people who haven’t seen one actual refugee react aggressively to the very proposal of establishing a refugee center in their proximity; stories about incidents catch imagination, spread like wildfire and persist even after they are clearly proven false.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/1MwOCHc

among the refugees are also terrorists, rapists, criminals, etc., but the vast majority are desperate people looking for a better life (in the same way that during the Cold War, among the refugees from the German Democratic Republic were hidden STASI agents). Among Europe’s xenophobes, however, this is given a paranoiac twist—immigrants appear (or pretend) to be desperate refugees, while in reality they are the spearheads of a new Islamic invasion of Europe. By way of this twist, the cause of problems that are immanent to today’s global capitalism is projected onto an external intruder: instead of refugees who are ultimately the victims of global capitalism, we get fundamentalist terrorists who threaten our way of life from outside.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/1RyktGu

even if most of our prejudices about immigrants were proven to be true (they are hidden fundamentalist terrorists, they rape and they steal), the paranoiac talk about the immigrant threat is still an ideological pathology, it tells more about us, Europeans, than about immigrants. The true question is not “Are immigrants a real threat to Europe?” but “What does this obsession with the immigrant threat tell us about the weakness of Europe?”

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/1UkY4A2

rather than attacking the silent, low-class majority as racist and ignorant of the immigrants’ plight, or, at best, as stupid victims of racist big media propaganda, would not the truly humanitarian reaction be to address their actual concerns that express themselves in a racist way?

Slavoj Zizek - Stranger Danger To Resolve the Migrant Crisis We Must Recognize the Stranger Within Ourselves http://ift.tt/1WOXvMO

the humanitarian reaction almost imperceptibly transforms a political-economic problem into a moral one of “refugee crisis”

Zizek, on the danger of mixing politics with moralism http://ift.tt/1Rp0Mkl

Our very predominant reaction to the Muslim Otherness, keeping them at a distance (of hatred or respect), thereby helps the “threat” to become reality.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/1RoOngh

the worst reaction to the racist anti-immigrant paranoia is to ignore eventual incidents and problems with immigrants, arguing that every critical mention of immigrants only feeds the racist enemies.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/1UOZaTn