Good on ya, Rob !
Charles
>>> Rob Schaap <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 06/15/99 10:28PM >>>
G'day Chris,
I'll be marking exams for the next week, so all I can do to assuage your
curiosity is pass on this response I fired in to the Habermas list when the
Rippert article surfaced. A real rant, I'm afraid - and much of it aimed
at arcane and rather peripheral (from this list's pov) stuff. Still, my
mind hasn't changed much. So, for the really bored, here 'tis:
>It's late Victor, but I'll chance a few thoughtlets. I don't think 'war' is
>discursively useful terminology, btw. As what happened on the Basra Road
>was not 'war', neither is Novi Sad or Belgrade 'war'. It is destruction and
>it is killing - but all in one direction. War denotes effective fighting
>between at least two parties, no?
>
>You also write:
>
>>I think the question of how to "use" Habermas's theory for political
>>purposes is itself highly questionable in light of Habermas's longstanding
>>insistence that substantive political positions cannot be derived from
>>philosophically justified procedures. Habermas's political writings are
>>unavoidably informed by his philosophical views, but here he does not
>>write as a "real expert in morals" as Rippert snidely puts it.
>
>And I mostly agree. Rippert's shot is a cheap one, but not wholly empty.
>Habermas is deploying status/authority here. An arrogantly normative
>article, for mine (my German is just projected Dutch, so I'll remember this
>call if apologies turn out to be warranted later on). Now to Rippert's
>article:
>
>Rippert: "What is most noticeable here as well, is that reality is
>completely left
>out. The professor is not interested in questions about the origins of the
>war-the real reasons why 19 NATO states are reducing a small country to
>ruins and terrorising the population, by means of a relentless bombardment
>that makes use of the most modern weapons. He simply repeats the war
>propaganda that the bombing is a "punitive military action against
>Yugoslavia"
>which became unavoidable following the collapse of Rambouillet. Its supposed
>aim is "to ensure a liberal resolution of Kosovar autonomy inside Serbia".
>
>Me: Rippert goes to my main problem here. Habermas spends no time on what
>actually happened. To disbelieve NATO 'facts' and their 'statement of
>intent' is to be bracketed out of this argument altogether. Where's the
>'dialogue free from domination' here? Where's his 'truth = warranted
>assertibility' I appreciate that many here would like to avoid too much
>investigation of the tediously empirical, and that's a norm I shall try to
>observe, but this represents a constraint on useful discussion, no?
>
>A contextual note, though: German authorities investigated in February and
>explicitly and repeatedly found no 'ethnic cleansing' - I've sources, but
>let's leave this for now. Even NATO came up with a figure of 2000 dead in
>the year up to to March '99. They've killed that many civvies themselves -
>and the 2000 killed by Serb militias weren't all civvies - and 5000 soldiers
>[many of 'em conscripts] as well! None of this is to be read as a defence
>of that unconscionable opportunist, Milsosevic, either.
>
>Rippert: "In better times, Habermas, resting on Hegel, spoke about form and
>content,
>and pointed out that the form of a social development is moulded by its
>content, and that form is essential. What then must be deduced from the
>brutal form of this war about its aims and content? Here the good
>professor >remains silent."
>
>Me: I can't pass comment, because Rippert says it so well! Nineteen of the
>world's richest and most powerful countries attack a small country -
>assuming a right found neither in law nor conscience, a right that makes
>might right everywhere. And the power isn't all tomahawks and cluster bombs
>- it's PR, too. I'd have thought the role of PR in this (and I've sources
>there, too) might be of interest to a man who trades on the foundational
>significance of communication. Habermas swallows the PR releases, thus
>bypassing the job of interrogating content. As form, strategic bombing has
>been known since 1944 to be 'problematic', and, in this particular case, to
>be categorically counter-productive (never mind, the question of strategic
>timing that has long concerned Robert Fisk).
>
>So, whatever the content, the form alone generates questions (not that I
>recommend ever looking at form alone). Milo's still in the chair (but then,
>there are plenty worse than he in that elite), A couple of hundred thousand
>Albanian Kosovars won't be in their homes by winter, and German and British
>capital are falling over themselves to win the contracts to rebuild what
>they destroyed - contracts let by international finance agencies through
>which control of the region is entrenched (that and an occupying army). Add
>US strategic concerns vis a volatile and unpredictable Russia. Not the sort
>of stuff we discuss on this list, but just possibly a hint at the content
>underpinning the form, eh?
>
>Rippert: "The more the reality of the war belies the propaganda, the more
>professor
>Habermas raises the debate to the level of complete abstraction-as if
>abstract terms had taken up arms. According to his Communication Theory, the
>warmongers and
>opponents are on the same level. In his eyes, both are pacifists.
>"conscientious pacifists", on the one hand, and "legal pacifists" on the
>other. And both
>can marshal good arguments. The "legal pacifists" orient towards
>international law and condemn the war because it contravenes international
>law, just as it contravenes the constitutional proscription on wars of
>>aggression. The "conscientious pacifists" make human rights their
>starting >point and legitimise the war as a humanitarian intervention
>"preventing crimes >against humanity".
>
>Me: Again, a strategic and exclusionary narrowing of the debate. I'm
>neither a legal nor conscientious pacifist on this (more 'anti-imperial
>domination' at the macro level, and 'anti-strategic bombing' at the micro)
>The US government kills more people than anyone else - has done for years.
>Clinton says 'sorry' to 100000 Guatamalan corpses, and that's okay - didn't
>he start his presidency with the Ricky Rector outrage, and didn't he take
>the electorate's mind off his pecker by killing half a dozen innocent
>Sudanese factory workers (please, correct me if I'm wrong). The US
>government killed as many in a week in Panama than Serb militias killed in a
>year (up to March - after all, what happened after that was as much to do
>with NATO as anybody else) ... 700000 dead Iraqis - Christ, but the list is
>a long one! 'Conscientious pacifists'? Some want those murderers up
>against a wall! 'Legal pacifist'? If the law allows the US government to
>kill with impunity, we should reject it! Here Habermas promotes the world's
>salient murderers of the last thirty years as the guarantors of a peace and
>democratic discourse! Where's the critical reflection in that? Where's the
>content!? Whither the individual-entity-in-'co-origination'-with-the-whole
>that *BFN* implied should underpin the new world society?
>
>Rippert paraphrases Habermas: "For the first time, the German government is
>taking human rights
>seriously. "Direct membership in an association of world citizens would even
>protect national subjects
>against the arbitrary actions of their own government." The war should be
>"understood as an armed peace-enforcing mission, authorised by the
>>international community (even without a UN mandate)." It represents "a
>step
>on the path from the classical >international law of nations towards the
>>cosmopolitan law of a world civil >society"."
>
>Me: No it bloody doesn't! A 'classical' realist international relations
>account presents a picture very different from that fed to us by Habermas,
>but you've not refuted it by simply drawing another picture! And where's
>the empirical evidence that there has been even so much as a trend in this
>direction? Or that this is what's happening here?
>
>Habermas waxes lyrical on form without any regard for content. Why should
>it be 'understood as an armed peace-enforcing mission'? Honestly now,
>where's the prospect for peace in ANY of this? Never mind the mass-killing
>done in its execution; I'm asking in what way has peace been served in the
>foreseeable future? There's MORE fear and loathing, MORE weaponry in the
>society - local power relations have changed a little, that's all. Couldn't
>have been any other way. And won't be. Peace had a better chance in
>February! And what's so good about a civil society? An aggregate of
>individual entities where the powerful politely and legally fleece the
>powerless - a form whose content is hegemonic domination - THAT'S civil
>society! How do we fit discourse into THAT? Where's emancipation? Where's
>the Habermas of yore, ferchrissakes?
>
>Rippert: "Such hocus-pocus is employed to obscure the simple fact that a
>little country is being terrorised by a coalition of imperialist great
>powers, >in order to establish a type of NATO protectorate in Kosovo."
>
>Me: In what way is that claim significantly wrong?
>
>Rippert: "This theoretician would have us believe that NATO terror will
>produce a democratic world civil society."
>
>Me: Indeed explicitly says that we 'should' do so. Moot definitions of
>'civil society' aside, how on earth does Habermas see this coming about?
>The act was undemocratic, it was about choosing sides (neither of which was
>the Albanian Kosovars - before this year, the KLA was a marginal and
>foreign-supplied outfit, whose views were roundly rejected by Kosovars at
>the election that put Rugova in), it was about exacerbating fear and
>loathing, it was about lying, and it was about a proposed treaty no-one
>could have accepted (indeed Serbia rejected one just like it in 1914 - you
>might remember). Building your hopes on foundations like that is a recipe
>for frustration and disillusionment.
>
>Rippert: "But where, pray tell, were the citizens themselves consulted
>about this? Where have they agreed to it? Do the Serbs not also belong to
>this "world civil society"?
>
>Me: An inane argument according to Vic (whose posts, incidentally, I
>usually admire very much).
>Why inane, Vic?
>
>We're killing people on the grounds that their political system does not
>serve them as a rational model of discourse, will-formation and coordinated
>action would have it serve them. This we do in the name of a new world
>order (or so H would have it), logically pursued every bit as much in their
>name as anyone else's. If they want this, too - why kill 'em?
>
>If they don't want it - how does an undemocratic force get the moral or
>logical legitimation to bomb them for not wanting it? What happened to
>the Habermas who wrote *Justification and Application*? Remember that stuff
>about incommensurable 'individual self-descriptions' and the concomitant
>need for agreeing to disagree? That was the sort of stuff Rugova used to
>say, and there's acknowledgement for it in the Yugoslav constitution. But
>now, the Serbs have been painted as 'Hitler-like' for their
>counter-insurgencies [and some autonomously local outrages I do not deny]
>where the disagreement to disagree was with the equally belligerent KLA [NOT
>the Albanian-Kosovar people as a whole], but NATO is heroic for its
>devastation of Serbia, where MOST of those immediately concerned were
>[effectively necessarily in peaceful fashion] disagreeing with them!
>Where's the respect for the 'lifeworld' category in that? Where's the
>bleeding obvious, and very Habermasian, notion that democracy and peace
>depend on how we handle the confontation between the one and the all? Does
>universalistic morality meet the particular form of life halfway here?
>Probably not a fair question, as Habermas never really tells us what he
>meant by this or its constituent terms (Well, not in 'Morality and Ethical
>Life', anyway).
>
>There seems no room for the 'one' in Habermas's cherished new world order at
>all! Given its birth, it could only be a Pax Americana, after all (too
>materialistic an analysis for some here, I'm sure - but that is where my
>initial outrage at Habermas's argument came from, after all).
>
>Rippert: "The arguments of this social philosopher recall the comments of
>an American general in the Vietnam War, who justified the torching of a
>village by saying it had to be destroyed in order to be"saved."
>
>Me: Goes back to my earlier rant about the 'virtues' of strategic bombing,
>a course of action that can only kill indiscriminately, does not defeat
>morale, does not unseat rulers, and does lay the environment waste for years
>to come. It is never the tool of saviours.
>
>Rippert: "As democratic legitimisation of the war, Habermas cites the "19
>undoubtedly democratic states" of the NATO coalition. "The 'air attacks'
>have so lowered Habermas's democratic standards, that even Turkey is raised
>to the level of an 'undoubtedly democratic state'," commented Josef Lang in
>the Swiss weekly Wochenzeitung on May 20."
>
>Me: Lang nails this absolutely unbelievable claim beautifully. What on
>earth has happened to Jurgen? Is Rippert's vulgar 'being determines
>consciousness' line on this the best answer on offer?
>
>Too tired to waffle on any more (no bad thing, I'm sure).
>
>Cheers,
>Rob.
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