When the district judge Vanessa Baraitser rejected the US demand to extradite Julian Assange, many Leftist and liberal critics commented on this decision in terms which recall the famous lines from T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral: “The last temptation is the greatest treason / To do the right deed …
Read More »Slavoj Zizek: We’re at a grim crossroads in this pandemic: one path leads to utter despair, the other to total extinction
We read again and again in our media that we are at the “beginning of the end” of the pandemic: although numbers of infections and deaths are still rising, millions are already vaccinated, so there is now at least the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. In spite …
Read More »Zizek: There will be no return to normality after Covid. We are entering a post-human era & will have to invent a new way of life
The world has lived with the pandemic for most of 2020, but what is our situation with regard to it now, in early December, in the middle of what the European media is terming ‘the second wave’? Firstly, we should not forget that the distinction between the first and second …
Read More »Slavoj Zizek: Biden’s win changes nothing and signifies stalemate that could see Trump run again in 2024
‘Democracy Reborn’, the title of a book from 2007 by the historian Garrett Epps, is used in US historiography to designate the time after the Civil War when all progressives joined forces to add Amendment XIV to the Constitution. This amendment provided African Americans with full citizenship and prohibited any …
Read More »Slavoj Zizek: Jeremy Corbyn wasn’t suspended from the Labour Party for anti-Semitism, he was defenestrated for anti-Capitalism
On October 29, 2020, Jeremy Corbyn was suspended from the British Labour Party – why? The Equality and Human Rights Commission, the UK equality watchdog, concluded its 130-page investigation with the claim that the Labour Party could have tackled antisemitism more effectively “if the leadership had chosen to do so,” …
Read More »Slavoj Zizek: Biden’s just Trump with a human face, and the two of them share the same enemy
In the run up to the US presidential elections, different forms of populist resistance are gradually forming a unified field: “Armed militia groups are forging alliances in the final stages of the US presidential election with conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers who claim the coronavirus pandemic is a hoax, intensifying concerns …
Read More »Slavoj Zizek: We should look to how Cuba coped with the fall of the Soviet Union to deal with our new Covid world
Europe is now paying the price for its summer complacency, when we hoped that coronavirus would be ‘burned’ by the heat. While the epidemic diminished, it did not disappear. Life opened up somewhat, though, and there was a relief that the worst seemed to be over. Now, in the autumn, …
Read More »Zizek: Covid crisis sparked fear of communism & China’s rise as superpower. But best way to prevent communism is to FOLLOW China
A story picked up by the UK media at the end of September passed almost unnoticed. As The Guardian reported, “The government has ordered schools in England not to use resources from organizations which have expressed a desire to end capitalism. Department for Education guidance issued on Thursday for school …
Read More »Slavoj Zizek: The treatment of Assange is an assault on everyone’s personal freedoms
There is an old joke from the time of World War I about an exchange of telegrams between the German Army headquarters and the Austrian-Hungarian HQ. From Berlin to Vienna, the message is “The situation on our part of the front is serious, but not catastrophic,” and the reply from …
Read More »