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Inke Arns: Zizek, part 2


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Date: Mon, 05 Jul 1999 11:42:14 +0200
To: nettime-l@desk.nl
From: Inke Arns <inke@berlin.snafu.de>
Subject: Zizek, part 2

[Zizek contd, part 2]


The ultimate paradox of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia is thus not the one
about which Western pacifists complain (by bombing Yugoslavia in order to
prevent ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, NATO effectively triggered a
large-scale cleansing and thus created the very humanitarian catastrophy
it wanted to prevent), but a deeper paradox involved in the ideology of
victimization: the key aspect to take note of if NATO's privileging of the
now discredited "moderate" Kosovar faction of Ibrahim Rugova against the
"radical" Kosovo Liberation Army. What this means is that NATO is actively
blocking the only and obvious alternative to the ground intervention of
Western military forces: the full-scale armed resistance of the Albanians
themselves. (The moment this option is mentioned, fears start to
circulate: KLA is not really an army, just a bunch of untrained fighters;
we should not trust KLA, since it is involved in drug trafficking and/or
is a Maoist group whose victory would led to a Khmer Rouge or Taliban
regime in Kosovo...) Now, with the agreement on the Serb Army's withdrawal
from Kosovo, this distrust against the KLA resurfaced with a vengeance:
after a couple of weeks in which it seemed that the US Army is seriously
counting on the KLA against the Serb forces, the topic of the day is again
the "danger" that, after the Serb Army's withdrawal, the KLA will - as the
NATO sources and the media like to put it - "fill in the vacuum" and take
over. The message of this distrust, again, cannot be clearer: it's OK to
help the helpless Albanians against the Serbs monsters, but in no way are
they to be allowed to effectively cast off this helplessness by way of
asserting themselves as a sovereign and self-reliant political subject, a
subject with no need for the benevolent charge of the NATO
"protectorate"...

	In short, while NATO is intervening in order to protect the
Kosovar victims, it is at the same time well taking care that THEY WILL
REMAIN VICTIMS, not an active politico-military force capable of defending
itself. The strategy of NATO is thus perverse in the precise Freudian
sense of the term: it is itself (co)responsible for the calamity against
which it offers itself as a remedy (like the mad governess from Patricia
Highsmith's "Heroine," who sets the family house on fire in order to be
able to prove her devotion to the family by bravely saving the children
from the raging fire...). What we encounter here is again the paradox of
victimization: the Other to be protected is good INSOFAR AS IT REMAINS A
VICTIM (which is why we are bombarded with pictures of helpless Kosovar
mothers, children and elder people, telling moving stories of their
suffering); the moment it no longer behaves as a victim, but wants to
strike back on its own, it all of a sudden magically turns into a
terrorist/fundamentalist/drug-trafficking Other... 

	The uncanny phenomenon that is strictly correlative to this logic
of victimization is the blurring of the line of separation between private
and public in the political discourse: say, when the German defense
minister Rudolph Scharping tried to justify the NATO bombing of
Yugoslavia, he did not present his stance as something grounded in a clear
cold decision, but went deep into rendering public his inner turmoil,
openly evoking his doubts, his moral dilemmas apropos of this difficult
decision, etc. So, if this tendency will catch on, we shall no longer have
politicians who, in public, will speak the cold impersonal official
language, following the ritual of public declarations, but will share with
the public their inner turmoils and doubts in a unique display of
"sincerity." Here, however, the mystery begins: one would expect this
"sincere" sharing of private dilemmas to act as a counter-measure to the
predominant cynicism of those in power: is not the ultimate cynicist a
politician who, in his public discourse, speaks in a cold dignified
language about the high politics, while privately, he entertains a
distance towards his statements, well aware of particular pragmatic
considerations that lay behind these high principled public statements? It
thus may seem that the natural counterpoint to cynicism is the "dignified"
public discourse - however, a closer look soon reveals that the "sincere"
revealing of inner turmoils is the ultimate, highest form of cynicism. The
impersonal "dignified" public speech counts on the gap between public and
private - we are well aware that, when a politician speaks in the official
dignified tone, he speaks as the stand-in for the Institution, not as a
psychological individual (i.e. the Institution speaks THROUGH him), and
therefore nobody expects him to be "sincere," since that is simply NOT THE
POINT (in the same way a judge who passses a sentence is not expected to
be "sincere," but simply to follow and apply the law, whatever his
sentiments). On the other hand, the public sharing of the inner turmoils,
the coincidence between public and private, even and especially when it is
psychologically "sincere," is cynical - not because such a public display
of private doubts and uncertainties is faked, concealing the true privacy:
what this display conceals is the OBJECTIVE socio-political and
ideological dimension of the decisions, so the more this display is
psychologicaly "sincere," the more it is "objectively" cynical in that it
mystifies the true social meaning and effect of these decisions. 


The Carnival in the Eye of the Storm

What cannot but strike the eye is how the humanitarian defense of the NATO
bombing and the vehement opposition to the NATO bombing in some Leftist
circles shared a common gesture of depoliticization: when these Leftists
perceived the NATO bombing as the last step in the sad narrative of the
disintegration of the Titoist Yugoslavia - this multi-ethnic promise of a
different, more authentic Socialism - in the vortex of ethnic warfare,
they, instead of providing a concrete political analysis, ultimately also
acted like depoliticized multiculturalists who bemoan the explosion of
(self)destructive neotribal passions. So the sad conclusion is that, in
the political and journalistic debates about NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia,
both sides were wrong - not in the sense that they were too "extremist,"
and that the truth lies somewhere in the middle; on the contrary, both
sides - the advocates of NATO bombing as well as its opponents - were
wrong for trying to occupy the false universal-neutral ground. The
proponents of NATO bombing evoked depoliticized human rights and the
discourse of universal victimization; their opponents presented the
post-Yugoslav war as the ethnic struggle in which all sides are ultimately
equally guilty, betraying the lost Yugoslav cause - they both avoided the
eminently political essence of the post-Yugoslav conflict. And, for this
reason, one can unfortunately predict that the conflict will continue to
glow under the ashes, temporarily contained and not resolved by the
imposed NATO peace. 

	The "disavowal of reality" in the NATO-Yugoslav war was also
double: the Serb counterpart to the NATO fantasy of war without
casualties, of a precise surgical operation ideologically sustained by the
ideology of global victimization, was - in the first weeks of the NATO
bombardment - the faked carnivalization of the war, which involved the
total disconnection from the reality of what went on down in Kosovo. So,
on the one hand, we had the more and more openly racist tone of the
Western media reports on the war: when the three American soldiers were
taken prisoners, CNN dedicated the first 10 minutes of the News to their
predicament (although everyone knew that NOTHING will happen to them!),
and only then reported on the tens of thousands of refugees, burned
villages and Pristina turning into a ghost town. And the Serb counterpoint
to it were the obscenities of the state propaganda: they regularily
referred to Clinton not as "the American president," but as "the American
Fuehrer"; two of the transparents on their state-organized anti-Nato
demonstrations were "Clinton, come here and be our Monica!" (i.e. suck
our...), and "Monica, did you suck out also his brain?". This is where the
NATO planners got it wrong, caught in their schemes of strategic
reasoning, unable to forecast that the Serb reaction to bombardment will
be a recourse to a collective Bakhtinian carnivalization of the social
life. 

	The standard topic of critical psychiatry is that a "madman" is
not in himself mad, but rather functions as a kind of focal point in which
the pathological tension which permeates the entire group (family) to
which he belongs finds its outlet. The "madman" is the product of the
group pathology, the symptomatic point in which the global pathology
becomes visible - one can say that all other members of the group succeed
in retaining (the appearance of) their sanity by condensing their
patholoogy in (or by projecting it onto) the sacrificial figure of the
madman, this exception who grounds the global order of group sanity.
However, more interesting that this is the opposite case, exemplified by
the life of Bertrand Russell: he lived till his death in his late 90s a
long normal life, full of creativity and "healthy" sexual satisfactions,
yet all people around him, all members of his larger family, seemed to be
afflicted with some kind of madness - he had love affairs with most of the
wives of his sons, and most of his sons and other close relatives
committed suicide. It is thus as if, in a kind of inversion of the
standard logic of group sanity guaranteed by the exclusion of the
"madman," here, we have the central figure who retained (the appearance
of) his sanity by way of spreading his madness all around him, onto all
his close relatives. The task of a critical analysis is here, of course,
to demonstrate how the TRUE point of madness of this social network is
precisely the only point which appears "sane," its central paternal figure
who perceives madness everywhere around himself, but is unable to
recognize IN HIMSELF its true source.

	And does the same not hold for the predominant way the Serbs
perceive their role today? On the one hand, one can argue that, for the
West, Serbia is a symptomal point in which the repressed truth of a more
global situation violently breaks out. On the other hand, Serbs behaves as
an island of sanity in the sea of nationalist/secessionist madness all
around them, refusing to acknowledge even a part of responsibility. It is
eye-opening to watch in the last days the Serb satellite state TV which
targets foreign public: no reports on atrocities in Kosovo, refugees are
mentioned only as people fleeing the NATO bombing; the overall idea is
that Serbia, the island of peace, the only place in ex-Yugoslavia that was
not touched by the war raging all around it, is attacked by the NATO
madmen destroying bridges and hospitals...

	No wonder, then, that the atmosphere in Belgrade in the first
weeks of the war was carnivalesque in a faked way - when they were not in
shelters, people danced to rock or ethnic music on the streets, under the
motto "With music against bombs!", playing the role of the defying victims
(since they know that NATO does not really bomb civilian targets).
Although it may fascinate some confused pseudo-Leftists, this obscene
carnivalization of the social life is effectively the other, public, face
of ethnic cleansing: while in Belgrade people defiantly dance on the
streets, three hundred kilometers to the South, a genocide of monstrous
proportions is taking place. So when, in the nightime, crowds are camping
out on the Belgrade bridges, participating in pop and ethnic music
concerts held there in a defiantly festive mood, offering their bodies as
the live shield to prevent the bridges from being bombed, the answer to
this faked pathetic gesture should be a very simple one: why don't you go
to Kosovo and make a rock carnival in the Albanian parts of Pristina? And
when people are wearing papers with a "target" sign printed on them, the
obscene falsity of this gesture cannot but strike the eye: can one imagine
the REAL targets years ago in Sarajevo or now in Kosovo wearing such
signs?

	In what is this almost psychotic refusal to perceive one's
responsibility grounded? There is a well-known Israeli joke about Clinton
visiting Bibi Netanyahu: when, in Bibi's office, Clinton saw a mysterious
blue phone, he asked Bibi what this phone is, and Bibi answered that it
allows him to dial Him up there in the sky. Upon his return to the States,
the envious Clinton demanded of his secret service to provide him such a
phone at any cost. In two weeks, they deliver it and it works, but the
phone bill is exorbitant - two million dollars for a one minute talk with
Him up there. So Clinton furiously calls Bibi and complains: "How can you
afford such a phone, if even we, who support you financially, cannot? Is
this how you spend our money?" Bibi calmly answers: "No, it's not that -
you see, for us, Jews, that call counts as a local call!" The problem with
Serbs is that, in their self-perception, they tend more and more to
imitate Jews and identify themselves as the people for whom the phone call
to God counts as a local call... That is to say, in the last years, the
Serb propaganda is promoting the identification of Serbia as the second
Israel, with Serbs as the chosen nation, and Kosovo as their West Bank
where they fight, in the guise of "Albanian terrorists," their own
intifada. Thew went as far as repeating the old Israeli complaint against
the Arabs: "We will pardon you for what you did to us, but we will never
pardon you for forcing us to do to YOU the horrible things we had to do in
order to defend ourselves!" The hilariously-mocking Serb apology for
shooting down the stealth bomber was: "Sorry, we didn't know you are
invisible!" One is tempted to say that the answer to Serb complaints about
the "irrational barbaric bombing" of their country should be: "Sorry, we
didn't know you are a chosen nation!" 

	When the Western powers repeat all the time that they are not
fighting the Serb people, but only their corrupted leaders, they rely on
the (typically liberal) wrong premise that Serbs are victims of their evil
leadership personified in Milosevic, manipulated by him. The painful fact
is that the Serb aggressive nationalism enjoys the support of the large
majority of the population - no, Serbs are not passive victims of
nationalist manipulation, they are not Americans in disguise, just waiting
to be delivered from the nationalist spell. On the other hand, this
misperception is accompanied by the apparently contradictory notion
according to which, Balkan people are living in the past, fighting again
and again old battles, perceiving recent situation through old myths... I
am tempted to say that these two cliches should be precisely TURNED
AROUND: not only are people not "good," since they let themselves be
manipulated with obscene pleasure; there are also no "old myths" which we
need to study if we are really to understand the complex situation, just
the PRESENT outburst of racist nationalism which, according to its needs,
opportunistically resuscitates old myths. To paraphrase the old Clintonian
motto: no, it's not the old myths and ethnic hatreds, it's the POLITICAL
POWER STRUGGLE, stupid! 

	Where, in all this, is the much praised Serb "democratic
opposition"? One shouldn't be too harsh of them: in the present situation
of Serbia, of course, any attempt at public disagreement would probably
trigger direct death threats. On the other hand, one should nonetheless
notice that there was a certain limit that, as far as I know, even the
most radical Serb democratic opposition was never able to trespass: the
farthest they can go is to admit the monstrous nature of Serb nationalism
and ethnic cleansing, but nonetheless to insist that Milosevic is
ultimately just on in the series of the nationalist leaders who are to be
blamed for the violence of the last decade: Milosevic, Tudjman,
Izetbegovic, Kucan, they are ultimately all the same... I am not claiming,
agains such a vision, that one should put all the blame on Serbs - my
point is just that, instead of such pathetic-apolitical generalizations
("they are all mad, all to blame"), one should, more than ever, insist on
a CONCRETE POLITICAL ANALYSIS of the power struggles that triggered the
catastrophe. And it is the rejection of such an analysis that accounts for
the ultimate hypocrisy of the pacifist attitude towards the Kosovo war:
"the true victims are women and children on all sides, so stop the
bombing, more violence never helped to end violence, it just pushes us
deeper into the vortex..."

	So what should the Serb "democratic opposition" do? Let us recall
Freud's late book on Moses and Monotheism: how did he react to the Nazi
anti-Semitic threat? Not by joining the ranks of the beleaguered Jews in
the defense of their legacy, but by targetting its own people, the most
precious part of the Jewish legacy, the founding figure of Moses, i.e. by
endeavouring to deprive Jews of this figure, proving that Moses was not a
Jew at all - this way, he effectively undermined the very unconscious
foundation of the anti-Semitism. And is it not that Serbs should today
risk a similar act with regard to Kosovo as their precious
object-treasure, the craddle of their civilization, that which matters to
them more than everything else and which they are never able to renounce?
Therein resides the final limit of the large majority of the so-called
"democratic opposition" to the Milosevic regime: they unconditionally
endorse Milosevic's anti-Albanian nationalist agenda, even accusing him of
making compromises with the West and "betraying" Serb national interests
in Kosovo. In the course of the student demonstrations against the
Milosevic's Socialist Party falsification of the election results in the
Winter of 1996, the Western media who closely followed the events and
praised the revived democratic spirit in Serbia, rarely mentioned the fact
that one of the regular slogans of the demonstrators against the special
police forces was "Instead of kicking us, go to Kosovo and kick out the
Albanians!". For this very reason, the sine qua non of an authentic act in
Serbia today would be precisely to RENOUNCE the claim to Kosovo, to
sacrifice the substantial attachment to the privileged object. (What we
have here is thus a nice case of the political dialectic of democracy:
although democracy is the ultimate goal, in today's Serbia, any direct
advocacy of democracy which leaves uncontested nationalistic claims about
Kosovo is doomed to fail - THE issue apropos of which the struggle for
democracy will be decided is that of Kosovo.)


The SECOND Way

The conclusion that imposes itself is thus that what we have here, in the
NATO-Yugoslav conflict, is a political example of the famous drawing in
which we recognize the contours either of a rabbit head or of a goose
head, depending on our mental focus. If we look at the situation in a
certain way, we see the international community enforcing minimal human
rights standards on a nationalist neo-Communist leader engaged in ethnic
cleansing, ready to ruin his own nation just to retain power. If we shift
the focus, we see NATO, the armed hand of the new capitalist global order,
defending the strategic interests of the capital in the guise of a
disgusting travesty, posing as a disinterested enforcer of human rights,
attacking a sovereign country which, in spite of the problematic nature of
its regime, nonetheless acts as an obstacle to the unbriddled assertion of
the New World Order.

	How, then, are we to think these two stories together, without
sacrificing the truth of each of them? A good starting point would be to
reject the double blackmail implied in their contrast (if you are against
NATO strikes, you are for Milosevic's proto-Fascist regime of ethnic
cleansing, and if you are against Milosevic, you support the global
capitalist New World Order): what if this very opposition between
enlightened international intervention against ethnic fundamentalists, and
the heroic last pockets of resistance against the New World Order, is a
false one? What if phenomena like the Milosevic regime are not the
opposite to the New World Order, but rather its SYMPTOM, the place at
which the hidden TRUTH of the New World Order emerges? Recently, one of
the American negotiators said that Milosevic is not only part of the
problem, but rather THE problem itself. However, was this not clear FROM
THE VERY BEGINNING? Why, then, the interminable procrastination of the
Western powers, playing for years into Milosevic's hands, acknowledging
him as a key factor of stability in the region, misreading clear cases of
Serb aggression as civil or even tribal warfare, initially putting the
blame on those who immediately saw what Milosevic stands for and, for that
reason, desperately wanted to escape his grasp (see James Baker's public
endorsement of a "limited military intervention" against Slovene
secession), supporting the last Yugoslav prime minister Ante Markovic,
whose program was, in an incredible case of political blindness, seriously
considered as the last chance for a democratic market-oriented unified
Yugoslavia, etc.etc.? When the West fights Milosevic, it is NOT fighting
its enemy, one of the last points of resistance against the
liberal-democratic New World Order; it is rather fighting its own
creature, a monster that grew as the result of the compromises and
inconsistencies of the Western politics itself. (And, incidentally, it is
the same as with Iraq: its strong position is also the result of the
American strategy of containing Iran.)

	In the last decade, the West followed a Hamlet-like
procrastination towards Balkan, and the present bombardment has
effectively all the signs of Hamlet's final murderous outburst in which a
lot of people unnecessarily die (not only the King, his true target, but
also his mother, Laertius, Hamlet himelf...), because Hamlet acted too
late, when the proper moment was already missed. We are clearly dealing
with a hysterical acting out, with an escape into activity, with a gesture
that, instead of trying to achieve a well-defined goal, rather bears
witness to the fact that there is no such goal, that the agent is caught
in a web of conflicting goals. So the West, in the present intervention
which displays all the signs of a violent outburst of impotent
aggressivity without a clear political goal, is now paying the price for
the years of entertaining illusions that one can make a deal with
Milosevic: with the recent hesitations about the ground intervention in
Kosovo, the Serbian regime is, under the pretext of war, launching the
final assault on Kosovo and purge it of most of the Albanians, cynically
accepting bombardments as the price to be paid.

	This also accounts for the insufficiency of the otherwise correct
statement that, at the Rambouillet negotiations in the early Spring of
1999, the Western proposal put Yugoslavia in an untenable position,
effectively stripping it of its sovereignty: it demanded free access of
the NATO ground troups not only to Kosovo, but to the military facilities
in the ENTIRE Yugoslavia, the free use of all transport facilities, the
exemption from being prosecuted by the Yugoslav authorities for any crimes
commited, etc.etc. - in short, an effective occupation of Yugoslavia. Does
this not raise the suspicion that, at least for the USA, the Rambouillet
meeting was from the very beginning not considered a serious negotiation -
the goal was from the very beginning to put Serbs in the position to
reject the Western non-negotiable proposal and thus to provide the
blueprint for the bombing by putting the blame on the Milosevic's
"stubborn rejection of the peace proposal"? However, while this
observation is in itself adequate, one should nonetheless take note that
its "excessive" character derives not from any direct "malevolence" or
aggressive intent of the West, but from the simple and quite
understandable frustration at being duped for so many years by Milosevic's
manoeuvres (recall the humiliations the UN forces were exposed in Bosnia,
when they were even used as the protective shield against possible air
attacks): the Western "cornering" of Yugoslavia in Rambouillet can only be
properly grasped as the delayed acting out that tried to recompense for
the long years of Western frustrations - its "excessive" character signals
that previous unresolved tensions and frustrations were displaced onto it. 

	One thing is for sure: the NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia did
change the global geopolitic coordinates. The unwritten pact of peaceful
coexistence (the respect of each state's full sovereignty, i.e.
non-interference in internal affairs, even in the case of the grave
violation of human rights) is over. However, the very first act of the new
global police force usurping the right to punish sovereign states for
their wrongdoings already signals its end, its own undermining, since it
immediately became clear that this universality of human rights as its
legitimization is false, i.e. that the attacks on selective targets
protect particular interests. The NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia also
signals the end of any serious role of UN and Security Council: it is NATO
under US guidance that effectively pulls the strings. Furthermore, the
silent pact with Russia that held till now is broken: in the terms of this
pact, Russia was publicly treated as a superpower, allowed to maintain the
appearance of being one, on condition that it did not effectively act as
one. Now Russia's humiliation is open, any pretense of dignity is
unmasked: Russia can only openly resist or openly comply with Western
pressure. On the other hand, the oscillations in the West's relationship
towards Russia also betrayed the confusion of their global strategy in the
Balkans: since the Western bombardment was a violent passage a l'acte
lacking a clearly defined goal, after humiliating Russia, it had again to
turn to the Russian diplomacy in order to mediate the political solution
of the crisis. The further logical result of this new situation will be,
of course, the renewed rise of anti-Western resistance from Eastern Europe
to the Third World, with the sad consequence that criminal figures like
Milosevic will be elevated into the model fighters against the New World
Order. 

	So the lesson is that the alternative between the New World Order
and the neoracist nationalists opposing it is a false one: these are the
two sides of the same coin - the New World Order itself breeds
monstrosities that it fights. Which is why the protests against bombing
from the reformed Communist parties all around Europe, inclusive of PDS,
are totally misdirected: these false protesters against the NATO
bombardment of Serbia are like the caricaturized pseudo-Leftists who
oppose the trial against a drug dealer, claiming that his crime is the
result of social pathology of the capitalist system. The way to fight the
capitalist New World Order is not by supporting local proto-Fascist
resistances to it, but to focus on the only serious question today: how to
build TRANSNATIONAL political movements and institutions strong enough to
seriously constraint the unlimited rule of the capital, and to render
visible and politically relevant the fact that the local fundamentalist
resistances against the New World Order, from Milosevic to le Pen and the
extreme Right in Europe, are part of it?

	This predicament is felt most strongly in countries such as
Russia, which, as it were, got the worst of both worlds, from
totalitarianism as well as from capitalist liberalism. Back in the 40s,
Theodor Adorno pointed out how, in the late capitalist "administered
world," the classic Freudian notion of the Ego as the mediating agency
between the two extremes, the inner drives of the Id and the external
social constraints of the Superego, is no longer operative: what we
encounter in today's so-called narcissistic personality is a direct pact
between Superego and the Id at the expense of the Ego. The basic lesson of
the so-called "totalitarianisms" is that the social powers represented in
the Superego pressure directly manipulate the subject's obscene drives,
by-passing the autonomous rational agency of the Ego. Along the same
lines, it is misleading to read today's Russian situation as the one in
which one needs to strike a proper balance between the two extremes, the
Communist legacy of social solidarity, etc., and the cruel game of the
open market competition: the key feature of the Russian post-Communist
situation is a direct pact (coincidence even) between the darkest
remainders of the past (secret KGB funds) and the most ruthless of the new
capitalists - the emblematic figure of today's Russia is an ex-KGB
apparatchik turned into a private banker with shady underground
connections...

	According to the media, when, at a recent meeting of the leaders
of the Western great powers, dedicated to the politico-ideological notion
of the "Third Way," the Italian prime minister d'Alema said that one
should not be afraid of the word "socialism," Clinton and, folowing him,
Blair and Schroeder, could not restrain themselves and openly bursted out
in laughter - this anecdote tells a lot about the problematic character of
today's talk about the Third Way. Crucial is here the curious enigma of
the second way: which is today the SECOND way? That is to say, did the
notion of the Third Way not emerge at the very moment when, at least in
the developed West, all other alternatives, from true conservativism to
radical Social Democracy, lost in the face of the triumphant onslaught of
the global capitalism and its notion of liberal democracy? Is therefore
the true message of the notion of the Third Way not simply that THERE IS
NO SECOND WAY, no actual ALTERNATIVE to the global capitalism, so that, in
a kind of mocking pseudo-Hegelian negation of negation this much-praised
"Third Way" brings us back to the FIRST AND ONLY way - the Third Way is
simply the global capitalism with a human face, i.e. an attempt to
minimize the human costs of the global capitalist machinery, whose
functioning is left undisturbed. 

	Let us then hope that - out of simple necessity, that is, since,
for these countries, this is in the long run their only means of survival
- Russia or another country like her will invent a true and simple SECOND
way, a way of breaking the vicious circle of global capitalism versus
nationalist closure. 


Notes:

1. Tariq Ali, "Springtime for NATO," New Left Review  234 (March-April
1999), p. 70.
2. Alain Badiou, La Sainte-Alliance et ses serviteuirs, distributed on the
internet.
3. Vaclav Havel, "Kosovo and the End of the Nation-State," The New York
Review of Books, Volume XLVI, Number 10 (June 10, 1999), p. 6. 
4. Ibid. 
5. See Carl Jensen, Censored 1999: The News That Didn't Make the News, New
York: Seven Stories Press 1999.
6. Steven Erlanger, "In One Kosovo Woman, An Emblem of Suffering," The New
York Times, May 12 1999, page A 13.



i n k e . a r n s __________________________ b e r l i n ___
49.(0)30.3136678 | inke@berlin.snafu.de | http://www.v2.nl/~arns/
mikro: http://www.mikro.org | Syndicate: http://www.v2.nl/syndicate