Zizek, Burma

Well, at another plenary Zizek spoke - or ranted rather - characteristically for the United European Christian Brotherhood - and admonished the middle classes for thinking thought that comfort was to be had in marching against regimes on saturdays. In many ways - objectionable though his position on Europe, Christianity, Brotherhood may be - he had a point. The solace or worse the high ground that European middle classes had assumed from having walked ten steps on a cold spring Saturday against the war in Iraq - was actually rooted in something quite hollow. Where Zizek characteristically slipped was in his attribution of the hollowness. Christian Europe was acting in too Christian a manner in countering this barbaric threat of terrorism from a militant Islam - according to Zizek. I.e Zizek though the middle classes were being too civilised about the war and the roots of the clash.
One can of course pick on each bit of Zizek's argument to reveal centuries of prejudice, but let that be for another time. But
I think he did pick on something interesting in talking about the solace of the middle classes - and the general futility of political protest on the street and that's what I want to pick up here.
It's like feminism. Just because women in Euro-America are giving up work in favour of becoming consumerism driven (largely) yummy-mummies, the rest of us are forced to reckon with the world as having become 'post-feminist'! Just try to run past that logic anywhere outside Euro-America and you sound like retrogressive and not post-anything at all really! Similarly, the likes of Zizek and theri pampered kin reckon that the world is supposed to have become bored of political protest, shouting in the street, or so it seems. In Zizek's Europe, the only reason one would put on our black march shoes would be for comforting the soul and not ousting a regime, but then really chicken soup is better and easier to do!
I heard this relentless attack on the 'rest of the world' by Zizek and empathised with a friend who did out his Christian soft spot, to which Zizek replied - "fuck you, i am christian and proud of it." We heard Zizek indulgently and a week later, images of monks in Burma began to flood the screens - tv, internet, newspapers, to say nothing of the frenetic activity in blogosphere! So perhaps Zizek did have a point - the middle classes in Euro-America protest in namby-pamby way (blogs, for example) and politics is reduced to its virtual version. And in the non-middle class world, non Euro-American world this world of namby-pamby, softly softly, please can i protest today, sort of way, protest has absolutely no connect with the polity and the polity has no regard for it.
But in recent months Nepal, Burma, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan - protest here is not made up of the middle classes. Or that they do not form its only or dominant platform. Because ultimately here what is at stake is not a politics of solace, of feel-good, of soft-power, but of what tomorrow looks like and how you can limit the opponent from defining it completely. Realpolitik. So perhaps Zizek was right about the middle classes - but except he was not. He critiqued protest more than he criticised power in his talk. And like a good Christian European philosopher forgot to mention, remember that he was talking about and from a culturally specific position and that there was a whole world that thrived outside it. Even if blogosphere does not, the monks in Burma have showed Zizek his relative place.