This title was there on a draft. I forgot about Nina Power, like everyone else. I meant to discourse on their performance of persecuted wickedness, their perpetually offended offensiveness, their tiresome pathos of the God What Assholes. But now it’s all too obvious.
Speaking of tho. Žižek as a character on the screen has largely been destroyed, but his operation continues to flourish. His protégés are placed everywhere now. I watched a video two of them made, Daniel Tutt and Haz al-Din, the latter whom I am scheduled to debate on Monday. These two have slightly different assignments, tho the metacapital project they serve is unified. But there is an army of them in academia, most of them drippy fascistic Trotskyists and (rad-ish) Liberals: Enzo Traverso, Bernard Harcourt, Timothy Bewes, Fabio Vighi, and more trad fascists, woke-coated, like his chief evangelist the pseudo-Communist Jodi Dean, and many more. All ridiculous people producing incoherent, shallow, propagandistic texts in this devastated derationalized academic milieu, in the most corrupted regions of the human sciences. Men, and a handful of women, whose principal tactics of con artistry are mannerisms and mimicry.
Tutt is a most amusing Shitzek mini-me on camera, because he has chosen to really ape one of the more comical Shitzek tics, which is to gasp and say ‘Again!’ and then repeat what he said in a new inflection to complete the innuendo, when two iterations are required for the manipulation.
In para-academic circles, the world of publishing, podcasts, there are scores of them: Paul Mason, Doug Henwood, Doug Lain, Nina Power, and on and on. Obviously, I am more aware of some than others.
When I say Žižek as a character has been destroyed, but that his operation thrives, I mean it forcefully, for the operation even expropriates and repurposes his destruction to advance itself. His flying monkeys include those assigned to produce vitiated versions of the annihilating critiques which destroyed him, such as Gabriel Rockhill, Žižekian of academia, whose production of a plagiarized, tailored, defanged, scrambled and repurposed critique then becomes a) a defense in the form of an ineffective and incomplete attack, and b) another springboard to fling his function, now carried out by Rockhill with CPC funding, up to greater prominence and reputation. From that perch, ever so gentle Oedpius Rockhill continues the Žižek project, the destruction of working class power, democracy, and all present and potential left politics, which he of course presents as the opposite of what it is. But Rockhill’s mechanism of propaganda, or that for which he is the front man, no doubt designed by Shitzek himself who is an idiot savant, is truly ingenious, for he makes of the now disgraced Shitzek in the end the poisonous unmasked enemy of Shitzek’s own ideological agenda, thus validating Shitzek with the tool of his own invalidity and repulsiveness.
It’s twisty, but if you know Shitzek a bit, it will be familiar. He just adds another rotation to the spin:
Shitzek begins as a liberal, representing the ruling class of the self-proclaimed Liberal West, the Civiliser, the imperial vanguard of the transnational ruling class, which he often identifies simply as Yerp, but rhetorically lacerating and politically targeting Liberalism (as what comes to be known as wokeness, but begins in the Shitzek project as socialism, the left, communism, Marxism, vulvoliberalism, political correctness, multiculturalism, feminism, etc etc), by which he means not the rule of this imperial Western ruling class, but only civil liberties and the achievements of the working class within social democracy, that is, the working class victories in the post-war settlement. In Slovenia this meant not just running for President as a founder of the Lib Dem Party promising to bring Civilized Liberalism to the ruins of authoritarian totalitarian Titoland dreary darkness, and not just vicious racist editorials in Mladina, and the publication of the first Slovene language edition of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, but the decitizening of minorities in Slovenia’s population, those considered non Aryan - Rom and Kosovo-Albanian - the theft of their pensions and other property and their deportation from their homes to other countries. Rather better known is his rhetorical defense of the Ambrus pogrom, a terroristic assault and successful massive land theft from a Rom family by neighboring properly Slovene landowners. Of his incitement of this pogrom and the organization of nationwide ethnic cleansing, NONE of his supposed critics speak.
(Dutifully, Rockhill chooses to mention none of this in his confessional repudiation of his ‘former’ mentor.)
Ok so: Shitzek’s initial game was to attack the working class stake in social and liberal democracy as sissification and tall poppy slaughter and degeneracy and pampered parasitism (while championing and venerating European Civilization blah blah) from behind a carnival mask of ‘Stalin,’ the bogey of rightist fantasy, and eventually of Hitler (never Tito). He eventually dropped the ludicrous pose as communist critic of The West and adopted, most of the time, the Hitlerian posture that the West equalling Yerpeen Civ equalling White Race and Culture equalling White Christendom of course in superior to every other whatever, but weakened by its very virtues of tolerance, non-violence, curiosity, and compassion, cannot defend itself against despotic Asiatic virilty and thus needs Fascism as the true democracy, its essence, which is also the essence of the Aryan Volk.
Despite all this being staggeringly obvious, Rockhill insists Shitzek doesn’t do this at all, but rather is a guy pretending to be a Communist who is really a Liberal Social Democrat who only says racist things sometimes because that is the character of liberalism and social democracy. Because Rockhill is carrying out his mission in the project of his mentor Shitzek. They are both gunning for the working class gains of the post-war settlement, which they mean to con working class and petty booj into thesmelves destroying by misleading them into the belief that it is the working class’ rights and power, and not their sponsors’ counterrevolution against them, that are responsible for the ruling class’ power and for ‘imperial decline’ and degeneracy and climate change and plague and whatever they are vaguely naming the disaster people feel afflicting them. They are both aiming to reverse the French Revolution now they have obliterated its communist sequels. They both play with adorning themselves in the bloody shirts of those they have politically butchered. They are working to help the ruling class achieve worldover the kind of power and control the Dengists achieved by their counterrevolution in China.
It’s not just distasteful and nasty when Rockhill, aping Shitzek, says things like lived multiculture in The West is nothing but when we academic gentrifiers in the critical theory summer school course eat in Thai restaurants. (He’s a funny one this Rockhill because unlike Shitzek he doesn’t want to seem like an unshaven hillbilly hating cosmopolitan modernity. He’s a Parisian, a bobo, and these kinds of crass moves end up seeming precious and interior decorator on him. Oh how vulgar your Thai dinner in Ménilmontant.) The Shitzekian routine is ‘Multiculturalism is a ruse of the leeeeberalz [the classic version says liberals, lately its The Left] because it just means ‘you can eat in a Thai restaurant.’’ First of all, you can open and cook in a Thai restaurant. The implication of Rockhill following the shitzmaster is only the contemptuously imagined white gentrifier diners are human beings and New Yorkers or Londoners or Parisians in that restaurant. Even the superficial level of this, allowing these con men their little storytelling of the world as this restaurant, conjured as a colonial scene of discrete racial roles, is fascist and dumb.
I’m going to pause in this somewhat arbitrary place but back soon.