The axis of denial

To escape politics of denial, we cannot just cling to multi-party democracy but build social consensus

COMMENT | SLAVOJ ZIZEK | The wife of a drunkard is in bed with her lover when her husband unexpectedly stumbles in and climbs under the sheets. “Darling, I’m so drunk that I see six legs at the bottom of our bed,” he says. “Don’t worry,” she replies, “Just walk over to the door and look again from there.” When he does, he is relieved. “You’re right, there are only four legs!”

This joke may be vulgar, but it touches on an important phenomenon. Generally, you expect to see a situation more clearly from the outside than when you are immersed in it. But sometimes, it is precisely this external position that blinds you to the truth. In the joke, the husband’s exclusion (standing by the door) creates a false sense of inclusion in which he confuses the lover’s legs with his own.

One finds a similar dynamic in the West’s support for Ukraine. We turn a blind eye to the fact that a domestic clique of oligarchs will likely emerge as the biggest winner of the Ukrainian struggle. Yet we should not be surprised if post-war Ukraine turns out similar to pre-war Ukraine, a place corrupted by oligarchy and colonised by big Western corporations that control the best land and natural resources. While we make our own sacrifices for the war effort, we fail to see that the gains will be appropriated by others, just like the drunkard who mistakes another man’s feet for his own perhaps because, deep down, he does not want to acknowledge the truth.

Can we avoid this trap? On June 20-22, 2023, the pan-European organisation Europe, a Patient held discussions in London on the need to protect Ukrainian communities from economic exploitation after the war. Such initiatives are needed more than ever, because support for Ukrainian defense must go hand in hand with ecological and social-justice concerns. All are equally important for the country’s future. For example, we can support Ukraine fully only if we also free it from the grip of the fossil-fuel industry, which relies on Russian oil.

The combination of military, environmental, and socioeconomic struggles is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Matters of war and ecology collided dramatically with the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam near Kherson in early June.

But Ukraine is hardly alone. Around the same time, wildfires in Canada ended up smothering New York City under a cloud of brown smoke, giving the city’s residents a taste of what people across the Global South know all too well. While paying lip service to the climate crisis and ecological breakdown, rich Western countries continue to do little about them.

This blinkered perspective is not confined to the right and the corporate sector. Many on the left today claim to support peace while favoring compromise with brutal, revisionist authoritarian regimes.

To understand this “pacifist” opposition, we should return to the situation at the beginning of World War II, when there was also a right-left coalition opposing U.S. involvement in foreign wars. Then as now, the “pacifists” argued that the situation in Europe did not concern America. They harbored strange sympathies for the aggressor, and they claimed that going to war would merely enrich the military-industrial complex. When Nazi Germany told the United Kingdom, in the summer of 1940, that it wanted peace, they thought Britain should have accepted Hitler’s generous offer.

Like all good lies, this one contains some grains of truth. The American conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan offered a version of this argument in 2008, arguing that if Winston Churchill had accepted Hitler’s 1940 offer, the Holocaust would have been less severe.

Moreover, just as Churchill led the British Empire to ruin by causing unnecessary wars with Germany, the argument goes, U.S. President George W. Bush led the United States to ruin by following Churchill’s example. Like many on the left, Buchanan does not believe the U.S. should offer guarantees to countries where it has no vital interests.

One hears a new variation of this motif in the context of the Ukraine war. Supposedly, the Soviet Union’s disintegration had the same effect as the Versailles Treaty: it created a predictable desire for revenge against the victors of the last war.

As in the past, this new right-left alliance is guided by conspiracy theories, like those peddled about vaccines by Robert Kennedy, Jr., and Donald Trump’s followers. It denounces anti-COVID measures as an instrument of control. It rejects helping Ukraine, since that would serve the NATO military-industrial complex. And in a model case of denial, it dismisses the biggest threats we face as mere ploys by big corporations to exploit the working class.

The politics of denial of seeing only four legs is, of course, overtly optimistic. It implies that we do not have to address any new dangers; we can carry on as if they do not exist. It is a product of populism on both the left and the right, and it is one of the main reasons why we are now in a “democratic recession.” As Grace Blakely of Tribune observes, “Authoritarianism is on the rise despite the liberal prediction that the spread of free markets would result in more democracy that’s because capitalism will always defend social hierarchies against the threat of economic equality.”

One can take this claim further: the threat to democracy comes also from the false populist resistance to corporate capitalism, which is epitomised by the “pacifist” left’s rejection of support for Ukraine on the grounds that it will “merely” benefit defense contractors. After all, Ukraine has already long been colonised by Western corporations, and only through a “green,” equitable reconstruction will it ever be liberated.

To escape our predicament, we cannot just cling to multi-party liberal democracy. Rather, we must find new ways of building social consensus and establishing active links between political parties and civil society. The immediate task is to oppose the new left-right populists, and that may require aligning with exponents of capitalist liberal democracy  just as WWII-era Communists fought alongside Western “imperialist” democracies against Fascism, knowing full well that imperialism was their ultimate enemy. These were strange bedfellows, but they at least could see what was really going on.

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Slavoj Žižek, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School, is International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London and the author, most recently, of ` Heaven in Disorder’ (OR Books, 2021).

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2023.