Thanks Zizek

  • lxvi
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    11
    ·
    2 years ago

    Americans don’t give a fuck about Ukraine. Nobody wants to go to war with Russia over Ukraine. This article talking about redefining terms and redrawing lines. This whole article is an art of what it critizes. The terms are that Americans don’t want to go to war with Russia. The red line is America antagonizing the Russians. Ukraine doesn’t even have to be mentioned. Americans don’t care. The majority opinion hasn’t moved from where it was a century ago; “let Europe go to War with Europe. They are European affairs”

    • CountryBreakfastOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      I kind of disagree that Americans dont want to go to war with Russia. Sure they dont “care” about Ukraine but Ukraine isnt really the issue and Americans dont care about any country anyway, and many just care about the integrity of their own exceptionalism and if that takes nuking east Europe and Asia then that is frankly on the table. The issue is Russia but Ukraine is, along with Trump, one of the many moral entanglements that US politicial discourse is capitalizing on. Russia is seen as the one sending us on a path towards a “just” war. When have Americans wasted a good casus belli? This idea that we just want European problems to stay in Europe has been so thoroughly underminded by the last 100 years of history that im surprised it still gets brought up.

      • lxvi
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        2 years ago

        You’d have a point if Americans marched to the drums of the Capitol, but they don’t. There’s a reason the US doesn’t bring their wars to a vote. They aren’t popular.

        • CountryBreakfastOP
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          2 years ago

          They are unpopular for intra-bourgeoisie reasons. Not out of anti-imperialist or decolonial aspirations.

          • lxvi
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            2 years ago

            No doubt. I think Americans are far from class conscious. I think war is unpopular nevertheless. It’s easy to believe certain things because of how they’re portrayed by the media, but the media presents a completely false reality. Not only are they lying but the foundations on which those lies are built are also lies.

            • CountryBreakfastOP
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              3
              ·
              edit-2
              2 years ago

              Yeah I think its basically an entire cultural lense that grew from colonialism and imperialism and it interprets information in a way that reproduces itself. Its like a capitalist cosmology. From my experience, to break out of it I had to basically recognize and admit I was born of a nation that is a long festering, highly developed, disease of history and has completely wrecked the entire ecology of the planet. When I first was interested in class and Lenin I did not yet understand my own place in the class system but ML thinking as well as decolonial thinking has given me a chance to put it together more clearly.

              Not easy to admit the entire process that defines you has brought the apocalypse but if someone wont do that, then I doubt they can understand proletarian revolutionary class consciousness because the global class system doesn’t easily develop proletarian class consciousness in the US by design. Even with the present downturn and the major contradictions, working people in the US are better off than most of the rest of the world and this combined with colonial cosmology is what crystalizes the embourgiousiement of the US working class into a political weapon that is used to reproduce the global class system.

              Thank you for coming to my Tedx talk

              • lxvi
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                2
                ·
                2 years ago

                Haha great Ted Talk. I don’t have anything to add, but very well put.