June 24, 2022
This commentary is about Slavoj Zizek, the enigmatic Slovenian philosopher. He was a revelation to me when I discovered his lectures and YouTube videos in college. And while attending a public policy and politics school as a liberal, I found him very useful. I’m going to intersperse his writing with mine, here, like it’s a commentary or dialogue. I consider this a bit of an homage, an exercise, or a reflection on someone whose work has been important to my intellectual formation.
While in public policy school, I evolved various strategies to not be forced into rote regurgitation of the neoconservative/neoliberal party line. Such an environment was rife with the kind of people who espouse performative but un-self-sacrificing "issue" advocacy that my friend nicknamed "squeebs", and the kind of professors who both together with the squeebs considered it a "win" for any left-leaning student to moderate their beliefs toward the party line that they toed. To survive in such an environment took a perfected and honed skill to detect faulty premises, and deflect accusations based on faulty premises. So what - I not only went to school, I also played the game.
The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek was invaluable to me here. He provided fundamental defenses against the toxicity of such an environment. His particular blend of psychology and dialectical materialism was perfect and perfectable by me for identifying the faulty premises - for instance, of those who had sold out.
Life as an openly left-leaning student at my school was full of life lessons on who to avoid or not ally with; who to protect on the basis of and for the expression of certain opinions; and how to maneuver and position yourself to avoid compromising situations. Zizek, however, gives the socially-aware the signpost toward understanding the absurdity of these Machiavellian fantasies that motivate a lot of the toxicity in the realm of politics and public policy. Zizek would have seen, as I did after learning from him, that these Machiavellian fantasies of my schoolmates almost always veered them toward concrete positions of mediocrity.
Zizek has a relevance that just won't quit. Today he has published a critique about the Ukrainian situation: mostly addressing the reflexive identification of the (older) Left with former Communist countries. It's been a while since I listened to his lectures. (Or read his essays. Less of that, I admit; but I have perused some.) But this essay was also relevant to me for other reasons.
I raged on social media about two months ago about the Ukraine situation. My line was, basically, that the Ukraine-Russia war is basically the two bad guys fighting it out. Russia is clearly the bad guy, but Ukraine is also the bad guy. Russia is a corrupt society ruled by a dictator, etc. etc. We know the populist litany against Russia. However, Ukraine is badly corrupted by a neo-Nazi influence. Let's not beat about the bush here. The OUN and the Azov battalion are explicitly Nazi groups. And while the US Congress has passed various bills forbidding US arms shipments to the Azov battalion and other Nazi militias, these groups are inseparable from the Ukrainian resistance forces, and so while US arms shipments may not be earmarked for use by the Azov Battalion and its ilk, (and may be earmarked to be explicitly not for their use, etc. etc.) there is no way to ensure that US arms shipments to Ukraine won't actually get into the hands of these neo-Nazi militias.
The Ukrainians are reputedly calling the Russian invaders "orcs" - a callback to The Lord of the Rings. So I'll take them up on that analogy. This war between Ukraine and Russia is like Saruman fighting Sauron in the The Lord of the Rings. As an explanation, Saruman was a bad guy that nonetheless was a rival of the other main bad guy, Sauron, who commanded the "orcs", in the fantasy books and movies The Lord of the Rings. Saruman's army was the "Uruk-hai".
Is the enemy of my enemy my friend? The small lesson of that subplot in The Lord of the Rings is that no, the enemy of my enemy is not my friend. Russia might be a legitimate rival of the United States, but that doesn't mean that Ukraine is a legitimate friend - and especially not a friend of a right-thinking American liberal.
Zizek now accepts the factual proof of the Putin regime's "imperial ambitions," as follows.
Pacifism is the wrong response to the war in Ukraine | Slavoj Žižek | The Guardian
For me, John Lennon’s mega-hit Imagine was always a song popular for the wrong reasons. Imagine that “the world will live as one” is the best way to end in hell.
Those who cling to pacifism in the face of the Russian attack on Ukraine remain caught in their own version of “imagine”. Imagine a world in which tensions are no longer resolved through armed conflicts … Europe persisted in this world of “imagine”, ignoring the brutal reality outside its borders. Now it’s the time to awaken.
The dream of a quick Ukrainian victory, the repetition of the initial dream of a quick Russian victory, is over. In what looks more and more as a protracted stalemate, Russia is slowly progressing, and its ultimate goal is clearly stated. There is no longer any need to read between the lines when Putin compareshimself with Peter the Great: “On the face of it, he was at war with Sweden taking something away from it … He was not taking away anything, he was returning … He was returning and reinforcing, that is what he was doing … Clearly, it fell to our lot to return and reinforce as well.”
More than focus on particular issues (is Russia really just “returning”, and to what?) we should read carefully Putin’s general justification of his claim: “In order to claim some kind of leadership – I am not even talking about global leadership, I mean leadership in any area – any country, any people, any ethnic group should ensure their sovereignty. Because there is no in-between, no intermediate state: either a country is sovereign, or it is a colony, no matter what the colonies are called.”
The implication of these lines, as one commentator put it, is clear: there are two categories of state: “The sovereign and the conquered. In Putin’s imperial view, Ukraine should fall into the latter category.”
And, as it is no less clear from Russian official statements in the last months, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Finland, the Baltic states … and ultimately Europe itself “fall into the latter category”.
We now know what the call to allow Putin to “save his face” means. It means accepting not a minor territorial compromise in Donbas but Putin’s imperial ambition. The reason this ambition should be unconditionally rejected is that in today’s global world in which we are all haunted by the same catastrophes we are all in-between, in an intermediate state, neither a sovereign country nor a conquered one: to insist on full sovereignty in the face of global warming is sheer madness since our very survival hinges on tight global cooperation.
As a matter of fact, this territorial dispute in Donbas is an integral part of Russian imperialism. Few people remember in every-day consideration that Russia is nearly a landlocked country. That is why the acquisition of St. Petersburg was made. And it is not coincidental that the acquisition of St. Petersburg jump-started Russia's first imperial period. (Think of roughly the period of time immediately following that depicted by Tolstoy in War and Peace.) Sure enough, there was a map that showed up on Reddit one day and disappeared into time without making much of an impact on the narrative about Russian aims. It shows that all the gas exports Russia is making come from only two port cities: one is St. Petersburg and the other is a port on the Black Sea (Novorossiyk) near the border of Ukraine.
There's some insignificant traffic from far-north ports but those ports are frozen out half the year. In general that is Russia's problem. Most of its sea ports are frozen out half the year. Russia is heavily reliant on its two primary ports: St. Petersburg and the Black Sea ports. And I haven't read it, only War and Peace and some of the other short stories, but isn't Tolstoy's Hadji Murad about wars in this region, the Caucasus between the Caspian and Black Sea, during Russia's first imperial period? This "warm-river" region has always been important to Russia's tenuous connection to the West and the world. Tolstoy makes a point in War and Peace of pointing out that when St. Petersburg was threatened by Napoleon's forces during that war the culture of the elite shifted toward appreciation of the "warm rivers" region's people. Russia has always been limited by its connection to the world outside.
But Russia doesn’t simply ignore global warming – why was it so mad at the Scandinavian countries when they expressed their intention to join Nato? With global warming, what is at stake is the control of the Arctic passage. (That’s why Trump wanted to buy Greenland from Denmark.) Due to the explosive development of China, Japan and South Korea, the main transport route will run north of Russia and Scandinavia. Russia’s strategic plan is to profit from global warming: control the world’s main transport route, plus develop Siberia and control Ukraine. In this way, Russia will dominate so much food production that it will be able to blackmail the whole world. This is the ultimate economic reality beneath Putin’s imperial dream.
Those who advocate less support for Ukraine and more pressure on it to negotiate, inclusive of accepting painful territorial renunciations, like to repeat that Ukraine simply cannot win the war against Russia. True, but I see exactly in this the greatness of Ukrainian resistance: they risked the impossible, defying pragmatic calculations, and the least we owe them is full support, and to do this, we need a stronger Nato – but not as a prolongation of the US politics.
The US strategy to counteract through Europe is far from self-evident: not just Ukraine, Europe itself is becoming the place of the proxy war between US and Russia, which may well end up by a compromise between the two at Europe’s expense. There are only two ways for Europe to step out of this place: to play the game of neutrality – a short-cut to catastrophe – or to become an autonomous agent. (Just think how the situation may change if Trump wins the next US elections.)
This seems like Zizek is going off the deep end - but not entirely so, I contend. On the one hand, it's not out of the question that Russia is trying to benefit from the catastrophe of global warming. As early as the 1970's, the CIA was forecasting that global food politics would be the primary outcome of climate change, of any kind; and that climatic changes could make regions of the world that are not viable for agriculture at the moment, viable in the future. (This can be found in a FOIA-ed CIA document that is publicly available.)
On the other hand, for the community of psychological professionals the Ukrainian situation profits a narrative that they engage in. If you take a very disconnected perspective on this, the war between Russia and Ukraine is a spectacle and a caricature of the conflict between Church and State. It's a shitshow versus a clusterfuck. Increasingly, neutrality can't be found in the spectacle. If the spectacle consumes thoughtful politics, this situation could get out of hand.
While some leftists claim that the ongoing war is in the interest of the Nato industrial-military complex, which uses the need for new arms to avoid crisis and gain new profits, their true message to Ukraine is: OK, you are victims of a brutal aggression, but do not rely on our arms because in this way you play in the hands of the industrial-military complex …
The disorientation caused by the Ukrainian war is producing strange bedfellows like Henry Kissinger and Noam Chomsky who “come from opposing ends of the political spectrum – Kissinger serving as secretary of state under Republican presidents and Chomsky one of the leading leftwing intellectuals in the United States – and have frequently clashed. But when it comes to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, both recently advocated for Ukraine to consider a settlement that could see it dropping claim to some land to achieve a quicker peace deal.”
The point that the "clearer heads" like these believe should prevail is also psychological - the mass psychology of national pride. The extent that the "warm rivers" Caucasus region is an essential part of Russian national pride buried in this nexus of its geopolitical reality, makes them crazy and willing to fight over tiny pieces of land. The territorial cession of a part of the Donbas is equated in the Russian nationalism we are seeing evidence of, with the whole imperial pride of Russian history. The policy these "clearer heads" propose relies on the assumption that there are some people in Russian government that are not yet subsumed by crazed nationalism. And the fact that some Russian people are protesting en masse against the actions of their government suggests that that rational element is there.
In short, the two stand for the same version of “pacifism” which only works if we neglect the key fact that the war is not about Ukraine but a moment of the brutal attempt to change our entire geopolitical situation. The true target of the war is the dismantlement of the European unity advocated not only by the US conservatives and Russia but also by the European extreme right and left – at this point, in France, Melenchon meets Le Pen.
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The open question is whether this moment is about seizing the initiative to not only force the acceptance of a new geopolitical paradigm, but to claim a measure of Might and Authority in this new paradigm, or if it represents a revanchist move toward nostalgia and glorification of an imperial past.
In my view, it doesn't have to be either/or. Russia has an interest in seizing initiative to take advantage of climate change politics in their own advantage at the expense of the rest of the world. And they have a convenient regression to a revanchist, re-imperial narrative, to justify and also obscure the true aims of their national project.
Incidentally, the analysis of state politics on the basis of food and agriculture has a strong historical basis in the physiocratic view of political economy, which was predominant before the confused fog-of-war of capitalistic analysis set in. It may be our future in a "climate changed" reality, but it is explained by past analysis. (Bloomberg News might have seized the phrase "climate changed" but I'm not endorsing their particular view of that possible future by using the phrase.)
The craziest notion floating around these days is that, to counter the new polarity between the US and China (which stand for the excesses of western liberalism and oriental authoritarianism), Europe and Russia should rejoin forces and form a third “Eurasian” block based on the Christian legacy purified of its liberal excess. The very idea of an “Eurasian” third way is a form of today’s fascism.
This is a very subtle point that political correctness has repressed the productive discussion of. Rejecting the duality of the conflict between these two ideas, liberalism and authoritarianism, is abdicating our responsibility to consider why it is we do what we do. It is, to me, an offensive absurdity that normal everyday people went along with fascism because they liked authoritarianism and despotism. On the contrary, they went with it because they were doing what they did just because they liked how it feels.
Insisting that there is a way to avoid making a choice against despotism, because it doesn't "feel good" to do something that is hard, is justifiably how fascism persuaded people in the past, and how it is still persuading people.
It is like the disapproving phrase "looking for an easy way out" except these people are "looking for an easy way in".
Even doing what we do out of solidarity and optimism is insufficient. Optimism is solidarity, but both of those concepts are value-neutral. Anyone with even the minimum amount of decency will admit this. Extending solidarity to anyone for anything they do, just for existing, devalues human dignity into an overall poverty. Pessimism is progress, and like it or not, our fantasies and motivations of what we do, have to be at least slightly uncomfortable and subversive.
So what will happen “when voters in Europe and America, faced with soaring energy costs and broader inflation driven by sanctions against Russia, might lose their appetite for a war that seems to have no end, with needs that are only expanding as both sides head for a protracted stalemate”? The answer is clear: at that point, the European legacy will be lost, and Europe will be de facto divided between an American and a Russian sphere of influence. In short, Europe itself will become the place of a war that seems to have no end …
What is absolutely unacceptable for a true leftist today is not only to support Russia but also to make a more “modest” neutral claim that the left is divided between pacifists and supporters of Ukraine, and that one should treat this division as a minor fact which shouldn’t affect the left’s global struggle against global capitalism.
I take this admonition in good spirits. There is a problem in contemporary environmentalism to stress solidarity at nearly all costs based on very unsophisticated lines of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." In environmentalism this has even extended to accommodating "blood and soil" ideology into the Left, via environmentalism, even though this is an explicitly Nazi ideology. I've written about this here. And China Mieville highlighted this in 2014 when he challenged the simplistic Utopianism on the environmentalist Left. "To try to think utopia in this world, without rage, without fury, is an indulgence we can't afford," he added. Not to put too fine a point on it, conservation is not progressive; it is exclusionary and inherently classist, and the truth of that goes back to the barbarity of monarchical England. That horrific situation led to the necessity of Magna Carta, and its companion document, the Charter of Forests - arguably to the necessity of written Anglo-Saxon law and human rights, itself.
These, we must rely on. Therefore the unimpeachable fact is that which is paraphrased by Mr. Mieville too: "Rather than hoping for cohesion, our best hope might lie in conflict. Our aim and aspect of our very utopianism should be this strategy of tension."
When a country is occupied, it is the ruling class which is usually bribed to collaborate with the occupiers to maintain its privileged position, so that the struggle against the occupiers becomes a priority. The same can go for the struggle against racism; in a state of racial tension and exploitation, the only way to effectively struggle for the working class is to focus on fighting racism (this is why any appeal to the white working class, as in today’s alt-right populism, betrays class struggle).
Today, one cannot be a leftist if one does not unequivocally stand behind Ukraine. To be a leftist who “shows understanding” for Russia is like to be one of those leftists who, before Germany attacked the Soviet Union, took seriously German “anti-imperialist” rhetoric directed at the UK and advocated neutrality in the war of Germany against France and the UK.
I do not fully agree here. To use an example from popular culture that Mr. Zizek may enjoy, the relevant cultural touchstone here is for me the show Battlestar Galactica. Specifically the strange inversion that happens in the third season. The show follows the refugees of an attack on humanity by robots that they created as they try to find a new home traveling through space, and so on. In the third season they find a planet to settle on, but the robots find them and catch them unawares. Helpless, they are occupied. And suddenly the certainty we had about the show evaporates. Up to that point, the traditional notions held, that the good guys are being attacked by robots that are terrorists, but now it is the humans that are occupied. The scene, the mise-en-scene, the shakycam footage, and its placement on the broadcasts at the height of the US occupation of Iraq; not to mention the story itself, are clear: this is Iraq under US occupation. The humans commit all sorts of bombing, subversion, terrorism.
This is unsettling enough to mainstream US sentiment. But the real crux of this subplot is more subtle and problematic. It is a fact that most of the "notorious collaborators" with the occupying forces in this retelling of the Iraq occupation were the figures who were high-ranking in the society on the ground. And in the progress of the show past the occupation subplot, some of the collaborators are punished or shamed (and some high ranking ones escape punishment, etc.). The terrorists are considered heroic once they are saved. This is unsettling to the mainstream geopolitical narrative, but it is part of the show's engagement with a legal narrative that can be problematized. But the most relevant point here is that the real elite figures of the show, never settle down on the planet, and when it comes under occupation, they just up and leave, absconding also with the warships and weapons. And this, I think, is very important.
The localized ruling class in the human settlement was bought out and so on by the occupation forces, but there is a higher ruling class that escapes all blame and actually coordinates the prosecution, trials, impeachments, and punishments for the localized ruling class collaborators - and who is to hold them accountable? No one, according to the show. And why do they do it? For the purposes of having a show, to put on a morality play to control the masses, and so on.
Of course, the point is not to examine the story hermetically, or rather sealed within itself, not to ask "what would we have done?" but in the process of social critique to look at what the subliminal messages from constructing the story that way communicate to the audience. Certain narratives are given "plot armor" because of how the story is told, and the task is to look past that. "It's just a story" - but what messages is it sending to those who take it too seriously? And we shouldn't look down on the power of visual rhetoric either: it fundamentally shapes attitudes and requires critique.
If the left will fail here, the game is over for it. But does this mean that the Left should simply take the side of the west, inclusive of the rightist fundamentalists who also support Ukraine?
In a speech in Dallas on 18 May 2022, while criticizing Russia’s political system, the ex-president Bush said: “The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia, and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq.” He quickly corrected himself: “I mean, of Ukraine,” then said “Iraq, anyway” to laughter from the crowd, and added “75”, referring to his age.
As many commentators noted, two things cannot but strike the eye in this rather obvious Freudian slip: the fact that the public received Bush’s implicit confession that the US attack on Iraq (ordered by him) was “a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion” with laughter, instead of treating it as an admission of a crime comparable to the Russian invasion of Ukraine; plus Bush’s enigmatic continuation of his self-correction “Iraq, anyway” – what did he mean by it? That the difference between Ukraine and Iraq doesn’t really matter? The final reference to his advanced age doesn’t affect in any way this enigma.
If I can regress to the elaboration of the inversion from Battlestar Galactica here, I do think that despite its problematic legalistic narrative, its treatment of geopolitics does allow the question: does opposing the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq really mean one has to unconditionally support the actions of occupied Iraqis?
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I can support some of them as natural reactions to invasion and oppression, but I don't have to accept all of their ideology, let alone the ideology of the resistance elements. Some of the actions of resistance to occupation are heroic, but I don't have to accept anyone's dicta about who is a good guy and who is not. The inversion opens up the space for decisions based on conscience.
Maybe Ukraine is like Iraq, and Russia is like the Bush-era U.S. But just like in the case of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, I can reject the notion that opposing the actions of my own State means categorically supporting the enemies of my State. That is false, and refines Bush's own absurdity when he said "If you're not with me, you're my enemy." And if that is true, then it's doubly true when its not the actions of my own State that I'm opposing.
But the enigma is dispelled the moment we take Bush’s statement seriously and literally: yes, with all differences taken into account (Zelenskiy is not a dictator like Saddam), Bush did the same thing as Putin is now doing to Ukraine, so they should be both judged by the same standard.
On the day I am writing this, we learned from the media that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s extradition to the US has been approved by the UK home secretary, Priti Patel. His crime? Nothing other than to render public the crimes confessed by Bush’s slip of tongue: the documents revealed by WikiLeaks revealed how, under Bush’s presidency, “the US military had killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents during the war in Afghanistan, while leaked Iraq war files showed 66,000 civilians had been killed, and prisoners tortured.” Crimes fully comparable with what Putin is doing in Ukraine. From today’s hindsight, we can say that WikiLeaks disclosed dozens of American Buchas and Mariupols.
So while putting Bush on trial is no less illusory than bringing Putin to the Hague tribunal, the minimum to be done by those who oppose Russian invasion of Ukraine is to demand Assange’s immediate release. Ukraine claims it fights for Europe, and Russia claims it fights for the rest of the world against western unipolar hegemony. Both claims should be rejected, and here the difference between right and left enters the stage.
I fully agree that supporting Ukrainian resistance, condemning Russia and so on shows the same energy that should be applied toward the freedom of Assange who exposed crimes of a similar nature to those done by Russia in Ukraine that the U.S. did in its turn, in Iraq and Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, North Africa, and so on.
Supporting Assange's release is of the utmost importance and means taking the stand that people should have the information necessary to make informed condemnations of the war crimes done by various State actors on the global stage, and not based on propagandistic messaging and knee jerk reaction to emotional targeting and manipulation.
From the rightist standpoint, Ukraine fights for European values against the non-European authoritarians; from the leftist standpoint, Ukraine fights for global freedom, inclusive of the freedom of Russians themselves. That’s why the heart of every true Russian patriot beats for Ukraine.
Every great movement of people in history has a critical moment when there is a real possibility of free will available to common people. That's Tolstoy's theory of free will - free will as the sum of infinitesimals. Where does that string of infinitesimal moments of free will begin for a person? It comes at a certain moment in these movements of people making history. Maybe this chance to grasp it wont be there in a little while maybe not even in a few months - but it is there now, and that is what is important. Now.
Slavoj Žižek is a philosopher. He is a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, and international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities of the University of London
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