Unholy Alliances: On the Left that Supports Russia Against Ukraine - by Slavoj Žižek
Part one of Living and Dying in a Mad World - originally published in Underground Theory: Coming To A City Near You
It makes me infinitely proud that I was invited to publish in Underground Theory—the idea of workers reading a text of mine is a dream come true. Many of today's “radical” theorists enjoy writing unreadable texts in which they explain why “ordinary” people are so ideologically brainwashed that they cannot understand our society—and my suspicion is that it is themselves who mask their ignorance in complex academic jargon. So it is my duty to take a risk: if you, actual workers, cannot relate to my texts, it means it is something wrong with my theory. If we, philosophers, are not ready to take this risk, we resign to the role of servants of the existing social order which is now turning from liberal capitalism to something much darker, techno-feudalism with the new mega-rich as our feudal lords. I am grateful to the effort you are ready to put into reading my work. In some deeply true sense, my fate is in your hands. -
Unholy Alliances
What makes me really depressed today is that a strong part of the Left is more or less openly supporting a state which acts as an empire, brutally attacking a neighboring state, a state which justifies its acts by an open appeal to neo-Fascist ideas (and supports extreme Right in Western Europe, from le Pen in France to Alternative fuer Deutschland in Germany). It is my sincere conviction that this reaction of the Left bears witness to its ethical and political bankruptcy. And this bankruptcy is not limited to Europe. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the newly re-elected President of Brasil, recently said the Ukrainian president Zelensky and his Russian counterpart Putin bear equal responsibility for the war in Ukraine…He thereby joined the club of “neutral” countries like South Africa and India whose neutrality is strictly pro-Russian. Neutrality is here a neutrality of somebody walking on a street, seeing how in a corner a child is beaten by a much stronger man, and calmly walking past the terrible scene, retorting to desperate cries for help: “Sorry, I am neutral!”
The standard argument of the Third World “neutral” countries is that in Ukraine we are dealing with a local conflict which pales compared to colonial horrors, or to more recent events like the U.S. occupation of Iraq. This argument misses the point: with the Russian attack on Ukraine, we got a brutal colonial war in Europe itself, and solidarity should be with the colonized. If some Third World states play neutrality, they forfeit the right to complain about the horrors of colonization anywhere. It’s the same with the Palestinian resistance to Israeli colonization of the West Bank: if you really want to fight anti-Semitism, you also have to support Palestinian resistance to what Israel is doing on the West Bank.
We live in an era of unholy alliances, a combination of ideological elements which violate the standard opposition of Left and Right. Let’s just mention one of the saddest recent examples. At the end of February 2023, the Ugandan parliament debated a further toughening of the anti-gay law—the most radical proponents demanded death penalty or at least life imprisonment for those caught in the act. Anita Among, speaker of the parliament, said in the debate: “You are either with us, or you’re with the Western world.” Feminist, gay, and trans struggles are thereby denounced as an instrument of Western ideological colonialism used to undermine African identity—and this immediately brings us to another unholy alliance: Russia, with its Orthodox fundamentalism, presents itself as an ally of Third World nations fighting colonialism, a fact that doesn’t prevent parts of the Western Left to lean towards Russia in its aggression on Ukraine. When Sahra Wagenknecht, the most popular representative of die Linke, the German Leftist party, organized and spoke at a meeting for peace in Dresden in February 2023, calling for the end of helping Ukraine with arms, Björn Höcke (one of the leading members of the extreme Right Alternative for Germany present at the meeting) shouted at her: “Ich bitte Sie, kommen Sie zu uns” (“Please come to us!”), calling her to change her party affiliation—and the public applauded him…These and other cases brought many social analysts to the (wrong) conclusion that, today, the opposition between Left and Right became meaningless. One of the causes of this impression is that the Left always prefers a symptomal reading of an ideology: things are not what they claim to be, their truth is the opposite (freedom in the market is the form of exploitation and domination, universal human rights mask imperialist domination…)—so what does the Left do when it confronts a reactionary agent which IS what it claims to be, where there is no need for deep symptomal analysis? Here the Left gets perplexed: what if, at some deeper level, we are even worse than our reactionary opponent? Apropos Ukraine, we get exactly this logic.
Recall what Putin said on February 21, 2022:[i] he repeated his old claim that Lenin, who rose to power after the downfall of the Romanov royal family, was the “author and creator” of Ukraine: “Let's start with the fact that modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia, more precisely, by the Bolshevik, Communist Russia.” So, Putin said, the proper name of Ukraine should be “Ukraina Vladimira Ilyiča Lenina.” He then went on that,
[T]oday the ‘grateful progeny’ /of Lenin/ has overturned monuments to Lenin in Ukraine. They call it decommunization. You want decommunization? Very well, this suits us just fine. But why stop halfway? We are ready to show what real decommunization would mean for Ukraine.
Putin’s logic is clear: Ukraine was a Bolshevik (Lenin’s) creation, so a true decommunization means the end of Ukraine. Trotsky faithfully followed Lenin’s path—the subtitle of his “Problem of the Ukraine” (from April 1939) tells it all: “For a Free, Independent Soviet Ukraine!” And he draws the full consequence from this stance:
But the independence of a United Ukraine would mean the separation of Soviet Ukraine from the USSR, the ‘friends’ of the Kremlin will exclaim in chorus. What is so terrible about that? - we reply. This is true proletarian internationalism![ii]
No wonder the only name Putin mentions in his war declaration on February 23, 2022, is that of Lenin.
But things get much darker here: reactionary ideology is not just used to justify land grabbing. The celebration of death in Russia today began with some religious preachers who assured their audience that Russians can “become themselves” only by killing, and that “all God’s creation” is at stake in Ukraine. Following this line, Vladimir Solovyov, one of Putin’s chief propagandists, said in a New Year message on Russian television:[iii]
Life is highly overrated. Why fear what is inevitable? Especially when we’re going to heaven. Death is the end of one earthly path and the beginning of another. Don’t let fear of death influence decisions. It’s only worth living for something you can die for, that’s the way it should be. /.../ We are fighting against Satanists. This is a holy war and we have to win.
And Magomed Kitanaev went to the end in this direction:
We're asking: Oh Ukrainians, why did you permit gay parades in Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odesa? Why did you permit it? Why didn't you come out against them, against your government that was overtaken by fascists? Without shame before God, people, they are openly, manifestly spreading their filth.[iv]
And how does much of the Western Left react to this? Those who show “understanding” for Russia follow in their logic the famous argument about the broken kettle evoked by Freud: (1) I returned the kettle unbroken to you, (2) the kettle was already broken when you gave it to me, (3) I never even borrowed a kettle from you. Such an enumeration of mutually-exclusive arguments just proves that the opposite is true: I borrowed an unbroken kettle from you and returned it broken. As Michael Marder has shown, the Ukrainian war version is: (1) it’s not a war, just a limited military operation, (2) yes, it’s a war, we attacked but we just answered to Ukrainian provocations, (3) we didn’t attack Ukraine, Ukraine started the war. I think we find a similar triple logic also in the argumentation why we shouldn’t give arms to Ukraine: (1) general pacifist argumentation: more arms never bring peace, they just extend and prolong the war; (2) pseudo-concrete analysis: the situation is complex, both sides are guilty, no one is clean; (3) brutal pragmatism: why should we get mixed in a war far away, a war which is not ours, and make our workers and poor suffer?
When I listen to endless pacifist declarations, I find them quite disgusting for at least three reasons. We all want peace, but abstract calls for peace are not enough: “peace” alone is not a term which allows us to draw a key political difference. Occupiers always sincerely want peace in the territory they hold. Germany definitely wanted peace in the occupied France 1940-1944, Israel wants peace on the occupied West Bank (which means the end of Palestinian resistance), and Russia is on a mission for peace in Ukraine—quite sincerely, since peace means de-Ukrainization…So when one reads long and pathetic calls for peace, one should ignore all the pathetic bla-bla and notice only one sentence, the only one which really matters: that the West should stop sending arms to Ukraine. The logical question that follows—but does this not mean that Ukraine will fall to Russian supremacy?—is obfuscated by calls for restraint and negotiations…The same Judith Butler who clearly condemns the Russian attack and also emphasizes the anti-LGBT+ and gay orientation of Russian politics, absolutely opposes giving arms to Ukraine—she recently said: “I am hopeful that the Russian army will lay down its arms.” OK, but what do we do TILL this miracle happens?
Now we come to the key thing: although these calls begin with a ritualized condemnation of the Russian attack, what follows is a full pressure on Ukraine to show constraint, not to provoke Russia too much. Russia is treated as a crazy giant that we should not disturb too much. During his visit to Slovenia in March 2023 Jeffrey Sachs said in an interview about the war in Ukraine: “The foundation for peace should be that both sides return home.” A statement which for sure deserves the top prize for the stupidity of the year—as if the war is taking place in a third neutral terrain from which both sides can withdraw. Where should Ukrainians return to when the terrain of war IS their home? There is another reading of this statement possible: since it is a proxy-war, “both sides” are Russia and NATO—but in this case, the statement is even more cynical, because what it amounts to is that NATO should withdraw its support of Ukraine.
I find particularly disgusting the argument that in Ukraine the West is fighting a proxy war with Russia which will lead to a total devastation of Ukraine. Of course Ukraine cannot win the war—it cannot win it ALONE, without our help. But the obvious other side of the cold statement that Ukraine cannot win the war is a deeper fear and prohibition: Ukraine SHOULDN’T win the war, because this might provoke Russia too much. So, if we cut the crap, the pressure on Ukraine is: make a compromise, cede to Russia more or less what it already occupied…The problem is that, for Ukraine, this is not a proxy-war, it is a war in which they are fighting for their survival as a nation. Are they really so stupid to get engaged in a proxy war, fighting for others?
This post was an excerpt from Underground Theory: Coming To A City Near You. Enjoy it serially here for free. Each part of Living and Dying in The End Times will be published on the THIRD Thursday of each month for the year of 2024. If you prefer a physical copy, orders within the U.S. can get it at a discount here. Otherwise, I recommend getting it from Amazon. Also, stay tuned for the Audible version of this - in production now!
Get involved: If you want to get actively involved with ongoing lecture sessions related to timenergy research and critical media theory, become a TU subscriber today here. TU Subscribers also get a PDF of Underground Theory.
Support: If you don’t have time to get involved but wish to support nonetheless, become a patron here.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Theory_Underground to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.