Re: <nettime> Crisis 2.0 - the political turn (some comments)

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

Hello Miguel -

> Personally, I think this kind of reasoning can lead to very dangerous
> "dead-ends". Do you just need to speak of "colonialism" to take away
> all individual responsabilities of human beings in their actions
> towards others?

Well, no. That's exactly why I wrote, in response to Allan Siegel, that 
the issue here is NOT just about history. Instead it's about what's 
happening now. The Middle East been the focus of war in the world since 
the mid-seventies (before it was Asia: Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia). 
The US is still fighting its illegitimate war in Iraq, which now 
threatens to spread much wider. And you might have noticed some recent 
events in Palestine? These are ongoing realities, very negative ones, 
whose consequences we ignore at our own peril. To that, one must add the 
anti-Muslim racism that has been rising in France and throughout Europe 
over the past twenty years. It's another present reality with serious 
effects on civil peace.

As for individual responsabilities, I think the terrorists in France 
have committed heinous crimes, and there's no excuse for that. I also 
think there is a clear and present danger of more such crimes to come. 
That's the point. At a time when the world is closer to full-scale 
global war than it as been for many decades, I do not see the wisdom in 
throwing symbolic oil on real fire, which is what the authors of 
sacrilegious caricatures have been doing. I'm asking where does the 
clear and present danger come from, what supports it and how to diminish 
it? Since 2001, we have seen some very bad answers to this basic question.

The psychology of superego guilt that Zizek describes does exist, for 
sure. But not in what I write. I don't like that way of thinking either. 
And at the same time, I don't believe all responsibilities are 
individual. We live in a world of singular persons, but also of nations 
and of blocs. Individuals who commit murder should be punished. Those 
who plot it should be stopped. But if you think only in terms of 
criminals and crimes - that is, if you think only in terms of 
individuals - then war falls entirely off the scales of justice, and 
words such as exploitation, oppression, domination and ecocide have no 
meaning. We need to deal with the consequences of collective acts. 
That's politics, not psychology.

Anyway, this is a tremendously polemical subject and the details are 
worth arguing over, so I appreciate your remarks.

best, Brian


#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org