On Slavoj Zizek’s new book about Russia
1. Zizek and me
More than a decade ago, Peter Hitchens, the conservative journalist and brother of the notorious atheist, Christopher Hitchens, said on the TV programme Question Time, that anyone in Britain who is young enough to do so, should leave and find somewhere else to live before the inevitable collapse of the country. Britain, he said, was on the road to total ruin. He had in mind some unspecified disaster, and some unspecified country where they should each go.
If you follow his posts on X, you see how he argues from time to time with large numbers of strangers and influential journalists and bloggers, who ask him why someone such as he is, who claims to love his country and its past, would nonetheless say such a terrible and pessimistic thing. But Hitchens continues to insist on the point, saying something like this, in a recent post: “Anyone who has the means of making a living in a foreign country should go to that country straightaway. Britain is heading toward catastrophic bankruptcy.”
This is an alarming thing to hear from a man who always, except perhaps in this case, favours telling the truth, insists on evidence and proof for any statement, insists on saying what is right, and who applies the virtue of justice and proper judgement in cases where it is seen to be lacking in public spaces.
The idea of leaving Britain, so as to avoid some nation-wide calamity, makes an impression on me. I am unable to leave this country myself, but the thought of it is often in my heart, and sets me thinking about other possibilities. It more and more seems the case that something irreparable has gone wrong with the nation, and that something like a great famine, or a long general outburst of continuous and unending lawlessness, something vague and world-ending, like a hyper-inflation event, is on the way.
I can express in simple terms why the sense of approaching disaster is not just a feeling, but a justified expectation, based on observation and meditation on what has been going on for the past half-century.
I chose to express something of that insight, by taking as my starting point something else which caught my attention, later that day, after I had walked into Chester. At the Waterstones bookshop there, I discovered, on the far edge of the lowest shelf of the ‘New Smart Thinking’ section, the most recent book by Slavoj Zizek : “Too Late to Awaken; What Lies Ahead When There Is No Future?” (2023). Leafing through it, I discovered that it is largely about the war in Ukraine.
I first heard of Zizek, the Slovenian former politician, who has taught at Birkbeck for decades now, and has published regularly and in great volume, around 2005. It seemed to me at the time that he was rising to prominence as a serious and new and original philosopher, becoming a significant writer in Britain and the United States. He did not disguise what he was: an activist writer who used Hegelian metaphysics and Lacanian psychoanalysis as the means of understanding everything of any importance in the new millenium. He was featured in prominent academic philosophy journals. He was a writer working in Britain who, unlike most other British philosophers of the time, applied French and German metaphysics in his books and essays. I also learned that he was a Marxist, although that aspect always seemed flippant and absurd to me during the years following, when I read through his publications.
In those days, I considered myself to be a student, and a learner, even though I was thirty years old. This man, I thought, could serve as a model of how to make a career, and a master of the art of philosophy. So, I used to take from him whatever was to my advantage when I read his books, while leaving out things of which I didn’t approve. The overall message he had in mind in any one of his books tended to be obscure to me, and they were quite obscure because of their style; meandering essays which never explicitly stated what they were most deeply concerned with; but they were also entertaining, long works, which referred me to new sources and suprising ideas. I see now that they never made precise and pithy statements of belief, for the reason that Zizek did not actually believe in anything specific. He considers beliefs to be a form of mere ideology; and, he considers reality and truth themselves to be aspects of ideological fabrication.
It must have been a few years after the Arab Spring uprisings, which occurred around 2010, that I took possession of a short book of Zizek’s concerned directly with those uprisings. It suited me at the time to notice and approve, that he was hoping for some kind of radical economic change in the world as a whole, as a result of these uprisings. It did not escape my notice, that the uprisings in Syria, Tunisia, Libya, and other places, for which he had so much enthusiasm, didn’t seem to have gone so well as he predicted. And in 2021 he wrote another book about recent events, this one concerned with the Covid episode. It explained how, from out of the global Covid crisis, there could arise the opportunity for an uprising of global revolution aimed at overturning capitalism. So, it was only in 2021 that I realised in full what Zizek actually intended to say in his books. Here was something which had a meaning and it was something he intended to say.
In short, Zizek procedurally mulls over events, looking for signs that the Marxist and Leninist moment for revolution is imminent. He thinks about events applying the wit of Lacan, applying a sexualised and obscene insight; but, considers the ultimate reality to be a movement of Hegelian ideas through Hegelian antithetical logic.
I noticed here and there, leafing through the pages of the new book while still at the bookshop the other day, that Zizek, despite what he says overtly and on the page, about his hopes for a new global order, and despite the fact that he writes in English and lives in Britain, that he seems to have begun to talk more frequently about Slovenia. I will apply some Lacanian analysis of his hidden desire: his frequent and unnecessary references to Slovenia in the book are signs of his concealed desire to leave Britain, and to retire to the obscurity of his homeland, his nationalistic, parochial place of origin.
As far as I could tell from leafing through the book while stood there in Waterstones, it was mostly concerned with the Ukraine war. I smiled to think that, despite all that he was saying on the page, despite everything he says out loud, Zizek is actually looking for a way out of the mess the globalists and Marxists have made of Britain and Europe.
But what had already set me and Zizek apart, and made me suspicious of his motives and his work had happened between the years 2005 and 2021; it was, however, not so much my observation that he had made utterly stupid and hopeless predications about the Arab Spring uprisings, nor that he had said that he had said that these ruinous events could lead to something magnificent and liberating. Rather, what had changed significantly over those years was, to put a gaping hole between us, was that I had begun to go to Orthodox Church services, and that I eventually converted to Christianity in 2019. Many confusions and half-measures and habitual compromises typical of my character during my youth, were only dissipated and left behind when I joined the Orthodox Church. The idle dreaming and the provocations aimed a creating the conditions for global revolution, which now appeared very clearly to be what Zizek was actually discussing in his books, no longer had any attraction for me.
I paid for the book and left. I wanted to do a review of it, for somebody to read, so as to understand better who Zizek is, and why he is a prominent philosopher in Europe and the US. I would hardly have bought the book if I had not intended to review it, because I could already see what it contained, so familiar with his method and his style had I become over many years of attention. His work has no instructive value for me now, except as a reminder of how I have changed over the years, and as an example of that to which I am opposed. So that is what I will do: I will review the book. However, I also propose to explain what it is that I myself believe.
Underneath all the bombast and comedy, and the ‘smart thinking’, his most recent book is concerned in large part with Russia and Ukraine. There is a relatively simple scheme set out in the book. I can set it out as follows.
Zizek considers himself to belong to a tradition of struggle and emancipation, a Western European tradition of liberalism, which is undeniable, triumphant, but unfinished. Although he does not devote much time to these themes, he mentions in passing, as things with which nobody will disagree: anti-racism, liberation of women from subjection, abolition of slavery, the class war, the breaking down of nationalist borders, and so on. But his major emphasis is classical Marxism: the liberation of the people from economic injustice.
The actual intent of his writing is, to describe the possibility of a successful revolution against global capitalism. His personal part in that struggle is the ostensible reason for his writing: he proposes ways that the revolution might happen, and how it might be secured against the effort of global capitalism to acquire, incorporate, and finally turn a profit from the revolution against its own self. Since the intent of the new book is to awaken thinking about the struggle against global capitalism, and to provoke action, it is a kind of manifesto or a programme. In this book in particular, he is concerned to show how the war against Russia is an opportunity which can be exploited by those who are struggling for global emancipation.
All of this is relatively uninteresting, to my mind. I have a different intention than merely analysing what he has to say. O, what he has to say is something like this, in brief: that Russia’s invasion was in part provoked by NATO, but it remains unforgiveable. That Russia is a failed state. That Ukrainian resistance was unexpectedly successful. That that West must not be reluctant to help; that Ukraine’s fighting spirit should be an example of how Marxists can win, how those who object to the struggle Ukraine is making, people such as Habermas, Jordan Peterson, Kissenger, are ‘peaceniks’. And so on, for 100 pages.
You have heard most of this before, in fact, because what Zizek writes here is exactly the same thing that everybody who writes in the papers, or speaks on TV or radio, has been saying without change since 2022. And this similarity of style and message is because Zizek is, in a way I had not understood before, one of the dominant class of Liberals who run Britain and the other countries of the West. Zizek is a member of the Liberal and largely atheist, secular order which rules Britain. He is a globalist like them. He is similarly in total agreement with the powers that be on all the other matters of note: the Arab Spring, the Colour Revolutions, the Covid 19 lockdowns, the need for very severe measures to counteract ecological climate change, global finance, immigration and open borders, and so on.
But Zizek never had a compelling reason to be so complicit as this. He did not need to agree in full with the public control measures around Covid 19, he did not need to join the unanimity about Covid, or about climate crisis, CO2 emissions, or Russia. Here and there, and very often in the past, he disagreed in a sly Hegelian or Lacanian way with what was going on around him. He can still do this, for instance, when he claims, rightly, that the LGBTQ movement is simply the upper bourgeois managerial class blowing smoke; LGBTQ, etc., a means of sewing division and coercing the lower classes to do things which confuse them; it is a way of diverting the attention of the masses away from the obscene wealth being gathered, and the real power and injustice which are being exerted on them.
But, it seems to me that Zizek saw an opportunity for change and global revolution in some of these confected and dishonest crises; and so, he joined, and he told the same platitudinous lies which the global and national governments were telling, where Covid, the Russia war, the necessity of NATO, and the Carbon emergency, were all cast as the dominant problems of our time. Opportunistically, he noticed that a movement of solidarity between people might possibility be established while Russia, Covid, or Global Climate Crisis were taking place, even were these things to be, as they obviously are, fake crises, confected problems, wars which were provoked. It would be possible to imagine Zizek welcoming an entirely faked up crisis, which he knows to be fake, and then setting about supporting harsh measures to deal with it. He would do so on condition that the chaotic and unnecessary activity would promise of a global uprising of solidarity and anti-Capitalism as an unforeseen or unplanned consequence.
The historical moment to which he refers most frequently, perhaps the only one he refers to with approval, is the moment when Lenin took control of the government of Russia, in 1921. It was an example of something which he would like to see happening again. It was a moment when a crisis, in this case the Great War, presented the opportunity for revolution. And that is the game which Zizek is playing, I suppose.
But what is also apparent is that Zizek, although looking for revolutionary struggle, is himself very much a Liberal. He says the same things as the BBC say, because he is one of them. He is ‘one of us’; he is a Western liberal of the familiar type. We should ask, is Zizek one of them for opportunistic reasons? Or, is not truer to put it like this: that they are like him, and that he is the most conscious among this elite, because he gives expression to the only future that these Liberals, atheists, globalists, and Capitalists, can imagine? Is he the philosopher of the dominant globalising Western leadership – men like Sunak, Merkle, Macron, Biden?
I wince at my own words. Have I suggested that the collective efforts, the serious and determined policies and measures discussed and ordered by recent British governments been total lies and aimed at something else? Surely I cannot consent to believe this? My tone of voice resembles the fool’s voice at court, the wild eyed conspiracy theorist. And yet, it is clear – that Zizek, and by extension, the global capitalist liberal order – truly are engaged in these massive social changes and experiments, and indeed in this Russo-NATO war, in order to achieve a more distant objective: global human society under a global, post-revolutionary secular government.
Such an internationalism is precisely what Zizek is working toward in an explicit way. I do not suggest that the business and political and media leaders of Europe and the US need to admit it to themselves; however, when Boris Johnson’s 2020 government declared lockdown, and in 2022, he flew in person over to Kiev to provoke the Ukrainians to fight, he and his class were more or less explicitly pushing our nations towards conditions such, that a global world order might be necessary, once the real trouble had thereafter started. Cause and effect is neither here nor there; personal agency, as a Lacano-Hegelian logic would have it, is not something which can be established: what can be established is, that the recent crises in the West do conduce to, and do give opportunity to, Marxist and Liberal global solidarity, whether intended or not. That’s to say, things might get so chaotic and dangerous, that the only means of surviving might be to form a global order, and to submit to complete dominance by a more or less Marxist dogmatic government.
Let me outline the course of history as Zizek sees it, and as ‘we’ see it, we Liberals of the West. After medieval feudalism, there arose the bourgeois, the entrepreneurial middle classes; and now, in the age of bourgeois triumph, everything is part of the global capitalist market. Our world is a liberal capitalist order, already a globalised world. A Marxist accepts this story and this contemporary situation; but he looks for the inevitable collapse of the market system, and he goes along with it as something historically necessary, because Marx’s theory says that it will before long collapse and be succeeded by revolution. The revolutionary struggle must take place on a global level, and so globalised capitalism is essential for the Marxist: it is a good sign. It needs only a bit more effort, the right set of words to inspire, the right sort of understanding, and the collective uprising will happen, the Marxist post-capitalist economic world order will be established.
If Parliamentary democracy needs to be set aside, as Lenin set it aside, then so be it. Whatever other measures are required, or whatever destruction, let it be. Zizek is quite explicit on these necessary cruelties, and the necessity of arousing the required determination in the people, providing them with a sense that they are ‘at war’. An urgency and fear and determination will need to be aroused in the masses, to make them acquire the discipline necessary, to achieve the final end of global Marxism. They will need to be pushed and coaxed by chaos and fear.
Zizek, who wrote this book around the beginning of 2023, around the time of the Spring Offensive, was at that time of the belief that Ukraine must defeat Russia, and in the book, he names and shames those who, he claims, are tired and cowardly, because they object to the fighting. The book has something like a list of those who oppose the war. I have seen Zizek debating with Jordan Peterson, at a conference, broadcast on YouTube, from a couple of years ago; so, I know that they are on familiar terms with each other. Nevertheless, Zizek describes in detail in his book, how he thinks Peterson became a ‘peacenik, and has come to sympathise with Russia; he says that he, Peterson, was sympathetic to Russia’s claims. In the same section of the book, Zizek explains that there are many Republicans in the US, and the Alt-Right in the US, along with some nationalist politicians in Europe, who form a sort of alliance, which is not in favour of Ukraine’s struggle, either; again, these people fall under the category of ‘peaceniks’. It is as if, where a man does not embrace the war, and put a bet down on global liberation, he deserves nothing but name calling and contempt. Just as you notice that Zizek doesn’t understand the motives for rejecting the Covid hysteria, he seems, like a sociopath, to also fail to have any ability to understand, why a man would not want war for war’s sake, which is the case for most Western politicians, or, war for revolution’s sake, which is the case with Zizek.
Zizek essentially wants Ukraine to fight against Russia for two reasons. Firstly, so as to facilitate a Great War-type disaster, so that from amongst the ruins and the chaos, a new Lenin can arise. And second, something I have yet to discuss, because he thinks that Russia is a failed state, a ‘nationalist’ entity, a Christian conservative heartland, which entails that Ukraine must fight and receive as much military help as possible, because nations and independent states such as Russia has become are standing in the way of global unity and universal liberalism.
While at one point calling on patriotism and patriotic feelings as an excuse for something he wants to see, mostly Zizek hates nations and nation states, and he also hates Christian nationalists. But this does not surprise, when we reflect that most Western liberal governments feel the same way. He quotes CNN with approval, when it in 2021 announced that the USA’s enemy within has a name: the Christian nationalist. And Zizek is observing and embracing the same view as theirs. He sees the global order as the logical pathway from global markets and capitalist order, through collapse, and into global Marxism. So, it follows that any nationalism or any Christian resistance and love of things as they are and used to be, must be defamed.
I have said enough about what Zizek thinks, now. I hope that what I have said gives a basic description of his beliefs and his rather cynical method. The peculiar quality of his writing is made interesting, especially for young people, because he brings to these subjects a willingness to engage in speculation about the deeper, unstated psychoanalytic secrets, which the BBC or Parliament would shy away from. Stylistically, he uses jokes, films, anecdotes, and the like, to elaborate on and prove psychoanalytic insights. Zizek calls on the Lacanian method when, for instance, he speculates that ‘anti-vaxxers’ secretly wanted the pandemic to continue indefinitely, because if only they had taken the vaccine, he says, the Covid pandemic would have ended sooner. So, to explain their determination not to take the vaccine, he can only speculate that their secret desire was for endless lockdown, some kind of aimless state of vegetating, a surrender to powerlessness. As for me, I can think of other reasons why we didn’t want the vaccine, and I wonder why Zizek is unable to see, that those reasons are quite plain and obvious. But where I come from, and what I see as the future and the past, I will explain as a conclusion to this essay.
I have outlined Zizek’s view of our age and our history, and I have shown that there is not much difference between it and the dominant Liberal Western view of our age and our history. They support Ukraine’s entry into NATO for pretty much the same reasons. Zizek only differs from the contemporary liberal politician, the obtuse elite culture figure, or the broadsheet newspaper columnist, in general, insofar as he has a concrete vision of the future, whereas non-Marxists tend not to be so confident about any particular heading. Zizek, by contrast, while he enjoys the way things are done and where they are heading, is looking always for a means of exploiting the present situation for specific future ends. Where the traditional liberal tends to believe in constant progress and the discovery of new technologies, and where this more or less describes his entire horizon of outlook, the Marxist is looking toward a financialised paradise based on violent revolution.
I need now to show the obverse, or the actual situation of our history and the present time, as I think it really is, and as I conceive it. What most interests me is something which Zizek, in his own mind, is too sophisticated to accept, namely the bare truth, and the actual reality of our situation, our world. Zizek doesn’t really believe in reality, or truth – and I understand why. But let’s not talk of that, yet.
I am going to assume that there are facts, truths, and reality. They do exist, in the following way: when I go out on my expeditions around Wales, I know for a fact, and it is true, that if I leap down a 30 meter vertical rock face and land on my feet, then my legs really will buckle and crumple, and if my head is damaged, I will die. There is no psychoanalytic way around this. There is no explaining it off as a narrative which somebody invented: if I jump, I die. Added to this, the knowledge affects me personally, and in this way, knowledge and foresight particularly and perhaps only have me for their subject.
It is not a matter of jumping and then exploiting the situation so as to achieve something else, a final objective. I can imagine Zizek making use, from his vantage, of the leap to death, so as to see paths toward utopia. Or, he might speak of the leap as the subject of a joke. But I refer to events only in so far as they are real, and have real consequences. I do not think that Hegelian logic dominates the world of events.
Similarly, while Zizek talks of war, I find his comments disgusting and empty, because war has a real logic, and real consequences. There is something I cannot take as real, in the hyperbolic calls for freedom, victory, sacrifice which in one place or another, Zizek quotes, as spoken by Ukrainians and other fighters. While some Ukrainians have just cause to be angry, or upset, I do not believe that any of them have any cause to demand continuance of any war anywhere. To me it is like an abuse of language: for they are putting their own men to death with those words. It is better if these things are left unsaid.
But Zizek sees in these obscene words calling for death what the vile globalist media papers see in them: cheering on as men, and women, go off to die anonymously on the front. This vile lying cant, equivalent to imagining that nothing is real, and that you can jump of a rock face, as if doing so were not the path straight to death and silence.
The logic of war is, that men do as they are told, and that once war has started, then the time for talk is long past. And yet, men like Zizek continue to talk and encourage it, after all, Zizek advises, as one of his strategies for revolution, creating the feeling of ‘war communism’ in Great Britain; he suggests waking people up and making them serious by simulating a situation of war.
These people write and talk about life and death and suffering on the battlefield in articles in The Spectator; they publish their irrelevant misleading comments alongside more appropriate discussions, such as those about the new Health Secretary, or whatever. One is approving of the colossal waste of life and finances of war in a rhetorical way, and the other is discussing some petty gossip about a bureaucrat, with if anything, yet more fervour and conviction.
Zizek, like almost the entire Liberal world, choses to ignore the many attempts to find peace in Ukraine. I can explain this, only as follows: when Zizek is looking for the opportune moment to initiate global revolution, and fighting Russia is precisely that opportunity, then Zizek provides reasons why the fight against Russia must continue. And in truth he does so. This is very disappointing, in a philosopher. It is understandable in the leader of NATO, or in the State Department. But Zizek has no excuse: while they are all avoiding the truth, that peace was possible and even necessary, the philosopher at least should confess the truth.
Zizek does given indications, after having laid out his chief message, the message that war is a good thing, that he knows some of the more subtle aspects to the build up to the invasion. But the letters and the phone calls from Moscow to Washington which went unanswered, or the visit of Johnson to Kiev in April 2022, are not important to his effort to insist that the war must continue. And do not forget that the same nonchalance and the same indifference to facts and reality affects all of the great, profit-making media channels. All those channels of information which, in order to survive the rise of the internet, have found new purpose by being the PR wing of any democratic administration or government.
Zizek alleges that Putin has given evidence of wanting to revive the Tsarist or Soviet empire. He says that, the war must continue against Russia, because Russia wants to establish a gigantic European empire. He provides no evidence of any kind for this, naturally; rather, speaking of ‘we’ and what ‘we know’ already, he simply asserts it.
How about the pages devoted to Medvedev’s X posts, as indications of Russia’s goals, as if Medvedev’s rather irrelevant opinions meant everything, when it is clear to us that they are not, and that they are merely posts on X. Zizek devotes a lot of time to Medvedev, conveniently pretending not to know, that Medvedev is more or less a private citizen speaking on his own behalf.
Most insulting, is Zizek’s insistence, equivalent to his insistence that the Covid Lockdown was essential, that the invasion of Ukraine was a completely unforgivable and unjustified act of violence. Although Zizek does point out that there was some provocation, and that he is aware of mitigating factors for the invasion, he nevertheless returns to the main point: it was an unforgivable act. But he would say this, because he wants the war to continue until Russia’s defeat and collapse.
I would like to remark, however, to put paid to this hysterical blindness in the face of stark reality, that the first strike in a war of this kind, where war is a pure extension of politics, is, truly, an act of violence. But the counter-strike from the opponent is also an act of violence. And when peace was possible, but the counter-strike went ahead anyway, as Ukraine’s violence continued beyond April 2022, then all moral judgements are at an end, and both sides have escaped all accusations of being too violent. Nonetheless, lacking any scruple or discrimination, Zizek keeps making the same empty accusation regardless.
Zizek remarks at one point, that Putin had asked the Ukrainian armed forces to take over in Kiev. He asked them to perform a coup, because he, Putin, wanted negotiations, and he said further that if Kiev were in the hands of the military, then the negations would go better for all concerned, because soldiers know how to come to an agreement. It goes unnoticed by Zizek, that here is the most direct proof that the invasion was a call for talks, and almost nothing else. Where Zizek sees an occasion to demand Russia’s defeat on the battlefield, we see evidence that Russia wanted negotiations from the first, and not war or even invasion.
We know what the talks would have been about, because they were laid out in messages sent begging to Washington at the end of 2021, which the US government refused to reply to: the talks would have been about Donbas secession, and Ukraine’s military neutrality. But the war continued, and you see how empty every word written about Ukraine’s struggle for liberation and victory, written after that event, has since that time become an obscenity covering up hundreds of thousands of deaths, and would have been better kept in silence. There is no victory and no glory yet written about Russia and Ukraine. There is just avoidance of the truth or the idle chatter of bad people.
What is it that is not liked about Russia? Zizek points the finger of blame at Dostoevsky, without irony. Dostoevsky, he says, invented the idea of the Russian nation, as a distinct thing, different from Europe. He described in inimitable form and with genius, a Christian country, a spiritual country. And Zizek hates that.
There are American Dostoevskys, too, it follows. Zizek finds others who he hates. In Washington in 2021, the enemy was located inside the United States, according to reports and government media of the time. They were Americans who were a direct threat to the global order. They were the American patriots who were also enemies, deep inside the US: and they were given the name Christian nationalists. That is to say, they were American patriots, and they believed in God. There, in summary, is what the liberal globalist order most detests.
I have already described the semi-veneration which I offered to Zizek for nearly a decade. To find him expressing such obviously and merely political opinions, is very disappointing. It shows a very severe instance of what I struggle to precisely define. Something like ‘name calling’, as if the bare mention of the name ‘nationalist’, or Christian, is supposed to arouse disgust and dislike in the reader. It’s mere party politics. It is very disappointing. It is very poor work.
Zizek does not expend any effort in telling us why nationalism is by its nature something to be opposed. Nor Christianity, likewise. But I suppose he assumes that his reader believes in global world order as a good; and, that his reader is an atheist Marxist. Perhaps he only now writes for people who already agree with him. If so, fair enough.
However, a couple of simple points should put this anti-philosophical simplicity in its proper perspective. To anyone who thinks in real terms about international relations, it is completely clear that there has never been a global order – there has simply been a United States military and financial domination. That’s not a global world; that’s a specific country with a more or less global empire. Secondly, respecting people and their religion, men like Zizek, Leftists, have been dabbling with Palestine and Islamism for a while now, treating these people as if their ‘religion’ did not matter. This is a major miscalculation, which has real world effects of a very bad kind. Both of these points are meant to say: this intentional blindness is not doing any good to anybody. The global order is nothing more than United States capital and military dominance; and most of the ‘third world’ is actually Islam, and is not friendly to ‘our’ objectives. The Marxists can’t seem to locate and adequately account for who their allies and enemies actually are.
Zizek’s globalism, by which he means all 189 countries of the world united into one, is of the kind which would encourage total global population movement within European borders. He calls any objection to such movement ‘racism’. But it comes natural to him to claim a man is racist if he wants to protect his own country and property, just as it comes naturally to him to say that Parliamentary democracy stands in the way of progress, and that a dictatorship would be better. And I again refer to the decline of Parliamentary power in Britain, and guess that Zizek is only explaining what recent forms of Liberalism and globalism really want and intend.
But enough of this now. It behoves me to try to explain what I am all about, and why I find all of these ideas which Zizek has disgraced himself with, so disappointing. The first thing to note is, that I don’t think that the state should have absolute power over anyone, as Zizek thinks that it should. In his vision of the future and the present, there is no God, and there is no soul. There hardly seems to be a person of any kind anywhere. There is only the working of capital, and the chance of global liberation, and the rise of some great leader, like Lenin. Now, Lenin was characterised by being a politician. And Marxists aim to harness the power of the state, so as to change the world and force men to do as they are told.
Effectively, Marxists like Zizek aim at making the nation state into an overwhelming power, so as to affect and change every part of the lives of the citizens, but across the entire globe. There will be no church, no restraint, no personal appeals to justice or to the sovereignty of the individual. There will be merely and absolutely the state and its power alone.
I do agree with Zizek, that wealth is too extremely gathered in a few hands, but I don’t call this Capitalism as he does. He says that this is a systematic thing, the activity of a system at work, the ‘capitalist system’. Rather, I think that ‘capitalism’ is just a name we have given recently to commercial activity, and that it has always existed and always will exist. I think that what Zizek calls ‘capitalism’ is actually a hallucination, an imaginary and temporary visitor to our lands which we can shove off by an effort of imaginative thinking. While wealth inequality in the liberal world (of which Zizek, as we have said, is a part) does disgust me, and we would agree that the new feudalism, and the rentier capitalism which has emerged in recent years, is disgusting and harmful to the nation, all the same, I don’t believe it will necessarily end in a Marxist utopia. I think that the wealth collection which takes place today, in fewer and fewer hands, can and should be constrained and controlled by regular and not utopian efforts.
Before I conclude by describing the politics I propose myself, I return to that threat of national disaster and bankruptcy in Britain. I have a list of the diseases. I think that the items on the list can more or less all be put down to the interference of globalists and Marxists in Britain. Here is the list of causes of destruction and bankruptcy.
1. The position of the state as the provider of a free living to all people, for the asking. As a consequence of the Churchill and Lloyd George Welfare Bills, which put the Church out of the public life.
2. The total decline of industry, in the form of manufacturing products, or of mining and energy production
3. The population collapse, due to education of British women and their employment in fake jobs rather than as mothers at home.
4. The sale of all the national assets, including most of the FTSE 100 businesses, to foreign investors and hedge funds. And the sale of the rest of the country to US based investment firms, whose main business is profit extraction
5. That the main industry of Britain is the maintenance of a sort of crime empire in the City of London: offshore tax havens and banking for the international rich
6. The decline of national sovereignty, with total military dominance by the United States, so that foreign policy has become a matter of doing what the US wants; meanwhile, the US is not a friendly ally.
7. The reliance on a favourable exchange rate on the dollar, as a means of escaping the fact that the pound is actually worthless, and that Britain is around 20th wealthiest country in the world; verging on third world levels of wealth already. Surviving infrastructure alone is keeping us going, but it is not being maintained and will eventually fail, leaving us nothing
8. The inevitable use of immigrant labour to keep the economy buoyant, which has the side effect of introducing Islam and other cults, which will be the inevitable ruin of the national consciousness, and the will to survive.
9. Overpopulation due to immigration, matched with unemployment or under-activity, as if the rule “If you don’t work, you die” were not a rule. Which was given its greatest moment of absurdity, when, because of the vague threat of a relatively harmless, and man-made virus (Covid), the nation did almost nothing whatsoever, for more than two whole years.
10. The collapse of the class structure, and of merit as a means to advancement, both of which were essential to what Britain was and why it was once successful and interesting. Both of which were absolutely essential to British culture, behaviour, and transmission of values essential to national survival.
11. The infiltration of globalist, Marxist values into the system of law and order, and into the law governing the family, divorce, abortion, sexual activity, education of children. As we have seen, the globalists need to see collapse before a successful global revolution can take place. So collapse and ruin are desired by Marxists. These things are more or less consciously planned.
12. The general betrayal of Britain by its governing class, so that belonging either to Europe, or to the United States, were the only options they actively pursued, at the expense of the future of the British themselves.
To avoid disaster, the nation should follow my individual example. Become Christian, and reject Marxism. I shall explain, as follows.
Zizek is a political thinker, and the weaknesses of merely political thinking are his weaknesses. He can claim to be dealing with impersonal things, on a large scale. And to gather together a coherent vision of things at that level is difficult. Which is all to say that, it is relatively easy for him also to make large errors.
His main error is, that he does not include himself, or me, in this political thinking. What else is the centre of his plan for Ukraine and the globe as a whole, but a new post-capitalist global order? That is the strange attractor, the ultimate focus of his work. Although Zizek set out to write a political commentary, on political matters, concerning how to govern large numbers of people, I by contrast begin my thinking at the level of the single individual. And because I can compile a coherent and better political theory from this origin, I do not forgive Zizek for his mostly amoral and violent visions.
What attracts and brings together the thinking of a British Christian is the single individual. That is the focus of Christianity, and of Christ’s message in the Gospels. I start with a substantial and almost infinite selfishness and self-centredness. Similarly, my politics is based in self-interest. Every man is his own centre, and his own chief. This not coincidentally gives me the advantage, in political argument, of being able to point to something existing and concrete with which to start. Whereas Zizek starts his politics from the not-yet-existing future global solidarity, I start from myself and my own interest.
It is possible to see history as the unfolding of a struggle for rights and freedoms. But there is no struggle for freedom in classical liberalism and Christianity, as I see it. Our freedom has existed in this form since we were born, and no matter what the society has been. If we posit, as the ground of political thinking and reckoning, the personal freedom and self-possession of the individual, and the liberty of his extended family or his country versus other countries, then we have the basis. But the value of the individual is not obvious, unless as I do, I take into account the Christianity which tells us, that each individual has his own fate, and that the world is the field for his individual conflict with evil, and at the wider level, the field for the development and protection of national enlightenment and religion.
Personal self-interest is not the basis to form a community, unless there are established ways of dispute resolution between individuals. That is what our constitution and our law and order system are. Additionally, and most troubling, perhaps the most profound objection to individual liberty is, that most men, particularly when in a natural uneducated state, are not capable of overcoming many vices, and their innate ignorance. Alongside individual freedom, it is possible and it has been necessary in the past, to bring to bear the power of a church, as a governor of the individual, keeping him in touch with God. But although I am Orthodox, I do take issue with this provision of a Church as the adequate means of training an individual.
The primary unit if value in Christian nations is the individual. Now, Zizek has mentioned Dostoevsky and Russian nationalism. The primary unit of value in Russia is, it is suggested by him and Zizek, the Russian people as whole. This is not appropriate for me, nor for most British individuals. I do not find my meaning and the point of my life in the entire set of my tribe. And the Church, a gathering of the faithful individuals into a unity, is not a natural idea for the English. Even before Henry VIIIth’s innovations, it was not the case that the Church brings all the English or British together into a single unity.
Rather, the English religion is inward, and selfish. A selfish relation to the Creator, to the spiritual other world, the inner world, the afterlife, and to virtuous behaviour. But unless there is an external agency, such as a Church, or an educator, how does any individual pull himself up by his bootstraps, and find the right path toward his true individual freedom? An individual is primarily defined by his property, and his personal mind, which is a property. The mind cannot govern itself. Which is why there needs to be an iron rule from outside, in order that the self be able to become its best and to be the good. A single individual needs, by definition, a private, an individual rule and method. But what is this private individual method which is also owned by the single individual?
The method cannot be the mind itself, it cannot be philosophy and reason, because the mind cannot govern itself. So education, facts, knowledge, and so on, are no substitute for a Church. Just as during the sacrament of confession, a person does not confess to God by carrying on an inner monologue, but rather, confesses before a priest, in order to thereby speak truly – just so, there needs to be something other than the mind when we want the mind to function properly and discover the truth of what it itself is. Something personal and yet from outside needs to be present.
I consider the practice of ‘the life of stillness’ to be exactly what this is. The way to become yourself is to follow this practice of self-quieting and devotion to the inner and other world. I do associate the intense personal spirituality, without any church, which Kierkegaard found himself obliged to submit to, to be exactly the meditation and quiet prayer with God which the single individual needs. The silent prayer is the means by which the individual empties himself out, locates himself in God’s care, finds his inner meaning, learns virtue.
Now, how can a politics be founded on self-interest, and on the one dedicated to a relation with himself qua a relation with God? We can look around at our national Church, and see that it has failed to offer the right path for us. It is not attended by the people as a whole people. The English church seems to me most often to be a kind of town hall meeting. I even refer myself to the way that there is a set time to arrive and to leave, and how it is possible to be too late; how the behaviour of congregations resembles a group of people who are merely doing a civic duty, rather than a religious one. The way there are well defined seats. The way the priest obviously brings his personality to the meeting, and tends to blot out the place for God. All of this reminds you of a formal, secular, official situation, and is symptomatic of something which is not really necessary. Going to church in Britain is not really necessary.
On the other hand, the Eastern Christian Orthodox way of conducting the service has the feel of something which does invite to the impersonal presence of God, where the Christian joins something really communal and something sacramental. But though this is a great advantage, we are not Russians or Greeks, and the individual, with his personal life and his right not to attend, still needs to be attended to. Which is where the life of stillness, as a practice to be carried out in order to complete the individual single life, is necessary. And there are justifications for this in Christ’s teaching.
But we are here dealing with politics, and how a nation should be formed from such individuals. The traditional form, and the one I and conservatives propose, is as follows. There will be a monarch, or in some places, an elected President. And the monarch must himself be connected to God, either directly through his own piety, or through his court. And through a set of classes and the system of power and class, this piety of the monarch is transmitted to the orders of the society at large, in its millions. The piety is transmitted through the aristocracy – defined as the nation’s rich and property owning people, the land owners, through the mercantile classes - and so on to the lower class of largely propertyless but labouring people. The class system is essential to the way that the British keep in touch with themselves, with God, and the way they form their society.
I also add that there must be an elite which are not a distinct class, but a mobile set of people who rise and fall on merit and achievement. By skill and achievement in some part of the general culture, people must be able to associate and join, for more or less time, the upper class. These are the elite. Additionally, to do so, like the rest of society, they must uphold the standards and meet the criteria for what is good and the best, as set out by the upper class. It should be pointed out, that the classes themselves are, and have been traditionally, open to rising and falling, in and out of the class. If a class is constrained to consist only of those who were born into it, then it is not a class, but a caste, and I am not interested in castes.
Now, for the individual to be able to exist in such a political or cultural situation, for politics is merely the day to day work required to sustain the land, not the land’s main activity – for the individual to exist in this kind of society, these are the requirements: a specific bounded territory, with an active military prepared to defend or extend those boundaries; a monarch; a class system; a recognised culture and an elite of practitioners; a largely democratic or mobile parliament; a system of law and order based in Christian principles of law derived from the historical activity of the people of the land. A Church is also essential, without any qualification. However, in England, attendance at Church is a duty, rather than a labour of love. The labour of love takes place in the individual; however, this must not be left down to arbitrary choice, either. Rather, the entire culture needs to be saturated with the imperative that the people engage in the life of stillness like their upper class and monarch, and also to attend church as often as possible, and definitely at the main celebrations of the calendar, and for sacramental occasions such as birth, marriage, and death.
If we were to put this model beside the utopian global model proposed by Zizek, for which he is prepared to see millions of soldiers on every side die, on the supposition that there might result a hitherto non-existent Marxist utopia, then we see that my proposal has the advantage of being easy to achieve. It has been achieved for hundreds of years. Further, any war would only break out in and around a conservative, monarchical and aristocratic society, in those times when external enemies threaten the existence of the nation.
It could be said, that these periodic wars are the actual history of Europe, and that the reason Marxists are looking for a global world is, that they want to avoid fratricidal wars. I don’t think that is so, personally. Marxists are not motivated by peace between nations. I think it is closer to the truth to say, that they do not acknowledge the individual’s existence, that they do not recognise God, and that their minds are drawn irresistibly toward a purely communal post-human world of total domination by a centralised authoritarian state, ruled over by men who, being Godless, have become God’s proxies. Just as the devil is said to take Christ’s place on earth.
It will be said that my politics is a backward step, or that it is a thing of the past. I would answer that time does not work in that linear way, toward constant progress. Sometimes it is necessary to go back. Earlier on in this essay, I proposed 12 or so terrible failures of Britain, leading to its ruin. I think that my societal system of rule would resolve those difficulties.
I have not dwelt on the aspect of the family in any detail, and ancestors and descendants, close relatives, and their relation to the single individual. But it is obvious, that care and provision for the family is the near at hand version for the care and protection of the nation at large. Other factors follow, such as that the function of women in society should be what nature has determined it to be, not what the ‘capitalists’ or Marxists would like it to be. Whereas utopians claim that everyone is equal, and so on, the conservative and Christian barely considers the single individual to be real at all, unless he is part of a coupling of a man and a woman, and belongs to a family unit which gives rise to children. But enough. I have made my point.