By Slavoj Zizek
WILL THE CAT ABOVE THE PRECIPICE FALL DOWN?
When an authoritarian regime approaches its final
crisis, its dissolution as a rule follows two steps. Before its actual collapse,
a mysterious rupture takes place: all of a sudden people know that the game is
over, they are simply no longer afraid.
It is not only that the regime loses its
legitimacy, its exercise of power itself is perceived as an impotent panic
reaction. We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the cat reaches a
precipice, but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground
under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss.
When it loses its authority, the regime is like a cat above the precipice: in
order to fall, it only has to be reminded to look down...
In Shah of Shahs, a classic account of
the Khomeini revolution, Ryszard Kapuscinski located the precise moment of this
rupture: at a Tehran crossroad, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a
policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman simply withdrew;
in a couple of hours, all Tehran knew about this incident, and although there
were street fights going on for weeks, everyone somehow knew the game is over.
Is something similar going on now?
There are many versions of the events in Tehran.
Some see in the protests the culmination of the pro-Western "reform movement"
along the lines of the "orange" revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, etc. - a
secular reaction to the Khomeini revolution. They support the protests as the
first step towards a new liberal-democratic secular Iran freed of Muslim
fundamentalism. They are counteracted by skeptics who think that Ahmadinejad
really won: he is the voice of the majority, while the support of Mousavi comes
from the middle classes and their gilded youth. In short: let's drop the
illusions and face the fact that, in Ahmadinejad, Iran has a president it
deserves. Then there are those who dismiss Mousavi as a member of the cleric
establishment with merely cosmetic differences from Ahmadinejad: Mousavi also
wants to continue the atomic energy program, he is against recognizing Israel,
plus he enjoyed the full support of Khomeini as a prime minister in the years of
the war with Iraq.
Finally, the saddest of them all are the Leftist
supporters of Ahmadinejad: what is really at stake for them is Iranian
independence. Ahmadinejad won because he stood up for the country's
independence, exposed elite corruption and used oil wealth to boost the incomes
of the poor majority - this is, so we are told, the true Ahmadinejad beneath the
Western-media image of a holocaust-denying fanatic. According to this view, what
is effectively going on now in Iran is a repetition of the 1953 overthrow of
Mossadegh - a West-financed coup against the legitimate president. This view not
only ignores facts: the high electoral participation - up from the usual 55% to
85% - can only be explained as a protest vote. It also displays its blindness
for a genuine demonstration of popular will, patronizingly assuming that, for
the backward Iranians, Ahmadinejad is good enough - they are not yet
sufficiently mature to be ruled by a secular Left.
Opposed as they are, all these versions read the
Iranian protests along the axis of Islamic hardliners versus pro-Western liberal
reformists, which is why they find it so difficult to locate Mousavi: is he a
Western-backed reformer who wants more personal freedom and market economy, or a
member of the cleric establishment whose eventual victory would not affect in
any serious way the nature of the regime? Such extreme oscillations demonstrate
that they all miss the true nature of the protests.
The green color adopted by the Mousavi
supporters, the cries of "Allah akbar!" that resonate from the roofs of Tehran
in the evening darkness, clearly indicate that they see their activity as the
repetition of the 1979 Khomeini revolution, as the return to its roots, the
undoing of the revolution's later corruption. This return to the roots is not
only programmatic; it concerns even more the mode of activity of the crowds: the
emphatic unity of the people, their all-encompassing solidarity, creative
self-organization, improvising of the ways to articulate protest, the unique
mixture of spontaneity and discipline, like the ominous march of thousands in
complete silence. We are dealing with a genuine popular uprising of the deceived
partisans of the Khomeini revolution.
There are a couple of crucial consequences to be
drawn from this insight. First, Ahmadinejad is not the hero of the Islamist
poor, but a genuine corrupted Islamo-Fascist populist, a kind of Iranian
Berlusconi whose mixture of clownish posturing and ruthless power politics is
causing unease even among the majority of ayatollahs. His demagogic distributing
of crumbs to the poor should not deceive us: behind him are not only organs of
police repression and a very Westernized PR apparatus, but also a strong new
rich class, the result of the regime's corruption (Iran's Revolutionary Guard is
not a working class militia, but a mega-corporation, the strongest center of
wealth in the country).
Second, one should draw a clear difference
between the two main candidates opposed to Ahmadinejad, Mehdi Karroubi and
Mousavi. Karroubi effectively is a reformist, basically proposing the Iranian
version of identity politics, promising favors to all particular groups. Mousavi
is something entirely different: his name stands for the genuine resuscitation
of the popular dream which sustained the Khomeini revolution. Even if this dream
was a utopia, one should recognize in it the genuine utopia of the revolution
itself. What this means is that the 1979 Khomeini revolution cannot be reduced
to a hard line Islamist takeover - it was much more. Now is the time to remember
the incredible effervescence of the first year after the revolution, with the
breath-taking explosion of political and social creativity, organizational
experiments and debates among students and ordinary people. The very fact that
this explosion had to be stifled demonstrates that the Khomeini revolution was
an authentic political event, a momentary opening that unleashed
unheard-of forces of social transformation, a moment in which "everything seemed
possible." What followed was a gradual closing through the take-over of
political control by the Islam establishment. To put it in Freudian terms,
today's protest movement is the "return of the repressed" of the Khomeini
revolution.
And, last but not least, what this means is that
there is a genuine liberating potential in Islam - to find a "good" Islam, one
doesn't have to go back to the 10th century, we have it right here,
in front of our eyes.
The future is uncertain - in all probability,
those in power will contain the popular explosion, and the cat will not fall
into the precipice, but regain ground. However, it will no longer be the same
regime, but just one corrupted authoritarian rule among others. Whatever the
outcome, it is vitally important to keep in mind that we are witnessing a great
emancipatory event which doesn't fit the frame of the struggle between
pro-Western liberals and anti-Western fundamentalists. If our cynical pragmatism
will make us lose the capacity to recognize this emancipatory dimension, then we
in the West are effectively entering a post-democratic era, getting ready for
our own Ahmadinejads. Italians already know his name: Berlusconi. Others are
waiting in line.
... Payvand News - 06/25/09 ... --
