Despite the fall of the communist bloc decades ago and the decline of related parties in the West, anti-communist discourse continues to exist in different configurations and places around the world. While it might seem that such a discourse ought to be a thing of the past, it endures. It remains prevalent in contemporary discourse. Anticommunism, a form of hate speech, has not faced similar condemnation for the incitement of crimes as fascist speech has.

As nonsensical as its existence may seem today, it is necessary to explain why it persists, why it continues to be so effective in mobilizing political affection, and why it remains a danger to the left- communist or not. Its survival persists despite the baseless claims made against it. To borrow from Žižek’s words, “Ideology is not just ideology; it has material consequences”[1]. It is this aspect that deserves our scrutiny.

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Since the 19th century, there have been reactionary anti-communist discourses. They gained significant strength after World War II when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) emerged strengthened from the world conflagration and demonstrated the success of the October 1917 revolution. From then on, the anti-communist discourse became, in many cases, an institutional discourse in many nations.

The US government was the primary advocate of the anti-communist ideology, which was solidified through McCarthyism. The Communist Party leaders and members, along with those suspected of collaborating with the USSR or being communist, were targeted for persecution in the United States. Thousands of people had their lives affected, lost jobs or were deported, including well-known artists in Hollywood.

Anticommunism has had significant negative consequences in the United States and globally, including persecution, harassment, nuclear arms races, and wars and interventions in other countries (McGowan, 2012b, p.114-115). Even anti-communism was effectively promoted, supporting local anti-communist groups and forging international connections to influence election outcomes against communist parties. Assistance was also provided to antagonistic military or religious groups to facilitate coups d’état and establish regimes that aligned with their interests. The proliferation of anti-communism, particularly in developing countries with a significant communist or socialist presence or under a left-leaning government, is believed to have justified the systematic killing of over 2 million people across 24 nations during the post-war era, in addition to incidents of abduction, disappearance, rape, and torture (Bevins, 2021). Mass atrocities that are often ignored by the United States and its allies, despite the overwhelming evidence substantiating their occurrence.

This discourse endures even in the absence of the USSR or any relevant international communist movement. Thus, the question becomes: why does it persist, and what is its ideological allure? The answer extends beyond the mere defense of the material interests of the capitalists; its efficacy lies in its fundamental fantasy and in its ability to mobilize social contradictions in its favor.

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Todd McGowan in his recent book Enjoyment Right & Left (2022a) defines that the politics of left and right are sustained and constructed around enjoyment (jouissance), as a concept from psychoanalysis, which differs from pleasure. In short, pleasure we experience through the reduction of arousal, such as the orgasm at the end of the sexual act; it is obtaining the object within the confines of the social order. In contrast, enjoyment is the construction of tension to arrive at pleasure. In this sense, enjoyment implies giving us a problem, the absence or loss of an object (unattainable), it requires a kind of sacrifice (self-destructive) and its attractiveness is constructed in the unconscious.

In modern societies, it is the contradictions inherent in themselves that generate enjoyment: a logic based on not belonging to the social order. In this sense, McGowan (2022a) argues that politics makes it possible to organize this type of enjoyment in such a way as to create the possibility of maximizing it or reducing the threat that others may pose to it. Hence, people invest so much in politics seeking to modify or maintain the social order in order to deal with their contradictions and non-membership in the same society.

The response of right-wing and left-wing political projects to the mobilization of enjoyment are  very different. For right-wing projects, enjoyment is built around creating an enemy to appear attractive to its members, to highlight group membership vs. those who do not belong. The enemy is then a site of enjoyment that allows the right to deny social contradictions. Immigrants, Jews, Muslims, and other nations are examples of groups that right-wing movements often construe as enemies. Whereas left-wing projects look for universal projects, that is to say, projects that embrace everyone. Therefore, the political position of the left is to occupy the place of contradiction, as with the class struggle, anti-racism or feminism[2].

Now, in order to mobilize jouissance in one political sense or another, a fantasy is required to organize it. McGowan (2022b, p.13) explains: “Fantasy delivers jouissance. The appeal of fantasy lies in its ability to provide a largely unconscious structure that organizes the jouissance of those fantasizing. Fantasy provides a scenario through which subjects relate to an object that they desire. Through this scenario, one has a path laid out to the desired object, a path whose difficulty feeds the enjoyment that fantasy produces. If the phantasy simply presented a direct access to the desired object, it would fail to facilitate enjoyment and be ineffectual as a fantasy.”

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The structure of the fantasy underlying anticommunism as a political ideology is analogous to that of racism. This very same fantasy has served as the foundation for both anti-Semitism and racism. Each is rooted in the idea of an externalized other, racialized in the case of the latter, who can obtain more enjoyment than oneself and serves as the impediment to obtaining the desired object of enjoyment. In this regard McGowan (2022b, p.27) points out:

“The fantasy is racist insofar as it grants Black men an inherent sexual superiority that leads to victory over white men with white women. In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon offers a compelling account of this phenomenon. He writes: “For the majority of Whites the black man represents the (uneducated) sexual instinct. He embodies genital power beyond the reach of morals and taboos. As for the white woman, reasoning by induction, they invariably see the black man the intangible gate leading to the realm of mystical rites and orgies, bacchanals and hallucinatory sexual sensations.” Just as Hitler fantasized about the Jew’s satanic enjoyment when he seduced a white German woman, Fanon recognizes that whites imagine an excess of black enjoyment when they fantasize about Black men seducing white women. Fanon points out that this scenario serves as a justification for white aggression, an aggression that has no motivation in actual events.”

In other words, the Nazi fear that Jews were taking German women[3] and the racist notion that black men were a means of obtaining “wild” sexual pleasure share a common structure. A fantasy of an uncastrated other who enjoys without restraint what we cannot. If that racialized other were not there, we could enjoy without problems. That other is a vital threat and must be controlled or eliminated.

This same fantasy structure is repeated for anti-communism in the Cold War era of US. Communism is an external obstacle to the American dream, a threat that can destroy it. It blocks the U.S. from controlling the world and shaping it as it pleases, while communists receive considerable admiration and prestige from the workers, intellectuals, and extensive segments of humanity.

Such a fantasy allowed the mobilization of a conservative enjoyment and with it the creation of a national identity (that of the United States) built around a common enemy: “Americans in the 1950s and 1960s shared the fantasy of a communism overrunning the United States. Although Americans ostensibly feared it, this fantasy had an incredible unifying power. The fantasy of communism had the effect of binding American society in a way that had never occurred beforehand and would not occur subsequently.” (McGowan, 2022b, p. 114).

This unification through fantasy has a strong component of paranoid character that makes it stand out from other right-wing projects. Take the example of James Jesus Angleton[4] “for two decades – from 1953 to 1973 – he was chief of the counter-intelligence section of the CIA, his task being to unearth “moles” within it. Angleton, a charismatic, highly idiosyncratic figure with a literary background (he  was a personal friend of T.S. Eliot, and even physically resembled him), was prone to paranoia. The premise behind his work was an absolute belief in the so-called “Monster Plot”: a gigantic deception co-ordinated by a secret KGB organization-within-the-organization”, whose aim was to penetrate and totally dominate the Western intelligence network, and thus bring about the defeat of the West” (Žižek, 1991, xxxvi).

The ideology that the US intelligence services had about the communists clearly had little to do with reality. This paranoia responded to the very contradictions of capitalism in the U.S. and could not explain the communist movements in their homeland[5]. Even if the plot had been true, their pathological paranoia would remain. We must remember “the Lacanian proposition concerning the pathologically jealous husband: even if all the facts he quotes in support of his jealousy are true, even if his wife really is sleeping around with other men, this does not change one bit the fact that his jealousy is a pathological, paranoid construction.” (Žižek, 2019, p.49).

This exemplifies the issue in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1966 film Torn Curtain. In the movie, the character of Michael Armstrong, a rocket scientist and physicist portrayed by Paul Newman, travels to the German Democratic Republic under false pretenses in order to discover secrets about their anti-missile systems. Hermann Gromek, a Stasi officer played by West German actor Wolfgang Kieling, suspects Armstrong of being a double agent and pursues him, ultimately resulting in Armstrong’s death. A few years following the production of the film, Wolfgang Kieling, an actor and World War II veteran who had battled against the USSR, migrated to the German Democratic Republic, defecting to the East as a statement against the Federal Republic of Germany’s assistance of the US in the Vietnam War. He also witnessed firsthand the 1965 Watts, California riots and US racism and police repression[6]. In defecting he called the US “the most dangerous enemy of humanity in the world today” citing their “crimes against the Negro and the people of Vietnam” (Kurlansky, 2005, p. 147-148).

Isn’t this paranoia against communism based on the fact that when the contradictions and injustices of the US society were deciphered, the population turned massively to the communist side; that they began to fight for the realization of the communist idea?

Anti-communism in the US also fed allegories to alien invasion movies in the form of an entity coming from outside, that once it captures or infects the subject, all traces of individualism disappear, to form a single unit or a collective. The Borg in Star Trek are a good example of this, an alien species that captures every individual to submit him to the “Borg collective” and enjoy his capabilities in a better way, even than the individual himself could do. 

Another example can be found in the 1982 film The Thing, the extraterrestrial thing that assimilates all living beings, including their abilities and memories; the individual is completely subjected to its designs. A Lovecraftian type of terror, which, as Michel Houellebecq (2006) has pointed out, is a reflection of the fear of the other. Therefore, the presence of this racist fantasy within the film should not be surprising, since it is inspired by the novel by John W. Campbell, a writer who was in favor of racial segregation and just had the opposite reaction to Wolfgang Kieling when he learned of the Watts riots. Campbell mentioned that the riots were because “there were ‘natural’ slaves who were unhappy if freed… and that the blacks were ‘against’ emancipation, which was fundamentally why they were indulging in ‘leaderless’ riots in the suburbs of Los Angeles!” (Moorcocks, 1984).

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The relationship of racist fantasy and anti-communism has always been hand in hand. A very good example is given by the Nazi regime, for its leaders the Bolsheviks and Jews were the same, for which they coined the myth of “Judeo-Bolshevism” (Hanebrink, 2018). The same kind of fantasy and enjoyment based on racism was mobilized for the establishment of the Nazi regime and as a response to the advance of communism. Enzo Traverso puts it well:

“Usually, the Nazis described intellectuals as “cold” and “bloodless” minds; Goebbels used to stigmatize any “intellectual agitator” who had found in Marxism his inspiration. The “magnificent specimen of this human decadence,” he made clear, was the Jew. Jewish Bolshevism was a major threat to Western civilization, insofar as it sealed the alliance between a revolutionary ideology like Marxism and the Slavic soul, behind which lurked the racial “sub-humanity” of the Eastern world: the Jewish intellectual – the true brain of the Soviet Union – was the maleficent mixer of this explosive cocktail. According to Alfred Rosenberg, “Bolshevism [was] the last product of the combination of a Jewish-cosmopolitan intellectualism with a passionate oriental religious fervor.” And the origin of this dangerous nihilistic ideology could be detected with the help of racial biology: “In order to understand the phenomenon of Bolshevism in its historical context,” he explained in 1935, “one must first accept the notion that parasites exist not only in the world of flora and fauna but, to put it in pedestrian scientific terms, also in the world of human beings.” In other words, Bolshevism was the ideological expression of parasitism, “a characteristic feature of Jewish blood.” As for Hitler, in 1933 he simply identified the proletarian dictatorship with “the dictatorship of Jewish intellectualism” and denounced the “Jewish-intellectual leadership of the world revolution” (Traverso, 2021, p. 304).

The result of Nazi anti-Semitism is well known, the genocide perpetrated against the Jews. What is often overlooked is that during the Nazi invasion of the USSR there was a mass shooting of Jews, communists and any Soviet official. During the Second World War, at least 26 million people died in the USSR (Ellman, 1994), and the racist fantasy of the Nazis played a preponderant role in this.

This operation of Judeo-Bolshevism has not disappeared, even in the US right wing this is reflected in the creation of the conspiracy behind “cultural Marxism”. This new version of the myth states that: “Jewish leftists fleeing Nazi Germany, including Frankfurt School theorists, plotted to subtly indoctrinate Americans in Marxist ideology, which they intentionally and surreptitiously rebranded in less-scary “cultural” forms like feminism and black liberation… In other words, radical Jewish immigrant professors are behind all the movements for greater civil rights and social equality, which are actually a secret vehicle for the imposition of Soviet-style communism in the United States.” (French, 2023).

Traverso (2018, p.94) similarly recalls that the communist was racialized and that it is this same formula that is still used today as part of Islamophobia, the favorite enemy of the new neo-fascist right-wingers: “Of course, Bolshevism and Islamism are two completely different things from each other, but in imaginary representation of the enemy (the threatening and dangerous figure of otherness), the bearded terrorist of Islamic creed, the Jihadist is to some extent the equivalent of the Bolshevik of yesteryear, with the knife between his teeth. The Bolshevik was racialized, stereotyped as someone alien to the nation with his own physical, intellectual, psychological, cultural traits: he was the ‘anti-race’. Today a similar phenomenon is observed with the obsolete and stereotyped image of the Yihaidsite, the monster crouching in every Muslim.”

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One of the most significant tragedies of the anti-communist discourse occurred in Indonesia, where almost a million people were murdered in the span of a year. This was carried out by the victorious dictatorship, who faced little international condemnation in spite of erecting monuments to their actions. It is important to note that Indonesia was a significant Third World country, unaffiliated with either the communist or US-led blocks, which posed a perceived threat to the latter. Therefore, they orchestrated a coup d’état, fearing that Indonesia would align with the communist bloc, leading other Third World nations to follow.

In 1965, the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) was the world’s third-largest communist party, with a close relationship to President Sukarno. Moreover, the first elections presented a high likelihood of the PKI taking power in Indonesia. However, due to the successful dissemination of anti-communism among military leaders through U. S. training, the military began considering seizing power. In response to rumors of a coup d’état plot, several soldiers with sympathies towards the PKI attempted to apprehend its members and assassinate the military commanders involved. However, the soldiers did not accomplish their objectives as they were only able to assassinate some of the generals, with others escaping unharmed. The military promptly placed the blame on the communists and feminists, who had flourished after Indonesia’s independence, and pointed to a communist plot to seize power.

They used this as an immediate pretext to carry out a coup d’état and massacre hundreds of thousands of people with the assistance of the US and UK. The entire pretext was founded upon a lie, a founding myth, that communists, with the aid of feminists, brutally tortured imprisoned military leaders. Portraying communists and feminists as monsters, as subhuman, and therefore necessitating their elimination. The coup and massacre were justified by a myth, which still persists today. The Indonesian government has erected monuments and allowed mafia paramilitary groups to continue celebrating these events, as shown in Joshua Oppenheimer’s film The Act of Killing (2012).

From a Lacanian interpretation, the justification of the 1965 Indonesian coup d’état can be read as a point de caption. The operation of the point de caption is the “magical inversion” by which the source of the failure becomes triumph and sustains an entire ideological space. An example of this is pointed out by Žižek (1991) with the “Dreyfus case”. In 1894 in France, Alfred Dreyfus, an army captain of Jewish origin, was accused of espionage, for which he was convicted of high treason and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. The case was highly publicized, public opinion was against him and generated strong anti-Semitism. Émile Zola intervened and published a plea in favor of Dreyfus that changed public opinion towards him, although he would not be released. Months later, Lieutenant Colonel Henry, in charge of French espionage, was arrested on suspicion that he had falsified documents for which Dreyfus had been convicted of high treason. The next day he would commit suicide. The point is that, had he admitted guilt, the Dreyfus case would have collapsed. However, the next day Charles Maurras published a text in which he reinterpreted the facts and placed Lieutenant Colonel Henry as a heroic victim who preferred his patriotic duty to abstract “justice”. In other words, he preferred to commit suicide rather than allow a small miscarriage of justice to be exploited by the Jewish “treason syndicate” to destroy the foundations of French life and the prestige of the army. The victim was not Dreyfus, but Henry who became the first blood shed by the Jewish conspiracy. This changed everything, the lack of organization of the right disappeared and the forces of consolidated around the “patriotic” unity. “Maurras provoked this reversal by creating the triumph, the myth of the “first victim”, from the very same elements which, before his intervention, aroused disorientation, and amazement (the falsification of documents, the unfairness of the sentence, and so on), and which he was far from   contesting. It is not surprising that right up to his death he considered this article as his finest achievement” (Žižek, 1991, p. 28).

It is precisely the myth surrounding the failed assassination of all the coup generals which allowed to place them as the “first victims” of the communist conspiracy, turning the political and military forces in their favor and facilitating the successful execution of the coup d’état. A defeat when their intentions were discovered became a bloody victory for anti-communism.

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But what kind of racist fantasy could they have about PKI communists? They fantasize that communists don’t want to work or don’t work, that they enjoy not working, and at the same time they are some form of geniuses who make plots and conspiracies to violently seize power. That they work tirelessly to achieve their goal. A contradiction, but it actually shows how human they are, that they seek to reduce labor exploitation and do it in a cooperative way. And they are right, without capitalism it would not be necessary to work in an exploited way and for that it is necessary to take political control and thus change society.

In this sense, one of the most symptomatic situations of the alignment of anti-communist discourse with the violence of the market is found in the Indonesian gangsters. In The Act of Killing, we see how the gangsters of course supported the murder of communists, who represented a problem for them, as they were not allowed to extort or steal. For them, being a gangster is synonymous with “free man”… a man that is free to rob, extort, beat, kill; capitalism’s freedom to exploit. The fantasy that PKI members were the ones enjoying, that they were not emasculated, therefore,   if they were eliminated, there would be no obstacle to enjoyment.

This is undoubtedly a derivation of the US anti-communist fantasy, which “divided the world into the free and the communists” (McGowan, 2022b, p. 115). To be American was to be anti- communist. For Indonesian mobsters, they worked on the side of the free world.

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Anti-communism is very adaptable, since it is defined according to the imaginary enemy they create, an enemy that they accuse of all the ills of societies and that allows mobilizing conservative enjoyment. As Bohoslavsky (2023) rightly mentions, during the postwar period communism was seen as the enemy that infiltrated all institutions and layers of society. Therefore, the anti-communist movements and the dictatorships that emerged from them (at least in Latin America) classified any enemy of theirs as communist and waged a “total war” and “probably infinite” war. “Any member of society was potentially “the enemy.” There was no significant difference between criticizing the authorities, being a deputy representing opposition parties, carrying out a bomb attack, reading Eduardo Galeano, joining the guerrillas, doing pastoral work among the poor or studying for a career in social sciences. All were perceived as diverse activities on the surface, but invisibly coordinated and at the service of the same red conspiracy” (Bohoslavsky, 2023, p. 183).

Is this “total” classification of the enemy not related to Hegel’s idea of bad infinity? That is to say, it is a way of overcoming the limited nature of the proposals of the anti-communist groups that pretend to maintain the current social order in an infinite way, avoiding confrontation with communist ideas (anti-racist, feminist, etc.), since it would imply recognizing the contradictions with which capitalism operates, its finiteness as a model of production and the universality that the proletariat represents in the conflict of the class struggle. This evasion is renewed by adding again and again more characteristics, new themes, of what it is to be communists. In such a way that the enemy is always changing, always redefined, and with it the anti-communist discourse and the conservative enjoyment they mobilize is also renewed.

Anti-communism pretends that the status quo is infinite (N), that it is also continuously identical, and each new leftist affront to the status quo it labels as communist, always adding a new characteristic (N+1…). Anti-communism could be said to have confronted the negation of the present moment, its extinction, by creating an infinite enemy, which allows it to evade the contradictions of its finitude.

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In September 1968, students and employees of the Mexican University Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla were preparing for a mountaineering excursion in the foothills of the Mexican mountain La Malinche. Due to weather conditions, they had to spend the night in the town of San Miguel Canoa, in Puebla. While they were resting, they were surprised by the local population, who would lynch them, under the accusations of the local Catholic priest who accused them of being communists, murderers and enemies of the Catholic religion who wanted to rob the town. All in an atmosphere of anti-communist propaganda widely promoted by the Mexican government in the face of the student movements in the world and in the country.

The tragic thing about this event is that, in reality — as in the cases of Indonesia or McCarthyism — for the anti-communist it does not matter if the person labeled as a communist really is one. It only matters that in their fantasy they are, that it feeds their paranoid enjoyment and allows them to define themselves on the basis of the enemy. This fact, which seems contradictory, is in reality what animates the anti-communist discourse, if the right (especially fascism) was opposed as a project to communism, without the existence of communism today, it can adopt other configurations, but always in opposition to an enemy.

In other words, although the anti-communist discourse no longer appeals today to a Soviet conspiracy to seize power, it continues to be perpetrated under a paranoid discourse based on the assumption that every left-wing social movement is communist. As the author Heinrich Geiselberger (2021) mentions when speaking about the new extreme right-wing movements: “No longer threatened by its reality, the enemies of socialism can only invoke its specter”. A spectrum that works for them to define themselves in antagonism and opposition to feminism, gender ideology, critical race theory, environmentalism or even liberal politicians that they label as communists, accusing them of conspiracies forged with other nations.

In the case of Latin America, with the so-called pink tide, many anti-communist movements resurfaced and added their local tone, with paranoid references to plots coming from the São Paulo Forum or from Cuba, Venezuela or China.

One of the biggest contemporary examples is the case of Brazil. The rise of Bolsonaro represented the victory of a populist extreme right movement with a strong anti-communist discourse. They painted Lula da Silva’s Workers’ Party as communists who would expropriate everything and turn Brazil into Venezuela, when Lula da Silva’s government had shown no sign of it.

The enjoyment of the anti-communist discourse, paranoia, may explain Bolsonaro. When he was a child, in the city of Eldorado where he lived, there was a chase of a communist guerrilla where there were massive identifications of people, shootings, road closures and a dead policeman. Even Bolsonaro supported the search for the guerrilla by serving as a guide. The population was astonished, especially the children, which is rumored to have motivated Bolsonaro to join the militia when he noticed its power to mobilize resources. But wasn’t it rather that what he enjoyed was the military’s anti-communist paranoia?

In the case of Mexico, where the extreme right-wing movement, FRENAAA (Frente Nacional Anti- AMLO), resorts to the discourse of anti-communism mixing religious, libertarian and nationalist elements to fight a ghost that is no longer haunting the world, but that allows it to shore up its reactionary identity. For this group, “populism, dictatorship and communism [are] the same” (Illiades & Kent, 2021, p.241), which is why Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), becomes their main enemy. One that attempts against the family, freedom and Mexico, totally overlooking AMLO’s own discourse regarding these issues that usually adopts conservative positions.

It is precisely in its policy of changing antagonism, without fixed coordinates, what makes anti- communism so persistent, which allows it to group together businessmen, conservative groups, religious groups and even free market ideologues. Creating an enemy around which to consolidate and therefore define and endorse their worldviews based on a paranoid discourse.

And this is the fundamental feature of the so-called new rightists, neo-fascist movements, etc. This takes up in a certain way the premise of Carl Schmitt, who points out that for politics the existence of enemies is required: “The enemy is solely the public enemy because everything that has a relationship to such a collectivity of men, in particular to a whole nation, becomes public by virtue of such a relationship.” (McGowan, 2022a, p. 106).

It’s like the cartoon where the skunk, Pepe Le Pew, is always chasing a black cat that he mistakes for a female of his species. It doesn’t matter that it is obvious that she is not a skunk, the important thing for the skunk is to believe that she is, so that he can compulsively and aggressively try to make the cat fall in love with him. Therefore, proposals to stop using the term communism, for a different master signifier such as humanism, is not useful to confront the anti-communist ideology.

Even the attack on the Chinese social network TikTok by the US and UK is an example of the re- edition of anti-communism and its fantasy: the fear that a social network allows the Chinese government to access the information of each individual through their cell phone and manipulate the users of this network by choosing what content to view or not to view.

Anti-communism, like racism, facilitates the expansion and maintenance of unchallenged capitalism, such as the promotion of regimes that prevent the emergence of popular movements on national scales that challenge the status quo in international relations.

As Bohoslavsky (2023. P.117) points out, “Those who make use of this type of argumentation are also those who regularly engage in conspiratorial activities. Thus they usually accuse third parties of committing sins (promoting coups d’état, buying the press, hiding their intentions, having spurious contacts with external actors, etc.) that are their own. That is why the conspiratorial and decadentist denunciation must be understood first of all as an involuntary image of the denouncers rather than as a – even vitriolic – description of the enemy”. Which makes it clearly dangerous for the various left-wing movements – even having nothing to do with communism. This discourse is part of capitalism and will always be a barrier to emancipatory movements as long as  it is not deactivated.

Footnotes

1. The importance of racist ideology must be emphasized, as it has consequences on the everyday life of those affected. Žižek (2008, p. 72) rightly mentions: “In other words, the white racist ideology exerts a performative efficacy. It is not simply an interpretation of what blacks are, but an interpretation that determines the very being and social existence of the interpreted subjects.” That is, racism in has clear material effects, such as slavery in the USA, apartheid in South Africa or the systematic exploitation of communities of color.

2.  McGowan (2022a, p. 105) emphasizes that “Conservative enjoyment is always derivative. It translates the emancipatory enjoyment of an internal contradiction into the enjoyment of opposition, the opposition between the friend and the enemy, between those who belong and those who do not…The enemy that the rightist forges out of contradiction is always a stand-in for the inherent failure of the social order itself. The enemy emerges as the personification of contradiction, a personification that makes the path to enjoyment clearer for the rightist than for the leftist, even though right wing enjoyment represents a fundamental betrayal of the basic emancipatory possibility inherent in the social structure.”

3. McGowan (2022a, p.23) recalls the paradigmatic racist fantasy that Hitler included in My Struggle: “With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in faith fir the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles his blood. With every means he tries to destroy the racial foundations of the people he has set out to subjugate.”

4.  See this article by Jefferson Morley (2018), in The Intercept, which shows the paranoia of James Jesus Angleton, as well as the consequences of it.

5. As Žižek points out regarding anti-Semitism in Germany in the 1930s: “The proper answer to anti-Semitism is therefore not ‘Jews are really not like that’ but ‘the anti-Semitic idea of Jew has nothing to do with Jews; the ideological figure of a Jew is a way to stitch up the inconsistency of our own ideological system.” (Žižek, 2009, p.49).  

6.  This example was originally mentioned by Žižek in a November 22, 2022 lecture entitled “Why Do We Enjoy Feeling Ashamed?”. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ya8dogGW4c

References

• Bevins, Vincent (2021). The Jakarta method.The anti-communist crusade and the murders that shaped ourw orld. Madrid: Capitán Swing.
• Bohoslavsky, Ernesto (2023). Historia mínima de las derecha slatinoamericanas. Mexico: El Colegio de México.
• El País. (2018). Portrait of an ultra. The man who conquered Brazil. Retrieved on March 28, 2023, from: https://elpais.com/internacional/2018/10/19/actualidad/1539961341_589723.html
• Ellman, M., & Maksudov, S. (1994). Soviet Deaths in the Great Patriotic War: A Note. Europe-Asia Studies,46(4),671-680. http://www.jstor.org/stable/152934.
• French, Nick (2023). Marxism Doesn’t Equal “Wokeness.” But If You Oppose Oppression, You Should Be a Marxist. Jacobing Mag. Retrieved May 7, 2023 from: https://jacobin.com/2023/04/cultural-marxism-woke-capitalism-conservatives-oppression
• Geiselberger, Heinrich (2021). The attack on the US Capitol was a case of ‘liquid authoritarianism’ in action. The Guardian. Retrieved March 25, 202 from: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/20/understand-politics-capitol-breach-authoritarianism-far-right
• Hanebrink, Paul. (2018). A specter haunting Europe: the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism.Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University.
• Houellebecq, Michel (2006). H. P. Lovecraft: against the world, against life. Madrid: Ediciones Siruela
• Illiades, Carlos & Kent C. Daniel (2022). Historia mínima del comunismo y anticomunismo en el debate mexicano. Mexico City: El Colegio de México.
• Kurlansky, Mark (2004). 1968 The year that rocked the world. New York: Random House Publishing.
• McGowan, Todd (2022a). Enjoyment Right & Left. Sublation Press, USA.
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