Zizek relies on shock value taken from inverting common good/bad dichotomies. For example he puts
on a toilet to say, “The thoughts from my head are the same as the shit from my body, but here you are listening to me.”
When Zizek brings the rhetorical trick to politics, he inverts liberal propaganda while fully accepting it premises. For example, modern liberal democracies are “dictatorships of the few” - but Zizek accepts the lie that they are highly democratic, that they suffer from an over-reliance of democracy, and that we need a true dictatorship instead of such democracies to save Europe.
By approaching communist ideas using anti-communist lies as his premises, Zizek is able to call himself a Leftist while reaching fascist conclusions. This is why he puts pictures of Stalin in his photo shoots: he participates in Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands-style smearing of Communist history. He means to say “Stalin was a successful version of Hitler (sniff) and Hitler is what Europe needs right now!”
So it makes sense that white supremacists in Stormfront.org’s “Ideology and Philosophy” forum cite Zizek in support of white nationalism! It makes sense for the common fascist to support a coke-addled millionaire Nazi who worked for the CIA to break up Yugoslavia, who uses “left” credibility to blather on about “Palestinian honor killings” and “fundamentalist Muslims” and refugees’ “desire for the west” leading to “Islamo-Fascism…an expression of impotence converted into self-destructive rage.”
Even Zizek’s most ardent supporter from the population of coherent Leftists, Adam Kotsko eventually concluded that Zizek is a “boring liberal” who “devolves into cheap contrarianism” and who is likely becoming a new Christopher Hitchens.
Today Zizek sits on a panel with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!
If Amy Goodman has any Left convictions she will press Zizek on his support of NATO bombing campaigns and his anti-Muslim xenophobia. She will expose Zizek’s lack of knowledge about economics and history and be ready to interrupt his narcissistic, noncommittal semantic wriggling.
Zizek would like you to take a moment to “discern a moment of truth” in “racist propaganda” Here is the moment of truth in the racist propaganda of today: NATO wants to expand. Nazis are coming to power in Europe. America’s propaganda machine is working hard to elicit your support for imperialist intervention in Syria, Venezuela, the Ukraine and many other countries. Zizek has earned a central position as the safe-to-quote “radical Left philosopher” within this propaganda machine
Don’t let Zizek supplant your voice with his open support of imperialism, fascism, and xenophobia!
Don’t trust Zizek to do the deep thinking for you!
Don’t believe this right-Hegelian nationalist when he claims to be a Marxist!
Trotsky somehow survived the brain damage from the ice pick. His vocabulary and rhetoric mangled and stunted, but still functioning strangely, he journeyed by night up into the highlands and he found a little cave out of which a dark stream ran; and he wormed his way like a maggot into the heart of the hills, and vanished out of all knowledge. Now he’s back, blinking, and gurgling in the light, with a new brand of anti-communism and anti-Left rhetoric, made to delude Left allies in academia and the bourgeoisie.
Show this cadaverous hatemonger he has no place speaking for the Left!
