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When the United States sits down with Ahmadenijad, the conversation may revolve around footwear, as the Guardian reports: When the Iraqi journalist, Muntazar al-Zaidi, hurled his shoes at the then-US president, George Bush, in December, Iranian officials declared him a hero and hailed his gesture as a mark of Islamic courage. They were presumably less impressed this week when Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was similarly targeted during a visit to the north-western city of Urumiye. David Pan’s essay “The Sovereignty of the Individual in Ernst Jünger’s The Worker“ appeared in Telos 144 in the fall of 2008. Elke Van der Steen asks him some questions. Elke Van der Steen: The form of subjectivity Jünger proposed, one that is free of the relativism of culture and the assumption of universal reason, and which is embedded in a human relationship to violence, can be relevantly applied to current situations of terrorism. Two particular ideas discussed in greater length in your essay seem particularly applicable. The first has to do with the preservation of the individual’s sovereignty by linking private experiences with violence to group affirmation, and the second involves the paradoxical disdain for the dissemination of a universal reason and culture, while embarking on a national mobilization of violence. An earlier version of this talk was presented at the 2009 Telos Conference. In a little-noticed coincidence, President Dmitry Medvedev and the then Democratic presidential nominee Senator Barack Obama delivered major foreign policy speeches in the summer of 2008 in Berlin. Notwithstanding important differences, both recognized the flaws of the prevailing international system and emphasized the need for a new global order that transcends narrow national self-interest and addresses common security threats. Crucially, President Medvedev and Senator Obama each vowed to strengthen U.S.-Russian ties and to build broader alliances. It’s one thing for the Secretary of State to backpedal on human rights and refrain from making them central to U.S.–China relations. This probably accurately reflects a moderate position on rights in the Obama administration, which may be disappointing some of its supporters, especially since it’s a rollback from the rights advocacy of the Bush administration. It’s quite another, however, to find that the newly appointed Chair of the National Intelligence Council, Chas Freeman, apparently holds that the Chinese government was too lenient in its treatment of the demonstrators at Tiananmen Square in 1989. As Wajda’s film on the Katyn massacre opens, we’re reminded of how often human rights have been betrayed explicitly by their defenders. Victor Zaslavsky’s Class Cleansing: The Massacre at Katyn documents how the U.S. government knew of Soviet culpability but participated in concealing it in order to mollify its wartime ally. George Earle, previously special envoy to the Balkans, prepared a report for Roosevelt, demonstrating that the Russians had carried out the killings: Roosevelt prohibited the publication and, to get Earle out of circulation, reassigned him to American Samoa (see Zaslavsky’s account, p. 61). Andrzej Wajda’s film Katyn, which is now playing at the Film Forum in Manhattan, examines the issues that are the central concern of Victor Zaslavsky’s Class Cleansing: The Massacre at Katyn, published by Telos Press. In stark, and sometimes brutal, manner, Wajda depicts the situation in Poland that led up to the massacre of Polish army officers in the Katyn Forest, as well as the subsequent deception employed by the Stalinist police state, which attempted to paint the event as an act of the Nazis. Reviewing Wajda’s film, A.O. Scott writes: With elegant concision, the film explores both the events leading up to the massacre and its aftermath, following a group of officers and their families through the agonies of war and the miseries of peacetime under Communism, circling back to end with an unsparing reconstruction of some of the killings. The movie should be of interest to anyone who has read Zaslavsky’s book, and will increase public awareness of the violence done to Poles and the history at Katyn. And, of course, the book, available here, is crucial background for an informed understanding of both the movie and the history of Communist violence. |
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