“They saw their injured country's woe;
The flaming town, the wasted field;
Then rushed to meet the insulting foe;
They took the spear, - but left the shield.”
―Philip Freneau
.
And by a prudent flight and cunning save A life which valour could not, from the grave. A better buckler I can soon regain, But who can get another life again?
Archilochus
Now THIS is Zizek's true metier, if that word means what i think it does.
He SOUNDS well when he speaks, but he READS very poorly –– meaning his prose is dense, turgid and all-but indecipherable.
He an the late Ayn Rand have that in common. She too was filled with fascinating ideas and passionate convictions, but to describe the dialogue in her novels as wooden would be much too kind and frankly indulgent.
And now for making minced meat of Slavoj's obsessive kvetching about the 'left and white guilt'. Here he seems almost torturously to be pandering to the right. Ask complicated questions and occasionally you burp through your posterior, of course.
No left person believes that the sins of the fathers are passed on to the sons. No one alive is responsible for past colonialism, European imperialism or various forms of slavery.
I don't feel guilty for the atrocities committed by Leopold II and his henchmen in the Congo. I wasn't there and didn't do it.
As regards that SA friend of his, clearly he/she (and maybe Slavoj himself?) doesn't understand how Belgian racialising of Rwandan Hutus and Tutsis facilitated the genocide, so much later.
I'm sure that Hutus and Tustsi were quite capable of killing each other over stupid and insignificant things LONG before the white man showed up. The Mohawks and Huron here in North America simply took advantage of the more advanced weaponry that the Dutch, French and English colonists were able to provide to slaughter each other.
Artificially creating two 'nationalities' on the same plot of land just adds another reason.
From a scientific point of view, would you rather experiment in a laboratory where you could control the variables, or on the street where you couldn't?
6 comments:
Now THIS is Zizek's true metier, if that word means what i think it does.
He SOUNDS well when he speaks, but he READS very poorly –– meaning his prose is dense, turgid and all-but indecipherable.
He an the late Ayn Rand have that in common. She too was filled with fascinating ideas and passionate convictions, but to describe the dialogue in her novels as wooden would be much too kind and frankly indulgent.
He's a prof, FT, NOT a novelist.
And now for making minced meat of Slavoj's obsessive kvetching about the 'left and white guilt'. Here he seems almost torturously to be pandering to the right. Ask complicated questions and occasionally you burp through your posterior, of course.
No left person believes that the sins of the fathers are passed on to the sons. No one alive is responsible for past colonialism, European imperialism or various forms of slavery.
I don't feel guilty for the atrocities committed by Leopold II and his henchmen in the Congo. I wasn't there and didn't do it.
As regards that SA friend of his, clearly he/she (and maybe Slavoj himself?) doesn't understand how Belgian racialising of Rwandan Hutus and Tutsis facilitated the genocide, so much later.
I'm sure that Hutus and Tustsi were quite capable of killing each other over stupid and insignificant things LONG before the white man showed up. The Mohawks and Huron here in North America simply took advantage of the more advanced weaponry that the Dutch, French and English colonists were able to provide to slaughter each other.
We're all capable of killing each other for very stupid reasons, no doubt.
Artificially creating two 'nationalities' on the same plot of land just adds another reason.
Artificially creating two 'nationalities' on the same plot of land just adds another reason.
From a scientific point of view, would you rather experiment in a laboratory where you could control the variables, or on the street where you couldn't?
Post a Comment