There is no doubt that Robert Fisk is the most knowledgeable, analytically astute and ideologically well-intentioned, as well as correct, of all the commentators on Middle East affairs.
And yet his latest comment in the London Independent concerning the military action just commenced in Libya does leave a few crucial questions begged. It is indeed helpful to underscore the duplicity, the hypocrisy and the naked militarism of past strategic interventions by the West in the Middle East that left the field strewn with countless innocent victims while at the same time empowering the very forces they claimed to fight.
It is also highly salutary to include in the crackpot leaders that the passions of the area throw up not only the usual suspects on the Arab side but also someone like Avigdor Lieberman, and by implication the entire Israeli extreme right effectively in power there at the moment.
It is, further, illuminating to emphasize that the western assessment of leaders such as Saddam and Arafat changed in proportion as these individuals either veered off from or alternatively capitulated to western strategic interests. These interests stayed pretty much unchanged over the past generation, remaining unswervingly inimical both to the aspirations of the Palestinians as well as the democratic yearnings of the Arab masses at large. He could have included in that list both Hamas, a creature of Shin Bet to counter the Intifada-minded PLO of the time, as well as the Afghan Mujaheddin famously praised by Zbig Brzezinski (mounted on a barrel) as the righteous agents of God -only to mutate later into the fountain of all earthly evil. Clearly Kadhaffi also belongs to this list.
But on the basis of this analysis it is not at all clear what the actual policy implications are for the present. There is a cogent case to be made (and it was made very eloquently by a distinguished spokesman of the left such as Michael Walzer) that despite past miscalculations and misdeeds the American military intervention in Afghanistan in 2001 was clearly justified, in law, in politics as well as in morality, and that if it had been pursued effectively Al Qaeda would have been obliterated as it ought to have been. The Iraq adventure, clearly misconceived as well as criminal on all the above counts, diverted resources and political energies from that legitimate target, leaving us with the present mess in both places.
It is true that the west went to bed with Kadhaffi after he renounced WMD and joined the anti-terrorist camp after 2003. But was this politically wrong under the conditions of the time? Even with the present hindsight it is not at all clear that it was. Kadhaffi continued to be the same crazed and odious ruler that he was before his about-turn. This is, and was at the time, clear.
But the suggestion that the foreign policies of the great powers ought to be based on the primary consideration of opposing (and overthrowing?) odious rulers is tantamount to the demand that the international arena should turn into a field of perpetual violent conflict -even if we assume that the criteria of who is odious and who is not are clear and settled.
The pursuit of morality and justice in international affairs is definitely a crucial consideration. But it functions within a constellation of other, pragmatic concerns. Each of these competing requirements ought to be assessed with a view to the general interest of humanity at any given historical juncture. The Stalinist empire was indeed as odious as they get, but the west was categorically justified in striking deals which legitimized its tyrannical control of Eastern Europe (such as Helsinki 1975), rather than attacking it outright. To avoid a nuclear holocaust was certainly a legitimate (and moral) goal under the circumstances, a consideration that trumped other pursuits (each one highly worthy in isolation), such as the forcible liberation of the "captive nations" as the extreme right demanded.
The Hungarians, in particular, paid for this dearly -but who in good conscience can say that the cause of human welfare and political freedom in Hungary and the world would have benefited through a military invasion of Hungary from the west to counter the Soviet one in 1956? How would the Hungarian nation be served by being extinguished along with many others? As it was the revolution was military crushed but was morally and politically victorious: there was indeed regime change in Hungary, for the eventual Kadar system (even under Soviet occupation) was vastly different from the Rakosi tyranny, even nursing the seeds of the overthrow of the dictatorship altogether in 1989. The logic of historical freedom is long-term and pragmatic policies are not necessarily inimical to it.
All in all, the morality of the politician, as Max Weber showed, is one of responsibility and not one of conscience, if by the latter we mean a stance of fiat iustitia pereat mundus. For if the world perishes, then so does justice. So the dalliance with Kadhaffi had things going for it, even though Tony Blair could have spared us the ostentatious embracing (Berlusconi is beyond the pale anyway) and Anthony Giddens the subtlety of his analyses of the "moderation" of the Jamahiria.
The point, now, with regard to Fisk is that the undoubtedly unpalatable prehistory that he brings out cannot predetermine present and future action. If the sins of the past and the uncertainties of the present mean that one cannot actually attempt anything for fear of going wrong, this signifies simply the forfeiture of political responsibility. This paralysis can only benefit the sundry monsters, filled with the "passionate intensity" that Yeats laments in his great poem, that the unchecked flow of life throws up.
The situation in Libya developed in such an unpredictable way that (despite Blair's and Giddens' missteps, not to speak of the institutional venality of the LSE) a threshold was crossed that made forceful intervention imperative. The ruthlessness with which the regime attacked its own population was clearly reminiscent of (if not on the same scale with) the events in Rwanda in 1994. That the Arab league came out backing the military imposition of flight interdiction and that the Security council provided the necessary legal authorization clearly distinguishes this case from Iraq in 2003. Fisk is right to underscore that military action had to be organized hastily and that it involves enormous uncertainties and risks with regards to the post-Kadhaffi era. But the alternative was to simply sit back and watch the regime squash its opponents under the boot like so many worms, "zenga zenga" in the Colonel's immortal phrase. These opponents are indeed not all saints as Fisk rightly reminds us. Still there is less risk now of the rebellion evolving into something equally or more nasty than the present government.
When the west was dithering the left was complaining that the only thing they cared about was Libyan oil controlled by their friend Kadhaffi. Now that it has intervened the same accusation is being leveled, i.e. that they went in to seize the oil. But if they had the oil under Kadhaffi in the first place, why bother take this highly expensive, dangerous and uncertain gamble? These are the stupidities that one hears here in Greece, where "anti-imperialist" demonstrations are being organized. One would expect such a response from the Greek left, which is definitely "the worst in Europe" as it has been correctly labeled. Fisk would do great disservice to his own intellectual and moral stature to fall into the same pit.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Finis Graeciae
I think it is safe to say that after one hundred and ninety years the experiment of modern Greece has, barring a miracle or two, finally failed. One, of course, still hopes against hope, for the realization of this finality weighs like a hellish gloom upon the soul. But these are subjective considerations. If one approaches the case in a sober-minded way, the evidence appears overwhelming that the project inaugurated in the early nineteenth century has run out of moral and cultural steam -the economic implosion is merely a side effect of this.
The phrase of the title was floated back in the eighties by a coterie of right-wing mystics to lament the incorporation of the country into the "Frankish" construct of united Europe, thus forfeiting its "Orthodox" authenticity and its folkish ways of a communalism based on blood ties and sentiment. At the very moment when the country was given its best, and last as it turned out, chance to shake off the torpor of traditionalism and the pettiness of personal kinship that trumps considerations of the common good and universal justice, this whining from the fringes became more and more persistent and acquired a wide audience.
In due time it penetrated the discourse of almost all segments of political opinion. It brought together a revived nationalism (that through this stratagem managed to jettison the legacy of the dictatorship precisely as it salvaged the core of its ideology of Messianic Greekness) and the unrepentant Stalinism of the left, who finally realized that they shared an enemy. And thus was engendered the monstrosity of an "Orthodox communism" or a "communist Orthodoxy" which considered their obsessive hatreds vindicated by the West's intervention in Kossovo, where the "imperialists" attacked a "fellow Orthodox" nation. Greek volunteers fought on the side of the Serbs in the killing fields of Srebrenica proudly raising the blue and white flag in celebration of that horrific massacre. And the few lonely voices that were raised here in protest against that indelible stain on the country's honor were shouted off the stage as agents of imperialism.
Today it is clear that the proclamation of the "end of Greece" has indeed come true, but for reasons exactly opposite of those alleged by its original authors. Greece has been finished precisely because that medieval mysticism and its "leftist" equivalent of a "people's commune" has swept away from public life all belief in constitutionalism and the rule of law as "western fictions" tyrannizing over the "soul of the people". One sees a direct parallel here with the visions of the Russian Slavophiles, denounced by Marx as reactionary fantasies for all the "communistic" pretensions that they also donned. The only "right" that has been left standing in this desolate social landscape is the brutal one of first possession, by those of superior might or political and personal connections. We are unmistakeably headed towards (if not actually in) a Hobbesian nightmare of morally unrestrained rapacity.
The political elites of the past generation are directly responsible for this state of affairs. They milked the European cow with gusto, using that largesse to fatten the cliques of their hatchet men that took control of state institutions -as well as their personal bank accounts abroad, of course. And they covered this up with a shrill rhetoric of "national pride" in combat with enemies at all points of the compass -beginning with weak northern neighbors and including the very Europeans whose subsidies made their debauchery possible.
They thus turned Greece into a pariah in the European system, claiming endless exceptions to European legal regulations that somehow threatened the domestic kleptocracy and broadcasting a retrograde nationalism that made a mockery of the trans-national (but not anti-national) comity that the European Union was trying so laboriously to forge. And this was the pitiful betrayal of that grandiose universalist endeavor that the revolutionary uprising of the Greeks symbolized, in the eyes of progressive Europeans and a part of the Greek elite itself, back at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
The tragedy of all this is that Greece had at its disposal a national myth among the most potent and vibrant of all national myths at the time. It was the projection of a destiny among the civilized (and Christian) nations of the west, whose culture had Hellenic foundations, that legitimized the political aspirations of those revolutionary fighters on the international plane. And it was to this vision, enunciated by Korais, but also by Ypsilanti and the first Greek national assembly at Epidaurus, that progressive Europe responded. This response, eventually maturing into a collective political intervention, actually saved the Greek revolution at the very moment when it had been extinguished on the ground, despite the magnificent epic of Messolongi.
But after that this nurturing national idea was systematically mismanaged and eventually botched. The European face and aspiration of Greekness was still alive in the official paideia of the nation through the nineteenth century. But in the course of the twentieth it gradually mutated into a particularist caricature of its original universalist inspiration. In this ideological presentation the Hellenic historical phenomenon, including the revolution, was systematically denuded of every European significance and dimension. European history was actually not taught in Greek schools, except incidentally as a tale of evil machinations against the "chosen race" and attempts to "steal" our cultural primogeniture (vide Elgin). This went hand in hand with the failure to construct a functioning civil and political society domestically. The greater the calamities heaped upon the Greek people by the incompetence and wrong-headedness of Greek politicians, the more ear-piercing the rhetorical shrillness of the official nationalism, attributing all disasters, external and domestic, to foreign causes.
We are at the present moment going through another bout of this collective hysteria, to which the Greek public sphere is characteristically prone. The cause is insignificant -but also highly revealing. A historical documentary about the revolution of 1821 is being shown on television, in which certain "sacred" truths are questioned (clumsily it ought to be said -but this is another issue) and the opinion of foreign scholars (among them a Turk, sacrilege of sacrileges!) is also aired. The crowd of intellectual thugs occupying the public sphere, the same ones raging against the "foreign occupation" of the country (meaning its financial rescue by the EU and the IMF), are up in arms denouncing the conspiracy (by Soros, the Freemasons, the Zionists and what have you) to rob us of our national identity.
The conclusion is sad but simple. The triumph of this degenerate nationalism is the result of the fact that, in the end, the modern Greeks have failed to become a nation. A nation is a community unified by common memories and sentiments, but also by commitments to political values and institutions that uphold the equal dignity and freedom of all members thereof. A national consciousness in its genuine form is a way of transcending private interest in the search of the common good, a mode of living together in mutual acceptance. And it does not imply contempt for other national cultures and ideals. This is the concept of the nation that springs from the writings of Rousseau and the experience of the French revolution, a notion that the leaders of the Greek renaissance of the 18th century subscribed to.
In contrast, the cult of "sacred" national symbols in present day Greece is mere rhetorical posturing and devoid of any moral or intellectual substance. It is a mere masque of hatred. In fact hatred has come to be the defining mark of this society, both internally and externally. Hence, the condition of latent civil war that defines its political and social life. It is in fact a non-community, an assemblage of particular associations ready to attack and devour those on the outside if the occasion presents itself and there is a prospect of success. Under these conditions "democracy" is simply a stalemate of opposing forces that are simply biding their time until given a chance to annihilate their opponents. The constitution and the laws are a mere sham, invoked as a pretext if it suits one's interest, but systematically violated to procure private advantage.
Greece has the most, the most complicated and the most wide-ranging laws (even some that are extremely enlightened), none of which is taken seriously or applied. The Hobbesian absence of law and right mentioned above is the dark reality underneath the legalistic facade. A statement by our comical "minister of justice" just a few days ago is indicative of the dominant ethos: when a person or a group violates the law, he pontificated in his usual asinine pompousness, "social realism" must be the guiding consideration. This means that if the law-breaker can argue that his/her circumstances somehow outweigh the obligation to obey the law then the crime is justified. This is the dominant attitude in this fake society. Lasciate ogni speranza chi voi entrate........
Dionysios Solomos, writing at the time of the revolution, expressed it trenchantly: if they hate one another they do not deserve freedom. I am afraid that he has not been proven wrong.
The phrase of the title was floated back in the eighties by a coterie of right-wing mystics to lament the incorporation of the country into the "Frankish" construct of united Europe, thus forfeiting its "Orthodox" authenticity and its folkish ways of a communalism based on blood ties and sentiment. At the very moment when the country was given its best, and last as it turned out, chance to shake off the torpor of traditionalism and the pettiness of personal kinship that trumps considerations of the common good and universal justice, this whining from the fringes became more and more persistent and acquired a wide audience.
In due time it penetrated the discourse of almost all segments of political opinion. It brought together a revived nationalism (that through this stratagem managed to jettison the legacy of the dictatorship precisely as it salvaged the core of its ideology of Messianic Greekness) and the unrepentant Stalinism of the left, who finally realized that they shared an enemy. And thus was engendered the monstrosity of an "Orthodox communism" or a "communist Orthodoxy" which considered their obsessive hatreds vindicated by the West's intervention in Kossovo, where the "imperialists" attacked a "fellow Orthodox" nation. Greek volunteers fought on the side of the Serbs in the killing fields of Srebrenica proudly raising the blue and white flag in celebration of that horrific massacre. And the few lonely voices that were raised here in protest against that indelible stain on the country's honor were shouted off the stage as agents of imperialism.
Today it is clear that the proclamation of the "end of Greece" has indeed come true, but for reasons exactly opposite of those alleged by its original authors. Greece has been finished precisely because that medieval mysticism and its "leftist" equivalent of a "people's commune" has swept away from public life all belief in constitutionalism and the rule of law as "western fictions" tyrannizing over the "soul of the people". One sees a direct parallel here with the visions of the Russian Slavophiles, denounced by Marx as reactionary fantasies for all the "communistic" pretensions that they also donned. The only "right" that has been left standing in this desolate social landscape is the brutal one of first possession, by those of superior might or political and personal connections. We are unmistakeably headed towards (if not actually in) a Hobbesian nightmare of morally unrestrained rapacity.
The political elites of the past generation are directly responsible for this state of affairs. They milked the European cow with gusto, using that largesse to fatten the cliques of their hatchet men that took control of state institutions -as well as their personal bank accounts abroad, of course. And they covered this up with a shrill rhetoric of "national pride" in combat with enemies at all points of the compass -beginning with weak northern neighbors and including the very Europeans whose subsidies made their debauchery possible.
They thus turned Greece into a pariah in the European system, claiming endless exceptions to European legal regulations that somehow threatened the domestic kleptocracy and broadcasting a retrograde nationalism that made a mockery of the trans-national (but not anti-national) comity that the European Union was trying so laboriously to forge. And this was the pitiful betrayal of that grandiose universalist endeavor that the revolutionary uprising of the Greeks symbolized, in the eyes of progressive Europeans and a part of the Greek elite itself, back at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
The tragedy of all this is that Greece had at its disposal a national myth among the most potent and vibrant of all national myths at the time. It was the projection of a destiny among the civilized (and Christian) nations of the west, whose culture had Hellenic foundations, that legitimized the political aspirations of those revolutionary fighters on the international plane. And it was to this vision, enunciated by Korais, but also by Ypsilanti and the first Greek national assembly at Epidaurus, that progressive Europe responded. This response, eventually maturing into a collective political intervention, actually saved the Greek revolution at the very moment when it had been extinguished on the ground, despite the magnificent epic of Messolongi.
But after that this nurturing national idea was systematically mismanaged and eventually botched. The European face and aspiration of Greekness was still alive in the official paideia of the nation through the nineteenth century. But in the course of the twentieth it gradually mutated into a particularist caricature of its original universalist inspiration. In this ideological presentation the Hellenic historical phenomenon, including the revolution, was systematically denuded of every European significance and dimension. European history was actually not taught in Greek schools, except incidentally as a tale of evil machinations against the "chosen race" and attempts to "steal" our cultural primogeniture (vide Elgin). This went hand in hand with the failure to construct a functioning civil and political society domestically. The greater the calamities heaped upon the Greek people by the incompetence and wrong-headedness of Greek politicians, the more ear-piercing the rhetorical shrillness of the official nationalism, attributing all disasters, external and domestic, to foreign causes.
We are at the present moment going through another bout of this collective hysteria, to which the Greek public sphere is characteristically prone. The cause is insignificant -but also highly revealing. A historical documentary about the revolution of 1821 is being shown on television, in which certain "sacred" truths are questioned (clumsily it ought to be said -but this is another issue) and the opinion of foreign scholars (among them a Turk, sacrilege of sacrileges!) is also aired. The crowd of intellectual thugs occupying the public sphere, the same ones raging against the "foreign occupation" of the country (meaning its financial rescue by the EU and the IMF), are up in arms denouncing the conspiracy (by Soros, the Freemasons, the Zionists and what have you) to rob us of our national identity.
The conclusion is sad but simple. The triumph of this degenerate nationalism is the result of the fact that, in the end, the modern Greeks have failed to become a nation. A nation is a community unified by common memories and sentiments, but also by commitments to political values and institutions that uphold the equal dignity and freedom of all members thereof. A national consciousness in its genuine form is a way of transcending private interest in the search of the common good, a mode of living together in mutual acceptance. And it does not imply contempt for other national cultures and ideals. This is the concept of the nation that springs from the writings of Rousseau and the experience of the French revolution, a notion that the leaders of the Greek renaissance of the 18th century subscribed to.
In contrast, the cult of "sacred" national symbols in present day Greece is mere rhetorical posturing and devoid of any moral or intellectual substance. It is a mere masque of hatred. In fact hatred has come to be the defining mark of this society, both internally and externally. Hence, the condition of latent civil war that defines its political and social life. It is in fact a non-community, an assemblage of particular associations ready to attack and devour those on the outside if the occasion presents itself and there is a prospect of success. Under these conditions "democracy" is simply a stalemate of opposing forces that are simply biding their time until given a chance to annihilate their opponents. The constitution and the laws are a mere sham, invoked as a pretext if it suits one's interest, but systematically violated to procure private advantage.
Greece has the most, the most complicated and the most wide-ranging laws (even some that are extremely enlightened), none of which is taken seriously or applied. The Hobbesian absence of law and right mentioned above is the dark reality underneath the legalistic facade. A statement by our comical "minister of justice" just a few days ago is indicative of the dominant ethos: when a person or a group violates the law, he pontificated in his usual asinine pompousness, "social realism" must be the guiding consideration. This means that if the law-breaker can argue that his/her circumstances somehow outweigh the obligation to obey the law then the crime is justified. This is the dominant attitude in this fake society. Lasciate ogni speranza chi voi entrate........
Dionysios Solomos, writing at the time of the revolution, expressed it trenchantly: if they hate one another they do not deserve freedom. I am afraid that he has not been proven wrong.
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