Phony Marxist Slavoj Žižek has once again thrown in with the ruling capitalist-imperialist order. In response to the righteous rising and protests of Black, Arab, and Muslim youth in France following the brutal police murder of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk [See “Powerful Uprising Against Police Murder and Racist Oppression Rocks France for Six Days, Defying Massive State Repression and Fascist Menace”], Žižek penned a sickening article for the New Statesman, outrageously titled “The Left Must Embrace Law and Order.”
Spare me the revulsion of doing a line-by-line refutation. But the fool-of-a-philosopher Žižek recycles the reactionary trope that such uprisings and rebellions only “hurt the poor”: targeting buses and “wreck[ing] the infrastructure that sustains the livelihoods of ordinary people....” Žižek also worries that such protests only play into the hands of right-wing forces and their calls for harsher clampdowns. So, according to Žižek’s perverse political logic, rather than ceding the issue of “public safety” to the right, the “left” should beat them at their own game—and “assume the slogan of law and order as its own.”
Lest there be any confusion about the needed “law and order”—at the very moment that youth are in the streets saying NO to police terror and the everyday violence and hopelessness of this system, and facing vicious repression and fascist demonization, the learned professor Žižek raises the specter of “youthful gangs terrorizing public spaces.”
Well, fuck you Slavoj Žižek! For standing with the oppressors not the oppressed. For ruling out of order the only solution to the horrors of this world: a real revolution to overthrow this capitalist-imperialist system. Žižek, in this case, is also ruling out resistance to oppression—which was what this uprising was about and without which people will be ground down and no revolution will be possible. He is also seizing on secondary features of this uprising—the burning of buses and looting of small businesses, for instance—to slander what was overwhelmingly positive and just.
By the way, this is only the latest in the annals of Žižek’s ugly imperio-chauvinist capitulation in times of moral and political reckoning:
- In 2015, when refugees driven to Europe by neocolonial plunder, wars, and interventions were drowning at sea (as they still are); facing fences, fascists, and police (as they still are); and demanding humane treatment and asylum—Žižek wrote articles and gave interviews defending “European values,” arguing that “Europe could not just open its borders ... out of feelings of guilt.”
- In 2016, he declared his support for Donald Trump, with the rationale that a Trump presidential victory could help bring about “a kind of big awakening.”
- In 2022, as the U.S. proxy war with Russia over Ukraine escalated, Žižek proclaimed in the Guardian, that “the least we owe Ukraine is full support, and to do this, we need a stronger NATO.”
A closing thought. To those in academic and literary circles who find in Žižek a provocative cultural commentator, or clever, poke-you-in-the-eye political “contrarian”—it is time to wake up! Slavoj Žižek is a sham, a shameful apologist for imperialism.