Slavoj Zizek is International Director at the Birkbeck Institute for Humanities, University of London, and Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His most recent book is Disparities.
The lesson of the recent referendum in Turkey is a very sad one.
After Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s dubious victory, Western liberal media were full of critical analyses: the century of the Kemalist endeavour to secularize Turkey is over; the Turkish voters were offered not so much a democratic choice as a referendum to limit democracy and voluntarily endorse an authoritarian regime.
However, more important and less noticed was the subtle ambiguity of many Western reactions – an ambiguity which recalls the ambiguity of Trump’s politics towards Israel: even while he stated that the United States should recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, many of his supporters are openly anti-Semitic.
But is this really an inconsistent stance?
Read the full article by Slavoj Zizek at ABC Religion and Ethics.