A while back I posted this song as a live youtube video. Here is the recorded version!
It's inspired by my experience as a customer service phone representative and the many angry, unreasonable callers I've talked to. Given that some customer with the same or worse problems can be so generous, understanding, forgiving, and kind indicates that it's not the situation that determines the outcome, but the personalities involved. When I am abused on the phone, I respond immediately by feeling angry and victimized, but when I come to my senses, my response is Buddhist in nature: to have compassion for the angry caller. They are ultimately the ones who suffer the most. They must live with their anger, resentment, and frustrations. They have not identified the source of their suffering as an attachment to an outcome that was never realized. They have not developed the ability to let that attachment, and with it their frustration, go. It's hard to be on the other end of that anger, but as a customer service rep, all I can do is provide a space for them to vent, and act within the limited powers afforded me to try and make it better.
Enjoy my song, "The Angry Customer":
The Angry Customer by tmhfband
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Book Review: Slavoj Zizek - Living in the End Times, Anger (Part III)
To read my introduction of Zizek, click here. To read about the Introduction to his book, click here. To read about Chapter 1 (Denial) click here.
Zizek appropriately starts his chatper on anger with an examination of racism. Inspired by the psychoanalyst Lacan, Zizek asserts that the foundation of racism is Fantasy. Fantasy refers to the reduction of the subject's embodied, contextual gaze at the world in favor of "observing the world in the condition of the subject's non-existence" (80). This is to say that the racist forgets his background, education, biases, and understanding and fantasizes about what the world would look like if he did not exist in it. This world, then, takes on an objective character. Racism takes root when this 'objective fantasy' starts to look a bit like a utopia from which he is excluded. Zizek writes, "In jealousy, the subject creates/imagines a paradise (a utopia of full jouissance) from which he is excluded. The same definition applies to what one can call political jealousy, from anti-Semitic fantasies about the excessive enjoyment of the Jews to Christian fundamentalists' fantasies about the weird sexual practices of gays and lesbians" (81). Jouissance refers to enjoyment and pleasure.
The human subject is a jealous subject, and it comes out in all sort of interesting and perverse ways. As a spectator of cinema, we are essentially jealous subjects: "Is she not, by definition, a jealous subject, excluding herself from the utopia observed on screen?" (81). Zizek identifies the scientific trend to explain each and every human behavior in terms of Darwinist reductions from human behaviors to animalistic adaptive strategies as an exercise in jealousy. Consider the animal documentaries we watch - a world where humans don't matter - where language isn't needed - where camera-men are not noticed or cared about. The animal kingdom represents a truly harmonious society - every animal spontaneously knows her role. Zizek notes, "This is why the case of National Geographic is so interesting: although it combines reports on both nature and human societies, its trick essentially is to treat a human society (whether a tribe in the middle of the Sahara or a small town in the USA) as an animal community in which things somehow work, where 'everyone has his place, where everyone is in his place, and where everyone knows and does exactly as he must so that everything can keep on in its proper place'" (83).
Zizek challenges us in this chapter to recognize this utopian dream as fantasy - "On account of its temporal loop, the fantasmatic narrative always involves an impossible gaze, the gaze by means of which the subject is already present at the scene of its own absence," not unlike the fantasy of witnessing our own funeral (84). These utopian dreams, so often responsible for outbursts of murder and violence, are the focus of Zizek's chapter on anger. It will be argued that spiritual, poetic verses on faith are responsible in developing the Fantasy that has resulted in so many nationalistic ethnic cleansing mobilizations that have occurred over the last century.
A common trend in all of Zizek's work is the critique of the so-called 'Post Ideological Era' we live in. This chapter follows suit. Zizek examines the ethnic cleansing and death squads of Bosnia and Rwanda, with close attention to Doctor Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb politician accused of war crimes committed against Bosnian Muslims. He was discovered, in hiding, under the alias Dragan Dabic, a spiritual healer writing articles for Zdrav Zivot (Healthy Life) magazine. Zizek argues that Dabic was not a "fiction constructed to obfuscate Karadzic's true identity," but rather "the ideological key to the 'real' war criminal Karadzic" (95). That is, Dr. Dabic's spiritual work, which was publishable and geared toward distinguishing the fine line between meditation and quietude, as accepted right into New Age Spiritual circles, was indeed the key to Karadzic's crimes against humanity. The foundational argument here is that poets, as inspired by faith and religion, lay the groundwork for moral impunity and nationalistic mobilization.
This is a difficult argument to swallow, but let's follow it through. Zizek, alongside Plato's repudiation of poets, argues that poets ultimately made the ethnic cleansing possible in places like Bosnia and Rwanda. According to Zizek, this Bosnian poem fits nicely alongside the ('spiritual') Chinese proverbs hand-selected by Dr. Dabic:
Convert to my new faith crowd
I offer you what no one has had before
I offer you inclemency and wine
The one who won't have bread will be fed by the light of my sun
People nothing is forbidden in my faith
There is loving and drinking
And looking at the Sun for as long as you want
And this godhead forbids you nothing
Oh obey my call brethren people crowd
The key to understanding how this spiritually inspired poem is responsible for today's 'postmodern nationalism' that fueled the fires for ethnic cleansing rituals, is its suspension of moral prohibitions: "People nothing is forbidden in my faith." Similar calls making the seemingly unethical ethical can be found in the Bible: "Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man's enemies will be the members of his household. He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me. He who has found his life will lose it, and he who has lost his life for Me sake will find it." (Matthew 10:34-9). (Also, see Luke 12:49-53 and Luke 14:26 and Thomas 16, which is, of course, non-canonical.)
Considering the poetic culture of Bosnia preceding ethnic cleansing, and the way Karadzic so gracefully self-identified with Dr. Dabic, we see the role of religion in justifying violence today. But we need to see it within a larger context: we live in a supposedly 'post-ideological era', and that means that we are no longer governed by a Big Other. This has played out as a call to enjoy life and fulfill ourselves, and makes no room for great public causes and mobilizations. Having no sides and no Big Other causes, all people are self-identified as 'moral' and "it is difficult for the majority of humans to overcome their revulsion at torturing and killing other human beings." Consider the tolerant nature US citizens have had toward the treatment of un-convicted criminals being tortured and help without trial in Guantanamo Bay. Even Barak Obama has been able to get away with keeping them there. And Zizek continues, "Since the majority are spontaneously 'moral' in this way, a larger, 'sacred' Cause is needed, which will make individual concerns about killing seem trivial" (97). The spiritual poetry of Bosnians and Rwandans preceding the killings, with calls to suspend moral prohibitions, inspiring the writings of Dr. Dabic following his war crimes, provides the Big Other - the mobilization, the abundantly present Ideology, the cause, the impetus, and the faith. Religion has made localized movements possible what would be impossible for those perceiving themselves as living in a 'post-ideological era'. For people with such perceptions, the mobilization is less visible and far more ubiquitous, realizing itself in a faith toward Capitalism. Its 'ethnic cleansing' does not involve death squads, and involves, for instance, courtroom battles between hegemonic corporations and exploited indigenous populations such as is the case between Chevron and the indigenous tribes of the Ecuadorian rainforest.
But back on point, with reference to localized explosions of anger and violence, Zizek concludes: "Religious ideologists usually claim that, whether true or not, religion can make otherwise bad people to do good things; from recent experience, we should rather stick to Steve Weinberg's claim that while without religion good people would do good things and bad people bad things, only religion can make good people do bad things" (97).
Part of Zizek's project is furthering a critique on Capitalism. He notes, when we stop anchoring ourselves to an impossible gaze, and rather to an embodied, contextual gaze, we are brought once again into the historical process and we become responsible agents for the way things are. For Zizek, this kind of understanding entails Marxism.
Zizek quickly points out that Marxism, against the fantasies of, say, the National Geographic 'story', does not see history as a linear, centered narrative. We do not all have our place, and the tragedy in Bosnia and Rwanda did not have to happen. History follows, rather, Stephen Jay Gould's mantra on biology: "Wind back the film of life and play it again. The history of evolution will be totally different." Marxism is always haunted by what could have been, and rests its hope in the fact that the reality we live today is not the result of historical necessity, but rather our ancestors (and our) failure to seize the moment and act (87). Zizek puts his Marxism thus: "first, that all history is a history of the present; second, that our understanding of actual history always implies a (hidden or not) reference to alternate history - what 'really happened' is perceived against the background of what might have happened, and this alternative possibility is offered as the path we should follow today" (88).
Unable to mobilize, concerned with enjoyment and fulfillment, our generation needs to take seriously this Marxist understanding of history. Our lame reactions to Bosnia and Rwanda present us with an alternative possibility, which should guide our actions today. First, we must recognize that we do not live in a post-ideological era. We are no less ideological than violent religious cults. We must constantly survey our self-understanding in the world and reflect on our ethical foundations. Only through such self-criticism can we hope that appropriate mobilizations will be possible. Only then can we seize the path that, given our history of the present, we should indeed take hold of.
Zizek appropriately starts his chatper on anger with an examination of racism. Inspired by the psychoanalyst Lacan, Zizek asserts that the foundation of racism is Fantasy. Fantasy refers to the reduction of the subject's embodied, contextual gaze at the world in favor of "observing the world in the condition of the subject's non-existence" (80). This is to say that the racist forgets his background, education, biases, and understanding and fantasizes about what the world would look like if he did not exist in it. This world, then, takes on an objective character. Racism takes root when this 'objective fantasy' starts to look a bit like a utopia from which he is excluded. Zizek writes, "In jealousy, the subject creates/imagines a paradise (a utopia of full jouissance) from which he is excluded. The same definition applies to what one can call political jealousy, from anti-Semitic fantasies about the excessive enjoyment of the Jews to Christian fundamentalists' fantasies about the weird sexual practices of gays and lesbians" (81). Jouissance refers to enjoyment and pleasure.
The human subject is a jealous subject, and it comes out in all sort of interesting and perverse ways. As a spectator of cinema, we are essentially jealous subjects: "Is she not, by definition, a jealous subject, excluding herself from the utopia observed on screen?" (81). Zizek identifies the scientific trend to explain each and every human behavior in terms of Darwinist reductions from human behaviors to animalistic adaptive strategies as an exercise in jealousy. Consider the animal documentaries we watch - a world where humans don't matter - where language isn't needed - where camera-men are not noticed or cared about. The animal kingdom represents a truly harmonious society - every animal spontaneously knows her role. Zizek notes, "This is why the case of National Geographic is so interesting: although it combines reports on both nature and human societies, its trick essentially is to treat a human society (whether a tribe in the middle of the Sahara or a small town in the USA) as an animal community in which things somehow work, where 'everyone has his place, where everyone is in his place, and where everyone knows and does exactly as he must so that everything can keep on in its proper place'" (83).
Zizek challenges us in this chapter to recognize this utopian dream as fantasy - "On account of its temporal loop, the fantasmatic narrative always involves an impossible gaze, the gaze by means of which the subject is already present at the scene of its own absence," not unlike the fantasy of witnessing our own funeral (84). These utopian dreams, so often responsible for outbursts of murder and violence, are the focus of Zizek's chapter on anger. It will be argued that spiritual, poetic verses on faith are responsible in developing the Fantasy that has resulted in so many nationalistic ethnic cleansing mobilizations that have occurred over the last century.
A common trend in all of Zizek's work is the critique of the so-called 'Post Ideological Era' we live in. This chapter follows suit. Zizek examines the ethnic cleansing and death squads of Bosnia and Rwanda, with close attention to Doctor Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb politician accused of war crimes committed against Bosnian Muslims. He was discovered, in hiding, under the alias Dragan Dabic, a spiritual healer writing articles for Zdrav Zivot (Healthy Life) magazine. Zizek argues that Dabic was not a "fiction constructed to obfuscate Karadzic's true identity," but rather "the ideological key to the 'real' war criminal Karadzic" (95). That is, Dr. Dabic's spiritual work, which was publishable and geared toward distinguishing the fine line between meditation and quietude, as accepted right into New Age Spiritual circles, was indeed the key to Karadzic's crimes against humanity. The foundational argument here is that poets, as inspired by faith and religion, lay the groundwork for moral impunity and nationalistic mobilization.
This is a difficult argument to swallow, but let's follow it through. Zizek, alongside Plato's repudiation of poets, argues that poets ultimately made the ethnic cleansing possible in places like Bosnia and Rwanda. According to Zizek, this Bosnian poem fits nicely alongside the ('spiritual') Chinese proverbs hand-selected by Dr. Dabic:
Convert to my new faith crowd
I offer you what no one has had before
I offer you inclemency and wine
The one who won't have bread will be fed by the light of my sun
People nothing is forbidden in my faith
There is loving and drinking
And looking at the Sun for as long as you want
And this godhead forbids you nothing
Oh obey my call brethren people crowd
The key to understanding how this spiritually inspired poem is responsible for today's 'postmodern nationalism' that fueled the fires for ethnic cleansing rituals, is its suspension of moral prohibitions: "People nothing is forbidden in my faith." Similar calls making the seemingly unethical ethical can be found in the Bible: "Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man's enemies will be the members of his household. He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me. He who has found his life will lose it, and he who has lost his life for Me sake will find it." (Matthew 10:34-9). (Also, see Luke 12:49-53 and Luke 14:26 and Thomas 16, which is, of course, non-canonical.)
Considering the poetic culture of Bosnia preceding ethnic cleansing, and the way Karadzic so gracefully self-identified with Dr. Dabic, we see the role of religion in justifying violence today. But we need to see it within a larger context: we live in a supposedly 'post-ideological era', and that means that we are no longer governed by a Big Other. This has played out as a call to enjoy life and fulfill ourselves, and makes no room for great public causes and mobilizations. Having no sides and no Big Other causes, all people are self-identified as 'moral' and "it is difficult for the majority of humans to overcome their revulsion at torturing and killing other human beings." Consider the tolerant nature US citizens have had toward the treatment of un-convicted criminals being tortured and help without trial in Guantanamo Bay. Even Barak Obama has been able to get away with keeping them there. And Zizek continues, "Since the majority are spontaneously 'moral' in this way, a larger, 'sacred' Cause is needed, which will make individual concerns about killing seem trivial" (97). The spiritual poetry of Bosnians and Rwandans preceding the killings, with calls to suspend moral prohibitions, inspiring the writings of Dr. Dabic following his war crimes, provides the Big Other - the mobilization, the abundantly present Ideology, the cause, the impetus, and the faith. Religion has made localized movements possible what would be impossible for those perceiving themselves as living in a 'post-ideological era'. For people with such perceptions, the mobilization is less visible and far more ubiquitous, realizing itself in a faith toward Capitalism. Its 'ethnic cleansing' does not involve death squads, and involves, for instance, courtroom battles between hegemonic corporations and exploited indigenous populations such as is the case between Chevron and the indigenous tribes of the Ecuadorian rainforest.
But back on point, with reference to localized explosions of anger and violence, Zizek concludes: "Religious ideologists usually claim that, whether true or not, religion can make otherwise bad people to do good things; from recent experience, we should rather stick to Steve Weinberg's claim that while without religion good people would do good things and bad people bad things, only religion can make good people do bad things" (97).
Part of Zizek's project is furthering a critique on Capitalism. He notes, when we stop anchoring ourselves to an impossible gaze, and rather to an embodied, contextual gaze, we are brought once again into the historical process and we become responsible agents for the way things are. For Zizek, this kind of understanding entails Marxism.
Zizek quickly points out that Marxism, against the fantasies of, say, the National Geographic 'story', does not see history as a linear, centered narrative. We do not all have our place, and the tragedy in Bosnia and Rwanda did not have to happen. History follows, rather, Stephen Jay Gould's mantra on biology: "Wind back the film of life and play it again. The history of evolution will be totally different." Marxism is always haunted by what could have been, and rests its hope in the fact that the reality we live today is not the result of historical necessity, but rather our ancestors (and our) failure to seize the moment and act (87). Zizek puts his Marxism thus: "first, that all history is a history of the present; second, that our understanding of actual history always implies a (hidden or not) reference to alternate history - what 'really happened' is perceived against the background of what might have happened, and this alternative possibility is offered as the path we should follow today" (88).
Unable to mobilize, concerned with enjoyment and fulfillment, our generation needs to take seriously this Marxist understanding of history. Our lame reactions to Bosnia and Rwanda present us with an alternative possibility, which should guide our actions today. First, we must recognize that we do not live in a post-ideological era. We are no less ideological than violent religious cults. We must constantly survey our self-understanding in the world and reflect on our ethical foundations. Only through such self-criticism can we hope that appropriate mobilizations will be possible. Only then can we seize the path that, given our history of the present, we should indeed take hold of.
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Fight Clubbing at Goose Lake
Reading Palahniuk to the sound of rushing water and the view of a massive lake saddled within Washington's southern border, I can't help but wonder what life would amount to without the scars I've acquired. My most devastating injury was my one and only broken bone - a shattered jaw that landed me in an emergency surgery, two root canals, four teeth lost, two pulled by the doctor, two spread out over the hospital floor I fell on, a jaw wired, and sharp metal braces stabbing my cold sores for two and a half years. Oh, and I almost forgot the two implants - a surgical procedure embedding metal sockets in my jaw that fake teeth would later screw into. The injury was the result of a stupid insecurity - if I'd just laid down when I felt the nausea approaching, I'd still have my same old crooked mouth. But I didn't, and along with scars on my hands acquired from brutal rowing practice, knees that increasingly remind me of the countless miles I've spent thrashing down mountains or the marathon I ran without training, or the lines coming out of my eyes resulting from entirely too much sun and not enough cream, I've come to see my imperfections as signs of living. And I hope to be a bungled mess when I'm old.
Palahniuk's Fight Club is about resisting mediocrity or the status quo. It's about getting bloodied, losing your job, blowing up your Ikea furniture, and setting fire to your Tommy shirts. It's about reaching enlightenment at the moment of hitting bottom. Didn't we all write this book when we were younger? At one time, I only owned what I could fit in my Nissan 200sx. And right now, under Mt. Adams, I have a car, a tent, some food, and a dog. I've been on quite a few trips now where I needed nothing more than what I carried on my back. I didn't listen to the radio, I didn't know what was happening in the world, I wasn't concerned with global warming. My concerns did not move beyond the mountains ahead, the rivers to my side, and the clouds immediately overhead. There's some mysterious truth in that kind of living, just as there's truth in Palahniuk's hero as he takes a beating in a basement, lit by just one lamp.
But now I own a table, and it's not light, and I'm strangely proud of it even though I didn't make it, and I have matching chairs, and I plan on wrapping it with blankets when I move to another apartment, and when we arrive at that apartment, I will inspect it for scratches. Am I Palahniuk's main character, pre Tyler Durden? Am I becoming him? Have I always been him? Why is my backpacking gear so nice and expensive?
Is Fight Club just for young people? Do you outgrow it? Is it too extreme? Similarly, as a professor once said to me, is Nietzsche a young man's philosopher? Is Zarathustra spouting eternal wisdom, or an age-specific kind of truth? I feel like I need regular reminders - from Fight Club: "Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you."
I think things change, obviously, when you start a family, when you start thinking collectively, with a partner, or when you have kids, or you plan to have kids. But while having kids may make a stable life with more possessions desirable, there's still the fact that these possessions don't mean a thing in the long run. If it means your kids will grow up with a stronger sense of home, and this better helps with their emotional and mental development, great. But there's still some kind of lie going on when it's thought to be a necessity. I walked alongside parents pushing a stroller on the Camino de Santiago. There was certainly some kind of emotional and mental development going on there. I think I will forever be torn between Tyler Durden and his protegee. I love my table, but I recognize it's ephemeral nature. I partake in a materialistic society. I don't blow it up. But I do understand it for what it is, and that seems an important part of the wisdom of Fight Club. I see the humor in it, I suppose.
There is one thing I will never relate to in Fight Club: the mean-spirited anarchy. I am far too passive and respectful of different people's unique situations to piss in anyone's soup, regardless of how bourgeoisie they are. This is true even if they piss in mine. My Fight Club is run by the Buddha.
Palahniuk's Fight Club is about resisting mediocrity or the status quo. It's about getting bloodied, losing your job, blowing up your Ikea furniture, and setting fire to your Tommy shirts. It's about reaching enlightenment at the moment of hitting bottom. Didn't we all write this book when we were younger? At one time, I only owned what I could fit in my Nissan 200sx. And right now, under Mt. Adams, I have a car, a tent, some food, and a dog. I've been on quite a few trips now where I needed nothing more than what I carried on my back. I didn't listen to the radio, I didn't know what was happening in the world, I wasn't concerned with global warming. My concerns did not move beyond the mountains ahead, the rivers to my side, and the clouds immediately overhead. There's some mysterious truth in that kind of living, just as there's truth in Palahniuk's hero as he takes a beating in a basement, lit by just one lamp.
But now I own a table, and it's not light, and I'm strangely proud of it even though I didn't make it, and I have matching chairs, and I plan on wrapping it with blankets when I move to another apartment, and when we arrive at that apartment, I will inspect it for scratches. Am I Palahniuk's main character, pre Tyler Durden? Am I becoming him? Have I always been him? Why is my backpacking gear so nice and expensive?
Is Fight Club just for young people? Do you outgrow it? Is it too extreme? Similarly, as a professor once said to me, is Nietzsche a young man's philosopher? Is Zarathustra spouting eternal wisdom, or an age-specific kind of truth? I feel like I need regular reminders - from Fight Club: "Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you."
I think things change, obviously, when you start a family, when you start thinking collectively, with a partner, or when you have kids, or you plan to have kids. But while having kids may make a stable life with more possessions desirable, there's still the fact that these possessions don't mean a thing in the long run. If it means your kids will grow up with a stronger sense of home, and this better helps with their emotional and mental development, great. But there's still some kind of lie going on when it's thought to be a necessity. I walked alongside parents pushing a stroller on the Camino de Santiago. There was certainly some kind of emotional and mental development going on there. I think I will forever be torn between Tyler Durden and his protegee. I love my table, but I recognize it's ephemeral nature. I partake in a materialistic society. I don't blow it up. But I do understand it for what it is, and that seems an important part of the wisdom of Fight Club. I see the humor in it, I suppose.
There is one thing I will never relate to in Fight Club: the mean-spirited anarchy. I am far too passive and respectful of different people's unique situations to piss in anyone's soup, regardless of how bourgeoisie they are. This is true even if they piss in mine. My Fight Club is run by the Buddha.
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Book Review: Slavoj Zizek - Living in the End Times, Denial (Part II)
For my review of Zizek's Introduction to the book, click here.
The first of the five stages of grief is denial, and that's where Zizek starts. He calls his first chapter: 'Denial: The Liberal Utopia' and he begins with a theme that appears throughout much of his work: a critique of the idea of a 'post-ideological era.' For more detail, you can read my introduction to Zizek, but, put simply, postmodern philosophers have argued that we have entered an era that is beyond the meta-narrative. A meta-narrative would be some story that guides our understanding of the world, like a religious story. The argument that we are beyond the meta-narrative states that we view such stories with a degree of cynicism. We take a little bit from this story and a little bit from that story and we create our own narrative, which we recognize as our own, and even that doesn't have real authority over our actions. We don't follow a blind faith toward it, and we creatively augment it to meet our needs. We don't, then, follow "the Other." For Zizek, there is a denial going on here, and while we may not follow "the Other," we most certainly do follow "the Big Other" - that more elusive other, which is global capitalism. Zizek has famously noted that liberals worry about the 'four riders of the apocalypse': the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances in the capitalist system itself, and rapidly growing social divisions and exclusions, and yet they'd sooner envision the apocalypse than an end to the Capitalist way of organizing society (x). The source of this sad reality is a denial.
Liberals and conservatives alike do not recognize their devotion to global capitalism as ideologically based. The 'Liberal Utopia' is the argument that movements toward multi-culturalism and human rights are beyond ideology. And Zizek starts with the French.
In 2010, the French drafted a law which bans the burqa and "imposes fines of up to 750 euros on anyone appearing in public 'with their face entirely masked'" (1). The law was predictably justified by all major French political parties in terms of post-ideological, universalist arguments protecting a woman's rights, "intended to protect the dignity and security of women" (1). Everything seems fine, until you dig deeper into the parliament's defense of the law. Zizek notes, "Problems, however, begin with Sarkozy's statement that veils are 'not welcome' because, in a secular country like France, they intimidate and alienate non-Muslims... one cannot but note how the allegedly universalist attack on the burqa on behalf of human rights and women's dignity ends up as a defense of the particular French way of life" (1). The law prevents Muslim women who would wear the burqa from entering public spaces, and nothing more. It does nothing to protect these women from being prevented by their families from leaving the home, and so it could actually take a big step back in terms of protecting women who wear the burqa.
Accounts from French women came out in defense of the law, saying that they are humiliated when they see a burqa in a public space. They feel excluded and rejected from society. So it becomes obvious - clouded in the jargon of women's rights and freedom of expression is an anxiety that comes with staring into the face of Otherness. Zizek writes, "From a Freudian perspective, the face is the ultimate mask that conceals the horror of the Neighbor-Thing: the face is what makes the Neighbor le semblable, a fellow-man with whom we can identify and empathize... This, then, is why the covered face causes such anxiety: because it confronts us directly with the abyss of the Other-Thing, with the Neighbor in its uncanny dimension" (2). The Neighbor looks directly at us through the slits in the burqa, but we can not return the gaze. We recognize the foundation for the law passed in France only when we recognize the role of ideology and all the influence it has in multi-cultural interactions.
Zizek, as a good Lacanian, is not arguing that we should rise out of our ideological notions, for its these notions that make up the symbolic ordering of our worlds. What we must be careful of, is utopian dreaming that forgets the role of ideology in our interactions. One liberal utopian dream that greatly undermines the political struggles of the dispossessed is that all forms of racism are the result of intolerance. Zizek asks, "Why are so many problems today perceived as problems of intolerance, rather than as problems of inequality, exploitation, or injustice?" This mis-categorization results in inertia because real root problems that can be addressed and fought are reduced to the impenetrable abyss of psychological states. It also takes the liberal into a self-denying space where he is protected from being implicated in the racism because he is self-identified as 'tolerant.' It does this by forgetting the background noise in favor of what's immediately present. Ideology, Zizek tells us, is "precisely such a reduction to the simplified 'essence' that conveniently forgets the 'background noise' which provides the density of its actual meaning. Such an erasure of the 'background noise ' is the very core of utopian dreaming" (5-6). It's through the facade of ideology that we effectively deny our role in the depredations suffered by the poor and the crises that loom before us on the other side of global capitalism.
An obvious American example is the increasingly politically acceptable racist policies cornering illegal immigrants in places like Arizona and Alabama. At the heart of laws requiring Hispanic people to carry documentation wherever they go and discouraging undocumented kids from attending schools is a similar anxiety that drives the French to outlaw the burqa. The undocumented worker represents, in Zizek's words, "an excessive excremental zero-value element" of global capitalism - the Neighbor, displaced from their home by economic forces, "while formally a part of the system, (having) no proper place within it" (23). Illegal immigrants are a group serving as the most generous and successful relief effort in the world, funneling millions of dollars year after year to the poor people residing in their place of origin. They are a hardworking people struggling to keep themselves and their loved ones alive. Anxious to stand face-to-face with this Neighbor, we direct our efforts at reforming the law to 'managing' these people. Forgotten all along are the route causes of this Neighbor's desperate attempt to find work. We forget this 'background noise', which wholeheartedly implicates every person in the country who does things like eating fruits and vegetables, spending time in constructed buildings, and partaking in imported goods from Mexico. We forget this 'background noise' and dream about 'controlling the problem' through a change in the law. This is part of the grand orchestra. The law will never address root causes: it works only to control that inequality, exploitation, and injustice that our political structure has made possible. If we move beyond accusations of racism and intolerance, we discover at the heart of it all a class struggle: an American people trying to put on a bus and export the shame of their imperialistic economic policies in Latin America. We are talking about an American people who are uneasy with the gaze of the exploited, displaced worker. This is at the root of campaigns to solidify English as the only acceptable language in the US and the calls to build a giant wall between the US and Mexico. With the help of ideology, we can justify oppressive policies and forget all about the struggle for survival endured by the illegal immigrant.
In upcoming articles, I will continue talking about Zizek's work.
The first of the five stages of grief is denial, and that's where Zizek starts. He calls his first chapter: 'Denial: The Liberal Utopia' and he begins with a theme that appears throughout much of his work: a critique of the idea of a 'post-ideological era.' For more detail, you can read my introduction to Zizek, but, put simply, postmodern philosophers have argued that we have entered an era that is beyond the meta-narrative. A meta-narrative would be some story that guides our understanding of the world, like a religious story. The argument that we are beyond the meta-narrative states that we view such stories with a degree of cynicism. We take a little bit from this story and a little bit from that story and we create our own narrative, which we recognize as our own, and even that doesn't have real authority over our actions. We don't follow a blind faith toward it, and we creatively augment it to meet our needs. We don't, then, follow "the Other." For Zizek, there is a denial going on here, and while we may not follow "the Other," we most certainly do follow "the Big Other" - that more elusive other, which is global capitalism. Zizek has famously noted that liberals worry about the 'four riders of the apocalypse': the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances in the capitalist system itself, and rapidly growing social divisions and exclusions, and yet they'd sooner envision the apocalypse than an end to the Capitalist way of organizing society (x). The source of this sad reality is a denial.
Liberals and conservatives alike do not recognize their devotion to global capitalism as ideologically based. The 'Liberal Utopia' is the argument that movements toward multi-culturalism and human rights are beyond ideology. And Zizek starts with the French.
In 2010, the French drafted a law which bans the burqa and "imposes fines of up to 750 euros on anyone appearing in public 'with their face entirely masked'" (1). The law was predictably justified by all major French political parties in terms of post-ideological, universalist arguments protecting a woman's rights, "intended to protect the dignity and security of women" (1). Everything seems fine, until you dig deeper into the parliament's defense of the law. Zizek notes, "Problems, however, begin with Sarkozy's statement that veils are 'not welcome' because, in a secular country like France, they intimidate and alienate non-Muslims... one cannot but note how the allegedly universalist attack on the burqa on behalf of human rights and women's dignity ends up as a defense of the particular French way of life" (1). The law prevents Muslim women who would wear the burqa from entering public spaces, and nothing more. It does nothing to protect these women from being prevented by their families from leaving the home, and so it could actually take a big step back in terms of protecting women who wear the burqa.
Accounts from French women came out in defense of the law, saying that they are humiliated when they see a burqa in a public space. They feel excluded and rejected from society. So it becomes obvious - clouded in the jargon of women's rights and freedom of expression is an anxiety that comes with staring into the face of Otherness. Zizek writes, "From a Freudian perspective, the face is the ultimate mask that conceals the horror of the Neighbor-Thing: the face is what makes the Neighbor le semblable, a fellow-man with whom we can identify and empathize... This, then, is why the covered face causes such anxiety: because it confronts us directly with the abyss of the Other-Thing, with the Neighbor in its uncanny dimension" (2). The Neighbor looks directly at us through the slits in the burqa, but we can not return the gaze. We recognize the foundation for the law passed in France only when we recognize the role of ideology and all the influence it has in multi-cultural interactions.
Zizek, as a good Lacanian, is not arguing that we should rise out of our ideological notions, for its these notions that make up the symbolic ordering of our worlds. What we must be careful of, is utopian dreaming that forgets the role of ideology in our interactions. One liberal utopian dream that greatly undermines the political struggles of the dispossessed is that all forms of racism are the result of intolerance. Zizek asks, "Why are so many problems today perceived as problems of intolerance, rather than as problems of inequality, exploitation, or injustice?" This mis-categorization results in inertia because real root problems that can be addressed and fought are reduced to the impenetrable abyss of psychological states. It also takes the liberal into a self-denying space where he is protected from being implicated in the racism because he is self-identified as 'tolerant.' It does this by forgetting the background noise in favor of what's immediately present. Ideology, Zizek tells us, is "precisely such a reduction to the simplified 'essence' that conveniently forgets the 'background noise' which provides the density of its actual meaning. Such an erasure of the 'background noise ' is the very core of utopian dreaming" (5-6). It's through the facade of ideology that we effectively deny our role in the depredations suffered by the poor and the crises that loom before us on the other side of global capitalism.
An obvious American example is the increasingly politically acceptable racist policies cornering illegal immigrants in places like Arizona and Alabama. At the heart of laws requiring Hispanic people to carry documentation wherever they go and discouraging undocumented kids from attending schools is a similar anxiety that drives the French to outlaw the burqa. The undocumented worker represents, in Zizek's words, "an excessive excremental zero-value element" of global capitalism - the Neighbor, displaced from their home by economic forces, "while formally a part of the system, (having) no proper place within it" (23). Illegal immigrants are a group serving as the most generous and successful relief effort in the world, funneling millions of dollars year after year to the poor people residing in their place of origin. They are a hardworking people struggling to keep themselves and their loved ones alive. Anxious to stand face-to-face with this Neighbor, we direct our efforts at reforming the law to 'managing' these people. Forgotten all along are the route causes of this Neighbor's desperate attempt to find work. We forget this 'background noise', which wholeheartedly implicates every person in the country who does things like eating fruits and vegetables, spending time in constructed buildings, and partaking in imported goods from Mexico. We forget this 'background noise' and dream about 'controlling the problem' through a change in the law. This is part of the grand orchestra. The law will never address root causes: it works only to control that inequality, exploitation, and injustice that our political structure has made possible. If we move beyond accusations of racism and intolerance, we discover at the heart of it all a class struggle: an American people trying to put on a bus and export the shame of their imperialistic economic policies in Latin America. We are talking about an American people who are uneasy with the gaze of the exploited, displaced worker. This is at the root of campaigns to solidify English as the only acceptable language in the US and the calls to build a giant wall between the US and Mexico. With the help of ideology, we can justify oppressive policies and forget all about the struggle for survival endured by the illegal immigrant.
In upcoming articles, I will continue talking about Zizek's work.
Monday, June 13, 2011
Book Review: Zizek- Living In The End Times, Part I (Introduction)
Since I wrote my first article about Zizek back in March, I've been hovered over his most recent work, Living in the End Times, trying to understand it. Here's what I've come up with, and I'm sure it's tattered with misunderstandings, but it's (I think) an interesting read, nonetheless.
What inspires Zizek's work is laid out in the introduction: "The underlying premise of the present book is a simple one: the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point. Its 'four riders of the apocalypse' are comprised by the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself (problems with intellectual property: forthcoming struggles over raw materials, food and water), and the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions" (x). Throughout the book, Zizek provides many examples of the 'four riders of the apocalypse', but his main objective is to understand human responses to such dire horizons. He notes, "Should this situation persist, can we even imagine the change in the Western 'collective psyche' when (not if, but precisely when) some 'rogue nation' or group obtains a nuclear device, or powerful biological or chemical weapon, and declares its 'irrational' readiness to risk all in using it? The most basic coordinates of our awareness will have to change, insofar as, today, we live in a state of collective fetishistic disavowal: we know very well that this will happen at some point, but nevertheless cannot bring ourselves to really believe it will" (x-xi). So the apocalypse will not be 2012 reigning down on us with hurricanes and tidal waves. It will be the logical completion of late capitalism.
To understand this, it's helpful think about the French philosopher Alain Badiou and his research in the classic text, Being and Event. In here, Badiou uses Cantorian set theory to ground his theory of Being and Events. Being refers to the field of ontology, which is what describes whatever can truly be said about the existence of entities, even as it possibly transcends empirical verification or formal proof, while nonetheless possessing an objective truth-value. For Badiou, mathematics is the ultimate example of Being: "(M)athematics, throughout the entirety of its historical becoming, pronounces what is expressible of being qua being" and "Mathematics is rather the sole discourse which 'knows' absolutely what it is talking about: being, as such, despite the fact that there is no need for this knowledge to be reflected in an intra-mathematical sense, because being is not an object and nor does it generate objects" (Badiou 8). This is to say that, mathematical entities, like the number two, cannot be empirically verifies as they don't exist in the physical universe, and yet they carry within them all the weight of being, and they can only be understood in terms of being. Mathematical entities assume an existence that can't be explained away by logical positivists or social constructivists. Indeed, the work of Godel helped verify Badiou's point about the Being of mathematical entities. Events, on the other hand, are "just those strictly unforeseeable and - as they appear at the time in question - wholly contingent irruptions of the new that may turn out to exert a uniquely powerful and lasting effect but which elude ontological specification precisely insofar as they belong to no existing (i.e. up-to-now thinkable) order of things" (Norris 9). An example that Badiou himself uses, that many of us can relate to, is the event of love. When someone falls in love, that unforeseeable experience will radically alter the previous order of things for the lover. One remains militantly dedicated to projects and priorities previously unthinkable within the confines of the paradigm previously guiding the lover. Badiou, in his work, uses Cantor's discovery of set theory as the penultimate example of an event. Set theory was discovered when mathematical theory had reached a zero point - a point of logical impasse that needed to be leaped over. It provided us with a discovery that couldn't exist within the previously existing order of things, but required a leap. For Badiou, we can trace the development of truth in those formal discoveries by militantly dedicated individuals that take us beyond formerly defined constructs and into new realms of understanding (which involves ontology, of course).
Zizek, like Badiou, sees all concepts, like Capitalism, as having within them a zero point, or a logical boundary from which one cannot pass, and from which pressure is continually exerted. For Capitalism, that boundary includes the 'four riders of the apocalypse'. Just as mathematics reached a logical impasse that Cantor leaped over, allowing it to evolve, Late-Capitalism contains a logical impasse that dedicated and creative individuals will one day leap over. His book does not speculate as to what that leap will be, although, for Zizek, it seems to involve some new model of communism. His book is really a Lacanian psychological analysis of the proponents of Late-Capitalism - the masses that "know very well that (the apocalypse) will happen at some point, but nevertheless cannot bring ourselves to really believe that it will." Or, the masses that provide corrupt leaders with the right to torture prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, who pay the taxes that support the Iraq occupation, who ignore the faceless foreigners who live in abject poverty even as we stress about our iPods breaking down, who tolerate slums both locally and abroad, and who remain silent as the gap between the rich and poor widens at an alarming rate. Zizek reminds us, "power (the subordination of many to one) is not an objective state of things which persists even if we ignore it, it is something that persists only with the participation of its subjects, only if it is actively assisted by them" (399).
Living in the End Times analyzes this 'collective fetishistic disavowal' in terms of the 5 stages of grief popularized by psychologist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance.
In upcoming articles, I will clumsily provide Zizek's analysis of each stage.
Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Trans. Oliver Feltham. New York: Continuum, 2005.
Norris, Christopher. Badiou's Being and Event. New York: Continuum, 2009.
Zizek, Slavoj. Living in the End Times. New York: Verso, 2010.
What inspires Zizek's work is laid out in the introduction: "The underlying premise of the present book is a simple one: the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point. Its 'four riders of the apocalypse' are comprised by the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself (problems with intellectual property: forthcoming struggles over raw materials, food and water), and the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions" (x). Throughout the book, Zizek provides many examples of the 'four riders of the apocalypse', but his main objective is to understand human responses to such dire horizons. He notes, "Should this situation persist, can we even imagine the change in the Western 'collective psyche' when (not if, but precisely when) some 'rogue nation' or group obtains a nuclear device, or powerful biological or chemical weapon, and declares its 'irrational' readiness to risk all in using it? The most basic coordinates of our awareness will have to change, insofar as, today, we live in a state of collective fetishistic disavowal: we know very well that this will happen at some point, but nevertheless cannot bring ourselves to really believe it will" (x-xi). So the apocalypse will not be 2012 reigning down on us with hurricanes and tidal waves. It will be the logical completion of late capitalism.
To understand this, it's helpful think about the French philosopher Alain Badiou and his research in the classic text, Being and Event. In here, Badiou uses Cantorian set theory to ground his theory of Being and Events. Being refers to the field of ontology, which is what describes whatever can truly be said about the existence of entities, even as it possibly transcends empirical verification or formal proof, while nonetheless possessing an objective truth-value. For Badiou, mathematics is the ultimate example of Being: "(M)athematics, throughout the entirety of its historical becoming, pronounces what is expressible of being qua being" and "Mathematics is rather the sole discourse which 'knows' absolutely what it is talking about: being, as such, despite the fact that there is no need for this knowledge to be reflected in an intra-mathematical sense, because being is not an object and nor does it generate objects" (Badiou 8). This is to say that, mathematical entities, like the number two, cannot be empirically verifies as they don't exist in the physical universe, and yet they carry within them all the weight of being, and they can only be understood in terms of being. Mathematical entities assume an existence that can't be explained away by logical positivists or social constructivists. Indeed, the work of Godel helped verify Badiou's point about the Being of mathematical entities. Events, on the other hand, are "just those strictly unforeseeable and - as they appear at the time in question - wholly contingent irruptions of the new that may turn out to exert a uniquely powerful and lasting effect but which elude ontological specification precisely insofar as they belong to no existing (i.e. up-to-now thinkable) order of things" (Norris 9). An example that Badiou himself uses, that many of us can relate to, is the event of love. When someone falls in love, that unforeseeable experience will radically alter the previous order of things for the lover. One remains militantly dedicated to projects and priorities previously unthinkable within the confines of the paradigm previously guiding the lover. Badiou, in his work, uses Cantor's discovery of set theory as the penultimate example of an event. Set theory was discovered when mathematical theory had reached a zero point - a point of logical impasse that needed to be leaped over. It provided us with a discovery that couldn't exist within the previously existing order of things, but required a leap. For Badiou, we can trace the development of truth in those formal discoveries by militantly dedicated individuals that take us beyond formerly defined constructs and into new realms of understanding (which involves ontology, of course).
Zizek, like Badiou, sees all concepts, like Capitalism, as having within them a zero point, or a logical boundary from which one cannot pass, and from which pressure is continually exerted. For Capitalism, that boundary includes the 'four riders of the apocalypse'. Just as mathematics reached a logical impasse that Cantor leaped over, allowing it to evolve, Late-Capitalism contains a logical impasse that dedicated and creative individuals will one day leap over. His book does not speculate as to what that leap will be, although, for Zizek, it seems to involve some new model of communism. His book is really a Lacanian psychological analysis of the proponents of Late-Capitalism - the masses that "know very well that (the apocalypse) will happen at some point, but nevertheless cannot bring ourselves to really believe that it will." Or, the masses that provide corrupt leaders with the right to torture prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, who pay the taxes that support the Iraq occupation, who ignore the faceless foreigners who live in abject poverty even as we stress about our iPods breaking down, who tolerate slums both locally and abroad, and who remain silent as the gap between the rich and poor widens at an alarming rate. Zizek reminds us, "power (the subordination of many to one) is not an objective state of things which persists even if we ignore it, it is something that persists only with the participation of its subjects, only if it is actively assisted by them" (399).
Living in the End Times analyzes this 'collective fetishistic disavowal' in terms of the 5 stages of grief popularized by psychologist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance.
In upcoming articles, I will clumsily provide Zizek's analysis of each stage.
Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Trans. Oliver Feltham. New York: Continuum, 2005.
Norris, Christopher. Badiou's Being and Event. New York: Continuum, 2009.
Zizek, Slavoj. Living in the End Times. New York: Verso, 2010.
Saturday, June 4, 2011
An Investigation: Israel
I clearly remember, one year ago, being glued to NPR's coverage of the Gaza Flotilla Raid. A flotilla of six ships, organized by Free Gaza Movement and Turkish Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief, tried to break the blockade Israel established in the Gaza strip to deliver humanitarian aid and construction materials to the Palestinian refugees living there. Stopped by Israeli military, inspections turned violent and nine passengers wound up dead. Predictably, controversy abounded. Israel accused the activists of attacking the officers with metal rods, and the activists accused the officers of sparking the violence. I didn't know what to believe.
Regarding the Israeli spokespeople, it seemed reasonable that they would have to inspect any equipment being delivered to the refugees as Hamas, the political entity governing the Gaza Strip, has been known for inspiring acts of terror against civilians in Israel.
Yet, a study coming out of the University of Glasgow in 2007, stated that "Half of the households surveyed had only one room; 44% had three or more people per room; 11% had no external ventilation; 49% had no heating; 54% had mould and dampness. The use of wood or charcoal for heating was associated with an increase in mould and dampness (p = 0.015). 135 Members of the population (31%) were aged under 15 years; 130 (30%) had a chronic condition. Logistic regression results showed that overcrowding (odds ratio (OR) 3.26) and a member of the household living in Gaza buildings for more than 15 years (OR 0.48) were significantly associated with children under 15 years. Age over 45 years (OR 5.32), a member of the household in full-time employment (OR 0.58) and a member of the household living in Gaza buildings for more than 15 years (OR 1.71) were significantly associated with chronic disease." There is a a crisis going on in this Israeli-controlled territory, and one must ask the question: why? At the time of the Flotilla Raid, I was also shocked and weary to hear that Israel refused an independent investigation of the raid, in favor of an Israeli-backed investigation.
As I struggled to understand how the Flotilla Raid Tragedy could occur, I realized that I didn't really understand what Israel was. I didn't know how it came to be a Nation-State, who the Palestinians are, or why a two-state solution that seems so reasonable is so difficult to attain. I've since studied the making of modern Israel, and I wanted to provide my understanding of how the state of Israel came to be because I think it helped me understand the context from which the Flotilla Raid evolved.
How did Israel come to be a nation?
There are a lot of naive assertions being spouted with regard to Israel. One of the most absurd I've heard is that it was a United States experiment. Nothing could be further from the truth. The United States was often unsupportive in the development of the nation of Israel, in large part because, during the Cold War, the US wanted to foster good relations with the oil-rich Arab nations who vehemently hated Israel.
Israel was created, I would contend, by a disgustingly anti-semitic Europe/Africa/Middle East which left thousand of people with little choice but to leave their homelands in search of an autonomous, self-governing, and militarily defended state.
The immigration of Jews into Turkish-controlled Palestine began with aspiring lower-middle class farmers escaping Russia as pre-planned and government inspired anti-Jewish riots emerged throughout the late 1800s. It became a political movement as the nineteenth-century was coming to a close and Theodor Herzl started the modern Zionist movement, a result of what he termed the "Jewish problem", the conclusion that the Jew's historical tribulation is the result of their statelessness. Migration to Israel became all the sweeter to Jews in Europe as anti-Jewish raids heightened in Russia during their revolution and 876 Jews were slaughtered in the Ukraine in October 1905 alone. Jewish housing associations started springing up in Israel and, predictably, an Arab nationalism started to emerge in response to so many foreigners moving in and settling land.
In September 1918, at the end of the first World War, Britain captured Jerusalem and brought Turkish rule in the area to an end. More Jewish migration ensued as, between 1915 and 1921 up to a quarter of a million Jews were slain or allowed to starve to death in the Ukraine and Russia. Additionally, Jews fled Poland as they passed legislation undermining Jewish economic life. Massive migration occurred throughout the 1930s as Central and Eastern Europe became overtly anti-semitic, and a large proportion of the immigrants came from Nazi Germany and Austria. In Palestine, the Arabs were quickly becoming outnumbered, violence erupted, and campaigns to cap the number of immigrants were sought after and awarded by the British. During World War II, Jews settled in Palestine fought alongside the British, while the majority of Arabs found themselves siding with the Axis Powers. In Iraq, for instance, the British had to unseat Rashid Ali al Gailani, who tried to place the Mosul oil fields at Hitler's disposal.
After the war, Britain held a largely anti-Zionist policy for fear of jeopardizing its valuable oil imports in the region, but their time controlling the area was coming to a close. They deferred all matters relating to Palestine to the United Nations. They debated what to do with Palestine. As Arab anti-semitism abounded, a high-ranking Syrian official at the time admitted, quite frankly, that if Palestine became an Arab-Palestinian regime, all Jews would be expelled. This led the UN to develop a two-state solution, where both a Jewish state and a Palestinian state would exist. This idea was uniformly rejected throughout the Arab world, and so on May 14, 1948, when Britain relinquished control and the UN declared the State of Israel, the Arab armies of Syria, Iraq, Transjordan, and Egypt invaded the following day, thus provoking Israel's war of independence.
Israel's Struggle to Survive
Starting with the war of independence, Israel has been in a fight for its life. With the Holocaust fresh in the memory of so many Israeli immigrants, the fear of a second Holocaust was a terrifying possibility. Israel, in its first twenty years, was surrounded by openly anti-Israel nations. Leading up to the Six-Day War that ended with Israeli control of the Gaza strip, Egypt, with the support of Russia, amassed tanks, planes, and arms, while it led Israeli-neighboring countries like Syria and Jordan in calls to destroy Israel outright. Here's an idea of what surrounded Israel, and still does to this day (on every extremist Muslim agenda is the destruction of Israel): "Lebanon, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Sudan, and Kuwait all announced that they were on a war footing, with some of them being in the process of sending token contingents to Cairo. In Gaza, hordes of armed Palestinians were filmed brandishing rifles and baying for Jewish blood. Cartoons appearing in the Arab press were intimidating. One from the Syrian paper al-Jundi al-Arabia depicted a heap of skulls, each marked with the Star of David, lying within the smoking ruins of Tel Aviv. The Arabs were certainly not coy in declaring that the demise of the Jewish state was avidly being sought. The Cairo-based radio station Voice of the Arabs made it clear that a total war would be waged against Israel 'which will result in the final extermination of Zionist existence.' Mullahs called for a jihad and one of Radio Cairo's hit songs exhorted the Arabs to smite, kill, burn, and destroy the Israelis. 'Itbah, itbah, itbah' (that is, 'massacre, massacre, massacre') ran its refrain. On June 2, General Murtagi, the commander of the Egyptian forces in Sinai, issued an Order of the Day that enjoined his troops to 'reconquer anew the robbed land of Palestine.' Just prior to the outbreak of the Six-Day War, on being asked in an interview on French television what plans he had for Jews born in Israel, Shukeiry, the head of the PLO, simply drew a finger across his throat. Elsewhere, in answer to the same question, Shukeiry responded 'those who survive will remain in Palestine, but I estimate that none of them will survive' (Leslie Stein - The Making of Modern Israel, 1948-1967, pp 284-285).
Such hatred and intolerance preceded each and every war Israel fought in its first years of existence. It's no wonder Israel has since presumably developed a nuclear warhead and reacts to antagonisms with strong military might. This might help explain its resistance to peace talks with Palestinian refugees and its resistance to a two-state solution. It must always be remembered that, from the beginning, Israel's existence was at stake, and this has modern cultural implications.
It should also be noted that the international community, in Israel's first twenty years, acted with indifference to Israel's challenges, and often with blatant opposition to her. Britain and France were responsible for denying Israel membership in the United Nations in 1948 and in its first 19 years, it only garnered UN support once, when Egypt denied Israel access to the Suez Canal. When Egypt didn't comply to the UN Security Council resolution to allow Israel access, in its seizure of the Israeli merchant ship Bat Galim, all the western powers showed indifference. Britain and the USA routinely condemned Israel throughout the 1950s as they sought to improve Arab-relations, fueled by the Cold War and antagonisms with Russia. The British officer Meinertzhagen said, "It is an odd fact that the Arabs can utter on platforms, in their Press and on the radio, the wildest, most savage threats of annihilating every Jew on the soil of what they continue to call Palestine; but if an Israeli says that his people intend to defend themselves, screams of shocked protest come from our Foreign Office and the world in general." Growing up with such international hostility, one can understand Israel's often critical stance toward international involvement in Israeli affairs, and this does perhaps provide context to their dismissal of an independent, international investigation of the Flotilla Raid.
The Challenges of a Two-State Solution
I don't want to sound like an Israeli apologist. I wholeheartedly believe in a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. Israel should award Palestinian refugees their independence and there shouldn't even exist the conditions to make things like the Flotilla Raid possible. Israelis need to heed the advice of their most historically important political leader, the first prime minister of Israel, Ben-Gurion. He said, "historically this country (Palestine) belongs to two races... a Jewish state must at all times maintain within her own borders an unassailable Jewish majority... the logic of all this is that to get peace, we must return in principle to the pre-1967 borders" (which do not include the Gaza strip). Unfortunately, while this is not acceptable to those Israelis in power, it's also not acceptable to those in power in Palestine. In keeping with historically intolerant Arab politics, Hamas does not accept the sovereignty of the state of Israel, and it supports terror and the dissolution of the Jewish state.
One must never forget the historically tenuous position of Israel when considering their foreign and domestic policies. A historically oppressed people, the Jews cling to the state of Israel with pride and self-determination. Surrounded by openly hostile nations and terrorist organizations, they needed to foster a culture of defense and, at times, as with the Six-Day War, preemptive strikes. The thought of a Flotilla smuggling in arms to Hamas could devastate yet more Jewish lives. On the other side, Palestinians are suffering a humanitarian crisis that needs to be addressed, and this legitimizes the Flotilla's effort and puts Israel under a skeptical microscope.
Work Cited:
Stein, Leslie. The Making of Modern Israel, 1948-1967. Cambridge: Polity, 2009.
Regarding the Israeli spokespeople, it seemed reasonable that they would have to inspect any equipment being delivered to the refugees as Hamas, the political entity governing the Gaza Strip, has been known for inspiring acts of terror against civilians in Israel.
Yet, a study coming out of the University of Glasgow in 2007, stated that "Half of the households surveyed had only one room; 44% had three or more people per room; 11% had no external ventilation; 49% had no heating; 54% had mould and dampness. The use of wood or charcoal for heating was associated with an increase in mould and dampness (p = 0.015). 135 Members of the population (31%) were aged under 15 years; 130 (30%) had a chronic condition. Logistic regression results showed that overcrowding (odds ratio (OR) 3.26) and a member of the household living in Gaza buildings for more than 15 years (OR 0.48) were significantly associated with children under 15 years. Age over 45 years (OR 5.32), a member of the household in full-time employment (OR 0.58) and a member of the household living in Gaza buildings for more than 15 years (OR 1.71) were significantly associated with chronic disease." There is a a crisis going on in this Israeli-controlled territory, and one must ask the question: why? At the time of the Flotilla Raid, I was also shocked and weary to hear that Israel refused an independent investigation of the raid, in favor of an Israeli-backed investigation.
As I struggled to understand how the Flotilla Raid Tragedy could occur, I realized that I didn't really understand what Israel was. I didn't know how it came to be a Nation-State, who the Palestinians are, or why a two-state solution that seems so reasonable is so difficult to attain. I've since studied the making of modern Israel, and I wanted to provide my understanding of how the state of Israel came to be because I think it helped me understand the context from which the Flotilla Raid evolved.
How did Israel come to be a nation?
There are a lot of naive assertions being spouted with regard to Israel. One of the most absurd I've heard is that it was a United States experiment. Nothing could be further from the truth. The United States was often unsupportive in the development of the nation of Israel, in large part because, during the Cold War, the US wanted to foster good relations with the oil-rich Arab nations who vehemently hated Israel.
Israel was created, I would contend, by a disgustingly anti-semitic Europe/Africa/Middle East which left thousand of people with little choice but to leave their homelands in search of an autonomous, self-governing, and militarily defended state.
The immigration of Jews into Turkish-controlled Palestine began with aspiring lower-middle class farmers escaping Russia as pre-planned and government inspired anti-Jewish riots emerged throughout the late 1800s. It became a political movement as the nineteenth-century was coming to a close and Theodor Herzl started the modern Zionist movement, a result of what he termed the "Jewish problem", the conclusion that the Jew's historical tribulation is the result of their statelessness. Migration to Israel became all the sweeter to Jews in Europe as anti-Jewish raids heightened in Russia during their revolution and 876 Jews were slaughtered in the Ukraine in October 1905 alone. Jewish housing associations started springing up in Israel and, predictably, an Arab nationalism started to emerge in response to so many foreigners moving in and settling land.
In September 1918, at the end of the first World War, Britain captured Jerusalem and brought Turkish rule in the area to an end. More Jewish migration ensued as, between 1915 and 1921 up to a quarter of a million Jews were slain or allowed to starve to death in the Ukraine and Russia. Additionally, Jews fled Poland as they passed legislation undermining Jewish economic life. Massive migration occurred throughout the 1930s as Central and Eastern Europe became overtly anti-semitic, and a large proportion of the immigrants came from Nazi Germany and Austria. In Palestine, the Arabs were quickly becoming outnumbered, violence erupted, and campaigns to cap the number of immigrants were sought after and awarded by the British. During World War II, Jews settled in Palestine fought alongside the British, while the majority of Arabs found themselves siding with the Axis Powers. In Iraq, for instance, the British had to unseat Rashid Ali al Gailani, who tried to place the Mosul oil fields at Hitler's disposal.
After the war, Britain held a largely anti-Zionist policy for fear of jeopardizing its valuable oil imports in the region, but their time controlling the area was coming to a close. They deferred all matters relating to Palestine to the United Nations. They debated what to do with Palestine. As Arab anti-semitism abounded, a high-ranking Syrian official at the time admitted, quite frankly, that if Palestine became an Arab-Palestinian regime, all Jews would be expelled. This led the UN to develop a two-state solution, where both a Jewish state and a Palestinian state would exist. This idea was uniformly rejected throughout the Arab world, and so on May 14, 1948, when Britain relinquished control and the UN declared the State of Israel, the Arab armies of Syria, Iraq, Transjordan, and Egypt invaded the following day, thus provoking Israel's war of independence.
Israel's Struggle to Survive
Starting with the war of independence, Israel has been in a fight for its life. With the Holocaust fresh in the memory of so many Israeli immigrants, the fear of a second Holocaust was a terrifying possibility. Israel, in its first twenty years, was surrounded by openly anti-Israel nations. Leading up to the Six-Day War that ended with Israeli control of the Gaza strip, Egypt, with the support of Russia, amassed tanks, planes, and arms, while it led Israeli-neighboring countries like Syria and Jordan in calls to destroy Israel outright. Here's an idea of what surrounded Israel, and still does to this day (on every extremist Muslim agenda is the destruction of Israel): "Lebanon, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Sudan, and Kuwait all announced that they were on a war footing, with some of them being in the process of sending token contingents to Cairo. In Gaza, hordes of armed Palestinians were filmed brandishing rifles and baying for Jewish blood. Cartoons appearing in the Arab press were intimidating. One from the Syrian paper al-Jundi al-Arabia depicted a heap of skulls, each marked with the Star of David, lying within the smoking ruins of Tel Aviv. The Arabs were certainly not coy in declaring that the demise of the Jewish state was avidly being sought. The Cairo-based radio station Voice of the Arabs made it clear that a total war would be waged against Israel 'which will result in the final extermination of Zionist existence.' Mullahs called for a jihad and one of Radio Cairo's hit songs exhorted the Arabs to smite, kill, burn, and destroy the Israelis. 'Itbah, itbah, itbah' (that is, 'massacre, massacre, massacre') ran its refrain. On June 2, General Murtagi, the commander of the Egyptian forces in Sinai, issued an Order of the Day that enjoined his troops to 'reconquer anew the robbed land of Palestine.' Just prior to the outbreak of the Six-Day War, on being asked in an interview on French television what plans he had for Jews born in Israel, Shukeiry, the head of the PLO, simply drew a finger across his throat. Elsewhere, in answer to the same question, Shukeiry responded 'those who survive will remain in Palestine, but I estimate that none of them will survive' (Leslie Stein - The Making of Modern Israel, 1948-1967, pp 284-285).
Such hatred and intolerance preceded each and every war Israel fought in its first years of existence. It's no wonder Israel has since presumably developed a nuclear warhead and reacts to antagonisms with strong military might. This might help explain its resistance to peace talks with Palestinian refugees and its resistance to a two-state solution. It must always be remembered that, from the beginning, Israel's existence was at stake, and this has modern cultural implications.
It should also be noted that the international community, in Israel's first twenty years, acted with indifference to Israel's challenges, and often with blatant opposition to her. Britain and France were responsible for denying Israel membership in the United Nations in 1948 and in its first 19 years, it only garnered UN support once, when Egypt denied Israel access to the Suez Canal. When Egypt didn't comply to the UN Security Council resolution to allow Israel access, in its seizure of the Israeli merchant ship Bat Galim, all the western powers showed indifference. Britain and the USA routinely condemned Israel throughout the 1950s as they sought to improve Arab-relations, fueled by the Cold War and antagonisms with Russia. The British officer Meinertzhagen said, "It is an odd fact that the Arabs can utter on platforms, in their Press and on the radio, the wildest, most savage threats of annihilating every Jew on the soil of what they continue to call Palestine; but if an Israeli says that his people intend to defend themselves, screams of shocked protest come from our Foreign Office and the world in general." Growing up with such international hostility, one can understand Israel's often critical stance toward international involvement in Israeli affairs, and this does perhaps provide context to their dismissal of an independent, international investigation of the Flotilla Raid.
The Challenges of a Two-State Solution
I don't want to sound like an Israeli apologist. I wholeheartedly believe in a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. Israel should award Palestinian refugees their independence and there shouldn't even exist the conditions to make things like the Flotilla Raid possible. Israelis need to heed the advice of their most historically important political leader, the first prime minister of Israel, Ben-Gurion. He said, "historically this country (Palestine) belongs to two races... a Jewish state must at all times maintain within her own borders an unassailable Jewish majority... the logic of all this is that to get peace, we must return in principle to the pre-1967 borders" (which do not include the Gaza strip). Unfortunately, while this is not acceptable to those Israelis in power, it's also not acceptable to those in power in Palestine. In keeping with historically intolerant Arab politics, Hamas does not accept the sovereignty of the state of Israel, and it supports terror and the dissolution of the Jewish state.
One must never forget the historically tenuous position of Israel when considering their foreign and domestic policies. A historically oppressed people, the Jews cling to the state of Israel with pride and self-determination. Surrounded by openly hostile nations and terrorist organizations, they needed to foster a culture of defense and, at times, as with the Six-Day War, preemptive strikes. The thought of a Flotilla smuggling in arms to Hamas could devastate yet more Jewish lives. On the other side, Palestinians are suffering a humanitarian crisis that needs to be addressed, and this legitimizes the Flotilla's effort and puts Israel under a skeptical microscope.
Work Cited:
Stein, Leslie. The Making of Modern Israel, 1948-1967. Cambridge: Polity, 2009.
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Poem: Am I Ever Outside Nature?
Am I Ever Outside Nature?
Am I ever outside nature?
People say so, but what do they mean?
With reference to the most wild places,
They stock their reasoning with unplanned landscape,
And in this sense, surely I am, predominately, out of nature
And, when understood this way, craving to return.
The wild and earnest, let’s say, has no gardner.
Too little does the industrial man peruse this haven.
But still it’s imprecise to conclude that our titan of industry is outside nature.
For he, despite his willing, is most certainly wild himself,
And a dangerous predator at that.
Provided he intuits mastery,
Provided he institutes slavery,
On land, in the sea, within the avery,
As such, he devours
And exerts his wild will.
But even his prey is wild, even if likewise surrounded by concrete.
You doubt? Observe him with a microscope.
Observe the jungle within.
Understood accordingly, I am never out of nature,
Whether predator or prey.
For nature, rather, is within me.
And as my stomach grumbles, I shall not forget this,
For it provides me perspective and valuable insight,
Even when the stars are concealed by city light.
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