Syndicate: Zizek, part 2

[Inke Arns <inke@berlin.snafu.de>]

[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


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