Slavoj Žižek: "Far from being a neutral benevolent mediator and guarantor of social stability, the Army instead stands for and embodies a certain social and political program—roughly speaking, integration into global-market, pro-Western, authoritarian capitalism. As such, the Army’s intervention is needed insofar as the majority is not ready to accept capitalism “democratically.” In contrast to the Army’s secular vision, the Muslim Brotherhood endeavors to impose a fundamentalist-religious rule. Both of these ideological visions exclude what the Arab Spring protesters stood for: economic solidarity and justice; democracy of active, engaged citizens. Although (almost) everyone enthusiastically supported the Tahrir Square democratic explosion, a hidden struggle to appropriate the meaning of the protests was quietly taking place. In the West, the official circles and most of the media celebrated Tahrir Square as similar to the “pro-democracy” velvet revolutions in Eastern Europe: a desire for Western liberal democracy, a desire to become like the West. But we shouldn’t be so fascinated by sublime moments of national unity. Rather, our focus should be on what happens the day after. How will this emancipatory explosion be translated into new social order? In the last decades, we witnessed a whole series of emancipatory popular explosions that were re-appropriated by the global capitalist order, either in its liberal form (from South Africa to Philippines) or in its fundamentalist form (Iran)."
Posted on: Sat, 24 Aug 2013 04:36:51 +0000
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