Hezbollah online (English version)

Hezbollah leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah:
Leader of the Party of God and/or Third AntiChrist?

As Iraq rejoices in its newfound freedom and Ariel Sharon bravely stakes his reputation on new initiatives for peace, our learned commentator Frank Capri examines a pertinent case of the politics of no alternative

Mel Brooks playing Hitler in To Be or Not To Be had it right. "All I want is peace," he declared before bre aking into song: "A little piece of Poland/A little piece of France/A little piece of Hungary/And Austria, perchance?" Today, who fails to see in this gem of a movie the bitter irony of the political declaration? In reality "we want peace" = "we want a piece of you" - your land, oil, domestic markets, etc. Politics, eh? It's uncanny.

From the statement two axioms can be retrieved. First, there is the "we" which presumes the universal mode of address when in actual fact it's the royal We which is in play here, ie, the "we" who supposedly represents the people. Second, the "piece" of the statement, or of the addressee. For "we want peace" read "we want a stake in your land". So, the (seeming) universal political declaration is always ironic, comic or two-faced. It has to be, since it always masks the real of the situation. What is this real?

This real is never an object or a goal. Politics doesn't aim for anything, since it's difficult enough just doing it. To presume so is to believe wrongly that "peace" (piece) can be a function (part) of the statement, ie, a realistic goal. It can't be. Politics can't detach itself from the real, its only "aim" is unqualified unity. But what about the universal? Even if we accept that the universal is hi-jacked by capital, by Empire, by "all" the watchwords of injustice and unlawful invasion, surely it makes more sense to contest the false universality, to un-mask the duplicity?

Here we land slap bang in a philosophical minefield. Our only way out is to occupy this deadly turf despite the risk of setting off explosions. It would seem that the real difficulty of thinking politics today stems from the problem of trying to reconcile the singular and the universal. Crudely put, to think singularity (as does Deleuze) as One-all doesn't solve the problem, it even misinterprets it. Basically, we're dealing with distinct concepts: the One (Plato) and the All (Aristotle). They each have their own genealogies. But neither can we solve it by presuming the existence of multiple totalities ("sets") unified through the political deed (Badiou). Politics in this case only comes down to a common denominator, a part presumed equal to the whole (a Bolshevik revolution for all the Soviets), which relegates politics once again to the level of a function. But politics as One cannot serve the whole, it cannot meet the universal interest. This would be to place the democratic cart before the political horse.

So what is the point of politics? What place, if any, does it have?

There are very few blueprints for real politics: not the Palestinian intifada (at least not post-Oslo) and certainly not the debacle in Iraq. Naturally WhoreCull supports the resistance in Iraq, just as it supports the principle of national sovereignty and the right of self-determination as enshrined in the UN constitution to which the US and the UK are signatories. That's not at issue here. If the people of an occupied land aren't free to blow up tanks and lynch the enemy, then where does that leave democracy? Donald Rumsfeld is entirely correct on that score. But there is more than mere "democracy" at stake in Iraq, not least when politics is concerned.

Beirut, 1982. A phoenix rises from the ashes of Palestine's defeat by the Israelis. Hezbollah, Party (or Army) of God. What is it?

We are familiar with the hyperbole and hysteria that surrounds the mention of this name; the organization's exclusion from the "peace process", since the piece is Palestine; their terrorist tactics of sheltering in civilian areas, so justifying the indiscriminate levelling of those areas by the occupiers, always in the interests of "security"; etc. Everyone understands the necessity of indiscriminate violence when it's trained on a ruthless, pathological enemy, an enemy who couldn't see reason if it wanted to. It's as if the Arabs had their own "logic". But then Hezbollah isn't an ordinary enemy. We could even say that it isn't an enemy at all.

In terms of politics, Hezbollah establishes a new principle of the real. This principle is not about taking sides, or of yielding to the reality principle, for the world determines nothing about the subject, and politics is not a question of negotiating the limits of a system. Nor can we define Hezbollah simply in terms of its practice or organisational potential. Hezbollah is the promise of the end of the world; it is the apex of a non-adaptive, non-dissipative system. Hezbollah says: trust in eternity, for eternity must be.

Of course, this is not to discount the tactics, or to relegate the real achievements of its political practice. Hezbollah is the Supreme One because it epitomizes today, with devastating effect, la pensée unique: the politics of no alternative. Only Hezbollah perverts liberal ideology, it poisons it to the core. It takes unity beyond the limit, beyond the friend-enemy distinction.

How so? In practical terms it makes Beirut ungovernable through utter annihilation. Hezbollah understands - and we are now seeing the same realization gradually take hold in Iraq - that political unity cannot be sacrificed on the ground of community, or even of existence. Politics can only work through explosion, tragedy and farce. It is the impossible wager that there is something beyond. Beyond disaster. Beyond the absolute. As such, Unity is pushed through the point of no return, like a spaceship entering a wormhole, or caught for eternity, in the eye of the beholder, on the event horizon, as it collapses in the real under the force of its own gravity.

"Disaster", "catastrophe", "chaos" are words used by our well-meaning liberals in response to the situation in Iraq. "We told you so!" they cry, "it could have been different." But they are wrong. That the situation was wholly foreseeable then does not alter the disastrous implications of what happens any time now or in the future. The Hezbollah principle is the untranscendable real of politics. It operates invisibly, flickering into life here and there, before disappearing only to crop up miraculously again somewhere else in the guise of another humanitarian intervention. We embrace it. This is only the end of a new beginning.

Vive the real! Vive Hezbollah! Vive the Party of God!