The "comunavirus" has broken out: Ernesto Araújo criticises communist Slavoj Žižek
The Coronavirus makes us wake up in the communist nightmare again
The "comunavirus" has broken out. Slavoj Žižek, one of today's most important Marxist theorists, shows this in his booklet "Virus", which was recently published in Italy. The Brazilian Foreign Minister has taken a stand on this.
The "comunavirus" has broken out. Slavoj Žižek, one of the most important Marxist theoreticians of today, shows this in his pamphlet "Virus", recently published in Italy (*). Žižek reveals what the Marxists have concealed for thirty years: Globalism is replacing socialism as the preparatory stage for communism. For him, the coronavirus pandemic represents an immense opportunity to build a world order without nations and without freedom.
The Minister quotes and comments below on some passages from Žižek's booklet, that masterpiece of roguish naivety, which surrenders unveiled to the communist-globalist game that the current pandemic is appropriating to completely undermine liberal democracy and the market economy, enslaving people and turning them into automatons with no spiritual dimension, easily controlled. The minister quoted:
"I hope that a different and much more beneficial ideological virus will spread, and we can only hope that it will infect us: a virus that will make us imagine an alternative society, a society that goes beyond the nation state and materialises in the form of global solidarity and cooperation."
"One thing is certain: new walls and other quarantines will not solve the problem. What will work is solidarity and a coordinated response on a global scale, a new form of what was once called 'communism'."
The Minister comments that Žižek does not hide his desire and conviction that a virus "different and more useful" than the coronavirus, an ideological virus, will infect the world and enable the construction of communism in an unexpected way. He is not even interested in what works or does not work to fight the coronavirus, the quarantine or the closing of the borders, because the aim is not to defeat the disease but to use it as a way down to hell, whose doors seemed blocked since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but which finally opened again. All in the name of "solidarity", of course, just as in Orwell's 1984 universe, systematic oppression is in the hands of the "Ministry of Love". Those who want to defend their basic freedoms, those who want to continue living in a nation state, lack the basic duty of "solidarity".
"A first and vague model of such coordination on a global level is represented by the World Health Organisation (WHO) (...) Greater powers are given to other organisations of this kind", Žižek continues.
Of course, the fact does not escape Žižek, as Minister Ernesto Araujo points out, that the WHO is currently becoming very useful for the cause of denationalisation, one of the preconditions of communism. The transfer of national powers to the WHO under the pretext that a centralised international body is more efficient than individual countries in dealing with problems (which has never been proved) is only the first step in building global communist solidarity. Following the same model, power should also be transferred to other organisations, each in its own sphere. Žižek does not specify this, but probably he has in mind a global industrial policy dictated by UNIDO, a global education programme controlled by UNESCO and so on.
"Doesn't all this clearly show the urgent need for a reorganisation of the world economy, which is no longer subject to market mechanisms? And here, of course, we are not talking about the communism of old, but about some kind of global organisation that can control and regulate the economy, and which can also limit the sovereignty of nation states when necessary."
Yes, comments Ernesto Araújo, it is not the communism of yesteryear that installed, sometimes in one country, sometimes in another, a central economic planning system that always failed to provide prosperity but always successfully controlled and oppressed society. It is now a global central planning system that would surely bring the same failure (in terms of prosperity) and success (in terms of oppression) to this model when it was applied at the national level in the past.
"Many moderate, left-leaning progressive commentators have revealed how the coronavirus epidemic lends itself to justifying and legitimising the imposition of control and disciplinary measures on people that were previously unthinkable within the framework of Western democratic societies."
Among these commentators, Žižek mentions Giorgio Agamben, a left philosopher who is apparently not Marxist, who wrote with great concern about the curtailment of freedoms that was taking place and who saw the reaction to the pandemic as greatly exaggerated panic (**). But what these commentators see with concern, Žižek receives with jubilation, and he calls the chapter in which he treats this
topic precisely: "Observe and punish? Yes, please!"
"Observe and punish? Yes, please!"
Žižek is, of course, referring to the title of Michel Foucault's 1975 book, "Surveiller et Punir" in the original, which described the evolution of the prisons of the 19th century into the prisons without bars of the Western postmodern society of control.
"It is not surprising that, at least so far, China - which was already largely deploying digitised social control systems - has proved best equipped to deal with the catastrophic epidemic. Should we perhaps infer from this that China, at least in some respects, represents our future? Are we not approaching a global state of emergency?"
"But if this [the Chinese model] is not the communism I have in mind, what do I mean by communism? To understand it, just read the WHO statements."
Minister Ernesto Araújo shows that Žižek has an ambiguous attitude towards China. He admires what he sees as Chinese success in social control, but at the same time he seems reluctant to identify his own conception of communism with the Chinese regime, perhaps because communism ultimately calls for the end of the state, whereas China represents a strong state model that communism seeks to overcome. It is this non-state, this zero degree of the state that corresponds to the maximum degree of power, that Žižek will seek in international bodies, which in his vision would allow totalitarian exercise without a totalising entity, a rigid but diffuse superpower exercised in the name of "solidarity" and therefore unassailable - for who would dare oppose solidarity? "Solidarity" is another noble and worthy concept that the left intends to hijack and pervert, to corrupt from within to serve their libertarian ends. They have done or tried to do the same with the concepts of justice, tolerance, human rights, with the very concept of freedom.
"It is not a utopian communist vision, it is a communism imposed by the exigencies of pure survival. It is a variant of 'war communism', as the measures taken by the Soviet Union from 1918 onwards were called."
Žižek seems to think: "Don't worry about it. There is nothing ideological about what I am proposing. I am only guided by the pragmatism of those who want to save humanity, and at this moment pragmatism dictates the option for a communist system, but it is an emergency communism, that's all." Then we would ask: "And when will this emergency be over? When will this state of emergency end?" Žižek would possibly answer with a smile full of "solidarity": "The state of emergency will last forever".
Žižek is not worried about the outcome of the quarantine to contain the coronavirus, he is not worried about containing the coronavirus, but about favouring the infection of the other virus, which he himself calls the ideological virus, a "different and much more useful" virus. He praises quarantine precisely because of its destructive potential. His dream world is Wuhan under quarantine:
"...a ghost town, the shops with open doors and no customers, only here and there a person on foot or a car, individuals in white masks (...) convey the image of a non-consumerist world at peace with itself."
In Žižek's thought, a world "at peace with itself" is achieved at the price of destroying jobs that enable millions upon millions of people to survive in dignity and with minimal autonomy, at the price of dismantling their freedom and livelihood. Communism has always declared that its goal is peace and the emancipation of all humanity. There, in a deserted city, without work, without life, where everyone is a prisoner in his own cubicle, under the supervision of a supreme authority that is not even the government of his own country (which, dictatorial as it may be, still has a face and a flag), but an anonymous and unreachable global agency, there lies the perfect configuration of peace and communist emancipation.
But the parallel with Nazism is perhaps an even more shocking passage in his book:
"'Arbeit Macht Frei' is still the right motto, despite the terrible use the Nazis made of it."
Here Žižek repeats the motto written on the doorstep of the Auschwitz concentration camp, the cynical, perverse statement that "work liberates". According to Žižek, then, the Nazis did not make mistakes in content, but only mistakes in the use of this expression (those who still do not believe that Nazism is only a diversion from communist utopia and not its opposite may find here an important element of reflection). According to this exponent of Marxism, "work makes free" is the "correct motto" of the new era of global solidarity that is coming as a result of the pandemic, and what distinguishes this new world from the Auschwitz camp is that this terrible lie, which perverts and degrades two sacred values of humanity, work and freedom, is now being put to good use. The communists will not repeat the mistake of the Nazis, and this time they will make the right use of it. Perhaps by convincing people that it is for their own good that they are imprisoned in this concentration camp and deprived of their dignity and freedom. It occurs to me to propose a definition: the Nazi is a communist who has not bothered to deceive his victims.
"Is not the human mind perhaps also a kind of virus that acts as a parasite on the human animal, using it for reproduction and sometimes even threatening to destroy it? And if it is true that the medium of the spirit is language, would it not be appropriate to consider that language is also, at a more elementary level, something mechanical, a simple matter of rules that we must learn and respect?"
I have always maintained - according to Minister Ernesto Araújo - that the mastery of language in order to destroy it as a means of thinking or of the spirit, as Žižek also says, is one of the great aims of communism, to destroy the spiritual dimension of man and thus to subjugate him completely. If the spirit lives in language and language is only rules to be learned and respected (yes, respected!), this means that language, like social behaviour in quarantine, is subjected to the mechanisms of "watching and punishing".
So it was with the rules of political correctness. Now political correctness also includes sanitary correctness, which is certainly more powerful. Sanitary correctness grabs you, ties you up and threatens you: "If you say this or that, you endanger the whole society, if you utter the word freedom, you are a subversive who can drive your whole population to death - so respect the rules."
Control the language to kill the mind
Control the language to kill the mind, that is the essence of communism today, that communism which has suddenly found in the coronavirus a treasure of oppression.
I have also said, and I repeat, the Minister adds: the real enemy that communism wants to slaughter is not capitalism, the enemy of communism is the human spirit in its complexity and beauty. It is the human spirit that Žižek's ideological virus sought to destroy.
One question arises after reading this totalitarian programme full of defiance and hypocrisy: should Žižek be taken seriously? Very seriously.
Žižek is probably the most widely read Marxist writer of the last thirty years. He influences "progressive" faculties and intellectual circles around the world, which in turn influence the media, which in turn influences politicians who make decisions that they are often unaware of the ideological root of the "pragmatic" concepts that guide them. What distinguishes Žižek from many of his peers is that he states openly what others hide between the lines.
In short, Žižek explains what had been prepared thirty years ago, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, when communism did not disappear but only provided itself with new instruments: Globalism is the new path of communism. The virus indeed appears as an immense opportunity to accelerate the globalist project. It has already been carried out through climatism or climate alarmism, gender ideology, politically correct dogmatism, immigrationism, the reorganisation of society according to the principle of race, anti-nationalism and scientism. They are efficient instruments, but the pandemic, which confronts individuals and societies with the panic of impending death, represents an exponentialisation of all.
Under the pretext of the pandemic, the new communism is trying to build a world without nations, without freedom, without spirit, led by a central "solidarity" agency in charge of surveillance and punishment. A permanent global state of emergency that is turning the world into one big concentration camp.
Faced with this, we must fight for the health of the body and the health of the human spirit, against the coronavirus, but also against the comunavirus, which is trying to take advantage of the destructive opportunity that the coronavirus, a parasite of the parasite, opens up.
(*) Žižek, Slavoj. Virus. Milan, All Grazie Bridge, 2020 (Fifth digital edition.) (The translation of all quoted texts from Italian into Portuguese is by Ernesto Araújo).
(**) Agamben, Giorgio. "Lo stato d'eccezione provocato da un'emergenza immotivata". Il Manifesto - Quotidiano Comunista, 26.02.2020.
Translation from Portuguese. The text by our Brazilian author refers to a contribution by Ernesto Araújo, the current Brazilian Foreign Minister, who in turn comments on a text by Slavoj Žižek. The minister published his text on his official Twitter account. The quotes in bold are from Slavoj Žižek's essay.
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