For Valentine's Day

since I love you all so much I will give you this week's Zizney adventure.

I'm sure we were all happy to hear the few bars of his almost forgotten "Vague Hague" psyop, like that snippet of Figaro at Don Giovanni's dinner, played right in the middle of the inane Guardian stuff on Egypt (in which he managed also to stuff the assertion that "hostility to Israel"=antisemitism. Just like he's not sure he's coming back to the Guardian, he was so upset they wouldn't publish his paen to Aryanism last month, now he's grabbing while the grabbing is good, like your wino uncle stuffing the bread rolls, spoons, shot glasses and salt shakers from the restaurant you are not taking him back to ever, so vilely did he treat eveyone, into his coat pockets.)

But the Vague Hague* is last season's bullshit - lately Zizz has been devoting himself to historical revisionism about Afghanistan. His rewriting of history is confined to the chronology - he wishes to disseminate as the official left, "Marxist" historical knowledge - which he represents - a tale from an alternative universe wherein the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan provoked the US to hire Bin Laden and import foreign fighters trained in terrorism to back the Mujahadin. He packages this bullshit into the kind of sacharine lefty candy coating that has for years proven irresistible to his addicted audiences:

Look, Afghanistan, I’m sorry to tell you, I’m old enough to remember, forty years ago, Afghanistan was arguably the most tolerant Middle East Muslim country, with a pro-Western technocratic king, with a very strong local communist party and so on. And then, we know what happened. Communist party tried to took power. They did. When they started to fail, Soviet Union intervened. Then Americans backed the Muslim fundamentalists. - DemocracyNow

I'm old enough to remember 40 years ago, Afghanistan was a very open, secularized country with a pro-Western, democratic model, strong local Communist Party. Then we know the story: Communists made the coup d'etat, Soviet Union intervened, America intervenes against..Al Jazeera

Afghanistan became fundamentalist when it was drawn into global politics (first through the Soviet intervention).

And there are many many more instances, all the same, like a cold caller's pitch, delivering the disinfo in this sharp, confident, bullet points way - we know, we all agree, it's uncontroversial, first Soviet invasion, then US response. Every repeat now sees this sequence preceded and succeeded and bundled this same way, introduced with the claim that he is remembering the history first hand - very reliable then, not like his youthful audience who have to derive their information from books and old newspapers - and paying off with the self-congratulation for worldiness and honesty and bigness-enough-to-acknowledge-they-weren't-always-this-diabolical and We the Politically Correct Multiculturalist Liberals, We the Vile Hypocritical Left, We the West, We Aryans are! We are! (to blame) and lessons in who we are he knows his audience never tires of hearing.

Why is this revisionism suddenly so important to Zizney? We can understand why his Haiti revisionism was useful to US imperial rulers, and of course why he put so much energy into the "Hague" ICTY=ICC propaganda, and why his Enron revisionism would have been welcome as well to the ruling class even though it was so silly, just as it's always appreciated when he promotes infantile blockbusters to elite audiences that still avoid a lot of those ads.

But this is odd, since nobody in the US establishment really ever denies what Brzezinski famously explained to all, that the US hired Bin Laden to recruit from the Gulf states and run terrorist paras in Afghanistan against a civilian population in order to provoke the Soviet invasion. But it seems a matter of immense importance and even urgency to Zizek to convince his dazed and credulous "left" followers - young and ignorant to be sure - that the Bin Laden operation was created in response to the prior Soviet invasion. It appears that even his first celebratory article about Egypt in the Guardian included this little meme, caught however by the Guardian editors and excised.

Why is this little imperialist apology disinfo campaign so important now that Zizz manages to work it into every television and radio appearance?



*US representatives simultaneously demanded of the Serbian government that it deliver suspected war criminals to the International Criminal Court at the Hague (in accordance with the logic of the global Empire which demands a trans-state global judicial institution) and that it sign a bilateral treaty with the USA prohibiting Serbia from ever delivering to any international institution (that is, to the same Hague court) any US citizen suspected of war crimes or other crimes against humanity (in accordance with nation-state logic). - Zizek, Iraq, the Borrowed Kettle. (Zizek is always a bit bolder with the lies and the racism etc in books; in the newspaper versions of this text, as below, he's more careful to be ambiguous, to get past fact checkers and editors one supposes. In the newspaper, he states that the US demands Serbia hand criminals to "the Hague Tribunal" - a phrase which could describe both the ICTY and the ICC. Then one sentence later he is again referring "the Hague Tribunal" as the subject of remarks by Timothy Garton Ash, as if they were the same tribunal, when the US demands Serbia hand suspects to the ICTY, and Timothy Garton Ash's quote referred to the ICC.)

And again; The first permanent global war crimes court started to work on July 1, 2002 in The Hague, with the power to tackle genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. Anyone, from a head of state to an ordinary citizen, will be liable to ICC prosecution for human rights violations, including systematic murder, torture, rape and sexual slavery, or, as Kofi Annan put it: "There must be a recognition that we are all members of one human family. We have to create new institutions. This is one of them. This is another step forward in humanity's slow march toward civilization." However, while human rights groups have hailed the court's creation as the biggest milestone for international justice since top Nazis were tried by an international military tribunal in Nuremberg after World War Two, the court faces stiff opposition from the United States, Russia and China. The United States says the court would infringe on national sovereignty and could lead to politically motivated prosecutions of its officials or soldiers working outside U.S. borders, and the U.S. Congress is even weighing legislation authorizing U.S. forces to invade The Hague where the court will be based, in the event prosecutors grab a U.S. national. The noteworthy paradox here is that the US thus rejected the jurisdiction of a tribunal which was constituted with the full support (and votes) of the US themselves! Why, then, should Milosevic, who now sits in the Hague, not be given the right to claim that, since the US reject the legality of the international jurisdiction of the Hague tribunal, the same argumentation should hold also for him?

And again: This contradiction is amply illustrated by the twin pressures the US was exerting on Serbia last year: it demanded that the government in Belgrade hand over suspected war criminals to the Hague tribunal (the logic of the global empire demands a trans-state global judicial institution) while at the same time urging it to sign a bilateral treaty with the US obliging it not to deliver to the International Criminal Court any US citizen suspected of war crimes or other crimes against humanity. No wonder the Serb reaction was one of perplexed fury. Apropos the Hague tribunal, Garton Ash wrote in the Süddeutsche Zeitung that ‘No Führer or Duce, no Pinochet, no Idi Amin and no Pol Pot should any longer be allowed to feel safe behind the palace gates of sovereignty from the intervention of people’s justice.’