The uncivilised state

Examine carefully the history of any state and one is soon waist-deep in blood. Consider just the permanent members of the Security Council: China, France, Russia, the UK and the US. Or the two most recent states — East Timor, and, since February 17 2008, Kosovo?

Consider five centuries of colonialism. Five centuries! Consider Auschwitz. Consider Hiroshima. If one is unsentimental about it, the only conclusion is: states don’t just protect us from a Hobbesian barbarism, they are also its most symptomatic manifestation.

In this regard, Ronald Reagan knew exactly what he was talking about when he welcomed Afghan mujahedin to the White House in 1985, referring to them as “the moral equivalent of America’s founding fathers” (America, of course, is an age-old authority in this matter because its “manifest destiny” has been to make other states’ business its own).

Nowhere is this barbarism more symbolically pertinent, however, than in the tragic Semitic struggles over Israel, where both parties have felt compelled by their respective victimisation to aspire to, and imitate, their oppressor’s colonial and racist national forms. As the philosopher Slavoj Zizek points out in his recent reflections on “violence”:

“But what if what disturbs me [about Israel] is precisely that I find myself in a state which hasn’t yet obliterated the ‘founding violence’ of its ‘illegitimate’ origins, repressed them into a timeless past …”

Because Israel hasn’t succeeded in doing this in same uncontested way as, say, Britain or China, it cannot hide its violence as an extension of the bureaucratic, legal and technological rationality that is the ruse of the civilised barbarian. If it had, then the issue of Palestine might today have gone the way of, say, Diego Garcia or Tibet. But as we who grew up under apartheid know, no one believes a pariah state when it claims to be acting in the interests of national security or merely enforcing the law. (If you are questioning Israel’s designation as such, take into account the de facto regular condemnation of that country by the UN General Assembly.)

Remember this dilemma when you next hear a spokesperson for the Israeli defence force desperately trying to sound perfectly reasonable. Remember also the hypocrisy in the fact that once a state has been liberated from being a pariah, then what previously would have been considered grounds for outrage goes unnoticed and unremarked upon. Remember also the impunity of the powerful.

A couple of centuries ago, Israel would have got away with all the primordial savagery. But today, with our growing but still undeveloped sense of global morality, there’s a sense that you can’t just go around demolishing people.

Although “regime change” and “spreading democracy” could suggest that it is indeed acceptable to some, we need also to remind ourselves of the massive dissent against it. Let us not forget, even though it was futile to prevent the deaths of, currently, more than a million people, that the biggest protest yet in Britain took to the streets in London to tell a deliberately deaf-as-a-post Tony Blair a million times over: “Not in my name.”

Such defeat is the stuff of progress, though. For, even though those banners and placards have long since been furled and put into storage, something’s changed, or rather changing, in relation to the state.

JM Coetzee in his Diary of a Bad Year describes how many people, disgusted by corrupt and venal administrations the world over but wary of the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde of revolutions, have voted with their feet and gone the way of “quietism, of willed obscurity, of inner emigration”.

While one shouldn’t confuse this trend towards disengagement with the “hollowing out of the state” so beloved of anarchist theory, it does speak, no matter how apathetic, of a great dissatisfaction with traditional political forms. It’s in effect another, albeit mute, “not in my name”.

Now, typically frowned on by activists for obvious reasons, its radical potential is never appreciated. For what it could be saying is this: we are firstly human beings with our own intimate concerns and, only a very, very distant second, citizens of a state.

Hurrah if that is so and if, despite enormous countervailing pressures, it miraculously grows to become self-conscious — for then, one day, what Zizek envisages as the most progressive political act in the Middle East might just come to pass: Arabs and Jews will embrace their diasporic existence and renounce any national control of Jerusalem, making this city an extra-state place. “A place for those with no place,” as Zizek puts it to remind us that we shouldn’t imagine a John Lennon-like world being as one. In an earlier essay he quotes instead the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze: “If you’re trapped in the dream of the other, vous êtez fotu — you’re fucked.”

No. This is a “place for those with no place” in the dreams and fantasies of others. This is place of discretion; a place to think; a place for that wonderful Yugoslav dissident Dubravaka Ugresic, who called nationalism “the ideology of the stupid”; a place to explore new forms; a place to reread George Monbiot’s Age of Consent and wonder how we are going to deal justly with the global magnitude of our shared environmental crisis; and a place for JM Coetzee’s pessimistic anarchistic quietists to leave their pessimism for better days.

Above all, it should be a place for that great comedian Bill Hicks to be reborn and remind us that what nationalism amounts to is no more than where our parents copulated!

If Jerusalem ever became that, then an area of a mere hundred or so square kilometers would become the political equivalent of that first photographic sighting of this blue planet from space.