If Satellites were Visible in the Night Sky...

Slavoj Zizek, "Vladimir Putin wants a holy war, do the Russians want it too?" (by Google Translate)

Actor and singer Ivan Okhlobystin made a diatribe at a rally on Red Square. Here is the analysis by our columnist Slavoj Zizek.

"Kopi Luwak" is the world's most expensive coffee, and it's literally made from poop: coffee beans that are partially digested and then excreted by the civet, a cat-like animal that lives in Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The civet's digestive enzymes change the structure of the proteins in the coffee beans, removing some of the acidity and making the coffee milder. It is mainly made in Indonesia.

In the Us , a cup of kopi luwak can cost as much as $80. Isn't today's new right-wing populist ideology, both in the US and in Russia , a kind of ideological kopi luwak? Old ideas, some of which are even respectable (like the critique of the exploitation of ordinary people by the financial elite), are being processed and turned into shit by today's monkeys.

Lukashenko wants to cleanse the West

So, isn't the best metaphor for today's Russian and Belarusian ideological propaganda that their leaders and ideologues, as civet cats, devour some noble parts of our emancipatory tradition (anti-fascist and anti-racist struggle, rejection of our commercialized and hedonistic way of life, struggle against the financial elites, the efforts to clean up the remnants of colonization...) by allowing their neo-fascist digestive enzymes to cleanse away the radical acidity of the emancipatory tradition they've swallowed, so that tradition is pooped out as a piece of shit that fits neatly into the existing global system , even though they present themselves as its destruction?

Lukashenko recently called on "forgetful Europe" to undergo moral cleansing for the (fascist) sins of its grandfathers and fathers. The real purpose of this moral call, however, is precisely to shed the radical emancipatory tradition that is at the heart of Europe. No wonder such calls for moral cleansing lead to indiscriminate outbursts of pure destructiveness.

The Russians want Holy War

As noted by Peter Sloterdijk , European civilization begins with Homer's "Iliad," which begins with the line about anger: "Achilles' wrath, for Greece the terrible source / Uncounted sorrows, heavenly goddess, sing!" (Another translation reads : "Anger goddess, sing the anger of Peleus' son Achilles, murderous, damned, / who cost the Achaeans untold losses.") Then the first line of a poem about the end of Europe will read as follows: "Sing the anger of President Putin , murderous, fateful, which cost Europe countless losses"?

Recent public events in Russia put a name to this anger: at a large gathering in Red Square celebrating the annexation of parts of Ukraine to Russia, actor and singer Ivan Okhlobystin delivered a diatribe, ending with the words: " We should call it a holy war! Holy was! In Russian there is an old word: Goida. Goda is a call for immediate action. We need such a war cry today! Goda, brothers and sisters! Goda! Fear us, people of the old world! Without beauty, without faith, without wisdom! A world ruled by lunatics, perverts and satanists! Fear us: WE COME! GOIDA!!!"

The crowd consisted mostly of state officials 

Gojda means, especially today: Let's go! Don't think, just obey and do! It's not only an old Russian word, but also a word that was a rallying cry of the oprichniki, Ivan the Terrible's private army, known for terrorizing his enemies (real and imagined), so it's clearly ruthless terror, torture and killing implied.

Incidentally, the only speech that has a similar tone to Ochlobystin's is Goebbels ' infamous "total war" speech, which he gave in Berlin in early 1943 after the defeat of Stalingrad . A world of lunatics, perverts and satanists devoid of beauty, faith and wisdom is indeed an adequate description of Putin's world. However, it must be added that the celebration in Red Square was a sham: the crowd consisted mostly of state officials who were brought there by buses, and most of them reacted to Okhlobystin's speech not with enthusiasm but with indifference and fear (applause and shouts were added later by the TV studio).

However, we should not be fooled: the fact that the war calls of Putin and his clique do not have the support of the majority makes them potentially even more dangerous: as we all know (and fear), such a desperate situation can lead to a unleash global war to maintain their power. General Sergey Surovikin, the new commander of the Russian armed forces in Ukraine, immediately made it clear what this "Goyda!" will look like: he is destroying the infrastructure of large cities with rockets and killing civilians indiscriminately (the same thing Surovkin was doing in Aleppo when he Syria "liberated"). There is a supreme irony in the fact that "surov" in Slovene (and some other Slavic languages) means "crude, brutal, cruel".