Well, now time passed and now it seems Everybody's having them dreams. Everybody sees themselves walkin' around with no one else.
Half of the people can be part right all of the time, Some of the people can be all right part of the time. But all the people can't be all right all the time I think Abraham Lincoln said that. "I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours," I said that.
-Bob Dylan, 'Talkin' World War III Blues'
Heh heh. Well, I guess that explains it - all the confusion in global politics, discussed previously. It's all one big, catastrophic failure of intersubjectivity. No wonder the Left and Right trade places from one global conflict to the next, without a principle in sight, when any position they do take in a given crisis, whether substantively right or wrong, stems less from authentic, subjective political and ethical concerns, and more from a tribal/collective impulse to objectively oppose, grounded purely in the negative. To objectify the enemy as something in any given situation, and attack that. The substantive correctness of a particular position is then only a by-product, or accident, secondary to an oppositional impulse that keeps both sides trapped in a simple dialectic of historical chance.
What is striking about the whole South Ossetia affair is that the Left and the Right have almost diametrically exchanged positions since the Kosovo war. Georgia's claim to South Ossetia is almost identical to Serbia's claim over Kosovo. Serbia's claim was in some ways even weaker, given that the Serbs, despite being in key positions of power in the military and police and dominating the social and political life of the province, were a minority in Kosovo, whose population was 90% Albanian. Serbia's claim to the territory is more based on medieval history than anything else, which brings it a bit closer to Israel's claim over the Occupied Territories, where similarly, a powerful minority (the Jewish settlers) effectively dominates the majority of the local population.
Nevertheless, while many on the far-Left fiercely opposed the NATO intervention on behalf of the Albanians in Kosovo, many now seem to - not so fiercely - support the far more brutal Russian intervention on behalf of the South Ossetians. We should greet with cheers, they say, the news that the world has another superpower besides the US. (Yay, more superpowers to bludgeon the rest of the world into obedience.) The US and Britain and other Western countries, for their part, shamelessly apply blatantly double standards, as in the case of Serbia and Israel, respectively, and their position on Georgia is full of mixed messages, doubtless because of Russia's economic prowess with respect to oil and gas supply. There is not a principle in sight anywhere.
But there is a broader issue here. There is a widespread doctrine in integrationist and communitarian circles, most notably embodied in the European Union, that greater economic integration and inter-dependence decreases the likelihood of armed conflict between states. In the aftermath of WWII, one of the key founding aims of the European Coal and Steel Community, which later became first the EC and then the EU, was to prevent another war between France and Germany. Economic integration and interdependence creates a disincentive to resolving disputes through armed conflict, or so the reasoning goes. (On a related note, some neoliberal ideologue also once declared that no two democracies have ever gone to war against each other, which was patently false at the time and has since been proven false time and time again...)
So is this really the case? Does the doctrine of integration-as-war-deterrent really deliver on its promise?
Given China's regional bullying, Russia's newly emergent interventionist stance, and the double standards applied all around, matters seem to be quite to the contrary: greater economic integration certainly reduces the likelihood of open conflict between the superpowers themselves - between countries who control a substantial portion of the global economy - but this leaves out the majority of the world's population. Sure, nobody will ever lift a finger against China, but if this is purely due to economic dependence and regardless of what China does, is this really a good thing? Is this not the very same pragmatic realist rationale that undermined any serious international opposition to the Iraq War in spite of much grumbling in mainstream political circles? And is it any different from the Cold-War doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD? Certainly, those countries who had nuclear weapons were unlikely to go to war against one another; but just like global economic prowess, the nuclear ticket leaves most of us out. The rules are made on a might-makes-right basis: the Chinese will rarely put up serious opposition to a US aggression against another sovereign country, because it sets a positive precedent for their own territorial pretensions, and vice versa. This spells even greater doom for those countries not in the club of the very rich and very powerful: if a country in possession of vast natural resources or labour power enmeshed in the global economy brutally invades a country on which very little of the world's economic output depends, or which has little in the way of political clout, nobody will do a damn thing.
And the hallowed principles invoked on all sides - international law, sovereignty, human rights - are nothing more than fictitious role-play or moral diversion in a cynical realpolitik game of give-and-take. What's more, even if in the short term there is less likelihood of a major global war between superpowers, in the long term, if they ever do come to blows...Even without open warfare, judging by the news headlines of the past few days, we may well be on the brink of what could be termed as the economic equivalent of a nuclear winter, worse than even the stock market crash of 1929.
Richard 'Lenin' Seymour and Pope Benedict XVI: Peas in a Pod?
Lenin's Tomb, the blog run by Richard Seymour, a.k.a. Lenin, has finally lived up to its name. One might even say that it lived up to its name since its inception, in one way or another. Yep, this is indeed Lenin's Tomb. If Heidegger is right, and Being is not simply Presence, then Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin did not die on January 21st, 1924 in Moscow, Russia; He survived that death. He died decades later, at the hands of the Socialist Worker Party and their apologia for Serbian neofascist ethno-nationalism; he died in the words and deeds of the buffoons behind this ignominious organization.
I made a declaration to that effect in a comment stream in response to a post on Seymour's blog, in which he, leaving aside facts and logic, displayed only a reasonable command of the English language, and a tenacity in deploying the 'expert' opinions of right-wing or Western imperialist UN sources sympathetic to the Serbs' neofascist project, and otherwise dubious sources, in supporting his views on the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s. In one notable instance he referred to Gen. Sir Michael Rose KCB CBE DSO QGM, an old-guard imperialist of British upper class breeding (seen in photo below and here making merry with Serb war criminal Ratko Mladic, with some good coverage of the affair) to support his view that it wasn't the Serbs besieging Sarajevo who caused the Markale massacre, but the Bosnians themselves; and that the Bosnian army generally committed "atrocities, including the deliberate attempts to provoke attacks on civilian infrastructure and buildings."
Gen Ratko Mladic (left) and Gen Michael Rose shaking hands
After I pointed out to him :
1. That this kind of logic is generally used by military aggressors to justify the campaigns of terror they unleash on cities; 2. That one cannot speak in these terms when practically everything in any modern city is in one way or another 'civilian infrastructure'; 3. That this is precisely the kind of logic used by Israelis to justify civilian casualties in the West Bank, or the by Americans in Iraq, an extreme variant of the logic of 'collateral damage' which only serves to conceals the intentionality in any act of war (sure, the Americans in Iraq do not deliberately target civilians, at least not always; but they knew very well that civilian deaths were inevitable, and are inevitable in any act of war) 4. That this is precisely the logic that states in general use to make the distinction between 'terrorism' and state violence (as in, when the stateless terrorists blow up people, that's 'terrorism', yet when states blow up people it's 'collateral damage' or the terrorists were using civilian infrastructure as bait); and 5. That this is precisely one of the main reasons why war is a profoundly unethical enterprise, except in the case where it is self-defensive, and only to that extent to which it is purely self-defensive (and pre-emptive warfare is by no means self-defensive but only a sneaky way of passing off an aggressive war as a defensive one)
Seymour finally insisted that he never meant to be apologetic for the Serbs, and asked "where do I state that the BiH provocations reported by UNPROFOR justified the attacks by the SRK?"
Well, it seems to me that already his question contains its own answer; for the very deployment of the neutral "BiH provocations reported by UNPROFOR" suggests redemption or endorsement of the cited views; kind of like if I were to say something like 'Hamas provocations reported by the UN' in relation to a massacre of Palestinian civilians. BiH, or Bosnian army attacks on Serb positions and artillery around Sarajevo, in an attempt to break the siege of Sarajevo, the longest siege on European soil in modern history, were according to Seymour simply 'provocations', intended, as Seymour's other statement (above) suggests, to draw fire on civilian infrastructure and demonise the Serbs. The Bosnian army, in other words, had nothing better to do than sneakily draw fire on their own civilian population, just like Hamas and Hezbollah and the Iraqi resistance habitually do. Poor Serbs, poor Americans, poor Israelis, for having such devious, demonic foes.
The final step of Seymour's pathetic denial is that he was merely quoting UN sources; these were not his words. (Although they were not in quotation marks, nor did he qualify his statements with words like 'alleged' but used them to support his overall view).
This is what I call the Papa Ratzi (or 'Papparazzi) defence; that's after Joseph Alois Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, who famously deployed it in a controversy over a lecture he delivered at the University of Regensburg, wherein he said of the Islamic faith, to the dismay of many, "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."
Not to worry though, the Pope thinks Islam is a kind and peace-loving religion, he was only quoting a 14th century text, “Dialogue Held With A Certain Persian, the Worthy Mouterizes, in Anakara of Galatia”, which for its part cites the views not of the author but of Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus. Nothing to do with the views of the Pope himself (twice removed), who was really only using the quote to illustrate the 'astoundingly harsh' way in which the interlocutor expresses himself. He was just making a drab, theological point, nothing remotely of interest to us, the general public.
I can just imagine the put-downs: "In the words of a 14th century Byzantine emperor...your mama is a whore!"
The Markale massacre, to note, against the view of Serb-sympathiser Rose, was declared by the Hague Tribunal (ICTY) to have been caused by an artillery shell fired from Serb positions.
My Position
The entire comment streams, in 2 discussions, can be seen here and here; I have saved them as html files, just in case Seymour, having blocked me from further posting and having deleted some of my comments, deletes them from his blog. Therein one may see on full display the irrationality, rhetorical incapacity, and factual deviance of these playground socialists who can't even spell the M in Marxism-Leninism.
In another instance, a blogger named QLIPOTH claimed that Alija Izetbegovic, the wartime President of Bosnia, "tried to prevent" Jews from leaving Sarajevo at the start of the war, and posts as evidence of this fact an article which clearly states that Izetbegovic rather kindly made a "request" of the leader of one Jewish community organization that the Jews don't all leave, since that would spell doom for the city (making it easier for the Serbs preparing their artillery in the hills to intensify hostilities without scruples) and since many foreign journalists were asking whether there was a mass exodus of Jews from the city.
These people can't even read their own sources properly, so go figure.
My position, as elaborated in the discussion, and my beef with leftist intellectuals who put forward an apologia for Serbian neofascist ethno-nationalism in the guise of socialism, can be boiled down to four points, broadly outlined as follows:
1. Multiculturalism vs Nationalism: The Yugoslav wars of the 1990s were not between a number of ethnic groups, fueled by ancient religious/ethnic rivalries and hatreds, but between two forces; the forces of ethno-fascism on one side, and the forces of Titoist socialist multiculturalism on the other. The places that saw the greatest destruction in the conflict, particularly in Serbia and Croatia, were not those where ethnic tensions were the highest; rather they were those - Sarajevo, Vukovar, Mostar, Dubrovnik - that best symbolized, throughout the existence of Tito's Yugoslavia, and even before, the inter-ethnic harmony that made the region famous. Even during the war it survived. Izetbegovic shared the Presidency with Mirko Pejanovic, a Serb; the war time government was composed of Muslims/Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats, from various parties, including the SDP (Social Democratic Party), the former League of Communists of Bosnia, which is still today the only truly multi-ethnic party in postwar Bosnia, led by Zlatko Lagumdzija (Bosniak), Bogic Bogicevic (Serb) and Ivo Komsic (Croat); Many Serbs and Croats were in the military, including command posts, such as Jovan Divjak, a Serb, who organized the initial defence of Sarajevo before becoming a commander in the Bosnian army, and is today a well-known peace and education activist. My own mother, a Serb, edited the only daily newspaper to continue publication throughout the war, Oslobodjenje (Liberation), with her Muslim, Serb, and Croat colleagues. The population of Sarajevo was itself multi-ethnic, and many Serbs and Croats, as well as Bosniaks, died in the Serb shelling of the city. (Even though Serb extremists later tried to pass off many of these as victims of ethnic cleansing by Muslims or some such drivel). If there was anything left of Tito's Yugoslavia in the 1990s, it was held together, however shakily, by the Bosnian government in Sarajevo.
Many leftist intellectuals in the West, however, were either indifferent or apologetic for Serbian nationalism, or openly supported Milosevic's murderous regime and his murderous thugs in Bosnia (Karadzic, Mladic, and co.); largely, presumably, on account of Milosevic being a socialist - although his party, the Socialist Party, formerly the League of Communists of Serbia, was never admitted into the Socialist International, by an almost unanimous vote of 150 parties from 130 countries, on charges of 'nationalism and warmongering'. No party from Serbia, in fact, has full-member status in the SI to this day. The SDP of Bosnia, on the other hand, along with the main Socialist parties from all the other former Yugoslav Republics, have been full members almost since inception.
2. Milosevic: The key agent in Yugoslavia's destruction was Slobodan Milosevic, whose relationship to the West was no less complex than that of Saddam. The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia had effectively ceased to exist as such before Croatia and Slovenia ever declared independence. The Yugoslav constitution of 1974 stipulated that any unilateral change of borders by any Republic within the Federation would result in the Federation effectively being dissolved. And before there was any talk of independence, before nationalist parties swept the 1990 elections, in 1989 Milosevic, in an aggressive expansionist move, annexed the provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo, in an attempt to control 3 of the 8 votes in the federal League of Communists. (Imagine, say, Gordon Brown abolishing the devolved powers of the Welsh and Scottish assemblies in order to control their votes in the EU Parliament and have legislation crafted to his liking) Prior to this he gave a historic speech in Kosovo (a majority-Albanian province which for decades had been dominated politically and militarily by a 10% Serb minority, whose position at the time therefore, as well as their historic claim to the land, is very similar to that of Jewish settlers in Palestine, who base their claim on even more remote history); this was on the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, which took place in 1389, when the invading Turks defeated the Serbs.
Milosevic's 1989 annexations are what led to the walkout of the Croatian and Slovene representatives in the League of Communists - before Tudjman ever appeared on the scene. What they wanted, in view of the constitutional provisions, was a re-negotiation of the constitutional terms of the Federation, for various reasons, but most notably on account of Milosevic unilaterally taking 3 of the 8 votes in the League of Communists. (especially given that Kosovo and Vojvodina had their own representatives precisely on account of their autonomy). The Serb representatives (who were now 3) shouted down all proposals and refused any re-negotiation or loosening of the Federation; they wanted to keep the enormous power they had just obtained by constitutional fraud.
From that moment on, Milosevic's power grab is just what led to the erosion of the League's credibility and power in the Republics and the rise in popularity of nationalist movements, eventually leading to the election of people like Tudjman and declarations of independence. Milosevic himself coming ostensibly from the Communist party (a wolf in sheep's clothing, for lack of a better analogy), the Communist leagues of the other republics - which in the 1990 elections in Bosnia ran as the SDP, or Social Democratic Party - had little chance of distancing themselves completely from Milosevic in the eyes of the electorate. The same wave of nationalism swept all over Yugoslavia in the 1990s - except that in Serbia, where it originated, in typically covert fashion the nationalists came from within the Communist party itself, and undermined it from the inside, eroding its credibility throughout the country (not just in Serbia). It is a travesty of Tito's Yugoslavia that many people on the left have no clue about this.
3. Atrocities: one tactic often deployed by Western politicians, especially right-wingers such as Cyrus Vance and Lord Owen, in arguing against any kind of intervention in the Balkans, is that 'all sides are equally guilty' - there are atrocities on all sides, some have only committed more. This neutral stance the right-wing militarists wished to disseminate in the West was aimed precisely at doing nothing and maintaining the arms embargo - because Western neutrality favoured Serbia, given that, at least in 1991-92, it had the overwhelming military superiority, having inherited the Yugoslav National Army, and maintaining the international embargo on Yugoslavia meant Bosnia and Croatia could not, without difficulty, arm themselves.
Yet the fact that the Allies in WWII committed atrocities never seems to have led anyone to such an ambiguous stance or to any doubt that the Nazis were the bad guys and the ones we should be fighting. The simple fact is that the Bosnian side wasn't the 'Muslim' side as often mistakenly described by western media; it was the multi-ethnic side, and it just so happens that most Bosnian Muslims or Bosniaks - though not all - were on that side. As for war crimes committed by the Bosnian army - by Bosniak units in particular - they tended to be individual or at relatively low levels of command responsibility; to the extent that they were not, they were largely dealt with during the war or in prompt fashion, with no delay in delivering defendants to the Hague court (note the contrast with the recent Karadzic case, over 10 years after the end of the war, or the fact that Mladic is still at large). Musan Topalovic Caco, one of only a handful of Muslim war criminals with any major command responsibility and by far the most notorious - was apprehended during the war, in 1993/4, by Bosnian army police, and shot while trying to escape. It is also noteworthy that his crimes were by no means directed at Serbs and Croats alone, but at any Sarajevans he felt like harassing.
4. Intervention: When Croatia, Slovenia, and finally Bosnia declared independence, and following massive desertions of non-Serbs from the Yugoslav National Army (JNA), the 'rump' state of Yugoslavia, now dominated more than ever by Serbia, inherited what in 1992 was still considered the 4th largest army (in terms of equipment) in the world. In the months prior to the Bosnian war, they had even confiscated weapons caches of the Bosnian Territorial Defence (in the old SFRJ, each republic had one, in addition to the federal army). If the leftist apologists for Serb nationalism and Greater Serbia believe that secession is a good enough excuse for starting a genocidal war; or that protecting Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia, where they certainly weren't threatened prior to the JNA's aggression (not to mention the attack on Slovenia, where there hardly were any Serbs, or the fact that in the shelling of Sarajevo they killed Serbs - their own - as well, including people I knew), is a good enough excuse for a genocidal war, they really, seriously need to think again. When Karadzic made his famous threat in Parliament, saying that if the referendum on independence was held, "we will destroy you", many Serbs, including my own mother and the Serb member of the Bosnian presidency at the time, Mirko Pejanovic, signed a petition saying that neither he nor Milosevic spoke in their name. They voted in the referendum on Bosnian independence, and with over 98 percent turnout and 64 percent of those in favour, Bosnia declared independence. And then the JNA struck. Many Western politicians, as mentioned, especially those on the Right, favoured neutrality, because they saw it as the quickest solution in light of the JNA's and Serbia's military superiority - the thinking went, maintain the embargo, let them fight it out, the Serbs will take control and stability will return.
By 1995, however, the situation had changed. The Bosnian army (remember, led by people like Jovan Divjak, a Serb himself) had grown into a formidable force, and was on the offensive. They had retaken swathes of territory from the Serbs, especially in northern Bosnia and were closing in on Bihac. Ironically, that was when the international community and NATO decided to intervene to stop the war, after three years of bloodshed and Bosnian government pleading with the UN to do something - they intervened when Karadzic and Mladic's Bosnian Serb fascist army was about to lose the war, without NATO's help. Thus the NATO intervention in Bosnia, although tactically, ostensibly targeting Serb positions, was not in reality strategically directed at the Serbs, at the Serb army, or at Serbia. If one followed the conflict carefully at the time, and knew what was going on, this would be pretty clear. And in the end, the intervention amounted to nothing more than destroying a few Serb tanks and artillery pieces - a symbolic gesture at most, and a good enough pretense to order the Bosnian army to halt their offensive and pull back.
So they stopped the Bosnian army offensive, destroyed a few Serb tanks, and sat everybody down to carve up the country along ethnic lines in the notorious Dayton Accords; ethno-nationalism had won the day, with NATO's help. The Bosnian government was even forced to give up territory they had just captured in the offensive; and many formerly majority ethnic-Muslim towns - now cleansed - ended up in Republika Srpska, the Serb entity. If NATO hadn't intervened, there would likely have been no partition, no Dayton accords, no Republika Srpska. The intervention effectively ensured partition and ensured the existence of Republika Srpska, an ethnically defined cantonal entity within what is ostensibly a united, single state. And given Milosevic's relationship to the West - no less complex than Saddam's - I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if he had something to do with it.
I have been going to the BFI a lot lately, mostly to watch the selection of early Chaplin shorts they have been showing, with live piano accompaniment. What strikes me after watching these early gags is that they amplify my (already substantial) appreciation of Chaplin's later, and truly great work a la Modern Times, City Lights,The Circus...
They illustrate retrospectively the enormity of the critical leap made by Chaplin: transferring the 'little tramp', a comedic character designed for these 15-20 minute slapstick, slapdash, silent 'sitcoms' whose sole purpose is entertainment, into the radically different context of full length feature films dealing with 'big themes'; turning the Tramp's apparent weaknesses as a 'serious' dramatic instrument - principally his vaudevillean, two-dimensional silent-screen naïveté - into a superb critical tool, and casually deploying along the way a wealth of excellent commentary on everything from love and relationships to social class, capitalist industrialization, and the rise of Nazism. (at a time when Hitler was still somewhat of a visionary hero in America and Time's 'man of the year', while Chaplin's The Great Dictator was received with derision by the public at large, only later to be hailed as a work of prescient genius.)
One could argue that Benigni does something like this in La Vita è bella; but the achievement is clearly nowhere near as original, extensive, or impressive. I do not necessarily agree with those of his critics who found his treatment of the Holocaust as offensive; he simply never achieves anything like the same critical depth or richness. One could even argue that there are grounds for 'offensiveness' in Benigni's treatment, not so much for his use of comedy, but for his doing it without the two-dimensional naïveté and innocence of Chaplin's Tramp, without the proper distance (Benigni's is ultimately a serious character who knows what is going on but protects his son by inventing a fairy tale)...
Admittedly, even in some of Chaplin's early shorts there are occasional flashes of brilliant social commentary, particularly on matters of social class. And the Tramp's very being who he is, is in a sense already a subversive move which it is all too easy to take for granted: it is not simply that he is a 'tramp', a specimen of the lowest of the 'lower classes'; it is precisely his free-wheeling nonchalance, his lack of any acute awareness of or anger about his own plight - his two-dimensionality - that is most subversive...
The Tramp, despite the passage of time, is simply unparalleled.
Tuesday night I went to an experimental/noise gig at Oto Cafe in Dalston, PAMELIA KURSTIN + JOHN BUTCHER. Pamelia Kurstin (the headline act) plays the theremin, one of the earliest electronic instruments, and the first instrument ever to be played without being touched. It was designed by Russian scientist Leon Theremin in 1919.
Theremin demonstrated the theremin shortly thereafter to Lenin (that's Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, not John...Lennon); the latter was so impressed that he started taking lessons on it, and later commissioned hundreds of them to be built and distributed around the Soviet Union - and the world, to demonstrate Russian technology and promote electronic music.
A modern-day theremin; the rod controls the pitch/modulation, while the loop controls the volume/texture, which is done simply by adjusting the position of your hands in the air.
Anyway, Kurstin is apparently one of only a very few people who play this instrument as a real instrument, and as a trained musician (rather than a geek fooling around with a sci-fi gadget); and she is bloody good, in spite of being very drunk from the start. Watching someone play it, especially in a particular kind of setting, with dim lighting and in total silence, was a bit surreal. It inspired me to make an eerie horror/mystery film using only her music. Something to think about.
John Butcher was good too, and way more experimental. Tapping on the saxophone keys, on the reed, without blowing, passing air through the holes, squeaking, grinding, twisting, turning - at one point stuffing the microphone into the hole of the sax...
Both acts, but especially John Butcher, made me think of Heidegger and 'tools'. How things emerge in consciousness only when they break down/cease to function as they should; how any instrument, even when played 'normally' makes a whole range of sounds that we never hear or associate with it - a whole world of sonic exertion that in 'normal' circumstances remains hidden from our ears.
Reading Zizek's recent piece in In These Times on the 'audacity of rhetoric', and on the heels of my vituperative tirades against leftist apologia for Serbian ethno-fascism in a lengthy exchange of comments on Lenin's Tomb (of which I will write more later), an SWP mouthpiece operated by blogger Richard Seymour ('Lenin'), I was reminded of this piece (below) published in the 'Readings' section of Harper's a few years ago. Despite its vaguely anti-Communist or at least apolitical stance, I like the way it smacks soothingly of Heideggerian 'resoluteness'. In fact, given that Simic is writing here as an American for an American audience, the neutralising sentiment perhaps isn't even vaguely anti-Communist; it aims precisely at leveling, insisting that even in "our democratic society" one must equally be alert as in any the 'Communist countries', suggesting that the liberal notion of 'freedom of speech', in its negative determination defined according to constitutional prerogative - a freedom embedded or 'objectified' in collective thinking in a liberal society - is, well, a bit of a myth. (I love the bit about the boy writing to President Johnson.) So perhaps it isn't even so much apolitical as anti-ideological, encouraging the cleansing operation of undermining or disturbing the background, encouraging one to reveal the hidden suppositions embedded in our speech and thought, the almost inevitable embeddedness of our daily existence, the pernicious presence of 'the they'. (And mind you, given Simic's Yugoslav background, I might add, if there is a single reason for any foreigner to learn our needlessly complex and obscure language, it is for its notoriously rich and varied 'stock of maledictions'):
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[Appreciation] IN PRAISE OF INVECTIVE From an essay by Charles Simic in Orphan Factory, a collection of Simic's writing to be published in October by the University of Michigan Press. Simic was born in Yugoslavia; he now lives in New Hampshire. Simic received the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
At the end of a murderous century, let's curse the enemies of the individual. If, in order to do so, we must fall back on the vocabulary of abuse, so be it. This is what I learned from twentieth-century history: Only dumb ideas get recycled. Every social reformer longs to be the brains of an enlightened, soul-reforming penitentiary. Everyone who is vain, dull, peevish, and sexually frustrated dreams of legislating his impotence. The image of a billion people dressed in Mao's uniforms and shouting from his little red book continues to be the secret hope of new visionaries. So, against ideologies from nationalism to racism, let us wield what the poet Cornelius Eady calls "the tongue we use when we don't want nuance to get in the way."
The first and never-to-be-forgotten pleasure that language gave me was the discovery of "bad words." I must have been three or four years old when I overheard my mother and another woman use the word "cunt." When I repeated it myself, when I said it aloud for all to hear and admire, I was slapped by my mother and told never to use that word again. Aha, I thought, there are words so delicious they must not be said aloud! I had a great-aunt who used such language every time she opened her mouth. My mother would beg her, when she came to visit, not to speak like that in front of the children, but my aunt paid her no mind. To have a temper and a foul mouth like that was a serious liability in a Communist country. "We'll all end up in jail because of her," my mother said. There are moments in life when true invective is called for, when it becomes an absolute necessity, out of a deep sense of justice, to denounce, mock, vituperate, lash out, in the strongest possible language. "I do not wish to be weaned from this error," Robert Burton wrote long ago in his Anatomy of Melancholy. I agree. If there is anything I want to enlarge and perfect, it is my stock of maledictions.
Once one comes to understand that much of what one sees and hears serves to make fraud seem respectable, one is in trouble. For instance, long before Parisian intellectuals did so, my great-aunt had figured out that the Soviet Union and the so-called people's democracies were a scam and a lie from the bottom up. She was one of these women who sees through appearances instantly. To begin with, she did not have a good opinion of humanity. Not because she was a sourpuss and a viper's nest of imaginary resentments. Far from it. She liked eating, drinking, a good laugh, and a quick roll in the hay behind her elderly husband's back. It's just that she had an unusually uncluttered and clear head. She would tell you that our revolutionary regime, which regarded loose tongues and levity as political crimes and those caught in the act as unhealthy elements, was a huge pile of shit, and that included Marshal Tito himself. Her outbursts were caused by what she regarded as other people's gullibility. As far as she was concerned, she was surrounded by cowards and dunces. The daily papers and the radio drove her into verbal fury. "Admit it," she'd yell at my mother and grandmother. "Doesn't it turn your stomach to hear them talk like that?" If they agreed and confided in a whisper that yes, indeed, these Commies are nothing but a bunch of murderous illiterate yokels, Stalinist stooges, and whatnot, she still wasn't happy. There was something about humans as a species that worried her to no end. Cursing them, I imagine, gave her royal pleasure and, unknown to her, gave pleasure to me too, listening behind the closed door with a shameless grin.
I knew a thirteen-year-old boy who wrote a letter telling off President Johnson for the conduct of the Vietnam War. It was some letter! Our president was an idiot and a murderer who deserved to be napalmed himself, and worse. One evening, as the boy and his mother and sister were sitting around the kitchen table slurping their soup, the doors and the windows leading to the fire escape flew open at the same time, and men with drawn guns surrounded the table. "We are the FBI," they announced, and they wanted to know: Who was Anthony Palermo? The two women pointed at the boy with thick glasses and crossed eyes. Well, it took a while to convince them that he was the one who wrote the letter. They were expecting a full-grown assassin with long hair and an arsenal of weapons by his side. The obvious point here is that the vileness and stupidity my aunt found so enraging is not limited to Yugoslavia or Eastern Europe or Communism but is alive and well and should be railed at, with our most pointed and inventive tongues, in our own democratic state. "What do you want from me, blood?" I once heard an old woman shout at the workers in a New York City welfare office. She then kept cussing for another five minutes, not because she had any expectation that the wrongs done to her would be righted but simply in order to make herself feel good and clean for one brief moment.
-Charles Simic
***
Amen and Hallelujah. So, here's to Richard Seymour 'Lenin' and all the other proto-fascist imbeciles and leftist apologists for Serb genocidal pretensions, at the SWP and elsewhere, for whom my only wish is that they rot forever in hell, preferably under intense Serb artillery bombardment with their friends Karadzic and Mladic at the helm.
Present-day British and American colonialists in Iraq and Afghanistan, with all the bullshit rhetoric about 'winning hearts and minds' could really learn something (about not invading countries) from the Partisan example. The only real victory in war is 'moral' victory, and after more than five years - longer than WWII - neither conflict (Afghanistan/Iraq) is over. Here are a couple more interesting bits from Hoare's book, Genocide and Resistance in Hitler's Bosnia: The Partisans and the Chetniks, 1941-1943:
"The Serb Partisan Ilija Vukoman recalls that in Central Bosnia: 'The Muslim women used to hide themselves - they wore the veil. I passed hundreds of times by the house of Muharem Baric and his wife without ever seeing her face. When the uprising began and work for the People's Liberation Movement got underway, Muharem's wife and many other Muslim women ceased hiding themselves from us.' [footnote omitted]"
"Zaga Umicevic-Mala recalls a young Muslim woman she met in Banja Luka, Nazifa Isakovic, who was recruited into the NOP by her brother Zaim, a Communist. Nazifa worshipped her brother and would carry out any task for the movement that he asked of her but, she told Umicevic-Mala, 'the only thing I could not do would be to take off my veil'. Two years later Umicevic-Mala met Nazifa again, as a Partisan and without her veil. 'Her blonde hair was flowing in the wind and her big blue eyes were happily gazing at the world around her.' Umicevic-Mala asked: 'Naza, what's happened to your veil? Do you remember what you said to me at Banja Luka?' Nazifa replied: 'I did not know how wonderful it is to gaze at the world without a headscarf'."...(287)
Yep, that's what happens when you actually inspire people. And guess what, boys - you don't inspire people by invading and demolishing their countries and homes, terrorising them, murdering their relatives, putting them in prison, cuffing them, stuffing them full with McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken and Burger King and bullshit rhetoric about democracy and human rights, and shoving ballots in their faces. Nope. Capitalism inspires fuck all.
Since I started writing about my communist partisan grandparents, I have done some casual research into Yugoslav/Bosnian WWII history. One interesting recent book I came across covers the period 1941-43, and in particular the 'civil war' between the Partisans on one side, and the Chetniks - Serbian nationalist/royalist paramilitaries, predecessors of contemporary Serbian nationalists, i.e. Karadžić, Milošević, et al. The Chetniks, on account of very effective propaganda through a long-established and influential Serbian lobby in the West (descendants of the Royal family reside in England to this day)**, actually received the bulk of Allied support until 1943, when Allied spies dispatched to both sides reported that the Chetniks were actually collaborating with the Germans while the Partisans were viciously fighting them. The Allies officially (and grudgingly, given the Partisans' communist agenda) switched their support at the Tehran conference.
The feats of the Yugoslav Partisans in WWII are the stuff of legend. These were not mere warriors - they were a representative cross-section of the society that spawned them, and included, among others, some of the greatest artists and writers of 20th century Yugoslavia, who later (or even during the war, those of them who died) immortalized their struggle in literature, film, fine art. For those of us who grew up with these stories the names of places and battles reverberate with a mythological power - The Battle of Sutjeska, The Igman March, the Battle of Neretva...Through the haze of childhood recollection the protagonists of these tales are endowed with an almost super-human strength and cunning in overcoming their far more powerful Nazi opponents. But what if there is indeed a real dimension of this struggle that is, well, not super-human, but super-(man)?
It is generally accepted that in spite of their technological and military weaknesses early in the war, the Partisans had two main advantages over their enemies: 1. a small but very effective cadre of Spanish Civil War veterans from the International brigades who, unlike even many German troops, had valuable experience of modern warfare (the Spanish Civil War is arguably the first truly modern war, at least on European soil), and 2. broad popular appeal due to the fact that their founding aims were political rather than ethnic or religious, allowing them to draw recruits across national, ethnic, religious, and other boundaries.
There is one under-explored dimension of this second point: the role of women. Many people don't realize just how radical Tito and co's project of national liberation was, and how deliberate some of the measures were that they took to reshape society from top to bottom. Just in case anyone reading my last post thought I was being merely facetious when I said, in the caption to the photo of my grandma and a comrade in wartime Mostar, that the Nazi Scourge had never yet encountered such a tough nut, read this passage from Hoare:
"...The group of Bosnians most excluded from political life prior to the Axis invasion was the female half of the population, which represented a larger proportion of the country's inhabitants than Serbs, Muslims, or Croats. In his seminal study of the Chetnik movement, Jozo Tomasevich noted the role of women in the Partisan victory: 'One of the fundamental differences between the Chetnik and Partisan movements was in their attitude toward women. The participation of women in Partisan fighting ranks and mass organisations of the Partisan movement was of such importance that all Partisan officials agreed that without the women the Partisans could never have won.' [footnote omitted] ...Male supremacy over women was as much a part of traditional rural society as religious semi-segregation. In overturning the one the KPJ helped to undermine the other, for the dissolution of traditional boundaries between men and women and between Orthodox, Muslims, Catholics, and Jews was part of the same process of turning 'peasants into Bosnians', a process inimical to the Chetnik project that upheld traditional social distinctions." (Genocide and Resistance in Hitler's Bosnia: The Partisans and the Chetniks, 1941-1943, 285-86.)
On the point about 'turning peasants into Bosnians' my grandpa's story, as told in the last post, is a case in point. How successful this was, well, my grandma may have a few things to say about it, but I think we're in overall agreement. (Although another thing I recall, at least from stories, is that whenever people tried to psychologize my grandpa's behaviour, she would explain that, as a peasant at heart, he had no such thing as a 'psyche')
Nevertheless, it gets even more amusing. To anyone interested in this topic I would recommend reading the entire chapter in Hoare's book which chronicles, among other things, touching episodes of Muslim women shedding veils and other niceties in joining or collaborating with Partisan ranks. Here are some other interesting bits:
"The prominent role of women in the Partisan movement inevitably found a role in the demonology of its right-wing enemies. An Ustasha report on Partisan atrocities in Prijedor, following the capture of the town in May 1942, claimed: 'Women, both from Prijedor and from the surrounding area, played a particularly prominent role in these bestialities'. [footnote omitted]...The Ustashas' Department of Public Security claimed in an internal report of September 1942 that the Partisans 'are in many places bloodthirsty, particularly the female persons in their ranks.' [footnote omitted] For their part, the Chetniks distributed a pamphlet in eastern Hercegovina in late 1942 claiming that among the Communists were many 'fallen and unfortunate women and girls without morals' [footnote omitted]...Partisan women were therefore the polar opposite of true, martyred Serb women. In Draza Mihailović's view: 'Communist women are recognisable by the fact that they are immoral; using free love they approach and seduce our men, particularly those who place fun above duty.'[footnote omitted]" (288-89)
Step aside, Diamanda Galas, you've got nothin' on these girls - not till you've seen some real combat...
While I am having difficulty picturing my grandma as a bloodthirsty berserker harpy, I find it very amusing to imagine the chill these fascists must have gotten to see women carrying guns and screaming communist slogans. One old Partisan anthem we all sang as kids is about a mlada partizanka - a young Partisan woman - who threw grenades at the enemy...
One could even argue that the presence of women helped turn the tide of the war not just quantitatively by inflating the ranks of the Partisans, but additionally in a qualitative way, by the effect on morale - building solidarity in the ranks irrespective of religious, ethnic, or gender differences, and demoralising their enemies, or simply scaring them shitless at the sight of this weird hybrid fighting machine.
This should in no way lead to any sympathy with the contemporary American project of nation-building or reshaping other societies: the partisans, who sought to reshape their own, were strategically precisely in the position of the mujahideen - the crucial difference being that they were fighting for unification and liberation, rather than segregation and imposition of strict religious codes. The crucial element in the effectiveness of their struggle, though, and in the unique position of Yugoslavia in the Cold War world after its break with the Soviet Union, is national self-determination.
Nor is this to advocate some brand of butch-feminism, i.e. the notion that women attain equality by adopting/imitating dominant macho male behaviour, etc. Rather, the idea is simply that there are no assigned roles - that women can, when the occasion arises, perform the same work as men, join the struggle, etc - and vice versa...
Going back to the broader issue of political appeal and the enfranchisement of the excluded, does this not go some way toward explaining why the vast majority post-colonial national liberation movements worldwide - even those spawned without any direct outside superpower involvement - were communist or socialist? Doesn't any national liberation struggle, in order to be truly successful, require this kind of breaking-down of ethnic, religious, gender, and other boundaries?
This is precisely the way to unite the different struggles: workers, women, oppressed minorities... In order to effectively confront a common external enemy, a nation must first shed its own internal demons; and perhaps the reason why Yugoslavia broke apart in the end is because this work was never thoroughly completed. The decades of Tito's 'brotherhood and unity' only relatively froze the post-war breakdown, nationalism in particular was never properly dealt with...(And here it may be worthy to concede, grudgingly, Žižek's point about the Jacobins and revolutionary terror - the French republic they inaugurated remains intact 200 years later, and it looks like it will survive even Sarkozy - so perhaps the Partisans simply weren't extreme enough...)
One should equally not be deterred here by the fact that Capital - once the sole preserve of wealthy white men - has in the meantime found ways to accommodate, commodify, and even commandeer the rhetoric of multi-culturalism, human rights, equality, etc. This is in its nature, as Deleuze and Guattari argue - deterritorialization. Yet we should never forget that these are the fruits of hard-won battles against Capital - even against liberalism,in its earliest incarnation. Why simply give up on this legacy and allow liberal Capital to mediate its impact and reterritorialize the gains for political 'street cred'?
One thing that some people today are shocked to hear, for instance, is that Swiss women - Switzerland being the darling of Global Capital, hosting a number of multinational corporations way out of proportion to its size - only gained the right to vote in 1971, by a national referendum in which one-third of the all-male electorate voted against suffrage. (One Swiss canton only granted women full suffrage in 1990!) And even after suffrage many discriminatory measures remained in place for years, such as husbands' control over their wives' property and capital, the husband's right to decide on the couple's place of residence, etc. Switzerland, until fairly late in the 20th century, is like some perverse modern capitalist version of the Taliban. Isn't this the best proof that modernity alone, not to mention its capitalist variant, is no guarantee of freedom, equality, human rights, etc - and that simply imposing 'democracy' is a hollow gesture when it comes to true liberation?
Not to overemphasize the value of the democratic vote, either - one always has to wonder why a particular freedom is being granted from the top at a particular time and to what end the political credit gained by those in power is being deployed. The end of colonialism is often seen as merely the transition or sublation to another form of colonialism - a version of what Hardt and Negri call Empire, what others have called economic imperialism (although 'Empire' goes beyond political economy, as a new incarnation of old state sovereignty); similarly, one could say that democratic reform is permitted when the power elite has sufficiently insulated itself from it, and this is ultimately the problem with gradualism.
But the answer to this predicament is not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. It is rather, keep the bathwater, and throw out the baby - insist on change, democratic or otherwise, but insist on it, as Martin Luther King did, now. Not when those in power find it suitable to throw some scraps from the table. Seize the revolutionary moment, intervene to change the very coordinates of what is deemed 'possible', to put it in Žižekian terms.
**This same lobby/propaganda machine has in recent years caused much of the confusion surrounding the Balkan wars of the 1990s, ironically pulling many Western leftist intellectuals (notably Chomsky and Parenti) into the ranks of apologetics for military aggression and ultimately genocide, under the banner of Serbian nationalism. This is largely due to the grossly mistaken impression that people likeMilošević- a rabid nationalist who inaugurated his tenure in 1989, on the 600th anniversary of the battle of Kosovo, by annexing Kosovo and Vojvodina and thus giving Serbia 3 votes in the 8-member national council, prompting the walkout in protest of Croatian and Slovene members - were somehow carrying on the legacy of Tito's Yugoslavia, rather than actively working together with the West to destroy it. One prominent and oft-quoted (ironically even by Chomsky) figure in this project was Gen. Lewis Mackenzie, a Tory politician in Canada and commander of UN forces in Sarajevo early on in the war, who gave testimony before the US congress in 1992 arguing against any intervention - even humanitarian aid - in the conflict, saying that "all three sides were equally guilty". Mackenzie was later revealed to have been on the payroll of a Serbian-American lobbying group while on a speaking tour following the publication of his book on Bosnia. Similarly, Diana Johnstone, who published a book supposedly debunking Serb atrocities in Bosnia, was refused further publication by In These Times- a leftist paper in the US for which she had regularly written - when the editors discovered that she was an old college friend of Mirjana Markovic, SlobodanMilošević's wife. (For the sake of comparison, just imagine a supposedly objective journalistic account justifying the Iraq war, presenting 'evidence' that there were indeed WMD in Iraq, that the Abu Ghraib photos were faked, there was no torture, the civilian death toll was exaggerated, etc - written by an author who turns out to be an old college friend of, say, Dick Cheney's wife. I actually had an e-mail debate about this with Chomsky, and I gotta say, Noam, I know it's hard to admit you were wrong, let alone taken for a complete fool, but sometimes you just gotta do it.)
