SACW - 28 Feb 2015 | Sri Lanka: Human Rights / Bangladesh: Humanist hacked to death / Pakistan: superstitions / India: Hindu Populism, censorship, dissent / superstitions and the bizarre conspiracy theories / Central Africa defiance of extremism / Zizek Interview /

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 28 February 2015 - No. 2848 
[since 1996]
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Contents:
1. Bangladesh: Secular humanist Avijit Roy hacked to death in Dhaka - statements and reports
2. Text of Letter by Human Rights Watch to President Sirisena Re. Human Rights Situation in Sri Lanka
3. Pakistan: Our once festivals | Farah Zia
4. India: Don't victimise activists - they stand between us and tyranny | Rajeev Dhavan
5. Satya Ki Hatya [The Abolition of truth] | Dilip Simeon
6. India: Censorship and the messy guidelines by the Information and Broadcasting Ministry
7. India: Food insecurity and statistical fog | Jean Drèze
8. Indian Democracy and Hindu Populism: The Modi Regime | Arvind Rajagopal
9. India: Death for dissent and disbelief | Shoumojit Banerjee
10. India: Expression of Concern Over Disruption of Discussion on a Book by the Author Noor Zaheer - statement by PADS
11. India: PUDR statement on the Murder of CPI leader Govind Pansare
12. Delhi Protest of 24 Feb 2015 Against Dilution of Land Acquisition Law - photos and statement(s)
13. India: Social Movement Bodies Demand Repeal of Land Ordinance 2014

14. Recent On Communalism Watch:
  - The Many Strands of Indian Identity (Pankaj Mishra)
  - India: After Chhattisgrah, Gujarat too may let government employees join RSS
  - India: RSS ideologue Dinanath Batra-led panel to advise Haryana schools on Gita
  - India: Vocal Hindutva hardliners, PM silence halt BJP’s Muslim membership march
  - India: Another Tamil author faces attack over book after Perumal Murugan
  - India: Bhagwat’s criticism of Mother Teresa might be accurate ‒ but it also applies to the RSS
  - India: Stones thrown at Mangalore prayer hall
  - India: Chhattisgarh: Government staff may join RSS; no service rules under violation
  - India World Hindu Forum / Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) wants ban on bars, liquor
  - Trying to cage a Tigress: Roused Civil Society defends Teesta Setalvad against Gujarat Attempt to Humiliate Her
  - and More ...
 
::: FULL TEXT :::
15. Pakistan: A sea of ignorance | Kamila Hyat
16. Pakistan 'killers' of Nanga Parbat climbers escape jail (BBC)
17. Over a line in the sand - An argument about India | Mukul Kesavan
18. A Song Against Jihad | Christopher de Bellaigue
19. What Greece Won | Paul Krugman
20. Utopia and Its Discontents: Slawomir Sierakowski interviews Slavoj Žižek
21. Review: Labovitz on Drake's Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts

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1. BANGLADESH: SECULAR HUMANIST AVIJIT ROY HACKED TO DEATH IN DHAKA - STATEMENTS AND REPORTS
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Blogger and writer Avijit Roy has been killed and his wife, blogger Rafida Ahmed Bonna, severely injured when unidentified miscreants hacked them at TSC of Dhaka University on Thursday night.
http://www.sacw.net/article10722.html

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2. TEXT OF LETTER BY HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH TO PRESIDENT SIRISENA RE. HUMAN RIGHTS SITUATION IN SRI LANKA
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We welcome some initiatives your government has already undertaken, such as case-by-case reviews of those detained under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, the lifting of restrictions on media reporting, the end of Internet censorship, and the appointment of non-military personnel as governors to the North and East provinces. Also important were the removal of nongovernmental organizations from the oversight of the Ministry of Defence
http://www.sacw.net/article10726.html

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3. PAKISTAN: OUR ONCE FESTIVALS | Farah Zia
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When exactly did we lose basant and what precisely do we want revived?
http://www.sacw.net/article10719.html

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4. INDIA: DON'T VICTIMISE ACTIVISTS - THEY STAND BETWEEN US AND TYRANNY | Rajeev Dhavan
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Coming down from Sikkim, you will see the River Teesta wind its way down resplendent with natural energy gurgling down to Siliguri, where it evens out. I am told Teesta Setalvad was named after the river — perhaps mystically drawing energy from it. Amongst the secular forces which came together to speak for the victims of the Gujarat holocaust of 2002 and combat communalism were Teesta Setalvad and the trusts: Sabrang and Citizens for Justice and Peace. The BJP rulers of Gujarat have never taken too kindly to this intervention, and attacked them using the strategy of criminal intimidation.
http://www.sacw.net/article10710.html

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5. SATYA KI HATYA [The Abolition of truth] | Dilip Simeon
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Hindi translation of Dilip Simeon's article 'The Abolition of truth' of 29 January 2015 on Gandhi and Godse worshippers.
http://www.sacw.net/article10709.html

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6. INDIA: CENSORSHIP AND THE MESSY GUIDELINES BY THE INFORMATION AND BROADCASTING MINISTRY
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At the root of many controversies related to the Central Board of Film Certification are the guidelines formulated by the Information and Broadcasting Ministry
http://www.sacw.net/article10712.html

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7. INDIA: FOOD INSECURITY AND STATISTICAL FOG | Jean Drèze
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An odd silence has surrounded the National Food Security Act (NFSA) in the last few months — as if food insecurity were a thing of the past. It may be recalled that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), far from opposing the Act, vociferously demanded a more comprehensive law when the NFSA was being discussed in Parliament in 2013.
http://www.sacw.net/article10725.html

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8. INDIAN DEMOCRACY AND HINDU POPULISM: THE MODI REGIME | Arvind Rajagopal
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Hindu assertion, like other forms of contemporary political chauvinism, is deeply connected with structural transformation and new modes of social aspiration. It reflects not only a changing alignment of upwardly mobile and dominant classes. It also points to a reaction against the erstwhile paradigm of postcolonial development, a paradigm that buckled under the pressures it was subject to.
http://www.sacw.net/article10727.html

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9. INDIA: DEATH FOR DISSENT AND DISBELIEF | Shoumojit Banerjee
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Maharashtra's prominent educational, social and cultural institutions have been insidiously infiltrated by forces of the Right that brook no pluralistic dissent
http://www.sacw.net/article10697.html

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10. INDIA: EXPRESSION OF CONCERN OVER DISRUPTION OF DISCUSSION ON A BOOK BY THE AUTHOR NOOR ZAHEER - STATEMENT BY PADS
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People's Alliance for Secularism and Democracy (PADS) is alarmed to learn that the short story writer and novelist Noor Zaheer, who is the author of a new book titled ‘Denied by Allah' faced a disruption of a discussion on her book at the World Book Fair in Delhi on 22 February 2015; We condemn any attempts to threaten and to silence an exponent for women's rights in India. We fully defend her rights to publically signal how religious laws, injunctions and practices impede on women's rights.
http://www.sacw.net/article10698.html

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11. INDIA: PUDR STATEMENT ON THE MURDER OF CPI LEADER GOVIND PANSARE
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PUDR expresses its condemnation and grief at the death of respected social activist and CPI leader, 82 year old Govind Pansare on 20 February 2015 as a result of the murderous attack on him and his wife Uma Pansare by gun carrying assailants in Kolhapur four days earlier.
http://www.sacw.net/article10696.html

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12. DELHI PROTEST OF 24 FEB 2015 AGAINST DILUTION OF LAND ACQUISITION LAW - PHOTOS AND STATEMENT(S)
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24 February 2015 "Delhi: Fury and frustration rocked the capital today, as nearly twenty thousand farmers, adivasis, workers, fisher people and others dependent on land for their livelihood converged from the length and breadth of the country and warned the Narendra Modi-led NDA Government that they shall intensify their stir, if the unconstitutional Ordinance amending the Land Acquisition and Rehabilitation Act, 2013 Act is not dropped in toto."
http://www.sacw.net/article10707.html

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13. INDIA: SOCIAL MOVEMENT BODIES DEMAND REPEAL OF LAND ORDINANCE 2014
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Opposition to ammendment to Land Ordinance 2014 - Press releases by the National Alliance of People's Movements (NAPM) and by Gujarat based Paryavaran Suraksha Samiti, Jyoti Karmachari Mandal and Sahiyar - Stree Sangathan
http://www.sacw.net/article10691.html

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14. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
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available at: http://communalism.blogspot.in/
  - The Many Strands of Indian Identity (Pankaj Mishra)
  - India: After Chhattisgrah, Gujarat too may let government employees join RSS
  - India: RSS ideologue Dinanath Batra-led panel to advise Haryana schools on Gita
  - India: Vocal Hindutva hardliners, PM silence halt BJP’s Muslim membership march
  - India: Another Tamil author faces attack over book after Perumal Murugan
  - India: Bhagwat’s criticism of Mother Teresa might be accurate ‒ but it also applies to the RSS
  - India: Stones thrown at Mangalore prayer hall
  - India: Chhattisgarh: Government staff may join RSS; no service rules under violation
  - India World Hindu Forum / Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) wants ban on bars, liquor
  - Trying to cage a Tigress: Roused Civil Society defends Teesta Setalvad against Gujarat Attempt to Humiliate Her
  - India: The new normal in MP - A Hindu majoritarian cultural agenda seems to be entrenched in the state
  - India: World book fair 2015 Intolerance Hit Debate on Book by Noor Zaheer Thanks to an Orthodox Cleric and An Ingeniously Silly Publisher which had Invited the Maulana
  - Communal clash in Shivamogga: 56 held, more arrests likely
  - India: The lawlessness of humour (Sanjay Hegde)
  - India: Support for Teesta is support for access to justice for victims of a pogrom (Indira Jaising)
  - India: The government should have no say on what language is acceptable in art (Palash Krishna Mehrotra)
  - India: NDTV debate on Gujarat Encounter Cops getting Bail, being Reinstated
and More ...
available at: http://communalism.blogspot.in/
 
::: FULL TEXT :::
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15. PAKISTAN: A SEA OF IGNORANCE
by Kamila Hyat
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(The News - 26 Feb 2015)

Perhaps because we have achieved so little in real terms, we have chosen to blind ourselves to reality. It takes courage to face the truth. It is much easier to instead set up a kind of fantasy world, put up on the pillars of ignorance and the fantasies which have a place in the world of fiction but not outside it. We today live within the walls of this world we have created to a greater and greater extent.

The world is made up of myths, fables, superstitions and the bizarre conspiracy theories that we now specialise in. We use these theories to explain all kinds of events, ranging from those at the international level to mundane day-to-day events. There are for example those in the country who apparently believe 9/11 was not the doing of Al-Qaeda or that Osama bin Laden was not killed in May 2011 in Abbottabad. The ‘Malala conspiracies’ too go around, each more absurd than the other – as do accounts built on tiny segments of truth, such as those about events in Balochistan.

Trickling down from these are the other conspiracy accounts, about vaccines causing sterility, about tunnels being dug into schools or about fortified foods being used by ‘enemies’ to cause harm. The paranoia that feeds these theories also promotes the curious idea that we are surrounded by enemies.

Of course, some of the stories are fed by the realities under which we live. The possibility of an attack on a ‘soft target’ of one kind or the other is real. But feeding this fear by posting rumours over social media, presenting them as fact and spreading them as widely as possible amounts to either ignorance or deliberately malafide intent. By doing so people everywhere are in fact playing into the hands of terrorists, whose purpose of course is to create fear and generate uncertainty. Armed with their mobile phones and tablets, people are helping them along. Exaggerated accounts of incidents are circulated and people appear to revel in creating as much panic and pandemonium as is possible.

This psyche is one that needs to be examined. No nation of healthy people would go about causing anguish or deliberately igniting anxiety in this fashion. Yet we see this happening on a daily basis and too many people seem to believe even the most outlandish stories, putting their own powers of reason aside.

As the Nazi Minister for Propoganda Joseph Goebbels said, if you tell a lie and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. Social media helps in the task of ceaseless repetition and, like a game of Chinese Whispers, the ‘truth’ tends to become warped and distorted as it shifts from one device to the next.

It would be a fallacy to believe ignorance is linked to a lack of education. The manoeuvring we have spoken of above involves perfectly literate, often well educated persons who are ignorant despite the degrees that follow their names. In the same manner as the unfounded stories they disseminate vague references to religion are used to take forward other notions which make little real sense.

Social media is in fact filled with nonsensical notions about eating certain foods to achieve specific purposes or about how selecting a particular colour from a set given on a website can determine your personality and your set of beliefs. Thousands of such ‘quizzes’ and ‘tests’ float across cyberspace and in other places. Of course, they can be undertaken simply as a ‘fun’ way to pass the time – but there are too many who hold faith in them and insist they are as valid as scientific proof. Horoscopes, followed religiously by huge numbers, fall essentially in the same category. Superstition that stems from these horoscopes is widespread and is spurred on by the pirs and fortune tellers that so many choose to visit on a regular basis, allowing their daily activities to be dictated by what they are told.

Some of this can be downright dangerous. The ‘remedies’ for diabetes or other incurable diseases spread through ignorance simply mislead people. Following this advice, which also comes in over television channels, could have very dangerous consequences. People have been known to abandon their medications on the basis of such information – or rather misinformation. It is of course their lack of good sense, and perhaps their desperation, which leads them to this.

In other cases, the lack of literacy and knowledge of people is exploited. Faith healers are one manifestation of this. So are those who have set up ‘magic machines’ in poor localities in Lahore and other cities, claiming they can diagnose any sickness under the sun and suggest how they can be cured. The output is essentially gibberish. More sophisticated scans, which people also believe focus on fertility and claims of sophisticated technology to treat a variety of diseases that require expert medical intervention.

On the same note, it is quite shocking to see quite how many people believe in the power of ‘black magic’. People one would not expect this from on the basis of their education, seem to earnestly believe in voodoo and that pins stuck into a doll could cause them, or those close to them, harm. The same kind of realm of ignorance expands into many other spheres of life. Education clearly does not always help remove it from the mind.

The problem is that this lack of ability to discern fact from fiction, truth from lies, has led us into all kinds of trouble. We simply do not see our own faults as a society and in fact blame their existence on ‘evil’ forces working against us. Why these forces of darkness should have gathered in such large numbers to torment us is unclear. The problem is that believing this prevents attempts to tackle our problems and prevent them from growing. This accounts for our mounting set of difficulties in so many different areas.

We would be well advised to raise our vision to other places and accept that there is a great deal that has gone wrong. We need to find ways to put it right. This is a difficult task. It could involve years of endeavour. Our inability as a state to handle these issues has contributed to the state of mind people find themselves in. But more and more damage is being caused by this. We can see it happening every day, and there is no sign that the age of ignorance is growing to an end. In fact, the darkness seems to be growing denser and it can only be brushed away through collective effort which involves the media, the education system, clerics and all other who have influence on society.

We need to build a more rational place to live in. Without rationality and reason, the human mind is stripped of much of its power. We have acted to take this power away and leave behind a kind of mindlessness which makes it harder and harder to perform useful function. Leadership by the government could help clear the path to be followed and make people more aware of what they need to do to prevent ignorance from spreading and discovering the value of light.

The writer is a freelance columnist and former newspaper editor.

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16. PAKISTAN 'KILLERS' OF NANGA PARBAT CLIMBERS ESCAPE JAIL | BBC News
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(BBC News, 27 February 2015)
In this photograph taken on August 7, 2014 a sign points towards a view of Nanga Parbat Nanga Parbat is the world's ninth highest mountain

Two militants on trial for killing a group of climbers at a base camp of Pakistan's Nanga Parbat mountain in 2013 have broken out of prison.
Police said they were searching for the pair. Another militant who had fled with them had been killed and a fourth was captured.
Taliban militants raided the camp in June 2013, forcing 10 climbers to kneel before shooting them.
About 20 people were arrested and face trial for the attack.
The assault was the worst attack on foreigners in Pakistan in a decade.
At least 15 gunmen dressed in the uniform of local security forces carried out the attack.
Correspondents say the base camp is at a height of 4,200m (13,779 ft), meaning the attackers would have had to travel for at least 18 hours by foot or by mule.
The foreign victims were identified as American, Chinese, Ukrainian, Slovakian, Lithuanian and Nepali. One Pakistani porter also died and officials believe he may have been targeted because he was a Shia Muslim.
Nanga Parbat, the world's ninth highest mountain at 8,126m above sea level, is popular with trekkers and mountaineers, especially during June and July.

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17. OVER A LINE IN THE SAND - AN ARGUMENT ABOUT INDIA
by Mukul Kesavan
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(The Telegraph, February 26 , 2015)

It was in April 2011 that Anna Hazare made his national debut at Jantar Mantar promising to slay corruption by forcing Parliament to pass a stringent Jan Lokpal bill. Nearly four years later, he is back at Jantar Mantar rallying opposition against the land acquisition bill that the National Democratic Alliance government wants to pass into law in this session of Parliament. Hazare's presence and the idiom of single-issue, civil society protest seems to unite these two moments in contemporary politics but the truth is that the politics that Hazare embodies in 2015 is radically different from the politics he stood for in 2011.

In 2011, the campaign against corruption and for the Jan Lokpal bill had a constituency nearly as vague as its agenda. Corruption, like terrorism, is an empty signifier: it means all things to all men and everyone's against it regardless of class, caste or faith. The chattering middle classes, who dominate the media's narrative, love to hate corruption because it is both a commitment without consequence and a source of inexhaustible virtue. One of the principal reasons for India Against Corruption's success was its sanctimoniousness. It was a bullet-proof campaigning stance because anyone who was against its agenda was, by default, either a cynic or actually for corruption. It was why Hazare's fast brought India's political elite to its knees: the ancien regime had dealt in cynicism for so long that it was helpless against the rhetoric of righteousness.

Many on the Left were ambivalent or outrightly hostile because in the beginning India Against Corruption seemed remarkably like a reincarnation of the anti-Mandal coalition with 'corruption' standing in for 'merit'. Liberal critics pointed to Arvind Kejriwal's opportunistic use of Baba Ramdev as a crowd magnet, to Kiran Bedi's proximity to the Bharatiya Janata Party and to the unsettling presence of Ram Madhav and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar on the dais or in IAC's inner conclaves, as reasons for their reservations about the movement. The relative absence of Muslims and Dalits in the IAC's visible base was another reason to be sceptical. Liberals warned darkly against the opportunism and social shiftlessness of this new movement.

Contrast this anti-corruption crusade with Anna Hazare's two day dharna this week designed to unify opposition to Narendra Modi's land acquisition bill. Medha Patkar, who spelt out the goals of the agitation in a long speech, made it clear that Hazare was leading a peasant or kisan agitation against an unjust bill that that threatened to sacrifice the livelihood of Indian peasants at the altar of corporate avarice. She went to great lengths to emphasize that the dharna's platform belonged to kisan organizations. Hazare's dharna was sharply focused on one clause of the proposed bill which allowed land acquisition without consent or social impact assessment for five allegedly exceptional public purposes which in actual fact could be stretched to cover every form of private enterprise.

From leading a hold-all crusade against corruption to leading a class-based agitation against predatory land acquisition, Hazare had gone from being a middle-class mascot trying to be all things to all men, to being a symbol of plebeian resistance against a realtor State. The cranky Gandhian committed to drilling India's great unwashed into disciplined virtue had morphed into a radical populist resisting the expropriation of the poor by the rich.

It wasn't Hazare that had been transformed, it was Indian politics, and Hazare had been partly responsible for the transformation. Schematically, Hazare's epic fast and Kejriwal's genius for creating tableaus that illustrated the United Progressive Alliance's cynicism and political bankruptcy comprehensively discredited the Congress as the party of Old Corruption. Kejriwal capitalized on the public awareness and political momentum created by that landmark Ram Lila Maidan agitation to float a political party that routed the Congress in the Delhi assembly elections of late 2013. As a curtain-raiser for the 2014 general election, this was a demoralizing defeat from which an already paralysed Congress never recovered. The political beneficiary of this defeat wasn't the Aam Aadmi Party despite the messianic hopes of their most zealous supporters, it was Narendra Modi.

The fall of the Congress helped clarify the ideological boundaries of Indian politics. Since Narasimha Rao liberalized the economy under duress in the early 1990s, the Congress's governing strategy had been a half-hearted liberalization led by Manmohan Singh twinned with welfare measures like MGNREGA smuggled in by Sonia Gandhi via the national advisory council. This created an oddly two-faced ruling dispensation that was home to both Jean Dreze and Montek Singh Ahluwalia.

Instead of the equivocation of the Congress, Modi offered a frustrated electorate the clarity of the Gujarat Model. The Gujarat Model makes two related assertions. One, that there will be growth through private investment attracted by good infrastructure and easy access to land and natural resources. This promise of growth and the livelihoods that it creates offers desis a future they can aspire to. Two, it insists that this economic dynamism is merely the obverse of the majoritarian decisiveness that secures a People against its enemies.

The reason that Modi has never wavered in his support for Maya Kodnani or Amit Shah nor ever expressed any regret about the Gujarat killings is because his reputation as a Hindu strongman is inseparable from his image as a decisive leader. As prime minister he has subcontracted the task of Hindu consolidation to his consigliere, but the challenge of creating an all-powerful executive with complete discretion in the matter of allocating land and natural resources is a job that he has to accomplish himself.

It is essential for the prime minister to get the land acquisition bill passed. Its exceptions are so large that they give his government a summary way of acquiring land for private 'entities' without consent and without scrutiny. This authority is central to the workings of the Gujarat Model; without it, Modi becomes just another politician, hamstrung by the scruples of bleeding hearts and bureaucrats.

It isn't a coincidence that Anna Hazare has begun to speak the language of the kisan sabha leaders of yore. Modi's prime ministership has defined the oppositional space. The Aam Aadmi Party won the Delhi election by selling its decentralizing, non-denominational politics as a real alternative to the top-down majoritarianism of the BJP. It was an extraordinary victory, small in actual scope - Delhi isn't even a proper state - but symbolically important because after a year of electoral success, the Modi juggernaut wasn't just stopped, it was flattened. The Delhi election was a defeat for the BJP's strategy of communal consolidation. The politics of 'controlled polarization' failed despite the Trilokpuri troubles and the best efforts of Sakshi Maharaj and Sadhvi Prachi.

In the context of this defeat and on account of the discontented murmurings of Modi's corporate choir, the land acquisition bill has become something of a test case for this government. Some commentators have suggested that the prime minister might defer to nervous elements in the sangh parivar who fear being seen as anti-peasant or anti-poor, and water down the land acquisition bill. I find that hard to believe. Having lost his aura of electoral invincibility, Modi will be reluctant to back down on a matter so central to his stewardship of the economy. Were he to do so, he would, in the eyes of his base, be no different from the trimming, compromising politicians that he ran against in 2014. Being a conviction politician is hard if you're seen to abandon your principal convictions.

There is a reason why Anna Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal joined forces at Jantar Mantar to oppose the land acquisition bill. Both of them saw that the great political battle of our time would be fought not over corruption but over the protocols governing the ownership and alienation of land. By insisting on a law that vested local administrative officials with near-absolute discretion in the matter of land acquisition, Modi was claiming for a republican State the arbitrary authority of colonial law. When he drafted the ordinance, he drew a line in the sand. In spite of the risk of being branded as a chronic agitator, Delhi's new chief minister showed up at Parliament Street with all 67 MLAs to show solidarity with the peasant organizations assembled there. He recognized, as Anna Hazare did, that this wasn't a quarrel over a single piece of legislation: it was an argument about India.

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18. A SONG AGAINST JIHAD
by Christopher de Bellaigue
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(The New York Review of Books, 22 Feb 2015)

[photo] A scene from Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu, 2014

It is difficult to unearth love, joy, and erotic charge in a story that begins with the killing of a man, includes capital punishment, and ends with the agonized features of an orphaned child. But this is what the Mauritanian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako does in Timbuktu, his account of the occupation of central Africa’s most storied city by jihadi fighters in 2012 and 2013. One comes away from Timbuktu (nominated for an Oscar in the Best Foreign Film category) not only despising the tyranny of Islamic extremism, but also strangely buoyed by the sense that its exponents may be redeemable through the dignity and beauty of their victims. This stems from Sissako’s stubbornly optimistic view of human nature, and of our shared origins in a state of purity. When he was asked recently about his refusal to reduce the jihadists to mere brutes, he replied, “a man has been a child. He has been good.”

Quite apart from its artistic merits, Timbuktu is a topical film; it finds echo in events of the past year in Iraq and Syria. In early 2012, fighters from the radical, al-Qaeda-linked group Ansar Dine swept across northern Mali, imposing a puritanical form of Sharia law as they went. By June, the group had gained outright control of Timbuktu and much of northern Mali, ultimately governing for nine months before it was driven out in a French-led intervention in early 2013. The film portrays the efforts of the jihadists to change the way people live in Timbuktu, an ancient center of learning and culture, just as ISIS have been doing in Raqqa, Mosul, and elsewhere.

In the hands of Sissako and his superb cadre of actors—many of whom are Mauritanian and Malian non-professionals—defiance of extremism is vested with such moral authority as to make the jihadists look risible. It has been declared illegal to smoke, to play football, to hang around in the streets. A game of soccer is duly held, without a ball–the players scamper about, tackling, intercepting, appealing to the referee. A fishwife refuses to wear gloves on the job. “Our parents raises us in honor, without wearing gloves,” she says as she is taken away. A young woman who has been caught singing in mixed company (a double crime) breaks convulsively into song while being publicly lashed.

At issue here is not simply tyranny and freedom; it is Islam versus an aberrant mutation. An old-school local imam rebukes the jihadists in the same measured tones in which all Sissako’s characters resist, recommending internal jihad, the fight against vanity and pride that is at the heart of mystical Islam. The justification that the jihadist commander gives after one of his men seizes a local girl—a rape that is legitimized through a “marriage” without her consent—is the classic riposte of the little person who has drunk power and believes himself to be omnipotent. “We are the guardians of all deeds,” he replies complacently to the imam’s protestations.

In some superb sequences toward the end of the film, Sissako makes a startling juxtaposition to show these moral and aesthetic extremes. A couple are about to be stoned to death—for adultery, we assume. The jihadists have buried them in the sand up to their chins before withdrawing a few paces and beginning to hurl their missiles—they thud into bone and tissue, making the viewer wince. Then Sissako cuts to another scene in the same low-rise, adobe-built, substantially medieval city, to a courtyard where a character named Zabou lives. Zabou is a one-woman resistance army. Her short hair is knotted with scraps of red cloth, her dark, luminous skin exudes a kind of madness, and when she walks unveiled around the town with a preferred rooster on her shoulder, spreading out her arms to obstruct the jihadists in their Toyota pickups they stop their moralizing and are silent.

Now Zabou lies on her daybed and watches one of the jihadists, a lean, intense North African, as he defies his own ideology and pirouettes around a lucky charm lying in the sand. It begins with a prostration, but then becomes a dance, slow, tense, slamming his heel into the floor, and then gradually as he unwinds and his arms sweep the sky, she too loosens on the daybed, running her hand over her stomach, running her eyes appreciatively over him. Finally, as he allows the sand to fall between his fingers, she closes her eyes. All this—the charm, the dance, the hints of an animist subculture running strongly under Islam, the unveiled woman luxuriating on a bed—is unutterably profane in the new Timbuktu. And then, as the scene’s classical score fades, we return to the execution ground and the two adulterers, their eyes closed and their heads tilted on broken necks, poking out of the sand.

These events swirl episodically around Sissako’s central narrative, which concerns the herdsman and musician Kidane (Ibrahim Ahmed), his wife Satima (Toulou Kiki), and their twelve-year-old daughter, Toya. Living in an encampment outside the town, the trio epitomize domestic harmony; they are gentle, loving, tactile, and content. But a tragic denouement seems assured from the moment Kidane kills a fisherman in an uncharacteristic rage over a dead cow, and is picked up by the jihadist police.

Sissako will give ultimate victory to his protagonists, but not in the usual cinematic fashion—by contriving an unlikely happy ending. Instead, he draws from these characters an ability to rise above tragedy, a victory of light over darkness that is notoriously hard to put across without seeming mawkish or insincere, but which director and actors manage flawlessly. One can only assume that the fine performances of the principals were facilitated by their intimate knowledge of the events that Timbuktu describes. (Layla Walet Mohamed, for example, who plays Toya, was discovered by the director in a Malian refugee camp in Mauritania). As Satima exhausts the few options that remain to obtain redress for her husband, the endgame approaches unstoppably. “I’m at peace with death,” Kidane tells the prosecutor he comes before (another surprisingly human jihadist). “We are all its children.” But he confesses, heartbreakingly, that he will miss one thing: “A face. My daughter’s face, my wife’s.”

Sissako’s film was actually filmed across the border in Mauritania, for while the jihadist fighters are long gone from Timbuktu, expelled by French parachutists in January 2013, some of their supporters remain, and making such a political film there would have been risky and difficult. The town he depicts is a small, sleepy place; the only motorized vehicle one sees with any regularity is the water-seller’s motorbike, laden with water drums, phut-phutting from one thirsty character to the next. And yet this smallness is belied by the worldly nature of the jihad, with Arabic, Tuareg, French, Bambara (a local language), and even English being spoken in the film, and a group of North African jihadists arguing over the respective merits of Zinedine Zidane and Lionel Messi (a gloriously off-the-wall discussion, as they belong to a radical movement that has banned football). The occupation of Timbuktu was an international affair, as are the invasions of swathes of Mesopotamia that are currently under ISIS control, and the principal front line in this war runs within Islam, as the great number of Muslims who have been killed by ISIS attests. Timbuktu speaks far beyond central Africa.
February 22, 2015, 9 a.m.

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19. WHAT GREECE WON
by Paul Krugman
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(The New York Times, 27 February 2015)
 
Last week, after much drama, the new Greek government reached a deal with its creditors. Earlier this week, the Greeks filled in some details on how they intend to meet the terms. So how did it go?
 
Well, if you were to believe many of the news reports and opinion pieces of the past few days, you’d think that it was a disaster — that it was a “surrender” on the part of Syriza, the new ruling coalition in Athens. Some factions within Syriza apparently think so, too. But it wasn’t. On the contrary, Greece came out of the negotiations pretty well, although the big fights are still to come. And by doing O.K., Greece has done the rest of Europe a favor.
 
To make sense of what happened, you need to understand that the main issue of contention involves just one number: the size of the Greek primary surplus, the difference between government revenues and government expenditures not counting interest on the debt. The primary surplus measures the resources that Greece is actually transferring to its creditors.
 
Everything else, including the notional size of the debt — which is a more or less arbitrary number at this point, with little bearing on the amount anyone expects Greece to pay — matters only to the extent that it affects the primary surplus Greece is forced to run.
 
For Greece to run any surplus at all — given the depression-level slump that it’s in and the effect of that depression on revenues — is a remarkable achievement, the result of incredible sacrifices. Nonetheless, Syriza has always been clear that it intends to keep running a modest primary surplus. If you are angry that the negotiations didn’t make room for a full reversal of austerity, a turn toward Keynesian fiscal stimulus, you weren’t paying attention.
 
The question instead was whether Greece would be forced to impose still more austerity. The previous Greek government had agreed to a program under which the primary surplus would triple over the next few years, at immense cost to the nation’s economy and people.
 
Why would any government agree to such a thing? Fear. Essentially, successive leaders in Greece and other debtor nations haven’t dared to challenge extreme creditor demands, for fear that they would be punished — that the creditors would cut off their cash flow or, worse yet, implode their banking system if they balked at ever-harsher budget cuts.
 
So did the current Greek government back down and agree to aim for those economy-busting surpluses? No, it didn’t. In fact, Greece won new flexibility for this year, and the language about future surpluses was obscure. It could mean anything or nothing.
 
And the creditors did not pull the plug. Instead, they made financing available to carry Greece through the next few months. That is, if you like, putting Greece on a short leash, and it means that the big fight over the future is yet to come. But the Greek government didn’t succumb to the bum’s rush, and that in itself is a kind of victory.
 
Why, then, all the negative reporting? To be fair, fiscal policy isn’t the only issue. There were and are also arguments about things like privatization of public assets, where Syriza has agreed not to reverse deals already made, and labor market regulation, where some of the “structural reform” of the austerity era will apparently stand. Syriza also agreed to crack down on tax evasion, although why collecting taxes is supposed to be a defeat for a leftist government is a mystery to me.
 
Still, nothing that just happened justifies the pervasive rhetoric of failure. Actually, my sense is that we’re seeing an unholy alliance here between left-leaning writers with unrealistic expectations and the business press, which likes the story of Greek debacle because that’s what is supposed to happen to uppity debtors. But there was no debacle. Provisionally, at least, Greece seems to have ended the cycle of ever-more-savage austerity.
 
And, as I said, in so doing, Greece has done the rest of Europe a favor. Remember, in the background of the Greek drama is a European economy that, despite some positive numbers lately, still seems to be sliding into a deflationary trap. Europe as a whole desperately needs to end austerity madness, and this week there have been some slightly positive signs. Notably, the European Commission has decided not to fine France and Italy for exceeding their deficit targets.
 
Levying these fines would have been insane given market realities; France can borrow for five years at an interest rate of 0.002 percent. That’s right, 0.002 percent. But we’ve seen a lot of similar insanity in recent years. And you have to wonder whether the Greek story played a role in this outbreak of reasonableness.
 
Meanwhile, the first real debtor revolt against austerity is off to a decent start, even if nobody believes it. What’s the Greek for “Keep calm and carry on”? FEB. 27, 2015
 
*American economist, Professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, Centenary Professor at the London School of Economics, and an op-ed columnist for The New York Times . He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 2008.
 

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20. UTOPIA AND ITS DISCONTENTS: Slawomir Sierakowski interviews Slavoj Žižek
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(Los Angeles Review of Books, February 23rd, 2015) 

SLAWOMIR SIERAKOWSKI is the founder and leader of Krytyka Polityczna (Political Critique), an Eastern European movement of liberal intellectuals, artists, and activists, with branches in Ukraine and Russia. He is also the director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Warsaw and the president of the Stanislaw Brzozowski Association, overseeing its publishing house; its online opinion site; cultural centers in Warsaw, Gdansk, Lodz, and Cieszyn, in Poland, and in Kiev, Ukraine; and 20 local clubs. He spoke to Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek after the Charlie Hebdo murders about the future of Europe, the Ukraine, capitalism, and the West.

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SLAWOMIR SIERAKOWSKI: In your article in the New Statesman, you expressed your solidarity with Charlie Hebdo. Do you think that the global reaction to what happened was adequate?

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Think about the pathos of universal solidarity which exploded in the days after the Paris killings, culminating in the Sunday January 11 spectacle of big political names from all around the world holding hands, from Cameron to Lavrov, from Netanyahu to Abbas — if there ever was an image of hypocritical falsity, this was it. The true Charlie Hebdo gesture would have been to publish on its front page a big caricature brutally and tastelessly mocking this event, with drawings of Netanyahu and Abbas, Lavrov and Cameron, and other couples passionately embracing and kissing while sharping knives behind their backs.

You very interestingly pointed out that Muslim terrorists are strange kind of fundamentalists since they see themselves in the social mirror of the West. Real fundamentalists like the Amish would just ignore Western hedonists and their stupid caricatures. So what, if not fundamentalism, is really behind these terrorists? Do you think that it is simply a desperate need for a transcendental cause, so lacking in this post-ideological world?

Things are much more ambiguous. If one asks a Russian anti-Communist which tradition is to be blamed for the horrors of Stalinism, one gets two opposed answers. Some see in Stalinism (and in Bolshevism in general) a chapter in the long history of Western modernization of Russia, a tradition that began with Peter the Great (if not already with Ivan the Terrible), and others put the blame on Russian backwardness, on the long tradition of Oriental despotism that predominated there. So while for the first group Western modernizers brutally disrupted the organic life of traditional Russia, replacing it with state terror, for the second group, the tragedy of Russia is that socialist revolution occurred at a wrong time and place, in a backward country with no democratic tradition. And are things not similar with the Muslim fundamentalism that found its (hitherto) extreme expression in ISIS?

It became a commonplace to observe that the rise of ISIS is both the last chapter in the long story of the anti-colonial reawakening as the arbitrary borders drawn after World War I by the great powers are being redrawn, and, simultaneously, a chapter in the struggle against the way global capital undermines the power of nation states. But what causes fear and consternation is another feature of the ISIS regime: the public statements of the ISIS authorities make it clear that the principal task of the state power is not the regulation of the welfare of its population (health, fight against hunger) — what really matters is religious life, to ensure that all public life obeys religious laws. This is why ISIS remains more or less indifferent towards humanitarian catastrophes within its domain — their motto is “take care of religion and welfare will take care of itself.” Therein resides the gap that separates the notion of power practiced by ISIS from the modern Western notion of so-called “bio-power” which regulates life: the ISIS caliphate totally rejects the notion of bio-power.

Does this make ISIS simply premodern, a desperate attempt to turn back the clock of historical progress?

Resistance to global capitalism should not rely on premodern traditions, on the defense of their particular life-forms — for the simple reason that such a return to premodern traditions is impossible, since globalization already determines the form of resistance to it: those who oppose globalization on behalf of traditions threatened by it do this in a form which is already modern, they already speak the language of modernity. Their content may be ancient, but their form is ultra-modern. So instead of seeing in ISIS a case of extreme resistance to modernization, one should rather conceive of it as a case of perverted modernization and locate it within the series of conservative modernizations which began with the Meiji restoration in Japan (rapid industrial modernization assumed the ideological form of restoration, of the return to the full authority of the emperor). The well-known photo of al-Baghdadi, the ISIS leader, with an exquisite swiss watch on his arm, is here emblematic: ISIS has well-organized web propaganda, financial dealings, et cetera, although these ultra-modern practices are used to propagate and enforce an ideologico-political vision which is not so much conservative as a desperate move to fix clear hierarchic delimitations, principal among them those who regulate religion, education, and sexuality (the strict, assymetrical regulation of sexual difference, the prohibition of secular education …).

Does the lack of a secular Left help explain the rise of the Muslim radicalism, and if so, what should the West do to solve the problem of global terrorism?

That’s my point — we cannot defeat it if we remain within the liberal-democratic coordinates. Only a new radical Left can do it. Recall Walter Benjamin’s old insight that “every rise of Fascism bears witness to a failed revolution”: the rise of Fascism is the Left’s failure, but simultaneously a proof that there was a revolutionary potential, dissatisfaction, which the Left was not able to mobilize. And does the same not hold for today’s so-called “Islamo-Fascism?” Is the rise of radical Islamism not exactly correlative to the disappearance of the secular Left in Muslim countries? When, back in the spring of 2009, Taliban took over the Swat valley in Pakistan, The New York Times reported that they engineered “a class revolt that exploits profound fissures between a small group of wealthy landlords and their landless tenants.” If, however, by “taking advantage” of the farmers’ plight, The Taliban are “raising alarm about the risks to Pakistan, which remains largely feudal,” what prevents liberal democrats in Pakistan as well as the US to similarly “take advantage” of this plight and try to help the landless farmers? The sad implication of this fact is that the feudal forces in Pakistan are the “natural ally” of liberal democracy.

So what about the core values of liberalism: freedom, equality, et cetera?

The paradox is that liberalism itself is not strong enough to save them against the fundamentalist onslaught. Fundamentalism is a reaction — a false, mystifying reaction, of course — against a real flaw of liberalism, and this is why it is again and again generated by liberalism. Left to itself, liberalism will slowly undermine itself — the only thing that can save its core values is a renewed Left. In order for this key legacy to survive, liberalism needs the brotherly help of the radical Left. THIS is the only way to defeat fundamentalism, to sweep the ground under its feet. To think in response to the Paris killings means to drop the smug self-satisfaction of the permissive liberal and accept that the conflict between liberal permissiveness and fundamentalism is ultimately a false conflict — a vicious cycle of two poles generating and presupposing each other. What Max Horkheimer had said about fascism and capitalism already back in 1930s — those who do not want to talk critically about capitalism should also keep quiet about fascism — should also be applied to today’s fundamentalism: those who do not want to talk critically about liberal democracy should also keep quiet about religious fundamentalism.

Do you see common ground between you and Michel Houellebecq, with his critique of Western liberal societies, combined with no justification for reactionary alternatives like Islamist or Russian ones?

Yes, definitely. Crazy as it may sound, I have much respect for the honest liberal conservatives like Houellebecq, Finkielkraut, or Sloterdijk in Germany. One can learn from them much more than from progressive liberal like Habermas: honest conservatives are not afraid to admit the deadlock we are in. Houellebecq’s Atomised is for me the most devastating portrait of the sexual revolution of the 1960s. He shows how permissive hedonism turns into the obscene superego universe of the obligation to enjoy. Even his anti-Islamism is more refined than it may appear: he is well aware how the true problem is not the Muslim threat from the outside, but our own decadence. Long ago Friedrich Nietzsche perceived how Western civilization was moving in the direction of the Last Man, an apathetic creature with no great passion or commitment. Unable to dream, tired of life, he takes no risks, seeking only comfort and security, an expression of tolerance with one another:

A little poison now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams. And much poison at the end, for a pleasant death. They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health. “We have discovered happiness,” — say the Last Men, and they blink.

Since you are a great cinema lover, let me ask you about Pawlikowski’s Ida, the last international success of Polish cinema, which also triggered a lot of controversies in Poland.

I do not know enough about the specific ideological situation in Poland to take part in these controversies.

It’s about anti-Semitism. But in today’s Poland, the argument is no longer between anti-Semites and their opponents but among the opponents about who was not sensitive enough, who still had some deeply hidden traces of it.

Such competition for who is more sensitive, such hermeneutic detective-search for hidden traces, is one of the worst expressions of what in the West they call Political Correctness. It is a hypocritical game that not only does not contribute to the fight against real racism, it even trivializes racism.

I would like to begin by making a general observation that, I think, is crucial. First, why are the best films about the holocaust comedies? Recall how Primo Levi, in If This Is a Man, describes the dreadful “selekcja,” the survival examination in the camp: naked prisoners have to run in front of an SS doctor who, barely noticing them, makes a note in his list, putting them into a right or left column: right means survival, left means gas chamber. Is there not something properly comic in this, in the ridiculous spectacle to appear strong and healthy, to attract for a brief moment the indifferent gaze of the Nazi administrator who presides over their life and death? Here, comedy and horror coincide: imagine the prisoners practicing their appearance, trying to hold head high and chest forward, walking with a brisk step, pinching their lips to appear less pale, exchanging advices on how to impress the SS man; imagine how a simple momentary confusion of cards or a lack of attention of the SS man can decide my fate …

I am far from laughing …

This “comical” aspect, of course, causes no laughter — it rather stands something which is too horrible to be a tragedy. The Muslim (the “living dead” in the camp) is so destitute that his stance can no longer be considered “tragic”: there is no dignity in him that is crucial for the tragic position, that is to say, he no longer retains the minimum of dignity against the background of which his miserable actual position would have appeared as tragic — he is simply reduced to the shell of a person, emptied of the spark of spirit.

There is a memorable passage of Still Alive, the memoirs of the Auschwitz survivor Ruth Klüger. During Ruth’s visit to Israel with a friend of hers, they met a Holocaust survivor who dismisses the West Bank Palestinians in openly racist terms as lazy thieves and terrorists to be thrown out of the land. When her friend is shocked by this outburst and tells Ruth he cannot understand how someone who went through Auschwitz, and saw all the suffering there, can talk like that, Ruth replies that the extreme horror of Auschwitz did not make it into a place which purifies its surviving victims into ethically sensitive subjects who got rid of all petty egotistic interests; on the contrary, part of the horror of Auschwitz was that it also dehumanized many of its victims, transforming them into brutal, insensitive survivors, making it impossible for them to practice the art of balanced ethical judgment. The lesson to be drawn here is that we have to abandon the idea that there is something emancipatory in extreme experiences, that they enable us to clear the mess and open our eyes to the ultimate truth of a situation.

It was Tadeusz Borowski, who first made this point in his short stories. By the way, they were entitled exactly in this horror-tragic style that you are talking about: This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. But you got lost, as usual — let’s go back to Ida.

Of course it’s an excellent film, made in a perfect ascetic way, but it is this perfection itself that bothers me — there is something false in it. No wonder Ida made so many people feel good: everything that happens is utterly predictable, there are no surprises. The quilt for the murder of Ida’s family falls on the ordinary poor farmer, and the guilt-ridden Wanda, a promiscuous Communist judge, kills herself. As for Ida herself, after tasting the forbidden fruit of sex (clearly using the saxophone player as a mere instrument), decides to enter the convent, thus bringing about a fantasy-like image of a Jewish Catholic nun. The film immediately aroused in me the desire to imagine different versions of the outcome: what if Ida decides to get married to the sax player, and it is Wanda who discovers faith and becomes a nun? What if, in their inquiry into who killed Ida’s family, the two women discover that a local priest was also involved? One can argue that such a different film would have been much better.

I know you are fascinated with this idea of multiple directions that a story can take — the reason you think Blind Chance is Kieslowski’s best film …

Yes, I even wrote a new version of Antigone along these lines — it will be staged in 2016. I asked myself which Antigone would fit our contemporary condition, and, coping with this problem, I decided to retell Sophocles’ Antigone in the mode of Bertolt Brecht’s three learning plays (Der Jasager, Der Neinsager, Jasager 2): at the crucial point of decision, events take three different directions — a procedure used also in Kieslowski’s Blind Chance. My premise is that such a staging confronts us with a true Antigone for our times, ruthlessly abandoning our sympathy and compassion for the play’s heroine, making her part of the problem, and proposing a way out which shatters us in our humanitarian complacency. My retelling is consciously anachronistic — I mention Kol Nidre, although it is a millennium later — and my text freely borrows ideas and formulations from the Talmud, Euripides’ Electra, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Walter Benjamin, Brecht, Orson Welles, Claudel. It doesn’t pretend to be a work of art but an ethico-political exercise. So in the middle of the play — the big confrontation between Antigone and Creon — the three version diverge: (1) The first version follows Sophocles’ denouement, and the concluding chorus praises Antigone’s unconditional insistence on her principle — fiat justitia, et pereat mundus … (2) The second version shows what would have happened if Antigone were to win, convincing Creon to allow the proper burial of Polyneices; i.e., if her principled attitude were to prevail, citizens cannot accept the burial of the traitor Polyneices, they rebel, and the whole city is in flames. In this version, the concluding chorus sings a Brechtian praise of pragmatism: the ruling class can afford to obey honor and rigid principles, while ordinary people pay the price for it. (3) In the third version, the chorus is no longer the purveyor of stupid commonplace wisdoms, it becomes an active agent. At the climactic moment of the ferocious debate between Antigone and Creon, the chorus steps forward, castigating both of them for their stupid conflict, which threatens the survival of the entire city. Acting like a kind of comité de salut public, the chorus takes over as a collective organ and imposes a new rule of law, installing people’s democracy in Thebes. Creon is deposed, both Creon and Antigone are arrested, put to trial, swiftly condemned to death and liquidated.

Where do you stand with regard to these three ethical choices? It appears that you are getting softer, politically, at least. From advocating revolution and even dictatorship of the proletariat, in your various statements you are now dreaming about a "nicely alienated society" …

If anything, I am harder than ever. If anything, I am now even more pessimist and radical than I was, so my preference is still the third choice. I think there is a whole series of antagonisms and dangers — ecology, biogenetics, intellectual property … — which cannot be dealt with within the confines of liberal-democratic capitalism. On the other hand, I am well aware that the 20th-century solutions (state socialism, social-democratic welfare state, local direct democracy) no longer really work. So what are we to do?

How do you combine this with your proclaimed fidelity to European legacy of emancipation?

In his Notes Towards a Definition of Culture, the great conservative T.S. Eliot remarked that there are moments when the only choice is the one between sectarianism and non-belief, when the only way to keep a religion alive is to perform a sectarian split from its main corpse. This is our only chance today: only by means of a “sectarian split” from the decaying corpse of the old Europe can we keep the European legacy of what Étienne Balibar calls egaliberte alive. To put it bluntly, if the emerging New World Order is the non-negotiable destiny for all of us, then Europe is lost, so the only solution for Europe is to take the risk and break this spell of our destiny. Today, more than ever, fidelity to the emancipatory core of the European legacy is needed. The lesson that the frightened liberals should learn is this: only a more radicalized Left can save what is worth saving in the liberal legacy today.

I know what you mean, but when I am hearing about the radical Left, I see guys who use to confuse politics with morality and by excluding any compromises, resign from any influence. Don’t you think that we need heretics rather than sectarians?

I do not think that the choice between sectarian moralistic purism and pragmatic spirit of compromises is a true choice. The choice is: do we remain within the Fukuyama coordinates of liberal-democratic capitalism and just try to make it more tolerable, so that, instead of the old utopia of socialism with a human face, we work for a global capitalism with a human face, or do we accept that the antagonisms we are facing today cannot be dealt with within the Fukuyamaist frame?

Furthermore, I think that the established politics today tends to confuse politics with ruthless amorality and principle-less opportunism — whenever I hear words like “democracy” and “human rights” in our media, I instantly get nausea.

All the rising economic powers, represented by BRICS, are very strong states, which carefully control their economies. The very fact that these states are not dependent on the market sounds promising, however not necessarily for democracy. Yes, it is still capitalism that we are talking about, but you cannot claim that it is the same one Fukuyama was thinking about.

The lesson of the post-9/11 era is the end of the Fukuyama dream of global liberal democracy, but at the level of economy, capitalism has triumphed worldwide — the Third World nations that endorsed it are those which are now growing at spectacular rates. The mask of cultural diversity is sustained by the actual universalism of the global capital. And this new global capitalism functions even better if its political supplement relies on so-called “Asian values.” Global capitalism has no problem accommodating itself to a plurality of local religions, cultures, traditions — so the cruel irony of anti-Eurocentrism is that, on behalf of anti-colonialism, one criticizes the West at the very historical moment when global capitalism no longer need Western cultural values in order to function smoothly, when it is doing quite well with authoritarian “alternate modernity” — in short, one tends to declaim against Western cultural values at the very moment when, critically reinterpreted, many of them (egalitarianism, fundamental rights, welfare-state) can serve as a weapon against capitalist globalization.

Do you include democracy among the European legacy that should be preserved?

It depends on what we mean by this much-abused term — here I am a Leninist: it is always the question of a “concrete analysis of concrete circumstances.” I think that TISA and other agreements are perfect indicators of where we stand with regard to democracy. The key decisions concerning our economy are negotiated and enforced in secrecy, out of our sight, with no public debate, and they set the coordinates for the unencumbered rule of capital. In this way, the space for decisions of the democratically elected political agents is severely limited, and the political process deals predominantly with issues towards which capital is indifferent (like cultural wars).

But most of us living in liberal democracies still understand ourselves as free citizens …

Here, again, one should repeat Lenin’s ominous question: “Freedom for whom? To do what?” Since, in our society, free choice is elevated into a supreme value, social control and domination can no longer appear as infringing on a subject’s freedom — it has to appear as (and be sustained by) the very self-experience of individuals as free. There is a multitude of forms of this un-freedom appearing in the guise of its opposite: when we are deprived of universal healthcare, we are told that we are given a new freedom of choice (to choose our healthcare provider); when we no longer can rely on a long-term employment and are compelled to search for a new precarious work every couple of years, we are told that we are given the opportunity to reinvent ourselves and discover new unexpected creative potential that lurked in our personality; when we have to pay for the education of our children, we are told that we become “entrepreneurs of the self,” acting like a capitalist who has to choose freely how he will invest the resources he possesses (or borrows). Constantly bombarded by imposed “free choices,” forced to make decisions for which we are not properly qualified (or don’t possess enough information about), we more and more experience our freedom as what it effectively is: a burden that deprives us of true choice.

Let’s be frank now: Do we really like to choose? Commodities in hypermarkets, TV channels, hotels, politicians, and so on.

The truth is very sad here. In big decisions where it truly matters, we don’t want really to choose, we want the appearance of choice, but we want simultaneously to be told what to choose. As for personal choices, let’s imagine a single mother with two small children — let’s call her Sophie. She wants the best for her children, but, lacking money, she has to make some hard choices: she can send only one of them to a good school, so which one will she choose? Should she organize a nice summer holiday for them, buy each of them a new PC, or should she rather provide better healthcare for them? Although her choice is not as tough and brutal as Sophie’s choice in the well-known William Styron novel, where Sophie has to choose one of her children to be saved from the gas chamber, it runs along the same lines and I would certainly prefer to live in a society which would deprive her of this freedom of choice.

Perhaps, this paradox also allows us to throw a new light on our obsession with the ongoing events in Ukraine, and even with the rise of ISIS in Iraq, both extensively covered by the media (in clear contrast to the predominant silence on TISA). What fascinates us in the West is not the fact that people in Kiev stood up for the mirage of the European way of life, but that they (as it seemed, at least) simply stood up and tried to take their fate into their hands. They acted as political agents enforcing a radical change — something that, as the TISA negotiations demonstrate, we in the West no longer have the choice to do.

This brings us to Ukraine — do you agree that much of the Western Left plays the sad role of Putin’s useful idiots?

As an old Leftist, I would first like to make a general observation apropos Ukraine. There was a deep irony in watching Ukrainians tearing down Lenin’s statues as a sign of their will to assert their national sovereignty: the golden era of Ukraine’s national identity was not the tsarist Russia (where Ukrainian self-assertion as a nation was thwarted), but the first decade of the Soviet Union when they established their full national identity.

Maybe good for their national identity, but one of the worst for their well-being. Actually, the best time for the rise of their national identity was under Austrian liberal rule before 1918. Ukrainians can be grateful to the Soviets only for the borders after 1945, which are now questioned by force.

The fact is that the opportunity of the Austrian rule was not used (only a minor part of the Ukrainians lived there), and the fact is that Ukrainians formed their national identity in the first decade of the Soviet rule, as an effect of the Soviet politics. In his last struggle against Stalin’s project for the centralized Soviet Union, Lenin again advocated the unconditional right of small nations to secede (in this case, Georgia was at stake), insisting on the full sovereignty of the national entities that composed the Soviet State — no wonder that, on September 27, 1922, in a letter to the members of the Politburo, Stalin openly accused Lenin of “national liberalism.” What Stalin did in the early 1930s was thus simply a return to the pre-revolutionary tsarist foreign and national policy (for example, as part of this turn, the Russian colonization of Siberia and Muslim Asia was no longer condemned as imperialist expansion, but was celebrated as the introduction of progressive modernization that set in motion the inertia of these traditional societies). And Putin’s foreign policy is a clear continuation of this tsarist-Stalinist line: after the Russian Revolution of 1917, according to Putin, it was the turn of the Bolsheviks to aggrieve Russia: “The Bolsheviks, for a number of reasons — may God judge them — added large sections of the historical South of Russia to the Republic of Ukraine. This was done with no consideration for the ethnic makeup of the population, and today these areas form the southeast of Ukraine.” No wonder we can see Stalin’s portraits again during military parades and public celebrations, while Lenin is obliterated; in a large opinion poll from a couple of years ago, Stalin was voted the third greatest Russian of all times, while Lenin was nowhere to be seen. Stalin is not celebrated as a Communist, but as a restorer of Russia’s greatness after Lenin’s anti-patriotic “deviation.” No wonder Putin recently used the term “Novorossiya (New Russia)” for the six southeastern counties of Ukraine, resuscitating a term out of use from 1917 …

So how would you answer the accusation, coming often from the Left, that Ukrainian politics is dominated by nationalists?

The Ukrainian nationalist Right — much more marginal than Marine Le Pen in France or Nigel Farage in UK, by the way — is part of what is going on today from the Balkans to Scandinavia, from the US to Israel, from central Africa to India: a new Dark Age is looming, with ethnic and religious passions exploding, and Enlightenment values receding. These passions were lurking in dark all the time, but what is new, now, is the outright shamelessness of their display. In the middle of 2013, two public protests were announced in Croatia, a country in deep economic crisis, with a high unemployment rate and a deep sense of despair among the population: trade unions tried to organize a rally in support of workers’ rights, while right wing nationalists started a protest movement against the use of cyrillic letters on public buildings in cities with a Serb minority. The first initiative brought to a big square in Zagreb a couple of hundred people, the second one succeeded in mobilizing hundreds of thousands, the same as with a fundamentalist movement against gay marriage. And it is crucial to see this ethical regression as the obverse of the explosive development of global capitalism — they are the two sides of the same coin.

The predominant political orientation in Ukraine is obviously sustained by the pro-European liberal-democratic capitalist dream. Do you have something good to say about the liberal-democratic capitalists?

Of course it’s good when a Left-liberal government does something — for example, the Lula government in Brazil radically reduced poverty. But there are limits to its maneuvering space — for example, what will the eventual Syriza-led government in Greece be able to do? To paraphrase President Bush, one should definitely not misunderestimate the destructive power of international capital, especially when it is combined with the sabotage of the corrupted and clientelist Greek state bureaucracy. In such conditions, can a new government effetively impose radical changes? The trap that lurks here is clearly perceptible in Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. For Piketty, capitalism has to be accepted as the only game in town, so the only feasible alternative is to allow the capitalist machinery to do its work in its proper sphere, and to impose egalitarian justice politically, by a democratic power which regulates economic system and enforces redistribution. Such a solution is utopian in the strictest sense of the term. Piketty is well aware that the model he proposes would only work if enforced globally, beyond the confines of nation-states (otherwise capital would flee to the states with lower taxes); such a global measure presupposes an already existing global power with the strength and authority to enforce it. However, such a global power is unimaginable within the confines of today’s global capitalism and the political mechanisms it implies — in short, if such a power were to exist, the basic problem would already have been resolved. Plus what further measures would the global imposition of high taxes proposed by Piketty necessitate? Of course the only way out of this vicious cycle is simply to cut the Gordian knot and act — there are never perfect conditions for an act, every act by definition comes too early, one has to begin somewhere, with a particular intervention, one just has to bear in mind the further complications that such an act will lead to. In other words, the true utopia is to imagine global capitalism as we know it today, still functioning the way it does, just with the added high tax rate proposed by Piketty,

So, back to Ukraine, in my books I repeatedly used the well-known joke from the last decade of the Soviet Union about Rabinovitch, a Jew who wants to emigrate. The bureaucrat at the emigration office asks him why, and Rabinovitch answers: “There are two reasons why. The first is that I’m afraid that in the Soviet Union the Communists will lose power, and the new power will put all the blame for the Communist crimes on us, Jews — there will again be anti-Jewish pogroms …” “But,” interrupts the bureaucrat, “this is pure nonsense, nothing can change in the Soviet Union, the power of the Communists will last forever!” “Well,” responds Rabinovitch calmly, “that’s my second reason.” We can easily imagine a similar exchange between a critical Ukrainian and a European Union financial administrator — the Ukrainian complains: “There are two reasons we are in a panic here in Ukraine. First, we are afraid that the EU will simply abandon us to the Russian pressure and let our economy collapse …” The EU administrator interrupts him: “But you can trust us, we will not abandon you, we will tightly control you and advise you what to do!” “Well,” responds the Ukrainian calmly, “that’s my second reason.” One cannot be sure what awaits Ukraine within the EU, beginning with austerity measures.

If Ukraine will end up as a mixture of ethnic fundamentalism and liberal capitalism, with oligarchs pulling the strings, it will be as European as Russia (or Hungary) is today. (And, incidentally, it would be crucial to also tell the full story of the conflict between different groups of oligarchs — the “pro-Russian” ones and the “pro-Western” ones — a conflict that forms the background of the big public events in Ukraine.) So yes, the Maidan protesters were heroes, but the true fight begins now, the fight for what the new Ukraine will be, and this fight will be much tougher than the fight against Putin’s intervention. A new and much more risky heroism will be needed here. The model of this heroism is found in those Russians who courageously oppose the nationalist passion of their own country and denounce it as a tool of those in power. What is needed today is the “crazy” gesture of rejecting the very terms of the conflict and proclaiming the basic solidarity of Ukrainians and Russians. One should begin by organizing events of fraternization across the imposed divisions, establishing shared organizational networks between the authentic emancipatory core of Ukrainian political agents and the Russian opposition to Putin’s regime. This may sound utopian, but it is only such “crazy” acts that can confer on the protests a true emancipatory dimension. Otherwise, we will get only a conflict of nationalist passions manipulated by oligarchs who lurk in the background. Such geopolitical games for the spheres of influence are of no interest whatsoever to the authentic emancipatory politics.

So, to mention some names that we find in headlines, it is crucial that we see how WikiLeaks (Assange, Manning, Snowden) and Pussy Riot are part of the same struggle. It made me very glad that the two Pussy Riot women, when they were recently in London, visited Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy and joined his Courage Foundation, the organization that aims to protect whistle-blowers. In this way, they wisely avoided the danger of being co-opted by the pro-American human rights defenders.

The conflict between Russia and Ukraine lately gave rise to the specter of World War III — do you take this fear seriously?

Yes, unfortunately. The present situation bears an uncanny resemblance to the situation around 1900 when the hegemony of the British empire was questioned by new rising powers, especially Germany, which wanted their piece of the colonial cake, and the Balkans was one of the places of their confrontation. Today, the role of the British empire is played by the US, the new rising superpowers are Russia and China, and our Balkans is the Middle East. It is the same old battle for geopolitical influence.

There is another unexpected parallel with the situation before the outbreak of the WWI: in the last months, media continuously warn us about the threat of the World War III. Titles like “The Russian Air Force’s Super Weapon: Beware the PAK-FA Stealth Fighter” or “Russia Is Ready for Shooting War, Will Likely Win Looming Nuclear Showdown with U.S.” abound; at least once a week Putin makes a statement seen as a provocation to the West, and a notable Western statesman or NATO figure warns against Russian imperialist ambitions; Russia expresses concerns about being contained by NATO, while Russia’s neighbors fear Russian invasion; etc. The very worried tone of these warnings seems to heighten the tension — exactly as in the decades before 1914. And in both cases, the same superstitious mechanism is at work: as if talking about it will prevent it from happening. We know about the danger, but we don’t believe it can really happen — and that’s why it can happen. That is to say, even if we don’t really believe it can happen, we are all getting ready for it …

What further complicates matters is that the competing new and old superpowers are joined by a third factor, the radicalized fundamentalist movements in the Third World which oppose all of them, but are prone to make strategic pacts with some of them. No wonder our predicament is getting more and more obscure: who is who in the ongoing conflicts? How to choose between Assad and ISIS in Syria? Between ISIS and Iran? Such obscurity — not to mention the rise of drones and other arms that promise a clean high-tech war without casualties (on our side) — gives a boost to military spending and makes the prospect of war more appealing.

How to stop our slide into this vortex?

The first step is to leave behind all the pseudo-rational talk about “strategic risks” that we have to assume, as well as the notion of historical time as the linear process of evolution where, at each moment, we have to choose between different options of action. We have to accept the threat as our fate: it is not just a question of avoiding risks and making the right choices within the global situation, the true threat resides in the situation in its entirety, in our “fate” — if we continue to “roll on” the way we do now, we are doomed, no matter how carefully we proceed. So the solution is not to be very careful and avoid risky acts — in acting like this, we fully participate in the logic that leads to catastrophe. The solution is to fully become aware of the explosive set of interconnections that makes the entire situation dangerous. Once we do this, we should embark on the long and difficult work of changing the coordinates of the entire situation. Nothing less will do.

Who will trigger such a movement? Do we need new leaders or heroes?

Yes, definitely. Not masters, just people who make us aware of our freedom. One of them is Marek Edelman, a Jewish-Polish political and social activist, who was the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Before World War II, he was active in the Leftist General Jewish Labour Bund (which opposed the Zionist project); during the World War II, he cofounded the Jewish Combat Organization, took part in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (becoming its leader after the death of Mordechai Anielewicz), and also in the citywide 1944 Warsaw Uprising. After the war, Edelman became a noted cardiologist; from the 1970s on, he collaborated with the Workers’ Defense Committee; as a member of Solidarity, he took part in the Polish Round Table Talks of 1989. While fighting anti-Semitism in Poland, Edelman was a lifelong anti-Zionist: in a 1985 interview, he said Zionism was a “lost cause” and he questioned Israel’s viability. Towards the end of his life, he publicly defended Palestinian resistance, claiming that the Jewish self-defense for which he had fought was in danger of crossing the line into oppression. In August 2002, he wrote an open letter to the Palestinian resistance leaders; though the letter criticized the Palestinian suicide attacks, its tone infuriated the Israeli government and press since it was written — to quote Paul Foot — “in a spirit of solidarity from a fellow resistance fighter, as a former leader of a Jewish uprising not dissimilar in desperation to the Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories.” Because of this, he never got any official Israeli recognition for his heroism; when Yitzhak Rabin visited Poland as PM and Edelman was in the delegation awaiting him at the Warsaw airport, he first refused to shake Edelman’s hand (the reason he gave was that he did not want to shake the hand of a Bundist). Edelman stands for a certain ethical stance which is rarely encountered today: he knew when to act (against Germans), when to make public statements (for Palestinians), when to get engaged in political activity (for Solidarity), and when just to be there. When his wife and children emigrated in the wake of the growing anti-Semitic campaign in 1968, he decided to stay in Poland, comparing himself to the stones of the ruined buildings at the site of the Auschwitz camp: “Someone had to stay here with all those who perished here, after all.” This says it all: what mattered was ultimately his bare and muted presence there, not his declarations — it was the awareness of Edelman’s presence, the bare fact of his “being there,” which set people free.

Is not Chelsea Manning a similar kind of hero? We often hear that today’s radical Left is unable to propose a feasible alternative. What Manning did simply was the alternative. To quote Gandhi, she was the change she wanted to see. For this, she risked everything, her life included. The very awareness of her, of her deeds, makes us free. But this freedom is a difficult freedom — it is also an obligation to follow in her steps.

Again, people will tell you that you are crazy comparing Edelman to Manning. I am sure that you are aware that by using all these provocative references, ranging from Lenin to Manning, your arguments lose a lot of importance. What kind of politics is this, if it is undercutting itself from the get go?

I do not see anything crazy in it. Edelman and Manning are for me two supreme cases of a true ethical stance. As for Lenin, I am fully aware that the time of Leninism has passed, and that the Stalinist nightmare did grow out of Lenin’s project. I just don’t want to be blackmailed into referring only to the established list of public heroes from Gandhi to Havel. If this means I am undercutting myself from the get go, so be it since this “get go” is today the get go of pragmatic, “realist” liberal politics, it doesn’t really interest me. The true task today is not to make the system better but to confront its limitations. The true utopia is not that of a radical revolutionary change, the true utopia is that, for us in the privileged countries, things can go on indefinitely the way they are now.

Slawomir Sierakowski is a Polish sociologist and political commentator.

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21. REVIEW: LABOVITZ ON DRAKE'S SLANDERING THE JEW: SEXUALITY AND DIFFERENCE IN EARLY CHRISTIAN TEXTS
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(H-Net - Reviews)

 Susanna Drake. Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. 184 pp. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8122-4520-2.

Reviewed by Gail Labovitz (American Jewish University 15)
Published on H-Judaic (February, 2015)
Commissioned by Matthew A. Kraus

According to the Flesh: Sexual Slander as a Tool of Early Christian Anti-Jewish Rhetoric

Two decades ago, Daniel Boyarin took the title of his book Carnal Israel from Augustine’s Tractate Against the Jews, where in the course of interpreting 1 Corinthians 10:18 (“Behold Israel according to the flesh”), Augustine describes the Jewish people as “indisputably carnal.” Stating at the outset that “Augustine knew what he was talking about,” Boyarin therefore announced his intent to “assert the essential descriptive accuracy of the recurring Patristic notion that what divides Christians from rabbinic Jews is the discourse of the body, and especially sexuality.”[1] In this new book, however, Susanna Drake returns to the rhetoric itself. Although she cites Augustine, and Boyarin’s interpretation of his words, as “the initial provocation for the present study” (p. 112, n. 8), her concerns are not the accuracy, but the intent and implications of such accusations made by Christian writers against Jews in late antiquity: what did it mean not only for Augustine, but for a number of early Christian writers--and those for whom they wrote--to accuse Jews of carnality? Her questions are: How did the figure of the “carnal Jew” come to function as a topos of early Christian literature? When did this topos first appear, and what purposes did it serve? How did the stereotype of the carnal Jew serve Christian leaders as they forged the boundaries between orthodoxy and heresy, Christianity and Judaism? And what can the development of this topos tell us about ancient understandings of gender and sexuality (p. 2)? To this end, she examines “the sexualized representations of Jews in writings by Greek church fathers from the first through fifth centuries CE” (p. 2); the authors she focuses on are the unknown author of the Epistle of Barnabas, Justin Martyr, Origen, Hippolytus, and John Chrysostom.

The period in which these writers were active was one in which Christian leaders were seeking to establish the boundaries of the newly emerging religion: boundaries between Christian and pagan, between Christian and Jew, and between orthodox Christian and heretic.  Attributing negative sexual and gender stereotypes to one’s ideological opponents served (not only for Christians but for many groups in the world of late antiquity) as a common means, then, to separate and distinguish oneself from such others. It also played a role in constructing internal norms of ideal attitude, practices, and social norms (and as Drake notes as an aside, often still does; p. 3). Because Jews and Christians shared origins and sacred texts, the boundary between Judaism and Christianity could be especially troublesome, and was often linked to discourse over heresiology as well (that is, perceived, accused, and/or actual “Judaizing” among those who claim to be Christians becomes a signifier of heresy). Sexual slander thus spoke to early Christians not just about who Jews were, but also how Jews read and (mis)interpreted sacred scripture, interacted with Christians, and threatened the purity of the Christian community. Among the particularly intriguing elements (for this reader, at least) of the materials that Drake surveys are that different authors, and even the same authors in different works, deploy gendered and sexualized imagery in multiple and not always compatible ways, with varying degrees of stability and effectiveness. Finally, as Christianity and imperial power became aligned at the end of this time period, such slander could further serve as rhetorical justification for coercion and violence against Jews and Jewish institutions.

Methodologically, Drake’s touchstones are works of postcolonialism (Homi Bhaba, Judith Butler) and (religious) cultural studies (Daniel Boyarin, Virginia Burrus), in which identities (such as Christian or Jew, orthodox or heretic, male or female) are recognized as socially constructed categories, constantly influenced by and reacting to forces and circumstances both external and internal in a complex web of power relations. Boundaries are typically less impermeable than some would wish, and “hybridity” threatens “purity.” Particularly influential here is Homi Bhaba’s analysis of the stereotype as a means to fix the identity of the colonized as “Other” and distinct from--typically meaning also inferior to--the identity of the colonizer, and thus to justify domination and colonization and to discourage undue mixing. Sex and sexuality, then, become a prime realm of metaphor for the simultaneous desirability of the Other and the threat of the “mongrel” who both results from and abets the process of blurring of boundaries between categories.

Because several later writers invoke Paul as part of their rhetoric, Drake begins in chapter 1 with an examination of the image of “Israel according to the flesh” and the deployment of sexual slander in the New Testament works attributed to Paul. The two are not directly connected at this point. While Christians are to be distinguished in their practices of chastity (or even celibacy), self-mastery, and shunning of porneia, the sexual Other for Paul is not the Jews, but idolatrous gentiles. In this, Paul draws on and develops similar trends in earlier and contemporaneous Jewish discourse regarding gentiles. Only once, Drake notes, does Paul attribute sexual sin (adultery, in Rom. 2:22) to a Jew, and in context the concern is as much hypocrisy (preaching against a variety sins while committing them oneself) as the particular sin itself (p. 24; also 28). “Israel according to the flesh” (and similar expressions), meanwhile, is bound up in the duality of “flesh” and “spirit,” and Paul’s privileging of the latter over the former for Christians and the Christian community. “Flesh,” however, has multiple and not always consistent associations for Paul, some more morally neutral than others. It may be associated with unruly, sinful physical desires including but not limited to the sexual, but also with the this-worldly sphere: procreation, kinship, and ethnic particularity; observance of the law as religious practice; and literalism in hermeneutics while missing the inner spiritual and allegorical meaning of scripture. Thus when second-century Christian writers begin to turn sexual slander against Jews, as in the Epistle of Barnabas and Justin Martyr’s Dialogue With Trypho, they at first do so “[a]part from Paul and in contradistinction from him” (p. 19). Both do, however, associate Jewish literalism with Jewish sexuality, and with particularly Jewish “lusts of the flesh.” As Drake writes of Justin Martyr, “[h]is argument depends on a tautology … : Jewish misunderstanding of scripture is rooted in Jewish lust; simultaneously, Jewish lust is rooted in and authorized by Jewish (mis)understanding of scripture” (p. 33).

These ideas and images carry over into the works of Origen, who was active in the third century and whose work is the subject of chapter 2. Many of Origen’s writings were composed in Caesarea in Roman Palestine, a city of cosmopolitan reputation and diverse population at the time, and thus the dangers of hybridity and Judaizing among Christians also emerge as a critical theme in his homilies and commentaries. The particular importance of Origen’s works in the history of Christian sexual slander against Jews, however, Drake argues, is his turn to and reinterpretation of Paul to further this discourse. The distinction between flesh and spirit that functioned in Pauline literature as a boundary between an old way of (Jewish) life prior to Christ and a new “life of the Spirit” open to believers of all ethnic origins alike (as well as a series of other dichotomies attributed to Paul), is mapped in Origen’s thought onto an essentialist difference between “Jew” and “Christian”--a difference that is “both interpretive and embodied” (p. 49). The “interpretive” and the “embodied” are further connected in that one supports the other: the truest spiritual interpretation of scripture can only come from the subjugation of the flesh to the spirit in the bodily discipline of the (Christian) interpreter, while (Jewish) fleshiness and indulgence in desires of the flesh on the one hand, and literalist hermeneutics on the other, are mutually reinforcing “adulterous” (in the multiple meanings of the word) practices. And in one final turn, these dichotomies are gendered, such that Christian spirituality is rational, self-controlled, and masculine, but Jewish fleshiness is uncontrolled, carnal, and feminine. It should be noted that Drake makes an unusual, or at least insufficiently explained, choice in this chapter (and also in the next) to present the representative texts--and hence the development of Origen’s thought--out of chronological order. Instead, her intent appears to be to first establish the rhetorical matrix of Jewishness, fleshiness, and literalism (in both interpretation and practice) in Origen’s writings, and then to discuss the ways in which Origen re/misreads Paul (and works attributed to Paul) “to depict Paul as the original and legitimating source for his representation of Jewish literalism and Jewish carnality” (p. 49).

Origen also figures in chapter 3, along with the early third-century Roman theologian Hippolytus (and several other writers, briefly), as Drake analyzes their commentaries to the story of Susanna and the elders, one of the Greek additions to the book of Daniel. In contrast to the deployment of gendered rhetoric discussed in the previous chapter, in which Christian chastity and Christian spiritual exegesis are associated with masculine self-discipline, in this case it is the vulnerable woman (Susanna) who is linked with chaste Christians subject to the predations of sexually aggressive male antagonists, Jewish and/or gentile; the story becomes (among other things) an allegorical prefiguration of the persecution of the early church and even Christian martyrdom at the hands of religious and imperial oppressors. Origen, more so than Hippolytus, focuses on Jews as the villains of the tale. Moroever, he “collapses the difference between the sexually corruptive elders in the Susanna story and the textually corruptive elders of his own day” (p. 69), once again drawing links between sexuality and exegetical practices. The Christian exegete in Origen’s model is trapped, as Susanna is between submitting to the elders or being falsely accused of adultery: “either he submits to the Jews and follows the literal sense of the law, or he follows the spirit of the law and is persecuted by the Jews on account of it” (pp. 71-72). Drake concludes the chapter with a quick survey of other Christian writers of the second through fourth centuries who presented Susanna as a model of piety and chastity for Christians and particularly Christian women, but did not focus on role of the elders, or hold them out as examples of opponents of the church.

A similar trope appears in Adversus Iudaeos, the sermons of John Chrysostom, which are the subject of chapter 4. While others have approached the sermons with an eye to the historical and social realities that might underlie and be reflected in Chrysostom’s rhetoric, Drake’s interest is in the sermons as a means of constructing reality: “identities, differences, communities, and boundaries in late fourth-century Antioch” (p. 79). In this case it is heretical and Judaizing (these being overlapping categories) elements in the Christian community who are cast as (sexual) aggressors (sometimes quite literally; in the first sermon, Chrysostom relates an episode in which he himself rescued a faithful Christian woman from a “Christian” man attempting to force her into a synagogue to take an oath); Jews themselves are deviant and threatening in other ways as well. Among the metaphors and images that Chrysostom musters, Jews are demonic, a disease, animalistic (Chrysostom especially invokes animals associated with brutish and overtly sexual behavior), prone to drunkenness and gluttony, sexually unrestrained, gender-deviant. The synagogue is like a theater--a site “disruptive of social hierarchies and ‘natural’ order” (p. 86)--and full of “soft” men (malakoi) and whorish women (pornai). Bestial Jewish bodies are indeed fit for suffering, violence, and even slaughter--or as Drake cleverly puts it, not only carnal but to be “treated as carne” (p. 93). Drake thus concludes with a brief discussion of the deployment of rhetoric such as Chrysostom’s in the fourth and fifth centuries to sanction legal discrimination against Jews and Jewish practice in imperial legislation, and actual violence against Jews even when nominally opposed by imperial authorities. The import of these discursive topoi is that rhetorical and physical aggression “were not merely coincidental”: “Early Christian leaders’ recourse to sexual and gendered invective … helped create the conditions for programs of dehumanization and violence” (p. 103).

The actual text of this book is not long--105 pages of text and just over 30 more of notes--and is hence quite dense, in the most positive sense of that word. There is a risk of missing the complexity of the discourse(s) Drake is examining and of her explication of her materials in an overly quick read. But for the careful and conscientious reader, there is much to be learned from this book.

Note

[1]. Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 1, 2.



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