Some of you may have heard of Slavoj Žižek. Most, I suspect, have not. He’s from Slovenia and is what I would characterize as a philosophizing polymath who has written and lectured extensively on Marxism, political philosophy, and Lacanian psychoanalysis, amongst other things. Frankly, he’s pretty out there and whenever I have attempted to read his books, I find myself quickly in over my head. Either Žižek is hopelessly obtuse or I simply don’t possess the cerebral horsepower to keep up. I’m pretty sure it’s the latter.
Regardless, Žižek was in New York City recently and, after speaking with some of the Occupy Wall Street crowd, he gave a short interview with a writer for Harper’s magazine. What I found of particular interest were some comments he made regarding the modern Communist movement’s attempts to reconcile their political theory with the horrors of Stalinism. Here’s a portion of his comments excerpted from the piece published in Harper’s (http://harpers.org/archive/2011/11/hbc-90008306):
"Yes, horrible things were done in the name of communism, but it’s good to have a name to remind you of that. It’s good to be aware of the dangers. I claim that with all the anticommunism, we don’t really even have a good theory of how this mega-catastrophe called Stalinism could have happened. What went wrong? I don’t like those easy philosophical generalizations in the style of Karl Popper, who’s a Plato-totalitarian-whatever, and then Rousseau or whoever. My problem with liberal anticommunist historians is that if anything they are not critical enough [of the] Stalinist regime. Their explanation is typically liberal. They reduce it to bad people who wanted money, power, whatever.
Did you see the film that I always mention? The German one who got Oscar? Life of Others? Not severe enough, I claim. We have a bad minister who wants to have the wife of the writer, so he [gets] the Stasi to follow the writer, to get something from him to get rid of him to have fully the wife. But this still reduces Communist terror surveillance to a single bad guy with some private pathology, as if beneath every evil here is some evil person who wants money, power, sex, whatever. What the film doesn’t confront is that even if there were no corrupted minister, even if all Stasi agents were relatively honest, we would have exactly the same observation, control, and so on. Because the horror of Communism, Stalinism, is not that bad people do bad things — they always do. It’s that good people do horrible things thinking they are doing something great."
Perhaps that last statement is true of any form of government, our own included.
There will always be bad people doing bad things, seeking to subvert the system for their own gain.
The tragedy is when the good people, convinced that they are doing something great, invariably commit the worst injustices and inflict the greatest harm.
