Reading Slavoj Zizek is like trying to follow a pingpong game on a merry-go-round: it takes concentration, which makes you dizzy, and then you stumble off where you got on.
But lets see if I get it. ...Zizek favors the little western-created Kiev oligarchic bully against the big western-created Russian oligarchic bully led by Czar Stalin-Putin, not only because little is cuter than bigger, but because Big Bully oligarch Putin is pushing his western-oriented cronies toward the East and barbarism; whereas the cute little Kiev oligarchic bullies are very happy exploiting their people to death for western, capitalist barbarians, who really aren’t barbarians--they are barbaric only because they have to fight barbarians, like Putin--and are really, deep down in their essence, true Judeo-Christian, liberal bourgeois children of Socrates, the Church, Voltaire, Hegel, Lenin, and Karl Marx. O.K.! ...fair enough. Seeing things that way, it’s understandable that Zizek would end the ride with his “utopian” hope that true Hegelian communists, like himself, might eventually shame the global financial community into repenting its lapse into petit fascism at home and imperial/barbarian ways abroad, and into taking up anew the necessary, historical task of establishing Global Liberal Bourgeois Democracy (after Greece, etc has been starved, Russia humbled, Africa cleansed of black people, and China Nuked). ...Then, sometime in the future, the Zeitgeist will have led us all the way to true communism, and history will end. Amen.
O.K. I’ve missed a couple of spectacular backhands, but I think I got much of the action. ...However...now that I’m a little more sober after my ride...I’m thinking--what about the coup? Did the embarrassing Victoria Nuland, funnel that 5 billion to Putin to make a coup on the Maidan in order to create a pretext to invade Ukraine? More bizarre things have happened. It’s worth considering. ...But, again--why does Zizek praise the Maidan protestors as “heroes” without mentioning the fascist militias that shot them down and cleared the streets of those “heroes”, living and dead, so that the old Kiev regime of little oligarchic bullies could step in dressed as a new regime of little oligarchic bullies? --Czar Putin-Stalin, of course. ...But ,now--and here’s the rub!--why does Zizek seem to have gotten lost in the gap of his parallax view and to not even have noticed what might be the real cause of crisis in Ukraine: the enraged workers in Southeastern Ukraine? They want to throw out both the little bullies, the big bullies, and the bully-masters of the EU and the US!
The only answer to these questions has to be that Zizek is part of the post-left dunciad of public “left” intellectuals and “socialist” politicians in the West. He even quotes Christopher Hitchens from the days before he took to nakedly posing with Rumsfeld in Iraq (after which he died of drink, not shame). These dunces see themselves as the saviors of Western Civilization against Eastern Barbarism. Most of them do well being good. But it seems to me I heard that song before, in Nuremberg, I believe.
I see you read that Zizek piece. I was wondering what you'd have to say about his defense of the Kiev regime. I still don't have an opinion, except that I am opposed to state violence. - A
ReplyDeleteHi dee, you're my only commenter. Thanks. Andrea has put this piece on Facebook for her legion of political friends. It's based on an old joke of Marx: he goes to a fancy party. Two men are violently arguing. Marx (Groucho, of course) goes up to them and says, "Hey, you big bully!--Let that little bully alone!"
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