Zizek on Havel

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Tue Oct 26 02:27:30 PDT 1999


Russell wrote:
>Who mentioned Marxism? I merely pointed to Ghandi's role in damping down
>popular resistance and the consequences of this for the development of the
>liberation struggle in India.

Actually, dampening the fire of popular resistance may be exactly what Ken admires Ghandi for, since Ken wrote:


>This is something that has been bothering me for quite some
>time now. "Outing" someone as a racist in public
>discourse, time and time again, has often lead to the
>literal destruction of their lives (public and private).
>I'm certainly not in favour of letting people off the hook
>for saying offensive things... but we need to be careful
>with what we say and how we approach this. There is a
>certain lack of compassion that I've experienced in recent
>protests. When people start chanting "kill the rich!" or
>start looking lingeringly on rocks to throw... I start
>getting nervous. When Serbia was being bombed, the first
>week of protests here in Toronto began with fire bombs
>hitting the US embassy - causing injury to people on both
>sides of the fence, police officers and protestors.
>Lifewise when some student protestors, in another instance,
>started "moshing" against police riot shields.

People who are outraged and fired up are not very good Kantians.... Another argument for postmodern ethics: its fear of the masses and their actions.

Yoshie



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