However, what is much more interesting is that, beneath all these diverging opinions, there seems to be a shared perception that 1989 marks the end of the epoch which began in 1789 – the end of a certain ‘paradigm’, as we like to put it today: the paradigm of a revolutionary process that is focused on taking over state power and then using this power as a lever to accomplish global social transformation. Even the ‘postmodern’ Left (from Antonio Negri to John Holloway) emphasizes that a new revolution should break with this fetishization of state power as the ultimate prize and focus on the much deeper ‘molecular’ level of transforming daily practices. It is at this critical point that Wahnich’s book intervenes: its underlying premise is that this shift to ‘molecular’ activities outside the scope of state power is in itself a symptom of the Left’s crisis, an indication that today’s Left (in the developed countries) is not ready to confront the topic of violence in all its ambiguity – a topic which is usually obfuscated by the fetish of ‘Terror’. This ambiguity was clearly described more than a century ago by Mark Twain, who wrote apropos of the French Revolution in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court:
There were two ‘Reigns of Terror’ if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; . . . our shudders are all for the ‘horrors’ of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with life-long death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? . . . A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror – that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us have been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.2
Does not the same duality characterize our present? At the forefront of our minds these days, ‘violence’ signals acts of crime and terror, let alone great wars. One should learn to step back, to disentangle oneself from the fascinating lure of this directly visible ‘subjective’ violence – violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent. We need to perceive the contours of the background which generates such outbursts. A step back enables us to identify a violence that sustains our very efforts to fight violence and to promote tolerance: the ‘objective’ violence inscribed into the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems. The catch is that subjective and objective violence cannot be perceived from the same standpoint: subjective violence is experienced as such against the background of a non-violent zero-level of ‘civility’. It is seen as a perturbation of the normal, peaceful state of things. However, objective violence is precisely the violence inherent in this ‘normal’ state of things. Objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as being subjective violence. Systemic violence is thus something like the notorious ‘dark matter’ of physics, the counterpart to an all-too-visible subjective violence. It may be invisible, but it has to be taken into account if one is to make sense of what otherwise seem to be ‘irrational’ explosions of subjective violence. Let us take a quick look at some of the cases of this invisible violence.
The story of Kathryn Bolkovac,3 recently made into a film (The Whistleblower, dir. Larysa Kondracki, 2010), cannot but terrify any honest observer. In 1998 Bolkovac, a US police officer, successfully applied for a place in the UN’s International Police Task Force in Bosnia-Herzegovina – under the auspices of a prominent defence contractor, DynCorp – and upon arrival, was assigned to a task force that targeted violence against women. Still new to this position, Bolkovac began to follow up leads which exposed a local sex-trafficking ring, apparently run by the Serbian mafia and dealing in very young girls from former communist-bloc countries – some of these girls were no older than twelve. But another link quickly surfaced: the girls’ johns seemed to include UN contractors in Bosnia, and possibly some of Bolkovac’s colleagues. Moreover, there were strong indications that UN personnel colluded with or even helped operate sex-trafficking rings in the region, and saw a profit from it.
Shocked by her findings, Bolkovac filed a series of reports with her superiors, but they were all either shelved or returned to her as ‘solved’. Nothing was done, and nothing changed – until Bolkovac was demoted and then sacked for ‘gross misconduct’, well before her contract was up. Finally warned that her life was in danger, she was reduced to flight and left Bosnia with her investigative files and little else.
Bolkovac proceeded to sue DynCorp for ‘wrongful termination’, and the suit was decided in her favour. As a result, DynCorp dismissed seven of its contractors in Bosnia for ‘unacceptable behavior’ and publicized changes to its screening protocols. But this sex-trafficking scandal does not seem to have tarnished the company. DynCorp has continued to net massive State Department contracts, despite accusations of criminal misconduct in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. For example, a US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks cites DynCorp personnel who were seen taking drugs and hiring ‘dancing boys’, a polite name for underage male prostitutes (and DynCorp is in Afghanistan, we should note, to train the new Afghan police corps).
The New York Times reviewer granted that ‘The Whistleblower tells a story so repellent that it is almost beyond belief.’ However, in an incredible ideological tour de force, the same reviewer went on to denounce the film’s very truthfulness as the cause of its aesthetic failure: ‘The Whistleblower ultimately fizzles by withholding any cathartic sense that justice was done, or ever will be done, once Kathryn spills the beans to the British news media.’4 It is true, I suppose, that in real life we are far from the ‘cathartic sense’ of films like All the President’s Men or The Pelican Brief, in which the final disclosure of political crimes brings a kind of emotional relief and satisfaction . . .
And is not the lesson of Libya after Gaddafi’s fall a similar one? Now we have learned that Gaddafi’s secret services fully collaborated with their Western counterparts, including participating in programs of rendition. We can perhaps discern this kind of complicity between ‘rogue states’ and the Western guardians of human rights at its most radical in Congo. The cover story of Time magazine on 5 June 2006 was ‘The Deadliest War In the World’ – a detailed report on how some 4 million people have died in Congo over the last decade as the result of political violence. None of the usual humanitarian uproar followed, just a couple of reader’s letters – as if some filtering mechanism blocked this news from achieving its full impact. To put it cynically, Time picked the wrong victim in the struggle for hegemony in suffering – it should have stuck to the list of usual suspects: Muslim women and their plight, the oppression in Tibet . . . It is Congo today which has effectively re-emerged as a Conradean ‘heart of darkness’, yet no one dares to confront it. The death of a West Bank Palestinian child, not to mention an Israeli or an American, is mediatically worth thousands of times more than the death of a nameless Congolese. Why this ignorance?
On 30 October 2008, the Associated Press reported that Laurent Nkunda, the rebel general besieging Congo’s eastern provincial capital Goma, said that he wanted direct talks with the government about his objections to a billion-dollar deal that gives China access to the country’s vast mineral riches in exchange for a railway and highway. As problematic (neocolonialist) as this deal may be, it poses a vital threat to the interests of local warlords, since its eventual success would create the infrastructural base for the Democratic Republic of Congo as a functioning united state.
Back in 2001, a UN investigation on the illegal exploitation of natural resources in Congo found that conflict in the country is mainly about access to and control and trade of five key mineral resources: coltan, diamonds, copper, cobalt and gold. According to this report, the exploitation of Congo’s natural resources by local warlords and foreign armies is ‘systematic and systemic’, and the leaders of Uganda and Rwanda in particular (closely