Belgrade nationalists: liberal society is too regulated to enjoy
anecdote · personal/autobiographical ·
retold in 3 talks
Žižek met likely ethnic cleansers in a Belgrade restaurant and tried to sell them the 'escape from freedom' / modernity-anxiety explanation. They laughed and corrected him: for them, Western liberal society is over-regulated and frustrating; going to Bosnia to engage in ethnic cleansing means 'I'm free again.'
As told 2
“They said, 'I cannot even beat my wife, I cannot rape her... For us, becoming a nationalist means: I go to Bosnia, engage in ethnic cleansing, I'm free again.'”
“if i were to live there, i cannot even beat my wife. i cannot rape a nice girl if see her... for them liberal society was all too regulated and stifling”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
Its cast and sources
populated by
Kurt Vonnegut1George Lucas1Jimmy Swaggart1Spike Lee1Golda Meir1Samo Tomšič1Mike Davis1Varlam Shalamov1
alongside works
Every retelling 2
Žižek met likely ethnic cleansers in a Belgrade restaurant and tried to sell them the 'escape from freedom' / modernity-anxiety explanation. They laughed and corrected him: for them, Western liberal society is over-regulated and frustrating; going to Bosnia to engage in ethnic cleansing means 'I'm free again.', illustrating surplus enjoyment in fascism,ideology and obscene enjoyment,nationalism
Hard-line nationalist ethnic cleansers told Žižek that modern liberal Western life was all too regulated, they couldn't beat their wives, rape, brawl, or swear freely. Nationalism gave them a new freedom to do all this 'on behalf of the nation'. This reverses the standard sociological account of fundamentalism as fear of freedom., illustrating transgressive freedom of nationalism,fundamentalism appeal,ideology