There should be no understanding for the fact that, in many - if not most – Arab countries, Hitler is still considered a hero; the fact that in primary-school textbooks all the traditional anti-Semitic myths - from the notorious forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion to claims that the Jews use the blood of Christian (or Arab) children for sacrificial purposes- are perpetrated. To claim that this anti-Semitism articulates resistance against capitalism in a displaced mode does not in any way justify it (the same goes for Nazi anti-Semitism: it, too, drew its energy from anticapitalist resistance): here displacement is not a secondary operation, but the fundamental gesture of ideological mystification. What this claim does involve is the idea that, in the long term, the only way to fight anti-Semitism is not to preach liberal tolerance, and so on, but to express the underlying anticapitalist motive in a direct, non-displaced way. … The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, in the most radical sense of the term, a FALSE conflict, a lure, an ideological displacement of the true antagonism. Yes, the Arab fundamentalists are Islamo-fascists - in a repetition of the paradigmatic Fascist gesture, they want capitalism without capitalism (without its excess of social disintegration, without its dynamics in which everything solid melts into air). Yes, the Israelis stand for the principle of Western liberal tolerance, while, in their singularity, they embody the exception to this principle (advocating a state based on ethnic-religious identity- and this in a country with the highest percentage of atheists in the world). The Israeli reference to Western liberal tolerance, however, is the form of appearance of the neocolonialist terror of Capital; the call for unfreedom (reactionary fundamentalism) is the form of appearance of the resistance to this terror. … We should go a step further and claim that it is the State of Israel which, in this case, is desecrating the memory of the Holocaust victims: ruthlessly manipulating them, instrumentalizing them into a means of legitimizing current political measures. This means that we should reject out of hand the very notion of any logical or political link between the Holocaust and present Israeli-Palestinian tensions: they are two completely different phenomena- one is part of the European history of Rightist resistance to the dynamics of modernization; the other is one of the last chapters in the history of colonization. On the other hand, the difficult task for the Palestinians is to accept that their true enemies are not the Jews but Arab regimes which manipulate their plight in order, precisely, to prevent this shift - that is, the political radicalization in their own states. … Pseudo-naturalized ethnico-religious conflicts are the form of struggle which fits global capitalism: in our age of post-politics, when politics proper is progressively replaced by expert social administration, the only remaining legitimate source of conflicts is cultural (ethnic, religious) tension. Todays rise of irrational violence should therefore be conceived as strictly correlative to the depoliticization of our societies, that is, to the disappearance of the proper political dimension, its translation into different levels of administration of social affairs: violence is accounted for in terms of social interests, and so on, and the unaccountable remainder cannot but appear to be irrational ... The properly Hegelian dialectical reversal is crucial here: what looks at first like the multitude of remainders of the past which should be gradually overcome with the growth of a tolerant multiculturalist liberal order is all of a sudden, in a flash of insight, perceived as this liberal orders very mode of existence - in short, teleological temporal succession is unmasked as structural contemporaneity. (In exactly the same way, what, in the realm of really existing socialism, looked like petty-bourgeois remainders of the past, that eternal excuse for all the failures of socialist regimes, was the inherent product of the regime itself.) So when Fukuyama talks about Islamo-Fascism, we should agree with him - on condition that we use the term Fascism in a very precise way: as the name for the impossible attempt to have capitalism without capitalism, without the excesses of individualism, social disintegration, relativization of values, and so on. SLAVOJ ZIZEK, WELCOME TO THE DESERT OF THE REAL! FIVE ESSAYS ON SEPTEMBER 11 AND RELATED DATES, Verso, 2002, pp.130-3
Posted on: Tue, 18 Nov 2014 02:27:57 +0000
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