Kritischer Kommentar von Alexander Karschnia zur Premiere des Films The Fourth World War bei next 5 minutes 4 in Amsterdam (September 2003):

For the fourth time media activists and net artists met in Amsterdam for a “tactical media lab" (11th –15th of September). The highlight was the showing of the new film of the US-american video-collective "Big Noise" called "The Fourth World War.” The celebration of this film with standing ovations at the closure of the four day event I read as a severe symptom of the de-politication of the worldwide resistance to global capitalism: Movement of movement – how low can you go? What has happened to the digital multitude? Actually, a lot has happened since the last Next 5 Minutes (12th –14th of March 1999): the Kosovo-War, Seattle, Prague, the outbreak of the second Intifada, Genoa, 9-11, the war against Afghanistan and Iraq… The world has turned upside down in the mean time. Still, many of the visitors seem to feel that they are on the frontline of a new militancy, that they are "part of something really cool that is about to change the world" (quote from the final discussion). This is charming, but where does this optimism come from while bombs explode every week killing civilians and a new kind of war has been launched that puts the world in a “state of permanent exception” (Agamben)? I am very sorry not to have brought this argument forward during the 5 Minutes, but I was really shocked by the naivity not only of the comrades from the US, but the general attitudes there. I write this down now because I am honestly concerned about what is happening within the ranks of activists that I counted myself a part of until now. Now I am afraid that the same people I expected to put forth a new view on the world are degenerating into a dangerously antimodern movement that fuels a fire that should be extinguished – by "us.” I am afraid that Geert Lovink and Florian Schneider are incorrect with their statement that the choice between Bush and bin Laden was none for us – and so we will proceed on our own path of globalization from beneath. I want to urge everybody very strongly to reconsider if ‚business as usual‘ can go on in the anticapitalist movement – or if things have changed too dramatically since 9-11. Maybe Genoa was the peak of this ‚general mobilization‘ of a worldwide crowd and now this ‚million men march‘ of the global masses should be interrupted – or even demobilized?

In the preparations of Genoa the propaganda from Berlusconi and the other G8-leaders about the anti-globalisation-protestors as potential "terrorists" and the threat of an Islamist attack seemed like pure paranoia from the side of the emperors. Just a month later it DID happen. And this is where things have turned another way. During n5m4 I got the impression that a lot of people treat this incident as a propaganda trick from the evil George W. Bush in his crusade. Or even turning it around into an image for the potential triumph over global capital, the fall of the Empire, the death of the Beast, the crushing of Babylon… A good example for this was the film of another US-video-collective that subverted parts of "Lord of the Ring", turning the gathering of the heroes into a gathering of the contemporary anti-capitalist forces. A really funny piece, I loved it, I laughed a lot, but at the end when the evil twin towers are mentioned in the actual story there is a cut – and the approaching terror-planes are shown. Got the picture? It is dangerous to play with the images of terror, it is nothing less, than in retrospect giving truth to the statements of Berlusconi & Co. prior to Genoa turning the movement of movements into an "anti-glob-mob.” Some people associated with the movement like Naomi Klein sensed this and urged a change in symbols. I think that at least some people at n5m4 had some trouble with “The 4th World War” -one of the organizers interviewed "Big Noise" and asked about Naomi Klein’s intervention. Unfortunately this suggestion was not taken up. The "Fourth World War" was presented: "Welcome to the war!" (Or: "Are your ready for the war.") The question is if this is just a rhetorical rather than radical gesture, ‚radical chic’ – or if this is a serious symptom. I left the room after the first ten minutes, because I couldn’t stand the way everything was mixed together and labelled as this “new war”: “Argentine, Mexico, South Corea, Palestine…” The original idea of Subcommandante Marcos to call the Cold War the "Third World War" and corporate globalisation the fourth had some charm to it – before 9-11. To apply it to the "war on terror" is dangerous. More than that, I would label it a reversed Bush-ism, the re-affirmation of the “state of exception”. It is the same political mistake as repeating the declaration of war against the Empire, that the Tutte Bianchi made before Genoa. After 9-11 it is very questionable if the movement should use the word “war” with positive connotations. Also it would be necessary to reconsider the reality of terror. I couldn’t believe how one could compare the armed, but defensive militancy of the Zappatista Army with the second Intifada: it is not the old Intifada of kids throwing stones against soldiers, this time it is kids throwing stones, but behind them are Palestinian snipers shooting at Israeli soldiers – so you have the picture of the kids for the TV cameras and when a kid gets in the fire line this also produces an image (we will get to that later). This time it is an Intifada of terror, suicide-attacks, “martyr”-murderers. It is not only unarmed people against a military machine, it is also a terror apparatus against a civil society. But in the “4th world war”, everything is getting stirred together: the mourning for disappeared family members during the Argentine dictatorship – a Hamas burial that is actually a hate rally. However deep the differences about the Israeli-Palestine-conflict are: Does anybody seriously believe that the Israeli Army is doing its military operations to bring free trade to the Palestinian territories? Can’t we at least agree that this is not part of the frontline of globalisation, but another kind of conflict?

Probably we cannot agree on anything related to that conflict, because the new militants really depend on the picture of the evil Israeli for a black-and-white-picture of the world. Even more, it is needed to pump oneself up with "aggression against the aggressors". The question really is, if it is the moral outrage over injustice or if within that outrage something else kicks in: the energy of a very old resentment. This seems to be a problem I have with probably the rest of the world’s left. As paradoxical as it is, it almost seems as if only in the German and Austrian Left, the countries where Nazism developed, there has been a debate about antisemitism on the side of the left (in leading left publications like KONKRET or Jungle World). Since the Gulf war in 1991 there was a strong thematization of antizionism being a cover-up for antisemitism and in the last years a left radical pro-Israel-attitude developed. On the eve of the war against the Baath-regime in Iraq the left was deeply divided. Ever since the so called Al-Aksa-Intifada started in September 2000 many political initiatives have broken up and many friendships have been shattered. I came to Amsterdam hoping to get away from this highly polarized atmosphere. I was – inspired by the Munich Volksbad Declaration of the make-world-congress – hoping to meet some people with a horizon beyond the question of pro and con, but searching for a New World that transcends territorial disputes (even if it is the "Holy Land") and that looks beyond "national liberation" as an emancipatory strategy. So I was really disappointed: by Next 5 Minutes as well as the makeworldpaper # 3, that was distributed there by Florian and Geert. I will start with this: "A complicated affair" by Herman Asselberghs and Pieter van Bogaert is a sad example for me of a misguided solidarity, one-sided and wrong. I liked the approach of talking about the everyday-life, about the conditions of artists in the Palestinian territories and their strategies for (artistic) survival, but I lost my sympathy when they mentioned a "suicide attack on an Israeli target" – knowing that these targets are all (in the language of the military) "soft targets": civilians. They seem to put the word "terror" in quotation marks when they write: "CNN has proclaimed a ‚day of terror‘ for the Israelis due to a bomb attack on a hotel in Mombasa, a failed attack on a flight from Kenya to Tel Aviv and a suicide squad in Jericho." I would argue: this IS a day of terror for the Israelis, no matter what CNN says. Mentioning CNN in this respect could all too easily suggest that it is only CNN – the US-American media (and you know how a lot of people think who controls the U.S. Media…) – that phrases it this way, as this was an act of propaganda. It is propaganda NOT to call this terror: this attack on Israeli people outside of Israel – as far away as Africa. This incident showed the deeply antisemitic character of the terrorists who want to make clear that no matter where Israelis are they could be attacked. I perceived this incident as another stage of escalating what anti-antizionist leftist came to call "the new anti-Jewish war" (since the massacer during Passach on March 27, 2002 the antisemitic character has been very obvious).

It would be very necessary to transfer the debate of antizionism-as-antisemitism into the forum of the world’s left, but at this point I want to adress one specific aspect: media politics around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Because here the old myths of media activism fall to pieces. Asselbergh and Bogaert mention the TV picture of the shooting of the young boy Muhammed al-Durra "around Christmas 2000.” Although this connection of the Palestinian riot and the Christian advent had often been made (one can speculate why) this specific incident actually took place on the second day of the outbreak of the second Intifada, on Septembre 30. It seems that the authors are just as uninformed as most of the other blindly one-sided people. Maybe they did not have a chance to see Esther Schapiras documentary "The Red Quadriga: Three bulletts and a dead child" about this incident (it just won a media-price in Moscow), but it has been shown in other countries too. But they could recently have read James Fallows article in "The Atlantic Monthly" (also: Zurich "Weltwoche" 29/30, also see the last issue of KONKRET, as well as No. 12, 2000). In their research the incident at the crossroad was closley investigated with ballistic measurements etc. and it comes to the conclusion that it was not possible for the Israeli soldiers in the fortress tower who were attacked by a mob to have shot the kid. There are a lot more strange circumstances: the father and the boy arrived at 15h, the burial shown on TV was on 13h. Also the boy that was buried had a deep stab wound in his stomach. The documentary does not answer how this boy could have been killed, others like Nahum Shahaf who was involved in a lot of the research done in Israel ask questions like: Why is there not more film material than only these two minutes of the killing (while the camera team was there far longer)? Why does it look as if the boy moves in the lab, although he is said to be dead. Why is there no blood on the fathers clothes? Why does the camera man shout: ‚The boy is dead‘ before he is hit? For Shahaf this scene was enacted for TV, the journalists leave this speculation open. But the question remains: was this part of a campaign? If it was, it was very successfull: this picture was not only deeply engraved in the collective memory, it became a post stamp in a couple of Arab countries, billboards were placed, a main road in Iraq and a park in Marocco were named after the boy and in Palestinian schools the kids learn to say: “We are all Mohammed.” His father said that he would also sacrifice his other kids… But let’s go on: Asselberghs and van Bogaerts text really is a good example for the media politics involved in this conflict, because they themselves mention that many Palestinians work as camera men for Western news stations (the man who filmed the al-Durra-scene was Palestinian and worked for France 2 for example.) One could argue that these camera men are "embedded journalists" of the Intifada. And one could argue, that the news management from the Palestinian authorities is a powerful weapon: pictures from the hot spot of world conflicts are an expensive commodity in the media economy, as we all know. But what most of us don’t want to know is how effective this news management from the Palestinian authorities can be. Another example: when at the end of the year 2000 two Israelis were lynched by a Palestinian mob, because they took a wrong turn and drove into a Palestinian village, the picture of one of the murderers, who holds his bloody hands out of the window to show the mob that they ripped the two men in pieces, was circulated around the world. It was shot by a small Italian TV team. A major Italian media corporation that didn’t capture these pictures officially sent an apology to the PA because they were threatened not to be allowed back in the territories – a serious threat for a big media corporation in one of the hot spots of the world! That should make every media activist think twice about their black-and-white-view-of-the-world. Is it really the independent media activists that go into the territories to show the truth versus the censorship of the militaristic Israelis? Or are the pictures that this "alternative CNN" brings to us the SAME pictures that we see on TV? In this respect the indy-coverage really is “parasitic” on mainstream media – they merge. Don’t the critical media-acitivsts realize that they are reproducing the media? Or is this a contradiction nowadays: to be critical and activist?

One last thing to Next 5 Minutes: That you only got a Palestinian filmmaker instead of an Israeli-Palestinian cooperation is probably not your fault, but simply impossible right now. But why as media critics do you not have a critical view on the way reports come in from the Palestinian territories? Why do you lose your criticism when it comes to this particular struggle? After 1999, when we have seen the Kosovo-Albanian seperatists succeed in internationalizing their conflict and using the NATO air force for their own purposes we should be very critical and look closely at what happens. It is not only the leading industrial countries that organize the military action to expand the reach of the EMPIRE, there also is effective lobbying and media work from small ethnic groups that want to redraw the world’s map! There is a collaboration of ethnic seperatism with the expansion of EMPIRE. Israel is in danger to become a second Jugoslavia, a vicitm of the New World Order. This danger comes from the politics of the EU (we’ll come back to that). Second: I was specifically disappointed that there was nothing at n5m4 on Iran. we have a massive student uprising there, the population supports it now, it is a pre-revolutionary situation there, but you seem just as desinterested in this as the rest of the European mainstream media. And there were a lot of things in the Net: the Student Union SMCCDI (movement for the coordination for democracy) has an Internet portal, there are webcams like www.Teheran24.com, there used to be female sites like www.Iraniangirl.com or the website for censored music www.teheranavenue.com (see: www.jungle-world.com, 35/03), – I mean, there is the chance for a peaceful regime-change from within, without the use of war from the outside – but the Europeans don’t care and their governements keep supporting the Mullahs and all the other Arabic despotic regimes. Ask Persian people in the diaspora what they think about the Europeans these days… And third: there was a lot of talk about EMPIRE, but most people seem not to have read Negri/ Hardt, because it is definitely NOT the old US-imperialism. What was completley missing was the other side of the picture: the EU, the free trade partners of Saudi-Arabia, Syria and Iran and the main financer of the Palestinian Authority – and maybe the terror (see the work of the dissident German green Ilka Schröder against the uncritical EU-support of the Palestinians: www.ilka.org). And why was in the tech-debate on n5m4 not one critical debate about the Galileo-project. A couple of months ago the EU told the public, it was just civilian – now they admit, it is for military purposes. It is a competition to the US-Army, because the Europeans got shut off during the Kosovo-war. What do you need this for – except to be capable of making your own war – or to even wage a war against the US. This makes one very skeptical of this new axis of peace (Germany-France-Russia-China). To speed up the military union of EUrope is not a path of peace – or do you agree with most of the Europeans, that this is a good thing – just because it is against the US? This is not the EMPIRE, this is a new imperialist conflict and who wants to take sides in that? Isn’t it the duty of leftists of all countries to first fight their own goverments (like Liebknechts old slogan: “The main enemy is within the own country!”) Even worse I think is that the Antiglob-movement celebrating the global masses on March 20th sides with the mob in Jakarta and Egypt, burning US and Israeli flags – the “small” and the “big Satan”. Solidarity with the people in the Islamist countries should not be uncritical, supporting hate rallies, antisemitic resentments. Take as a counter-example the Iranian students movement’s paper "Leave Israel, what about us" in which they said they didn’t want to hear the governments antizionist propaganda as explanation of all ills, being the ill itself: the theocracy. So fourth: I really missed a debate on terror. Why didn’t we address the question of networks of terror like “al Kaida”. This is a truly dystopic sci-fi-scenario: the EMPIRE striking back against an autonomous network, a PC in a cave in Afghanistan. This brings me back to the beginning: this war has to be ended by us – and by “us” I mean those people who have thematized networking, the media, the new world of communication etc. Of course, it is the souvereign who defines the state of exception (Carl Schmitt). But it is up to us to intervene in this discourse! Neither by re-affirmation of the “war”, nor by ignoring the reality of terror or posing the question as Bush vs. bin Laden. It is about a re-definition of peace. The EMPIRE used to be defined as EMPIRE that brings about permanent peace (like the Pax Romana). Since 9-11 peace seems like a promise, like an eschatological goal, like the beginning of messianic times. Peace surely has nothing to do with the EU taking up arms against the US – it is about the multitude taking over the EMPIRE. But the multitude is not the new masses on the march against global capital and it’s definitely not the mob raging against the US and Israel! The multitude is a promise – like peace, the coming community (Agamben): MAKE WORLD. PEACE! (27.09.2003)