Giorgio Agamben: "Freedom and Insecurity"

 Disclaimer: this is an unofficial translation.

Source: https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-libert-5-insicurezza

Giorgio Agamben

Freedom and Insecurity

December 8, 2022

John Barclay, in his prophetic novel Argenis (1621), defined in these terms the security paradigm that would be progressively adopted by European governments later on: “Either you give men their freedom or you give them their security, for which they will abandon freedom.” Freedom and security are thus two antithetical paradigms of governing, among which the state has to operate its choice every time. If it wants to promise security to its subjects, the sovereign will have to sacrifice their security. Michel Foucault, on the other hand, has shown how the security (the sureté publique) that the physiocratic governments, starting from Quesnay, were the first to adopt explicitly among their tasks in XVIII century France, must be intended. It was not — then as today — to prevent catastrophes, which in the Europe of those years were essentially famines, but to let them produce themselves and then immediately intervene to govern them in the most useful direction. To govern here reacquires its etymological meaning, which is “cybernetic”: a good pilot (kibernes) cannot avoid storms, but, when these happen, it must nevertheless be capable to govern its ship according to its interests. Essential, in this perspective, was to spread a sense of security among the citizens, through the conviction that the government was watching on their tranquility and on their future.

What we are witnessing today is an extreme development of this paradigm and, together, its punctual reversal. The primary task of governments seems to have become the capillary spreading of a sense of insecurity and even panic among the citizens, which coincides with an extreme compression of their freedom, and which finds in such insecurity its justification. Today, the antithetical paradigms are no longer freedom and security; rather, in Barclay’s terms today it should be said: “give men insecurity and they will renounce freedom.” It is no longer necessary, therefore, that governments show themselves capable to govern problems and catastrophes: insecurity and emergency, which now constitute the only foundation of their legitimacy, cannot ever be eliminated, but — as we are seeing today with the substitution of the war between Russia and Ukraine to the one against the virus —only articulated according to converging modalities, but different every time. A government of this kind is essentially anarchic, in the sense that it has no principle to abide to, if not the emergency which itself produces and entertains. It is likely, however, that the cybernetic dialectic between anarchy and emergency will reach a point beyond which no pilot will be able to govern the ship and humans, in the now inevitable shipwreck, will have to go back to questioning themselves about the freedom which they have so incautiously sacrificed.

The Specter of Hitler in the Collective Western Mind

Once again, the West's enemy du jour is compared to Hitler in the Western establishment media.

For example, Ireland’s deputy premier Leo Varadkar has called Putin the “Hitler of the 21st century.” Timothy Snyder opined in the Boston Globe about "Putin’s Hitler-like tricks and tactics in Ukraine." Michael Ruane, echoing U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, argued in the Washington Post that "Putin’s attack on Ukraine echoes Hitler’s takeover of Czechoslovakia." At Thursday's press briefing held by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, so-called Ukranian journalist Iryna Somer asked: "Don't you think it's time for NATO to build anti-Hitler sorry, anti-Putin coalition?" These are just some examples out of many.

In this post I am not going to argue about the substance of this comparison, since it is plainly absurd and highly disrespectful of the millions of victims of the Holocaust because it trivializes the crimes against humanity of the real Adolf Hitler and of his regime.

What I would like to discuss, instead, are the reasons why the specter of Hitler keeps regularly coming back whenever Western governments want to convince their subjects of the evil nature of their designated enemies.

First, a non-exhaustive historical review of Western-made Hitler comparisons:

• In 1988, U.S. Ambassador Vernon Walters at the United Nations compared Fidel Castro to Hitler and Stalin at the U.N. Commission on Human Rights: 

I am old enough to remember those who apologized for Hitler and Stalin... I remember the cries of shock and betrayal when the truth of what those dictators had done filtered out to the world... I think that sooner rather than later the same cries will go up when the world finally acknowledges the horrors of life under Castro.

• In 1989, U.S. representative and deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger compared Panama's leader general Manuel Noriega to Hitler at a meeting of the Organization of American States (OAS):

Gen. Noriega has turned Panama into a haven for drug traffickers and a center for money laundering and the transshipment of cocaine. Will Gen. Noriega be permitted to falsely wrap himself in the flag of Panamanian sovereignty while the drug cartels with which he is allied intervene throughout this hemisphere? That is aggression as surely as Adolf Hitler's invasion of Poland 50 years ago was aggression. It is aggression against us all and some day it must be brought to an end. 

That same year, the U.S. invaded Panama and captured Noriega killing hundreds of civilians in the process.

• In 1990, U.S. President George Bush I was trying to convince the U.S. American people to support a military intervention in response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Referring to the false claim that Iraqi troops were taking babies out of incubators and leave them out to die, Bush I said: "We are dealing with Hitler revisited."

• In 2006, following in his father's footsteps while at war in Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. President George Bush II (W.) flavored his comparison of Osama bin Laden to Hitler with the specter of communism: "Bin Laden and his terrorist allies have made their intentions as clear as Lenin and Hitler before them."

• Also in 2006, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld linked Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez to Hitler: "He's a person who was elected legally, just as Adolf Hitler was elected legally and then consolidated power..." In 2002, the U.S. had unsuccessfully tried to topple Chavez.

• Again in 2006, U.S. general and presidential hopeful Wesley Clark called Serbia's deposed President Slobodan Milosevic "a petty Hitler." Clark was NATO's supreme allied commander when the alliance bombed Yugoslavia in 1999.

• In 2008, Israel's Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, talking with Stephen Haldey, U.S. national security adviser in the Bush II administration, said that Iran's President "Ahmadinejad is a modern Hitler and the mistakes that were made prior to the Second World War must not be repeated."

• In 2011, it was the turn of Moammar Gadhafi to be compared to Hitler. To garner support for NATO's bombing of Libya, U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said on the floor of the U.S. Senate: 

Colonel Qadhafi has threatened to carry out attacks against homes, offices, families in Europe unless NATO stops its campaign of air strikes against his regime in Libya. He actually means it. Hitler meant it. He means it.

• In 2016, British newspaper The Independent published an article by May Bulman titled: "Isis 'studied Nazi methods' to create own version of Hitler Youth and train child killers from birth." The Independent cleverly made the linkage to Hitler although Isis was not headed by one single person.

• In 2017, White House press secretary Sean Spicer suggested during a daily briefing that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is worse than Hitler because Hitler "didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons." He later apologized about the false statement about Hitler not using chemical weapons but doubled down on the suggestion by saying that Hitler "was not using the gas on his own people the same way that Assad is doing."

• During one the 2020 U.S. presidential debates, U.S. Senator and presidential hopeful Joe Biden "compared Trump's relationship with Kim Jong Un to America's 'good relationship with Hitler' before the war."

The first thing that this brief list shows is that every single designated enemy by the U.S. and its allies has been compared to Hitler either by a U.S. government official or by one of its proxies (government officials of allied nations and Western establishment media) at some point or another.

The primary and most obvious purpose of this type of linkage is to portray the chosen target as a monster that poses an existential threat to the world.

But here, I want to advance another, perhaps less obvious explanation that while not invalidating the primary purpose may reveal something that is more deeply seated and thus more ominous.

First, it must be pointed out that Hitler, which Eric Fromm described as "a clinical case of necrophilia" compounded by sadism, was purely a Western product. In other words, the ideology of Nazism was the offspring of Western capitalist and cultural imperialism.

For this reason, Hitler and Nazism are perceived in the West as an indelible stain on its historical claim of moral and cultural superiority.

As such, Western Hitler-calling of its non-Western designated enemies should also be seen as a form of collective psychological projection aimed at exorcising Western inner demons and sense of guilt. A way for the West to tell itself and the rest of the world the story that Hitler and Nazism were just an aberration, a momentary lapse of reason, and not the logical conclusion of Western endemic cultural racism coupled with the cold rationality of the capitalist mode of production.

Yet, today, as Western leaders insanely and unnecessarily intensify the post-WWII push towards nuclear war, we must sadly take note that the Hitlerian form of necrophilia was not simply an aberration but the symptom of a culture that is bent towards destruction and ultimately collective suicide.

The West's Authoritarian Structure of Feeling

Western liberal democracies are ripe for dictatorship. The signs are everywhere: police abuses, extrajudicial killings, dehumanization of immigrants, indefinite states of emergency, etc. Now, we can add the victimization of children to the list.

Today, I will focus on the extremely disturbing reactions to a recent video that shows UK guards trampling on a child at the Tower of London.

This is the video:

First, the propagandistic techniques of ITV News. Notice how the headline ends with a question mark: "Guard tramples a child at Tower of London?" Yes, he does, as the video clearly shows. Yet, the editors at ITV News have decided to put that into question, as if it was something debatable. Moreover, at the end of the clip the newsman said that after the incident the guard checked to see if the child was OK, as if to say that that was enough to justify the guard's behavior.

Now, from what I've seen, the vast majority of online reactions to the video are a clear case of blame the victim: since it was the child who stepped in front of the guards, the heartless logic goes, it was his fault. Period. A variant of that blames the parents, particularly singling out the mother.

But, regardless of who was at fault, the fact is that the guard could have done several things:

1) He could have sidestepped the child. The fact that he had the time to yell "Stand clear!" demonstrates that he could have easily sidestepped the child and chose not to.

2) He could have stopped to check on the child. Not only he did not do that, but he didn't even turn to look at what happened.

These are two of the things that a caring human being would and should have done. For example, had the child stepped in front of a moving car, the driver, no matter how in the right, would have had the duty to stop. This is the good samaritan principle which has been encoded into law in much of the world.

Is the military exempt from that? Judging from the online justifications, it seems so: "the guard was doing his job," "the guard was on duty," "the guard was following orders," "if the guard had stopped he could have lost his job," etc.

Incidentally, all these types of justifications of military personnel have been deemed unacceptable at the Nuremberg trial and yet, today, most people are choosing to embrace power over the defenseless.

This extremely cruel and inhumane structure of feeling has reached a level that is worrisome.

More and more people today are willing to unquestioningly and reflexively defend and justify power and its abuses no matter how clear and self-evident they are.

It is a sign of a people that feel scared, under siege, and thus, like small children, they flock under the mantle of authority hoping to be protected.

This fear, this terror, has become so deep and entrenched that it has wiped away any kind of human empathy; leaving, in its wake, a dark void filled with anger, sadism, and a pervasive nihilism.

Sadly, a society that has reached this level of callousness is a society that is ripe for dictatorship and all the horrors that come along with it.

Giorgio Agamben: "Reflections on the Plague"

Disclaimer: this is an unofficial translation.

Source: https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-riflessioni-sulla-peste

Giorgio Agamben

Reflections on the Plague

March 27, 2020

The reflections that follow do not concern the epidemic, but what we can understand from people’s reactions to it. It is about, that is, the reflection upon the easiness with which an entire society has accepted to feel pestilential, to isolate at home and to suspend its normal life conditions, its work, friendship, and love relations and even its religious and political convictions. Why were not there, as it was also possible to imagine and as it usually happens in these cases, protests and oppositions? The hypothesis that I would like to suggest is that somehow, albeit unconsciously, the plague was already there, that, evidently, people’s life conditions had become such, that a sudden sign was enough for these to appear as they were — that is, intolerable, like a pestilence indeed. And this, in some sense, is the only positive data that can be drawn from the present situation: it is possible that, later on, people might start asking themselves if the way they were living was right. And what no less must be reflected upon is the need of religion that the situation shows. A clue for this is, in the hammering discourse by the media, the terminology borrowed from the eschatological vocabulary that, to describe the phenomenon, obsessively resorts, particularly in the American media, to the word “apocalypse” and evokes, often explicitly, the end of the world. It is as if the religious need, that the Church is no longer able to satisfy, was hesitantly searching for a place to constitute itself and was finding it in that which has by now become the de facto religion of our time: science. This, like every religion, can produce superstition and fear or, in any case, can be used to spread them. Never like today had we witnessed the spectacle, typical of religions in moments of crisis, of differing and contradictory opinions, that goes from the minority heretical position (even represented by prestigious scientists) of those who negate the gravity of the phenomenon to the dominant orthodox discourse that affirms and, nevertheless, diverges often radically on the modalities for confronting it. And, like always in these cases, some experts or self-styled ones can secure the favor of the monarch, who, as in those times of religious disputes that divided Christianity, takes sides with one current or the other and imposes its measures.

One other thing that makes one think is the evident collapse of every common conviction and faith. It could be said that that people no longer believe in anything — besides the naked biological existence that must be preserved at any cost. But on the fear of losing life only a tyranny can be founded, only the monstrous Leviathan with a drawn sword.

Because of this — once the emergency, the plague, will be declared finished, if it will— I do not believe that, at least for those who have preserved a minimum of lucidity, it will be possible to return to live as before. And this is today perhaps the most despairing thing — even though, as it has been said, “only to those who have no longer hope, hope has been given.”

Giorgio Agamben: "Social Distancing"

Disclaimer: this is an unofficial translation.

Source: https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-distanziamento-sociale

Giorgio Agamben

Social Distancing

April 6, 2020

“We do not know where death awaits us; so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned to die, has unlearned to be a slave. Knowing how to die gives us freedom from subjection and constraint.”

Michel de Montaigne

Because history teaches us that every social phenomenon has or can have some political implications, it is opportune to register with attention the new concept that has entered the political lexicon of the West today: “social distancing.” Although the term has probably been produced as a euphemism compared to the crudeness of the term “confinement” used until now, it needs be asked what could be a political order founded on it. This is much more urgent, inasmuch as it does not concern solely a purely hypothetical hypothesis, if it is true, as it is beginning to be said by many sides, that the actual health emergency could be considered as the laboratory where the new political arrangements that await humanity are being prepared. Although there are, as it always happens, fools who suggest that such situation can be certainly considered something positive and that the new digital technologies have allowed to happily communicate from a distance for some time, I do not believe that a community founded upon “social distancing” is humanly and politically livable. In any case, whatever the perspective might be, it seems to me that it is on this theme that we should reflect upon.

A first consideration concerns the truly singular nature of the phenomenon that the “social distancing” measures have produced. Canetti, in that masterpiece that is Crowds and Power, defines the crowd upon which power is founded through the inversion of the fear of being touched. While men usually fear being touched by the stranger and all the distances that men institute around the self are born from this fear, the crowd is the only situation where this fear reverses itself into its opposite. “It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched… As soon as a man has surrendered himself to the crowd, he ceases to fear its touch… The man pressed against him is the same as himself. He feels him as he feels himself. Suddenly it is as though everything were happening in one and the same body… This reversal of the fear of being touched belongs to the nature of crowds. The feeling of relief is most striking where the density of the crowd is greatest.”

I do not know what Canetti would have thought of the new phenomenology of the crowd that we find ourselves in front of: what social distancing measures and panic have created is certainly a crowd — but a crowd sort to speak reversed, formed by individuals who keep themselves at a distance from one another at any cost. A crowd that is not dense, therefore, but that is rarefied and which, however, is still a crowd, if this, as Canetti specifies later on, is defined by its compactness and passivity, in the sense that “it is impossible for it to move really freely … it waits. It waits for a head to be shown it.”

A few pages later, Canetti describes the crowd that is formed by a refusal, in which “a large number of people together refuse to continue to do what, then, they had done singly. They obey a prohibition, and this prohibition is sudden and self-imposed. It can be an old prohibition which has been forgotten, or one which is resuscitated from time to time. But, in any case, it strikes with enormous power. It is as absolute as a command, but what is decisive about it is its negative character.”

It is important not to overlook that a community founded upon social distancing would not have to deal with, as it could be naively believed, an individualism pushed to the excess: it would be, exactly to the contrary, like the one we see today around us, a rarefied crowd founded upon a refusal, but, exactly because of this, particularly compact and passive.