Every authentic Leftist should put on the wall above his bed or table the opening paragraph of Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man under Socialism, where he points out that, “It is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought.” People find …
Read More »Slavoj Zizek: How Donald Rumsfeld’s catastrophic ‘unknown unknowns’ approach on Iraq can help us deal with Covid crisis
On June 29, Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense for Presidents Gerald Ford and George W. Bush, and one of the main architects of the US invasion of Iraq, died at the age of 88. He will be remembered mostly for the catastrophic consequences of that invasion. The goal of …
Read More »Zizek: Assange turns 50 in jail – a reminder of a Western democracy paradox he exposed, where non-freedom gives a sense of freedom
Today, WikiLeaks co-founder Assange is celebrating his 50th birthday, being held at the Belmarsh maximum-security prison in London as Washington seeks his extradition to the US, where he could be jailed for up to 175 years if found guilty. When Belarus forced a Ryanair plane en route from Athens to …
Read More »Slavoj Zizek: Israelis’ SHAME over what their state is doing in West Bank would be sign of truly belonging to Israel
Sometimes the Slovene government does something that makes me deeply ashamed of being a citizen of Slovenia. One such moment came earlier this month when, in an act of solidarity with Israel, it decided (together with Austria and the Czech Republic) to fly Israeli flags along the national and EU …
Read More »Slavoj Zizek feat. Rammstein: ‘We have to live till we die’ is the Covid-era inspiration we all need
Is there a more sobering lesson than being humiliated and reduced to near-impotence by a virus, a primitive self-reproductive mechanism which some biologists don’t even count as a form of life? No wonder that calls for a new ethic of modesty and global solidarity abound. But is this the true …
Read More »Slavoj Zizek: Trump’s GREATEST TREASON is the betrayal of populism
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,” …
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