Now, when it’s way too late, everybody has discovered the phenomenon of Russian propaganda. I can’t turn on the TV or pass by the grocery register without noticing hysterical headlines. It angers me because this milk has not only been spilt, it has gone rancid about a decade ago.

For years, I’ve been begging people to believe that this is happening, to stop linking to garbage articles about “neo-Nazis in Ukraine”, good Soviet chickens (use the search function to your right), Russia’s unhappiness about the NATO expansion, and the impoverishment of Russia by Milton Friedman’s shock therapy. But no, this is a drug nobody could quit. And now that they have extended their oligarchy into the White House, everybody is suddenly going “OMG, how could this happen?” 

The only way out of this – and it will be a long and painful way – is for everybody to start asking themselves what it is that was so attractive about this message for such a long time. 

Žižek doesn’t like multicultiralism because what person with a functioning brain does? This, of course, makes him Enemy #1 for the especially mealy-mouthed amongst our PC brethren. See this bit of heresy, for instance:

The multiculturalist anti-colonialist defence of the multiplicity of ‘ways of life’ is also false: it covers up the antagonisms within each of these particular ways of life, justifying acts of brutality, sexism and racism as expressions of a particular culture that we have no right to judge by foreign ‘Western values.’

And there is a really really good analysis of the naive attempts to educate migrants on Western norms of sexual behavior. As if we were talking about people who have never seen a TV or held a cell phone.

This is why the naive attempts to enlighten immigrants (explaining to them that our sexual mores are different, that a woman who walks in public in a miniskirt and smiles does not thereby signal sexual invitation, and so on) are examples of breathtaking stupidity. Immigrants know all this perfectly well—and that’s why they are doing it. They are well aware that what they are doing is foreign to our predominant culture, and they are doing it precisely to wound our sensitivities.

Mind you, though, you’ve got to rummage around a lot in the book to alight on these good, insightful parts. There is a lot of empty blabber that Žižek uses to hide his insights. So remain forewarned: if you think you might like the book, it might be my rendering of it that looks so enticing. 

[The best part is still to come. . .]

While I agree with Žižek that we need to get rid of the idiotic belief that a criticism of anybody who is Muslim or of any aspect of Islam is evidence of Islamophobia (and a criticism of somebody who happens to be a Jew* or a Christian does not constitute anti-semitism or hatred of Christianity), I don’t understand his argument that ISIS practices Islamo-fascism. The word “fascism” has been so overused that I believe it would be best to leave it out of the discussion of ISIS altogether. Fascism is a product of a different civilization, and I don’t see how using this term helps enlighten us about ISIS.

Žižek is absolutely right, however, in his analysis of the mechanisms of liberal guilt:

The more Western liberal Leftists probe their own guilt, the more they are accused by Muslim fundamentalists of being hypocrites who try to conceal their hatred of Islam. Such a paradigm perfectly reproduces the paradox of the superego: the more you obey what the pseudo-moral agency demands of you, the more guilty you are. It is as if the more you tolerate Islam, the stronger its pressure on you will be. The same holds true for the influx of refugees: the more Western Europe is open to them, the more it will be made to feel guilty that it failed to accept even more of them.

Sorry for a long quote but I think it’s good and deserves to be preserved. 

The most valuable thing, for me, in Žižek’s analysis is that whenever he manages to break through his terror of the subject he discusses, he manages to come up with a very lucid explanation of many of the aspects of the encounter between the refugees and locals. For instance, many Europeans keep fretting that refugees seem to demand a lot for people who are supposedly fleeing from horror. But it’s precisely those who escape from the worst, says Žižek, who demand the best:

One can observe here the paradox of utopia: precisely when people find themselves in poverty, distress and danger, and one would expect that they would be satisfied by a minimum of safety and well-being, the absolute utopia explodes.

Žižek points out that what refugees need is being treated as human beings, not as symbols or vehicles of moral redemption. There is nothing wrong with talking about them like one would of any regular person because guess what? They are regular people. When Žižek puts into practice this idea and makes the following statement

In short, the refugees want to have their cake and eat it. They basically expect to get the best of the Western welfare state while retaining their specific way of life, which is in some of its key features incompatible with the ideological foundations of the Western welfare state

that’s precisely when the liberal pearl-clutching begins. 

[More is to come. . .]

* I’m still angry over being told I’m an anti-semite here on the blog for criticizing Lloyd Blankfein. I criticized him as a disgusting piece of human refuse, not as a Jew. What his religion or ethnicity are couldn’t be of a lesser interest to me. Do people really think I’d like him more if his name were Peter Smith or Taras Bulochkin?

There is a lot to say about Žižek’s clunkily titled Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbors: Against the Double Blackmail, so I will break the review up into several parts. This is a very good sign because, at least, there is something to say about the book, meaning that it offers more than the usual string of platitudes on the subject. The platitudes are still there, of course. They are like an incantation everybody has to repeat before approaching the matter but there are useful insights, as well. Bauman’s book on refugees, for instance, contains nothing but completely correct, reasonable, painfully obvious things that it makes no sense to discuss since they are so obvious.

I will start with the worst that the book has to offer. And if you aren’t scared away by this part, then go ahead and read the following parts of the review. Like everybody else, Žižek is terrified of his subject. Every insight he offers is followed by some pedestrian PC mantra that is supposed to remind everybody that Žižek is a hardcore Leftist. This strategy didn’t work. Even the very modest departure from Liberal Orthodoxy that Žižek timidly undertook in this book merited him veritable howls of anger and pain from the good girls and boys of the Liberal camp (here is just one example but there are dozens. Notice the truly pathetic exhortation of “don’t read it!” It is as if simply seeing Žižek’s words will pollute the Liberal innocence too much.) 

Žižek clearly knew that he was going to be torn into shreds for saying things like

Are those who advocate a radical opening of the borders aware that, since our democracies are nation-state democracies, their demand equals a suspension of democracy—a gigantic and fundamental transformation should be allowed to affect a country without the democratic consultation of its population?

and 

The next taboo that we must discard is the all too fast equation of the European emancipatory legacy to cultural imperialism and racism: many on the Left tend to dismiss any mention of ‘European values’ as the ideological form of Eurocentric colonialism. . . The time has come to drop the Leftist mantra according to which our main task is the critique of Eurocentrism.

and especially 

Another taboo to be jettisoned is the notion that the protection of one’s specific way of life is in itself a protoFascist or racist category.

Oh, goodness! Fast, give me some pearls to clutch! To compensate for these scandalous statements that make him a pariah among his political community, Žižek comes out with insane – and seriously offensive – statements like

The greatest victims of the Paris terror attacks will be refugees themselves.

I’m completely against blaming refugees for Paris attacks but you’ve got to be totally off your rocker if you truly believe that there can be greater victims than the ones who are dead as a result of the attacks.

If you manage to stay patient throughout a regular sprinkling of this kind of hyper-compensatory madness, though, you will be rewarded with valuable insights. And that’s more than can be said about any other book I have seen on the subject. 

I got up freakishly early today – at 6:45 am. And it’s the weirdest feeling to be up so early. I’m strangely energized. Maybe I should do it more often, just to shake things up.

If I see yet another “nobody should be judged for their beliefs”, I will scream. Where is this strange idea even coming from? Of course, everybody should be judged for their beliefs. We are not doomed to our beliefs. If you choose to believe shitty, disgusting or stupid things, that’s your choice, and I’m absolutely judging you for that. And please feel free judge me in turn.
The belief in the sacred nature of beliefs should be abandoned. 

Freak sites like Naked Capitalism are having a very funny hissy fit over being named as sites infected with Russian propaganda in the famous WashPo piece. It’s truly hilarious because the idiots have stunk of Putinbotism for years but had no idea they were being used to spread propaganda. Because they are that dumb.

Of course, there are tons of insignificant little bloggers who are used to spread propaganda that they happily gobble up. One is the fellow called Mike the Mad Biologist.

Since I’m not going to a resort, I decided to visit the spa for a nice, relaxing procedure. As I was browsing the list of services they offer, I realized that the only procedure I want is the one where they bring me to a room with dimmed lights and quiet music, and then everybody leaves me be so that I can stare at the wall for an hour. Yes, I know there’s a work of literature about this.

I’m friendly with the spa owner and I could definitely ask her to rent me one of her rooms for an hour. She knows that I’m.  . . erm.  . . eccentric. But there is a distance between eccentric and full-blown crazy, and I don’t want to cross it in too much of a rush.

Hey, I’ve been buried in syllabi creation and I completely missed it! Out new Secretary of state is that very Exxon CEO who can’t quit making kissy face with Putin.

This is getting ridiculouser and ridiculouser. With every new cabinet appointment one goes, “Well, this is the absolute worst. At least, it can’t get worse than that!” And then you discover that yes, it can. 

The whole thing has gotten to the point of being frankly funny. A cabinet of billionaires and a billionaire president elected to look out for the interests of the common folks! And they all belong to Putin! 

A sea of laughs.

I’m teaching a course on literature of the crisis (known on this blog as the erosion of the nation-state by liquid capital) next semester. But all of the texts I’m putting on the syllabus are not the ones that I analyze in my book. Because I don’t want to be boring to myself. 

There will be essay, theater, poetry and short story of the crisis. No novels because I don’t make students buy books.