SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Putin and the new right

 

The Government of Kosovo has announced a measure requiring Serbs from the north of Kosovo to apply for local license plates and replace the existing Serbian ones with them. However, the Serbs organized protests (the media reported that there were also shootings) and blocked roads at two border crossings, which is why the Kosovo authorities postponed the measure for a month.

 

Serbia has long had a similar rule for Kosovo owners of license plates on its territory, so Kosovo tried to apply the same standard. The problem, of course, is that Serbia does not recognize Kosovo as an independent state, although the USA and about 100 other countries have recognized it.

 

It would be just another local story, if it were not involved in the geopolitical dynamics triggered by the Russian aggression against Ukraine. As Vladimir Đukanović, a representative of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party, thought aloud recently, channeling the Russian explanation for the invasion of Ukraine, Serbia could "be forced to begin the de-Nazification of the Balkans". The phrase "forced to go" reflects the Kremlin's farcical retort that NATO aggression provoked it to invade Ukraine.

 

Đukanović's reference to the "Balkans" follows the same logic as Russia, which implies that the whole of Europe, caught in the vortex of self-destructive degeneration (LGBTQ+, same-sex marriages, without clear gender boundaries, etc.) will eventually have to be "denazified". As Aleksandar Dugin, the court philosopher of Russian President Vladimir Putin, explains: "We are fighting against absolute evil, embodied in Western civilization, its liberal-totalitarian hegemony, in Ukrainian Nazism."

According to this new conservatism, Nazism, communism and woke hedonism are the same thing. But putting all these opposites in the same bag is too much even for us die-hard Hegelians. It reveals the inconsistency of Kremlin propagandists and the pro-Russian American and European alt-right, which claims to embody traditional Christian values, while in words and deeds it supports genocide and glorifies sexual violence.

 

As a leading player in this cultural war, the Kremlin, through its intermediaries, intervened not only in Kosovo but also in Bosnia, which it warned not to think about becoming a member of the NATO alliance. Unfortunately, Western leftists and pacifists ignore the geopolitical dimension of Putin's "denazification" project. As Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the British Labor Party, recently complained: "Sending weapons to Ukraine will not bring a solution, it will only prolong this war. The war in Ukraine could last for years".

 

This position implies that Western governments should simply let Russia occupy Ukraine. It is a strange "pacifism" that puts pressure on the victim (that they must not defend themselves too energetically) and their supporters (that they must not help the victim of the aggressor too much), and not on the aggressor.

 

Western "pacifists" demand that we "de-demonize" Putin. Sooner or later there will have to be some kind of negotiations, so we should treat him as a future partner. In fact, we should do the exact opposite: the attack on Ukraine forces us to re-demonize Putin, not personally but as an exponent of a dangerous geopolitical and ideological project.

 

There is more and more evidence that Russia is turning into something radically foreign to the inhabitants of today's Western democracies, but well known to students of European history. Take the recent proposal by the Russian Liberal Democratic Party to replace the term "president" with "pravitel" ("ruler"). According to this party, the existing term has "always embarrassed us" because it was first used in the USA, and it was only "much later" that it spread to the rest of the world.

 

The "degeneracy" of the West is the main ideological target of the new right, along with an unhealthy fascination with authoritarian rulers. Recently, Keri Lake, the Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, said that Donald Trump and the Republican governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, have "big balls".

 

This is a necessary and not accidental feature of the new right in defense of Christianity. In order to attract enough followers, their leaders have to provide them with a good time ("pure excess of enjoyment over ordinary pleasures"). An ideology that awakens the worst impulses in its adherents can mobilize millions of people.

 

Let's take another example: isn't Russia's "peaceful military intervention" in Ukraine like the "legitimate rape" that US Congressman Todd Aikin, then Republican Senate candidate from Missouri, defined in 2012? According to Ejkin, abortion should be banned because if a woman experiences "legitimate rape" her body will somehow know not to get pregnant.

 

Faced with negative reactions from the public, Aikin defended himself by saying that he "expressed himself incorrectly". He thought there were "legitimate cases of rape" that the police refer to "when they're investigating or whatever." But his basic message remained the same: if a woman gets pregnant after rape, she must have secretly wanted it, because otherwise her body's reaction to "stress" would have prevented it.

 

It is telling that Putin talks about Ukraine in the same way. At a press conference on February 7, he mocked the Ukrainian government's objections to the Minsk agreements and added: "Whether you like it or not, that's your duty, my beauty." The sexual connotations of that statement are well known in Russia and Ukraine through the song "Sleeping Beauty in a Coffin", by the punk rock group Krasnaya Plesen / Red Mold from the Soviet era: "Spit beauty in the grave, Я podkralsya i ebu. I like it - I don't like it, Sleep, my beauty. / Sleeping beauty in a coffin, I snuck up and fucked her. Whether you like it or not, sleep now my beauty". It follows that the rape of a country is sometimes justified. The victim asked for it. As with rape, what motivates the new right is not love but the desire to dominate.