Comments on the Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord

Author:Guy Debord [Debord, Guy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, General, Political
ISBN: 9781859841693
Google: 8Cd5nmMKkNMC
Amazon: 1844676722
Publisher: Verso
Published: 1998-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

XIX.

At the beginning of 1988, General Noriega suddenly became known world-wide. He was the unofficial dictator of Panama, a country without an army, where he commanded the National Guard. Panama is not really a sovereign state: it was dug out for its canal, rather than the reverse. Its currency is the dollar, and the true army which is stationed there is similarly foreign. Noriega had thus devoted his entire career -- precisely like that of [General] Jaruzelski in Poland -- to serving the occupying power as its chief of police. He imported drugs into the United States, since Panama was not bringing him sufficient revenue, and exported his 'Panamanian' capital to Switzerland. He had worked with the CIA against Cuba and, to provide adequate cover for his economic activities, had also denounced some of his rivals in the import trade to the US authorities, obsessed as they are with this problem. To the jealousy of Washington, his chief security advisor was the best on the market: Michael Harari, a former officer with Mossad, the Israeli secret service. When the Americans finally decided to get rid of this person [Noriega], some of their courts having imprudently condemned him, Noriega declared that he was ready to defend himself for a thousand years, for Panamanian patriotism and, at the same time, against his own people in revolt and foreigners; in the name of anti-imperialism, he quickly received public approval from the more austere bureaucratic dictators in Cuba and Nicaragua.

Far from being a peculiarly Panamanian strangeness, this General Noriega, who sells and simulates everything, in a world which everywhere does the same thing, was altogether a perfect representative of the integrated spectacular, and of the successes that it allows the most varied managers of its internal and international politics: a sort of man of a sort of state, a sort of general, a capitalist. He is the very model of the prince of our times[38] and, of those destined to come to power and remain there, the most able to resemble him closely. It is not Panama which produces such marvels, it is our era.

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