Žižek Slavoj Oct 1 2011 in theage.com.au
The West’s thirst for doing business allows it to remain oblivious to the violence in its economic and political systems
… At the forefront of our minds, these days, violence signals acts of crime and terror, let alone great wars. One should learn to step back, to disentangle oneself from the fascinating lure of this directly visible “subjective” violence, violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent.
We need to perceive the contours of the background which generates such outbursts. A step back enables us to identify a violence that sustains our very efforts to fight violence and to promote tolerance: the “objective” violence inscribed into the very smooth functioning of our economic and political systems.
The catch is subjective and objective violence cannot be perceived from the same standpoint – subjective violence is experienced as such against the background of a non-violent zero-level. It is seen as a perturbation of the normal peaceful state of things. However, objective violence is precisely the violence inherent to this “normal” state of things. Objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjective violence.
Systemic violence is thus something like the notorious “dark matter” of physics, the counterpart to an all-too-visible subjective violence. It may be invisible, but it has to be taken into account if one is to make sense of what otherwise seem to be ”irrational” explosions of subjective violence.
[…] We can discern this complicity between the “rogue states” and the Western guardians of human rights at its most radical in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is again emerging as the African heart of darkness.
The cover story of Time magazine on June 5, 2006, was “The World’s Deadliest War – a detailed documentation on how about four million people died in Congo as the result of political violence over the previous decade. None of the usual humanitarian uproar followed, just a couple of readers’ letters – as if a filtering mechanism blocked this news from achieving its full impact.
To put it cynically, Time picked the wrong victim in the struggle for hegemony in suffering; it should have stuck to the list of usual suspects: Muslim women and their plight, the oppression in Tibet.
Congo today has effectively re-emerged as a Conradian “heart of darkness” – no one dares to confront it head-on. The death of a West Bank Palestinian child, or an Israeli or an American, is worth thousands of times more to the media than the death of a nameless Congolese.
Why this ignorance? On October 30, 2008, Associated Press reported that Laurent Nkunda, the rebel general besieging Congo’s eastern provincial capital Goma, said he wanted direct talks with the government about his objections to a deal in the billions of dollars that gives China access to the country’s vast mineral riches in exchange for a railway and highway. As problematic (neocolonialist) as this deal may be, it poses a vital threat to the interests of local warlords, since its eventual success would create the infrastructural base for the Congo as a functioning united state.
In 2001, a UN investigation on the illegal exploitation of natural resources in Congo found that the conflict in the country was mainly about access, control and trade of five key mineral resources – coltan, diamonds, copper, cobalt and gold.
According to this investigation, the exploitation of Congo’s natural resources by local warlords and foreign armies is “systematic and systemic”, and the Ugandan and Rwandan leaders in particular (closely followed by Zimbabwe and Angola) had turned their soldiers into armies of business. Rwanda’s army made at least $US250 million in 18 months by selling coltan, used in mobile phones and laptops.
The report concluded that the permanent civil war and disintegration of Congo “has created a ‘win-win’ situation for all belligerents. The only loser in this huge business venture is the Congolese people.”
Beneath the facade of ethnic warfare, we thus discern the contours of global capitalism. After the fall of Mobutu Sese Seko, Congo no longer exists as a united operating state – especially its eastern part is a multiplicity of territories ruled by local warlords controlling their patch of land by an army which as a rule includes drugged children, each of the warlords with business links to a foreign company or corporation exploiting the (mostly) mining wealth in the region.
This arrangement fits both partners: the corporation gets the mining right without taxes, the warlord gets money. The irony is that many of these minerals are used in high-tech products like laptops and mobile phones – in short, forget about the savage customs of the local population, just take away from the equation the foreign high-tech companies and the whole edifice of ethnic warfare fuelled by old passions will fall apart.
Not the least irony is here that among the greatest exploiters are Rwandan Tutsis, the victims of the horrifying genocide more than a decade ago. In 2008, the Rwandan government presented many documents which demonstrated the complicity of former French president Francois Mitterrand (along with his administration) in the genocide of the Tutsis. France supported the Hutu plan for the takeover, up to arming their units, in order to regain influence in this part of Africa at the expense of the Anglophone Tutsis. France’s dismissal of the accusations as totally unfounded was itself unfounded.
Bringing Mitterrand to the Hague tribunal, even posthumously, would have been a true act: the furthest the Western legal system went in this way was the arrest of General Augusto Pinochet, already a rogue statesman. The indictment of Mitterrand would have crossed the fateful line and for the first time brought to trial a leading Western politician who pretended to act as protector of freedom, democracy and human rights. The lesson of the trial would thus have been the complicity of the Western liberal powers in what the media present as the explosion of the “authentic” Third World barbarism.
The “ethical” side of capitalism is thus the result of a complex process of ideological abstraction or obliteration. Companies dealing with raw materials extracted in suspicious conditions (using de facto slaves or child labour) effectively practice the art of “ethical cleansing”, the true business counterpart to ethnic cleansing. Through reselling, such practices obscure the origins of raw materials bought in places where the materials were produced under conditions unacceptable in the West.
There definitely is a lot of darkness in the dense Congolese jungle – but its heart lies elsewhere, in the bright executive offices of our banks and high-tech companies.
In order to truly awaken from the capitalist “dogmatic dream” (as Immanuel Kant would have put it) and see this other true heart of darkness, one should reapply to our situation Bertolt Brecht’s old quip from his The Threepenny Opera: “What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank?”
What is the stealing of a couple of thousand dollars, for which one goes to prison, compared with financial speculations which deprive tens of millions of their homes and savings, and are then rewarded by state help of sublime grandeur?
What is a Congolese local warlord compared to the enlightened and ecologically-sensitive Western top manager? Maybe Jose Saramago was right when, in a recent newspaper column, he proposed treating the big bank managers and others responsible for the meltdown as perpetrators of crimes against humanity whose place is in the Hague tribunal.
Maybe one should not treat this proposal just as a poetic exaggeration in the style of Jonathan Swift, but take it seriously.