On Žižek and Russia

The following video is almost two hours long. I have not summarized it, but address the general tenor of Žižek’s argumentation and presentation.

An Evening with Slavoj Žižek: Why Do We Enjoy Feeling Ashamed? (YouTube)

I continue to be shocked at how terrible Žižek’s take on the Russian attack on Ukraine is. This video is very long and he spends most of the time fighting foolish strongmen, mostly people he calls his “friends”, who all seem to have the absolute worst reasons possible for not supporting Ukraine wholeheartedly.

I heard absolutely nothing about any of the reasons anyone that I read has given for wanting to bring an end to this war. Žižek seems to think that being contrarian means somehow making it look like people who want to end the war are the truly violent people and those who sell weapons are not. This is ridiculous on its face—and even upon reflection.

Perhaps he thinks that the unending war in Ukraine or the total annihilation of Russia is a necessary evil, which we have to endure in to have even more peace? Is this Žižek’s Christopher Hitchens moment? Perhaps we finally found the bugbear—Russia—that turns Žižek’s brain off. He spends a considerable amount of time somehow equating Russia’s attitude toward LGBT as being worth any other sacrifice. He’s in fantastic company in the U.S. (that’s sarcasm)—I just wonder if he’s aware of what he seems to be saying.

Or maybe he just got sick of being called a Putinist all the time and this is just a long troll. Jesus, he does a good job, though. Check out 1:00:00, where he sounds like he’s presenting to a Women’s Studies class. In the second half, starting at 1:05:00, he posits that Russia’s purported position of siding with the third world can be nothing but Russian propaganda, that too many countries believe without question.

What I find missing is that Žižek fails to compare this at all with the fact that so many other countries do exactly the same thing with American propaganda. The more interesting analysis would be to see the whole conflict as a battle between high-level powers for allies, each deploying propaganda measures to win friends.

More interesting would be to think about what we would do if not only the revolution were to come from the “wrong type of people” (as with Jan. 6th in the U.S.) but also countries would learn to fake being helpful and democratic so well that you could no longer tell the difference—like the androids in Blade Runner. What if China or Russia were to learn how to fake being nice so well that they were actually beneficial? What if the U.S. did?

At least Žižek understands Russian and claims to listen to a lot of Russian media. So, he’s bathing in the awfulness of that media. It’s like listening only to FOX News, I imagine. Now he says that Russia’s media must be taken at face value and that “words matter”. I suppose they do, but we also have to consider who’s saying them and why they’re saying them. Like, the Democrats say they are anti-racist, but all of their policies are implicitly racist—so do words matter there? They say one thing and do another. Do those words matter? Or do words only matter if you say you’ll do something bad? Does it matter if you actually follow through or have the capability of following through on it?

I wonder what happened to Žižek (as I’ve done before from one or two of his recent articles). It’s not because I happen to disagree with him, but I’m saddened to see that the slyness and playfulness is gone from his argumentation—and he loses not a word on who his bedfellows have become in taking such a strong stand against (only) Russia.

At least he doesn’t waste any time rehashing the history of NATO’s encroachment. That is important for determining how to avoid this situation again—perhaps here Žižek would disagree, saying that pure evil like Putin cannot be avoided or appeased, to which I would shake my head and wonder if he literally doesn’t see that the same argument applies to NATO and the U.S—but is not important for getting fewer people killed and suffering and wasting power and time with a war. Perhaps the history will be important to a rapprochement, but it’s not necessarily important right now.

What really shocks me is Žižek’s seeming lack of nuance and seeming complete disregard for his lacking nuance. He describes the situation as extremely black-and-white, as if arming Ukraine is unequivocally the only possible moral solution—and then brooks no disagreement. I cannot distinguish his position from that of any other moron who thinks we should just push on through and win the war and destroy Putin, as if that were a remote possibility.

He batted the nuclear fear aside—just like anyone else on MSNBC—but didn’t address the possibility that the war could go on for another decade. He seems to think it will be over quickly. Either that, or he’s completely faking his empathy for Ukrainians. What if it’s not over quickly? What if it happens exactly as all of the far more qualified forecasters are predicting? I can’t tell the difference between Žižek and Biden on this.

If he thinks that we just have to push through in Ukraine in order to rid the world of the awful Russian empire, what does he see coming after that? A solidification of the beneficence of American empire? Wouldn’t it be just as easy to use the same logic to consider the Russians having invaded to be the monkey wrench in the works that we need to begin to topple NATO and the American empire? Wouldn’t that be a thought worth entertaining? Or is he really so in the tank for NATO and convinced that there is a definite good guy/definite bad guy here that he can leave his usual ambivalence by the wayside? Or does Žižek really think that his hoped-for socialist flowers will bloom in the garden of American empire?

The second question was very good:

“You said ‘words are not just words. They should always be taken seriously, especially in Putin’s case’ and he has brought up mutually assured destruction on many occasions now. How is it, in your mind, considered moral, to advocate for a confrontational stance against Russia when the possible consequences are so high i.e. mutually assured destruction.”

Žižek was absolutely swimming in a way that I’ve rarely seen him do. He was at a loss for words and his analysis was not good. He fell back to straw-manning people who knee-jerk diss on everything NATO does but not automatically what Russia does. Hey Žižek: there is no need to keep hammering on the crimes of a criminal who admits to being a criminal. It’s the one who commits crimes but claims holiness whom we should keep an eye on.

Instead of answering the guys question, Žižek returned to answering questions his left-liberal friends asked instead. He went on to harangue Yanis Varoufakis for celebrating the blow to American imperialism that was the retreat from Afghanistan. Of course, the people of Afghanistan will not be better off under the Taliban (maybe). Of course, you shouldn’t celebrate necessarily, but it was a good thing that America finally left.

Žižek thinks Russia would not have stopped at Ukraine, so he’s totally in the tank for the theory that Putin’s goal is to take all of Europe. The guy from the audience was great, asking just the right questions. I wonder whether Žižek isn’t just getting old? Or whether he had a shitty run of COVID? He seemed very muddled. Žižek kept repeating the well-worn propaganda elements (e.g. Putin’s saying that he wants to bring back the Soviet Union, which he never said, at least not if you include his full quote).

He kept fighting his leftist friends (who were not there) who think that “they are on the side of good if they oppose NATO.” It’s not about being good or bad, you old fool. It’s about trying to figure out which causes you should support in order to put an end to this war, to increase stability, to get us focused again on the real problems. Nobody serious is saying that one side is all good or all bad. There is no point discussing those viewpoints. The idea is how to realistically stop this and prevent it from getting worse and maybe figure out how to avoid it happening in the future (which involves paying attention to the actual history).

He did not answer the question. He did not justify how his simplistic “words are not just words” applies in one case and not the other.

We want a solution. Constantly saying Russia is bad is useless. Could we have prevented it? Do we care? Girlfriend scratched up the car. Why? Is she really just crazy? Or did we drive her crazy? I she too sensitive? Does it matter? Will our car keep getting scratched by girlfriends if we don’t change? Are we sure enough that we’re not the asshole that we prefer to keep getting our car scratched rather than to change our behavior? Or do we just beat the shit out of her before and/or afterwards to make sure it never happens again? Will that really work? Do we still have the moral high ground? Do we care?