Kissinger’s Year: 1973 by Alistair Horne
Orion Books, £20
First as Tragedy, Then as Farce by Slavoj Zizek
Verso, £7.99
Having been lectured by a stalwart activist on the centrality of revolt to human dignity, Razumov, the brooding imposter-revolutionary of Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes, scoffs: “As if anything could be changed! In this world of men nothing can be changed – neither happiness nor misery. They can only be displaced at the cost of corrupted consciences and broken lives – a futile game for arrogant philosophers and sanguinary triflers.”
Conrad’s sympathetic critique of the terrorist violence employed by would-be revolutionaries in Tsarist Russia was founded on an understanding of the autocratic and arbitrary violence of the Tsarist system, and yet the cynicism of the Razumov type – who sees every attempt at an empancipatory intervention as an affront to the historical process, to the nation, to the very order of things – lives on in every society, at every level.
Indeed, over the past three decades, it has become writ large as the very essence of our political culture, sustained by the venal influence of a post-modernist intellectualism whose amoral aestheticism has reinforced the grand narrative of capitalist hegemony with so much ironic dross disguised as micro-history.
The great conceit of mainstream political discourse is that the radical left is utopian and naive, and that the cynicism of contemporary realpolitik is informed by something more substantial and permanent than mere ideological fervour. It is in the spirit of that same conceit that the journalist Alistair Horne has written a book about the exploits of Henry Kissinger, the former US Secretary of State, during the tumultuous events of 1973. The bald fact that Kissinger’s Year: 1973 was published with the endorsement of Dr Kissinger himself should serve as a sufficient summary of the worth of this book. In his chapter on the role of the United States in the Pinochet coup, Horne dispenses with any semblance of academic credibility, descending into a polemical – and cliché-ridden – account of such brazen one-sidedness that it might have come straight from the mouth of US National Security Advisor John Bolton.
In the first place, the account of this seizure of power is just half a page long and makes no mention of the murders in the Santiago stadium and the systematic campaign of state repression that followed, as though the coup were simply a question of taking out Salvador Allende himself at the La Moneda Palace.
Horne, described by the Financial Times as “one of the best writers of history in the English-speaking world”, argues that primary responsibility for the coup lay not with the US policymakers who endorsed it or even with the right-wing generals who carried it out, but with Allende and the socialists themselves, for “fear breeds terror” – in other words, Allende frightened Chile’s generals into seizing power, shutting down democracy in the country and killing and torturing thousands. Horne facetiously quotes Byron – “I have been cunning in mine overthrow” – before indulging in a facetious attack on what he perceives to be the unjustified legendary status posthumously acquired by Allende following his brave last stand at the Moneda Palace on the day of the coup.
The memory of the murdered president is held in high esteem by many across the world – something Horne considers “ridiculous” and comparable to the public hysteria in Britain following the death of Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales, in 1997. The brutal torture by the Pinochet regime of many thousands of innocent Chileans is callously dismissed as the pet project of an obsessive foreign-based “human rights coterie” for which Horne expresses contemptuous condescension. Kissinger is widely regarded as the proponent par excellence of unsentimental political pragmatism, and the sycophantic tone of Horne’s book is reflective of a wider journalistic admiration for a management style of politics which is wrongly perceived to be dispassionately post-ideological and, as such, always possessed of clarity of vision and foresight.
In his new book, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Slavoj Zizek reminds us that Kissinger offered immediate and full support to the
ill-fated new Soviet regime installed by an anti-Gorbachev coup in 1991. The regime barely lasted three days; realpolitik couldn’t keep up with the pace of events, and Kissinger’s measured pragmatism was exposed as a stab in the dark. The context of Zizek’s critique is the creeping westward influence, within an economically liberal framework, of an authoritarian form of capitalism, a “capitalism with Asian values”, imbued by right-wing populism of the Berlusconi variety under the increasing normalisation of the emergency state – a process facilitated by the economic and social insecurity arising out of the present crisis.
The charge of utopianism is traditionally levelled at socialists; “The mere utterance of it”, as Jack London observed in The Iron Heel, “could damn any scheme, no matter how sanely conceived, of economic amelioration or regeneration.” Zizek’s charge against the cynics whose ideas dominate contemporary political discourse is that it is they who are the utopians. The ideological closing of ranks in response to the present crisis supports Zizek’s view: mainstream criticism of economic policy is locked in a narrative which blames the economic meltdown on contingent deviations – the size of bankers’ bonuses and such like – rather than capitalism as such, mirroring the practice of Soviet propagandists who attributed any failings in Eastern bloc countries to a failure of fine-tuning of the socialist system.
In Zizek’s view, the demand for a return to a “real economy” is irreconcilable with a desire to retain a capitalist economic system, as the latter is defined by “self-augmenting financial circulation [which] is its only dimension… in contrast to the reality of production”. Likewise, the assertion by commentators such as John Caputo that social reform under capitalism will render radical left politics redundant appears manifestly utopian for, as Zizek explains, “the malfunctionings of capitalism are not merely accidental disturbances but are structurally necessary”.
“It is now becoming clear”, writes Zizek, “that the true utopian epoch was that of the happy Clintonite ’90s, with its belief that we had reached the end of history, that humanity had finally found the formula for optimal socio-economic order”. It is a compelling argument, although in truth we did not have to wait until 2009 for Francis Fukuyama’s famous dictum to be, as it were, objectively proven wrong – it was ideologically-motivated inane drivel before the ink had even dried.
More to the point, it must be understood that the moral onus is on those wishing to defend the present illegitimate and unjust global system to prove their case, rather than hiding behind a dogmatically-constructed discourse of pragmatism; otherwise they, like the utopian revolutionaries of Joseph Conrad’s novel, will in time be destined for marginalisation and extinction, as debates – and times – move on.
Nathaniel Mehr
