COMMUNIST IDEALS IN EASTERN EUROPE: ALIVE, CINEMATIC AND PRÊT A PORTER

Written by  Ioana Burtea

http://www.europeandme.eu/sixthsense/item/259-communist-ideals-in-eastern-europe-alive-cinematic-and-pr%C3%AAt-a-porter

Slavoj Zizek’s new film, The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (official website), is meant to be a wake-up call, not a propaganda film. While most things we see on the big screens are idealised, romanticised, stereotypical versions of reality (and especially of morality), the "big problems" eat away at us because public opinion avoids tackling them. This is especially true for Eastern Europe, where years of dictatorial regimes taught the population to not ask too many questions and less than 25 years of democracy haven’t yet produced a particularly opinionated generation. In several short scenes, Zizek, the Slovenian philosopher, film-maker and the protagonist of the movie, uses examples from film, music, history and current events to discuss various ideologies.

One of the fascinating points Zizek makes in the film is how the financial crisis became a source of violent outbursts and protest movements across Europe. He believes Europe no longer faces "an accident", something that can be fixed, but rather is undergoing a structural phenomenon. Crisis has become a way of life, with the poor getting poorer and the rich getting richer until the poor act out. What these protests lack, though he says, is a coherent agenda. Putting it this way, most of the manifestations of protest in Europe, including the Eastern countries, have been nothing but rage episodes or wannabe-copies of what a public manifestation should look like. 

Slavoj Zizek's film is proof of a larger phenomenon - a modern version of communism becoming fashionable.

And Zizek may have a point. In May 2010, one of the biggest Romanian protests of the past decade took place in Bucharest. Over 30,000 people protested against the Emil Boc government and the austerity measures he had implemented. Far from touching on any violent frustration, the protest turned into what will be remembered as one of the largest-scale dance parties in Eastern Europe. People performed carefully synchronised choreographies on a well-known Romanian party-classic: the Penguin Dance. It’s on YouTube. And thus the grand reason why everyone gathered was forgotten. As Zizek would say, it started out from a spirit of revolt, but wasn’t followed by an actual revolution.

COMMUNIST PAST, LEFTIST FUTURE?

It is impossible to watch The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology without stumbling upon the fact that Zizek is a self-confessed communist with a declared interest in Lenin. What people need, he argues, is "a strong body able to reach quick decisions and to implement them with all necessary harshness". He believes the socialism implemented in Eastern Europe went terribly wrong and that Stalinism was a perverse torture inflicted upon citizens. However, he wonders why the emancipatory movement ended up so tragically and points out that an attempt at social change – even a leftist one – should not be thought to end in disaster.

Wherever you might fall in the political spectrum, Slavoj Zizek’s film is proof of a larger phenomenon – a modern version of communism that is becoming fashionable and targeting the young, cinema-consuming audiences. This re-emergence of leftism has been obvious in Europe since the beginning of the financial crisis and it is only growing stronger with the liberals’ failure to overcome it. We now have modern socialist parties that advocate free health care and the right to state pensions, promise stability in the job market, and oppose war and the expansion of NATO. Most importantly, they challenge the status quo of capitalism. It is the case with the main opposition party in Greece, Syriza, which in 2012 became the second largest group in the Greek Parliament. A much less radical version of this is the Romanian USL, the liberal-socialist coalition that won the local elections in June

Within this context it is even more crucial to distinguish between ideology and strategy – most of these parties are socialist only by name and televised speeches. The USL is not leftist, it is nothing. It is a bunch of people taking advantage of a void in the political landscape – namely a serious alternative to the capitalist waste Slavoj Zizek criticises. In the long run, people will always end up regretting having voted for them. The restless search for leftist solutions by young generations and mavericks like Slavoj Zizek is a sign that neither of these parties have filled or will ever fill that void.

The restless search for leftist solutions... is a sign that neither of these parties have filled or will ever fill the void.

LEFTISM IN THE EAST

Having leftist views is still a delicate subject in Eastern Europe, especially for youngsters – people don’t say it loudly, they only share their opinions in the voting booth. Politically correct society usually perceives such people as those who learned nothing from the past and it is slow in drawing a line between historical communism and modern leftism. This is another reason why Slavoj Zizek has become extremely popular – he has always been outspoken about his beliefs, even ostentatious.

Eastern Europe hasn’t forgotten its past. But more and more people want a leftist approach in running their countries and bringing the economy to life. They want a different approach, something that has nothing in common with Leninism or life under Nicolae Ceaușescu. Wanting a liberal left capable of producing solutions in a time when democratic capitalism is failing is not unreasonable. It just takes a bit of courage – and escaping ideology, says Zizek – to admit it.

In his new movie, Slavoj Zizek takes that courage and multiplies it by a million. He talks about adopting leftism with passion and naturalness. He adds some of the most iconic films and cultural trends of the past century to this mix and invokes a myriad of arguments for his positions. Some are logical and reasonable, others provocative, and some are difficult to imagine – like releasing oneself from all ideologies, living uninfluenced by anything.

LOOKING AT EVERYTHING

At its heart then, Zizek proposes that we should constantly question our past and our present, as well as how we imagine our future. He puts communism back on the table and invites us to think about it once more, from a different point of view, with new information at hand. He encourages us to demand a real change in the social and economic order and go beyond the capitalism we’ve come to accept.

Putting aside his efforts to turn us into little Leninists, Zizek's film lets us admit that we’re disappointed with our leaders, our political options and our world. So, let’s get our hands out of our pockets and admit that we need to re-examine our options – maybe create new ones. Let’s look at everything.

from a review of Sophie Fiennes’s The Pervert's Guide to Ideology

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/12972-the-perverts-guide-to-ideology-how-ideology-seduces-us-and-how-we-can-try-to-escape-it

excerpt of film review by Yosef Brody

[…]

A truly unique personality, Žižek provides piercing social criticism by examining, in what is perhaps the most effective and entertaining way possible, the social and psychological meanings concealed within popular culture and mundane consumer objects. His main thesis is that ideology in its most powerful form is hidden from the view of the person who submits to it. Once it can be clearly perceived it effectively loses its power of social control; obversely, to believe oneself to be non-ideological is actually equivalent to being driven primarily by ideology.

No matter which orthodoxy we may live under, Žižek explains, we usually enjoy our ideology, and that is part of its function. Paradoxically, it hurts to step outside of it and examine it critically; by default we tend to resist seeing the world from any angle other than the one fed to us.

Žižek's many examples are pleasurable in themselves, whether you agree with his analysis or not. Take Beethoven's Ode to Joy. Žižek sees this piece of music, at least the first part of it, as presenting the quintessence of an ideological frame, a structural template. He shows how this composition has been used as an anthem by Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Mao's China, South Rhodesia under colonial control, far left Peruvian guerilla forces, a pre-unified Germany when East and West participated in the Olympics as one nation in 1988, and the contemporary European Union. Ode to Joy provides an attractive but completely empty container that is devoid of all meaning, one that can be filled with any ideas whatsoever. The clichéd emotional image it provides effectively works to seduce and neutralize individuals, blinding them to their own reality.

Moving on from Beethoven we take a long, winding tour through cinema, traveling with Žižek through uncompromising socio-psychoanalytic analyses of A Clockwork Orange, West Side Story, Titanic, Jaws, Cabaret, Brazil, Full Metal Jacket, The Sound of Music, The Dark Knight, and many others. Watching key sequences from each, we enter the mind of Žižek, who sometimes appears inside set reconstructions of the films he is analyzing as he is analyzing them, a hilarious gimmick used to excellent effect (and one first used in Fiennes' lesser The Pervert's Guide to Cinemafrom 2006). In one of the more memorable moments, he interprets the inner monologue of the Taxi Driver and its greater meaning while lying in Travis Bickle's grungy bed, Scorsese camera angle and all. This method, skillfully used by Fiennes, serves to underscore Žižek's main idea since, just like with Ode to Joy, we're confronted with a potent and seductive framework that can reliably accommodate various contents.

Interlaced with his often-priceless film analyses are worthy and helpful looks at recent events, including the Breivik massacre of young leftists in Norway, the London consumer riots, Tahrir Square, and Occupy Wall Street, as well as examinations of the role of fear in modern society, suicidal violence, obscenity in the military, misguided fantasies about saving resistant women from victimhood, official lies as forms of social control, the psychoanalytic differences between Judaism and Christianity and the urgent need for all of us to take responsibility for our dreams. If this seems like a lot, it is, but it also all fits together quite beautifully in a lightening-quick 134 minutes. And if you watch through the end of the credits you'll be rewarded with a gem of a moment, a radical reimagining of an iconic film that effectively brings together his primary points.

[…]

http://weeklyworldnews.com/headlines/52834/mitt-romney-hired-as-president-of-disneyland/

Russia: Reading Aloud in Public Is Illegal

http://chtodelat.wordpress.com/2012/11/27/reading-in-public-illegal/

Russia: Reading Aloud in Public Is Illegal (Protest against the Torture of Russian Prisoners)

On November 26, a protest against the torture of Russian prisoners took place outside the headquarters of the Federal Penitentiary Service in Moscow. The protest was occasioned by the conflict in penal colony № 6 in Kopeisk. Police detained more than ten people during the protest.

This is how the protest was announced on Facebook:

On November 26 at 6:00 p.m, a protest against torture in Russian prisons will take place outside the headquarters of the Federal Penitentiary Service at Zhitnaya 14.

We protest against torture in Russian prisons and support the inmates in Kopeisk, who spoke out against bullying, extortion and sexual abuse. During the protest, we will be reading prisoners’ stories of torture and humiliation aloud. We are convinced that the public should be aware of what is actually going on in Russian prisons. And not just be aware, but try and stop this nightmare.

At penal colony no. 6 in Kopeisk in the Chelyabinsk region, more than a thousand prisoners have for several days refused to go inside in protest against torture and beatings. Silently, lined up, they stand in the cold for several hours. They refuse to eat, believing that it is better to die than to continue to suffer torture, humiliation and blackmail.

A group of convicts seized the guard tower in the industrial area of the colony and hung up a banner with the message “People, help us!” Riot police were deployed to the colony; they attacked prisoners’ relatives who had gathered outside the prison gates. People were beaten bloody and the windows of their cars were smashed. Among the victims was human rights activist Oksana Trufanova. “I heard [the command] ‘Beat!’ and the relatives were attacked by men in black masks and uniforms wielding clubs,” she said in an interview. “Everyone fled, but [the riot police] ran many people down. Personally, I was hit on the head and pushed to the ground. I told them I was a human rights activist, but they told me rudely, using obscene language, to keep quiet or I’d get another whacking.”

Even now the authorities are trying to convince us that nothing has happened, and that journalists have exaggerated the scale of the protests. That is why it is so important not to let them hush up this outrage.We demand:

-  An objective investigation of all allegations of torture and extortion in the colony, and an open trial of Federal Penitentiary Service employees implicated in them.

- The punishment of Interior Ministry officers who employed violence against family members and human rights activists gathered outside colony no. 6.

______

 Why the prisoners “rioted”:

Olga Belousova, the sister of one of the inmates, was allowed inside Penal Colony No. 6 along with two other relatives. As a witness, she was able to speak to the press about the situation there.

“There were 60 people in the room; all were standing quietly,” Belousova said. “I told them that we support them and came to make sure that everything is fine, and that we want to make their voices heard outside the colony.”

The complaints, which were mainly communicated by the prisoners, include enormous extortions, inappropriate use of force and numerous other humiliations, Belousova says.

“They don’t touch those who give them money, but against those who can’t they use force to make their relatives pay,” she added.

Former convict Mikhail Ermuraky believes that this system of exploitation was a main reason for the riot.  

His mother said her son was tortured multiple times, sometimes even including with sexual abuse.

“They start beating those who don’t want to pay,” said Ermuraky in a recent interview with the RIA Novosti news agency.

The father of another convict, who spent three months in colony No.6, told Russia’s Dozhd television that he has twice paid off prison staff.

“Every month… If you don’t bring money, there will be problems,” a man who wasn’t named told Dozhd.

Payments in prison are typically euphemized as “voluntary contributions.” Local human rights ombudsman Aleksey Sevastianov has noted complaints from relatives that such “contributions” can sometimes reach up to 200,000 rubles – more than $6,400. For comparison, the average Russian’s annual income is just over $10,000.

For convicts, such sums are impossible to pay – roughly half the prisoners in the colony are not employed. Those who do have jobs in the prison are paid extremely little – less than 100 rubles, or just over $2, per month. Such a wage is not enough even to buy food in a convenience store in the territory, where prices are said to be higher than in the town.

The head of the detention facility met with inmates’ relatives after the uprising, assuring them that he is willing to abolish “the system of contributions.” However, relatives now fear that this change could bring retaliation from the prison staff.

When asked if such a system could be considered as criminal corruption, human rights ombudsman Sevastianov agreed that it is illegal, and should be investigated.

He explained that with the scheme working in the facility, relatives wire money to a bank account given by the colony’s administration. Thus, for example, millions of rubles sent by convicts’ families were spent to build a new church on the territory.