Infinite Justice and the Road to Nowhere

Infinite Justice and the Road to Nowhere

By Franz Schandl

[These articles are translated from the German on the World Wide Web, http://www.krisis.de. Franz Schandl is an Austrian writer and social critic.]

The dirtiest plans cry for the most fantastic vocabulary. Nothing is as fantastic as rage. At present, rage is like a planetary infection. Infinite justice only means everyone is equal in death. Spreading that is now important. “Justice will be done”, Bush says and commends his values that have to be ours as the sharp sword. Where prayer begins, thinking ends when faith is in money.

Where such “ideas” are brought into play, thinking dies. Emotional resentment dominates. The good fights against the evil as in one of those fairy-tales made in Hollywood. What is terrible is not that people tell a pack of lies. What is dreadful is that they believe in the justice drivel. Fervently they cry: Give war a chance!

One should be thankful to the US administration that they so shamelessly reveal their plans even if they cannot foresee the consequences. The fact remains that the thickest trail of blood extracted since the summer of 1945 is that of the United States of America. This is not the result of a special American malevolence but the manifestation of the strongest capitalist system.

What is on the horizon is the end of law, not the enforcement of justice. The first terrorists demonstrated this; the second terrorists imitated the first. Who is better is a question of tastelessness. Infinite justice means that whoever does not believe must believe. Americans and the Taliban agree: “Down with the unbelievers!” The whole world imagines that it must take sides instead of strictly refusing this front.

Who can end the murder would be interesting, not who started it. The latter is a limited question that always finds a justification: “If you hadn’t done this, we wouldn’t have done that…” Whoever weighs dead against dead produces the dead again and again. This logic must be broken. Whether this can happen is doubtful. All experience speaks against this; all necessity speaks for it. Now the warriors of God arm on all sides. The resistance is trifling. In the holy war, nothing is sacred any more. Everything may become the goal of death since death is the goal. The only thing that people can be infinitely is dead. What is queued up is the generalization of the death mania, blow after blow, attack after attack.


The Road to Nowhere

By Franz Schandl

[This article is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, http://www.krisis.de. Franz Schandl is an Austrian writer and social critic. The reader is referred to other articles by Robert Kurz, Maria Mies, Frederike Habermann, Christoph Butterwege and Pierre Bourdieu.]

The US administration titles its current crusade “enduring justice”. This crusade is no joke, satire or bad film. It is bitter seriousness, dead earnest. In the meantime, the first ground troops have apparently landed.

Like infinite justice, enduring freedom can only happen in death. What is enduring is only death, the final liberation from life. Enduring freedom is the code name for endless death. The necrophilia of a system is revealed in its sermons and slogans even its exponents do not understand their own horizon. Their own horizon was never an object of their reflection. What shines is ignorance. The White House thinks of its freedom as the happy hunting grounds, as endless and eternal, freedom – here, there and everywhere.

If the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, author of “The Essence of Christianity”, would hear of the new American war terminology, he would turn around in his grave. “Whoever is afraid of being finite is afraid of existing.” The crusaders now want to bring this deal non-existence to the enemies. Angels of death are not merely their fanatical adversaries. They are themselves and have always been angels of death.

“Culture is to die for!” is not a motto of Osama Bin Laden although it would entirely fit him but comes from Samuel P. Huntington. Nearly all the media are reeling off this Western like an ideological saturation or carpet bombing. Our vision does not have to be distinguished from television. The campaign of death and the advertised campaign of freedom are one. One would be inconceivable without the other. Thinking is generally not possible in times of global madness that knows its free enterprise rationalities. The subjects produced by the culture industry are greedy, not inquisitive. They do not even want to know what they wage war against. The main thing is revenge!

Thus capital freedom is now perpetuated through a campaign that primarily equates death with freedom. Death already existed when the operation was approaching. The humanitarian catastrophe in Afghanistan already began before the military operation. The ensemble of fear and hunger, flight, poverty and sickness brought catastrophe. Days of silence will be devoted to such trivialities, not only minutes of silence for the victims. There is no simple comfort for that catastrophe.. The words hopelessness and wretchedness reveal its whole dimension.

If children and fools speak the truth, then Bush jr. and his warriors of God are included. They are truly the Ajatullahs of freedom. The ultimative ranting and raving demonstrates the character of his personnel. The religious mania in Talisbanistan and in Amerikanistan has a very similar structure. Both are extremist modern, not medieval. A dark future threatens, not a depressing past.

To endure means “holding out”, “surviving”, “bearing” and “tolerating”. The western power shows this with others. The alarmed empire immunizes itself with strong words… “That one sees the retribution in me” (Dante) could be the command of the hour. Still the autistic gossip of freedom does not provoke liberated laughter but produces understanding and consent, sometimes even frenetic applause. Many tons of stubbornness without a gram of perception is lodged in this persistence. The terrain of folly is endless. Its expansion, it seems, is the mother of all duties in the Orient and the Occident.

The punitive action could be described this way. First of all machine guns drone, grenades detonate, bombs explode and troops slaughter. The Talking Heads can be heard from behind the fighting. “Well we know where we’re going/ But we don’t know where we’ve been/ And we know what we’re knowing/ But we can’t say what we’ve seen”, the stanza exclaims. “We’re on the road to nowhere/ come on inside” is the refrain.

Bush and Bin Laden together want to force a barbarization program on the planet. A collusion, a common agreement even if against their will, underlies their collision. The challenge to all emancipatory forces must be to energetically thwart this scenario of horror without anti-Islamism and anti-Americanism. The resistance should be free from cultural resentment. Amid more than enough errors, one should not be led astray. The left may not be an accompanying orchestra or a panic orchestra.