Far from being Orientalist, Zizek's main point is that the Chinese power elite, still "Orientals" unlike "us" in the Western imagination, have, like just about everyone else, actually turned to the power of the market to melt everything solid, including political and religious opposition, into thin air: "Beijing finally learned the lesson: what is the oppressive power of secret police forces, camps and Red Guards destroying ancient monuments compared to the power of unbridled capitalism to undermine all traditional social relations?" ("How China Got Religion," 11 October 2007, <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/opinion/11zizek.html>).
The object of Zizek's critical examination, like Stanley Fish's, Terry Eagleton's, and Mark Lilla's for instance, is not the Orient, real or imagined, but liberalism and its incompatibility with true believers, secular or religious, who "dare to take their beliefs seriously": "'Culture' has commonly become the name for all those things we practice without really taking seriously. And this is why we dismiss fundamentalist believers as 'barbarians' with a 'medieval mindset': they dare to take their beliefs seriously. Today, we seem to see the ultimate threat to culture as coming from those who live immediately in their culture, who lack the proper distance." The Taliban, the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution, and the like are merely his imaginary foils in contrast with which he delineates the problem of liberalism . . . especially for the Left.
On 10/11/07, bhandari at berkeley.edu <bhandari at berkeley.edu> wrote:
> As a whole the Iranian community in the US is in no uncertain
> terms opposed to any kind of destablization, much less intervention
I wish! Who do you think these people, for instance, teaming up with Freedom House and the like <http://www.gozaar.org/template.php?id=336> are?
On 10/11/07, Shane Mage <shmage at pipeline.com> wrote:
> Opeditorializing in todays NYTIMES, among other stupidities Mr. Zizek
> emits this:
>
> "... When in 2001 the Taliban in Afghanistan destroyed the ancient
> Buddhist statues at Bamiyan, many Westerners were outraged - but how
> many of them actually believed in the divinity of the Buddha? Rather,
> we were angered because the Taliban did not show appropriate respect
> for the "cultural heritage" of their country. Unlike us
> sophisticates, they really believed in their own religion, and thus
> had no great respect for the cultural value of the monuments of other
> religions..."
>
> Only the sort of person who pontificates on what he knows absolutely
> nothing about could talk like that about
> "the divinity of the Buddha," when there are exactly as many
> Buddhists who believe in the divinity of the Buiddha
> as there are Muslims who believe in the divinity of the Prophet. And
> only an ignoramous would talk about the
> Taliban (an asset of the Pakistan ISI, itself an asset of the US CIA)
> having or not respect for the cultural heritage
> of "their" country, when that country didn't even exist when the
> statues were carved and when they were legally
> recognized as part of the cultural heritage of *humanity*, a group of
> which Zizek is presumably a member.
"Under Saddam you were likely to be tortured and shot if you let someone steal an antiquity; in today's Iraq you are likely to be tortured and shot if you don't." -- Abbas al-Hussaini, "the head of Iraq's supposedly sovereign board of antiquities and heritage," as paraphrased by Simon Jenkins, Guardian, 8 June 2007
If I keep reading things like this, I'll be tempted to give not only Iran's sexy President but also its Islamo-Stalinist Leader a blank check for defending his country -- and the cultural heritage of humanity that exists there -- by any means necessary.
-- Yoshie