The true danger

In the last few years, troubles in our global-capitalist paradise have exploded at four levels, with four figures of the enemy: the renewed fundamentalist-terrorist threat (the declaration of war against ISIS, Boko Haram …); geo-political tensions with and between non-European new powers (China and especially Russia); the rise of new radical emancipatory movements in Europe (Greece and Spain, for the time being); the flow of refugees crossing the Wall that separates ‘Us’ from ‘Them’, thereby ‘posing a threat to our way of life’. It is crucial to see these threats in their interconnection — not in the sense that they are the four faces of the same enemy, but in the sense that they express aspects of the same immanent ‘contradiction’ of global capitalism. Although fundamentalism and the flow of refugees appear as the most threatening of the four (is ISIS not a brutal denial of our civilized values?), the tensions with Russia pose a much more serious danger to peace in Europe, while movements like Syriza prior to its capitulation undermine from within global capitalism in its neo-liberal version. But there should be no misunderstanding here: Western powers can easily co-exist with fundamentalist regimes; while in the case of Putin, the problem is how to contain Russia in geo-political terms (recall that his rise is the result of the catastrophic Yeltsin years marked by corruption, the years when Western economic advisors helped to humiliate Russia and to bring it to ruin). So although the US formally declared war on ISIS, and although there is constant talk about the threat of a war with Russia, the true danger are the moderate and ‘gentle’ new emancipatory movements from Syriza in Greece to the followers of Bernie Sanders in the US, and their putative radicalization.

—Slavoj Žižek, The Courage of Hopelessness, (London: Penguin, 2018), xii.