Levelling the Egg-Pelting Field: A Draft Manifesto

(Dear Friends, Here is a draft manifesto drafted by a colleague from the University. Another one that proves where the critical minds belong.)

What’s in a Protest?

In a website about military joke, the following joke can be found:
An Army recruiter delivered a windy pep talk to encourage a group of college students to join the VOLAR. But the culminating point of his oration was greeted with cat calls, whistles and projection of rotten eggs and an assortment of no less rotten vegetables and fruits.

A visitor asked a student: "Why you throw tomatoes at the man and now you are applauding him?"

"We want an encore. I still have some tomatoes left!" explained the student.
AFP: Auckland: Around 600 anti-war protesters whistled, thumped drums and set fire to flags outside New Zealand's parliament today as Australian Prime Minister John Howard met leaders inside. The protesters, who included three Green Party MPs, also hurled tomatoes onto the steps of the parliament building in a show of anger over Howard's unstinting support for US-led military action against Iraq.

From the Philippine Daily Inquirer: STUDENTS of the University of the Philippines pelted Armed Forces Chief of Staff Gen. Hermogenes Esperon Jr. with eggs and mud on Friday inside the UP campus in Quezon City, the military said. Esperon was leaving a conference hall at the UP where he had been addressing a forum, when at least 10 students began chanting “fascist military” and throwing eggs and mud, hitting the general on his back and pants, AFP spokesperson Lt. Col. Bartolome Bacarro said. (Published on page A2 of the September 23, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer)

So what’s the difference between these two incidents? Like the Holocaust there are various ways to interpret UP incident.

• The liberal interpretation: The APSM statement proposes the liberal neutral interpretation:
“Contrary to accusations, APSM stands for academic freedom. We believe that academic freedom means that a person, organization or institution can articulate ideas and political beliefs without the threat of being harmed in any way. In fact, the presentation of the forum is an attempt to achieve that objective. The military as an institution, just like other actors in society, deserves its right to participate in public discourse and present its ideas and policies. Fora such as the one presented promotes transparency by engaging the military in a public discussion of its ideas and policies.”
This is the usual liberal mantra: dialogue please, but no riot! So while a liberal passionately attacks ideas she dislikes and vigorously defends her own stand, she recoils quickly from asserting the consequences of her viewpoint. So let’s all work for the elimination of violence, but when this requires slightest violence, the liberal shirks. So a liberal deep ecologist can retort: “How dare these green parties cause pain and suffering for those tomatoes!” to which the UP liberal animal right advocates can rejoin: “How dare these Leftists cause pain and suffering to unhatched chicken eggs?” (which of course is questionable because the eggs are bad eggs) That’s why she is often defeated by a staunch conservative who goes through the consequences of what she believes without hesitation. Since a liberal proposes non-violent, peaceful way of resolving conflict, she is bound to be peaceful even if she knows very well that her enemy is cruel. One must be reminded here of Herbert Marcuse’s plea for intolerance:

The tolerance which is the life element, the token of a free society, will never be the gift of the powers that be; it can, under the prevailing conditions of tyranny by the majority, only be won in the sustained effort of radical minorities, willing to break this tyranny and to work for the emergence of a free and sovereign majority - minorities intolerant, militantly intolerant and disobedient to the rules of behavior which tolerate destruction and suppression.” are determined and defined by the institutionalized inequality (which is certainly compatible with constitutional equality), i.e., by the class structure of society. In such a society, tolerance is de facto limited on the dual ground of legalized violence or suppression (police, armed forces, guards of all sorts) and of the privileged position held by the predominant interests and their 'connections'.

Can we not therefore claim that what the students displayed is a kind of “liberating tolerance”? A symbolic act to test the tolerance of the liberal tolerators?

We must insist today on Leninist plea for intolerance and the futility of formal freedom. Formal freedom is the freedom of choice within the coordinates of the existing power relations, while actual freedom designates the site of an intervention that undermines these very coordinates. So within the so-called liberal democratic formal space, you can choose among varieties of dialogue: forum, debate, symposium, lecture, colloquium, roundtable discussion, etc. Egg throwing? No, it’s not in the liberal’s civilized menu!

A more radical reading here presents itself: isn’t the angry protest of the students, against the sector of the military that protects the President and not the People, a real expression of highest military honor: the principle of non-toleration of unethical behavior? And that the throwing of eggs to General Esperon is a symbolic act reminding him of the highest military valor, which is saying NO! to politicians who drag the nation to chaos and division? And if General Esperon claims he is innocent (of involving himself in electoral fraud and omission in the face of political killings), then, all the more he has to show vigorously that the military does not tolerate any form of corruption whether inside or outside the military. Any gesture short of this is to diminish military honor!

Liberals can retort: “But throwing eggs could have been substituted by throwing sour arguments against the General in the forum!” What is hypocritical here is that the liberals who flaunt this argument are doing what Lacan calls as acting out: two people with different, irreconcilable, political beliefs, being nice and sharing congenial glances, when there is a seething antagonism between them. What the egg throwers accomplished is a kind of symbolic act: the suspension of the rules and assertion of one’s passion.

• The “Maybe those who threw them were bad eggs” argument: According to this, UP students who participated were not representative of the entire UP system and therefore they must apologize to clear the stained reputation of UP students. The obscene supplement to this argument is the condescending (but unaristocratic statement of General Esperon): “I still have high regards for UP.” This obscene supplement flattens out the difference between Esperon’s statement and the fetishistic statement: “I still trust the electoral system even if it has room for allowing some politicians to cheat.” This obscene supplement abolishes the remainder between egg throwing and political corruption.

What is missing in this argument is the Hegelian notion of concrete universality. The ideals of the University as empty ideals that must be filled with concrete content. Each generation of UP students must struggle to define what will count as UP values. So if academic freedom is part of UP values, we must leave room for antagonistic negotiation on how to define this value. So the struggle now is: Is the action of the egg-throwers part of that this quasi-Kantian transcendental value? What must not be missed here is that the liberals and detractors of the egg throwers had already scored points by invoking the value of academic freedom: egg throwing against a General violates academic freedom! What an irony! The task of those who are sympathetic to the incident should immediately do is to claim universality on their side. “Yes, the egg throwing is part of our academic freedom!” As Marcuse argues, “According to a dialectical proposition it is the whole which determines the truth--not in the sense that the whole is prior or superior to its parts, but in the sense that its structure and function determine every particular condition and relation. Thus, within a repressive society, even progressive movements threaten to turn into their opposite to the degree to which they accept the rules of the game.” Egg throwing is definitely a refusal to play the liberal coy game..

An Aristocratic Response, Yes, Please!
According to one of the aphorism of German military: “That which does not kill me makes me stronger.” And Nietzsche endorses this in the Twilight of the Idols. That is why cruelty and power are so dear to Nietzsche. Miller interprets Nietzsche as saying that, “To exercise actively the will to power, he regards as the essence of life. To exercise this power with abandon is not only to court being cruel but, when cruelty occurs, to enjoy the pain the suffering, the agony that cruelty causes. "To practice cruelty is to enjoy the highest"-note the adjective: the highest -"gratification of the feeling of power." To enjoy the exercise of power is, in effect, to be cruel. And cruelty is the virtue of the noble individuals. As Miller points out BE CRUEL in your resoluteness, welcome the harsh renunciations and sometimes brutal costs of relentlessly pursuing any vaulting ideal, be it wisdom, Godliness, or revolutionary purity. This we may call the cruelty proper to the ascetic, an eagerness to suffer the pains entailed by unswerving commitment to any burning faith or transcendent ambition.” Of course the military and the Rightist can claim they can also be cruel. This is where the liberal are out-smarted: they shy away from inflicting cruelty to realize their ideals, but the reactionaries do not!
Fabricating the Bad Egg Festival

In the age of post-politics, and what Giddens calls as post-traditional society, where new traditions are fabricated, the egg throwing incident is a perfect candidate for staging a festival of spectacle, which eventually can rival the Tomatina (tomato battle) Festival in Bunol, Valencia, Spain, every last Wednesday of August, or the Mr. Tomato Head Festival of Ukrainians, during Indpeendence Day (a festival ushered by the great Ukrainian anarchist, Nestor Makhno). If Nietzsche says, “Without cruelty there is no festival,” we must also assert its obverse: “Without festival there is no cruelty.” Bur whereas Ukrainians throw tomato on the picture of the most corrupt politician, and Spain use tomato, the UP festival can be called Esperon Day, or Bad Eggs Festival. If Alpha Phi Omega fraternity has the Oblation Run, then progressive students can have their own “fabricated” festival.

The One Measure of True Love Is: You Can Insult the Other

This festival should be a reminder to future generation of UP students, that for a brief moment, the students are able to equalize their status differences with the highest military official, no less than the Chief of the Armed Forces of the Philippines. (Because if the incident happened elsewhere it could have been catastrophic!) And that UP can be a freedom zone where statuses do not matter! And that is the highest meaning of RESPECT --A VIRTUE being misrepresented by liberals, and being flaunted by the MILITARY! Esperon deserves RESPECT, yes! --BUT RESPECT on equal terms. As Nietzsche reminds us, respect can only be exercised among equals! THE HIGHEST FORM OF RESPECT THEREFORE IS DISREPECT! As Zizek puts it, “For me there is one measure of true love: you can insult the other... That's the truth of it. If there is true love, you can say horrible things and anything goes.”