Note: This article was received from Prof Slavoj Žižek upon our publishing of the previous article “From Sartre to Zizek, freedom or Bashi-Bazouklouk — Engin Kurtay“. Professor has mentioned that he cut off all links with RT.
After the Russian attack on Ukraine, I was yet again ashamed of being a citizen of Slovenia. The Slovene government immediately proclaimed that it is ready to receive thousands of Ukrainian refugees fleeing Russian occupation… OK, but when Afghanistan fell to Taliban, this same government announced that Slovenia is not ready to receive any refugees from there – the justification was that instead of escaping, people should stay there and fight Taliban with guns. Along the same lines, a couple of months ago when thousands of refugees from Asia tried to enter Poland from Belarus, Slovene government offered Poland military help, claiming that Europe is under attack there. So there are obviously two species of refugees, “ours” (European), i.e., “real refugees,” and the Third World ones who don’t deserve our hospitality.
Slovene government posted a tweet on February 25 making this distinction clear: “The refugees from Ukraine are coming from an environment which is in its cultural, religious, and historical sense something totally different from the environment out of which refugees from Afghanistan are coming.” After the outcry this tweet provoked, it was soon withdrawn – but the genie of the obscene truth left the bottle for a brief moment.
I don’t mention this for moralist reasons but because I think such a “defense of Europe” will be catastrophic for the Western Europe in the ongoing global struggle for geopolitical influence. Our media are now focused on the conflict between Western “liberal” sphere and the Russian “Eurasian” sphere, each side accusing the other of posing a threat: the West is fomenting “color revolutions” in the East and encircling Russia with NATO expansion; Russia brutally tries to restore its control over the entire ex-Soviet domain, and nobody knows where it will stop. It already made it clear that it will not just stand and observe if Bosnia and Herzegovina gets closer to NATO (which probably means it will support the separation of the Serb part from Bosnia). All this is part of a larger geopolitical game – just recall the Russian military presence in Syria which saved the Assad regime.
What the West largely ignores is the third much larger group of countries which mostly just observe the conflict: the Third World, from Latin America to the Middle East, from Africa to South-East Asia – even China is not ready to fully support Russia, although it has its own plans. On February 25, in a message to Kim Jong Un, Xi Jinping said China is ready to work, together with the Korean side, to steadily develop the China-DPRK relations of friendship and cooperation “under a new situation” – a coded reference to the Ukrainian war. There is a fear that China will use the “new situation” to “liberate” Taiwan.
This is why it is not enough just to repeat things which cannot but appear obvious to us. It is true that already the language used by Putin tells it all. On February 25 2022, Putin has called on the Ukrainian military to seize power in their country and overthrow President Zelensky, claiming it would be “easier for us to make a deal with you” than with “this gang of drug addicts and neo-Nazis” (the Ukrainian government) who have “taken the entire Ukrainian people hostage.” We should also note how Russia immediately militarizes every counter-measure: when Western states considered the option to exclude Russia from the SWIFT (the intermediary for financial transactions), Russia replied that this equals an act of war – as if Russia did not already start a large-scale actual war? Another chilling case: “To anyone who would consider interfering from the outside – if you do, you will face consequences greater than any you have faced in history,” Putin said on February 24 2022, when he announced the military intervention in Ukraine. Let’s just try to take this statement seriously: “interfering from the outside” can mean a lot of things, inclusive sending defensive military equipment to Ukraine; “consequences greater than any you have faced in history”? European countries have faced two world wars with millions dead, so a “greater” consequence can only be a nuclear destruction. This (not only rhetorical) radicalization is what should worry us: most of us expected that Russia will just occupy the two “republics” controlled by Russian separatists or, in the utmost case, the whole Donbas area – nobody really expected the total invasion of Ukraine.
Those who support Russia or at least show some “understanding” for its acts are, however, a group of strange bed-fellows. Perhaps the saddest part of the story is that quite a few on the liberal Left thought the crisis was just a game of bluffing since both sides knew they cannot afford a full war – their message was: “Just take it easy, don’t lose nerves, and nothing will happen.” Unfortunately, we have to admit that Biden was right when, 10 days ago, he said that Putin made a decision to invade… After the Russian aggression, some on the “Left” (I cannot use the word here without quote marks) are putting the blame on the West – the story is well-known: NATO was slowly strangling and destabilizing Russia, encircling it militarily, fomenting color revolutions, ignoring Russia’s quite reasonable fears. Just recall that Russia was twice attacked from the West in the last century… There is, of course, an element of truth in this, but saying just this is the same as justifying Hitler by putting the blame on the unjust Versailles treaty which crushed German economy. And it also means that the big powers have the right to control their own spheres of influence, sacrificing the autonomy of small nations on the altar of global stability. Putin repeatedly claimed that he was forced to intervene military since there was no other choice – in its own way this is true, but we have to raise the key question here: military intervention appears as Putin’s TINA (“there is no alternative”) only if we accept in advance his global vision of politics as the struggle of big powers to defend and expand their sphere of influence.
So what about Putin’s accusations of Ukrainian Fascism? (Incidentally, it is weird to characterize Zelensky, a Jew who lost a lot of his family predecessors in the holocaust, as a neo-Nazi…) We should rather turn the question around and direct it at Putin himself: all those who have any illusions about Putin should note the fact that he elevated to the status of his official philosopher Ivan Ilyin, a Russian political theologist who, after being expelled from the Soviet Union in the early 1920s on the famous “philosophers’ steamboat,” advocated against Bolshevism and Western liberalism his own version of Russian Fascism: state as an organic community led by a paternal monarch. For Ilyin, the social system is like a body, each of us has a place in this body, and freedom means knowing your place. Accordingly, for Ilyin, democracy is a ritual: “We only vote in order to affirm our collective support for our leader. The leader’s not legitimated by our votes or chosen by our votes.” Is this not how Russian elections de facto operate in the last decades? No wonder Ilyin’s works are now massively reprinted in Russia, with free copies given to state apparatchiks and military conscripts. Aleksander Dugin, Putin’s court-philosopher, closely follows in Ilyin’s steps, just adding a post-modern spin of historicist relativism:
“Post-modernity shows that every so-called truth is a matter of believing. So we believe in what we do, we believe in what we say. And that is the only way to define the truth. So we have our special Russian truth that you need to accept. If the United States does not want to start a war, you should recognize that United States is not any more a unique master. And [with] the situation in Syria and Ukraine, Russia says, ‘No you are not any more the boss.’ That is the question of who rules the world. Only war could decide really.”
The immediate question here is: but what about the people of Syria and of Ukraine? Can they also choose their truth/belief or are they just a playground of the big “bosses” and their struggle? The idea that each “way of life” has its own truth is what makes Putin so popular among the new populist Right – no wonder his military intervention in Ukraine was greeted by Trump and others as the act of a “genius”… So when Putin talks about “denazification,” we should just remember that it is the same Putin who supported Marine le Pen in France, Lega in Italy, and other actual neo-Fascists movements.
But there is nothing surprising in all this: forget about “Russian truth,” this is just a convenient myth to justify one’s power, Putin now acts as a belated copy of the Western imperialist expansionism. So to really counter him, we should build bridges to the Third World countries many of whom have a long list of fully justified grievances against Western colonization and exploitation. It’s not enough just to “defend Europe”: our true task is to convince the Third World countries that, in the face of our global problems, we can offer them a better choice than Russia or China. And the only way to achieve this is to change ourselves well beyond the Politically Correct post-colonialism, to ruthlessly extirpate forms of neo-colonialism even when they are masked as humanitarian help.
If we don’t do this, we will just be left to wonder why those in the Third World don’t see that in defending Europe we are fighting also for their freedom – they don’t see it because we are not really doing it. Are we ready to do it? I doubt it.
at 1:29am Moscow time zone