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
If you poke a bear with a stick and the bear growls at you and you keep poking the bear then whose fault is it when you get mauled?
You are aware, of course, of a thing called "Metaphor"?
And, likewise, you are aware that in this metaphor the bear is neutral, while the party harassing and provoking the bear is the belligerent?
And of course you are aware that the Bear is a commonly used symbol to represent the nation and people of Russia?
Bears are interesting creatures. They're incredibly dangerous, but rarely attack unless directly provoked.
the west should have known NATO expansion was a diplomatic catastrophe waiting to happen.
The West did, and does, know. This outcome was intended. They've worked very hard for years to provoke this war. This is exactly the political situation that NATO wanted, and is indeed the sole purpose for which NATO was created and has been maintained. NATOs entire existence culminates in this crisis and they will do everything in their power to continue to exacerbate Russia's situation, hopefully short of nuclear war.
This shit is fucking idiotic
this whole post fuckin sucks lol
If you poke a human with a stick and the human growls at you and you keep poking the human then whose fault is it when you get mailed?
Capitalism is a system that is without reason. Animal spirit jokes aside this is a good analogy
Nah, just a regular dog. You keep pushing a regular dog into a corner and you get bit.
Rape culture is not an appropriate or acceptable metaphor for geopolitics. If you're a nation-state and you join a belligerent military nuclear armed alliance that exists solely for the purpose of destroying Russia and subjugating it's people you should expect a military invasion. In fact everyone who pays the least bit of attention to geopolitics expected this military invasion. Civilians are not actors in this drama. States are. Civilians are the people who are ground underfoot by the machinations of presidents and oligarchs. The State of Ukraine is absolutely the belligerent in this situation and presented a clear causus belli to which the State of Russia was obligated to respond in order to protect it's sovereignty and territorial integrity. The people of Russia, Ukraine, Germany, the EU, America, and beyond will all suffer from this. They are the victims. The State of Ukraine is not a victim.
Nobody is saying that Putin was justified invading
Actually, lots of people are saying this.
Really? I've not seen much of that. The dominant narrative I've seen just about everywhere is to completey dismiss or ignore NATO's share of culpability for the conflict. Or to declare Putin worse than Hitler to justify US/NATO intervention.
Zizek is a central Euro Boomer. I'm shocked he's not calling for a no-fly zone or a nuclear exchange with Russia tbh.
a no-fly zone or a nuclear exchange with Russia
:same-picture:
Zizek is a joke who occasionally lands a decent punchline. I don’t take him seriously at all anymore. Too focused on being a public intellectual.
this is actually a good point, but not for what he's trying to make
stop licking Putin's boots, please. the contrarian, non-materialistic praise of him and his choices ignores the complete meaninglessness of this conflict. just because liberals are too stupid to understand nuance doesn't mean we should forget about revolutionary defeatism as a concept and defend Putin, even ironically. yes, there is historical context, but the interests of one massive oligarch who helped with the collapse of the USSR are not better interests than those of the other oligarchs who helped with the collapse of the USSR. i do not understand how bringing up his historical reasoning for attacking Ukraine is even relevant. I guarantee there will be exactly the same number of nazis staffed as there were beforehand, even if they just become masked.
Putin is not our friend.
do you think any of us have any actual power here? we're just elevating an oligarch in our eyes for no reason except contrarianism. we have no power over whether or not capitalists throw us into meaningless conflict. America has next to no class consciousness.
some of the more contrarian and uncritical comments reach into meaningless praise
I don't fucking care if America's enemies are perfect. None of them (except like fucking North Korea) are perfect.
Some of them are better than others. Some of them I only tenuously support.
As long as they oppose America, I support them nevertheless. As long as they oppose the conditions that smother socialism, I support them nevertheless.
All I care about is that America is defeated, because socialism cannot happen under global American hegemony.
"support" Putin in the sense that going against America's interests is great and good. But there is absolutely no reason to treat this like some of us do with China, with uncritical support of him. That is my issue. The capitalist government in Russia has shown no inclination it will not backstab and destroy socialists movements just like America does if given the chance. treating him as anything except a opportunist who is currently doing something that conveniently hinders someone even worse would be disingenous
let them fight
I trust the Russian oligarchy less to be honest. Anyone who is under the delusion that anyone would be better off under some sort of Russian hegemony needs to get their head on straight. These are the people who overthrew the USSR and benefited from the worst peacetime collapse in human history. As far as I am concerned they are all Fascists unless someone can prove it otherwise to me.
"I, as an American, want Russia to lose because of revolutionary defeatism."
The point of revolutionary defeatism is that your own country loses.
no, the point of revolutionary defeatism is that you don't care who wins lol
nvm, i was wrong, i was actually confused because the colloquial term is used as a synonym for "nihilism", not actual desire for loss even though that's the dictionary definition
either way i don't really think thinking Putin is better than America is really revolutionary defeatism, especially when like 80% of the people doing so aren't even Ukrainain
Revolutionary defeatism is when you want your own country to lose. That is what defeatism means, to want defeat.
To achieve defeat, you must implicitly or explicitly support your country's enemies, like Russia.
yeah i just double checked, i actually misread everything i read about it
like we're entering "critical support to hitler for killing hitler" territory here
the point i'm making is that Putin and American capitalists are effectively the same, so them fighting is analogous to hitler killing himself, not that they're actually similar to hitler
When have Russian capitalists run amok across the world bombing multitudes of countries back into the age of open air slave markets?
lmfao when dagestan and chechyna and syria just straight up dont exist.
jesus fuckin christ lmao
pointing at what now? I havent espoused support for any war, warmonger.
Yes, just like the cia causes leftist infighting to keep from being effecrive I am glad to see some capitlaist infighting
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.
When Putin talks about “denazification” in Ukraine, we should bear in mind his support for Marine le Pen’s National Rally in France, Matteo Salvini’s Lega in Italy, and other actual neo-fascist movements.
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".
:zizek:
“I wrote all of thish while (schniff) blackout drunk and sho on and sho forth”
