A sample of the judaized mainstream media reaction to Slavoj Zizek’s plagiarized review of Kevin MacDonald provides a glimpse of right and wrong as proscribed by the anti-White/pro-jew regime:
Did Marxist Philosophy Superstar Slavoj Žižek Plagiarize a White Nationalist Journal?, by Taylor Wofford, Newsweek.
Slavoj Zizek plagiarized white supremacist magazine American Renaissance. Why?, by By Rebecca Schuman, Slate.
Famed Philosopher Accused Of Plagiarizing White Separatist Journal, by Annalisa Quinn, NPR.
Slavoj Žižek Sorta Kinda Admits Plagiarizing White Supremacist Journal, by Michelle Dean, Gawker.
The “marxist”/”leftist” commissariat is virtually stoning one of their own superstars, and it clearly is less about his plagiarism, a mere intellectual crime, than it is about their perception that he kinda sorta violated their anti-White/pro-jew moral imperative.
The commissars are morally outraged. Plagiarism, schmagiarism. Though shalt not discuss anti-jew or pro-White thoughts without unambiguous and unreserved condemnation. It’s a secular, racially particularist morality which holds jews, as a group, exempt from any criticism, placing them over above and in utter contradistinction to Whites, who may only be criticized, at least when our very existence isn’t flatly denied.
Whereas the anti-White attitude is right up front in the headlines above, you have to dig a bit to find the pro-jew attitude driving it. Matthew Walther lays both halves out most explicitly in his brief condemnation of Zizek at The American Spectator. Walther asks, Did the Marxist Philosopher Slavoj Zizek Plagiarize a White Nationalist Magazine?
It certainly looks that way. The other night I was reading my galley copy of Adam Kirsch’s forthcoming essay collection, Rocket and Lightship. It’s full of good stuff, but the best piece in it is about the Slovenian Marxist gadfly Slavoj Zizek. Zizek is a strange character: a social democratic dissident turned unapolegtic Leninist; a pop-culture loving obscurantist; a millionaire philosopher. He is also, Kirsch intimates, without quite saying as much, an anti-Semite.
Now I read at Ron Unz’s new website that Zizek appears to have plagiarized a book review that appeared nearly two decades ago in Jared Taylor’s soi-dissant “white nationalist” (a stupid, meaningless phrase: there is no such country as “white”) magazine, American Renaissance.
Zizek has apparently been playing along the edge of the pro-jew line for a while, and some jews, ever sensitive and vigilant, have noticed.
Kirsch’s relatively lengthy indictment of Zizek The Deadly Jester, published by New Republic in 2008, strikes a similar tone to the brief and more recent scolds noted above. But lacking the “White nationalist” foil Kirsch had to perform a much more elaborate dance around “the Žižek phenomenon” before finally getting to his point.
“Our ‘freedoms,'” Žižek writes in Welcome to the Desert of the Real, “themselves serve to mask and sustain our deeper unfreedom.” This is the central instance in Žižek’s work of the kind of dialectical reversal, the clever anti-liberal inversion, that is the basic movement of his mind. It could hardly be otherwise, considering that his intellectual gods are Hegel and Lacan—masters of the dialectic, for whom reality never appears except in the form of the illusion or the symptom. In both their systems, the interpreter—the philosopher for Hegel, the analyst for Lacan—is granted absolute, unchallengeable authority. Most people are necessarily in thrall to appearances, and thereby to the deceptions of power; but the interpreter is somehow immune to them, and can singlehandedly recognize and expose the hidden meanings, the true processes at work in History or in the Unconscious.
This sacerdotal notion of intellectual authority makes both thinkers essentially hostile to democracy, which holds that the truth is available in principle to everyone, and that every individual must be allowed to speak for himself. Žižek, too, sees the similarity—or, as he says, “the profound solidarity”—between his favorite philosophical traditions. “Their structure,” he acknowledges, “is inherently ‘authoritarian’: since Marx and Freud opened up a new theoretical field which sets the very criteria of veracity, their words cannot be put to the test the same way one is allowed to question the statements of their followers.” Note that the term “authoritarian” is not used here pejoratively. For Žižek, it is precisely this authoritarianism that makes these perspectives appealing. Their “engaged notion of truth” makes for “struggling theories, not only theories about struggle.”
But to know what is worth struggling for, you need theories about struggle. Only if you have already accepted the terms of the struggle—in Žižek’s case, the class struggle—can you move on to the struggling theory that teaches you how to fight. In this sense, Žižek the dialectician is at bottom entirely undialectical. That liberalism is evil and that communism is good is not his conclusion, it is his premise; and the contortions of his thought, especially in his most political books, result from the need to reconcile that premise with a reality that seems abundantly to indicate the opposite.
Hence the necessity of the Matrix, or something like it, for Žižek’s worldview. And hence his approval of anything that unplugs us from the Matrix and returns us to the desert of the real—for instance, the horrors of September 11.
See where Zizek is going? Kirsch does.
There is a name for the politics that glorifies risk, decision, and will; that yearns for the hero, the master, and the leader; that prefers death and the infinite to democracy and the pragmatic; that finds the only true freedom in the terror of violence. Its name is not communism. Its name is fascism, and in his most recent work Žižek has inarguably revealed himself as some sort of fascist. He admits as much in Violence, where he quotes the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk on the “re-emerging Left-Fascist whispering at the borders of academia”—”where, I guess, I belong.” There is no need to guess.
Žižek endorses one after another of the practices and the values of fascism, but he obstinately denies the label. Is “mass choreography displaying disciplined movements of thousands of bodies,” of the kind Leni Riefenstahl loved to photograph, fascist? No, Žižek insists, “it was Nazism that stole” such displays “from the workers’ movement, their original creator.” (He is willfully blind to the old and obvious conclusion that totalitarian form accepts content from the left and the right.) Is there something fascist about what Adorno long ago called the jargon of authenticity—”the notions of decision, repetition, assuming one’s destiny … mass discipline, sacrifice of the individual for the collective, and so forth”? No, again: “there is nothing ‘inherently fascist'” in all that. Is the cult of martyrdom that surrounds Che Guevara a holdover from the death worship of reactionary Latin American Catholicism, as Paul Berman has argued? Perhaps, Žižek grants, “but—so what?” “To be clear and brutal to the end,” he sums up, “there is a lesson to be learned from Hermann Goering’s reply, in the early 1940s, to a fanatical Nazi who asked him why he protected a well-known Jew from deportation: ‘In this city, I decide who is a Jew!’… In this city, it is we who decide what is left, so we should simply ignore liberal accusations of inconsistency.”
Here, near the end, Kirsch finally drops his mask. The last fifteen paragraphs are all about jews, judaism, Israel and “anti-semitism” – laying bare Kirsch’s entirely jewish concerns. In classic jewish form he begins by psychopathologizing Zizek for “obsessing” about the jews:
To produce this quotation [about Goering] in this context is a sign, I think, of something darker. It is a dare to himself to see how far he can go in the direction of indecency, of an obsession that has nothing progressive or revolutionary about it.
It is not surprising that it is the subject of the Jews that calls forth this impulse in Žižek, because the treatment of Jews and Judaism in his work has long been unsettling—and in a different way from his treatment of, say, the United States, which he simply denounces. Žižek’s books are loosely structured and full of digressions, more like monologues than treatises, but for that very reason, his perpetual return to the subject of the Jews functions in his writing the way a similar fixation might function in an analysand’s recital: as a hint of something hidden that requires critical examination.
Typically, the form that Žižek’s remarks on Jews take is that of an exposition of the mentality of the anti-Semite. This is an unimpeachable and rather common forensic device, but somehow it does not quite account for the passionate detail of Žižek’s explorations.
The power and influence of jews is pervasive in, say, the United States. Other than jew-obsessed jews and the occasional slip-up by one of their useful idiots, only “anti-semites” take any notice. What is remarkable is that, whether they perceive jewish influence or not, most everyone else keeps their mouths shut about it, even while they freely criticize “Americans” and “Europeans” collectively.
Which brings us to the crux of Kirsch’s beef. It’s about policing perceptions and assigning blame:
Why this need to keep open, as if for the sake of argument, the possibility that the Jews really were guilty of all the things of which the Nazis accused them? Why, when Žižek returns to this same line of reasoning in Violence—”even if rich Jews in the Germany of the 1930s ‘really’ exploited German workers, seduced their daughters,” and so on—are there quotation marks around “really,” as though the truth or the falsehood of Jewish villainy were a question to be postponed until it can be given fuller consideration?
These moments, unpleasant as they are, are not quite expressions of anti-Semitism. But in In Defense of Lost Causes, Žižek does make plain what he might call the “fantasmatic screen” through which he sees Jews.
As far back as World War II, he remarks, rehearsing one of the oldest and most pointless “ironies” of modern history, “the Nazis and the radical Zionists shared a common interest…. In both cases, the purpose was a kind of ‘ethnic cleansing.'”
This method of alleviating European guilt by casting “the exemplary victims” of the Holocaust as in some sense the agents of holocaust is far from unknown on the European left. But what is less common, even there, is Žižek’s resurrection of some of the oldest tropes of theological and philosophical anti-Semitism.
It makes sense, then, that Žižek should finally cast his anti-Judaism in explicitly theological terms. Why is it that so many of the chief foes of totalitarianism in the second half of the twentieth century were Jews—Arendt, Berlin, Levinas? One might think it is because the Jews were the greatest victims of Nazi totalitarianism, and so had the greatest stake in ensuring that its evil was recognized.
Kirsch concludes:
Under the cover of comedy and hyperbole, in between allusions to movies and video games, he is engaged in the rehabilitation of many of the most evil ideas of the last century. He is trying to undo the achievement of all the postwar thinkers who taught us to regard totalitarianism, revolutionary terror, utopian violence, and anti-Semitism as inadmissible in serious political discourse.
Kirsch can’t quite call what Zizek does “anti-semitism” because Zizek makes it difficult to understand what he’s doing. In trying to decipher Zizek, however, Kirsch shows us his own “fantasmatic screen”, and it has nothing to do with Zizek. Kirsch sees the jews as purely innocent victims, and unsurprisingly it has everything to do with seeing Whites purely as their victimizers.
The Zizek affair isn’t about the revolutionary left devouring its own heroes. It’s about maintaining a regime under which painting Whites as guilty and evil is the norm, and any criticism of jews is inadmissible.
Picture source: Slavoj Zizek with Josefina Ayerza; “It doesn’t have to be a jew…” It doesn’t have to be an Eskimo either. But of course it is the jews – if not for them nobody would make such a ridiculous fuss insisting that it isn’t. That’s how a bullshit artist like Zizek can become rich and famous by regurgitating typically jewish psychobabble about “racists” and “Americans”, but stands to forfeit it all by kinda sorta offending the sensibilities of the jews.
