By Huw Lemmey / 27 April 2012
It was bound to end in disaster: two ideologues, one a
communist and the other a neo-conservative, “do battle” over a skype link from
a house in England where Assange is held under house arrest.
“You are a supporter of the closest thing we have to
Nazism, which was a utopian idea, in the Middle-East! You support the
Palestinians!” rails Horowitz in his opening statement. “I don't see anything
to distinguish the Palestinians, who want to kill the Jews, from the Nazis.” It
becomes clear almost immediately that, perhaps, this debate will generate more
heat than light. But Žižek is in no mood to get burned, at one point needing to
be physically restrained by Assange. Both sides accuse the other of being
Nazis, and further accusations flung at public figures. Horowitz doesn't hold
his tongue:
“Europe is a cultural theme park. It is insignificant.
That's what the welfare state did — it took Europe out of the picture ... The
Swedes have no morals”
His choicest morsels of opprobrium are reserved for
Obama, however: “You've got a leftist in the White House, a guy who was brought
up and trained by communists, whose whole political career was in the communist
left”. This point is the most contested by Žižek: “In what meaningful sense is
[Obama] a communist?”
Horowitz: "The United States is crippled in part
because the Commander-in-Chief is a leftist!"
Žižek: "Here I respectfully disagree... if the
United States still have a certain attraction and so on to the world, it is because
of people like Obama!"
The circus continues, but perhaps the sanest moment lies
in Žižek's last words, as the credits roll: “This was madness”.
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