Welcome to the Neighborhood

 “Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbors,” by Slavoj Žižek, 2016

Žižek aims his arrows at liberals, Left-liberals and the petit-bourgeois ‘left’ in this slim polemic, dealing with the issue of refugees in Europe and the racist liberal idea of ‘cultural relativism.’ I’ll leave you with quotes for the most part.  He deals with growing femicides, Islamic terror groups like ISIS, ‘nihilist’ violence, Europe’s libratory side, imperialism and invasions, fascism’s two aspects in religion and nationalism, then delves into some questionable psychology.  He seems to take somewhat of a ‘culture of civilization’ tack at first, but then clearly promotes universal liberation.  It was written in the aftermath of gang attacks on women in Cologne, Germany carried out mostly by Arab youth, ISIS attacks against civilians in Paris and the kidnapping of girls in Rotherham, UK by Pakistani gangs.

Žižek’s overall solution – a left solution by the way – to the dilemma of either completely open borders or unscalable walled borders, promoted by humanitarian liberals and rightist nationalists in that order, is not new.  Liberals do not deal with the causes of immigration; the Rightists don’t either, nor do they care.  The solution is to stop wars, invasions, bombings, unequal trade, export substitutes and debt, ‘pragmatic’ support for dictators and imperialist economic competition over minerals, oil, gas, diamonds, food, land and rare metals.  Add to that global warming.  Refugees do not want to leave their families, countries and societies unless they are in dire need.  And they are.  To follow this route would mean an overturn of the capitalist system world-wide. 

Žižek knows that immigration is only going to increase due to ‘failed states’ and national borders are going to become more and more useless.  His scalable solution is to highly organize the inclusion of immigrants into Europe.  Many stations in countries interviewing, classifying and organizing immigrants as to what work they can do, where they can live, their rationale, their ties to fundamentalism, but still with limits.  After all, capital is actually looking for workers and consumers, though he doesn’t mention that key economic fact except once, commenting on a “cheap precarious workforce.”  Nor does he mention the concept of ‘blowback’ for the crimes of capital.  Europeans, like many societies, are having less babies as well.

What does Žižek have to say?  His use of the term “Left” is a muddy idea mixing liberals, left-liberals and Stalinists together.  By the way, he is not a Marxist, he is just secretly inspired by Marxism. 

QUOTES:

     ·        “Every four minutes in South Africa a woman or a girl – often a teenager, sometimes a child – is reported raped and every eight hours a woman is killed by her partner.”

     ·        “Western leftists ... make some kind of ‘strategic compromise’ in which the humiliation and persecution of women and gays are silently tolerated on behalf of the greater ‘anti-imperialist’ struggle.”  

·        “Their remedies (charity in this case) do not cure the disease, they merely prolong it.” (Oscar Wilde)

·        “Anglo-Saxon neoliberalism and ‘Asian values’-infused authoritarian capitalism” are the two, twin poles of capital, both of which need to be opposed.  He thinks the latter is now being preferred by most capitalists as more effective.

·        “Investor-State Dispute Settlement” … allows companies to sue governments if those government’s policies result in loss of profits.”

·        “… culture is no longer just an exception, a kind of fragile superstructure rising above the ‘real’ economic infrastructure, but more and more a central ingredient of our mainstream ‘real’ economy.”

·        He opposes the liberal-leftist mantra that “our main task is the critique of Eurocentrism.”

·        “…another Leftist taboo that needs to be abandoned is that of prohibiting any critique of Islam.”

·        “The silent premise of some critics of Islamophobia is that Islam somehow resists global capitalism.”  It does not, as for instance ISIS was a profit-making machine, as is Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Gulf States.

·        “The Old Testament describes this gift (of Israel) in the terms of ethnic cleansing.”

·        “Netanyahu suggested that Hitler had wanted only to expel Jews from Germany, not to exterminate them” – instead blaming that on the Palestinian mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini - thus giving comfort to holocaust deniers.

·        “…the good thing about the intolerance of religious fundamentalisms: that they cannot tolerate each other.”

·        “…some apparent anti-racism is effectively a barely covert racism, condescendingly treating Pakistanis as morally inferior beings who should not be held to our standards…” regarding women.

·        Rapes in India, Ciudad Juarez, of aboriginal women in western Canada, and Catholic pedophilia he calls “learned, externally imposed, ritualized: part of the collective, secret, symbolic substance of a community.” 

·        “…violence against women resonates with the subordination of women and their exclusion from public life.”

·        Some riots and violence are “means without ends.” (Walter Benjamin.) See the destruction of two post offices and damage to one library in Minneapolis during the Floyd rebellion.  

·        “The dynamics of world capitalism” and “western military intervention” constitute “the political economy of refugees.” This is based on export substitution and exploitation of oil, diamonds, food and land in ‘failed states.’ 

·        “What if the obstacle to integration is not only Western racism?” Some communities have no interest in integration.

·        “…the culture war is a class war in a displaced mode.”

·        “The wager of Marxism is that there is one antagonism (class struggle) which overdetermines all others…which is … the concrete universal…”

·        “…yet another taboo to be left behind is the dismissal of the worries and cares of so-called ‘ordinary people’…”

·        “… the multiculturalist anti-colonialist defense of the multiplicity of ‘ways of life’ is also false; it covers up the antagonisms within each of these particular ways of life…”

·        “We are not gays!” (Robert Mugabe); “The struggle against gays appears as an aspect of the anti-colonial struggle.”  He opposes this idea.

·        “The principal threat to Europe does not come in the shape of Muslim immigrants but in its anti-immigrant populist defenders.”

·        “…Freud and Lacan insist on the problematic nature of the basic Judeo-Christian injunction to love one’s neighbor…”

·        “…there is no emancipatory potential in fundamentalist violence, however anti-capitalist it claims to be…”

·        “…all the imagined, democratic-multitude-grassroots changes ‘from below’ are ultimately doomed to fail…”

·        “Should we tolerate it if refugees settling in Europe prevent their children going to school; if they force their women to dress and behave in a certain way; if they arrange the marriage of their children; if they maltreat – and worse – gays among their ranks?”

·        In this situation:  “Our axiom should be the struggle against Western neo-colonialism as well as the struggle against fundamentalism…”

·        “… humankind should get ready to live in a more plastic and nomadic way…”

·        “…national sovereignty will have to be radically redefined and new levels of global cooperation invented.”

At the end Žižek endorses a reinvented Communism as the only progressive solution to the capitalist melt-down of the entire world by climate change, refugees, dictatorship, poverty and apartheid.

Prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “Living in the End Times,” “Did Someone Say Totalitarianism?” “Violence,” “First as Tragedy, Then as Farce,” “Pandemic – Covid 19 Shakes the World,” “Heaven in Disorder,” “Like a Thief in Broad Daylight,” (All by Zizek); “Tropic of Chaos” (Parenti); “Illegals, Migrants and Refugees,” “Central America’s Forgotten History” (A. Chomsky); “The Great Escape.”

Red Frog

And I bought it at May Day Books! / July 10, 2023