The Pervert's Guide to Ideology Page #4

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for nothing, man?

For some low life pimp?

Stands in a hall?

I'm the- I'm square?

You're the one

that's square, man.

I don't go screw and

f*** with a bunch of killers

and junkies the way you do.

The task is always to save

the perceived victim.

But what really drives

this violence of the hero

is a deep suspicion that

the victim is not simply a victim.

That the victim, effectively

in a perverted way

enjoys or participates in what

appears as her victimhood.

So that, to put it very simply -

she doesn't want to be redeemed,

she resists it.

Let's go home, Debby.

And this is the big problem -

if I make an immediate jump

to the political dimension -

the big problem of American

military interventions,

especially so-called

humanitarian interventions.

From Iraq to already

Vietnam half a century ago.

We try to help them,

but what if they really

did not want our help?

The result of this

debilitating deadlock

can only be an

outburst of violence.

We do get, towards

the end of the film

Travis exploding

in a killing spree.

Killing the pimps, all the

people around the young girl.

Violence is never

just abstract violence.

It's a kind of brutal

intervention in the real -

to cover up a certain

impotence concerning

what we may call

cognitive mapping.

You lack a clear picture

of what's going on.

Where are we?

Exactly the same holds

for the terrifying outburst of

violence:
Anders Behring Breivik's

murder spree in Oslo.

Exploding a bomb in front

of the government building

and then killing dozens

of young members

of the social democratic party

in an island close to Oslo.

Many commentators

tried to dismiss this as

a clear case of personal insanity.

But I think Breivik's manifesto

is well worth reading.

It is palpably clear

there how this violence -

that Breivik not only theorised

about but also enacted -

is a reaction

to the impenetrability

and confusion of global capital.

It's exactly like Travis Bickle's

killing spree

at the end of the Taxi Driver.

When he is there,

barely alive,

he symbolically with

his fingers points a gun

at his own head.

Clear sign that all this

violence was basically suicidal.

He was on the right path,

in a way -

Travis in the Taxi Driver.

You should have the

outburst of violence

and you should

direct it at yourself

but in a very specific way

at what in yourself

change you, ties you

to the ruling ideology.

Pippin? Pippin?

In Steven Spielberg's Jaws

a shark starts to attack

people on the beach.

What does this attack mean?

What does the shark stand for?

There were different,

even mutually exclusive

answers to this question.

On the one hand

some critics claimed

that obviously the shark stands

for the foreign threat

to ordinary Americans.

The shark is a metaphor

for either natural disaster -

storms or immigrants

threatening

United States citizens

and so on.

On the other hand

it's interesting to note that

Fidel Castro,

who loves the film,

once said that for him

it was obvious that

Jaws is kind of

a leftist Marxist film

and that the shark

is a metaphor for

brutal big capital

exploiting ordinary Americans.

So which is

the right answer?

I claim none of them and

at the same time all of them.

Ordinary Americans, as ordinary

people in all countries

have a multitude of fears.

We fear all kind of things.

We fear maybe,

immigrants or people

whom we perceive as lower

than ourselves attacking us,

robbing us. We fear people

raping our children.

We fear natural disasters,

tornados, earthquakes,

tsunamis; we fear

corrupted politicians.

We fear big companies

which can basically

do with us

whatever they want.

The function of the shark

is to unite all these fears

so that we can in a way

trade all these fears

for one fear alone.

Smile, you son of a...

In this way our experience

of reality gets much simpler.

Why am I mentioning this?

Because isn't it that

for example, the most extreme

case of ideology,

maybe in the history

of humanity -

the Nazi fascist anti-Semitism

work precisely in

the same way?

Imagine an ordinary

German citizen

in the late 20s/early 30s.

His situation is,

in an abstract way

the same as that

of a small child.

He's totally perplexed.

Social authority, symbolic

order is telling him

you are a German worker,

banker, whatever -

but nothing functions.

What does society

want from him?

Why is everything

going wrong?

The way he perceives

the situation

is that newspapers

lie to him.

He lost his work

because of inflation.

He lost all his

money in the bank.

He sees moral degradation

and so on...

So what's the

meaning of this all?

The original fascist

dream is to -

of course as the dream

of every ideology -

to have a cake

and to eat it.

As it was often pointed

out, fascism is,

at it's most elementary,

a conservative revolution.

Revolution:
economic

development,

modern industry, yes.

But a revolution which

would none the less

maintain or even reassert

a traditional hierarchal society.

A society which is

modern, efficient,

but at the same time

controlled by

hierarchal values with no

class or other antagonisms.

Now, they have a problem

here, the fascists,

but antagonism, class

struggle and other dangers

is something inherent

to capitalism.

Modernisation,

industrialisation -

as we know from

the history of capitalism -

means disintegration

of old stable relations.

It means social conflicts.

Instability is the way

capitalism functions.

So how to solve

this problem? Simple.

You need to generate

an ideological narrative

which explains how

things went wrong

in a society, not

as a result of the

inherent tensions in the

development of this society

but as the result

of a foreign intruder.

Things were okay until Jews

penetrated our social body.

The way to restore the

health of our social body

is to eliminate the Jews.

It's the same operation

as with

the shark in Jaws.

You have a multitude

of fears

and this multiplicity

of fears confuses you -

like you simply

don't know

what's the meaning

of all this confusion.

And you replace this

confused multitude

with one clear figure:

the Jew. And everything

becomes clear.

The search for cuts in

the social security provision

to lone parent families

in part spurred this report.

The social security

department fears

that the accelerating budget

for single mothers

on benefits

could reach nearly

5 billion pounds

by the end of the decade.

But the issue

of the lone parent

has increasingly been

seen as the heart

of John Major's back to

basics crusade.

Remember, I think around

two, three decades ago -

when the prime minister of

the United Kingdom was

John Major -

there was a kind of

ideological campaign

to return to

morality and so on.

And all the evils of society

were embodied in the

conservative narrative

in the figure of

unemployed single mother.

Like, there is violence

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