PROJECT OVERLOOK is an on line brainstorm conceived to elaborate a reply to the new permanent global war.

Since September 11th 2001 the worldwide socio-political – cultural and mediatic situation has been evolving drastically.

The answer to the terrorist masterpiece is the escalation of a new military and mediatic campaign that unifies war and entertainment in a new form of apocalyptic spectacle - a “wartertainment” that is spreading in a very totalitarian form.

Shocking and awing with an unprecedented global spectacular impact - one of the most strategic effects of this new “medialitary” thing is the disempowerment and obsolecence of any form of art - language or media code as we know it .

The project’s main goal is to map out this new frame, to unveil its apocalyptic nightmarish image and - moving beyond the actual artistic and mediatic forms – to design and realize events that contrast and dissolve the paralysing picture of the absolute war into which we are framed.

a brilliant piece about the wartertainment by SAMUEL WEBER ( Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities at
Northwestern University - author of The Legend of Freud (1982), Institution and Interpretation (1987), Return to Freud: Jacques Lacan's
Dislocation of Psychoanalysis (1991), and Mass Mediauras: Form,
Technics, Media (1996) etc etc:

SAMUEL WEBER

WAR – TERRORISM AND SPECTACLE
<<>>
[...] The notion of spectacle can, if we take the time to reflect a bit,
help us describe just what is distinctive about International Terrorism
being declared Public Enemy Number One. For in order for something to be
a spectacle, it must, quite simply, take place, which is to say, it must
be localizable. Whether inside, in a theater (of whatever kind), or
outside, in the open, a spectacle must be placed in order to be seen
(and heard). But the place, and taking-place of a spectacle is no
ordinary locality not at least in the way place has traditionally been
defined: namely, as a stable, self-contained container. For the stage or
scene of a spectacle is never fully self-contained. To function as a
stage or a scene, a place must itself take place in relation to another
place, the place of spectators or of an audience. The space of a theater
is divided into the space of the stage and that of the audience. This
makes the place and taking-place of a spectacle singularly difficult to
pin down, since, as Guy Debord put it, in his book The Society of the
Spectacle (1967): "the world the spectacle holds up to view is at once
here and elsewhere; it is the world of the commodity ruling over all
lived experience. The commodity world is thus shown as it really is, for
its logic is one with men's estrangement from one another and from. . .
what they produce."

[...] In the images of catastrophe that dominate broadcastmedia "news,"
the disunity is projected into the image itself, while the desired unity
is reserved for the spectator off-scene (and for the media itself as
global network). To support such identification and the binary
opposition on which its success depends, images must appear to be
clearly localizable, self-contained, and meaningful at the same time
that they englobe destruction, mutilation, and implosion. They must
contain and comprehend the catastrophes that thereby appear to be
intelligible in and of themselves, without requiring the spectator to
look elsewhere. The spectator thus can sustain the illusion of occupying
a stable and enduring position that allows one to "stay the same"
indefinitely. This is the moral of the story, whether it is called
"Enduring Freedom" or "Infinite Justice."

The War against Terrorism is thus conducted in the name of enduring
freedom as the freedom to remain the same, to keep one's place
indefinitely. This is also the message of infinite justice: to remain
indefinitely the same is to pursue the enemy relentlessly, without end,
until he is cornered in his innermost redoubts and destroyed. The
trajectory that leads from the Twin Towers to the caves of Tora Bora
marks the will to power as a will to endure. This is the not-so-hidden
religious subtext of the ostensibly secular War against Terrorism, which
is above all a defense and an affirmation of "globalization" as the
right to rule the earth. To rule the planet, one must survive. But to
survive, one must rule. Western television (and often print) media
appeal to their viewers by promising them the continued rule of such
survival. "Stay with us: we'll be right back after the break." Stay with
us and survive; leave us and perish. The spectacle of the Twin Towers
imploding a phallic fate if there ever was one and of a portion of the
Pentagon in ruins, broadcast in "real time," had two effects. On the one
hand, it heightened the anxiety of the "break" on which the appeal of
consumption is based. Consumer confidence was shattered, at least
temporarily, and after a period of mourning, the official discourse had
to urge all citizens not, as one might have expected, to "get back to
work," but to "get back to consuming," and start spending again. The
promise of immortality was broken, for the time being at least. Since
precisely such traumatic breaks are at the origin of the compulsion to
consume, the basic structure and process was not fundamentally altered
as long as the putative cause of such anxiety could be located in an
image, confined to a site, a stage or, rather, relegated to multiple
sites and stages, but in succession, one after the other. This is the
end of the military response to terrorism: it must be named (al-Qaeda),
given a face (Osama bin Laden), and then above all located (Afghanistan,
Tora Bora, Sudan, Somalia, etc.) in order then to be depicted, if
possible, and destroyed.

[...] On the other hand, when terrorism is defined as "international,"
it becomes more difficult to locate, situate, personify, and identify
or, rather, it can only be located in sequence, one site after the
other, not all at once. From this point on, the War against Terrorism
becomes a scenario that unfolds step-by-step, yet intrinsically without
end in its effort to bring the global enemy to "infinite justice."
Almost from the beginning of this "war," the Bush administration
asserted that the enemy was "international" in character, neither
limited to one person, however important, nor to one state, however
nefarious. Thus, the War against Terrorism, unlike the cold war, cannot
be defined primarily as a war against a single state, the Soviet Union,
or against its international emanation, the "Communist Conspiracy." It
is not even a war against a single terrorist organization, however
decentralized, such as al-Qaeda. International Terrorism englobes all
the "rogue" states that for years have been designated by the U.S. State
Department as aiding and abetting terrorism: Iraq, North Korea, Sudan,
Syria, and so on. What characterizes this policy is its continuing
effort to tie terrorist networks to nation-states. This identification
both supplies and supplants any discussion of other possible "causes,"
conditions, or ramifications. In this view, all of these can be located
in the pathological behavior of individual "rogue" states, whose
roguishness consists in their refusal to follow the norms of
international behavior as laid down by the United States government. (In
passing, it should be noted that the political use of the word rogue has
an interesting history. The first time I became aware of the word was in
relation to the assassination of President Kennedy, when it was used by
investigators though certainly not by the government to describe
elements of the government ["rogue" elements of the "intelligence"
services or military] that might have acted secretly, outside the
official chain of command. Later the term was used to designate states
that did not comply with American expectations of proper political
behavior, such as Libya, Cuba, North Korea, Iraq, and the like. In
short, from a term designating the disunity of "official" state
organizations, it became a designator of abnormal political-state
behavior, a symptomatic development, to say the least.) In conclusion,
the spectacle, at least as staged by the mainstream broadcast media,
seeks simultaneously to assuage and exacerbate anxieties of all sorts by
providing images on which anxieties can be projected, ostensibly
comprehended, and above all removed. Schematically, the fear of death is
encouraged to project itself onto the vulnerability of the other which
as enemy is the other to be liquidated or subjugated. The viewer is
encouraged to look forward and simultaneously forget the past;
encouraged to identify with the ostensibly invulnerable perspective of
the camera registering the earthbound destruction as blips tens of
thousand of feet below. Such a position seems to assure the triumph of
the spectator over the mortality of earthbound life.

The trails of the B-52s in the stratosphere high above the earth
announce the Demise of the Caves and the Second Coming of the Towers.
And with these Good Tidings, the first global spectacle of the
twenty-first century appears to approach a Happy Ending, at least on our
television screens. Yet it leaves a gnawing suspicion: that if the
spectacle seems to be drawing to a close, for the time being at least,
the scenario itself is far from over.

I receive and post this article wrtitten by Reed Johnson – staff writer of the Los Angeles Times appeared on the nwsp edition of the April 20th:



War in all its awful beauty

Can anything that causes so much death and destruction also be exquisite? Ask an artist or a poet.


By Reed Johnson,

War, we all know, is hell. But war is also beautiful. It is the savage lyricism of "The Iliad," the epic sweep and microscopic precision of a Bruegel battle scene, the solemn symmetry of a photograph, published in Life magazine in September 1943, of three soldiers lying dead on a New Guinea beach, their dark bodies pressing into the light sand.

Look again at some of the imagery spewing from America's war with Iraq. On our TV screens, chiaroscuro clouds of smoke and sand drift to engulf palm trees, minarets, people. In newspaper pages, shafts of light from exploding missiles pierce the desert night, recalling Walter de Maria's wondrous outdoor sculpture "The Lightning Field." A British soldier's reflection in a pool of leaking oil shimmers and blurs.

In the split-second it takes for the eye to absorb them, momentarily removed from their grim context, these images are ravishing, exhilarating, uncanny. Beautiful.

"War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages," wrote Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944).

The author of those feverish sentiments was an Italian poet, dramatist and intellectual snake-oil salesman who is credited with inventing the short-lived art movement known as Futurism. When Marinetti set down the principles of the movement in a 1920s manifesto, he exalted war as if it were a magnificent orchestral score composed for bullets, flames and blood, launching an aesthetic that later served the bellicose Italian dictator and Hitler henchman Benito Mussolini. But over the years, saner minds have echoed the idea that war can produce gorgeous images and striking effects that furnish the raw material for sublime works of art -- a subtle yet crucial difference from Marinetti's rabid notion that war itself can be a form of art.

To anyone who has experienced war's ravages firsthand, that idea may sound naive, grotesque, even absurd. Yet over centuries of human brutality, the aesthetic has seldom been at odds with the horrific. Leonardo da Vinci, painter of delicate saints and serene landscapes, stuffed his notebooks with sketches of furious men at arms and fiendishly clever fighting machines. In the 1860s, Mathew Brady shocked the New York public by exhibiting gruesome photographs of Civil War dead. "Here are the dreadful details!" an accompanying text declared. "Let them aid in preventing such another calamity from falling upon the nation." Only later was it revealed that Brady and his collaborators had repositioned some slain soldiers for dramatic effect.

During the last months of World War II, Japanese warlords persuaded thousands of college-educated student-soldiers to "die like beautiful falling cherry petals" in service to the emperor. This exquisite metaphor, deeply engrained in Japanese culture, was exploited by the warlords in one of the most effective fusions of ancient aesthetics and modern propaganda technique ever devised -- a fatal act of performance art.

Even overtly antiwar artworks like Brady's photographs, Goya's chilling series of aquatint prints, "Los Desastres de la Guerra" (The Disasters of War), and the Vietnam-as-tragic-farce movies of Oliver Stone, Francis Ford Coppola and Stanley Kubrick are as memorable for their dazzling imagery and high-art allusions, their stirring snatches of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyrie" and Barber's Adagio for Strings, as they are for their pacifist sentiments.

In his just-published memoir "Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles," Anthony Swofford observes that fighting men make no distinction between pro-war and antiwar movies once they get caught up in the intoxicating visuals. Another witness to the aftershocks of the 1991 Gulf War, German filmmaker Werner Herzog, captured the devastating destruction of Operation Desert Storm in his 1992 documentary, "Lessons of Darkness," which featured hallucinatory shots of burning oil rigs, ruined buildings and corpses submerged in sand dunes, all set to the music of Verdi, Wagner and Mahler. While the movie added up to a scorching indictment of war's waste, most reviewers raved about how beautiful it all looked.

Today, war is still reshaping our sense of the aesthetic, as for the past 1 1/2 years the world has been alternately repulsed and transfixed, saddened and mesmerized by the devastation unleashed on Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington and New York. For now, the immediacy of these images may make it impossible to view any of them as aesthetically charged objects. In time, however, it's likely that some will be regarded not just as journalistic documents, but also as artworks, and that they will in turn supply inspiration for those seeking to make art.


SONTAG'S VIEW

In her newly published book "Regarding the Pain of Others," writer and critic Susan Sontag, focusing on photography, asserts that "there is shame ... in looking at the close-up of a real horror. Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it.... The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be."

Because photography purports to capture real life, unadorned, its depictions of war are more problematic than those of other art forms. But as Sontag acknowledges, photographic images reflecting horrifying events can be beautiful on a purely formal and aesthetic level. Among the examples she cites are certain stunning images of the World Trade Center ruins. However, she writes, "the most people dared say was that the photographs were 'surreal,' a hectic euphemism behind which the disgraced notion of beauty cowered."

As Sontag observes, most thinking people feel guilty for deriving sensory pleasure from anything directly connected to the suffering of others. How can we suspend our ethical and moral judgment, even momentarily, and allow ourselves to be dazzled by those psychedelic strobes over Baghdad, those cataracts of tanks and troops rolling across blasted desert-scapes, those majestic towers in Lower Manhattan cascading like steel-and-glass tsunamis? How can we shut our ears and eyes to the screams and mangled bodies

behind those abstractions, just beyond the range of the camera lens?

And yet the impulse to aestheticize war is as old and possibly as instinctive as the urge toward war itself. Metaphorically, it's no accident that Beauty, in the person of Helen of Troy, was the cause of the decade-long battle between the Trojans and Greeks, a cultural touchstone of Western civilization. Centuries later, Freud mused about the symbiotic relationship between Eros, the heavenly personification of sexual love, beauty and desire, and Thanatos, the dark embodiment of the death wish.

Like the gods Mars and Venus, who were clandestine lovers in Greco-Roman mythology, war and beauty are deeply, almost pre-cognitively embedded together in the human psyche. Though reason and ethics may insist that nothing that causes death and destruction ever can be truly beautiful, the senses argue otherwise.

"The tracer rounds made lines of incandescent beauty, lovely arcing curves and slow S's and parabolas of light," wrote reporter Michael Kelly, who died two weeks ago covering the second U.S.-Iraq war, upon witnessing the bombing of Baghdad during the first U.S.-Iraq war.

Though the sensory overload of war wouldn't seem to call for any embellishment, it often tempts witnesses to go it one better. As Sontag notes in her book, Brady and his colleagues belong to a long list of photojournalists who doctored or staged some of the most famous battle images in history (including the raising of the U.S. flag at Iwo Jima). Two weeks ago, a photographer for The Times lost his job after using computer technology to combine parts of two digital images into one. "His explanation was that he wanted to improve the picture," Times managing editor Dean Baquet told the Washington Post. "It's heartbreaking. People believe that newspapers screw around with pictures for political reasons. In his case it was an aesthetic thing."

The aesthetic rules for Hollywood, of course, are different from those for journalists. Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski won deserved praise for the heart-racing realism he brought to the opening 25-minute D-day montage in Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan." But in his quest to bring the audience "as close to the soldiers as possible through the camera," Kaminski hit upon a form of "realism" that was, in fact, a brilliant act of stylization. "That's where the idea of kind of a hyper-reality came from, the idea of employing different camera speeds, creating this kind of staccato movement," he says.

Although Kaminski says it would be wrong to describe an actual scene of human carnage as beautiful, he thinks the word can be applied, for example, to the Kuwaiti oil fires of Operation Desert Storm. And he's a connoisseur of the visually sensual in movies like "Apocalypse Now" and "The Thin Red Line."

"Beautifully, beautifully done movie," Kaminski say of the latter, "the sweeping camera through the grass revealing crawling soldiers, or hundreds and hundreds of Japanese soldiers burning alive and their uniforms smoldering. There's some beauty in it, you know? It's a totally different, poetic look at the events, philosophical and poetic."

Max Ryynänen, an art critic and vice president of ROR Gallery in Helsinki, Finland, agrees with the great philosophers who argued that ethics could not be separated from aesthetics. "Still, sometimes the phenomena we encounter may just seduce us to stress the ethical or the aesthetical," he said in an e-mail interview. "A Van Gogh strikes us aesthetically if we are into art. A beautiful sunrise strikes us aesthetically even if we are not into art -- you don't need background for it. A picture of an African child suffering because of hunger strikes us ethically, whatever intentions we have. I'd say the World Trade Center [attacks] had both effects on us Europeans, watching it all safely from a distance."

Even when terror and destruction strike close by, threatening our homes, our loved ones and our very lives, it may be hard to curb the impulse to grab a paintbrush, pick up a Leica, or wax rhapsodic in prose or verse. Like many artists and photographers in New York City when the hijacked planes hit the twin towers, Daniel Rothbart, an artist and writer, immediately grabbed his camera and began shooting the unfolding scene -- "which perhaps wasn't the most humane thing to do," he says. He saw careering police cars and firetrucks, long rows of identical TV news-truck satellite dishes arrayed along the West Side Highway, "almost like a forced perspective, looking backward," and a massive pedestrian exodus ahead of the onrushing plumes of ash.

"It was like this extraordinary ballet, this choreography, that had been realized through this intense study of the terrorists,"

says Rothbart, who lives with his wife (then his fiancée) in Manhattan's TriBeCa neighborhood, just a few blocks from the World Trade Center site. "You felt guilt and discomfort in appreciating that inner beauty. There's a conflict. There's something extraordinary in witnessing that building, and at the same there's guilt knowing people were trapped inside that building and were dying."

Rothbart says he didn't see himself "engaged in making art that day" but in "documenting history." He still hasn't done anything with the photos he took, and for a long time after the attacks he felt that he couldn't write or make art. "It was really a powerful feeling of impotence in the face of what happened, or irrelevance." He finally dealt with the subject months later in an essay for NY Arts magazine on the aesthetics of war, in which he cited Marinetti's quote and likened the collapse of the twin towers to the immolation of Valhalla in Wagner's opera "Götterdämmerung."

"The burning buildings held a primordial fascination for those who experienced them," he wrote. "However troubling it may be, this current of abstraction that allows us to see beauty in carnage exists within us all. Like a subterranean current in the human psyche it reveals itself in moments like the destruction of the World Trade Center, but is rarely acknowledged and almost never embraced."


COMPOSER'S WORDS

Karlheinz Stockhausen, the German avant-garde composer, was publicly chastised around the world for a kindred statement that he made about the Sept. 11 attacks. The terrorist strikes were, he said, "the greatest work of art imaginable.... Minds achieving something in an act that we couldn't even dream of in music, people rehearsing like mad for 10 years, preparing fanatically for a concert and then dying, just imagine what happened there. You have people who are that focused on a performance and then 5,000 people are dispatched into the afterlife, in a single moment. I couldn't do that. By comparison, we composers are nothing." Stockhausen later amended his remarks, saying he meant that only a Lucifer could have orchestrated the attacks.

Even the composer's most ardent fans might agree he was guilty, at a minimum, of gross insensitivity. But Raúl Zamudio, a New York art historian, independent curator and author of a magazine essay titled "Art & Violence: Poetry After Auschwitz, Art After 9/11," thinks Stockhausen's point may have been that "the spectacle of violence was so great that you could only have seen it through an artistic or formal lens." Perhaps Stockhausen had in mind Wagner's hypothetical concept of a gesamptkunstwerk, or "total artwork" synthesizing all forms of aesthetic expression.

A far less grandiose musical response to Sept. 11 succeeded beautifully for many listeners in transforming tragedy into art. Two weeks ago, American composer John Adams received the Pulitzer Prize in music for his 25-minute work "On the Transmigration of Souls." Commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, the piece incorporated adult and children's choruses as well as voice-over readings of victims' names and taped street sounds. Adams has said he envisioned the piece as a "memory space" where "you can be alone with your thoughts and emotions."

Which option then, for the artist, is more aesthetically and morally responsible when confronting a horrifying event such as war: to make the most thoughtful, deeply felt and expressive artwork one can, or to insist that no art should be made at all? Inadvertently, Stockhausen's notorious quote echoed a famous epigram coined by German philosopher Theodore Adorno and cited in the title of Zamudio's essay: "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." And yet poetry was written, plays were staged, movies were made, paintings were painted, music was performed after Auschwitz. Some of these works were even about Auschwitz.

Surely something more than mere prurient interest lies behind our compulsion to look and record, to contemplate even as we recoil, to marvel even as we mourn. One person's exploitation of tragedy, after all, can be another's attempt to understand, to make peace, to make amends. And as critic and journalist Henry Allen

wrote in a June 2000 article in the New Yorker, it's an irony worthy of Oscar Wilde that "we can worry about people being exploited with photography after they've been bombed, starved, exiled, mutilated and hacked to pieces with machetes."

Putting it another way, the mere act of staring or not staring at an image of war, of reading an elegy about a battle or listening to a piece of music inspired by thousands of lost lives, will do little one way or the other for the victims of those calamities. The preservation of their memory and the meaning of what they endured depends on what we do after we put down the poem about Auschwitz or Hiroshima, or the one about Baghdad or Basra yet to be written; after we exit the photo gallery and go home; after we emerge from the vicarious dreams of the movie house and step into the light of day.

"Let the atrocious images haunt us," Sontag writes in her book. "Even if they are only tokens, and cannot possibly encompass most of the reality to which they refer, they still perform a vital function. The images say: This is what human beings are capable of doing -- may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don't forget."

Or be prepared, in another time and place, for another terrible beauty to be born.

The following article written by Brian Eno (appeared on the Time Magazine edition of January 2003) well synthesizes the deep feeling that generates the core question of this on line brainstorm:

The U.S. Needs to Open Up to the World


By Brian Eno


Europeans have always looked at America with a mixture of fascination and puzzlement, and now, increasingly, disbelief. How is it that a country that prides itself on its economic success could have so many very poor people? How is it that a country so insistent on the rule of law should seek to exempt itself from international agreements? And how is it that the world's beacon of democracy can have elections dominated by wealthy special interest groups? For me, the question has become: "How can a country that has produced so much cultural and economic wealth act so dumb?"
I could fill this page with the names of Americans who have influenced, entertained and educated me. They represent what I admire about America: a vigorous originality of thought, and a confidence that things can be changed for the better. That was the America I lived in and enjoyed from 1978 until 1983. That America was an act of faith — the faith that "otherness" was not threatening but nourishing, the faith that there could be a country big enough in spirit to welcome and nurture all the diversity the world could throw at it. But since Sept. 11, that vision has been eclipsed by a suspicious, introverted America, a country-sized version of that peculiarly American form of ghetto: the gated community. A gated community is defensive. Designed to keep the "others" out, it dissolves the rich web of society into a random clustering of disconnected individuals. It turns paranoia and isolation into a lifestyle.
Surely this isn't the America that anyone dreamed of; it's a last resort, nobody's choice. It's especially ironic since so much of the best new thinking about society, economics, politics and philosophy in the last century came from America. Unhampered by the snobbery and exclusivity of much European thought, American thinkers vaulted forward — courageous, innovative and determined to talk in a public language. But, unfortunately, over the same period, the mass media vaulted backward, thriving on increasingly simple stories and trivializing news into something indistinguishable from entertainment. As a result, a wealth of original and subtle thought — America's real wealth — is squandered.
This narrowing of the American mind is exacerbated by the withdrawal of the left from active politics. Virtually ignored by the media, the left has further marginalized itself by a retreat into introspective cultural criticism. It seems content to do yoga and gender studies, leaving the fundamentalist Christian right and the multinationals to do the politics. The separation of church and state seems to be breaking down too. Political discourse is now dominated by moralizing, like George W. Bush's promotion of American "family values" abroad, and dissent is unpatriotic. "You're either with us or against us" is the kind of cant you'd expect from a zealous mullah, not an American President.
When Europeans make such criticisms, Americans assume we're envious. "They want what we've got," the thinking goes, "and if they can't get it, they're going to stop us from having it." But does everyone want what America has? Well, we like some of it but could do without the rest: among the highest rates of violent crime, economic inequality, functional illiteracy, incarceration and drug use in the developed world. President Bush recently declared that the U.S. was "the single surviving model of human progress." Maybe some Americans think this self-evident, but the rest of us see it as a clumsy arrogance born of ignorance.
Europeans tend to regard free national health services, unemployment benefits, social housing and so on as pretty good models of human progress. We think it's important — civilized, in fact — to help people who fall through society's cracks. This isn't just altruism, but an understanding that having too many losers in society hurts everyone. It's better for everybody to have a stake in society than to have a resentful underclass bent on wrecking things. To many Americans, this sounds like socialism, big government, the nanny state. But so what? The result is: Europe has less gun crime and homicide, less poverty and arguably a higher quality of life than the U.S., which makes a lot of us wonder why America doesn't want some of what we've got.
Too often, the U.S. presents the "American way" as the only way, insisting on its kind of free-market Darwinism as the only acceptable "model of human progress." But isn't civilization what happens when people stop behaving as if they're trapped in a ruthless Darwinian struggle and start thinking about communities and shared futures? America as a gated community won't work, because not even the world's sole superpower can build walls high enough to shield itself from the intertwined realities of the 21st century. There's a better form of security: reconnect with the rest of the world, don't shut it out; stop making enemies and start making friends. Perhaps it's asking a lot to expect America to act differently from all the other empires in history, but wasn't that the original idea?

A cut-up from a conversation with the french philosopher PAUL VIRILIO (author of the book “The informational Bomb” and curator of the exhibition CE QUI ARRIVE) :


A CONVERSATION WITH PAUL VIRILIO


TB: And this so-called crisis in contemporary art which you talk about…


Paul Virilio: I won’t say any more about it. The question doesn’t lie there at the moment. On this subject you should read my essay “La procedure silence” published in 1999.


TB: What do you think of the increasing of “apocalyptic exhibitions”?


Paul Virilio: It is because we are on the brink of a significant moment. The party of the end is already here, the ecological party, which has formed around the possibility of the end, through pollution, through various floods, the greenhouse effect, etc. Now, the gravity of industrial accidents renders the appearance of an eschatological party possible, a party of the end. This raises major philosophical questions. Nazism was an eschatological party, which brought about absolute war.

This eschatological question is coming up once more, in the form of terrorism. Technology contains an eschatological dimension within its power, its force, its qualitative success. So philosophers, thinkers, are comparatively engaged with this end, ecology or eschatology. There is therefore a responsibility within expressive media that doesn’t only involve painters, film or video directors, but the whole world.

And the exhibition is a possible way to start. Camus said, “I am not a philosopher, I am an artist”; he declined his role as philosopher while he was actually being one. But the question was already one regarding the medium of expression. Camus used to say: “The 18th century was the century of mathematics, the 19th that of biology, the 20th that of fear.” And he added, “Of course, I could answer myself by saying that fear is not a science, but it is a technique.”

There is an emulation of the expressionism of terror, which I totally refuse to accept. It touches on very serious things. When Stockhausen calls the New York attacks “the greatest work of art ever made,” it is a very serious matter indeed! In an epoch of media coverage there is a model of the aesthetic of terror, which is dangerous. One is facing something very serious and I really think that one should not mix the crisis in contemporary art with the ethical crisis of politics.

This is the letter that PETER SELLARS wrote a couple of weeks ago to the direction of La Biennale di Venezia - of which he is the director of the Theatre Section.
These lines shows the in-depth face of one of the most important contemporary artists – that we really want as P.O. contributor.

Here is the paper:


PETER SELLARS to LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA

Dear dignitaries, officials, members of the board of directors, members of the press, staff and friends of the Biennale di Venezia:

I am sorry that I cannot be with you this morning in person. I am honored to have been invited to curate the theater program for the 2003 Venice Biennale. I hope to present a program that is both modest and memorable in the spirit of these times of reduced budgets and increased expectations, with fewer resources and higher hopes.

We are gathered on the 15th day of the bombing of Baghdad in the third week of a new war. This war might become the first real "world war": a war of peoples, economies, technologies and belief systems. This is not just a war among nations, but a war of populations against their own governments, a war of economic policies and propaganda machines pitted against the great masses of humanity, and a war for spiritual and material self determination on a planet starved for peace.

We have arrived at a moment in which all over the world, in democracies and dictatorships alike, the people's demand for justice rises from the streets. The immediacy and necessity of strong public action and a strong public voice stand directly before us every day now. Theater was invented to cultivate a public voice and to creatively charge the moral dynamics of public life.
These dark times are demanding from our generation more courage, clarity, and creativity than we know how to give. All we know is that we must move forward. How?

The Venice Biennale is motivated by the immediacy of the present tense. It is recognized around the world as a platform for what is happening now. And what is happening at this moment in the history and future of art-making is surprising, unprecedented, divergent and wide open. But we are also experiencing the return to a deeply felt center of gravity that emerges in times of war. We are confronted with the difficulty and urgency and complexity of truth-telling. We are hungry for the profound exploration of alternatives. And we are in desperate need of a space for reflection, analysis and compassion. Beauty becomes an essential to life.

Theater is traditionally the most poetically and politically responsive art form. The theater program for the 2003 Venice Biennale will be shaped as events on the world stage unfold in the next three months. The details of the program will be announced in June. The program will focus on artists working in the aftermath of terrible destruction, on acts of rebuilding, acts of recovery and acts of reconciliation. The program will invite the public into areas of shared understanding across cultures that are being developed and sustained by a new generation of artists working collaboratively and cooperatively in different disciplines and from multiple world-views. We will focus on healing, exorcism, transformation, debate and amazement, listening to the spirits of the dead in the dark and hearing the sounds of our own voices in the light of day.

Peter Sellars

The following is one of the latest and deepest considerations about the global war by the slovevian psychoanalist/philosopher SLAVOJ ZIZEK:

- 03/13/2003 - THE IRAQ WAR: WHERE IS THE TRUE DANGER?

by Slavoj Zizek

We all remember the old joke about the borrowed kettle which Freud quotes in order to render the strange logic of dreams, namely the enumeration of mutually exclusive answers to a reproach (that I returned to a friend a broken kettle): (1) I never borrowed a kettle from you; (2) I returned it to you unbroken; (3) the kettle was already broken when I got it from you. For Freud, such an enumeration of inconsistent arguments of course confirms per negationem what it endeavors to deny - that I returned you a broken kettle... Do we not encounter the same inconsistency when high US officials try to justify the attack on Iraq? (1) There is a link between Saddam's regime and al-Qaeda, so Saddam should be punished as part of the revenge for 9/11; (2) even if there was no link between Iraqi regime and al Qaeda, they are united in their hatred of the US - Saddam's regime is a really bad one, a threat not only to the US, but also to its neighbors, and we should liberate the Iraqi people; (3) the change of regime in Iraq will create the conditions for the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The problem is that there are TOO MANY reasons for the attack...

Furthermore, one is almost tempted to claim that, within the space of this reference to the Freudian logic of dreams, the Iraqi oil supplies function as the famous "umbilical cord" of the US justification(s) - almost tempted, since it would perhaps be more reasonable to claim that there are also three REAL reasons for the attack: (1) the control of the Iraqi oil reserves; (2) the urge to brutally assert and signal the unconditional US hegemony; (3) the "sincere" ideological belief that the US are bringing to other nations democracy and prosperity. And it seems as if these three "real" reasons are the "truth" of the three official reasons: (1) is the truth of the urge to liberate Iraqis; (2) is the truth of the claim the attack on Iraq will help to resolve the Middle East conflict; (3) is the truth of the claim that there is a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda. - And, incidentally, opponents of the war seem to repeat the same inconsistent logic: (1) Saddam is really bad, we also want to see him toppled, but we should give inspectors more time, since inspectors are more efficient; (2) it is all really about the control of oil and American hegemony - the true rogue state which terrorizes others are the US themselves; (3) even if successful, the attack on Iraq will give a big boost to a new wave of the anti-American terrorism; (4) Saddam is a murderer and torturer, his regime a criminal catastrophe, but the attack on Iraq destined to overthrow Saddam will cost too much...

The one good argument for war is the one recently evoked by Christopher Hitchens: one should not forget that the majority of Iraqis effectively are Saddam's victims, and they would be really glad to get rid of them. He was such a catastrophe for his country that an American occupation in WHATEVER form may seem a much brighter prospect to them with regard to daily survival and much lower level of fear. We are not talking here of "bringing Western democracy to Iraq," but just of getting rid of the nightmare called Saddam. To this majority, the caution expressed by Western liberals cannot but appear deeply hypocritical - do they really care about how the Iraqi people feel?

One can make even a more general point here: what about pro-Castro Western Leftists who despise what Cubans themselves call "gusanos /worms/," those who emigrated - but, with all sympathy for the Cuban revolution, what right does a typical middle class Western Leftist have to despise a Cuban who decided to leave Cuba not only because of political disenchantment, but also because of poverty which goes up to simple hunger? In the same vein, I myself remember from the early 1990s dozens of Western Leftists who proudly threw in my face how for them, Yugoslavia still exists, and reproached me for betraying the unique chance of maintaining Yugoslavia - to which I always answered that I am not yet ready to lead my life so that it will not disappoint Western Leftist dreams... There are effectively few things more worthy of contempt, few attitudes more ideological (if this word has any meaning today, it should be applied here) than a tenured Western academic Leftist arrogantly dismissing (or, even worse, "understanding" in a patronizing way) an Eastern European from a Communist country who longs for Western liberal democracy and some consumerist goods... However, it is all too easy to slip from this fact to the notion that "under their skin, Iraqis are also like us, and really want the same as we do." The old story will repeat itself: America brings to the people new hope and democracy, but, instead of hailing the US army, the ungrateful people do want it, they suspect a gift in the gift, and America then reacts as a child with hurt feelings because of the ingratitude of those it selflessly helped.

The underlying presupposition is the old one: under our skin, if we scratch the surface, we are all Americans, that is our true desire - so all that is needed is just to give people a chance, liberate them from their imposed constraints, and they will join us in our ideological dream... No wonder that, in February 2003, an American representative used the word "capitalist revolution" to describe what Americans are now doing: exporting their revolution all around the world. No wonder they moved from "containing" the enemy to a more aggressive stance. It is the US which is now, as the defunct USSR was decades ago, the subversive agent of a world revolution. When Bush recently said "Freedom is not America's gift to other nations, it is god's gift to humanity," this apparent modesty nonetheless, in the best totalitarian fashion, conceals its opposite: yes, BUT it is nonetheless the US which perceives itself as the chosen instrument of distributing this gift to all the nations of the world!

The idea to "repeat Japan in 1945," to bring democracy to Iraq, which will then serve as model for the entire Arab world, enabling people to get rid of the corrupt regimes, immediately faces an insurmountable obstacle: what about Saudi Arabia where it is in the vital US interest that the country does NOT turn into democracy? The result of democracy in Saudi Arabia would have been either the repetition of Iran in 1953 (a populist regime with an anti-imperialist twist) or of Algeria a couple of years ago, when the "fundamentalists" WON the free elections.

There is nonetheless a grain of truth in Rumsfeld's ironic pun against the "old Europe." The French-German united stand against the US policy apropos Iraq should be read against the background of the French-German summit a month ago in which Chirac and Schroeder basically proposed a kind of dual Franco-German hegemony over the European Community. So no wonder that anti-Americanism is at its strongest in "big" European nations, especially France and Germany: it is part of their resistance to globalization. One often hears the complaint that the recent trend of globalization threatens the sovereignty of the Nation-States; here, however, one should qualify this statement: WHICH states are most exposed to this threat? It is not the small states, but the second-rate (ex-)world powers, countries like United Kingdom, Germany and France: what they fear is that, once fully immersed in the newly emerging global Empire, they will be reduced at the same level as, say, Austria, Belgium or even Luxembourg. The refusal of "Americanization" in France, shared by many Leftists and Rightist nationalists, is thus ultimately the refusal to accept the fact that France itself is losing its hegemonic role in Europe. The leveling of weight between larger and smaller Nation-States should thus be counted among the beneficial effects of globalization: beneath the contemptuous deriding of the new Eastern European post-Communist states, it is easy to discern the contours of the wounded Narcissism of the European "great nations." And this great-state-nationalism is not just a feature external to the (failure of) the present opposition; it affects the very way France and Germany articulated this opposition. Instead of doing, even more actively, precisely what Americans are doing - MOBILIZING the "new European" states on their own politico-military platform, ORGANIZING the common new front -, France and Germany arrogantly acted alone.

In the recent French resistance against the war on Iraq, there definitely is a clear echo of the "old decadent" Europe: escape the problem by non-acting, by new resolutions upon resolutions - all this reminiscent of the inactivity of the League of Nations against Germany in the 1930s. And the pacifist call "let the inspectors do their work" clearly IS hypocritical: they are only allowed to do the work because there is a credible threat of military intervention. Not to mention the French neocolonialism in Africa (from Congo-Brazzaville to the dark French role in the Rwanda crisis and massacres)? And about the French role in the Bosnian war? Furthermore, as it was made clear a couple of months ago, is it not clear that France and Germany worry about their own hegemony in Europe?

Is the war on Iraq not the moment of truth when the "official" political distinctions are blurred? Generally, we live in a topsy-turvy world in which Republicans freely spend money, creating record budget deficits, while Democrats practice budget balance; in which Republicans, who thunder against big government and preach devolution of power to states and local communities, are in the process of creating the strongest state mechanism of control in the entire history of humanity. And the same applies to post-Communist countries. Symptomatic is here the case of Poland: the most ardent supporter of the US politics in Poland is the ex-Communist president Kwasniewski (who is even mentioned as the future secretary of NATO, after George Robertson), while the main opposition to the participation of Poland in the anti-Iraq coalition comes from the Rightist parties. Towards the end of January 2003, the Polish bishops also demanded from the government that it should add to the contract which regulates the membership of Poland in the EU a special paragraph guaranteeing that Poland will "retain the right to keep its fundamental values as they are formulated in its constitution" - by which, of course, are meant the prohibition of abortion, of euthanasia and of the same-sex marriages.

The very ex-Communist countries which are the most ardent supporters of the US "war on terror" deeply worry that their cultural identity, their very survival as nations, is threatened by the onslaught of cultural "americanization" as the price for the immersion into global capitalism - we thus witness the paradox of pro-Bushist anti-Americanism. In Slovenia, my own country, there is a similar inconsistency: the Rightist nationalist reproach the ruling Center-Left coalition that, although it is publicly for joining NATO and supporting the US anti-terrorist campaign, it is secretly sabotaging it, participating in it for opportunist reasons, not out of conviction. At the same time, however, it is reproaching the ruling coalition that it wants to undermine Slovene national identity by advocating full Slovene integration into the Westernized global capitalism and thus drowning Slovenes into contemporary Americanized pop-culture. The idea is that the ruling coalition sustains pop culture, stupid TV amusement, mindless consumption, etc., in order to turn Slovenes into an easily manipulated crowd unable of serious reflection and firm ethical posture... In short, the underlying motif is that the ruling coalition stands for the "liberal-Communist plot" : ruthless unconstrained immersion in global capitalism is perceived as the latest dark plot of ex-Communists enabling them to retain their secret hold on power.

The almost tragic misunderstanding is that the nationalists, on the one hand, unconditionally support NATO (under the US command), reproaching the ruling coalition with secretly supporting antiglobalists and anti-American pacifists, while, on the other hand, they worry about the fate of Slovene identity in the process of globalization, claiming that the ruling coalition wants to throw Slovenia into the global whirlpool, not worrying about the Slovene national identity. Ironically, the new emerging socio-ideological order these nationalist conservatives are bemoaning reads like the old New Left description of the "repressive tolerance" and capitalist freedom as the mode of appearance of unfreedom. Here, the example of Italy is crucial, with Berlusconi as prime minister: the staunchest supporter of the US AND the agent of the TV-idiotizing of the public opinion, turning politics into a media show and running a large advertisement and media company.

Where, then, do we stand with reasons pro et contra? Abstract pacifism is intellectually stupid and morally wrong - one has to stand up against a threat. Of course the fall of Saddam would have been a relief to a large majority of the Iraqi people. Even more, of course the militant Islam is a horrifying anti-feminist etc. ideology. Of course there is something of a hypocrisy in all the reasons against: the revolt should come from Iraqi people themselves; we should not impose our values on them; war is never a solution; etc. BUT, although all this is true, the attack is wrong - it is WHO DOES IT that makes it wrong. The reproach is: WHO ARE YOU TO DO THIS? It is not war or peace, it is the correct "gut feeling" that there is something terribly wrong with THIS war, that something will irretrievably change with it.

One of Jacques Lacan's outrageous statements is that, even if what a jealous husband claims about his wife (that she sleeps around with other men) is all true, his jealousy is still pathological; along the same lines, one could say that, even of most of the Nazi claims about the Jews were true (they exploit Germans, they seduce German girls...), their anti-Semitism would still be (and was) pathological - because it represses the true reason WHY the Nazis NEEDED anti-Semitism in order to sustain their ideological position. And the same should be said today, apropos of the US claim "Saddam has weapons of mass destruction!" - even if this claim is true (and it probably is, at least to some degree), it is still false with regard to the position from which it is enunciated.

Everyone fears the catastrophic outcome of the US attack on Iraq: an ecological catastrophe of gigantic proportions, high US casualties, a terrorist attack in the West... In this way, we already accept the US standpoint - and it is easy to imagine how, if the war will be over soon, in a kind of repetition of the 1990 Gulf War, if Saddam's regime will disintegrate fast, there will be a universal sigh of relief even among many present critics of the US policy. One is even tempted to consider the hypothesis that the US are on purpose fomenting this fear of an impending catastrophe, counting on the universal relief when the catastrophe will NOT occur... This, however, is arguably the greatest true danger. That is to say, one should gather the courage to proclaim the opposite: perhaps, the bad military turn for the US would be the best thing that can happen, a sobering piece of bad news which would compel all the participants to rethink their position.

On 9/11 2001, the Twin Towers were hit; twelve years earlier, on 11/9 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. 11/9 announced the "happy 90s," the Francis Fukuyama dream of the "end of history," the belief that liberal democracy has in principle won, that the search is over, that the advent of a global liberal world community lurks round the corner, that the obstacles to this ultra-Hollywood happy ending are just empirical and contingent, local pockets of resistance where the leaders did not yet grasp that their time is over; in contrast to it, 9/11 is the main symbol of the end of the Clintonite happy 90s, of the forthcoming era in which new walls are emerging everywhere, between Israel and the West Bank, around the European Union, on the US-Mexican border. The prospect of a new global crisis is looming: economic collapses, military and other catastrophes, emergency states...

And when politicians start to directly justify their decisions in ethical terms, one can be sure that ethics is mobilized to cover up such dark threatening horizons. It is the very inflation of abstract ethical rhetorics in George W. Bush's recent public statements (of the "Does the world have the courage to act against the Evil or not?" type) which manifests the utter ETHICAL misery of the US position - the function of ethical reference is here purely mystifying, it merely serves to mask the true political stakes, which are not difficult to discern. In their recent The War Over Iraq, William Kristol and Lawrence F. Kaplan wrote: "The mission begins in Baghdad, but it does not end there. /.../ We stand at the cusp of a new historical era. /.../ This is a decisive moment. /.../ It is so clearly about more than Iraq. It is about more even than the future of the Middle East and the war on terror. It is about what sort of role the United States intends to play in the twenty-first century." One cannot but agree with it: it is effectively the future of international community which is at stake now - the new rules which will regulate it, what the new world order will be. What is going on now is the next logical step of the US dismissal of the Hague court.

The first permanent global war crimes court started to work on July 1, 2002 in The Hague, with the power to tackle genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. Anyone, from a head of state to an ordinary citizen, will be liable to ICC prosecution for human rights violations, including systematic murder, torture, rape and sexual slavery, or, as Kofi Annan put it: "There must be a recognition that we are all members of one human family. We have to create new institutions. This is one of them. This is another step forward in humanity's slow march toward civilization." However, while human rights groups have hailed the court's creation as the biggest milestone for international justice since top Nazis were tried by an international military tribunal in Nuremberg after World War Two, the court faces stiff opposition from the United States, Russia and China. The United States says the court would infringe on national sovereignty and could lead to politically motivated prosecutions of its officials or soldiers working outside U.S. borders, and the U.S. Congress is even weighing legislation authorizing U.S. forces to invade The Hague where the court will be based, in the event prosecutors grab a U.S. national. The noteworthy paradox here is that the US thus rejected the jurisdiction of a tribunal which was constituted with the full support (and votes) of the US themselves! Why, then, should Milosevic, who now sits in the Hague, not be given the right to claim that, since the US reject the legality of the international jurisdiction of the Hague tribunal, the same argumentation should hold also for him? And the same goes for Croatia: the US are now exerting tremendous pressure onto the Croat government to deliver to the Hague court a couple of its generals accused of war crimes during the struggles in Bosnia - the reaction is, of course, how can they ask this of US when THEY do not recognize the legitimacy of the Hague court? Or are the US citizens effectively "more equal than others"? If one simply universalizes the underlying principles of the Bush-doctrine, does India not have a full right to attack Pakistan? It does directly support and harbor anti-Indian terror in Kashmir, and it possesses (nuclear) weapons of mass destruction. Not to mention the right of China to attack Taiwan, and so on, with unpredictable consequences...

Are we aware that we are in the midst of a "silent revolution," in the course of which the unwritten rules which determine the most elementary international logic are changing? The US scold Gerhardt Schroeder, a democratically elected leader, for maintaining a stance supported by a large majority of the population, plus, according to the polls in the mid-February, around 59% of the US population itself (who oppose strike against Iraq without the UN support). In Turkey, according to opinion polls, 94% of the people are opposed to allowing the US troops' presence for the war against Iraq - where is democracy here? Every old Leftist remembers Marx's reply, in The Communist Manifesto, to the critics who reproached the Communists that they aim at undermining family, property, etc.: it is the capitalist order itself whose economic dynamics is destroying the traditional family order (incidentally, a fact more true today than in Marx's time), as well as expropriating the large majority of the population. In the same vein, is it not that precisely those who pose today as global defenders of democracy are effectively undermining it? In a perverse rhetorical twist, when the pro-war leaders are confronted with the brutal fact that their politics is out of tune with the majority of their population, they take recourse to the commonplace wisdom that "a true leader leads, he does not follow" - and this from leaders otherwise obsessed with opinion polls...

The true dangers are the long-term ones. In what resides perhaps the greatest danger of the prospect of the American occupation of Iraq? The present regime in Iraq is ultimately a secular nationalist one, out of touch with the Muslim fundamentalist populism - it is obvious that Saddam only superficially flirts with the pan-Arab Muslim sentiment. As his past clearly demonstrates, he is a pragmatic ruler striving for power, and shifting alliances when it fits his purposes - first against Iran to grab their oil fields, then against Kuwait for the same reason, bringing against himself a pan-Arab coalition allied to the US - what Saddam is not is a fundamentalist obsessed with the "big Satan," ready to blow the world apart just to get him. However, what can emerge as the result of the US occupation is precisely a truly fundamentalist Muslim anti-American movement, directly linked to such movements in other Arab countries or countries with Muslim presence.

One can surmise that the US are well aware that the era of Saddam and his non-fundamentalist regime is coming to an end in Iraq, and that the attack on Iraq is probably conceived as a much more radical preemptive strike - not against Saddam, but against the main contender for Saddam's political successor, a truly fundamentalist Islamic regime. Yes in this way, the vicious cycle of the American intervention gets only more complex: the danger is that the very American intervention will contribute to the emergence of what America most fears, a large united anti-American Muslim front. It is the first case of the direct American occupation of a large and key Arab country - how could this not generate universal hatred in reaction? One can already imagine thousands of young people dreaming of becoming suicide bombers, and how that will force the US government to impose a permanent high alert emergency state... However, at this point, one cannot resist a slightly paranoid temptation: what if the people around Bush KNOW this, what if this "collateral damage" is the true aim of the entire operation? What if the TRUE target of the "war on terror" is the American society itself, i.e., the disciplining of its emancipatory excesses?

On March 5 2003, on "Buchanan & Press" news show on NBC, they showed on the TV screen the photo of the recently captured Khalid Shakh Mohammed, the "third man of al-Qaeda" - a mean face with moustaches, in an unspecified nightgown prison-dress, half opened and with something like bruises half-discernible (hints that he was already tortured?) -, while Pat Buchanan's fast voice was asking: "Should this man who knows all the names all the detailed plans for the future terrorist attacks on the US, be tortured, so that we get all this out of him?" The horror of it was that the photo, with its details, already suggested the answer - no wonder the response of other commentators and viewers' calls was an overwhelming "Yes!" - which makes one nostalgic of the good old days of the colonial war in Algeria when the torture practiced by the French Army was a dirty secret... Effectively, was this not a pretty close realization of what Orwell imagined in 1984, in his vision of "hate sessions," where the citizens are shown photos of the traitors and supposed to boo and yell at them. And the story goes on: a day later, on another Fox TV show, a commentator claimed that one is allowed to do with this prisoner whatever, not only deprive him of sleep, but break his fingers, etc.etc., because he is "a piece of human garbage with no rights whatsoever." THIS is the true catastrophe: that such public statements are today possible.

We should therefore be very attentive not to fight false battles: the debates on how bad Saddam is, even on how much the war will cost, etc., are false debates. The focus should be on what effectively goes on in our societies, on what kind of society is emerging HERE as the result of the "war on terror." Instead of talking about hidden conspirative agendas, one should shift the focus onto what is going on, onto what kind of changes are taking place here and now. The ultimate result of the war will be a change in OUR political order.

The true danger can be best exemplified by the actual role of the populist Right in Europe: to introduce certain topics (the foreign threat, the necessity to limit immigration, etc.) which were then silently taken over not only by the conservative parties, but even by the de facto politics of the "Socialist" governments. Today, the need to "regulate" the status of immigrants, etc., is part of the mainstream consensus: as the story goes, le Pen did address and exploit real problems which bother people. One is almost tempted to say that, if there were no le Pen in France, he should have been invented: he is a perfect person whom one loves to hate, the hatred for whom guarantees the wide liberal "democratic pact," the pathetic identification with democratic values of tolerance and respect for diversity - however, after shouting "Horrible! How dark and uncivilized! Wholly unacceptable! A threat to our basic democratic values!", the outraged liberals proceed to act like "le Pen with a human face," to do the same thing in a more "civilized" way, along the lines of "But the racist populists are manipulating legitimate worries of ordinary people, so we do have to take some measures!"...

We do have here a kind of perverted Hegelian "negation of negation": in a first negation, the populist Right disturbs the aseptic liberal consensus by giving voice to passionate dissent, clearly arguing against the "foreign threat"; in a second negation, the "decent" democratic center, in the very gesture of pathetically rejecting this populist Right, integrates its message in a "civilized" way - in-between, the ENTIRE FIELD of background "unwritten rules" has already changed so much that no one even notices it and everyone is just relieved that the anti-democratic threat is over. And the true danger is that something similar will happen with the "war on terror": "extremists" like John Ashcroft will be discarded, but their legacy will remain, imperceptibly interwoven into the invisible ethical fabric of our societies. Their defeat will be their ultimate triumph: they will no longer be needed, since their message will be incorporated into the mainstream.