies and traditional ties in favour of market exchange. People can react to this by attacking the symptoms, such as the surface discourse of liberalism rather than the practicalities of capitalism, in defence of ‘traditional’ forms of exploitation. The form that capitalism takes, i.e. liberalism, thus begets if not the fact then the form of its enemy: illiberal fundamentalism.
For this reason, Osama bin Laden and his crew attack homosexuality, fornication, intoxication and gambling (all defended by liberalism based on the right of the individual to do as they will, so long as they harm no other) in the same breath as usury – i.e. modern banking, the necessary prerequisite of a free market. Even the attitude of such people to advanced technology, that other symptom of modernity, is one of suspicion – though no doubt hypocritical, since OBL himself is reportedly surviving due to a dialysis machine.
I shall leave [4] and [5]; the former seeming to me a bit of gobbledegook (what the hell is a Hegelian step back and is that any different from the regular English idiom ‘to step back’, i.e. to gain perspective?) and the latter seeming like an excuse for a pissing contest over how far people like Norman Geras do or do not critically analyse liberal democracy (that is, cast the mote) before they attack religious fundamentalism. They hardly require much explanation – and I think my point is already made in any case.
Namely, when Žižek drops the Lacanian silliness, his points are pretty traditional – and agree with them or disagree with them, they are not as immediately nonsensical as Norman Geras would make out.
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