>>Let me ask Doug: What use is any of Zizek's analysis,
>>first, in responding to the present situation in Austria, and second, in
>>addressing the general two-party fraud? Do you really think that the twin
>>ruling parties spawn third parties in order to prevent the rise of left
>>alternatives? If I had written that, I'd be thumped as a conspiracy monger,
>>but because an oracle has spoken, we should accept it as revelation?
>
>What's useful in it? First, it helps explain the reaction of the EU
>and the US: they get to puff out their chests and feel noble about
>defending democracy (against what is, it must be conceded, a
>democratic electoral process), while all of them have completely
>embraced capitalism and marginalized any commitment to social justice
>their parties once imperfectly represented (Clinton, Blair, Schroder,
>etc.). Isn't it useful to discredit their posturing? (There's some
>similarity to the demonizing of Slobo & the Serbs: the moral
>self-aggrandizing of the Third Way crowd.) Second, it helps explain
>the popular appeal of far-right politics - why some leftish sorts in
>the US, for example, embrace Buchanan.
Well, Zizek _is_ the Third Way, complete with his own "demonizing of Slobo & the Serbs" (for instance, he criticized Alain Badiou for being soft on Milosevic & Serb nationalism).
Peter Dews writes in _The Limits of Disenchantment_ (London: Verso, 1995):
***** ...Zizek is ultimately a 'Right Hegelian' masquerading -- albeit unwittingly -- as a 'Left Hegelian'. He views the modern individual as caught in the dichotomy between his or her universal status as a member of civil society, and the particularistic attachments of ethnicity, nation and tradition, and this duality is reflected in his own ambiguous political profile -- _marxisant_ cultural critic on the international stage, member of a neo-liberal and nationalistically inclined governing party back home. (252) *****
In his essay "NATO AS THE LEFT HAND OF GOD?" Zizek says:
***** The ultimate paradox of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia is thus not the one about which Western pacifists complain (by bombing Yugoslavia in order to prevent ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, NATO effectively triggered a large-scale cleansing and thus created the very humanitarian catastrophy it wanted to prevent), but a deeper paradox involved in the ideology of victimization: the key aspect to take note of if NATO's privileging of the now discredited "moderate" Kosovar faction of Ibrahim Rugova against the "radical" Kosovo Liberation Army. What this means is that NATO is actively blocking the only and obvious alternative to the ground intervention of Western military forces: the full-scale armed resistance of the Albanians themselves. (The moment this option is mentioned, fears start to circulate: KLA is not really an army, just a bunch of untrained fighters; we should not trust KLA, since it is involved in drug trafficking and/or is a Maoist group whose victory would led to a Khmer Rouge or Taliban regime in KosovoŠ) Now, with the agreement on the Serb Army's withdrawal from Kosovo, this distrust against the KLA resurfaced with a vengeance: after a couple of weeks in which it seemed that the US Army is seriously counting on the KLA against the Serb forces, the topic of the day is again the "danger" that, after the Serb Army's withdrawal, the KLA will - as the NATO sources and the media like to put it - "fill in the vacuum" and take over. The message of this distrust, again, cannot be clearer: it's OK to help the helpless Albanians against the Serbs monsters, but in no way are they to be allowed to effectively cast off this helplessness by way of asserting themselves as a sovereign and self-reliant political subject, a subject with no need for the benevolent charge of the NATO "protectorate"Š
In short, while NATO is intervening in order to protect the Kosovar victims, it is at the same time well taking care that THEY WILL REMAIN VICTIMS, not an active politico-military force capable of defending itself. The strategy of NATO is thus perverse in the precise Freudian sense of the term: it is itself (co)responsible for the calamity against which it offers itself as a remedy (like the mad governess from Patricia Highsmith's "Heroine," who sets the family house on fire in order to be able to prove her devotion to the family by bravely saving the children from the raging fireŠ). What we encounter here is again the paradox of victimization: the Other to be protected is good INSOFAR AS IT REMAINS A VICTIM (which is why we are bombarded with pictures of helpless Kosovar mothers, children and elder people, telling moving stories of their suffering); the moment it no longer behaves as a victim, but wants to strike back on its own, it all of a sudden magically turns into a terrorist/fundamentalist/drug-trafficking OtherŠ *****
Zizek is wrong in two respects. (1) NATO and the KLA _were_ cooperating with each other, so his complaint that NATO did not support the KLA is utterly ungrounded. (2) Apparently, Zizek thinks that the KLA are worthy of leftist support. Anyhow, Zizek out-Blairs Blair in his passionate embrace of Kosovo-Albanian separatists.
Yoshie