|
Palestinian Children Killed
in GAZA
More
children than Palestinian fighters are being killed in Israel's offensive on
Gaza, according to the UN. Shown here are the name, age, and sex of 132 of those
children, recorded by the Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights
(click here for a larger view)   |
“LET GAZA
LIVE”
Stop the
Bombing!
End the
Blockade!
* * *
*
DPP
Standout/Flyering
WEDNESDAY,
July 30
4:30-6PM
Ashmont
T-Station
Dear Friends,
Many of you have read about or
participated in protests against the Israeli attack on Gaza in Copley Square and
downtown Boston. Now it’s time to bring the message to our
neighborhoods!
We had a successful standout at
Roxbury Crossing on Saturday. Please join members of DORCHESTER PEOPLE FOR PEACE
and local residents this Wednesday at Ashmont Station.
(This action will go on whether or not a cease-fire is
declared because ending the siege of Gaza is what humanity requires.)
And whether you can come or
not please make calls to Washington demanding an end to this massacre and
blockade.
Israel has created a massive
humanitarian disaster in Gaza. At
least 1000 Palestinians have been killed and thousands more injured. According
to the UN, three-quarters of the dead are civilians, including hundreds of
children and women. Tens of thousands have been made homeless.
Yet our Congress has
unanimously passed resolutions blaming only the victims and calling the firing of ineffective mortars and
rockets from Gaza “an unprovoked attack” on Israel. This ignores decades of
Israeli Occupation and a brutal 8-year Israeli siege of Gaza that has left 1.8
million Palestinians penned up and blockaded in an area only slightly larger
than the city of Boston, with no place to run, no place to hide from Israeli
bombs.
CALL YOUR
REPRESENTATIVE - and Senators Markey
and Warren - to say that this is unacceptable! Israel must be held accountable
and our government should stop supplying the $billions, the planes and the bombs
it is using to destroy Gaza.
TELL THE US STATE
DEPT to demand the bombing stop and the
Israeli blockade of Gaza ended!
Congressional Switchboard: (202)
224-3121
(Find your Member of Congress
at
US State Department: (202) 647-3672
Jeff Klein
|
Shipquay Street, County Derry, Ireland
Beyond Propaganda: Discourse of War and Doublethink. €œWhen the Lie Becomes the Truth€
Global Research, July 25, 2014
Since the attacks of September 11,
we are witnessing a transformation of the way the media report the news. They
lock us in the unreal. They base truth not on the coherence of a presentation,
but on its shocking character. Thus, the observer remains petrified and cannot
establish a relation to reality.
The media are lying to us, but at the same time, they show us that they are
lying. It is no longer a matter of changing our perception of facts in order to
get our support, but to lock us in the spectacle of the omnipotence of power.
Showing the annihilation of reason is based on images that serve to replace
facts. Information no longer focuses on the ability to perceive and represent a
thing, but the need to experience it, or rather to experience oneself through
it.
From Bin Laden to Merah, through the €œtyrant€ Bashar al-Assad, media discourse has become the permanent production of fetishes, ordering surrender to what is €œgiven to see.€ The injunction does not aim, as propaganda, to convince. It simply directs the subject to give flesh to the image of the €œwar of civilizations€. The discursive device of €œWar of Good against Evil,€ updating the Orwellian doublethink process must become a new reality that de-structures our entire existence, of everyday life in global political relations.
Such an approch has become ubiquitous, especially regarding the war in Syria. It consists of cancelling a statement at the same time as it is pronounced, while maintaining what has been previously given to see and hear. The individual must have the ability to accept opposing elements, without raising the existing contradiction. Language is thus reduced to communication and cannot fulfill its function of representation. The deconstruction of the faculty to symbolize prevents any protection vis-Ã -vis the real to which we are in submission.
Enunciating a Statement And its Opposite at the Same Time
![]()
In the reports on the conflict in Syria, the double think
procedure is omnipresent. Stating at the same time a thing and its opposite
produces a decay of consciousness. It is no longer possible to perceive and
analyze reality. Unable to put emotion at a distance, we cannot but feel the
real and thus be submitted to it.
Opponents of the regime of Bashar al-Assad are dubbed €œfreedom fighters€ and Islamic fundamentalist enemies of democracy at the same time. It is the same with regard to the use of chemical weapons by belligerents. The media, in the absence of evidence, express certainty as to the Syrian regime€™s responsability, although they mention the use of such weapons by the €œrebels€. In particular, they relayed the statements of magistrate Carla Del Ponte, a member of the UN independent commission of inquiry into violence in Syria, who said, on May 5, 2013 on Swiss television, “According to the testimonies we have gathered, the rebels have used chemical weapons, making use of sarin gas.” This magistrate, who is also the former prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia can hardly be called indulgent toward the €œregime of Bashar Assad.€ €œOur investigations should be further developed, verified and confirmed through new evidence, but according to what we have established so far, it is the opponents who used sarin,€ she added. [1]
The White House, for its part, did not want to consider this evidence and has always expressed an opposite position. Thus, as regards the August 21 Ghouta massacre, it released a statement explaining that there is €œlittle doubt€ of the use by Syria of chemical weapons against its opposition. The statement added that the Syrian agreement to allow the UN inspectors in the area is €œtoo late to be credible.€
Reduction of qualitative to quantitative.
Following the use, August 21, 2013, of chemical weapons in the suburbs of Damascus, Kerry reiterated the €œstrong certainty€ of the United States concerning the liability of the Syrian regime. A U.S. intelligence report, released by the White House and said to rely on €œmultiple€ sources, also said that the Syrian government used nerve gas in the attack, the use of which by the rebels is €œhighly unlikely€. [2]
The individual is placed outside the differentiating power of language. That which is qualitative, that which is certain, is reduced to that which is quantitative, to the €œdifferent degrees of certainty€ expressed previously by Obama or the €œhigh certainty€ pronounced by J. Kerry. The €œvery little doubt€, as to the liability of the Syrian regime, also mirrors the €œhighly unlikely€ responsibility attributed to opponents. Quality is thereby restricted to a quantitative difference. Quality, that which is, becomes at the same time, that which is not or at least that which may not be, because it no longer expresses a certainty, but a certain amount or degree of certainty or doubt. The opposites, €œcertainty€ and €œdoubt€ become equivalent. The qualitative difference is reduced to a quantitative gap. There is no longer any quality other than that of measurement.
This reduction of qualitative to quantitative has otherwise already invaded our daily lives. We no longer refer to the poor but to the €œless fortunate€. Similarly, we no longer encounter invalids, but €œless able persons€. The least skilled jobs are now given names that deny de-qualification. Thus, a cleaning woman becomes a € housekeeper€, the cashier disappears in favour of the €œsales assistant€ and garbage Collector are now called « sanitation worker ».
The separating power of language is annihilated. Words are turned into verbal phrases that build a homogenized world. We are in a world in which everyone is advantaged. No more are there qualitative differences between human beings, but only quantitative differences. The vision of a world of perfect homogeneity where only equals exist, no longer differing other than quantitatively, was already foreseen by George Orwell in Animal Farm: « All are equal, but some would be more so than others » « [3].
Absolute Certainty in the Absence of Evidence.
The word, which describes and differentiates things, is replaced by an image, by that which is everything at the same time as being nothing. Instead of a word referring to an object, degrees of certainty concern only the feelings of the speaker. These verbal phrases are not intended to designate objective things, but to place the person who receives the message in the perspective of the speaker, to lock them in the warped meaning created by the latter.
Expressed certainty can detach itself from facts and present itself as purely subjective. It does not refer to an observation, but refers to a condition posing as objective through a quantization operation.
The certainty of U.S. and French authorities also distinguishes itself in that it is built on equivocal data, on the invocation of evidence of liability of the Syrian regime, although they recall the impossibility of knowing who struck and how chemical weapons were used. It is no longer possible to construct an objective certainty, because the observation of facts is defused and leaves room for the stupefaction of the observer. Expressed certainty no longer separates true from false, since the ability to judge is suspended.
Precisely, subjective and objective certainty is undifferentiated. It is not a matter of believing what is stated, but of believing the authority who speaks, no matter what he says. Statements of Presidents Obama and Holland are immediately given as absolute certainty, ie: they occupy the place that Descartes gives to God €œas a principle guaranteeing the objective truth of subjective experience€¦€ [4]. The matter of going through the steps of objective verification, through the judgment of existence, does not arise to the extent that certainty is set free from all spatial and temporal constraints. It is posited in the absence of limits, in the absence of what psychoanalysis calls the €œThird Person€, the place of the Other. [5]
Removal of the €œThird Person€
Absolute certainty, posing as the be all and end all, installs a denial of reality, that which escapes us. It does not recognize loss. Constituting €œwe€ is no longer possible because it can only be formed from that which is missing. The monad, for its part, lacks nothing because it is fused with state power. Fetishes fabricated by €œthe news€ fill the void of reality, occupy the place of that which is missing and operate a denial of the third party.
Absolute certainty is opposed to the establishment of a symbolic order integrating the €œthird person€ [6], the domain of language. The proper function of language is to signify that which is real, knowing that the word is not reality itself, but that by which it is represented. Jacques Lacan expresses this necessity with his aphorism €œthe thing must be lost in order to be represented€. [7]
On the contrary, absolute certainty attaches words to things and does not take into account their relationships. In the absence of a ’third person’, it prevents any real articulation with the symbolic. This absence of linkage is the formation of a social psychosis wherein that which is stated by power becomes reality. The deficiency also allows the emergence of a perverse structure that reverses the speech act and prevents identifying the reality of the psychosis.
Enrolling us in psychosis, the discourse of French and American authorities originates in perverse denial. It constitutes a coup against language €œcoup because disavowal is situated at the logical basis of language€ [8]. Denial of reality is realized by a commodification of words and a procedure of cleavage. The cynical coup is this: €œpervert that by which law is articulated, make language the reasonable discourse of unreason€ [9] as with €œhumanitarian war€ or €œcounter-terrorism€.
Counter-terrorism legislation is presented as rational actions to dismantle the law in favour of the fabrication of images. U.S. law is particularly rich in these pictorial constructions, such as the €œlone wolf€, a lone terrorist related to an international movement, the €œenemy combatant€ or €œunlawful belligerent€ that exist, because they are designated as such by the U.S. President. The enemy combatant, as illegal belligerent, may be a U.S. citizen who has never been on a battlefield and whose €œmilitary action€ amounts to an act of protest against a military engagement. Deviation from that which is stated by the powers that be is no longer possible. Similarly, any protection against its real threat is removed. The reality manifests itself without dissimilation and can henceforth petrify us.
The suppression of the Third Person reducing the individual to a monad, no longer having an Other outside of state power, allows authority, especially as regards discourse on the war in Syria, to produce a new reality. Evidence of the guilt of the Syrian regime exists, because authority says so.
A €œdisturbing strangeness€.
The absence of a €œthird person€ settles us in transparency, in a never-never land beyond language. It removes the relationship between interior and exterior. The expression of the omnipotence of the U.S. President, his will to break free from the constraints of language and of any judicial order, reveals our condition, its reduction to €œnaked life.€ There then occurs €œa special kind of scary€ Freud calls Unheimliche [10], a term which has no equivalent in French and which can as well be translated as €œdisturbing strangeness€ and as €œdisturbing familiarity.€
It would be, as defined by Schelling, something that should have remained hidden and which has reappeared. Unveiled, worldly things appear in their raw presence as Real. Where the individual believed himself at home, he suddenly feels driven from his home and becomes strangely foreign to himself. The inside of our condition, our annihilation is thrown out and appears to us as a plaything of the U.S. executive branch. The staging of our division, €œdisturbing strangeness€, becoming that which is most familiar to us, suppresses intimateness by replacing it.
Freud suggests a dissociation of the ego. The latter is then pulverised and can no longer display the Real, the threat that petrifies it. Freud speaks of the formation of a stranger “I” that can turn itself into moral conscience and treat the other part as an object [11].
This mechanism reappears as the return of the repressed archaic, that which is intended to hide the distress of the nursing child. The €œdisturbing strangeness€, produced by Obama’s speech is of the same order. It instrumentalises what happened in Iraq in order to prevent us from forgetting our impotence. Thus, it reinforces €œthe permanent return of the same€ constitutive of a sense of “disturbing strangeness” or disturbing familiarity. The process of repetition presents itself as an inexorable process, like a power that we cannot confront.
Jacques Lacan confirms this reading. Echoing the work of Freud on the €œdisturbing strangeness€, he shows that anxiety arises when the subject is facing the €œlack of lack€ that is to say, an all-powerful otherness that invades the self to the point of destroying every faculty of desire. [12]
In fact, the two translations, the first highlighting the strangeness, the second its familiar character, make each highlight one aspect of this particular anxiety that one can also deal with thanks to the notion of transparency. Interior and exterior confusing themselves, the individual is at once struck by the strangeness of seeing his impotence, by his interior deprivation exhibited outside himself and by the colonization of his intimacy by the spectacle, become familiar, of the enjoyment of the other.
Denial and Splitting of the Ego.
Dissociation is an archaic defense attempt when faced with a power with which one cannot cope. This disintegration of the Ego allows the return of a €œdéjà vu€. The Superego calls one to see oneself as an infant, as one who does not speak, thus causing a feeling of “disturbing strangeness”.
Faced with the imperative need to believe in the responsibility of Bashar Assad, the individual must suspend contrary information and treat it as if it did not exist. He proceeds to a denial of all that is different, then couched in the regressive position, that of the umbilical union with the mother, a stage preceding language, before the appearance of the function of the father. [13]
The denial of the contradiction between a thing and its opposite, the responsibility of the Syrian government and the use of chemical weapons by the rebels, is the act of denying the reality of perception seen as dangerous because the individual would then have to face the omniscience displayed by the powers that be. To contain the anxiety produced by the “disturbing strangeness€, the subject is forced to juxtapose two opposing and parallel ways of reasoning. The individual then has two incompatible unlinked visions. The denial of the opposition between these two elements removes any confliction; because there coexists within oneself two opposing statements that are juxtaposed without influencing each other. This denial rests on what psychoanalysis calls the €œsplitting of the ego.€
The cleavage gives one the opportunity to live on two different levels, placing side by side, on the one hand, €œknowledge€, the use of sarin gas by the rebels, and on the other hand a dodging of confrontation with a suspension of information. This is to prevent any struggle, any symbolism in order to enjoy the full omnipotence of the powers that be. In the absence of a perceived lack in what one is told, one finds oneself beneath the conflict in an annulment of any judgment.
Orwell has also highlighted this procedure in his definition of €œdoublethink.€ It consists in the following: €œto hold simultaneously two opinions which cancel each other out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them,€ while being able to forget, « whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed ». Then one must forget, ie: €œconsciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you have just performed. € [14]
Cleavage is recurrent in the speech surrounding the war in Syria. Things here are regularly affirmed, at the same time as that which contradicts them without a relationship being established between the different enunciations. Contrary to statements by Carla Del Ponte, Washington would first have arrived, €œwith varying degrees of certainty,€ at the conclusion that the Syrian government forces had used sarin gas against their own people. However, Barack Obama, at the same time, said the United States didn’t know € how [these weapons] were used, when they were used or who used them€ [15]. The operation places the subject in fragmentation, unable to react to the nonsense of what is said and shown. One cannot cope with a certainty that is claimed in the absence of evidence.
The logical reversal of language building becomes a manifestation of the power of the U.S. executive. It exhibits a capacity to overcome any language organisation and thus all symbolic order. The absurdity reclaimed by the statement is as a coup against the logical basis of language. It henceforth has a petrification effect on people and captivates them in psychosis.
Notes at online piece
This article was first published on our French language website www.mondialisation.ca
Article in French :
Discours de la guerre et double pensée. L’exemple de la Syrie. Mondialisation.ca, 29 of June of 2014
Translation : Roger Lagass
From Bin Laden to Merah, through the €œtyrant€ Bashar al-Assad, media discourse has become the permanent production of fetishes, ordering surrender to what is €œgiven to see.€ The injunction does not aim, as propaganda, to convince. It simply directs the subject to give flesh to the image of the €œwar of civilizations€. The discursive device of €œWar of Good against Evil,€ updating the Orwellian doublethink process must become a new reality that de-structures our entire existence, of everyday life in global political relations.
Such an approch has become ubiquitous, especially regarding the war in Syria. It consists of cancelling a statement at the same time as it is pronounced, while maintaining what has been previously given to see and hear. The individual must have the ability to accept opposing elements, without raising the existing contradiction. Language is thus reduced to communication and cannot fulfill its function of representation. The deconstruction of the faculty to symbolize prevents any protection vis-Ã -vis the real to which we are in submission.
Enunciating a Statement And its Opposite at the Same Time
Opponents of the regime of Bashar al-Assad are dubbed €œfreedom fighters€ and Islamic fundamentalist enemies of democracy at the same time. It is the same with regard to the use of chemical weapons by belligerents. The media, in the absence of evidence, express certainty as to the Syrian regime€™s responsability, although they mention the use of such weapons by the €œrebels€. In particular, they relayed the statements of magistrate Carla Del Ponte, a member of the UN independent commission of inquiry into violence in Syria, who said, on May 5, 2013 on Swiss television, “According to the testimonies we have gathered, the rebels have used chemical weapons, making use of sarin gas.” This magistrate, who is also the former prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia can hardly be called indulgent toward the €œregime of Bashar Assad.€ €œOur investigations should be further developed, verified and confirmed through new evidence, but according to what we have established so far, it is the opponents who used sarin,€ she added. [1]
The White House, for its part, did not want to consider this evidence and has always expressed an opposite position. Thus, as regards the August 21 Ghouta massacre, it released a statement explaining that there is €œlittle doubt€ of the use by Syria of chemical weapons against its opposition. The statement added that the Syrian agreement to allow the UN inspectors in the area is €œtoo late to be credible.€
Reduction of qualitative to quantitative.
Following the use, August 21, 2013, of chemical weapons in the suburbs of Damascus, Kerry reiterated the €œstrong certainty€ of the United States concerning the liability of the Syrian regime. A U.S. intelligence report, released by the White House and said to rely on €œmultiple€ sources, also said that the Syrian government used nerve gas in the attack, the use of which by the rebels is €œhighly unlikely€. [2]
The individual is placed outside the differentiating power of language. That which is qualitative, that which is certain, is reduced to that which is quantitative, to the €œdifferent degrees of certainty€ expressed previously by Obama or the €œhigh certainty€ pronounced by J. Kerry. The €œvery little doubt€, as to the liability of the Syrian regime, also mirrors the €œhighly unlikely€ responsibility attributed to opponents. Quality is thereby restricted to a quantitative difference. Quality, that which is, becomes at the same time, that which is not or at least that which may not be, because it no longer expresses a certainty, but a certain amount or degree of certainty or doubt. The opposites, €œcertainty€ and €œdoubt€ become equivalent. The qualitative difference is reduced to a quantitative gap. There is no longer any quality other than that of measurement.
This reduction of qualitative to quantitative has otherwise already invaded our daily lives. We no longer refer to the poor but to the €œless fortunate€. Similarly, we no longer encounter invalids, but €œless able persons€. The least skilled jobs are now given names that deny de-qualification. Thus, a cleaning woman becomes a € housekeeper€, the cashier disappears in favour of the €œsales assistant€ and garbage Collector are now called « sanitation worker ».
The separating power of language is annihilated. Words are turned into verbal phrases that build a homogenized world. We are in a world in which everyone is advantaged. No more are there qualitative differences between human beings, but only quantitative differences. The vision of a world of perfect homogeneity where only equals exist, no longer differing other than quantitatively, was already foreseen by George Orwell in Animal Farm: « All are equal, but some would be more so than others » « [3].
Absolute Certainty in the Absence of Evidence.
The word, which describes and differentiates things, is replaced by an image, by that which is everything at the same time as being nothing. Instead of a word referring to an object, degrees of certainty concern only the feelings of the speaker. These verbal phrases are not intended to designate objective things, but to place the person who receives the message in the perspective of the speaker, to lock them in the warped meaning created by the latter.
Expressed certainty can detach itself from facts and present itself as purely subjective. It does not refer to an observation, but refers to a condition posing as objective through a quantization operation.
The certainty of U.S. and French authorities also distinguishes itself in that it is built on equivocal data, on the invocation of evidence of liability of the Syrian regime, although they recall the impossibility of knowing who struck and how chemical weapons were used. It is no longer possible to construct an objective certainty, because the observation of facts is defused and leaves room for the stupefaction of the observer. Expressed certainty no longer separates true from false, since the ability to judge is suspended.
Precisely, subjective and objective certainty is undifferentiated. It is not a matter of believing what is stated, but of believing the authority who speaks, no matter what he says. Statements of Presidents Obama and Holland are immediately given as absolute certainty, ie: they occupy the place that Descartes gives to God €œas a principle guaranteeing the objective truth of subjective experience€¦€ [4]. The matter of going through the steps of objective verification, through the judgment of existence, does not arise to the extent that certainty is set free from all spatial and temporal constraints. It is posited in the absence of limits, in the absence of what psychoanalysis calls the €œThird Person€, the place of the Other. [5]
Removal of the €œThird Person€
Absolute certainty, posing as the be all and end all, installs a denial of reality, that which escapes us. It does not recognize loss. Constituting €œwe€ is no longer possible because it can only be formed from that which is missing. The monad, for its part, lacks nothing because it is fused with state power. Fetishes fabricated by €œthe news€ fill the void of reality, occupy the place of that which is missing and operate a denial of the third party.
Absolute certainty is opposed to the establishment of a symbolic order integrating the €œthird person€ [6], the domain of language. The proper function of language is to signify that which is real, knowing that the word is not reality itself, but that by which it is represented. Jacques Lacan expresses this necessity with his aphorism €œthe thing must be lost in order to be represented€. [7]
On the contrary, absolute certainty attaches words to things and does not take into account their relationships. In the absence of a ’third person’, it prevents any real articulation with the symbolic. This absence of linkage is the formation of a social psychosis wherein that which is stated by power becomes reality. The deficiency also allows the emergence of a perverse structure that reverses the speech act and prevents identifying the reality of the psychosis.
Enrolling us in psychosis, the discourse of French and American authorities originates in perverse denial. It constitutes a coup against language €œcoup because disavowal is situated at the logical basis of language€ [8]. Denial of reality is realized by a commodification of words and a procedure of cleavage. The cynical coup is this: €œpervert that by which law is articulated, make language the reasonable discourse of unreason€ [9] as with €œhumanitarian war€ or €œcounter-terrorism€.
Counter-terrorism legislation is presented as rational actions to dismantle the law in favour of the fabrication of images. U.S. law is particularly rich in these pictorial constructions, such as the €œlone wolf€, a lone terrorist related to an international movement, the €œenemy combatant€ or €œunlawful belligerent€ that exist, because they are designated as such by the U.S. President. The enemy combatant, as illegal belligerent, may be a U.S. citizen who has never been on a battlefield and whose €œmilitary action€ amounts to an act of protest against a military engagement. Deviation from that which is stated by the powers that be is no longer possible. Similarly, any protection against its real threat is removed. The reality manifests itself without dissimilation and can henceforth petrify us.
The suppression of the Third Person reducing the individual to a monad, no longer having an Other outside of state power, allows authority, especially as regards discourse on the war in Syria, to produce a new reality. Evidence of the guilt of the Syrian regime exists, because authority says so.
A €œdisturbing strangeness€.
The absence of a €œthird person€ settles us in transparency, in a never-never land beyond language. It removes the relationship between interior and exterior. The expression of the omnipotence of the U.S. President, his will to break free from the constraints of language and of any judicial order, reveals our condition, its reduction to €œnaked life.€ There then occurs €œa special kind of scary€ Freud calls Unheimliche [10], a term which has no equivalent in French and which can as well be translated as €œdisturbing strangeness€ and as €œdisturbing familiarity.€
It would be, as defined by Schelling, something that should have remained hidden and which has reappeared. Unveiled, worldly things appear in their raw presence as Real. Where the individual believed himself at home, he suddenly feels driven from his home and becomes strangely foreign to himself. The inside of our condition, our annihilation is thrown out and appears to us as a plaything of the U.S. executive branch. The staging of our division, €œdisturbing strangeness€, becoming that which is most familiar to us, suppresses intimateness by replacing it.
Freud suggests a dissociation of the ego. The latter is then pulverised and can no longer display the Real, the threat that petrifies it. Freud speaks of the formation of a stranger “I” that can turn itself into moral conscience and treat the other part as an object [11].
This mechanism reappears as the return of the repressed archaic, that which is intended to hide the distress of the nursing child. The €œdisturbing strangeness€, produced by Obama’s speech is of the same order. It instrumentalises what happened in Iraq in order to prevent us from forgetting our impotence. Thus, it reinforces €œthe permanent return of the same€ constitutive of a sense of “disturbing strangeness” or disturbing familiarity. The process of repetition presents itself as an inexorable process, like a power that we cannot confront.
Jacques Lacan confirms this reading. Echoing the work of Freud on the €œdisturbing strangeness€, he shows that anxiety arises when the subject is facing the €œlack of lack€ that is to say, an all-powerful otherness that invades the self to the point of destroying every faculty of desire. [12]
In fact, the two translations, the first highlighting the strangeness, the second its familiar character, make each highlight one aspect of this particular anxiety that one can also deal with thanks to the notion of transparency. Interior and exterior confusing themselves, the individual is at once struck by the strangeness of seeing his impotence, by his interior deprivation exhibited outside himself and by the colonization of his intimacy by the spectacle, become familiar, of the enjoyment of the other.
Denial and Splitting of the Ego.
Dissociation is an archaic defense attempt when faced with a power with which one cannot cope. This disintegration of the Ego allows the return of a €œdéjà vu€. The Superego calls one to see oneself as an infant, as one who does not speak, thus causing a feeling of “disturbing strangeness”.
Faced with the imperative need to believe in the responsibility of Bashar Assad, the individual must suspend contrary information and treat it as if it did not exist. He proceeds to a denial of all that is different, then couched in the regressive position, that of the umbilical union with the mother, a stage preceding language, before the appearance of the function of the father. [13]
The denial of the contradiction between a thing and its opposite, the responsibility of the Syrian government and the use of chemical weapons by the rebels, is the act of denying the reality of perception seen as dangerous because the individual would then have to face the omniscience displayed by the powers that be. To contain the anxiety produced by the “disturbing strangeness€, the subject is forced to juxtapose two opposing and parallel ways of reasoning. The individual then has two incompatible unlinked visions. The denial of the opposition between these two elements removes any confliction; because there coexists within oneself two opposing statements that are juxtaposed without influencing each other. This denial rests on what psychoanalysis calls the €œsplitting of the ego.€
The cleavage gives one the opportunity to live on two different levels, placing side by side, on the one hand, €œknowledge€, the use of sarin gas by the rebels, and on the other hand a dodging of confrontation with a suspension of information. This is to prevent any struggle, any symbolism in order to enjoy the full omnipotence of the powers that be. In the absence of a perceived lack in what one is told, one finds oneself beneath the conflict in an annulment of any judgment.
Orwell has also highlighted this procedure in his definition of €œdoublethink.€ It consists in the following: €œto hold simultaneously two opinions which cancel each other out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them,€ while being able to forget, « whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed ». Then one must forget, ie: €œconsciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you have just performed. € [14]
Cleavage is recurrent in the speech surrounding the war in Syria. Things here are regularly affirmed, at the same time as that which contradicts them without a relationship being established between the different enunciations. Contrary to statements by Carla Del Ponte, Washington would first have arrived, €œwith varying degrees of certainty,€ at the conclusion that the Syrian government forces had used sarin gas against their own people. However, Barack Obama, at the same time, said the United States didn’t know € how [these weapons] were used, when they were used or who used them€ [15]. The operation places the subject in fragmentation, unable to react to the nonsense of what is said and shown. One cannot cope with a certainty that is claimed in the absence of evidence.
The logical reversal of language building becomes a manifestation of the power of the U.S. executive. It exhibits a capacity to overcome any language organisation and thus all symbolic order. The absurdity reclaimed by the statement is as a coup against the logical basis of language. It henceforth has a petrification effect on people and captivates them in psychosis.
Notes at online piece
This article was first published on our French language website www.mondialisation.ca
Article in French :
Discours de la guerre et double pensée. L’exemple de la Syrie. Mondialisation.ca, 29 of June of 2014
Translation : Roger Lagass