Yanis Varoufakis is one of the most devious of this new breed of ruling class populist/left imposters. He’s doing something very significant. He does virtually no propaganda anymore. It’s all mimicry. He is basically accurately descibing the situation.
What this means is: the ruling class knows that most people do in fact understand the situation. There is no point in trying to hide it from anyone. They need not strive to silence and control information or analysis. They’ve given up on trying to hide it. They’re all about spin, and imposters, and a new spectacular effect.
Right now Varoufakis is reminding me of Elio Petri’s Investigation of A Citizen Above Suspicion.
He was caught in flagrante carrying out an enormous, depraved con job to plunder and destroy Greece. Indeed he may have been the most prominent of the politicoperatives, the solidly ruling class aggressor sent in to perform in disguise as defender, playacting as the wised up lefty hustler and chum of some imaginary Chinese Communist White Knight, but really the maximally cynical fascist partner of the predatory transnational billionaires many of whom travel under that hamsick banner. Supermanspreading in the seat where a real defender and leader of the popular resistance might have emerged, his evil acts were postmodernly apotropaic. And here he is now, shameless - utterly without shame, like Gianmaria Volonté’s true fascist sociopath, enjoying the parading of his bloody hands as he picks the human flesh from between his fangs — swaggering to the well again to draw up the people’s confidence and support, as if this known criminal past had made him more vital, more vivid, more valid, a complex political hero on a noisy, compelling HBO journey through the edgy landscape of digital age politics.
His party is the European Realistic Disobedience Front, already a masterpiece mush of ecclectic, contradictory and vacuous signals, dissolving into that attractively scented all¬hing haze where language used to be (Realistic = opportunist collabo + Front with its radical militant conotations) which not too subtly fascistically delivers the acronym mera (day). The slogan of this party is downright astonishing, an exemplary morbid phenomenon of the DisOrient:
"συμμαχία για τη ρήξη"
being "Alliance for the Rupture" (via @hieropunk)
That red.
The Italian translation just presents them sporting another Obama slogan, change! with the added implied jolt of greatresettism (change everything!)
Alliance for the Rupture
But this phrase is just as morbid as morbid phenomena get. Varoufakis the Shitzek associate delivers on the promise of the Maestro’s success with the maximally kitsch and comix Time of Monsters, which rapidly became the favorite ‘quotation’ of all the sleazy fake left academics who ended as murderous plague hysterics a decade later. Now the Goebbelsian idiom that so delighted them — old world dying! new struggling to be born! epic mood! — has been translated for Varoufakis target audience.
Monsters for the Rupture!
Of course the vendors of this strategic woollyness and deliberate refusal to signify, heavily laced with hopium, are prepared with analogies as alibis. Is intifada any more specific? Dechoukaj? The Resistance? Their slogan is intended, for the ear of a certain audience, to echo these terms. But of course yes, all those terms are more specific. Obviously. Above all, the order of language production is reversed. Intifada, Dechoukaj, the Resistance, like Fascism, named concrete movements, concrete people engaged in a concrete praxis. The Rupture is a prospectus from a heap of con artists. A junk bond, a pitch, a swoosh to sew on robberies. It refers to nothing. It’s brazenly just screenwriting. Lazy screenwriting.
Kill communists/communism, infiltrate the remnants, scrape them out leaving only a shell, crawl in it, denounce a scapegoat for the murder, parade as the victim but winkingly boast of credit, but in an at once heightened and attenuated, condensed kitsch form. Intensified in strong false affects, like the wellbeing that wellbutrin induces, and packed with every possible maximally weak meaning, to be exploited only dishonestly.
Permit me to quote myself:
“Now is the time of monsters” is not an “interpretation” of the Gramsci passage. It’s a substitution. If NLR readers are ready to insist that Gramsci called anarchism a “monster” and that Stalin boasted of his will to mass murder, then Žižek’s been successful. But there’s more. He is selling Goebbel’s vision (Old World dying, New World struggling to be born) and exhorting his audience to admire and embrace those glamorous monsters (a ‘Thatcher of the Left,’ an Adolf Hitler who’s finally ‘violent enough’) to bring it about. In the context of his oeuvre, what he’s doing is obvious and his sources too.
It makes me crazy. Gramsci wrote in “The Crisis of Authority”: “The crisis [of authority] is happening because the old [authority] is dying and the new one can’t be born. In this interregnum we see a great variety of extreme phenomena.” Goebbels wrote: “The old world is dying and we are seeing the struggle for the New World…The 2000 year old Christian age is dying and a new National Socialist world under Adolph Hitler is being born.” Žižek ended his NLR piece, right after traducing Stalin, with the fake quote “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”
Who is he repeating? Obviously it’s Goebbels and the Nazi myth. It has nothing in common at all with Gramsci’s remarks. Nothing. The meaning as well as the vocabulary is Goebbels’. The only thing Žižek changes of Goebbels’ is that instead of “Adolph Hitler” he writes “monsters.” The sense of his contentions, to the degree they have one, is the same Hitlerian revival he is always advocating, now is the time for the Thatcher of the Left, for the Hitler who is violent enough. For the “terrifyingly wonderful” solution for “warriors” who have to exterminate people that Himmler found in the Baghavad Gita: “just do it.” The slightest acquaintance with Gramsci is sufficient to know he did not reproduce this Nazi mythological grandiosity.
Despite all this, that little psyop of that fake quote was fantastically successful with people who at the time thought of themselves as progressives and even lefts, but have since been revealed, by the plague program, to be extreme raving fascists ready for anything, for any bloody exterminism that might bring them a sensation, however false, of security in the favor of the ruling class vanguard.