Who’s this?
I’m from Northern Ireland, twenty eight years old, and can resist anything except temptation, flattery or money.
Yes, that’s right it’s ‘Lenin’ of Lenin’s Tomb. For those who haven’t come across him before he’s a student who blogs in support of the Respect Coalition and Hezbollah. For the purpose of what comes next you’ve got to remember he is also a tiresomely typical Stopper in that he thinks most of the world’s problems are caused by American foreign policy, and that pretty much anyone who stands up to it is to be supported politically.
Who are his favourite writers?
Slavoj Zizek; Ellen Meiksins Wood; Robert Brenner; Benno Teschke; Franco Moretti; Alain Badiou; Ernesto Laclau; Anthony Giddens (circa 1980s); Alex Callinicos; Terry Eagleton; David Harvey; Foucault; Perry Anderson; Samir Amin; Jaqueline Rose; bell hooks; Gramsci; Gregory Elliot; Alistair MacIntyre; Martti Koskenniemi; Edward Said; Partha Chatterjee; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak; Peter Gowan; Noam Chomsky; Aime Cesaire.
Very impressive comrade, but whose name is that at the head of the list indicating his position as the most favourite one of ‘Lenin”s favourite writers?
Can it be the same Slavoj Zizek who wrote this in the New York Times earlier this week?
The United States as a global policeman — why not? The post-cold-war situation effectively called for some global power to fill the void. The problem resides elsewhere: recall the common perception of the United States as a new Roman Empire. The problem with today’s America is not that it is a new global empire, but that it is not one. That is, while pretending to be an empire, it continues to act like a nation-state, ruthlessly pursuing its interests. It is as if the guiding vision of recent American politics is a weird reversal of the well-known motto of the ecologists — act globally, think locally.
Surely not. After all Lenin’s Tomb is resolutely against American imperialism and this Zizek fellow seems to be arguing in favour of a massive increase in its reach.
Maybe it’s a different Zizek – perhaps the one who complained about ‘the interminable procrastination’ of an armed Western response to a certain recently dead Central European hard man, and who said in the Independent on April 24 1999 ‘I definitely support the bombing’ of Milosevic’s regime by Nato.’
Blimey. Bomber Zizek.
Note to Lenin: we’d all be more impressed with your reading list if you’d shown at least some evidence of opening the pages of the works of the writers listed, rather than simply regurgitating the names of currently fashionable social theorists without first checking whether they were slavering imperialist warmongers with a fetish for bombing runs.
What a chump.
Hat tip: BC