Excerpt from Zizeks Living in the End Times: Whenever we are tempted by the fascinating spectacle of Third World violence, we should always take a self-reflexive turn and ask ourselves how we ourselves are implicated in it. There is an old anecdote about a group of anthropologists who penetrated the heart of darkness of central New Zealand in search of a mysterious tribe rumored to perform a chilling death-dance with mud-and-wood masks. Late one day, they finally reached the tribe, somehow explained to them what they wanted and then went to sleep; the next morning, the members of the tribe performed a dance which met all their expectations, and so the anthropologists returned satisfied to civilization and wrote up a report on their discovery. Unfortunately, however, another expedition visited the same tribe a couple of years later, made a more serious effort to communicate with them, and learned the truth about the first expedition: the tribesmen had somehow grasped that their guests wanted to see a terrifying death dance, and so, in order not to disappoint them because of their sense of hospitality, they worked all night to make the masks and practice the dance invented to satisfy their guests — the anthropologists who thought they were getting a glimpse into a weird exotic ritual were actually receiving a hastily improvised staging of their own desire. Is not something quite similar going on in contemporary Congo, which is again emerging as the African heart of darkness? The cover story of Time magazine on June 5, 2006 was headlined The Deadliest War in the World—a detailed documentation of how around four million people have died in Congo as the result of political violence over the last decade. None of the usual humanitarian uproar followed, just a couple of readers’ letters—as if some kind of filtering mechanism had blocked this news from achieving its full impact. To put it cynically, Time had picked the wrong victim in the struggle for hegemony in suffering—it should have stuck to the list of usual suspects: Muslim women and their plight, oppression in Tibet, and so forth. Congo today has effectively re-emerged as a Conradean zone: no one dares to confront it head-on. The death of a West Bank Palestinian child, not to mention an Israeli or an American, is mediatically worth thousands of times more than the death of a nameless Congolese. But why this ignorance? On October 30, 2008, AP reported that Laurent Nkunda, the rebel general besieging Congos eastern provincial capital Coma, said that he wanted direct talks with the government about his objections to a billion-dollar deal that gives China access to the countrys vast mineral riches in exchange for a railway and highways. As problematic and neo-colonialist as this transaction may be, it poses a vital threat to the interests of local warlords, since its eventual success would create the infrastructural base for the Democratic Republic of Congo to function as a united state. Back in 2001, a UN investigation into the illegal exploitation of natural resources in Congo found that the conflict in the country is mainly about access to, control of, and trade in five key mineral resources: coltan, diamonds, copper, cobalt, and gold. According to this investigation, the exploitation of Congo’s natural resources by local warlords and foreign armies is systematic and systemic,“ and the Ugandan and Rwandan leaders in particular (closely followed by Zimbabwe and Angola) had turned their soldiers into business armies: Rwandas army made at least $250 million in eighteen months by selling coltan. The report concluded that the permanent civil war and disintegration of Congo “has created a win-win situation for all belligerents. The only loser in this huge business venture is the Congolese people.” One should bear in mind this good old economic-reductionist” background when one reads in the media about primitive ethnic passions exploding yet again in the African jungle. Beneath the façade of ethnic warfare, we thus discern the workings of global capitalism. Alter the fall of Mobutu, Congo no longer exists as a united operational state; its eastern part especially is a multiplicity of territories ruled by local warlords controlling their patch of land with an army which, as a rule, includes drugged children. Each of the warlords has business links to a foreign company or corporation exploiting the mostly mining wealth in the region. This arrangement suits both parties: the corporations get mining rights without taxes and other complications, while the warlords get rich. The irony is that many of these minerals are used in high-tech products such as laptops and cell phones—in short: forget about the savage behavior of the local population, just remove the foreign high-tech companies from the equation and the whole edifice of ethnic warfare fueled by old passions falls apart. A further irony here is that in among the predominant exploiters are Rwandan Tutsis, victims of the horrifying genocide over fifteen years ago. In 2008, the Rwanda government presented numerous documents which demonstrated the complicity of President Mitterrand and his administration in the genocide of the Tutsis: France had supported the Hutu plan for the takeover, to the point of arming their units, in order to regain influence in this part of Africa at the expense of the Anglophone Tutsis. Frances outright dismissal of the accusations as totally unfounded was, to say the least, itself somewhat flimsy. Bringing Mitterrand to The Hague Tribunal, even if posthumously, would have been a just act. The furthest the Western legal system went in this direction was with the arrest of Pinochet, who was already seen as a rogue statesman; but an indictment of Mitterrand would have crossed a fateful line, in for the first time bringing to trial a leading Western politician who had pretended to act as protector of freedom, democracy, and human rights. The lesson of such a trial would thus have been the complicity of the Western liberal powers in what the media present as the explosion of Third World barbarism. There certainly is a great deal of darkness in the dense Congolese jungle—but its causes lie elsewhere, in the bright executive offices of our banks and high-tech companies. In order to truly awaken from the capitalist “dogmatic dream (as Kant would have put it) and recognize this other true heart of darkness, we should reapply to our situation Brechts old quip from his Beggars’ Opera: “What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?” What is the stealing of a couple of thousand of dollars, for which one is sent to prison, compared to the kind of financial speculation that deprives tens of millions of their homes and savings, but whose perpetrators are then rewarded with state help of sublime grandeur? What is a local Congolese warlord compared to an enlightened and ecologically sensitive Western CEO? Maybe José Saramago was right when, in a recent newspaper column, he proposed treating the big bank managers and others responsible for the global financial meltdown as perpetrators of crimes against humanity whose right place is before The Hague Tribunal. Perhaps one should not treat this proposal merely as a poetic exaggeration in the style of Jonathan Swift, but rather take it absolutely seriously.
Posted on: Sun, 04 May 2014 00:54:42 +0000
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