https://twitter.com/VaushV/status/1502591584067481604
Catching up on Zizek articles
radlib who can't read Marx but loves the guy who criticizes art and culture...folks this is why we need to get the Game Theory youtuber to read Das Kapital
and saw earlier this month he wrote those who blame Russia's invasion of Ukraine on NATO and the West are "not really leftists" and compared them to Hitler apologists lmao
Zizek: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/europe-unequal-treatment-of-refugees-exposed-by-ukraine-by-slavoj-zizek-2022-03
And now some who call themselves leftists (I wouldn’t) are blaming the West for the fact that US President Joe Biden was right about Putin’s intentions. The argument is well-known: NATO was slowly encircling Russia, fomenting color revolutions in its near-abroad, and ignoring the reasonable fears of a country that had been attacked from the West in the last century.
There is, of course, an element of truth here. But saying only this is equivalent to justifying Hitler by blaming the unjust Treaty of Versailles. Worse, it concedes that big powers have the right to spheres of influence, to which all others must submit for the sake of global stability. Putin’s assumption that international relations is a contest of great powers is reflected in his repeated claim that he had no choice but to intervene militarily in Ukraine.
Is that true? Is the problem really Ukrainian fascism? The question is better directed at Putin’s Russia. Putin’s intellectual lodestar is...
Lol fuck off no one cares about philosophy, idealist. Russia is clearly not the party doing finance imperialism to privatize farmland and keep people jobless and poor. That's the entire purpose of the IMF/World Bank (radlibs talk about geopolitics like NATO because idealists are only concerned with superstructure, not the material base)
Zizek attempts to be speaking dialectically but he's just a lazy careerist contrarian, this is why we need a commitment to historical materialism, you end up being on the level of Vaush.
coincidentally he wrote for this neoliberal website with a nerdy FIght Club name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Syndicate
Project Syndicate, which Ezra Klein described as "the world's smartest op-ed page,"
the least amount of soul
received grants from the Open Society Foundations, The Politiken Foundation in Denmark, Die Zeit, ZEIT-Stiftung, and The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Zizek drew attention away from finance imperialists on a website funded by the exact people who want to turn Ukraine in a nation who doesn't own their own farmland? PMC synthetic leftist hackfraud lol
I mean its not a matter of if big powers have a "right" to a sphere of influence, its a thing that exists that you have to work around and with, I dont think the US has a right to a sphere of influence but it obviously operates as if the entire world is within its sphere of influence and you gotta be prepared to handle the consequences as long as it operates like this. Whining about how spheres of influence shouldnt exist is not going to change the fact that great powers do lay claim to spheres of influence, and whining about how lesser powers "dont get too choose" or are "treated like they have no agency" isnt either, because even your beloved Europe is fucking infringing on the agency of African nations and other colonized peoples.
Zizek also does fucking euro-cringe nazi apologism.
Also this is obvious but I still wanna say it, Vaush doesnt give a fuck about Zizek either, this is just bad faith namedropping as support for his own opinions, if Zizek said that NATO is at fault he'd just say that Zizek is an insignificant meme man and no one listens to him.
Reminds me of all the liberals who were telling everybody how Noam Chomsky said to vote for Biden.
Also of people quote mining every revolutionary and theorist for the slightest suggestion of support for their positions that they then spam against inexperienced comrades to browbeat them with the "authority" of that revolutionary.
They did this a fuckton with Lenin suggesting that the British communist party should offer support for the surging Labour party exclusively so that their failure due to imperialism and the opportunism of social democracy instead leads to a flow of class conscious workers into the communist party. All of the surrounding context gets flayed off into just "Lenin said that we need to vote for the lesser evil and thats Joe Biden".