"I see very dark clouds on the horizon" (Slavoj Zizek, 36' 11")
=>Silvio Berlusconi's videocracy makes an appearance at 38'30".
The clip-cum-Zizek' comment made me wonder:
- is Berlusconi really smart or are Italians, in general, really stupid?
- Perhaps more importantly: How much damage has the Italian left caused to the country?
It's really your fault, you idiots.
"I think Berlusconi is one option for our future" (Slavoj Zizek, 43' 07")
"Berlusconi is a step forward in combining" a seemingly neutral technocratic party and nationalistic populism. "He is, at the same time, a corrupted man and a populist"; he turns politics into "an empty spectacle", he "depoliticizes politics". His "systematic destruction of the minimal dignity of state authority" is unprecedented.
"Berlusconi, as everybody knows, is a living obscenity" (Slavoj Zizek, 43' 26")
"This is not just a joke. There's something very strange going on. It is as if the political power is discovering that it can work in a totally cynical way. Making a joke of itself. And so on and so on... But this is one side which shouldn't blind us for the other side of Berlusconi. Are we even aware that for over a year and a half now - from 2008 - Italy is formally in an emergency state?
Yes, in Italy, "emergency state" was proclaimed a one year and a half ago. Why? Because this measure renders it possible [for] the Italian government to deploy the army within the country. And so they started [a war] against the immigrants, then against the mafia in Napoli, then they want to use it in city parks and so on to prevent rapes, whatever...
And the shocking thing is how people accepted this...
This is an ominous image at our future.
Look at Italy if you want to see what out future authoritarianism will look. It's not the old-style authoritarianism where, all of a sudden, you awake up one morning and a voice tells you 'all the freedoms are suspended' and so on...
No. All the small individual freedoms are left to us. You can engage in sex, in all its perversions, consumerism... You can make fun of everything, life is one big public spectacle and so on. But, at the same time, beneath it, it's a new authoritarian state, to call it by its name. 'Groucho Marx' authoritarianism. Really.
Isn't Berlusconi something like Groucho Marx in Duck Soup?
This is our future, I claim" (Slavoj Zizek, 2010)
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