and sorry for my bad english spoken but form of revolt Re: [spectre] Zizek, The Two Totalitarianisms

[Aliette Guibert]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Aliette Guibert" <guibertc at criticalsecret.com>
To: "Soenke Zehle" <soenke.zehle at web.de>; <spectre at mikrolisten.de>
Sent: Tuesday, March 15, 2005 12:15 AM
Subject: Re: [spectre] Zizek, The Two Totalitarianisms


> This debate between the European members of parliament is stupid. There is
> no bad or a check icon. There are iconoclastic signs and the others which
> are not. Nothing of that kind
> has credit note with the evil or the good but strictly with the faith at a
> special moment.
>
> There is no check or of bad totalitarianism. The totalitarianism it is the
> totalitarianism: it is always bad for the liberties, it is always
criminal -
> even totalitarianism of the good is criminal.
>
> As for the disappearence of the sickle and the hammer, as for the
> nazis'swastika (from India): nobody will remember more the state of mind
of
> societies, the injustice in
> front of the production of industrial time, the rationalist
> administration, which have preexisted. The swastika since the Nazis, if it
> was taken back by the neonazis, was so much used by the extreme
> left-wing Punks to appoint the manipulations and the abuses in the
> Press, the visionaries of our present years from the 70s, and it is not it
> which acted formerly, the icon unifier, but arms were stretched
> out in sign of submission.
>
> What is needed it is not the disappearance of the symbol but the education
> of the fact that they represented of concretely disastrous for the
> people - including the Nazi project which is itself a modern project
> that we deny or not. We'll do not settle the history short of negationism
> without expecting for the worst futures from it.
>
> The sickle and the hammer were symbols of the peoples revolted to the
> assault of the power before the power deceived it, etc. it was a
> progressive symbol even if Stalin connoted i later ; and if Hitler had not
> promoted
> the swastika, nobody would worry about it today.
>
> No totalitarianism is reduced to its iconography.
>
> No iconography can be reducible in the totalitarianism - it would be too
> easy for the offspring! The problem it is only the context and the
> environment of the iconographic quotation.
>
> If the totalitarianism is inflexible it is surely no the iconography
> which is the main vehicle but the structure, the administration, the
> rationalism objectives and objectal projects which were not questioned
after
> the
> liberation of 1945, it is an integral part of the modern society and
> matérialist postmodernism; the liberties being got rid of, the free
traffic
> of
> the disinformation can indeed come true.
>
> Today we are manipulated in all the loss of our liberties in all the loss
of
> our liberties in the name of the good. It is exactly this justification to
> the social subjection in Big
> Brother. Read again it; it is exactly the society which
> Bush is establishing for a long time in the United States, for example
> against the CAE and the others, every day a little more against every
> American citizen.
>
> Negationism does not open the critical cognitive doors. More we see
removing
> liberties more we get out the immunizing social defence connected to the
> informated societies. From a generation to the other one. Now we have to
> think of the transmission so that generation following ones can think of
the
> radical criticisms leading to the united change and to the tolerance of
the
> cultures.
>
> Without such projects this moral Europe makes me more and more fear. I am
> afraid that the worst - which for some of us is already there -
reproduces.
>
> I am against all the process of censorsshops -from the digital economy of
> the web to the icons of the totalitarism whatever they would be-. I am for
> the critical education to the autonomous consciousness.
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Soenke Zehle" <soenke.zehle at web.de>
> To: <spectre at mikrolisten.de>
> Sent: Sunday, March 13, 2005 1:40 PM
> Subject: [spectre] Zizek, The Two Totalitarianisms
>
>
> > LRB | Vol. 27 No. 6 dated 17 March 2005 | Slavoj Zizek
> > The Two Totalitarianisms
> > <http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n06/print/zize01_.html>
> > Slavoj Zizek
> >
> > A small note – not the stuff of headlines, obviously – appeared in the
> > newspapers on 3 February. In response to a call for the prohibition of
> > the public display of the swastika and other Nazi symbols, a group of
> > conservative members of the European Parliament, mostly from
> > ex-Communist countries, demanded that the same apply to Communist
> > symbols: not only the hammer and sickle, but even the red star. This
> > proposal should not be dismissed lightly: it suggests a deep change in
> > Europe’s ideological identity.
> >
> > Till now, to put it straightforwardly, Stalinism hasn’t been rejected in
> > the same way as Nazism. We are fully aware of its monstrous aspects, but
> > still find Ostalgie acceptable: you can make Goodbye Lenin!, but Goodbye
> > Hitler! is unthinkable. Why? To take another example: in Germany, many
> > CDs featuring old East German Revolutionary and Party songs, from
> > ‘Stalin, Freund, Genosse’ to ‘Die Partei hat immer Recht’, are easy to
> > find. You would have to look rather harder for a collection of Nazi
> > songs. Even at this anecdotal level, the difference between the Nazi and
> > Stalinist universes is clear, just as it is when we recall that in the
> > Stalinist show trials, the accused had publicly to confess his crimes
> > and give an account of how he came to commit them, whereas the Nazis
> > would never have required a Jew to confess that he was involved in a
> > Jewish plot against the German nation. The reason is clear. Stalinism
> > conceived itself as part of the Enlightenment tradition, according to
> > which, truth being accessible to any rational man, no matter how
> > depraved, everyone must be regarded as responsible for his crimes. But
> > for the Nazis the guilt of the Jews was a fact of their biological
> > constitution: there was no need to prove they were guilty, since they
> > were guilty by virtue of being Jews.
> >
> > In the Stalinist ideological imaginary, universal reason is objectivised
> > in the guise of the inexorable laws of historical progress, and we are
> > all its servants, the leader included. A Nazi leader, having delivered a
> > speech, stood and silently accepted the applause, but under Stalinism,
> > when the obligatory applause exploded at the end of the leader’s speech,
> > he stood up and joined in. In Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be,
> > Hitler responds to the Nazi salute by raising his hand and saying: ‘Heil
> > myself!’ This is pure humour because it could never have happened in
> > reality, while Stalin effectively did ‘hail himself’ when he joined
> > others in the applause. Consider the fact that, on Stalin’s birthday,
> > prisoners would send him congratulatory telegrams from the darkest
> > gulags: it isn’t possible to imagine a Jew in Auschwitz sending Hitler
> > such a telegram. It is a tasteless distinction, but it supports the
> > contention that under Stalin, the ruling ideology presupposed a space in
> > which the leader and his subjects could meet as servants of Historical
> > Reason. Under Stalin, all people were, theoretically, equal.
> >
> > We do not find in Nazism any equivalent to the dissident Communists who
> > risked their lives fighting what they perceived as the ‘bureaucratic
> > deformation’ of socialism in the USSR and its empire: there was no one
> > in Nazi Germany who advocated ‘Nazism with a human face’. Herein lies
> > the flaw (and the bias) of all attempts, such as that of the
> > conservative historian Ernst Nolte, to adopt a neutral position – i.e.
> > to ask why we don’t apply the same standards to the Communists as we
> > apply to the Nazis. If Heidegger cannot be pardoned for his flirtation
> > with Nazism, why can Lukács and Brecht and others be pardoned for their
> > much longer engagement with Stalinism? This position reduces Nazism to a
> > reaction to, and repetition of, practices already found in Bolshevism –
> > terror, concentration camps, the struggle to the death against political
> > enemies – so that the ‘original sin’ is that of Communism.
> >
> > In the late 1980s, Nolte was Habermas’s principal opponent in the
> > so-called Revisionismusstreit, arguing that Nazism should not be
> > regarded as the incomparable evil of the 20th century. Not only did
> > Nazism, reprehensible as it was, appear after Communism: it was an
> > excessive reaction to the Communist threat, and all its horrors were
> > merely copies of those already perpetrated under Soviet Communism.
> > Nolte’s idea is that Communism and Nazism share the same totalitarian
> > form, and the difference between them consists only in the difference
> > between the empirical agents which fill their respective structural
> > roles (‘Jews’ instead of ‘class enemy’). The usual liberal reaction to
> > Nolte is that he relativises Nazism, reducing it to a secondary echo of
> > the Communist evil. However, even if we leave aside the unhelpful
> > comparison between Communism – a thwarted attempt at liberation – and
> > the radical evil of Nazism, we should still concede Nolte’s central
> > point. Nazism was effectively a reaction to the Communist threat; it did
> > effectively replace class struggle with the struggle between Aryans and
> > Jews. What we are dealing with here is displacement in the Freudian
> > sense of the term (Verschiebung): Nazism displaces class struggle onto
> > racial struggle and in doing so obfuscates its true nature. What changes
> > in the passage from Communism to Nazism is a matter of form, and it is
> > in this that the Nazi ideological mystification resides: the political
> > struggle is naturalised as racial conflict, the class antagonism
> > inherent in the social structure reduced to the invasion of a foreign
> > (Jewish) body which disturbs the harmony of the Aryan community. It is
> > not, as Nolte claims, that there is in both cases the same formal
> > antagonistic structure, but that the place of the enemy is filled by a
> > different element (class, race). Class antagonism, unlike racial
> > difference and conflict, is absolutely inherent to and constitutive of
> > the social field; Fascism displaces this essential antagonism.
> >
> > It’s appropriate, then, to recognise the tragedy of the October
> > Revolution: both its unique emancipatory potential and the historical
> > necessity of its Stalinist outcome. We should have the honesty to
> > acknowledge that the Stalinist purges were in a way more ‘irrational’
> > than the Fascist violence: its excess is an unmistakable sign that, in
> > contrast to Fascism, Stalinism was a case of an authentic revolution
> > perverted. Under Fascism, even in Nazi Germany, it was possible to
> > survive, to maintain the appearance of a ‘normal’ everyday life, if one
> > did not involve oneself in any oppositional political activity (and, of
> > course, if one were not Jewish). Under Stalin in the late 1930s, on the
> > other hand, nobody was safe: anyone could be unexpectedly denounced,
> > arrested and shot as a traitor. The irrationality of Nazism was
> > ‘condensed’ in anti-semitism – in its belief in the Jewish plot – while
> > the irrationality of Stalinism pervaded the entire social body. For that
> > reason, Nazi police investigators looked for proofs and traces of active
> > opposition to the regime, whereas Stalin’s investigators were happy to
> > fabricate evidence, invent plots etc.
> >
> > We should also admit that we still lack a satisfactory theory of
> > Stalinism. It is, in this respect, a scandal that the Frankfurt School
> > failed to produce a systematic and thorough analysis of the phenomenon.
> > The exceptions are telling: Franz Neumann’s Behemoth (1942), which
> > suggested that the three great world-systems – New Deal capitalism,
> > Fascism and Stalinism – tended towards the same bureaucratic, globally
> > organised, ‘administered’ society; Herbert Marcuse’s Soviet Marxism
> > (1958), his least passionate book, a strangely neutral analysis of
> > Soviet ideology with no clear commitments; and, finally, in the 1980s,
> > the attempts by some Habermasians who, reflecting on the emerging
> > dissident phenomena, endeavoured to elaborate the notion of civil
> > society as a site of resistance to the Communist regime – interesting,
> > but not a global theory of the specificity of Stalinist totalitarianism.
> > How could a school of Marxist thought that claimed to focus on the
> > conditions of the failure of the emancipatory project abstain from
> > analysing the nightmare of ‘actually existing socialism’? And was its
> > focus on Fascism not a silent admission of the failure to confront the
> > real trauma?
> >
> > It is here that one has to make a choice. The ‘pure’ liberal attitude
> > towards Leftist and Rightist ‘totalitarianism’ – that they are both bad,
> > based on the intolerance of political and other differences, the
> > rejection of democratic and humanist values etc – is a priori false. It
> > is necessary to take sides and proclaim Fascism fundamentally ‘worse’
> > than Communism. The alternative, the notion that it is even possible to
> > compare rationally the two totalitarianisms, tends to produce the
> > conclusion – explicit or implicit – that Fascism was the lesser evil, an
> > understandable reaction to the Communist threat. When, in September
> > 2003, Silvio Berlusconi provoked a violent outcry with his observation
> > that Mussolini, unlike Hitler, Stalin or Saddam Hussein, never killed
> > anyone, the true scandal was that, far from being an expression of
> > Berlusconi’s idiosyncrasy, his statement was part of an ongoing project
> > to change the terms of a postwar European identity hitherto based on
> > anti-Fascist unity. That is the proper context in which to understand
> > the European conservatives’ call for the prohibition of Communist
symbols.
> >
> > Slavoj Zizek, a psychoanalyst and dialectical materialist philosopher,
> > is a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana and international
> > co-director of the Centre for Humanities at Birkbeck College in London.
> >
> > ______________________________________________
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