WTC

Kurds

 

-Slavoj Zizek, "European leftists are rejecting the Kurds over their reliance on the US. It is just another disgusting betrayal"

Must they sacrifice themselves on the altar of anti-imperialist solidarity? While the sovereign states around them are gradually sinking into a new barbarism, Kurds are the only glimmer of hope

Well over a hundred years ago, Karl May wrote a bestseller, Through Wild Kurdistan, about the adventures of a German hero, Kara Ben Nemsi. This immensely popular book established the perception of Kurdistan in central Europe: a place of brutal tribal warfare, naïve honesty and sense of honour, but also superstition, betrayal, and permanent cruel warfare. It was almost a caricature of the barbaric Other in European civilization.

If we look at today’s Kurds, we cannot but be surprised by the contrast to this cliché – in Turkey, where I know the situation relatively well, I have noticed that the Kurdish minority is the most modern and secular part of society, at a distance from every religious fundamentalism, with developed feminism, etc. (Let me just mention a detail that I learned in Istanbul: restaurants owned by Kurds have no tolerance for any sign of superstition…)

The stable genius (Trump’s self-designation) justified his recent betrayal of Kurds (he effectively condoned the Turkish attack on the Kurdish enclave in northern Syria) by noting that “Kurds are no angels”. Of course, since, for him, the only angels in that region are Israel (especially on the West Bank) and Saudi Arabia (especially in Yemen). However, in some senses, the Kurds ARE the only angels in that part of the world.

The fate of the Kurds makes them the exemplary victim of the geopolitical colonial games: spread along the borderline of four neighboring states (Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran), their (more than deserved) full autonomy was in nobody’s interest, and they paid the full price for it.

Do we still remember Saddam’s mass bombing and gas-poisoning of Kurds in the north of Iraq in the late 1980s? More recently, for years, Turkey has played a well-planned military-political game, officially fighting Isis but effectively bombing Kurds who are really fighting Isis.

In the last decades, the ability of the Kurds to organize their communal life was tested in almost ideal experimental conditions: the moment they were given a space to breathe freely outside the conflicts of the states around them, they surprised the world.

After Saddam’s fall the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq develop into the only safe part of Iraq with well-functioning institutions and even regular flights to Europe. In northern Syria, the Kurdish enclave centered in Rojava was a unique place in today’s geopolitical mess: when Kurds were given a respite from their big neighbors who otherwise threatened them all the time, they quickly built a society that one cannot but designate as an actually-existing and well-functioning utopia.

From my own professional interest, I noticed the thriving intellectual community in Rojava where they repeatedly invited me to give lectures – these plans were brutally interrupted by military tensions in the area.

But what especially saddened me was the reaction of some of my “Leftist” colleagues who were bothered by the fact that Kurds also had to rely on the US military protection.

What should they have done, caught in the tensions between Turkey, Syrian civil war, the Iraqi mess and Iran? Did they have any other choice? Should they sacrifice themselves on the altar of anti-imperialist solidarity?

This “Leftist” critical distance was no less disgusting than the same distance towards Macedonia. A couple of months ago, the discussion was around how to resolve the problem of the name “Macedonia”.

The solution proposed was to change the name to “North Macedonia,” but this was instantly attacked by radicals in both countries. Greek opponents insisted that “Macedonia” is an old Greek name, and Macedonian opponents felt humiliated by being reduced to a “Northern” province since they are the only people who call themselves “Macedonians.”

Imperfect as it was, this solution offered a glimpse of an end to a long and meaningless struggle with a reasonable compromise. But it was caught in another “contradiction”: the struggle between big powers (the US and EU on the one side, Russia on the other).

The West put pressure on both sides to accept the compromise so that Macedonia could quickly join the EU and NATO, while, for exactly the same reason (seeing in it the danger of its loss of influence in the Balkans), Russia opposed it, supporting rabid conservative nationalist forces in both countries.

So which side should we take here? I think we should decidedly take the side of the compromise, for the simple reason that it is the only realist solution to the problem – Russia opposed it simply because of its geopolitical interests, without offering another solution, so supporting Russia here would have meant sacrificing the reasonable solution of the singular problem of Macedonian and Greek relations to international geopolitical interests. (Now that France has vetoed the fast-track inclusion of North Macedonia into the EU, will they be responsible for an unpredictable catastrophe in that part of Balkans?) Will the Kurds be dealt the same blow from our anti-imperialist “Leftists”?

That’s why it is our duty to fully support the resistance of the Kurds to the Turkish invasion, and to rigorously denounce the dirty games Western powers play with them.

While the sovereign states around them are gradually sinking into a new barbarism, Kurds are the only glimmer of hope. And it’s not only about Kurds that this struggle is fought, it’s about ourselves, it’s about what kind of global new order is emerging.

If Kurds will be abandoned, it will be a new order in which there will be no place for the most precious part of the European legacy of emancipation. If Europe turns its eyes away from the Kurds, it will betray itself. The Europe which betrays Kurds will be the true Europastan!

Neuralink THIS!

 

Slavoj Žižek, "Elon Musk’s desire to control our minds is dehumanizing and not what is needed in a socially distanced world" 

Neuralink, which would see humans receive brain implants readable by a computer, is Elon Musk’s latest big idea. But digital control of our thinking would be a step in the wrong direction.

At the end of August, Elon Musk presented the first living proof of the success of his Neuralink project at a press conference in Los Angeles. On display was what he referred to as “a healthy and happy pig” with an implant which made its brain processes readable to a computer. I’d be curious to hear how he knew the pig was happy…

Anyway, what we were then told was a familiar story. Musk emphasized the health benefits of Neuralink (silently passing over its potential for an unheard-of control over our inner lives), and announced that he is now looking for human volunteers to try it out.

Using pigs first, then men, is an ominous parallel with electroshock therapy, which was invented by Italian psychiatrist Ugo Cerletti in 1938. After Cerletti saw electric shocks imposed on pigs before slaughter, making them more docile in their final moments, he was inspired to try the same treatment on humans.

Maybe this is a low blow against Musk, as extremes are to be avoided when considering Neuralink. We should neither celebrate it as an invention that opens up the path towards singularity (a divine collective self-awareness), nor fear it as a danger that we will lose our individual autonomy and become cogs in a digital machine.  

Musk himself is falling into an ideological dream, as seen in the headline and subhead of a recent report in The Independent: “Elon Musk predicts human language will be obsolete in as little as five years: ‘We could still do it for sentimental reasons.’ Neuralink chief says firm planning to connect device to human brain within 12 months ...” 

Even if we ignore the technical feasibility of this dream, let’s just think about what the reality of our minds directly sharing experiences – outside the realm of language – would mean for the process of, for example, erotic seduction.

Imagine a seduction scene between two subjects whose brains are wired so that the other’s train of thought is accessible. If my prospective partner can directly experience my intention, what remains of the intricacies of seduction games? Will the other person not react with something like: “OK, I know you desperately want to f**k me, so why are you asking me all those stupid things about the movies I enjoy and what I would like to have for dinner? Can’t you feel that I would never have sex with you?” All would be over in a second.

More fundamentally, the distance between our inner life, the line of our thoughts, and external reality is the basis of the perception of ourselves as free. We are free in our thoughts precisely in so far as they are at a distance from reality, so that we can play with them, conduct thought experiments, and engage in dreaming, with no direct consequences to reality. No one can control us there.

Once our inner life is directly linked to reality, so that our thoughts have direct consequences in reality – or can be directly regulated by a machine that is part of reality, and are in this sense no longer ‘ours’ – we effectively enter a post-human state.

Neuralink should thus make us raise basic questions: not just “Will we still be human if immersed in a wired brain?” but also “What do we understand by ‘human’ when we raise such questions?” 

I’ve dealt with these questions, including the new, unheard modes of social control opened up by Neuralink, in my book ‘Hegel in a Wired Brain’. We should never forget that if we can directly regulate processes in reality with my thoughts – for example, I just think that my coffee machine should prepare a latte macchiato, and it happens – the causal link works also in the opposite direction. Those who control the digital machine which ‘reads my mind’ can also control my mind and implant thoughts into it.  

What is important for us today, in the midst of the Covid epidemic, is to see that social distancing – or rather, bodily distancing – supplements the vision of Neuralink. How?

Physical distancing as a defence against the threat of contagion led to intensified social connectivity, not only within quarantined families but also with others (mostly through digital media). But there were also outbursts of physical closeness, such as raves and partying, which reacted to both. Rave represents not just bodily closeness, but also less social control and thus more distance to society at large.

What happened with the epidemic was not a simple shift from communal life to distancing, but a more complex shift from one constellation of closeness and distancing to another one.

The fragile balance that existed pre-epidemic between communal life and the private sphere is replaced by a new constellation in which the diminishing of the space of actual/bodily social interaction – due to quarantines, etc – doesn’t lead to more privacy, but gives birth to new norms of social dependency and control. Don’t forget that even drones were used to control us in quarantine.

And so, the prospect of Neuralink ideally fits the vision of a new society in which we will be bodily isolated, living in protective bubbles, and simultaneously sharing the same mental space. In our psychic lives, we will be closer to each other than ever before, immersed into the same space.

What we need now is not only more physical proximity to others, but also more psychic distance from others.