Slavoj Žižek on Fascism.

I very much enjoyed The Pervert's Guide to Cinema and its follow-up The Pervert's Guide to Ideology. Žižek uses the movie Jaws of all things to explore Fascism and its essential character and objective. It has become all too fashionable to claim an equivalence between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, as if to imply the US and UK should have sat it out and let the Germans and Russians slaughter one another. There are even those on the Right who try to argue that the Third Reich was identical to Stalin's Russia. Here Žižek drives home the difference:

Long before Solzhenitsyn, as Christopher Hitchens wrote in 2011, ‘the crucial questions about the Gulag were being asked by left oppositionists, from Boris Souvarine to Victor Serge to C.L.R. James, in real time and at great peril. Those courageous and prescient heretics have been somewhat written out of history (they expected far worse than that, and often received it).’ This internal dissent was a natural part of the Communist movement, in clear contrast to fascism. ‘There were no dissidents in the Nazi Party,’ Hitchens went on, ‘risking their lives on the proposition that the Führer had betrayed the true essence of National Socialism.’ Precisely because of this tension at the heart of the Communist movement, the most dangerous place to be at the time of the 1930s purges was at the top of the nomenklatura: in the space of a couple of years, 80 per cent of the Central Committee and the Red Army leadership were shot.

As Žižek points out, in The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, the promise of Fascism was always a conservative revolution, to transform the whole of class society and to, ultimately, bring about an alternative modernity devoid of the class antagonism. The aim is a society wherein a traditional hierarchical social order stands in harmony with a highly efficient and innovative economy. The problem resides in the inherent capacity for crisis and class conflict in the capitalist system. To circumvent the class antagonism and leave the class society intact is impossible. Therefore, the assertion of a racial identity is a necessary means of reconciling the working-class to conditions of exploitation and binding them to the ruling-class. It attempts to forge a collaboration of the classes through a shared racial consciousness. The array of social ills inherent to class society are then externalised onto the Other as an infection to be rooted out.

Here I would wheel in the work of Allen on white racial identity. If we look at the Theodore W Allen thesis on white racial consciousness we find that it is not a neutral social construct it is objective and it is a formation of social control. The white race is, ironically, colourless and yet defined as a distinct social category in this way. Perhaps the white race could only be constituted as a multi-class bloc against the Other which would in turn be defined as non-white. In this way the class struggle can be offset against the immediate need to build class collaboration. This is the promise of a harmonious capitalist society. It is conspicuous in its absence from not just the present, but the past as well. As Noel Ignatiev writes "We cannot say it too often: whiteness does not exempt people from exploitation, it reconciles them to it. It is for those who have nothing else."

Shouting Fire.

The recent explosion of outrage in the Middle East over an anti-Islamic cartoon produced in America has raised the debate over freedom of expression and speech once again. Here's some food for thought on this complicated matter. As Slavoj Žižek argues there is a point at which censorship can function as the measure of cultural standards. He suggests we shouldn't fear censorship for this reason. It's been commonplace for European countries to ban explicit Fascist propaganda, swastikas and so on, yet in Hungary the restriction has been altered to outlaw Communist and Nazi propaganda. This new change leaves the door open for other Fascist propaganda - it's the rehabilitation of Fascism other than the Hitlerian variety. We wouldn't like to live in a society where you argue against rape. Instead Žižek argues that the ideal situation would be where anyone who argues for rape to be legal is immediately disqualified by virtue of their position. It's certain that the sanctions of regard are already in place to some extent across the West.

Consider the following: If I came into your home and put up a poster which declares that the Holocaust was a 'hoax' it would not be a violation of my right to free-speech and free-expression if you were to rip down the poster and throw me out of your home. It would be utterly absurd for me to claim that this is a fundamental violation of free-speech, as well as a concerted effort by the Left to subvert our society and undermine the unremitting greatness of the white man. Even the most strident advocate of the right to free-speech would shudder at the thought of defending this case. So there is a distinction between private and public space, which is relevant to free-speech as there is a difference between expression in the home and expression on Speakers' Corner. Really freedom of speech is not supposed to be applied consistently as a universal principle justifying every statement in any situation. The complex question regards the specifics of the particular situation.

The conflict between private space and free-speech becomes increasingly ambiguous when it comes to the media, in which debates can be held in a space which is at once public and private in a way. The extent to which the broadcasting is a form of involvement of your private space is blurred. Significantly the popular anger about political correctness has emerged with the decline of the public space in recent decades. It has become a means of political mobilisation for the Right in the post-political era. The only struggle worth fighting is to preserve the permissive society of racists, sexists, homophobes and so on. After all, we're led to believe that the Left are working to undermine our civil liberties with this totalitarian notion of political correctness. Even though political correctness can be found on the most conservative of university campuses in the US. It's primary focus is the phraseology deployed in statements regarding race, gender, sexuality etc. 

Political correctness is not as much a matter of what can be said as much as about how it can be said. Nevertheless it is viewed with suspicion by many, we are told it must be combated for it is an imposition on our wholesome society from the lair of cultural Marxists. You can tell it's a concocted panic as it is endorsed by the mainstream media and commentariat. No one ever stands up to promote political correctness. It is only railed against by the brave journalists who are paid by Rupert Murdoch. At the same time there is little concern for the evacuation of meaningful political language and discourse. You can see this when the use of the word 'profits' is replaced with 'jobs' whenever a politician talks about a deal involving government and business. It's more blunt when the mass-killing of foreign civilians becomes 'collateral damage' while kidnapping and torture by governments becomes a 'rendition'. As Gore Vidal observed, you can now 'liberate' a country by bombing it - this is true decadence! The death of 1789 may not be far off the emptying out of the language of politics.

It was politically correct for conservatives to accuse Ken Livingstone of 'homophobia' when he said that the Conservative Party is 'riddled' with closet homosexuals. He was accused of racism when he said that he looked forward to seeing the Saudi Royal Family 'swinging from lampposts'. Yet at the same time Ken Livingstone is constantly accused of being a rabid anti-Semite with a sympathy for Muslim extremism. An honest observer can see that Ken Livingstone has used provocative language in picking fun at the opponents of his worldview: whether it's Tories or the King of Saudi Arabia. As for the allegations of anti-Semitism Ken Livingstone is an outspoken critic of Israel and has been vilified as a Judeophobe for over three decades because of his position on the conflict. With all of this in mind it has to be acknowledged that these accusations are forms of political correctness expressed by the Right. It seems that the phenomenon has transcended left and right.

As Stewart Lee once said political correctness is little more than a clumsily institutionalised form of politeness, which has downsides too but it's a lot better than the time when people could make all kinds of obscene comments. Before political correctness, in Britain, we lived in a country where people like Bernard Manning and Jim Davidson were allowed on television to spout jokes that pick fun at gays, women, ethnic minorities and the disabled. That was a time when we could watch shows like The Black and White Minstrel Show, in which white actors "blacked up" for the sake of 20 years of "family entertainment". And it has to be acknowledged that very often the stories of political correctness going mad are exaggerated. Lee has pointed this out that the infamous example of Birmingham Council banning Christmas. Actually Birmingham Council decided to use the word Winterval as an umbrella term to cover Christmas and other religious celebrations around the same time.

The Perils of Depoliticization.

Religious anti-Politics.

It’s often overlooked that the encroachment on public space and stultification of mass-politics has damned us to an anaemic existence in political terms. The inability to participate in a meaningful fashion in the realm of organised politics has left people without any means of identification, participation and association at the political level. Religious fundamentalism fills the breach when there are no meaningful forms of political organisation and participation to involve oneself.It seems significant that the politics of fear came to the forefront of American foreign policy in the early 21^st Century. The space which was once filled by Communism was now a slot occupied by Islamism. It became the new enemy we must vanquish in the name of freedom. This closed down the End of History narrative which began with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The old question of whether the future will be socialist, fascist or capitalist could be put aside. It was the triumph of liberal democratic capitalism, the only system left and the world was now beyond politics.

As Slavoj Žižek notes Kansas was once the bedrock of American leftism, after the triumphs of Reaganomics and the subsequent stultification of US politics Kansas has become another centre of Christian fundamentalism. The same can be said of Afghanistan, which was once a moderate Westward looking monarchy before the Communist coup and subsequent Russian invasion to which the primary resistance came from radicalised Muslim groups supported by the US. It was the US that founded the Mujahideen in 1978 and later financed the Taliban to secure plans for an oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea through Afghanistan to Pakistan. In Pakistan the US supported the military dictatorship of General Zia ul-Haq which carried out an extensive radicalisation of Pakistani society in the 1980s. The military junta was conceived in a coup that unseated the comparatively liberal Bhutto government. The US actually went as far as to produce Jihadist manuals, printed at the University of Nebraska, to be distributed in Pakistan.

It is no coincidence that the rise of radical Islamism in the Middle East coincides with the failures and decline of Arab nationalism combined with the collapse of the Soviet Union. In part this came down to the deliberate destruction of nationalist alternative to secure the hold on the oil spigot through the theocracies on the Arab peninsula. The involuntary euthanasia of Arab nationalism also served to defend Israeli expansionism and insulate rejectionists from meaningful negotiations for a peaceful settlement and the international consensus which supports it. The radical Islamists were empowered by this decline as the Arabs turned from one identity-marker to another. The only form of association and identification became religious rather than national in what was left of the political realm. In the Middle East it has been the major form of the politics of resistance to American and Israeli military power in the region for far too long. It took the place of left-wing and nationalist movements often with the blessing of Washington.

Hope in Democracy.

Everywhere you look in the Middle East there were currents of secular nationalism that have been destroyed. In Iran the nationalist government of Mossadegh was overthrown in 1953 to install the Shah which acted as a bulwark to the various forces in the country until 1979 when radical Shi’ite Islamists seized the state in the midst of revolution.Hezbollah came out of the Amal movement on the other side of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which disarmed the Lebanese Left and the PLO. The Amal movement was a Shi’ite communalist movement, not fundamentalist, until it underwent radicalisation with Hezbollah as a splintered off-shoot with the sponsorship of the Iranian state. The Israeli government even supported Hamas in its early years to undermine the secular Left and particularly Arafat. Similarly in Egypt Sadat supported the emergence of radical Islamic groups to undermine the more left-wing Nasserites. It backfired and Sadat was killed by Islamists in 1981 for the peace treaty he signed with the Israelis.

After 30 years of Mubarak the Egyptian brand of nationalism has discredited itself fully and the halcyon days of Nasser remains a distant memory. Mubarak stuffed his family’s accounts with an estimated $70 billion while the majority of Egyptians have had to survive on less than $2 a day.The lowest moment came at the height of the Tahrir protests Mubarak got down on his knees and begged Netanyahu to invade Egypt so that he could hold onto his position as a ‘heroic Arab leader’. What he didn’t know was that the generals were listening in on his phone calls and Mubarak was soon dethroned. Ultimately the democratic uprising of 2011 that dethroned Mubarak gave birth to a neutered Islamic administration with a coterie of generals around it. It seems significant that the democratic nationalist Sabahi was knocked out of the race quickly, leaving the Egyptian people to choose between a felool and a fanatic. The nationalist alternative was dirtied far too much to be revived even in a dissident form.

The Arab Spring is an opportunity for the people of the Middle East to re-politicize. This does not mean a return to 'proper politics'. In the original Greek sense polis means more than a community as Mike Marqusee notes "It was a self-conscious unit of self-administration (independent of empires) and from the start was made up of separate, contending social classes." He goes further to note that Athenian democracy was itself the product of a class struggle and class compromise between aristocrats and artisants who had become 'free citizens'.  Politics emerged as a distinct activity concerned with the affairs of the polis in separation from any tribal loyalties. The polis was not to be conflated with the oikos, the economy was a private realm from the radical democratic polis. Depoliticization can open up greater space for capital's rule. The future of the Middle East is not in the anti-politics of theoconservatism, rather it is in the democratic opening which will give room for greater organisation at the grass-roots. This is only the beginning of a long process.

Working-Class Heroism.

The trade union model has long tended towards reformism in its place within the capitalist system as a dependent. The union depends for its existence on the business class in it's role as the private owner of the means of production. Typically trade unions are content with the protection and promotion of working conditions, pensions, pay and so on. The labour movement on it's own is not an agent of revolutionary change for the simple reason it has a vested interest in the system. The labour movement is unlikely to overthrow the system or even try to take over the managerial duties to rearrange the workplace in a democratic form for workers’ control. The unions may even tend to dampen down radical currents by winning concessions from the capitalists. The great victories of the 20th Century came about partly as a way of "buying-off" socialism. The system has to survive for trade unions to remain necessary for empowerment of the working-class within its chains.

The preference is for a social democratic capitalism complete with strong welfare state institutions over the laissez-faire alternative of unfettered markets. In the 1980s right-wing administrations in the US and Britain staged a series of ram-raid attacks on the labour movement and the industries they sought to defend. The reactionaries succeeded in defeating the major unions and wiped out domestic industries such as cars and coal. The neoliberal turn has virtually destroyed the culture of solidarity in the working-class. In the aftermath the only union strongholds serve as defenders of the privileges of an almost ‘aristocratic’ layer in the working-class - what Žižek calls the ‘salaried bourgeoisie’. In Britain this recently took the form of defending the pensions of doctors and other public sector workers. This in turn creates the division between people who have no security because of the devastation of the last 30 years and the people who have managed to hold onto a raft. It’s the old division between the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving’ poor.

The tube unions are the last bastion of working-class power left in this country and this is precisely the reason that the forces of reaction are out to destroy them. The widespread perception is that the tube unions are simply out to protect their privileges, which the rest of the working-class goes without. This is part of the death of the culture of solidarity and the devastation that the working-class has endured. But it isn't totally untrue of the tube workers. The strikes aren't, at the immediate level, about the preservation of the welfare state let alone any socialist dreams of overthrowing capitalism. The rest of the working-class can see this and are willing to support right-wing politicians to blow Bob Crow out of the water for the inconvenience he has caused them. Of course, this is a part of the very process of neoliberalisation which pits the working-class against itself in its bid to eviscerate the cultural solidarity. We are reduced to resentful individuals in this way, distant from one another and looking out for who's getting a better deal than us.

No longer is the trade union simply an instrument of workers’ power even as it was in the days when Arthur Scargill fought valiantly against Thatcher’s policy of mass-unemployment and deindustrialisation. It might seem that the working-class movement is totally finished because it has been de-industrialised and, at this point, unions have been reduced to xenophobic suspicions of anymore ‘foreign rivals’ coming over here. This isn’t to say that the deindustrialisation of the North was fine and that we should oppose the efforts of the fragments leftover of organised labour. Rather it should demonstrate the urgent need to reconstruct the working-class movement in a much more radical form. It's fine to propose unionisation of workers on a European scale. It would be wrong to confine the prospects of unionisation not just to the nation-state but to the traditional industries that have been wiped out. The unionisation of the indebted could serve as the means to undermine the power of the financial institutions.

Take a look at some of the stats. The household debt in Britain is set to rise from £1,560 billion to £2,126 billion in this time of austerity. I would assume there is something similar going on with household debts around the world given the attempts of government to patch up the system as it is. Household debt in the US was at 115% in 2011 down from 135% in 2008, the dip is probably the result of the crisis. In the years of the bubble, 2000 to 2007, households doubled their debt to almost $14 trillion while personal consumption shot up by 44% from $7 trillion to nearly $10 trillion. Over a period of 5 years American households ringed $2.3 trillion of home equity loans and cash-out refinancing from their homes. That's an injection of nearly $500 billion into the economy every year. So you can see why Obama's so-called "stimulus package" was a cop-out, $787 billion for 2 years doesn't cut it! Especially when it's left to the sort of self-glorified bureaucrats who would rather cut than spend.

There is actually an opportunity in this. It might seem that the working-class movement is finished because it has been de-industrialised and, at this point, unions have been reduced to xenophobic suspicions of anymore foreign rivals coming over here. That extends to the opposition of trade unions to European integration, these are supposed to be organisations that are internationalist. It's fine to propose unionisation of workers on a European scale. We're wrong to confine the prospects of unionisation to traditional industries that have been wiped out. The formation of debtors into unions on a cross-continent scale could potentially give the working-class a way to yank at the banks. A straight refusal by the majority of people with debts to make the payments unless the rates of interest are cut could work. It could also be a way to wipe away household debt altogether. This isn't to say that the capitalist system could not incorporate this into it, it could do easily, but it is a starting point in accordance with conditions which are radically different to the 20th Century.

Only a God can save us.

 

For Heidegger the gods will save us once we welcome them back into our world, when we've gotten past this technological stance which stifles us. You could take this as an expressed acceptance of the futility of all struggle. There can be no way out of the hegemony, all we can do is wait for an outburst of ‘divine violence’. Thus ‘only a God can save us.’ Žižek sees this as one of many reactions by the Left to the hegemony of global capitalism and its indestructibility. The capitalist system can't help but tend towards moral relativism and secular pluralism, but this goes further as value is just commodity and purchase the system is totally atheistic and nihilistic. In these terms capitalism is insufficient for Being, it has no real space for it other than as a thing to be commodified and exchanged at a price. All the while capitalism denies our essence and fails to even understand itself. It has to hide behind words like ‘free-enterprise’ and ‘democracy’ for fear of being recognised for what it is.

It was Rosa Luxemburg who predicted that the capitalist system would collapse once expansion and growth ad infinitum had become an impossibility. The only possible limit to the infinite growth paradigm could come in its most thorough dominance in the world. If the world went capitalist then the parasite would soon have to face the real possibility of its own demise. With this in sight, it would take a global push to tip the system over. Today we find, as Bauman put it, capitalism has learned to create “host organisms” and onwards the parasite strives. This is nothing unusual, Karl Marx never foresaw the possibility of the capitalist system buying-off socialism with social democratic reformism. For Heidegger the answer to the technological nightmare, which engulfs us, was to be found in neither capitalism nor socialism. Notoriously Heidegger joined the Nazi Party after Hitler was rushed into power in 1933 and went on to betray his former mentor Edmund Husserl.

In his day Martin Heidegger drew a distinction between National Socialism as it existed at the time as opposed to the idealised vision which had not been realised. Heidegger may have been indulging in the far-right equivalent of ultra-leftist position which retains a certain distance from power and real decisions in its criticism of the established order. The farthest Heidegger went, in later life, to renounce National Socialism was to point to its “failure” to emerge as a genuine Third Position to American capitalism and Russian communism. In an interview for Der Spiegel, Heidegger makes it clear that he regards each of these systems as determined by ‘planetary technology’. The implication being that there has not yet been a thorough attempt to provide an answer to the nihilism of modern man as technological, value-creating and subjectivist. After all Fascism was something of a last-ditch attempt on the part of capitalism to purge itself of immense contradictions.

In Living in the End Times Žižek writes about the poetico-military complex with regard to Radovan Karadžić in Bosnia and the anti-Tutsi writer Hassan Ngeze in Rwanda. These were sincere and terrible poets, not simply corrupt politicos, who held up material to be manipulated as part of the riling up of jingoist sentiments. It this which was so instrumental in Yugloslavia as nationalism first began to appear on the scene in the 70s and 80s. Karadžić as a kind of parallax, homicidal poet from one angle and spiritual healer from another. Dragan Dabić provides the ideological key to Karadžić. Žižek reminds us of Lacan's thesis "truth has the structure of a fiction". The talk of setting free the individual's cosmic energies that link us all to the cosmos leads us to the Pagan conception of life as cosmic and its sanctity - which means that the blood of innocents will soon be flowing in the streets.

To convey the way Karadžić saw Bosnian Muslims, Žižek refers us to a favourite Chinese proverb of Karadžić's "He who cannot agree with his enemies is controlled by them." But this does not adequately capture the postmodern brand of nationalism to which Karadžić subscribed. And so he goes onto include a telling excerpt from a poem Karadžić wrote called 'For Izet Sarajlić'. It features the line "People nothing is forbidden in my faith" and this is the permissive spirit of postmodern nationalism, which seeks to liberate us from political correctness and multiculturalism. In this post-political era, there is no other way to mobilise the masses for a public cause and the only dominate calls are for us to enjoy ourselves. The majority of us are 'moral' in that we cannot slaughter each other out of disgust at such conduct and so a 'sacred' Cause is necessary to render killing acceptable to us.

It is in such poetry and violence that we regress from the Christian love of the neighbour to the Pagan past of putting our tribe before all the others. It may be presented as a defence of Christian values, but it is the greatest threat to the Judeo-Christian legacy in Europe. As Žižek notes it goes against the universalism of the Holy Spirit, to which we each have immediate access to as individuals irrespective of their place in the social order. Who else may we add to this catalogue? There is, of course, the Austrian writer Peter Handke, who gave a speech at the funeral of Slobodan Milošević. We might even include DH Lawrence, as he was on the radical Right and moved from Christian theology to Pagan mysticism. Then there's Eduardo Limonov who founded a neo-fascist movement in post-Communist Russia. In the bombardment of Sarajevo, Eduardo Limonov visited with Karadžić and was filmed taking a turn firing into the streets below them with a rifle.

The poet Eduard Limonov had returned to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union having spent almost 20 years in exile in America. Limonov was appalled to witness the reign of Boris Yeltsin as the Kremlin sought to impose Western-style capitalism with "shock therapy" as the means to this end. This would be a disaster as Limonov was convinced American capitalism was no different than Soviet totalitarianism, it was just more sophisticated in its oppression. He decided to take drastic action and founded a political party to recapture the original aims of the Bolshevik Revolution and integrate it within a modern nationalism. It would be the National Bolshevik Party that is now the embodiment of the resurgent nationalism which have sought to put a stop to the Russian process of 'modernisation' since the 1990s. The drink-sodden Yeltsin and the gang of free-marketeers around him practically destroyed Russia only to give way to Putin in the end.

Then there is Heidegger who had planned to lecture on Nietzsche and Hölderlin in 1944-45 but the trajectory of the war demolished these plans. Before that he had lectured on Hölderlin already at the beginning of the Nazi era when he himself was a member of the Party. The hymns selected were Germania and The Rhine, note the obvious nationalist connotations. For Heidegger the dilemma of Western existence had manifested itself in Germany, the land of the middle. He saw the question of Being and the matter of German identity as entwined. The Germans are the most metaphysical people in these terms and if Europe isn't going to go down the path of annihilation then this decision can only come through the development of new, spiritual forces from the centre. Nietzsche had diagnosed the condition, Hölderlin had the cure for it. The way to open the question of Being and the new and deeper way of being German. This is could very well have been the way Heidegger had wanted to be the philosopher of the Third Reich.

What undermines this neat pattern is that National Socialism may have found Pagan blood myths useful at times Hitler did condemn Pagan cults in 1938. This is because Fascism has few consistent and universal characteristics other than a reactive spirit and a pathological Judeophobia. More generally, this may just be the instances of that Fascist tendency to aestheticise politics. We shouldn't forget that our concerts are modeled on Nazi rallies. This tendency remains alive and well in the National Bolshevik Party that Limonov has led for the last 20 years in Russia. Many of its members came out of the Russian avant-garde music scene which had resisted communism as it scoffed at the West. Originally the avant-garde was on the side of the revolutionaries in 1917 until it was suppressed at the appearance on the scene of socialist realism under Stalin. It only resurfaced in the 1960s during the Khrushchev thawing period, then it became an expression of resistance under Brezhnev and when the Wall fell the artists prescribed Nazism as a positive vision.

In 1917 Rosa Luxemburg reflected that the time of pogroms against Russian Jewry has been brought to a close - principally by the October Revolution - before adding "I can sooner imagine - pogroms against Jews in Germany." At the time of Luxemburg's death, at the hands of the Freikorps, Heidegger was working under Husserl at Freiburg. By then the First World War had ended, with millions slaughtered and Germany left vanquished. Heidegger had served, albeit in a limited capacity, as a soldier and this he shared with the future Fuhrer along with the year of his birth. Luxemburg had been incarcerated for her firm opposition to the imperial bloodbath and amidst the confusion Rosa reached out to Benito Mussolini, who she assumed was still the socialist editor of Avanti! - little did she know that Mussolini had been kicked out of the Italian Socialist Party by then for his support of the war. This is where the defeats of the Left converge with the opening for Fascism.

It would be tempting to go off on a tangent about the relation between Heidegger’s philosophy and the politics in which he engaged personally, specifically National Socialism. That would be pushing things as Heidegger at most leaves the door open to fascism, there is nothing inherently fascist about his philosophy. As Robert Solomon notes, it might be more constructive to engage with the world as it is today. There is a sense in which everything is reduced to the same level in consumerism, as with technology and money, whereby human beings are cut-off from the world and each other. Ultimately, this leaves human beings diminished as technology and money reduce the world in its immediacy - a leveling effect which has become the primary source for alienation in the modern world. In a way Heidegger returned to the pessimism of Schopenhauer in his last days.

Heidegger's last writings are dominated by his own particular notion of releasement, which could be seen as a way of thinking and living that has turned away from willing. This comes across as Schopenhauerian, though it may have been the Taoist influences on Heidegger by that point. When it came to the return of the gods, Heidegger found Nietzsche's programme for overcoming nihilism unsatisfactory. Nietzsche wanted to place the Übermensch where God once stood as a central pillar of values. Once the old myths underpinning our superstructure begin to give way, we must find new ideals in order to advance beyond what humanity has been thus far. In this Heidegger sniffed out the Will to Power which has been responsible for the destruction of values in the first place. It was not new forms of domination that can save us, but rather a humbling to power as we await the return of the gods. Maybe what we need is a bit more Nietzsche than Heidegger in this regard.

Male Mythology in Gonzo.

The Americans based in Puerto Rico as journalists, businessmen and soldiers are depicted as a horde of corrupt, perverted and sex-crazed sociopaths. There is Moberg who is obsessed with cannibalism (a twisted form of the unfulfilled longing) and Zimburger who is described as "more beast than human". Then there is the reckless Yeamon and the inexplicably unfuckable Sala, between them we might situate Kemp as a kind of "moderate witness" who is never as passive as Sala nor as rebellious as Yeamon. Paul Kemp participates and observes the mayhem, but manages to pull-back from the edge and gets to walk off towards the sunset as it were. This is a standard lesson of literature, the passive will destroy themselves and the rebel will be destroyed by the system. It is being able to participate and pull back from the edge just in time that makes for a great story. Especially when we're talking about Gonzo journalism, the journalist is a participant in his story in the full subjective sense. With all of this mind we should look at when Paul Kemp finds himself on a beach after a night of festivities with a woman called Lorraine:

We talked for a while, drying off as best we could, and suddenly she reached over and pulled me down on top of her. “Make love to me,” she said urgently.

I laughed and leaned down to bite her on the breast. She began to groan and jerk me around by the hair, and after a few minutes of this I lifted her onto the clothes so we wouldn’t get full of sand. The smell of her body excited me tremendously and I got a savage grip on her buttocks, pounding her up and down. Suddenly she began to howl: at first I thought I was hurting her, then I realised she was having some sort of extreme orgasm. She had several of them, howling each time, before I felt the slow bursting of my own.

We lay there for several hours, going at it again when we felt rested. All in all I don’t think we said fifty words. She seemed to want nothing but the clutch and howl of the orgasm, the rolling grip of two bodies in the sand.

Paul Kemp promised to call Lorraine - the lie we all know so well - and never does, as far as we know, whereas Kemp later returns to the US where Chenault waits for him. She had left Yeamon for Paul soon after she reappeared after the incident at the carnival, in which she was almost certainly gang-raped at a party - a trauma never fully explored or resolved in the book, it just happened. After turning up at Kemp's place Chenault asks Paul Kemp to get in the shower with her and then comes a flash of impure Gonzo "I heard a gong somewhere in the back of my brain, and then a melodramatic voice saying, 'And this concludes The Adventures of Paul Kemp, the Drunken Journalist. He read the signs and saw it coming, but he was too much of a lecher to step out of the way.' Then there was organ music, a sort of feverish dirge, and then I was stepping out of my shorts and into the shower with Chenault." It is clear that our hero did not go celibate between the chapters, but the sex scene with Chenault is significant in its difference to the earlier tryst on the beach.

I felt totally defeated. For a while I paced around the apartment, barely hearing her happy chatter, then I gave up entirely and went over to the bed and took off my clothes. I fell on her with such a violence that her smile quickly disappeared and it became a desperate business.

She kicked her feet in the air and shrieked and arched her back and she was still trying when I exploded inside her and collapsed with exhaustion. Finally she gave up and locked her legs around my hips and her arms around my neck, and started to cry.

I leaned on my elbows and looked down at her 'What's wrong?' I asked.

She kept her eyes closed and shook her head. 'I can't,' she sobbed. 'I get so close, but I can't.'

We might reach for the term 'courtly love' to denote the way in which Chenault was pursued by Paul Kemp simply because she was forbidden to him as Yeamon's girlfriend. It began on the plane over to Puerto Rico where he was desperate to see to it that she could sit next to him and ended up getting into a fight with an elderly man over his seat. Keep in mind that the perpetuation of the 'courtly love' structure hints at the ongoing attempts of man to compensate for his reduction of women to mere vehicles for his fantasy.In turn woman comes to inhabit this fantasy as her 'femininity' and she is deprived of her particularity as a woman. As the pursuit moved beyond 'loving' her (for lack of a better phrase) for something in her more than herself - as an object - to seeing her as a subject of lack. If we continue along this Žižekian line we find that this leads us to the conclusion that sexual difference retains the Real which cannot be symbolised and lovers are fated to settle for a relationship that is a "non-relationship".

Then again we might be tempted here to accept the conclusion that the point of the tryst on the beach with the "dark skinned" Lorraine was to stand as the exotic Other with a certain authenticity in contrast to the anemic and inhibited whiteness of Chenault. A racism turned on its' head where Lorraine was an exotic and wild lay on a beach by comparison with Chenault. So the only point of Lorraine was to point us towards Chenault's deficiency, once she has served her purpose on the beach she can disappear. It is only after Kemp beds Chenault that the narrative can reach a conclusion - the return to home - so we might designate Puerto Rico as a vanishing mediator on it's own. But then what might we read into Chenault's disappearance as she heads onwards to New York? A rendezvous in the Big Apple remains a genuine possibility for Paul with Chenault. It is never fully resolved what happened at the carnival, through Paul's eyes it is as if Chenault was "asking for it" in the standard misogynist contours of rape as in some way the fault of the woman.

As Žižek has pointed out there is a sense in which the excessive desire of female fantasy and male fantasy fails in a bid to overcome such an excess. It poses a threat to male identity and the woman has to be erased as it were. One way to escape from the excessive Real encountered in fantasy is to 'make love', not to reenact the fantasy but to escape from it. Perhaps this is the reason that Chenault has to 'disappear' from the narrative in order for it to be able to reach any conclusion. What might that say about her appearance in the narrative as a whole? Effectively she was only present as her desire for phallic enjoyment. In the note she leaves for him to find Chenault writes "I can't stand it anymore. My plane leaves at six. You love me. We are soul-mates. We will drink rum and dance naked. Come see me in New York. I will have a few surprises for you." This is the only space which opens up for Chenault's subjectivity, yet she can only express what we already know and expect of her. There is no active part to play and in actuality woman "therefore does not exist" in the Lacanian formula.

A Restless Summer.

Over the summer there seemed to be an endless flow of stories for the media to prepare narratives for and spoon-feed to us. This will come as a shock to those of you who have spent the summer in a masturbation furnace or perhaps on Mars. With everything from neo-fascist killing sprees and economic crisis to phone hacking and celebrity deaths, it was a damn good summer for news and certainly no silly season. Here are a few looks at major events in the summer, which you won't find in the mainstream media.

  
 THE GREEK MYTHS.

The debt crisis in Greece has rocked the Eurozone for months as it looked like German and French banks might be sunk the IMF and the EU moved in to force austerity measures in Greece to secure the interests of bankers in Western Europe. So Greece slashed €700 million more than the IMF and EU demanded of them, even as the country was saddled with yet more debt and the Europeans banks were handed €110 billion. The media so kind to inform us that the crisis was the result of "out-of-control" spending which we shouldn't pick up the bill for. The irony of all this is that the European country that has defaulted more than any other in the last century is Germany. Germany was excused from reparations to the countries that it had invaded, nor did the Germans have to pay back the loans that the Third Reich squeezed out of the countries it occupied in the war and especially not to the Greeks. Germany didn't even pay back the US for the loans that were used to pay the reparations levied on Germany after the First World War.

Even though from 2001 to 2007 the total spending of the EU was equal to 50.7% of GDP, out of the 27 member-states Greece was outspent by 13 states. Over the same time period public spending in Greece amounted to 44.6% of GDP. As the crisis hit Greece there was a jump in spending to 50.4% of GDP in 2009 and that is still the average expenditure in Europe. The relatively high level of public debt in Greece, before the crisis, goes back to the 1980s when the country was still recovering from the military junta. The weakness of the Greek government is in fiscal policy, though not spending but in tax-revenues that have collapsed as a result of anti-government sentiment exacerbated by an explosion of unemployment since the recession began. Sweden has the highest expenditure in Europe and yet there is no debt crisis, the reason being that the Swedish tax system is a lot better. The crisis in Greece was down to a flawed tax system and widespread anti-government sentiments which amounted to widespread tax avoidance and evasion.

Then there is the suspicious line that the Greeks are a "venal" and "lazy" people who have enjoyed a lavish state-expenditure at the expense of the rest of Europe. In actuality Greeks work around 2,120 hours a year compared with about 1,712 hours a year worked in Britain and 1,473 hours by Germans. Out of the OECD countries Koreans are the only people who work longer hours than the Greeks. You may have read of the "Greek Gravy Train", the tales of railway workers paid £60,000 a year and the way that professionals retire at 50 - though the average retirement is 62. There isn't much ink on paper about the huge numbers of Greeks who have received no pay in months and the ever-rising unemployment rate. Rationally, the Germans should bailout Greece in the way that the US bailed out Germany for free after it defaulted just after the Second World War. Instead the EU have been led by Germany into bailing out the banks at the expense of Greek democracy. The Greek people are now facing around 10 to 15 years of economic stagnation complete with a huge decline in the standard of living and in the end the country will still default anyway.

HACKED OFF!

The scandal at News International will probably be never fully said and done. It is much bigger than simply a scandal of hacking the phones of murdered children and soldiers killed in battle. We now know a lot more about the profoundly sordid relationship between the Murdoch media and the Establishment.  It has been common knowledge for a long time that the News International has a right-wing agenda. Out of the 247 editors who work for Rupert Murdoch not one came out in opposition to the Iraq war. The Murdoch media amounts to 40% of British media and has backed Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair and David Cameron to electoral victory. We now know that soon after Cameron took office he first met with Rupert Murdoch before going on to meet with Rebekah Brooks when she edited The News of the World and then Dominic Mohan of The Sun for a "general discussion". Cameron attended the News International summer party where he gave an interview to James Harding of The Times and went onto give a speech at the CEO summit of that same newspaper.

Keep in mind that the Prime Minister also met with Paul Dacre, the editor of The Daily Mail, Lord Burns of Channel 4 and Deborah Turness of ITV News in the first month he was in office. Cameron later met with the editor of The Evening Standard for another "general discussion", the Prime Minister also attended the summer parties of The Financial Times and The Spectator. Unfortunately, the level of ingratiation that the political class has met with Murdoch does not end at a Christmas dinner with Rebekah Brooks and James Murdoch. We know that Tony Blair is the Godfather of Murdoch's daughter. We find that the Conservative Party and the police were entangled in the conspiracy ran out of a Murdoch red-top. No surprise here, it was the Thatcherites and the Met who colluded with Murdoch in 1986 to crush the print unions in Wapping. A favour for when The Sun led the media campaign against the Miners Strike of '84. Perhaps an extended favour for the campaign the Murdoch press led against Tony Benn - which went as far as actually fabricating psychiatric reports in order to question Benn's mental health - to prevent him from becoming leader of the Labour Party.


The problem with the dominant narrative in the mainstream media is that it assumes what went on at The News of the World was an aberration. As in All the President's Men we're told that the little guy can uncover a scandal which reaches the very top of power and then can bring down the President in the name of justice. So corruption can reach the very top but because of the democratic features of our society we can find it, root it out and restore greatness in our society. Once again it turns out we want the thing itself without the harsh element of it, just as so many of us want coffee without coffee (decaffeinated coffee), war without war (no casualties on our side) or even a revolution without revolution (no real change). In this case it is as if we want sleaze without sleaze, we need to get back to proper journalism which run without corruption and unscrupulous methods such as phone-hacking. It's the classic feel good story which is used to prevent a serious attempt to ask fundamental questions about the nature of the mass-media and the provision of news through corporate structures to the public.

NORWAY'S 9/11?

The massacre in Norway came out of nowhere seemingly, it took the pundits by surprise and prompted an embarrassing attempt to resurrect the "War on Terror" narrative. The Sun jumped on the opportunity to spin the headline 'Al-Qaeda Massacre: Norway's 9/11'. Clearly the Murdoch press were desperate to lead the public away from the stench of criminality around the papers and lead them by the nose against Muslims once again. It was almost as bad as when the American press looked up Edward Said for an "insight" into international terrorism in the wake of the Oklahoma City Bombing. Even though Said is a Christian, he is a Palestinian and therefore must be an expert on terrorism. After it turned out to be just another angry white man we could still read about the "failure" of multiculturalism that led to the attacks in The New York Times. We might choose to read in The Atlantic about how the massacre was a "mutation of jihad" whereby a white man goes ape as a Muslim fanatic would in order to prevent the coming "Islamization" of Europe. The leader of the English Defence League, a former BNP member, appeared on Newsnight to spin the same line.

In many instances the press came out no better than Robert Brasillach when he conjured up the notion of "reasonable anti-Semitism" during the Nazi occupation of France. Brasillach insisted he had no beef with Charlie Chaplin, Yehudi Menuhin and Marcel Proust, but the rest of Jewry could go hang as far as he was concerned. Similarly Breivik a distinguishes between "loyal" and "disloyal" Jews, who are a threat to the European civilisation, the state of Israel and global capitalism. For Breivik, Hitler was only wrong to exterminate the "loyal" Jews who deserved a homeland. In the same vein of thought we find Jack Straw who attacks Nick Griffin on Question Time as a Fascist before wheeling out Griffin's line that the Pakistani men see our women as "white meat". So there is a "reasonable racism" to be deployed for the protection of women against Pakistani rape gangs and to maintain "Britishness" with a ban on veils. There is nothing more suspect than the insistence that the actions of Anders Behring Breivik represent a current of working-class opinion in Europe which must be acknowledged in order to prevent such violent outbursts. 


In the manifesto Breivik churned out there are references and quotes to columnists Jeremy Clarkson and Melanie Phillips as well as Bernard Lewis, Bat Ye'or, Pamela Geller, Geert Wilders, Daniel Pipes, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the Unabomber. The thought process behind the slaughter in Norway begins the mainstream right-wing discourse on Muslims and immigration in general, but then radiates outwards to the farthest reaches of jingo-lunacy. In one such instance Breivik used extracts of the Unabomber's manifesto and replaced words such as 'blacks' and 'leftists' with 'Muslims' and 'cultural Marxists'. You don't have to look too far to find hysterical noise in the gutter press about political correctness, multiculturalism, secularism, European integration and the "leftist" bias of the media. Interestingly Breivik didn't attack foreigners and turned his gun on his fellow Norwegians who were too tolerant towards the foreigners. As if the problem is not immigrants as such, but the political class that has been "corrupted" by the Left in a bid to subdue the unremitting greatness of the white man.
 

SHOPPING with VIOLENCE.

The riots seen in the UK seemingly came out of nowhere, inexplicable and indiscriminate violence tore through the capital before hurtling across the country. It was a peaceful protest in Tottenham over the death of Mark Duggan at the hands of police officers that descended into violence first. Then came a tidal wave of violence and looting that rushed through the streets of London, Birmingham, Manchester and a lot of other places. The commentariat was soon flailing wildly out of control for a useful narrative with Max Hastings wondering "How do you inculcate values in a child whose only role model is footballer Wayne Rooney - a man who is bereft of the most meagre human graces?" The Evening Standard pinned the blame on the GTA series whilst Melanie Phillips blamed the "liberal intelligentsia", oh and the rise of single-motherhood. As the Left called for a recognition of "legitimate grievances" the Right called for cuts to benefits and the repossession of property to punish the rioters. Then the decadent Starkey emerged to tell us all that it is down to the encroachment of "black culture" into a halcyon vanilla Britannia.

The conservatives were eager to shoot down any liberal nonsense about "legitimate grievances" and "social deprivation". At the same time the only permissible view was outright condemnation of the violence, which is a platitude to say the least as no one condones what happened. Even though the Right wanted to stress that these were the decisions undertaken by free individuals they could not bring itself to admit the exact nature of the riots. In the midst of the riots Kelvin MacKenzie was asked "Should we try to understand this?" and he responded "No, I don't think we should..." As if that wasn't bad enough then Michael Gove popped up to let us know that he's on "the side of order" and there are no excuses for violence. A strange position for Michael Gove to take given that he thinks the Iraq war is justified by the GDP of Iraq at the moment. Incidentally there are 5 million orphans in Iraq with over 1 million people dead as a direct consequence of war, with millions more displaced, deformed and dispossessed.

The violence of the student demonstrations came with a political message whereas the riots had no message at all. The rioters were not a revolutionary subject, in the Marxist sense, but more of a Hegelian 'rabble' who are outside of the organised social space and can only express their discontent through irrational outbursts - a 'lumpen-insurrection' of sorts. The rage and despair of the 'rabble' was expressed in the most impotent forms, the torching of random buildings and pointless thievery for example. Slavoj Žižek was right to call for a rejection of the demand to take a side, either that of a 'disenfranchised youth' or a 'small business owner'. In the riots we saw society attack society, a lot like watching a man slash away aimlessly at his own limbs, as Hunter S Thompson noted of much worse riots in the 60s "the American dream was clubbing itself to death". It was a conflict between people with a stake in community, who had managed to function within the system, and the people with no such stake and nothing to lose.

Zygmunt Bauman was correct to designate the riots as "defective and disqualified consumers" and it is easy to see the mass-looting as consumerism turned violent as it could not be realised in the proper way of shopping. Even the ignominious David Starkey acknowledged this point when he called the riots "shopping with violence". That was before he opted to wheel in the words of Enoch Powell to insulate the prevailing ideology from any damaging self-reflection. In the riots we find that at best "legitimate grievances" are secondary to impotent expression of anger, despair and envy. Ultimately the riots were a clear demonstration of the material force of ideology, it was the barbarous underbelly of consumerism rising to the surface and overflowing for all to see on Sky News. As for the people peddling vengeful answers to the riots, these are the same people who claimed there is no such thing as society. It was they who called for the "liberation" of the individual to pursue their own self-interest at the expense of others.

IRONY in TRIPOLI.

Then the Libyan Civil War resurfaced in the news as the rebels seized the capital to the surprise of Orientalist commentators everywhere, to whom the Arabs are still either incapable of winning a fight or are bloodthirsty animals. It looks as though this is the autumn of the Colonel, for Gaddafi soon disappeared. The great irony of the situation is that the Gaddafi regime was interventionist in foreign policy and had been for a very long time. The regime backed Idi Amin in Uganda, Slobodan Milošević in Serbia and Charles Taylor in Liberia as well as the IRA, the Sandinista movement and the ANC. Gaddafi sought to mediate disputes in African countries such as Mali, specifically between the government and rebels. He has even sent peace keeping missions to countries like Somalia. It has even been suggested that the Libyan government provided millions in investments to support governments in Liberia, Niger, Chad and the Central African Republic. Under Gaddafi the country had been led into armed conflict with Egypt and Chad on multiple occasions.

For years Muammar al-Gaddafi stood as the mirror-image of an American neoconservative as he saw a moral obligation to intervene where necessary on the side of the victim against the oppressors of the world. Of course, the side of the victim can be chosen selectively in accordance with the geopolitical value of fending off a particular oppressor. The same is true of the neoconservatives who wanted to fight the Communists in Afghanistan in the name of "freedom", but quietly supported Ceaușescu in Romania at the same time. We find similar contradictions in Libyan foreign policy, Colonel Gaddafi was on board for war crimes in Sierra Leone but backed the ANC at a time when Nelson Mandela was smeared as a "terrorist" in the US and Britain. The same reasoning was deployed to justify sending Libyan agents across into Egypt with the stated purpose of "subversion", even though Gaddafi was an admirer of General Nasser and wanted to emulate him as a "strong man".

Back in 1971 the CIA and MI6 put together a plot to bring down Gaddafi as part of an all-out-invasion of Libya, which would culminate in the release of political prisoners and the restoration of the monarchy. The plot fell apart as the CIA concluded that the Colonel sufficed as a bulwark to Communism in North Africa. The regime in Tripoli was opposed to Israel and Western imperialism, but  it was also opposed to the Soviet Union and Russian influence in the region. This was good enough for the time being. There has even been the suggestion (which has yet to be verified) that the coup which Gaddafi orchestrated in 1969 had been supported by the US. The regime modeled itself on the example set by Egypt, which had become a worrying example of independence by then. It is plausible that the coup was seen as a way to "buy-off" socialism and create a bulwark to the Soviet Union at the same time. So when tensions in the new regime led to a conspiracy to overthrow Gaddafi in 1975 the CIA immediately warned the Colonel who then steam-rolled over all internal opposition and continued to pursue an interventionist foreign policy.

As Gaddafi's regime became increasingly repressive and began to turn to the Soviet Union for greater support, so it was clear that Libya was going to become a "pariah state". Today commentators like to make reference to the way Gaddafi sponsored terrorism. When the US bombed Libya in 1986 the "reason" was that Gaddafi had sent arms and advisers to the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Gaddafi mirrored the American support for the Contras, who were at the forefront of a terrorist campaign against the Sandinistas. The US continued to lean on Libya into the 1990s, this went as far as economic sanctions and backing an attempt to assassinate Gaddafi in 1996. A few years later the US made peace with Libya as Gaddafi made a bid to secure a comfortable place in a world that had changed greatly since the Berlin Wall fell. The support lent to Gaddafi was extreme, it went as far as selling him weapons which were later used against his own people. The British and the American governments even saw to it that the attempt to indict Gaddafi for his responsibility for the deaths of 1.2 million people in Sierra Leone.