Johann Hari

Do you believe in the rights of women, or do you believe in multiculturalism? A series of verdicts in the German courts in the past month have shown with hot, hard logic that you can't back both. You have to choose.

The crux case centres around a woman called Nishal, a 26 year old Moroccan immigrant to Germany with two kids and a psychotic husband. Since their wedding night, this husband beat hell out of her. She crawled to the police covered in wounds, and they ordered the husband to stay away from her. He refused. He terrorised her with death-threats.

So Nishal went to the courts to request an early divorce, hoping that once they were no longer married he would leave her alone. A judge who believed in the rights of women would find it very easy to make a judgement: you're free from this man, case dismissed.

But Judge Christa Datz-Winter followed the logic of multiculturalism instead. She said she would not grant an early divorce because - despite the police documentation of extreme violence and continued threats - there was no "unreasonable hardship" here.

Why? Because the woman, as a Muslim, should have "expected" it, the judge explained. She read out passages from the Koran to show that Muslim husbands have the "right to use corporal punishment". Look at Sura 4, verse 34, she said to Nishal, where the Koran says he can hammer you. That's your culture. Goodbye, and enjoy your beatings.

This is not a freakish exception. Germany's only state-level Minister for Integration, Armin Laschet, says this is only "the last link, for the time being, in a chain of horrific rulings handed down by the German courts."

The German magazine Der Speigel has documented a long list of these multicultural verdicts. Here's just a few. A Lebanese-German who strangled his daughter Ibthahale and then beat her unconcious with a bludgeon because she didn't want to marry the man he had picked out for her was sentenced to mere probation. His "cultural background" was cited by the judge as a mitigating factor.

A Turkish-German who stabbed his wife Zeynep to death in Frankfurt was given the lowest possible sentence, because, the judge said, the murdered woman had violated his "male honour, derived from his Anatolian moral concepts." The bitch. A Lebanese-German who raped his wife Fatima while whipping her with a belt was sentenced to probation, with the judge citing his... you get the idea.

Their victims are forced to ask - like Soujourner Truth, the female slave who famously challenged early women's rights activists to consider black women as their sisters - "Ain't I a woman?"

In Germany today, Muslim women have been reduced to third-class citizens stripped of core legal protections - because of the doctrine of multiculturalism, which says a society should be divided into seperate cultures with different norms according to ethnic origin.

But too often this issue is mixed up with other debates and gets waved through for the sake of politeness. The right loves mashing "mass immigration and multiculturalism" into one sound-bite. Well, I think Britain should take more immigrants and refugees, not fewer - but multiculturalism is a disastrous way to greet them.

These German cases highlight the flaw at the core of multiculturalism. It assumes immigrants have one homogenous culture which they should all follow - and it allows the most reactionary and revolting men in their midst to define what that culture is. Across Europe, many imams are offering advice to Muslim men on how to beat Muslim women. For example, in Spain, the popular Imam Mohammed Kamal Mustafa warns that you shouldn't use "whips that are too thick" because they leave scars that can be detected by the "infidels".

That might be Mustafa's culture - but it isn't Nishal's. It isn't the culture of the women who scream and weep as they are beaten.

And yes, we should admit that this is disproportionately a problem among Muslim, Sikh and Hindu immigrants who arrive from countries which have not had women's rights movements. Listen to Jasvinder Sanghera, who founded the best British charity helping Asian women after her sister was beaten and beaten and then burned herself to death. She says: "It's a betrayal of these women to be PC about this. Look at the figures. Asian women in Britain are three times more likely to commit suicide than their white friends. That's because of all this."

Yet the brave campaigners who have tried to help these women - like Labour MP Ann Cryer - have been smeared as racist. In fact, the real racists are the people who vehemently condemn misogyny and homophobia when it comes from white people but mysteriously fall silent when it comes from black and Asian men.

Indeed, in the name of this warm, welcoming multiculturalism, the German courts have expliclty compared Muslim women to the brain-damaged. The highest administrative court in North Rhine-Westphalia has agreed that Muslim parents have the 'right' to forbid their daughter from going on a school trip unless she was accompanied by a male family member at all times. The judges said the girl was like "a partially mentally impaired person who, because of her disability, can only travel with a companion."

As the Iranian author Azar Nafisi puts it: "I very much resent it when people - maybe with good intentions or from a progressive point of view - keep telling me, 'It's their culture'... It's like saying the culture of Massachucets is burning witches." She is horrified by the moves in multicultural Canada to introduce Shariah courts to enforce family law for Muslims.

Multiculturalists believe they are defending immigrants. But in reality, they are betraying at least 55 percent of them - the women and the gays. It is multiculturalists, for example, who are the biggest champions of the government's massive expansion of 'faith schools', where children will be segregated according to parental superstition and often taught the most literalist and cruel strain of a 'faith'.

What will girls and gay pupils be taught there? Will they have Sura 4, verse 34 drilled into them, along with the passages from the hadith where Mohammed calls for gay people to be executed? We know Catholic schools often push the most vile aspects of their faith at children; why should Muslim schools be different?

We desperately need to empower Muslim women to reinterpret the Koran in less literalist and savage ways, or to leave their religion all together, as they wish. But multiculturalism hobbles them before they even begin, by saying they should stick to the 'authentic' culture represented by the imams.

Yes, it would be easy to keep our heads down, go with this multicultural drift, and congratulate ourselves on our tolerance of the fanatically intolerant. But I can give you a few good reasons to. Their names are Nishal and Abtahale and Zeynep and Fatima, and, yes, they were women.

For that small sliver of the intellectual world who are self-consciously postmodern academics, Slavoj Zizek - a shambling, rambling Slovenian philosopher - is a folk hero. At any lecture podium, any time, any where, he will emit hazy clouds of gaseous theory with the ampehtamine-intensity and comic riffs of Bill Hicks.

He emerged seemingly fully formed from the wreckage of the former Yugoslavia with an eclectic magpie-philosophy, rapidly spewing out books and essays on everything from opera to the use of torture in TV series 24. Zizek is the biggest box office draw postmodernists have ever had, their best punch at the bestseller lists. He is fawned over everywhere from the London review of Books to the New Yorker.

It's not hard in the opening scenes of this new documentary to see why they fall for him. Zizek looks like an immense human Droopy Dawg, and talks with such babbling neurotic force about everything from quantum physics to Hegel to Meg Ryan that, for a moment, he is hypnotic. Here he leads the film-makers through his chaotic trans-continental life, jabbering to them from his bed and even taking them to the long staircase where he fantasisies about killing himself - before posing as a splattered corpse on the conrete floor beneath.

But as the movie progresses, something remarkable happens: Zizek not only symbolically enacts his own suicide; he commits intellectual suicide, all-but-admitting that his 'philosophy' is a grotseque slew of nonsenses. If the director Astra Taylor intended to make a fawning fan-letter - as her cameos in the film suggest - she has failed. If she intended to shred Zizek's credibility, she has succeeded stunningly.

What does Slavoj Zizek believe? What does he argue for? These obvious questions are considered vulgar among postmodernists, and when you first look through Zizek's 25 books and counting, it is almost impossible to find an answer. It seems he seeks to splice Karl Marx with the notoriously-incomprehensible French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, slathering on top an infinite number of pop-culture references. His defenders claim he is trying to stretch the scope of philosophy to cover the everyday flotsam that philosophers have hitherto ignored, just as Joyce and Proust stretched the novel to cover shitting and handjobs.

But gradually, as you pore through Zizek's words or stare at his bemused audiences here, you discover that his work is not complex because it is expressing a highly complex point. No - it is complex to hide the fact that he has no point, except to revive a murderous and discredited ideology.

When asked by an audience member what his idea of a good social order is, he replied: "Communism! I am absolutely in favour of egalitarianism with a taste of terror." Behind Zizek's comedy-routines, he believes we need to return to Bolshevism. He is not offering warm, fuzzy Lennonism; it is cold, bloody Leninism.

Zizek writes rapturous hymns of praise to the "genius" and "strength" of Lenin, calling him "the politician of the twentieth century" and demanding "fidelity to Lenin's legacy". Just in case there is any ambiguity about the anti-democratic nature of supporting the man who errected a monstrous one-party police state in Russia, Zizek explains that Lenin's "ultimate lesson is that only by throwing off out attachment to liberal democracy" can we become virtuous.

This contempt for liberal democracy - and preference for dictatorship - is a constant in Zizek's work. He approvingly quotes Alain Badiou who argues: "Today the enemy is not called Empire or Capital. It's called Democracy." Zizek says about Benito Mussolini, "You know, the democrats in 1925 accused Mussolini: 'You want to rule Italy, but you don't have any programme.' You know what was his answer? 'We do have a programme: our programme is to rule Italy at any price. I love Mussolini."

When Zizek was asked if he wanted to be a government minister in the mid-1990s, he replied, "I am only interested in two posts - either Minister of the Interior or head of the Secret Police."

He condemns the new language of human rights as an unacceptable brake on reconstructing Leninism. When asked about Stalin, he says, "My big worry is not be ignored but to be accepted. People still have this idea that this guy did some bad crimes... Of course it's not as simple as that, that I am simply a Stalinist, that would be crazy, tasteless and so on. But obviously there is something in it, that it's not simply a joke."

He actually praises Chairman Mao's notorious indifference to the massive loss of human life in a nuclear war as "a cosmic perspective" and a "message of courage". He says the "terror" involved in Maoism is "nothing less than the condition of freedom."

When you peel back the patina of postmodernism, there is old-fashioned philo-tyrannical nonsense here. At some level, Zizek knows that this is preposterous - he lived under Soviet tyranny, and even joined the opposition. Simply by putting a camera in front of him and leaving it running, Taylor sees his facade and his ideas crumble.

After rambling on that "it is not a joke" to say he is "Stalinist", Zizek suddenly admits, "I think there was a thing called totalitarianism, and it was bad... You know, if I was not myself, I would arrest myself." He then admits that his political positions are monstrous: "The worst thing is to play the 'we are all human' game. I am not human. I am a monster. It's not... that I wear the mask of a theoretician and underneath I am a warm human being. I am a monster who plays, pretends he is human."

He expresses this monstrousness repeatedly in his writing, mocking the liberals who back off from the "cruelty" necessary to build his ideal world. He recounts with admiration this anecdote: "Walking to his theatre in July 1956, Brecht passed a column of Soviet tanks rolling towards the Stalinallee to crush the workers' rebellion. He waved at them and later that day wrote in his diary that, at that moment, he was for the first time in his life tempted to join the Comminist party." Zizek calls this "an exemplary case of the passion of the real. It wasn't that Brecht supported the military action, but that he perceived and endorsed the violence as a sign of authenticity."

So is Zizek a kind of philosophers' Borat, taking ludicrous positions to see how far he can push it? His followers dismiss every depraved political statement as an ironic joke. At times Zizek insists fiercely he is not a comedian, that he means every word. Then he confesses in a terrible moment of self-awareness: "My eternal fear is that if for a brief moment I stopped talking the whole spectacular appearance would disintegrate, [and] people would think there is nobody and nothing there. They would think I am a nobody who has to pretend all the time to be a somebody."

As he watches his hero Jacques Lacan deliver an incomprehensible lecture on video, Zizek exclaims: "There is nothing behind this obscurity. This is just bluffing." It is a plain moment of projection, and an unwitting confession of charlatanism. His political thought quickly descends into contradictory drivvel, where he claims he is against the people who condemn the bombing of Kosovo and against the people who condone it, and calls for "a revolution without revolution." He has, of course, constructed a convoluted epistemology to justify this, claiming that in reality "we can only speak about things that do not exist" and "we can ultimately only talk... about things we do not understand."

This kind of postmodern thought can only entertained because nobody would ever take it seriously enough to act on it. When Deleuze and Guattari say we should all become scizophrenic, when the gay Michel Foucault embraces the murderously homophobic Ayatollah Khomeini, when Zizek suggests a return to Leninist terror - the very positions are admissions that postmodernism is a merely an unserious intellectuals' confection. It leads nowhere except to demoralisation and disaffection.

Zizek is fond of riffing on objects from everyday life, and talks in the film about a "chocolate laxative" he recently bought in a chemist. It's an apt image, because Zizek himself is like a chocolate laxative - sweet at first taste, but ultimately leaves only a torrent of painful shit.

And yes, 'Zizek!' is a painful film, almost the record of a philosophical nervous breakdown. You do not end up hating Zizek, even when he says with Stalinist relish that he wants to rehabilitate "notions of discipline, collective order, subordination." No - you end up hating the Academy that takes this non-thought seriously. Are they really saying you can advocate tyranny as long as you throw in some gags about Keanu Reeves?

In the end, they have left us nothing but a Theory-Clown with bloody tears.

"Zizek!" (unrated) is released on 4 May in britain and will be showing at the Institute of Contemporary Arts

You can send comments on this article for publication in the New Statesman to letters@newstatesman.co.uk or just for me to johann -at- johannhari.com

You can comment on it (and read others' comments) here.

You can read other articles I've written about postmodernism here, here, and here. There are also lots more in the archive.

There's a critical response to this article by Stephen Poole, whose blog I usually really like, here. Obviously I like this post less, since it calls me an idiot...

The divine Ophelia Benson responds to him here.

While the world's press has been fixated on the teeny-weeny scandal over whether World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz helped to get his girlfriend a $300,000-a-year gig next door, they have been ignoring the rancid stench of a far bigger scandal wafting from Wolfie's Washington offices.

This slow-mo scandal isn't about apparent petty corruption in DC. It's about how

Let's start with the victims. Meet Hawa Amadu, a seventy-something living in the muddy slums of Accra, the capital of Ghana, and trying to raise her grandkids as best she can.

Hawa has a problem - a massive problem - and the World Bank put it there. She can't afford water or electricity any more. Why? The World Bank threatened to refuse to lend any more money to her government, which would effectively make it a leper to governmental donors and international business, unless they stopped subsidizing the cost of these necessities.

The subsidies stopped. The cost doubled. Now Hawa goes thirsty so her grandchildren can drink, and weeps, "Am I supposed to drink air?"

She is not alone. Half a world away, in Bolivia, Maxima Cari - a mother - is also thirsty. "The World Bank took away my right to clean water," she explains. In 1997 the World Bank demanded the Bolivian government privatise the country's water supply. So Maxima couldn't afford it any more. Now she has to use dirty water from a well her villagers dug themselves. This dirty water is making her children sick, and she is sullen.

"I wash my children weekly," Maxima says. "Sometimes there's only enough water to wash their hands and faces, not their whole body.... This is not a nice way to live." The newly elected socialist government of Evo Morales is planning to take the water back - and he is, of course, condemned and threatened by the World Bank.

Meet some more victims. I have met hundreds, from Africa to Latin America to the Middle East. Muracin Claircin is a rice farmer in Haiti - only he can't grow rice any more. In 1995, the World Bank demanded Haiti drop all restrictions on imports. The country was immediately flooded with rice from the US, which has been lavishly subsidised by the American government. The Haitian government barely exists and can't offer rival subsidies anyway: the World Bank forbids it. So now Muracin is jobless and his family are starving.

Some 5000 miles away, Charles Avaala in Ghana is watching his tomatoes rot. He used to grow them for a government-owned community tomato cannery that provided employment for his entire community. The World Bank ordered his government to close it down, and to tear open the country's markets to international competition. Now he can't compete with the subsidy-fattened tomatoes from Europe. He, too, is starving.

How would Hawa and Maxima and Muracin and Charles feel if you told them that none of this is considered a scandal, but business as usual?

These victims are not merely an anecdote soup; they are an accurate summary of the World Bank's effect on the poor. Don't take my word for it. The World Bank's own Independent Evaluation Group just found that barely one in ten of their borrowers experienced persistent growth between 1995 and 2005 - a much smaller proportion than those who stagnated or slid deeper into poverty. The Bank's own former chief economist, Nobel-prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, says this approach "has condemned people to death... They don't care if people live or die."

Why? Why would a body that claims to help the poor actually thrash them? Because its mission to end poverty has always been mythical. As George Monbiot explains in his book 'The Age of Consent', the World Bank was created in the 1940s by US economist Henry Dexter White to be a further projection of US power. The bank's head is invariably American, the bank is based in Washington, and the US has a permenant veto on policies. They do not promote a sensible mix of markets and state action - the real path to development. No: the World Bank pursues the interests of US corporations over the poor, every time.

The Bank's staff salve their consciences by pickling themselves in an ideology - neoliberalism - that says there is never a conflict between business rights and human rights. If it's good for Shell, it must be good for poor people - right?

This ideology also backfires on us in the rich world. In 2000, the World Bank was finally forced to undertake a review of its energy policies. It did its best to rig it, putting the former energy minister of the corporation-licking Indonesian dictator General Suharto. Emil Salim was even serving on the board of a coal company at the time he was appointed.

But - to everyone's astonishment - Salim concluded by opposing the carbon-pumping oil and gas projects that make up 94 percent of all the Bank's energy projects. He said they should be stopped altogether by 2008.

The Bank's response? It ignored its own report and carried on warming. The business climate, it seems, trumps the actual climate. Feel the heat.

While the elites huff and puff about Wolfowitz's alleged small corruptions and ignore his organization's proven immense corruptions, there is something we - ordinary citizens - can do. In the summer of 2001, at the global justice protests in Genoa, I met with Dennis Brutus, a former inmate of Robben Island Prison alongside Nelson Mandela. He had been repelled by the Bank's actions in South Africa, and started his protests against them by asking a very basic question: who owns the World Bank?

It turns out we do. Ordinary people in the west - through their trade unions, churches, town councils, universities and private investments - own it. The bank raises nearly all its funds by issuing bonds on the private market. They are often held by socially minded institutions, the kind who signed up to Make Poverty History.

So, Brutus realised, we have a simple power: to sell the bonds and bankrupt the World Bank. "We need to break the power of the World Bank over developing countries just as the disinvestment movement helped break the power of the apartheid regime in South Africa," he explained.

The campaign to make World Bank bonds as untouchable as aparthied-era investments has already begun. The cities of San Francisco, Boulder, Oakland and Berkeley have sold theirs. Several US unions have also joined. Even this small ripple has caused anxiety within the bank about the threat to its "AAA" bond rating.

In the Genoa sun, as tear gas fired by the Italian police hissed in the background, Brutus told me, "I lived to see the death of political apartheid. Now I want to live to see the end of global financial apartheid."

This is the fight we should join - not some petty squabble over which Washington technocrat is morally pure enough to lead the forces of subsidy-slashing and starvation.

POSTSCRIPT: You can send letters about this article for publication in the Independent to letters@independent.co.uk or just to me to johann -at- johannhari.com

You can read more articles I've written about the World Bank, IMF and global justice issues here.

From the neon lights of Britain's big cities, it looks like the fight for gay equality is finally over. After a century of struggle and ten years of Tony Blair, gay people in Britain can get married, join the army, climb the charts, climb to the cabinet, and climb into bed without fearing the police. Blair has now done everything the gay community could possibly ask except peel off his shirt and dance with the go-go boys in Heaven.

But then you bump up against a statistic that shows how sharp homophobia remains: gay teenagers are still six times more likely to commit suicide than their straight siblings.

If we aren't going to abandon those kids to their nooses, the fight for equality needs to shift now from lobbying politicians to changing the culture. From across the Atlantic, there is a whisper of the way to do it.

Last year, the 6'10 hard-as-concrete NBA basketball star John Amaechi came out, a stun-bomb he describes in the autobiography published last week, 'Man in the Middle'. "I just want to bring about change, to make things easier for young kids," he explains. It's the same reason Martina Navaratilova gives: "It's hugely important for kids [to see there are people like us] so they don't feel alone in the world."

If a gay adolescent growing up today is naturally effeminate, there is a planetarium of role-models for him. But if he is just pining for a boyfriend he can have a pint and watch the match with, there is nobody he can recognise in the public eye.

The best way to show these gay kids they are normal is for some of the deities of our national religion - football - to follow Amaeche and come out. If there was a gay Beckham or Rooney winning it for England, it would do more to transform attitudes than a thousand be-nice-to-gays school lessons.

But it is startling to remember that as it stands, Britain's only ever openly gay football player was hounded and pillioried until he committed suicide. Justin Fashanu, the first million-pound black player, was dubbed "a bloody poof" by his manager Brian Clough and "an outcast" by his own brother. After years of bracing this bigotry, he locked himself in a garage and gassed himself.

There are dozens of gay players trying to avoid the same fate by remaining closetted. What can we do to coax them out? Outing would be useless: if they have to be forced, then it inspires nobody.

There is another way. It is to kick homophobia out of football with the same force as racism. Twenty years ago it was common for black players to be greeted with monkey noises and inflatable bannanas. That world has been wiped out now.

You could see the first steps toward a parallel campaign last year, when it was alleged - falsely - that Ashley Cole was gay. The website for fans of rival team Arsenal organised systematic homophobic abuse against him, including printing up huge £20 notes depicting 'Queen' Ashley.

The Football Association's response, after prompting from Peter Tatchell, was a model of how to react. The fans at the next match were inundated with anti-homophobia flyers. Anybody caught trying to bring in homophobic material was banned. CCTV cameras were trained on Arsenal fans so anybody leading homophobic chants could be banned from future matches too. The abuse withered away.

It will be incredibly hard for another footballer to come out, so we have to make it as easy for him as possible. Let's have anti-homophobia videos before the matches where the leading players say how stupid it is, just as they did with racism. Let's have matches dedicated to giving homophobia the red card, with money raised for charities working with gay teenagers. Once the pitch is cleared of bigotry, more men will step forward.

Is this so much to ask? At the moment, many football fans have shown themselves happy to cheer for wife-beating misognynists and men who have been very plausibly accused of rape. Is homosexuality worse?

Amaechi explains in his autobiography how he was emboldened by small gestures. His straight fellow player Andrei Kirilenko guessed his sexuality and invited him to a New Year's Eve party with a note saying, "Please come, John. You are welcome to bring your partner, if you have one, someone special to you. Who it is makes no difference to me." That's a real man. British sport needs more of them, supporting their gay fellow players.

It will take a brave, ballsy footballer to come out. But whoever he is, he has extraordinary power. He will not only change his own life. He will pull back teams full of gay teengers, even here in liberal Britain, who are currently living - and dying - in despair.

POSTSCRIPT: You can read more of my articles about gay issues here.

I've written an article exposing Andrew Roberts, George Bush's favourite historian, in this week's The New Republic, one of America's leading political magazines.

You can read the original article here.

It's all here.