kateoplis:

AlJazeeraEnglish speaks to Slavoj Žižek, author of Living in the End Times, whom I quoted a few days ago:

AJ: Tony Blair spoke about the fact that the West needs to manage this situation and the transition. He seems to have a real serious fear as to what is happening. What do you make of that? Was he implying that the Egyptians or the Arabs are not worthy of democracy?

SZ: Well of course he wouldn’t say this openly, publicly, but I think his message, if one could read between the lines, is quite unambiguous. You know that wonderful French proverb: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, the more things change the more they stay the same? So it’s obvious that what Western powers -so far as they’re represented by Blair- want is some changes which will basically enable for the global situation to remain the same…

You know how, often in our multi-cultural era where we all are suspicious about Universalism, we like to hear how democracy as we understand it is something specifically Western, ‘you should understand different cultures,’ and so on. But what effected me tremendously when I was not only looking at the general picture in Cairo but listening to interviews with participants and protesters there, is how irrelevant this multi-cultural talk becomes. There, where we are fighting a tyrant, we are all Universalists. We are immediately in solidarity with each other. That’s how you build universal solidarity not with some stupid Unesco multi-cultural respect: “We respect your culture, you ours”. It’s the struggle for freedom.

Here we have a direct proof that a) freedom is universal and b) especially proof against that cynical idea that somehow Muslim crowds prefer religiously fundamentalist dictatorship, whatever. No!! What happened in Tunisia, what happens now in Egypt is precisely this Universal revolution for dignity, human rights, economic justice. This is Universalism at work.

… One protestor said, I’m proud to be Egyptian. I am proud for them. They gave us the lesson against this falsely respectful but basically racist prejudices: “Oh, Arabs have their specific culture; they cannot really get it”. They got it. They understand democracy by doing what they are doing better than we do in the West. 

Žižek was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is known as the “Elvis of cultural theory” and ran for Slovenia’s presidency in 1990. (thanks to the wonderful byronic)

(via headfullofid)