Saddam therapy

Not so long ago, a declassified report of the IRAQI Perspectives Project (created by the United Stolk Armed Forces) can hardly recall a scientific study, although it was conceived by this. Rather, it is more appropriate to talk about a pre -prepared necrogue for a person who, as claimed, did not allow America to sleep calmly - that is, of course, for Saddam Hussein. His defeat, however, is explained by the fact that he himself, politically and sincerely, was in a kind of sleepy, drunken, illusory state, which, supposedly, could not end in anything other than giant collapse.

Modern wars are usually depicted in a humanitarian vein. These are wars for the sake of peace, if possible, universal. But in the case of Iraq and Saddam, the war had a different shade - therapeutic. The image of an Iraqi dictator with an open mouth, in which a military physician is looking, became a media embodiment of the whole logic of this war. What was it worth treating Saddam from? As it now turns out, this disease ("a disease called Saddam") had a complex - political and psychic nature. Like any other disease of the “spiritual” sense, it seemed to be in the wrong practice of “truth” and in the wrong attitude to its own cognitive abilities. In other words, in a certain maximum reassessment of these abilities.

The study of the pre -war period of Iraq is centered on the figure of the dictator in a completely special sense. It is primarily engaged in his personal states, thoughts, opinions, attitudes, etc. Only Saddam's intentions are significant. It was they who, the statement, led the country to the war. The study of the dictatorship now is the field of cognitive sciences. The false (why - a special question) consciousness embodied in a separate person is endowed with the characteristics of almost complete omnipotence. In the spirit of court historiography, in which it all depends on the word of the next son of the sky. But thereby, not so much is an additional point in the conviction, as the productive-dictatorial essence of Saddam is confirmed. The authors of the report, it seems, do not ask the question - why, even if Saddam believed that everything in his country depends on him, on his thoughts and intentions, they need to be guided by the same premise? And this in itself suggests a change in the entire modern topic of "dictatorship".

Traditionally, the accusation of dictatorship is associated with the accusation of some cognitive and at the same time political illusions, of the illusions of cognition, which became the illusion of politics. It is assumed that where there is a dictator, there is no policy. Therefore, the fight against a dictator is, first of all, “criticism”, and “criticism” almost in the philosopher, the definition of those boundaries of the dictator that he himself considers non -existent, insignificant or too remote from the center of his own thinking and power. That is why (again, traditionally) the struggle with the dictator seems extremely simple and unnoticed: there is nothing easier than philosophical criticism, for the presumptuous mind (read - dictator), usurizing the rights of all other cognitive citizens, betrays itself, inevitably shows the slack and falls out of the even place. This is how the literary code of the "fall of the dictator" is built. For example, in the Nabokovsky “extermination of a tyrant” a tyrant (aka a dictator and a usurpator) is eliminated by itself, simply a change in the installation of consciousness (hence the thesis about the sufficiency of the smallest amount of laughter to eliminate the largest dictator). Even more clearly, this humorous plot was discharged from Lem on the "Eleventh Travel of John Tikhoi." The dictatorship is nothing more than an illusion substantiated by the corporate interests of a small company that sought to save its assets.

In fact, the ideological resource of many years of Western criticism of Saddam was not at all to the dangers, which, supposedly, represented its regime for the international community, namely the illusory nature of this regime. In the presentation of the latter as a great error and as a false practice of dealing with knowledge. In the simplest case, illusoryness is reconstructed as total censorship: the dictatorial regime is illusory precisely because it excludes the whole society in favor of one, replacing this dictator society. The dictator literally "does not want to know anything about it (society)." Simply put, the dictatorship is a locally untreated society if the truth is to think in Hegelian terms of inclusion. For example, the more the Kurds "do not exist" as part of the Iraqi society, the more illusory the dictatorship. Explanation and mass replication of external "dangers" of the dictatorial regime is nothing more than the conjunctural translation of this sustainable structure, suggesting that the dictatorship as a certain political and cognitive practice is internally dissolved and therefore expects its inevitable collapse. Real criticism is criticism from the inside, and the revolution in this sense is equivalent to criticizing the boundaries of cognition.

But the report presented by American scientists does not work for this criticism. Moreover, focusing on the figure of Saddam, he implicitly confirms his powers. After all, if everything really depended on this person, what can the criticism of the dictatorship be built on? The abstraction of democracy here does not work precisely because the study should show the implementation of the mechanisms of internal criticism - for example, similar to the fact that there were a period of the 80s in Eastern Europe ("Civil Forums", "Solidarity", etc.). In this case, the problem of the dictatorship is not that it excludes society in favor of one person (or one organ, which is equivalent), but that this society is difficult to detect even after eliminating the dictator.

In this sense, the war with Saddam set the task of "saving criticism." Even if we assume the possibility of deploying the standard mechanism of criticism, no one can say what empirical embodiment he would end up in the end, and how much time it would take. It is possible that the dictatorship of Saddama simply did not become the maximum dictatorship that collapses from one explosion of laughter. Perhaps in Iraq they did not know how to laugh. Assumptions to make late, since the war became the implementation of criticism, extremely logical implementation, consistent. Simultaneous. Even the "untimely" - in the sense in which there is no temporary gap between the packages of syllogism and its conclusion.

In conditions when the internal criticism of the dictatorship is slow with the advent, the war becomes the embodiment of this delayed criticism, but at the same time it destroys its own conditions. The more emphasized the role of Saddam as a dictator, the more difficult it is to understand where the immanent criticism of the Iraqi society could be expected, which is now already replaced by external criticism. Moreover, all the logic of eliminating the dictatorship is shifted - now it is no longer directed by the principle of the impossibility of the ultimate exclusion of the whole society in favor of the dictator, but the principle of the impossibility of correctly sending cognitive functions by the dictator. In other words, therapy in the war appears from the moment from which the only subject of criticism is the dictator itself - as it would like any possible dictator, since it is responsible for all the bad and for all the good, and for the shortness and abundance.

Numerous examples given in the report indicate one thing: the dictator, if necessary, arrives in the world of illusions. These illusions are different. For example, Saddam does not believe in the possibility of capturing Iraq, as he hopes for counteraction to France and Russia, which should have opposed US plans. This, let's say, is an illusion of everyday consciousness. But there are others: the preference of relatives in all state structures and the uneven distribution of rights between related chiefs and non -grouped seems to be a “generic” atavism, which seized the individual consciousness of the dictator. In the most fully, the dictatorial practice of working with knowledge is manifested in the alleged confidence of Saddam in its own cognitive abilities and in full refusal of these abilities to others. It is emphasized that Saddam insisted on the inability to engage in politics, relying only on scientific and ordinary knowledge - he is unsatisfied with the "analytics" that he is offered - it is either limited to raw facts or does not come out further to the retelling of the Western newspapers, which Saddam, of course, is not interesting. In this situation, the only resource remains the own intuition of the dictator, the extraordinary abilities, which, in fact, are tautologically justified by the fact that the dictator is the only "transcendental subject" capable of cognition, while everyone else is capable of only the broadcast of knowledge. The mysticism of abilities is not in their quality, but in their limitation by the only agent - this is precisely issued for the main illusion of Saddam, a kind of theoretical and political nonsense, for which he must pay, because, as the punitive and healing reality should prove, he is not one capable of productive thinking.

The dictator car is built so that it involves the selection of "unaccides" - and this in itself imposes a restriction on the internal criticism of the dictatorship. Even talented and qualified military experts are afraid to express their opinion of the Genius-Saddam, since this opinion could detect the triviality of the latter. Ultimately, the dictatorship is not accused of eliminating the horizon of social progress or a common good, but of extremely incorrect handling of the truth: obviously lying propaganda of the surroundings of Saddam is false only in the eyes of the Americans who approached Baghdad, while the dictator itself fell into a trap of its absolute knowledge, since it did not imply any verification. Verification is equivalent to forced therapy. After all, if the dictator is a consistent solipsist, nothing and no one (except himself) can convince him of the falsity of his beliefs.

No matter how relate to Saddam and the actions of the American army, one thing is clear. The traditional discourse of "external intervention", "international settlement", "security", etc. It does not cover the entire field of relations and meanings arising in similar - quite regular - international acts. The rapprochement of the logic of war and therapy suggests that exposing the “cure of Saddam by the Americans” as an empty ideological trick is not so simple. Of course, the whole thing can be only in "interests", but quite arbitrary ideology can also be provided by these interests. It is impossible to contrast this therapy with something like the political "antipsychiatry", speaking on behalf of the ultimate autonomy, isolation, uniqueness of cognitive and true resources, as well as local experiments. The point is not what exactly this therapy is used, the fact is that it speaks of a society in which it is used.

The war, which has become an endless course of treatment, sends the defeated in the "sanatorium" in which they should recover from their transcendental illusions. If usually illusions of this kind were likened to a large continuous dream, then the functions of an active, initiating the collapse of the dictatorship, the side are the functions of awakening, wake -up. The world alarm clock instead of the world gendarme. Another thing is that this expected awakening cannot be recorded, extended in something more simple poke to the side: the more thorough the dictatorship comes down to the dictator, the more useless it is to try to wake it up, since all therapeutic efforts turn it into a semblance of a lunatic that walks in an external unknowable world with widely closed eyes. Emergency therapeutic actions impose a ban on the detection of the "natural" forces of the social organism, which is ultimately used to delegate therapy itself.

Probably, a report would not be more interesting in the style of "description of the disease", but in the style of "recommendations for the future." What to do to the future dictator if it appears? But is it not absurd in the very idea of ​​a "dictator" that would be ready to study on the mistakes of dictators, who were "woken up" and "cured"? Is it possible to assume that the dictator would be worried about how to remain a dictator and get rid of the peculiar dictatorial illusions, which, in fact, involve therapy? Does it imply existence as a dictator of the impossibility of such a question? After all, in the end, what had to be done by Hussein in order to stay and not lose the war? To abandon your exceptional abilities, to build a fundamentally different system of production and transmission of knowledge - but all this just means the rejection of dictatorship. The logic of therapy is tautological, but this does not mean that it is meaningless. She, in the form that was declared by the Iraqi war, speaks of the final collapse of (enlightened) ideas of authentic development, immanent criticism, and, possibly, the ideas of "society" as such. Where there are only "interested agents", there is neither society nor sociality. Democracy can be provided in the same way as any other business, that is, investments, the field for which is prepared by therapeutic practices - inspection and correction.

Therapy in the field of cognition has the problem that the therapist appears from reality. In this case, war is just a way to accelerate verification, the reality that comes. However, an attempt to appropriate reality is impossible not only for the dictator, but also for the therapist . This is understandable, if only because the course of treatment does not always take place in accordance with previously these forecasts. Traditional therapy in the field of spiritual and political diseases always “produces” his own patient adapted for itself - as a psychoanalysis that has replaced the area of ​​its application from the family bed to the analyst’s sofa, but real problems appear only when individual patients are verified and therapy of the therapist himself.