https://www.democracynow.org/2008/5/12/world_renowned_philosopher_slavoj_zizek_on
'So — but there is a different problem here, which is I think this deadlock of American politics, foreign politics. Again, I’m now not talking about anti-American — quite on the contrary, you know? I think I mentioned it in my yesterday’s talk, namely the problem is, what is it in the United States politics that they achieve exactly the opposite of what they want? As they put it — as we sometimes put it, they win the war — they win the battle, but lose the war.
For example, let’s take, again, Iraq. This is my supreme example. They went there to do what? (a) To defundamentalize the country, to introduce their — some kind of a secular democracy, which would then serve as a model for the others; (b) to contain Iran. Now, three, four years later, what’s the result? (a) Almost two million, all the educated, secular, middle classes, majority of them left the country. The country is more religiously fundamentalist than ever. (b) We know that among the Shia political elite, the orientation is fundamentally pro-Iranian. So isn’t this a nice paradox that the ultimate result in Iraq of the US intervention is the exact opposite? It’s really a little bit like Oedipus’s story, you know? The parents were told, your son will kill you, blah, blah. They acted to prevent it, and in this very way they realized it. So something is obviously wrong here.'
The rest of it is his trademark verbal diarrhea, avoiding the question, making an obscure philosophical point instead of a clear moral stance, basically endorsing conformist establishment viewpoints but disguising it well enough that it's not obvious, or at least deniable.
Couldn't find any comments on Libya or the Syria conflict, but this is enough to show that he's fully on board with the hypocrisy and double standards of the west and would never subject it to the kind of critique reserved for official enemies, as above. Compare his broadside against Medvedev to this presentation of George W Bush's supremely cynical lie about welcoming the Iraq protests:
'it’s not so much that I was against the protests. I myself participated in protests. I just do not share the enthusiasm of some of even big European intellectuals, like Jacques Derrida, Jurgen Habermas, who saw in that widespread movement of protest almost a birth of the new civil society movement in Europe. What bothered me is the way the protest was in a way parasitic upon — upon — OK, the other guys, those in power who wanted the war, how they legitimized each other.
For me, that protest was part of what I see as the main failure. But it’s not a subjective failure. It’s in the situation of modern left, which all too often for me adopts this rather comfortable moralizing position of we condemn, we criticize, but like we can’t do anything more, so this safe moralizing position, which is why, as I like to emphasize, I was in Great Britain, in United Kingdom in that point. And what did strike me is how, after the big protests, both sides appeared satisfied in a strange way. The organizers of demonstrators made their point: you see the majority is behind us, people oppose war, we made our point. But silently, they knew they didn’t stop the war, nothing. Blair government, the other side, was also satisfied. You see what an open society is: even when a country goes to war, we can — and again, the best answer, I think, was provided unintentionally by George Bush when he visited at that time UK. I remember, when asked by journalists, “How do you comment on big protests against you?” he said, “I totally support them, because, you see, that’s why we are going to Iraq, so that things like this, massive protest against the government, so that things like this could happen only — will happen also in Iraq.” So, of course, this was either a bad joke or hypocrisy or whatever you want. But there is a truth in it. Everyone, in a way, all the sides, felt satisfied. And this is what often worries me, this — how should I put it? — secret, symbiotic relationship. Those in power like a certain type of moralistic protest, which does nothing.'
No Zizek, that's bollocks. I was there and nobody who protested against the war was 'satisfied' when it went ahead. For many including myself that was the end of any lingering faith that we lived in a democratic society amenable to the will of the people. Just because you're an amoral poseur doesn't mean that everybody else is too...
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