.
The title of this post recalls Žižek’s own 2008 work In Defense of Lost Causes. Not one of his better books, in my opinion. Žižek remains one of the few redeemable intellectuals of our time. Despite, or perhaps because of, his zany antics and constant clowning, he manages to be consistently insightful. Or at least compared to most. Marxism, like Žižek, might today be a lost cause. But I’ll defend it nonetheless.
Molly Klein and friends have leveled a number of accusations against the Slovenian Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek. Among other things, they have alleged that he is a “psyop” in the employ of the US government. Supposedly he is working to undermine the rebirth of any genuinely anti-imperialist Left. (Recently Molly suggested that the Jacobin editor and founder Bhaskar Sunkara is also a paid propagandist). Klein’s online clique — a couple drones and devotees, but mainly sock puppets run by Klein herself — takes great exception to the term “tankie,” yet calls anyone who disagrees with them a fascist.
They have also implied that Žižek and his Ljubljana school colleagues Alena Zupančič and Mladen Dolar published a translation of the apocryphal Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1989, the first to appear in Slovenia. Certainly a serious charge, not to be taken lightly. It is however baseless, as can be proved without much difficulty. Perhaps Klein’s other arguments against Žižek are accurate (not bloody likely). But this is the claim under investigation here, so I’ll confine my remarks to it.
Most are probably aware that the Protocols were widely disseminated in the first few decades of the twentieth century, providing “indisputable proof” of an international Jewish conspiracy. Anti-Semites in multiple countries across Europe and North America promoted the text as an authentic document, as part of their vicious smear campaign against the Jews. So its translation would seem especially incendiary in a place like former Yugoslavia, where memories of the Holocaust were still fresh in the 1980s.
http://t.co/j0iX68oFvu @jaywattsiii constant nazi crap.and fakery. You know he published first Slovene lang. .edition of Protocols of Zion?
— Red Kahina (@RedKahina) June 22, 2015
@YakovPettersson one slight error. Zizek actually published FIRST EVER Slovene edition of Protocols of Elders of Zion, not the first postwar
— Red Kahina (@RedKahina) June 12, 2015
@TomFrome yes of course seriously. He was the edutor with Mladen Dolar of Tribuna and they published the first Slovene edition of Protocols
— Red Kahina (@RedKahina) May 17, 2015
Perhaps it is a waste of time to debunk Klein’s defamatory claim. Nobody really believed this ridiculous libel to begin with. Readers of Žižek will no doubt be surprised to hear that he endorses the view that the Protocols are genuine, as this runs counter to everything he has said on the subject in his writings. For example, in Welcome to the Desert of the Real he wrote:
When we consider [the Palestinian-Israeli] conflict we should stick to cold, ruthless standards, suspending the urge to try to “understand” the situation: we should unconditionally resist the temptation to “understand” Arab anti-Semitism (where we really encounter it) as a “natural” reaction to the sad plight of the Palestinians; or to “understand” the Israeli measures as a “natural” reaction against the background of the memory of the Holocaust. There should be no “understanding” for the fact that, in many — if not most — Arab countries, Hitler is still considered a hero; the fact that in primary-school textbooks all the traditional anti-Semitic myths — from the notorious forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion to claims that the Jews use the blood of Christian (or Arab) children for sacrificial purposes — are perpetrated. To claim that this anti-Semitism articulates resistance against capitalism in a displaced mode does not in any way justify it (the same goes for Nazi anti-Semitism: it, too, drew its energy from anticapitalist resistance): here displacement is not a secondary operation, but the fundamental gesture of ideological mystification. What this claim does involve is the idea that, in the long term, the only way to fight anti-Semitism is not to preach liberal tolerance, and so on, but to express the underlying anticapitalist motive in a direct, non-displaced way.
Žižek’s understanding of anti-Semitism as a misrecognized form of anticapitalism mirrors that of Moishe Postone and Werner Bonefeld, as well as other Marxist theorists of antisemitism. But the pertinent point here is that the Slovenian philosopher explicitly denounces the Protocols as a forgery, which they are. Why would he maintain the Protocols were the Real deal if he clearly believes them to be a hoax? Klein takes this a step further, of course, “betting that [Žižek] translated the Protocols into Slovenian and wrote Sublime Object side by side.”
Let’s examine the accusation in detail, however, point by point.
- First, it is pointed out that Žižek, Dolar, and Zupančič edited and wrote essays for the Ljubljana-based student journal Tribuna. In 1971, Dolar became editor of “the student newspaper Tribuna,” as he relates in a recent interview. More info can be found in Žizek and His Contemporaries: On the Emergence of the Slovenian Lacan, an intellectual history put out by. Perfectly true.
- Next, Klein et al. refer to an obscure report from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 1990, discussing a scandal that had broken out the previous year. “A prominent member of the tiny Jewish community in Slovenia has sued the youth magazine Tribuna for publishing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious anti-Semitic forgery that originated in Czarist Russia at the turn of the century.” Perfectly true.
- Third, a paper by Laslo Sekelj on “Antisemitism and Jewish Identity in Serbia after the 1991 Collapse of the Yugoslav State” from 1997 is invoked. “Ljubljana’s University magazine Tribuna (financed from the republic’s budget) between August 1988 to March 1989 published The Protocols of the Elders of Zion for the very first time in the Slovenian language, and there was no way to have its publication suspended,” writes Sekelj. “This was the first open publication of the Protocols in Yugoslavia since 1945.” Perfectly true.
Indeed, this is the same publication Dolar edited in the early- to mid-1970s, to which Žižek and Zupančič contributed articles. Case closed! Turns out they were right. Right?
Wrong.
Dolar and Žižek were long gone by the time chief editor Tomaž Drozg decided to serialize the controversial translation of the Protocols in August 1988. From around 1980 onward, Žižek and his pals worked primarily on the psychoanalytic publication Problemi. (Incidentally, Klein & co. fail to notice that Sekelj approvingly alludes to an article Žižek wrote in 1983 lambasting antisemitism in Slovenia). The reason for this is simple: it’s a fucking student publication. Žižek wrote for it when he was still a student, and likewise with Dolar.
But surely the fact that Žižek wrote for a publication that went on to publish the Protocols is indicative of deep some intellectual affinity, right? Not really. “Through the decades of publishing Tribuna has been facing a constant change in editorial policy, political affiliation, genre, format, design,” one site explains. How can one hold an individual or group of individuals accountable for editorial choices they didn’t make, in a journal whose political perspective had been dramatically overhauled — not once, but multiple times — since they left?
None of this, it should be said, is a groundbreaking discovery on my part. It is not impressive. A child could have done it. The entire run of Tribuna from 1951 to 1998 and 2009 to the present is available in toto for free online, scanned and uploaded to the Digital Library of Slovenia. So anyone who would like to verify Klein’s claim is free do so without much bother; it’s no great effort. Why, then, did no one bother to double-check?
Glancing at just one of the issues from the series that printed the Protocols translation, a note from editor Tomi Drozg can be read. I don’t know Slovenian, but am fluent enough in Russian that I can sort of fake reading other Slavic languages. Plus, there’s always Google translate. From what I can make out, Drozg addresses some of the outrage that came from their initial publication (which featured only sparse commentary). He explains that while they were fabricated, the Protocols are historically important enough to reprint in the magazine. Whether Drozg is being mendacious here by playing dumb is hard to tell, but either way it has nothing to do with Žižek and his cohort. Anyone reading this who is fluent in Slovenian is welcome to offer a translation.
Klein and her Stalinist cronies are practically illiterate even in English, however, so maybe I should cut them some slack. Some of them I like to think are merely misguided, or else too polite to tell Molly to stfu. Emma Quangel, for example, though by she’s probably too far gone. John Steppling actually writes very thoughtful essays over at his blog, so I don’t know why he associates with these knuckleheads.
Quangel came through big a couple days ago by tracking Dylann Roof’s racist manifesto. Good on her for that, even if I disagree with her politics. A little over a year ago, however, she wrote something on this subject that deserves to be addressed:
Why are we giggling when there is a panel at Left Forum called “Žižek must be destroyed”? The facts are clear. Molly Klein invites us to consider the possibility that the Left is being targeted for infiltration and destruction. Is that so much to ask? I heard someone walk out of the panel huffing, “Well, I know Žižek is a racist, but that’s just crazy.” Are you kidding me? If Žižek is a racist, if he supports ethnic cleansing, if he sides 100% of the time with an imperialist agenda, if he spends much of his efforts presenting a grotesque caricature of a “Marxist” and misattributing Goebbels quotes to actual revolutionary Marxists, shouldn’t we be concerned? Apparently, a time of dark reaction such as this is the wrong time to consider the possibility.
Why are we giggling? Because it’s fucking stupid, that’s why.
Addendum
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UPDATE: Simon Gros, who is from Slovenia, has been kind enough to translate the editorial note in full. It reads as follows:
About the Protocols
Admitting to mistakes is not my favorite pastime. This time, however, I feel obliged to apologize for something which had the opposite effect of what was desired: namely, the publication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion without any explanation. One had being arranged, but the author commissioned to write it wasn’t able to finish in time, making it my problem. In this sense the outrage felt by many Jews was justified, even though the text was already recognized as a falsification in court. But the intention behind publishing it was in no way antisemitic, or anything still darker, as the person who reported me to the Ljubljana prosecutor would like to claim. I am sure the Slovene public is mature enough to read this sort of text without becoming antisemitic. The destiny of the Slovenian nation is in many ways similar to the Jewish one. So in this context antisemitism would be absurd, as should ultimately be clear even to the person who informed on me. Yet to the Jews a sincere apology for misunderstanding the intent of the translation. I pledge to correct my mistake.
Greetings
Tomi DrozgP.S. The “introductory text” to The Protocols in the sixteenth issue of Tribuna is an integral part of the book, and not an editorial foreword (as was mistaken by a lot of people).
Gros adds: “In my opinion this is a terrible excuse for publishing something like this, since it raises the question of what their purpose for translating it might have been (if not to promote antisemitism). Especially because no qualification or explanation of intent seems to have been published, like this ‘apology’ claims.” I agree with Gros’ assessment. An awful justification.
He continues: “It should be noted that this is not the first time an attack on Žižek has been based on some occurrence in Slovenia which was later unjustly applied to him, as if it had been done by him and not some other Slovene. In a similar case I found accusations of anti-Roma racism directed at him, based on the racist way in which our former (now deceased) president Drnovšek dealt with the issue of one particular Roma family. This was heavily reported in the media. So something in Slovenia is picked up and later applied to him personally. Quite a strange logic, primarily stemming from foreigners’ inability to understand the language.”
Idiocy should be mocked, not responded to. To take it seriously is already too affirmative.
Who the hell is Molly Klein? Does she have much of anyone reading her blog and much of any one caring what the hell she posts? There are MANY wingnuts out there. MANY. Why is this one of any importance?
Is this because zizek likes rammstein?
As a fellow slovene nazi (as I also wrote for Tribuna) I have perhaps first underestimated the theoretical genius of Red Kahina. I now see the light and hope Žižek answeres her. Perhaps something about how the left is this internalization of its negation as such, that perhaps this infiltration of the negative is precisely how the left as such is possible today … and so on, and so on.
Hi Ross! You didn’t really address what I said in my post entitled “Let’s talk discipline”, you just sort of sneered and expect everyone to go along with it.
Anyway, you didn’t link to the post, which is a bit broader in scope than whatever you’re looking to accomplish (not much it seems), so I invite your audience to read it for themselves in full: http://manyfesto.org/2014/06/11/lets-talk-discipline/
Love how he judges you “too far gone”. Chauvinism doesn’t begin to describe it. Who does he imagine he is? Literally no one outside of a small group of East coast men on our USian wannabe-Left know who Ross Wolfe is. He affects nothing and builds nothing. You actually did something of merit against fascism and it’s burning sexist men like him and Henwood up. That’s why the faint praise is always followed up with an insult. And why does this pro-Israel person think anyone cares what he thinks about imperialism, anti-Semitism or anti-Semites? If Molly Klein didn’t exist, I don’t think he would have anything to write about these days. I wouldn’t advise replying to him again, he desperately needs validation from actual leftists like you. It’s getting boring swimming around as a big fish in a tiny pool of boring, do-nothing men. He is probably looking for more women to ceaselessly mention and harass in this underwhelming blog.
Wait, are you seriously talking about “harassing women” and “Molly Klein” in the same comment? If anything, she’s the serial harasser. She’s created “parody accounts” such as Meiny Kampfappel or “Moldy Lick-spittle” just to harass Molly Krabapple. She ceaselessly tweets about #OpPornPixie on Twitter.
Molly Krabapple should really take out a restraining order.
hey, i’m an eastern european intellectual and most everyone i know knows who ross is.
It looks like he’s aiming to accomplish the demolition of that tankie Molly Klein’s conspiracy theory, if that’s what you mean by that subtle, oblique and sophisticated parenthesis:
“(not much it seems)”
Wow, you’re dangerous.
Can’t wait til you Lefty Boy Scouts take down the incorrigible Molly Klein. All eighty people aware of this dire conflict will sing your names. I’m sure the real work will begin after that too.
At a cafe in Ramallah during summer 2011, Slavoj Zizek sits cracking racist and sexist jokes for a full half hour to the stunned silence of those present. One or two excuse themselves from the table in shock and disgust. “Sometimesh,” Zizek says, “I like to take my son, you know, to Dubai, and blow ten thousand dollars in one weekend, just for the hell of it.”
Three days later he travels to Tel Aviv:
“However, Zizek did not officially endorse or even talk much about BDS – and when he did it was because he was prompted to during Q&A. His two clear statements about BDS were that a) he is not 100% behind it and b)he supports a movement that is initiated jointly by Palestinians and Israeli here in the region.
Rather, Zizek spent almost two hours with the crowd’s undivided attention talking about antisemitism, capitalism and the place of the Jew in the world.
(…)
Sitting in a room full of Israeli activists, some of whom consider themselves on the forefront of the fight against Israeli occupation and apartheid; who devote much of their time going out to the West Bank in solidarity with Palestinians, in confrontation with Israeli military and who favor a total boycott of the country, I could feel the disappointment in the room from certain people that Zizek was not speaking more critically and disapprovingly of Israel. He barely said the word occupation, did not mention the word apartheid even once. He did not directly speak that much about Israel itself or what should be done.
This was a bold move with such an audience – and I’m not sure if people got it or not, but in many ways, I think that Zizek was actually levying criticism against the very activists sitting in that room. They are so caught up with the “evils” of Israel that they have lost perspective on what is going on in the rest of the world, and may have lost sight of the very real dangers of continued antisemism, which has all sorts of consequences.
(…)
But he also stated that someone from the Democratic Republic of Congo would sell his mother into slavery in a heartbeat for the chance to move to the West Bank.”
– http://972mag.com/slavoj-zizek-in-tel-aviv-antisemitism-is-alive-and-kicking-in-europe/17190/
Sure……… *I’m* dangerous.
Emma, I’m trying to ask you and Molly and her whole coterie a very simple question: Did Žižek actually publish (even translate) The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? Yes or no?
Molly is on record as having claimed that he has, multiple times in fact. I’ve presented evidence that pretty clearly establishes that Žižek had nothing to do with this publication after the mid-1970s. Not as an editor, not as a translator, not even as a contributor. So regardless of whatever else you claim Žižek has done or said, it has no bearing on whether he actually did this particular action (as Molly says he did). While you may think “this sounds like something Žižek would have done,” it is irrelevant to determining if he actually did it.
Please try to answer without diverting attention to some other awful thing Žižek has supposedly done or said. Those are not at issue here, even if true. Besides, if your case against Žižek is otherwise so watertight, based on numerous other examples, surely you could make it without having to resort to fabrications such as this.
…..pffffttt bwahhahaha!! That’s gold Wolfe-san!!
How ironic that these supposed “critics” (a term that is perhaps a tad to charitable for such baseless bomb throwing loons) operate in the same exact fashion as anti-Semites do according to how Žižek himself has described the phenomenon in both print and film:
Is this not the exact logic that Klein and others are engaging in when offering “criticism” whereby Žižek is a clown not to be taken seriously because he is a dangerous fascist monster in disguise whose theories are laughable fabrications that parody Marxism precisely because he deploys Marxism so often that its clear he is an agent provocateur embedded into academia by the World Bank and FBI to curb true revolutionary potential while instilling extreme violence into the intellectual environment by being a pacifist coward who is by no means sufficiently radical due primarily to his undying support for the state of Israel no matter what by way of propping up the worst of the Palestinian element and actively encouraging Israel’s destruction (and so on, and so on)…
Looked at in this light it would appear that his critics are more likely the real appropriators of anti-Semitic reasoning which must means that Slavoj Žižek is exactly what he claims to be; a philosopher who antagonizes all systems and solutions not by offering counter solutions and suggestions but by incessantly questioning the ideological, psychological, and (dare I say) spiritual structures that frame both the quotidian and phenomenal in politics and experience. If you do that right you are bound to be called quite a few names by the logically challenged!
Despite knowing John Jacobs, I wasn’t aware that this existed:
http://criticaltheoriesofantisemitism.net/
That by itself made this article worth a read, so thanks.
And of course I meant JACK Jacobs.
Molly Klein has found a juggernaut to which to hitch her otherwise uninspiring writing, tack on some Zizek critique and get an audience, quite a clever strategy.
LOL i can’t even deal w/ this
How on Earth can such people be called ‘critics’? Even at the most phantasmatic edges of the ‘imaginary-symbolic-real’ ontology, this just bloody makes no sense.
I’d put my money on Molly Klein being an agent rather than Zizek. Could this whole charade be nothing but an attempt to deflect attention away from her incessant sowing of discord on the left?
Ross did you deliberately ignore my comment from the previous post, or are you deploying Red Kahina’s lowly tactics yourself to avoid a confrontation when one is DUE?
No Zizek didn’t publish the Protocols and he is not a Nazi. He is primarily a contrarian. But what he either supports, or turns a blind eye to, is pretty close to new-fangled Nazism – ideologically and politically supporting his country’s seccession on the backs of poorer republics, Serb-bashing, agreeing to the exodus of minorities from Slovenia, hailing Zack Snyder’s 300 against everybody else saying that it isn’t a Nazi film, welcoming the independence of Kosovo, the list is endless and he adds a stunt each year.
It is the enthousiastic reception of such a politically sold-out and morally discredited figure, by the Western Left, that speaks volumes about what that Left really is, and my dear Ross, I;m sorry if that hurts your feelin’s but they’re NOT BLOODY MUCH.
And if Missuz is wrong about many many things, she’s not wrong when she champions figures like Michael Parenti instead, who spoke the truth about Yugoslavia.
If Zizek has appeal to youngish blokes like yourself then it’s primarily because Brits and Americans never go the trouble of learning the Russian language, and so their grasp of Eastern European history is CRIMINALLY BAD, as is their awareness of the existence of innumerable Russian REAL intellectuals. So Zizek is able to impress with what Slavs see as complete mediocrity, pop shit and self-indulgent manic babble.
Still it’s rather shocking that none of ya ‘young socialists’ notices for example how infrequently Zizek talks about Russia, and he’s supposed be some kind of a modern-day reincarnation of Lenin, the way everybody drools about his supposed erudition. I mean you’ve plastered your whole life with Soviet photographs and you never ask yourself, hey, why does Zizek NEVER talk about Russia???
In other words your attack on Missuz here covers up the fact that you don’t want to discuss YOUR OWN TROTSKITE SHIT, Ross, for example the total failure of the Western Left to address the Yugoslav disintegration properly.
“Missuz”, “Michael Parenti”, “TROTSKITE SHIT”, lol. For the record, Ross is closer to left communism / ultraleftism. He is not a Trotskyist as far as I know and is critical of American/British Trotskyism just as much as Twitter Stalinism.
If I can parse what you’re saying about Zizek, you seem to be claiming he is complicit in oppressing other “nations” because he supported Slovenian secession, rather than being nostalgic for Titoism and a unified Yugoslavia as you apparently are. I don’t know if that is still the case, though, as Zizek’s politics have changed a lot since the 80s and 90s, when he was some sort of dissident liberal. Whereas today he is a self-described “communist”, though he’s more like a social democrat, as he supports Syriza etc.
These equations between Zizek, NATO, “Western Left” etc are so poorly argued they don’t deserve a response from anyone, and seem to circularly rely on Molly Klein’s conspiracy theory. Although you, apparently, are not Molly Klein. But for the sheer incoherence of your two posts, you might as well be.
Due to a hyperproduction of nostalgic Soviet images it’s impossible to determine exactly what Ross’s orientation is, but that’s HIS JOB to make that clear, not mine. He does seem to hang out with Trotskian vedettas, such as Kamarad Agata Pyzik, although I have no idea how deep that goes. Ross is certainly critical enough not to become a victim in discussions.
Michael Parenti, if you care to read or listen to his work, explains how and why Yugoslavia was dismantled by Western powers. There is no ‘conspiracy theory’ there, simply the necessity of breaking up ex-Communist space so that Western capital may penetrate and conquer. And the project primarily succeeded due to Trotskyist betrayal, i.e. the movement of so-called ”oppressed republics” like Slovenia, who just happened to be historic Western allies, towards independence from the ”oppressive” federal state, that is to say into the status of tiny Western colonies at the price of a four-year civil war.
At least in Yugoslavia, the Trotskyist wing of the socialists was always in favor of the self-determination of the peoples, I see them as the fifth column, and their work is essential for the facilitation of the break-up. The most prominent figure used to be Tito’s right hand Edvard Kardelj in Slovenia. Although they will formally not admit to such a thing, they operate exactly like NATO, since NATO bombed Serbia on the premise that Serbs were jeopardizing the self-determination of Kosovar Albanians.
It is only NOW, with the recent developments in Ukraine and Putin’s reaction to them, that it;s becoming clearer to the Western public how this scenario works, but it started already in Yugoslavia, which was a kind of an Ukraine on the outer rim of the ex-Soviet empire. NATO and the Trotskyists are again springing o the defense of poor oppressed Ukrainians, threatened by the oppressive Russian state and thwarted in their endless desire and yearning to provide access to Western Capital.
I disagree with Missiz that Zizek is especially important politically, except in the sense that his overbearing media presence on the Left perpetuates the lies and the distortions of historic truths. The way you admonish me for not acknowledging the fact that he might have ”changed views”, as if that should and must interest me, is reflective of the way he has achieved the status of a semi-deity within the lame Western Left. But I just refuse to forget what he did in those times when it really mattered.
It’s like your comrade AGATA PRCZYK, Ross, who just wrote that poor Russians are suffering dreadfully in the absence of Western food brands, and in this she merely follows the Trotskyan Party Line according to which Western capitalism may be critisized as long as you’re wearing a condom.
As soon as the issue of self-determination (read: Western-sponsored seccession) rears its ugly head, the Trotskite immediately gropes for Zizek and other such Left apparatchiki of the West. It’s like when Prczyk was complaining that the self-determination of Ukraine had been jeopardized when Putin decided on a clampdown of seccessionist tendencies. And before that NATO hijacked Kosovo and turned it into the largest drugs and prostitution cartel in Europe, also under the banner of ”the people’s right to self-determination”.
(After all, it is precisely Trotskyan self-determination that led to the atomization of Eastern Europe and its transformation into a full Western colony. All these ‘oppressed wimmin’ states wanted to experience so-called freedom, inspired by some transsexual shit from the Pet Shop Boys ”Go West” and suchlike crap that PRCZYK was listening to in those lonely hours without a boyfriend in sight)
While I’m not surprised that a Pole or a Slovene – which are just alternate words for pussy – would be saying things like that, since their sustenance depends so much on the kidness of Austro-Hungarian strangers, and they have always been NATO’s willing executioners, it really surprises me that a tough-looking brutalist such as yourself would be joining the club, too, and springing in the defense of goddamn Slavoj Zizek.
Or are you a PUSSY yourself, Ross???
“inspired by some transsexual shit from the Pet Shop Boys ”Go West” and suchlike crap that PRCZYK was listening to in those lonely hours without a boyfriend in sight”
Are you a TERF as well?
I think Wolfe’s criticism is a futile endeavour from the beginning. There’s no need to engage in a serious criticism of someone whose opinion (slander) is considered “fucking stupid” as a conclusion (that was the idea from the very beggining).
The structure of the first pharagraph is somewhow ambiguous: “I know very well that Žižek is a clown, a lost cause, etc., but… (compared to most, or as an exception) he’s insightful, he should be defended, etc.” Being a “defense”, I’d rather expect from Wolfe a serious and direct harsh critique at him, not an anemic pesudo-defense.
FUCK
American Trotskyism? Is that still a thing?
Ross it seems I have to explain to your readers how Eastern politics works, cause they’re severely undereducated I see.
Eastern Euro cuntries have from the dawn of time been put in the role of Western slaves, sissified and feminized, but there was a period during the USSSR’s heyday that they were temporarily shielded – for better or for worse – by daddy Stalin’s huge balls, from the Western dick.
It would be exaggerated to say that it was the days of wine and roses, but on the other hand, it wasn’t as bad as they say. It was always the most pussy-whipped countries like Poland, Slovenia, Chekoslovakia that complained most vocipherously about Soviet oppression. But even in the worst days of Stalin, there was health insurance for everyone and Bolsoy teater for the prole; it was mainly INTELLECTUALS who felt that they didn’t have all the freedom in the world to experience all bourgeois perversity.
Then in the 1970s-1980s came the New Age Transsexual revolution in the West, so the Eastern avantgarde started dreaming about transvestitism, drugs and rock’n’roll. Although cuntries like Poland and Slovenia have always been talented sissies – their history is full of total submission to various Empires – they now heard that in the West important figures like David Bowie and Annie Lennox were being BI-CURIOUS and nobody was beating them up or sending them to the Gulag. Western marketing was powerful, so the sissies started believing that they, too, could have the freedom to choose their own lipstick and lingerie. They embraced the Trotskite idea of self-determination, and calls became louder and louder for various seccessionisms.
Then the Soviet Union fell apart, and the pussy satellite space became available for Western plundering again. The sissies rushed into the European embrace – Poles stood in front of McDonald’s like a line in front of Auschwitz – but Serbia had the misfortune of being Russia’s most important ally in the Balkans, so it bore the brunt of Western punishment in the form of sanctions, bombing, isolation, etc. etc.
Another problem was that the sissies might have achieved independence, but their deeply-seated desire for feminization never ended, so they very quickly succumbed to Western dick, even MORE DEEPLY than they did to the Soviet variety. They masochistically enjoyed a double fuck: Euroatlantic dick in front, the heritage of Communism from behind. You can tell just how SISSY-PANSEY their desire was by the way they kept believing, all the while, that McDonald’s and Mars Bars really stands for empowerment, even as their energy resources, salaries and job securities slowly disappeared into the pockets of European bankers.
Now the tables are turning again. It became evident over the last decade that Western democracy had largely been a form of military restructuring to continue the centuries-old Drang nach Osten project, which ALWAYS broke on the back of the Russian bear. In other words, since the West, despite its Martian technology, still has very little to offer in terms of resources and long-term economic solutions, they have to press on with the submission of Russia.
Which perhaps could’ve worked had President Putin not had such a HARD DICK, against which many a Western pussy is going to break. But that’s a future discussion.
The satellite-pussies are understandably upset, for now they realize that there isn’t a dick anymore they can grope for. Since they fucked off Russia, now they have to play with the West, and the West strikes them as even crueller. This is why you hear so much pussy venting and pussy riots from that area, including the call for ”neither Moscow nor Washingon”, which is just another way of saying that there’s no dick.
While Zizek may be the most refined pussy voice of the lot, have no doubt, she’s a hairy pussy. Her ”post-modern” flirting and frolicking with attitudes, opinions and digressions merely reflects the pussy-whipped ambivalence of your average Slovene, forever passively-aggressively ambivalent towards the Austro-Hungarian dick, wanting and not wanting at the same time to suck it.
always appreciate your comments
why would Slovenia complain about “Soviet oppression,” though? it was never part of the USSR or the Eastern Bloc, since it was part of Yugoslavia
why would Slovenia complain about “Soviet oppression,” though? it was never part of the USSR or the Eastern Bloc, since it was part of Yugoslavia
Nobody really knows how Yugoslavia became, but it doesn’t take a conspiracy theory to see that the generous Western support for it enabled it to thrive; Slovenia and Croatia are traditional Western proxies (Croatia even had a Nazi government in WW2). Both by the constitution and by the budget Slovenia was privileged in many ways, even though this was hushed down in the name of ”brotherhood and unity” and ”self-management”, common folk knew it, knew that the East-West dividing line never really disappeared, and that the Yugoslav constitution was ”asymmetrical”, burdening Serbia with autonomous provinces and playing into the fact that Serbs were dispersed around the country, so much more difficult to maintain than the tiny homogenous Slovenlia.
(Of course, Serbian domestic traitors were too busy enjoying the infamous Communist privileges to take any serious action against this asymmetricality; this is something Missuz and Stepplin’ never mention because these tankies believe that Communism was pristine, and Serbs cannot be held accountable for irresponsibility and laziness; however I primarily blame my nation for not living up to their role as the leaders of Yugoslavia)
Slovenlia was indirectly complaining about Soviet oppression because the Yugoslav federation, led by the supposedly ”oppressive” Serbs, was likened to Stalin’s Russia. That’s the Trtskyist punchline: they’re attacking my independence as a wimman, and my right to self-determine my pussy.
Now truthfully, Tito did send dissidents to atrocious work camps, and in some aspects it was a fairly totalitarian state. The request to reform Yugoslavia was perfectly justified; however just LEAVING like a whore, in the middle of the night, is the pussiest thing the Slovenlians could have done, and they did that WHILST being Tito’s favorited darlings. Which merely revealed what we all knew, i.e. that Slovenlia is actually an Austrian colony.
You see the same thing in some parts of Ukraine, only Ukraine 0has the very good excuse of being POOR, which was never the case in Slovenia. So when the transsexual trend started in the West, Leibach launched their post-modern happy Nazi performances, supposedly ironizing the oppressiveness of the Yugoslav state. However these parodic performances were actually expressions of the Slovenian desire to secede and exercise bourgeois perversities on their own, which you could see very well when they appeared on Eurovision as three drag queens. Missuz has a good expression: fasho-flavored. It’s not overtly fascist, but it sure does taste like fascism.
Then Germany pulled out its formidable Bavarian dick, and the stage was set for the Slovenlians to secede. Fame and fortune was promised to Slovenlia if it leaves Yugoslavia… etc …
Now my PERSONAL THEORY, Ross, maintaned by many a compatriot, is that the tenements of the neoliberal world over were laid down in YUGOSLAVIA, by Trotskite-leaning planners. This is because one development of the right to self-determination, the self-management system namely, is nowadays part and parcel of absurdist capitalist HR procedures. A form of soft fascism is exercised wherein you’re controlled ever more tightly but on paper they’re saying that you always have the right to determine the company’s policy YOURSELF. I believe the system functions as well as it does precisely because of this promise of personal freedom. But as we all know, collectivity, which was supposed to have been the point of socialist self-management, all but evaporated, and behind all the talk of freedom and love, you’re an object. Another interesting thing is how much the system of the United Nations, with its endlessly bureaucratic decision-making process, resembles Yugoslav self-management. But then one has to remember what a pivotal role Tito played in the UN.
Tito is my favorite socialist strongman
if only for that letter he sent Stalin
Tito is my favorite socialist strongman
I know you have a taste for older daddies, Ross.
My favorite is the Greek stud minister Varoufakis. He thinks Greece should dump Europa, and I agree. They should leave, causing a chain reaction of catastrophes so that Europa disintegrates and the West is plunged into a savage recession. Meanwhile, Russia can always bail Greece out.
Agata can work as part-time penis concierge at Putin’s summer dacha. (The task of a penis concierge is to wipe the functionary’s penis after pissing)
This to supplement Owen’s meagre income as gender theory teacher at the Lesbian Corrective Program of Moscow’s state prison.
That Zizek’s being a shill for capital is dismissed out of hand suggests a woeful (willful? wistful?) ignorance of the history of counterinsurgency in the last century or so. That the ruling class has false tribunes stationed all over the internet/media/academia is attested a thousandfold. Let me see: testimony in court and before Congress by high-ranking intelligence officials including more than one DCI; released FOI documents (my fav’ was the revelation that WaPo editor Ben Bradlee was a spook. If you were surprised by that then you still don’t get it.); countless defector disclosures; leaked documents etc.
The question is not whether but who. My guess is that Zizek is a spook. Not because he did/not publish “The Protocols” but because of the lies he writes like:
“There should be no “understanding” for the fact that, in many — if not most — Arab countries, Hitler is still considered a hero; the fact that in primary-school textbooks all the traditional anti-Semitic myths — from the notorious forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion to claims that the Jews use the blood of Christian (or Arab) children for sacrificial purposes — are perpetrated.”
This is Zioganda. According to Human Rights Watch, there are NO Arab countries in which school textbooks claim that Jews drink Christian blood. This is Zionist blood libel against the Arabs, and Zizek is promulgating these racist defamations.
And when he’s not lying directly, he’s producing vacuous, flaccid nonsense (what I like to call Slavojwocky) like:
“For the anti-Semite, the Jew is a figure of absurd contradiction: at once the most vile and most grossly refined, he lives in squalor and/or decadent wealth, he is too stupid and yet an utter genius without compare…”
Even if he isn’t a spook his work is Left kitsch at best and meaningless at worst, as Chomsky has noted.
As for “The Protocols”: according to Konrad Heiden in his bio’ of Hitler, the book was originally written by a man named Maurice Jolie as a roman a clef about Napoleon III and his successful seizure of the French throne and the camarilla who planned and executed the coup. The plot (of the book) was then appropriated by the Ochrana who added a few flourishes of their own, and converted into a Jewish plot to take over the world for political reasons. Some who accept this provenance believe that the man who did the rewriting was Boris Brasol. He’s a very interesting figure whose hand found its way into a few of the 20th century’s more interesting intrigues. He eventually holed up in Detroit working for Henry Ford and ghost-writing much of what bears the latter’s name. He was also the immediate supervisor of and mentor to Alfred Rosenburg, who ended up editing the Nazi newspaper (Volkische Beobachter, if I remember/spell that correctly) and who likewise wrote much of what appeared over Hitler’s name. [It should be noted that there are those who insist that Rosenburg was never officially in the Ochrana and no such records exist. In any event he rubbed elbows with many high-ranking Ochranists.]
In any case, I hope ross gets over his mancrush on the Zizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
“Zizek is a spook”
In Stirner’s sense, perhaps, for the stalinist twitter imaginary. The fact that you even bother with these paranoid hypotheses is a testimony to your own insanely typical “anti-semitic” or more accurately, vyshinskyite logic. Contemporary capitalist society has no need of spooks to discredit a left composed of people as paranoid and idiotic as yourself.
Zizek’s work on anti-semitism is comparable to Bonefeld’s, with which I am sure you are ignorant, and has little to do with “Zioganda”, a term sure to send black friday thrills up and down the kyphotic spines of the twitter imps of the PFLP boosting/BDS mob.
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