Yugoslav student newspaper treats fake elections as real
anecdote · personal/autobiographical ·
retold in 7 talks
Žižek and colleagues on a Yugoslav student journal found the perfect subversive act: not attacking fake elections but reporting on them AS IF they were real, 'Latest news, it looks that communists will remain in power', which so disturbed the Party that they were called to the Central Committee.
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026
As told 7
“we just published on the evening of elections an extraordinary issue of the journal with the big title: 'Latest news, it looks that communists will remain in power'”
“They couldn't have told us 'no, they were not free elections.' He just said: boys, don't fuck with me, you know very well what I mean.”
“Latest results, it looks like communists will probably remain in power.”
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
Boris Buden2Ernst Nolte2Leszek Kołakowski2Rudolf Slánský2Arundhati Roy3Franco Berardi2Anne Applebaum3Osama bin Laden2
alongside works
Every retelling 7
Žižek and colleagues on a Yugoslav student journal found the perfect subversive act: not attacking fake elections but reporting on them AS IF they were real, 'Latest news, it looks that communists will remain in power', which so disturbed the Party that they were called to the Central Committee., illustrating social obscenity,the Big Other,ideology and appearances
As a young half-dissident, Žižek and colleagues on a student journal published a special issue treating communist elections as real: reporting live results as if genuine competition. The party bureaucrat was furious but could not say the elections were fake, ending with the admission 'you know very well what I mean.', illustrating cynicism as ideological necessity,ideology,performative contradiction in late socialism
As a student in Yugoslavia, Žižek's newspaper decided to cover fixed communist elections as if they were genuinely free, reporting 'communists will probably remain in power', and was immediately summoned by the central committee., illustrating ideological performativity,taking ideology at its word,freedom of choice on condition
Žižek's student journal reported communist elections as if they were genuinely free ('Latest news: it looks that communists will win!'), which infuriated the Party more than direct denunciation would have., illustrating ideology and form,truth speaks through lie,lying for Jesus
In the early 1980s, Žižek's student journal published results of Yugoslav elections as if they were genuinely in doubt; the furious party official could not state the regime's cynical secret without undoing it, over-identification as subversion., illustrating obscene supplement,ideology,over-identification as subversion
In late-1970s Yugoslavia, Žižek's student journal took the communist party's claim of 'free elections' literally and published an election-night issue treating the outcome as genuinely uncertain; they were summoned by the central committee, whose bureaucrat could not explicitly say what they'd done wrong., illustrating inherent transgression,ideology's unspoken rules,naivety as political weapon