joanna bujes wrote:
>
> Actually, I thought Guy Debord, in his "Society of Spectacle," had a
> pretty good analysis of Stalinism. It's a short book (100 pp or so) and
> a great book. I recommend it.
>
> Joanna
>
> Michael Pugliese wrote:
>
If it is the whole of MP's post that Joanna is quoting, then the post is close to a lie. Zizek ends the article (in the 17 March issue of LRB) by flatly declaring that Hitler and Stalin are NOT comparable, that attempts to compare them are in fact attempts in Europe to bring Hitler back to respectability:
**** It is here that one has to make a choice. The ‘pure’ liberal attitude towards Leftist and Rightist ‘totalitarianism’ – that they are both bad, based on the intolerance of political and other differences, the rejection of democratic and humanist values etc – is a priori false. It is necessary to take sides and proclaim Fascism fundamentally ‘worse’ than Communism. The alternative, the notion that it is even possible to compare rationally the two totalitarianisms, tends to produce the conclusion – explicit or implicit – that Fascism was the lesser evil, an understandable reaction to the Communist threat. When, in September 2003, Silvio Berlusconi provoked a violent outcry with his observation that Mussolini, unlike Hitler, Stalin or Saddam Hussein, never killed anyone, the true scandal was that, far from being an expression of Berlusconi’s idiosyncrasy, his statement was part of an ongoing project to change the terms of a postwar European identity hitherto based on anti-Fascist unity. That is the proper context in which to understand the European conservatives’ call for the prohibition of Communist symbols.*****
It is not, Zizek argues, even rational to compare the two.
Carrol