I'm not arguing with you there, although I suspect Zizek was a victim of Parenti's definition of anti-communism more than a willing participant in it.

Distinction with a difference? I'm not educated enough to tell you, I stumbled in here on accident without noticing what comm I was on.

I really don't have more to give you here, because I'm really just talking about a old man I think tried to do the right thing rather than a philosopher and his body of work.

That said, and I cannot remember where I first encountered it, it was Zizek himself who deprogrammed my own hatred of the USSR. I have no idea how I came across this passage or when, but I personally would not be a Stalin Loving Communist without it;

"In the Stalinist ideological imaginary, universal reason is objectivised in the guise of the inexorable laws of historical progress, and we are all its servants, the leader included. A Nazi leader, having delivered a speech, stood and silently accepted the applause, but under Stalinism, when the obligatory applause exploded at the end of the leader’s speech, he stood up and joined in. In Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be, Hitler responds to the Nazi salute by raising his hand and saying: ‘Heil myself!’ This is pure humour because it could never have happened in reality, while Stalin effectively did ‘hail himself’ when he joined others in the applause. Consider the fact that, on Stalin’s birthday, prisoners would send him congratulatory telegrams from the darkest gulags: it isn’t possible to imagine a Jew in Auschwitz sending Hitler such a telegram. It is a tasteless distinction, but it supports the contention that under Stalin, the ruling ideology presupposed a space in which the leader and his subjects could meet as servants of Historical Reason. Under Stalin, all people were, theoretically, equal."

I haven't read the article it's from, and I'm actually debating if I want to at this point in my life. But yeah, Slavoj opened the door to my hot and heavy Stalinism.