9/8/15 Slavoj Žižek · Save us from the saviours: Europe and the Greeks · LRB 7 June 2012

www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n11/slavoj-zizek/save-us-from-the-saviours 1/2

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Slavoj Žižek is a

researcher at Birkbeck

College, University of

London, and the

author of Absolute

Recoil and Trouble in

Paradise.

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Vol. 34 No. 11 · 7 June 2012

page 13 | 1285 words

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Save us from the savioursSlavoj Žižek on Europe and the Greeks

Imagine a scene from a dystopian movie that depicts our society in the near future.

Uniformed guards patrol half-empty downtown streets at night, on the prowl for

immigrants, criminals and vagrants. Those they find are brutalised. What seems like a

fanciful Hollywood image is a reality in today’s Greece. At night, black-shirted

vigilantes from the Holocaust-denying neo-fascist Golden Dawn movement – which

won 7 per cent of the vote in the last round of elections, and had the support, it’s said,

of 50 per cent of the Athenian police – have been patrolling the street and beating up

all the immigrants they can find: Afghans, Pakistanis, Algerians. So this is how Europe

is defended in the spring of 2012.

The trouble with defending European civilisation against the immigrant threat is that

the ferocity of the defence is more of a threat to ‘civilisation’ than any number of

Muslims. With friendly defenders like this, Europe needs no enemies. A hundred years

ago, G.K. Chesterton articulated the deadlock in which critics of religion find

themselves: ‘Men who begin to fight the Church for the sake of freedom and humanity

end by flinging away freedom and humanity if only they may fight the Church … The

secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular

things, if that is any comfort to them.’ Many liberal warriors are so eager to fight anti-

democratic fundamentalism that they end up dispensing with freedom and democracy

if only they may fight terror. If the ‘terrorists’ are ready to wreck this world for love of

another, our warriors against terror are ready to wreck democracy out of hatred for

the Muslim other. Some of them love human dignity so much that they are ready to

legalise torture to defend it. It’s an inversion of the process by which fanatical

defenders of religion start out by attacking contemporary secular culture and end up

sacrificing their own religious credentials in their eagerness to eradicate the aspects of

secularism they hate.

But Greece’s anti-immigrant defenders aren’t the principal danger: they are just a by-

product of the true threat, the politics of austerity that have caused Greece’s

predicament. The next round of Greek elections will be held on 17 June. The European

establishment warns us that these elections are crucial: not only the fate of Greece, but

maybe the fate of the whole of Europe is in the balance. One outcome – the right one,

they argue – would allow the painful but necessary process of recovery through

austerity to continue. The alternative – if the ‘extreme leftist’ Syriza party wins –

would be a vote for chaos, the end of the (European) world as we know it.

The prophets of doom are right, but not in the way they intend. Critics of our current

democratic arrangements complain that elections don’t offer a true choice: what we get

instead is the choice between a centre-right and a centre-left party whose programmes

are almost indistinguishable. On 17 June, there will be a real choice: the establishment

(New Democracy and Pasok) on one side, Syriza on the other. And, as is usually the

case when a real choice is on offer, the establishment is in a panic: chaos, poverty and

violence will follow, they say, if the wrong choice is made. The mere possibility of a

Syriza victory is said to have sent ripples of fear through global markets. Ideological

prosopopoeia has its day: markets talk as if they were persons, expressing their ‘worry’

at what will happen if the elections fail to produce a government with a mandate to

persist with the EU-IMF programme of fiscal austerity and structural reform. The

citizens of Greece have no time to worry about these prospects: they have enough to

worry about in their everyday lives, which are becoming miserable to a degree unseen

in Europe for decades.

Such predictions are self-fulfilling, causing panic and thus bringing about the very

eventualities they warn against. If Syriza wins, the European establishment will hope

that we learn the hard way what happens when an attempt is made to interrupt the

vicious cycle of mutual complicity between Brussels’s technocracy and anti-immigrant

populism. This is why Alexis Tsipras, Syriza’s leader, made clear in a recent interview

that his first priority, should Syriza win, will be to counteract panic: ‘People will

conquer fear. They will not succumb; they will not be blackmailed.’ Syriza have an

almost impossible task. Theirs is not the voice of extreme left ‘madness’, but of reason

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9/8/15 Slavoj Žižek · Save us from the saviours: Europe and the Greeks · LRB 7 June 2012

www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n11/slavoj-zizek/save-us-from-the-saviours 2/2

In Athens

19 OCTOBER 1995

James MillerThinking without a

Banister

12 MAY 1994

Terry EagletonIn the Twilight Zone

27 SEPTEMBER 1990

Noël AnnanDiary

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Politics and economics,

Economic theory ,

Political theory , 2000-

present, 2011-2012,

Europe, Southern

Europe, Greece, Western

Europe, Germany ,

Recession

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speaking out against the madness of market ideology. In their readiness to take over,

they have banished the left’s fear of taking power; they have the courage to clear up the

mess created by others. They will need to exercise a formidable combination of

principle and pragmatism, of democratic commitment and a readiness to act quickly

and decisively where needed. If they are to have even a minimal chance of success,

they will need an all-European display of solidarity: not only decent treatment on the

part of every other European country, but also more creative ideas, like the promotion

of solidarity tourism this summer.

In his Notes towards the Definition of Culture, T.S. Eliot remarked that there are

moments when the only choice is between heresy and non-belief – i.e., when the only

way to keep a religion alive is to perform a sectarian split. This is the position in

Europe today. Only a new ‘heresy’ – represented at this moment by Syriza – can save

what is worth saving of the European legacy: democracy, trust in people, egalitarian

solidarity etc. The Europe we will end up with if Syriza is outmanoeuvred is a ‘Europe

with Asian values’ – which, of course, has nothing to do with Asia, but everything to do

with the tendency of contemporary capitalism to suspend democracy.

Here is the paradox that sustains the ‘free vote’ in democratic societies: one is free to

choose on condition that one makes the right choice. This is why, when the wrong

choice is made (as it was when Ireland rejected the EU constitution), the choice is

treated as a mistake, and the establishment immediately demands that the ‘democratic’

process be repeated in order that the mistake may be corrected. When George

Papandreou, then Greek prime minister, proposed a referendum on the eurozone

bailout deal at the end of last year, the referendum itself was rejected as a false choice.

There are two main stories about the Greek crisis in the media: the German-European

story (the Greeks are irresponsible, lazy, free-spending, tax-dodging etc, and have to

be brought under control and taught financial discipline) and the Greek story (our

national sovereignty is threatened by the neoliberal technocracy imposed by Brussels).

When it became impossible to ignore the plight of the Greek people, a third story

emerged: the Greeks are now presented as humanitarian victims in need of help, as if a

war or natural catastrophe had hit the country. While all three stories are false, the

third is arguably the most disgusting. The Greeks are not passive victims: they are at

war with the European economic establishment, and what they need is solidarity in

their struggle, because it is our struggle too.

Greece is not an exception. It is one of the main testing grounds for a new socio-

economic model of potentially unlimited application: a depoliticised technocracy in

which bankers and other experts are allowed to demolish democracy. By saving Greece

from its so-called saviours, we also save Europe itself.

25 May

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