>I do not recall you commenting on the following passages from his article
>in the latest New Left Review. Are you in agreement with them? Or do I
>wholly misunderstand their significance?
I asked Zizek about this when I talked with him last week. I said it sounded a bit too much like an endorsement of NATO for my taste. He swore it wasn't, and swore he opposed the bombing.
I largely agree with the bottom half of what you quote. I don't like the first half so much, mainly because I get nervous when people talk about what "The West" should do. The term itself seems like a euphemism for a racialized imperialism, and I don't like the idea of "The West" intervening in other people's affairs.
Doug
>"In the last decade, the West followed a Hamlet-like procrastination
>towards the Balkans, and the present bombing has effectively all the signs
>of Hamlet's final murderous outburst in which a lot of people die
>unnecessarily - not only the King, his true target, but also his mother,
>Laertes, Hamlet himself - because Hamlet acted too late, when the right
>moment had already passed.
>
>So the West, in the present intervention which displays all the signs of a
>violent outburst of impotent aggression without a clear political goal, is
>now paying the price for the years of entertaining illusions that one could
>make a deal with Milosevic: with the recent hesitations about the ground
>intervention in Kosovo, the Serbian regime may, under the pretext of war,
>launch the final assault on Kosovo and purge it of most of the Albanians,
>cynically accepting bombing as the price to be paid."
>
>
><>
>
>
>"... the protests atainst bombing by the reformed Communist parties all
>around Europe, including the PDS, are totally misdirected: these false
>protesters against the NATO bombing of Serbia are like the caricaturized
>pseudoleftists who oppose the trial of a drug dealer, claiming that his
>crime is the result of social pathology of the capitalist system.
>
>The way to fight the capitalist New World Order is not by supporting local
>proto-fascist resistances to it, but to focus on the only serious question
>today: how to build *transnational* political movements and institutions
>strong enough to constrain seriously the unlimited rule of Capital, and to
>render visible and politically relevant the fact that the local
>fundamentalist resistances against the New World Order, from Milosevic to
>Le Pen and the extreme Right in Europe, are part of it?"