Zizek weighs in on Iran

The first thing he mentions is that there is a moment when people know the game is over. The problem with this is that they only know something if its true. And sometimes people can feel this way without the feeling being vindicated. Tienanmen Square in 1989 perhaps felt this way. Bizarrely, Zizek ends the piece concluding that this will probably not be a revolution now in Iran.

Zizek repeats Alizadeh's fallacious claim: "the high electoral participation – up from the usual 55% to 85% - can only be explained as a protest vote" (this is no coincidence – Zizek knows Alizadeh and certainly will have read Alizadeh's piece).

Then Zizek draws us a picture of what the contest represents. Unlike the pictures drawn by others, I suppose he must think this is the right picture. Ahmadinejad, he says, is not the friend of the poor – he's an Iranian Berlusconi. This statement is unbelievably stupid. It's worth pointing out that Ahmadinejad has certain things in common with Berlusconi: they both say things in public that embarass the cultured elite of their countries, for example. Otherwise, they're completely different. Where Berlusconi is a flashy pultocrat who personally controls the country through his media empire and personal control of state power, Ahmadinejad is a humble man of modest means who is only one of a number of major leaders, and not the most powerful.

Mousavi on the other hand represents the revivial of "the Khomeini revolution". Not Khomeini himself, of course, who more or less ruled Iran for a decade, but of the revolution that bought him to power. Maybe. Zizek quotes Freud here on the return of the repressed, where he should have quoted Marx: history always repeats itself as farce.

Update: the statement of the Communist Party of Iran (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist) could have been targeted as a riposte to Zizek's line on Mousavi; it is aimed directly at the protesters, urging them to have no illusions in Mousavi, and attacks Khomeini.