Why fear the Arab revolutionary spirit?
The western liberal reaction to the
uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia frequently shows hypocrisy and cynicism
BY SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK
What cannot but strike the eye in the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt
is the conspicuous absence of Muslim fundamentalism. In the best
secular democratic tradition, people simply revolted against an
oppressive regime, its corruption and poverty and demanded freedom and
economic hope. The cynical wisdom of western liberals, according to
which, in Arab countries, genuine democratic sense is limited to
narrow liberal elites while the vast majority can only be mobilised
through religious fundamentalism or nationalism, has been proven
wrong. The big question is what will happen next? Who will emerge as
the political winner?
When a new provisional government was
nominated in Tunis, it excluded Islamists and the more radical left.
The reaction of smug liberals was: good, they are basically the same;
two totalitarian extremes – but are things as simple as that? Is the
true long-term antagonism not precisely between Islamists and the
left? Even if they are momentarily united against the regime, once
they approach victory, their unity splits, they engage in a deadly
fight, often more cruel than against the shared enemy. Did we not
witness precisely such a fight after the last elections in Iran? What
the hundreds of thousands of Mousavi supporters stood for was the
popular dream that sustained the Khomeini revolution: freedom and
justice. Even if this dream was utopian, it did lead to a breathtaking
explosion of political and social creativity, organisational
experiments and debates among students and ordinary people. This
genuine opening that unleashed unheard-of forces for social
transformation, a moment in which everything seemed possible, was then
gradually stifled through the takeover of political control by the
Islamist establishment.
Even in the case of clearly
fundamentalist movements, one should be careful not to miss the social
component. The Taliban is regularly presented as a fundamentalist
Islamist group enforcing its rule with terror. However, when, in the
spring of 2009, they 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 by “taking advantage” of the farmers’ plight the
Taliban are creating, in the words of The New York Times, “alarm about
the risks to Pakistan which remains largely feudal”, what prevented
liberal democrats in Pakistan and the US from similarly “taking
advantage” of this plight and trying to help the landless farmers? Is
it that the feudal forces in Pakistan are the natural ally of liberal
democracy?
The inevitable conclusion to be drawn is that the
rise of radical Islamism was always the other side of the
disappearance of the secular left in Muslim countries. When
Afghanistan is portrayed as the utmost Islamic fundamentalist country,
who still remembers that 40 years ago it was a country with a strong
secular tradition, including a powerful communist party that took
power there independently of the Soviet Union? Where did this secular
tradition go?
And it is crucial to read the ongoing events in
Tunisia and Egypt (and Yemen and… maybe, hopefully, even Saudi Arabia)
against this background. If the situation is eventually stabilised so
that the old regime survives but with some liberal cosmetic surgery,
this will generate an insurmountable fundamentalist backlash. In order
for the key liberal legacy to survive, liberals need the fraternal
help of the radical left. Back to Egypt, the most shameful and
dangerously opportunistic reaction was that of Tony Blair, as reported
on CNN: change is necessary but it should be a stable change. Stable
change in Egypt today can mean only a compromise with the Mubarak
forces by way of slightly enlarging the ruling circle. This is why to
talk about peaceful transition now is an obscenity: by squashing the
opposition Mubarak himself made this impossible. After Mubarak sent
the army against the protesters, the choice became clear: either a
cosmetic change in which something changes so that everything stays
the same, or a true break.
Here then is the moment of truth:
one cannot claim, as in the case of Algeria a decade ago, that
allowing truly free elections equals delivering power to Muslim
fundamentalists. Another liberal worry is that there is no organised
political power to take over if Mubarak goes. Of course there is not;
Mubarak took care of that by reducing all opposition to marginal
ornaments so that the result is like the title of the famous Agatha
Christie novel, And Then There Were None. The argument for Mubarak –
it’s either him or chaos – is an argument against him.
The
hypocrisy of western liberals is breathtaking: they publicly supported
democracy and now, when the people revolt against the tyrants on
behalf of secular freedom and justice, not on behalf of religion, they
are all deeply concerned. Why concern, why not joy that freedom is
given a chance? Today, more than ever, Mao Zedong’s old motto is
pertinent: “There is great chaos under heaven – the situation is
excellent.”
Where then should Mubarak go? Here the answer is
also clear: to The Hague. If there is a leader who deserves to sit
there, it is him.
(Slavoj Žižek, a Slovenian philosopher
and cultural critic, is international director of the Birkbeck
Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London. This
article was published on guardian.co.uk on February 1, 2011.)
Courtesy: guardian.co.uk
|
|