DIVIDED WE STAND, UNITED WE FALL!

Democracy will have to be reinvented – by violence, if necessary.

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When you watch a report on a big political event, reactions of the public to this report can often be more enlightening than the report itself. The last time I had such an experience was when I watched the Sky News interview with the German ambassador to the UK days after the local elections in Thuringia and Saxony. What fascinated me more than the interview itself were numerous readers’ comments[1] – their common refrain was the anti-democratic character of the “firewall” which forbids all other parties to enter into a coalition with Right-populist Alternative for Germany (AfD): “He's basically saying that all the other parties in Germany won't work with them and accept the will of the people!” And: “Firewall = ignore the voters? And who is far right here?” And: ““It is happening in all Europe and they continue to find excuses???? Don’t they get it??? Is it difficult to hear the PEOPLE of Europe???” Simple reproach, but difficult to answer in a satisfactory way without engaging in ridiculous claims about the total manipulation of so-called ordinary people. Here is another typical reader’s reaction which provides a tentative answer:

“To reduce people voting for parties of the right, simply address their concerns. Less low skilled mass migration, lower level of economic migrants/asylum seekers, and less of the woke ideology, and maybe a bit less collectivism/communism.”

There is nothing simple in these concerns. Low-skilled mass migration is what keeps Western European economies alive today: in the UK, Italy and Germany, the majority of low skilled physical jobs as well as jobs in care for the old and ill are done by immigrants. If they are thrown out, the entire economy collapses. No wonder people say immigrants arriving on the shores of the UK is good news: Britain will be far less haunted by a lack of a workforce than other West-European countries. To confuse this capitalist stance with Communism is a sad index of where we are today, a confusion clearly discernible in another reaction: “The people are tired of far-left rule.” An absurdity if there ever was one. AfD proponents protest that they are not far Right, but they commit the same mistake when they designate the (still) hegemonic liberal order “far left.” No, this order is not far Left, it is simply the progressive-liberal centre which is much more interested in fighting (whatever remains of) the Left than the new Right. If what we have now in the West is “far-left rule,” then von der Leyen is a Marxist Communist (as Viktor Orban effectively claims).

The standard formula we hear when the populist Right gets millions of votes – “we should address the concerns of the people” - implies an extremely arrogant patronizing attitude: ordinary people are stupid, they target the wrong culprit for their troubles, so we should tell them who is the true bad guy, not the immigrants but global capitalism. Such a replacement theory (replace “other race” with “global capital”) doesn’t work, it is in itself stupid. So-called ordinary people know well that big corporate capital is behind the immigrants (new populists exploit this fact all the time); however, they experience the threat to their way of life posed by immigrants as an immediate fact of their lives, which triggers autonomous racist dynamics. It is not good enough for them to be told by the Left “we’ll deal with the deeper causes,” they want the problem solved at the level of their daily experiences. The only way to fight it is therefore to take their complaints seriously, without idealizing immigrants, but also delve more deeply into their racism and bring out its contradictory nature. To put it in simple terms, what a racist perceives as an obstacle to his identity, to an unimpeded realization of what he is (the intruding foreigner), is effectively the condition of his identity: a racist needs the Other as a threat to sustain itself. If deprived of the Other, it crumbles. The Other (race) as a threat is ultimately here to obfuscate one’s own crisis and decadence.

Another pro-AfD reaction is: “sharia law is far right, not the AfD.” Our answer to it should be: I agree with the first part, not with the second one. There should be absolutely no taboos in our critical analysis of Islam: we should shamelessly violate the silent prohibition of many Leftists to critically analyze Islam as an expression of islamophobia. It is a fact that the separation between state power and religion (“give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar”) is deeply rooted in Christianity (although it was regularly violated), while there is no such principled separation in Islam. Khomeiny fully asserted the unity of Islam and the political, he stated clearly that “the foundation of Islam is in politics”: “The religion of Islam is a political religion; it is a religion in which everything is politics, not just its acts of devotion and worship.” Here is his most succinct formulation: “Islam is politics or it is nothing.”[2] For this reason, he is celebrated as effectuating a “decolonization of the political” in the sense of the ability to found and congeal social relations… One should recognize the moment of truth in these claims: the so-called Khomeiny Revolution was a unique case of a passionate political engagement of the masses, a moment of re-creating society, the whole texture of social links. However, although what is here celebrated as a “decolonization of the political” is a genuine political act, it enacts a full unity between the political and the religious, which is why it precludes any notion of secular politics, of politics not grounded in a sacred text.

Boris Buden[3] rejects the predominant interpretation which sees such phenomena as a regression caused by the failure of modernization. For Buden, religion as a political force is an effect of the post-political disintegration of society, of the dissolution of traditional mechanisms which guaranteed stable communal links: fundamentalist religion is not only political, it is politics itself, i.e., it sustains the space for politics. Even more poignantly, it is no longer just a social phenomenon but the very texture of society, so that in a way society itself becomes religious phenomenon. It is thus no longer possible to distinguish the purely spiritual aspect of religion from its politicization: in a post-political universe, religion is the predominant space in which antagonistic passions return. What happened recently in the guise of religious fundamentalism is thus not the return of religion in politics but simply the return of the political as such. So the true question is: why did the political in the radical secular sense, the great achievement of European modernity, lose its formative power? Such a radical stance is more and more replaced by the spirit of pragmatic compromises – here is another reaction:

“when a right-wing extremist party does not yet have an absolute majority, a coalition is ideal to show this party. This party has no solutions and participation in government of a federal state would show that easily and clearly. And less damage can be done at the state level than at the national level.”

But the experience with Trump’s presidency shows that such a strategy is very dangerous: instead of domesticating the far Right, it opens up the space for its gradual radicalization. So I much prefer another reader’s straight and honest formulation: what we need is a new racist apartheid:  “Only destiny for this once great nation /Germany/ is becoming the South Africa of Europe.” But my preferred reaction is the following one: “It's a shame the BSW can't work with the AfD in Saxony. They both want peace and low immigration.” (By “peace” it means no help to Ukraine.) It sounds (and is) quite logical: a coalition of those who truly address the concerns of the people.

We should note here a contrast between Germany and France. In France, the three (for now) incompatible domains (new populist Right, liberal centre, Left) are clearly distinguished, while in Germany the lines of demarcation are blurred: the old distinction Left-Right with all its shades of meaning was replaced by a series of new false or, at best, secondary oppositions (pro- and anti-immigrants, pro- and anti-woke…), so that we got a new political mapping (or, rather, a superposition of different mappings).

Within this new space, things that were unimaginable months ago are now seriously considered – say, some forces in CDU even consider a broad coalition that would include die Linke to prevent AfD participating in state power. From the anti-immigrant standpoint, the ideal formula would be the opposite one, a big coalition between AfD and BSW, since, from this standpoint, BSW is a Leftist party which did exactly what the anti-immigrants want: it took the infamous “concerns of ordinary people” very seriously. So we have now, with the electoral success of BSW, the split in the anti-immigrant field itself: the coalition between the two is – for the time being, at least - impossible (AfD wants it, BSW rejects it).

What unites the AfD and BSW is the avoidance of Trump-style vulgarity: although AfD from to time slips into open racism, they both speak a “civilized” moderate language. Even the radical Left is recently trying to normalize itself: there is a new tendency on the fringes of our political spectrum, something we cannot but call a “moderate far Left”; its main proponents are Domenico Losurdo (who recently died) and Gabriel Rockhill. (Rockhill analyzed the link between Adorno and Horlkheimer and the CIA, and also dismissed me as “capitalist’s court jester.”)

This tendency is far Left because what it does is that it breaks the firewall that defined the post-WWII Western Left: it rehabilitates the “really existing Socialism,” inclusive of Stalin and Mao. But it does this not in the exalted Stalinist language: its language is that of moderation and non-dogmatic realist pragmatism, so that it’s not so much rehabilitation but rather normalization of Stalinism and Maoism. Stalinism should be viewed as one of the stages in the complex development of Socialism; yes, it had its excesses, but also its great achievements, and it emerged as an understandable reaction to the boycott and pressure on Socialist countries. After taking power, revolutionaries had to accept that they lived in a real world in which, in order to survive, you had to organize your own secret police and other forms of oppression. In a similar vein, the deadly excesses of the Chinese revolutions (like tens of millions of dead in the “Great Leap Forward” in late 1950s) are accounted for as moments of the contradictory gradual development of Socialism, with the oscillation between two extremes (revolutionary terror and a partial return to capitalist economy). It is easy to recognize in this normalization an exact mirror-image of the far Right attempts to “normalize” Fascism by situating it into its historical context.

The first thing to do to clarify this mess is to problematize democracy itself (at least the way this term functions today). One has to gather the courage to reject the simple explanation that what is missing is the mobilization of the people, a true democracy sustained by the popular engagement. If there is a lesson to be learned from the latest Right-populist protests, it is that the time has come to turn around what Abraham Lincoln once said: “You can fool all people some of the time and some people all the time. But you can never fool all people all the time.” Today’s version is: most people can avoid being fooled some of the time and some people can avoid being fooled all the time. But most people can never avoid being fooled all the time. A genuine emancipatory engagement of the people is a rare event which quickly disintegrates. And we are not talking only about Western democracy here: recall how, in the time of the Cultural Revolutions, Mao Ze-dong was sending thousands of intellectuals to the agricultural communes to learn from ordinary farmers whom he elevated into “subjects supposed to know” – one can argue that it was good for intellectuals to get acquainted with the actual life on the countryside, but what they definitely did not get is some deeper wisdom about social life. Today, there is no privileged group which harbors an authentic understanding of society.

To be more precise, it’s not so much that the majority is fooled, it is that they basically don’t care – their main concern is that the relatively stable daily life goes on unperturbed. The majority doesn’t want actual democracy in which they would really decide: they want the appearance of democracy where they freely vote, but some higher authority which they trust presents them with a choice and indicates how they should vote. When the majority doesn’t get such clear hints, people get perplexed and the situation in which they are supposed to really decide is paradoxically experienced as a crisis of democracy, as a threat to the stability of the system. However, when the so-called silent majority begins to care, when they feel like victims and explode in real anger, things, as a rule, get much worse. As the ongoing wave of Rightist populism vastly demonstrates, they expose themselves even more to manipulation, falling prey to conspiracy theories.

What is thus missing in today’s mess is not some larger unity but its very opposite. Alain Badiou was right to say that true ideas are those which enable us to draw the true line of division, a division that really matters, that defines what a political struggle is really about – and today’s hegemonic Master-Signifiers (freedom, democracy, solidarity, justice…) are no longer able to do this (if they were ever able to do it is another question). “Democracy” is regularly used to justify neocolonialism, plus some hardline Socialist countries (East Germany, North Korea…) called themselves democratic. “Freedom” is often used as an argument against public healthcare (“it limits our freedom of choice”) or universal public education, “justice” can also mean “everyone should act according to his/her/their proper place in social hierarchy,” etc. To confront the great challenges today, it is crucial to learn to draw the proper lines of division – the old motto “United we stand, divided we fall.” should be turned around: divided we stand, united we fall.

Here is a case where division should be without any restraint. Back in late July of 2024, a number of ministers and Members of Knesset, as well as journalists and TV commentators, criticized a raid by the IDF's military police on the Sde Teiman base in the south of Israel, in which it arrested a number of reservists accused of abusing imprisoned Palestinians.[4] These arrests, which also triggered large public protests in Israel, happened after, horrified at what they saw, some Israeli reservists heroically rendered public that, among other forms of abuse, the security personnel on the Sde Teiman base were torturing Palestinian prisoners by pushing metal sticks into their rectums, which made some of them bleed to death. Peter Oborne has shown a clip from the following debate in Knesset:

“This is insanity, someone in the prosecutor’s office thinks it’s possible to arrest soldiers for things they do to Nukhba (Hamas Elite Unit) terrorists. We can’t continue as usual… (INTERJECTION: To insert a stick in a person’s rectum, is this legitimate?) Shut up! Yes, if he is Nukhba, everything is legitimate to do. Everything.”[5]

And Oborne has also shown a clip from an Israeli TV debate:

“Soldiers are suspected of raping a shackled prisoner – this doesn’t concern you?” “I don’t give a rat’s arse what they do to that Hamas man /…/ First, they deserve it and it’s a great form of revenge. Secondly, maybe it will act as a deterrent.”[6]

This, then, is what we get from “the only democracy in the Middle East”! Can one even imagine what our reaction would have been if the same thing happened in Russia! This brings us to the second point: the entire affair was downplayed, almost ignored, in our big Western media – and this wilful ignorance - the very opposite of simply not knowing it - rings more loudly than all the cries and shouts of the death of Western liberal democracy. Democracy will have to be reinvented – by violence, if necessary.

In the history of radical politics, violence is usually associated with the so-called Jacobin legacy, which is why it is often rejected as something to abandon if we aim to start anew. Even many of today's (post-)Marxists are embarrassed by the so-called Jacobin legacy of centralised state terror, and want to free Marx of it, proposing an authentic good “liberal”Marx who was later obfuscated by Lenin – it is, so the story goes, Lenin who (re)introduced into Marxism the Jacobin legacy, thus falsifying Marx's libertarian spirit... But is it so? Let us take a closer look at how the Jacobins effectively opposed the recourse to a majority vote on behalf of those who talk on behalf of the eternal Truth (how “totalitarian”...). How could Jacobins, the partisans of unity and of the struggle against factions and divisions, justify this rejection?

“The entire difficulty resides in how to distinguish between the voice of truth, even if it is minority, and the factional voice which seeks only to divide artificially to conceal the truth.”[7]

Robespierre's answer is: the truth is irreducible to numbers (counting), it can be experienced also in solitude: those who proclaim a truth they experienced should not be considered as factionists, but as sensible and courageous people. In this case of attesting the truth, he said in the Assemblee on December 28 1792, any invocation of majority or minority is nothing but a means to '“reduce to silence those whom one designated by this term ‘minority’ has everywhere an eternal right: to render audible the voice of truth.” It is deeply significant that Robespierre made this statement in the course of the Assemblee nationale apropos the trial of the king. Girondins proposed a “democratic” solution: in such a difficult case, one should make an “appeal to the people”: one should convoke local assemblies all around France and ask them to vote on how to deal with the king, only such a move will give legitimacy to the trial. Robespierre's answer was that such an ‘appeal to the people’ effectively cancels the sovereign will of the people which, through the insurrection and revolution, already made itself known and changed the very nature of the French state, bringing about the Republic.

Robespierre's argumentation effectively points forward to Lenin who, in his writings of 1917, saves his utmost acerb irony for those who engage in the endless search for some kind of "guarantee" for the revolution; this guarantee assumes two main forms: either the reified notion of social Necessity (one should not risk the revolution too early; one has to wait for the right moment, when the situation is "mature" with regard to the laws of historical development: "it is too early for the Socialist revolution, the working class is not yet mature") or the normative ("democratic") legitimacy ("the majority of the population is not on our side, so the revolution would not really be democratic") - as Lenin repeatedly puts, as if, before the revolutionary agent risks the seizure of the state power, it should get the permission from some figure of the big Other (organize a referendum which will ascertain that the majority supports the revolution).

With Lenin, as with Lacan, the revolution ne s'autorise que d'elle-meme: one should assume the revolutionary act not covered by the big Other - the fear of taking power "prematurely," the search for the guarantee, is the fear of the abyss of the act. Therein resides the ultimate dimension of what Lenin incessantly denounces as "opportunism," and his wager is that "opportunism" is a position which is in itself, inherently, false, masking the fear to accomplish the act with the protective screen of "objective" facts, laws, or norms, which is why the first step in combating it is to announce it clearly: "What, then, is to be done? We must aussprechen was ist, 'state the facts,' admit the truth that there is a tendency, or an opinion, in our Central Committee..."[8]

Especially when we are dealing with ‘strong truths’ (les verities fortes), shattering insights, pronouncing them entails symbolic violence. When la patrie est en danger, Robespierre said, one should fearlessly state the fact that “the nation is betrayed. This truth is now known to all Frenchmen and Lawgivers, the danger is immanent; the reign of truth has to begin: we are courageous enough to tell you this; be courageous enough to hear it.” In such a situation, there is no space for a neutral third position – in his speech celebrating the dead of the August 10 1792, abbe Gregoire evoked the proverb:

“There are people who are so good that they are worthless; and in a revolution which engages in the struggle of freedom against despotism, a neutral man is a pervert who, without any doubt, waits for how the battle will turn out to decide which side to take.”

Before we dismiss these lines as “totalitarian,” let us recall a later example when the French patrie was en danger: the situation after the French defeat in 1940 when none other than general de Gaulle, in his famous radio address from London, announced to the French people the “strong truth” (France is defeated, but the war is not over) against the Petainist collaborators. When de Gaulle, in his historic act, refused to acknowledge the capitulation to Germans and continued to resist, he claimed that it is only he, not the Vichy regime, who speaks on behalf of the true France (on behalf of true France as such, not on behalf of the “majority of the French”!), what he was saying was deeply true even if it was “democratically” not only without legitimization but clearly opposed to the opinion of the majority of the French people. (And the same goes for Germany: it was the tiny minority actively resisting Hitler which stood for Germany, not the active Nazis and also not the undecided opportunists.)

There is no reason to despise democratic elections; the point is only to insist that there are not per se an indication of Truth – as a rule, they tend to reflect the predominant doxa determined by the hegemonic ideology. There can be democratic elections which enact an event of Truth – the election in which, against the sceptic-cynical inertia – the majority momentarily “awakens” and votes against the hegemonic ideological opinion; however, the very exceptional status of such a surprising electoral result proves that elections as such are not a medium of Truth.

This position of a minority which stands for All is more than ever actual today, in our post-political epoch in which the plurality of opinions reigns: under such conditions, the universal Truth is by definition a minority position. As Sophie Wahnich points out, in a democracy corrupted by media, this is what ‘the freedom of the press without the duty to resist amounts to: the right to say anything in a political relativism instead of a demanding and sometimes even lethal ethics of truth.’ In such a situation, the uncompromisingly-insisting voice of truth (about ecology, about biogenetics, about AI, about the excluded...) cannot but appear as ‘irrational’ in its lack of consideration for the opinions of others, in its refusal of the spirit of pragmatic compromises, in its apocalyptic finality.

What grounds a truth is the experience of suffering and courage, sometimes in solitude, not the number and force of majority. This, of course, does not mean that there are infallible criteria for the truth: the assertion of Truth involves a kind of wager, a risky decision, one should cut out its path, sometimes even enforce it. Those who tell the truth are as a rule first not understood, they struggle (also with themselves) and seek for the proper language to tell it. It is the full recognition of this dimension of risk and wager, of the absence of any external guarantee, which distinguishes the authentic truth-engagement from any form of »totalitarianism« or »fundamentalism.«

But, again: how are we to distinguish clearly this ‘demanding and sometimes even lethal ethics of truth’ from the sectarian attempts to impose one's own position upon all others? How can we be sure that the voice of the minoritarian ‘part of no-part’ is effectively the voice of universal truth and not merely a particular grievance? The first thing to bear in mind here is that the truth we are dealing with is not “objective” truth, but the self-relating truth about one’s own subjective position; as such, this truth is an engaged truth, measured not by its factual accuracy but by the way it affects the subjective position of enunciation. In his Seminar 18 on “a discourse which would not be of a semblance,” Lacan provided a succinct definition of the truth of interpretation in psychoanalysis: “Interpretation is not tested by a truth that would decide by yes or no, it unleashes truth as such. It is only true inasmuch as it is truly followed.” There is nothing “theological” in this precise formulation, only the insight into the properly dialectical unity of theory and practice in (not only) psychoanalytic interpretation: the “test” of the analyst’s interpretation is in the truth-effect it unleashes in the patient.

The standard liberal motto apropos violence - it is sometimes necessary to resort to it, but it is never legitimate – is not sufficient: from the radical emancipatory perspective, one should turn this motto around. For the oppressed, violence is always legitimate (since their very status is the result of the violence they are exposed to), but never necessary - it is always a matter of strategic consideration to use violence against the enemy or not.[9] What does this amount to? Patrick Stewart (a Left-wing Socialist actor who superbly played Lenin in the 1974 TV series Fall of Eagles) says as Lenin (and the imagined words fit the real Lenin perfectly):

“Objectively, the enemy can be your best friend, your lover, your party colleague, the chairman of your local branch, the editor of your party journal. The battle that’s coming now is not with the tsar, it is with ourselves.”[10]

I first misread these lines, reading them not the way they are obviously meant, as a globalized suspicion (“your enemy can be even your best friend, one among your closest circle”), but in the opposite sense: your greatest friend is the one whom you perceive as your enemy. However, my misreading also delivers its own truth: since the goal of the revolutionary activity is to bring about actual revolution (taking power), enemy’s gestures which unwittingly create conditions for the revolution are very helpful. That’s why Lenin was horrified by Stolypin’s reforms which, if successful, would postpone revolution for decades. (Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin served as the third prime minister and the interior minister of the Russian Empire from 1906 until his assassination in 1911. Known as the greatest reformer of Russian society and economy. As prime minister, Stolypin initiated major agrarian reforms, known as the Stolypin reform, that granted the right of private land ownership to the peasantry. His reforms caused unprecedented growth of the Russian state, which was halted by his assassination. Lenin was relieved by Stolypin’s death: he immediately grasped that the final result of his reforms would have been a satisfied peasant class with no will to engage in revolutionary activity. Stolypin was thus the true enemy, and the hardliners who cancelled his reforms after his death were objectively our friends…

The point is thus not to engage in unconstrained physical violence but – like Oborne’s report with which we began – to tell the truth, aussprechen was ist, “state the facts,” to unleash the violence of words which shatter and mobilize people. The actual political violence that may follow should be practiced in a Gandhian way, taking into account all the usual humanitarian considerations – no such constraints hold for the Word at its beginning, and for the violence that sustains it. This is why the structure of the state power that best fits our predicament should be triple, not just democracy plus a stupid monarch elected by a lot, but added to it a collective body standing for social wisdom (not just experts). Take ecology: the necessary tough measures needed to cope with ecological threats cannot be left to democratic vote. Today, in an age when the fateful limitation of the Western model of multiparty liberal democracy is becoming more and more obvious, the need to supplement liberal democracy with another mechanism of power is also growing.

Attempts in this direction are already taking place, although they largely pass unnoticed. Recall Switzerland, a definitely successful and stable country. Very few people know who are the ministers there or which parties have a majority – government is considered a kind of neutral mechanism that one can safely ignore. Plus in Switzerland they often have referendums, but with a nice totalitarian touch: when a citizen goes to vote, he gets together with a piece of paper to fill in another piece of paper where the state gives him/her on how advice how to vote. (It is through a referendum held in February 1971 that women got the right to vote, and the women’s vote didn’t affect in any serious way the relation between political parties.) A couple of decades ago, a Communist served as the mayor of Geneva, a city which embodies modern capitalism, and life just went on, with no perturbances (the same thing is – in 2024 - now going on in Graz, Austria). The secret is that, elevated above the state administration, there is a kind of state council composed of less than 10 (financially, economically…) important members who, although they mostly stay in the shadows, effectively control and regulate social processes.

Unexpectedly, this brings us back to Iran. With all the inevitable critique of Iran, one must admit that, when Khomeiny took power, he took great pain to formalize a quite similar structure: a democracy, but with an external body controlling it, deciding, vetoing, etc. This body is the Guardian Council composed of the top representatives of the Muslim Clergy and led by the Supreme Leader (first Khomeiny himself, now Khamenei). Iran has a democratically-elected parliament, prime minister and president, but all candidates have to be confirmed (and are often vetoed) by the Supreme Leader to safeguard the Islamic purity of Iran. Iranian constitution has thus been called a "hybrid" of "theocratic and democratic elements". While Articles 1 and 2 vest sovereignty in God, Article 6 "mandates popular elections for the presidency and the Majlis, or parliament".[11]

But what about China today (and Vietnam and…)? Do we not have there the Communist Party as the non-elected guardian which controls and directs the state apparatus inclusive of all elected bodies? There are obvious problems with this model: elected bodies are a rubber stamp for the decisions of the party (which, interesting to note, is excluded from the legal system: it doesn’t exist from the standpoint of the law, it is nowhere registered as a legal entity) plus what is obviously missing is a stupid monarch elected by a lot. China is thus worse than Iran where there is a minimum of public political struggles (between “moderates” and “hardliners”).

But the main problem here is, of course: how will this controlling body be nominated? Who will do it? Of course it should NOT be democratically elected, and it also not “apolitical” – in some sense, it is the most political body of them all, the outcome of an informal class struggle. Ideally, its basic orientation should be that of a moderately-conservative Communism (aware of the urgency of radical changes, but cautious in their realization). It contrast to the democratic state administration, it clearly stands for a dictatorial element – for a point of violence.

I am far from suggesting that we need the same (Iranian) model in Europe (after all, Iran is an Islamic republic based on a sacred book); however, we in Europe (and all around the world) are facing the same problem: how to combine a secular democracy with a non-elected advisory body plus a non-sacred quilting point, a top agent or agency of formal decision which performs a political collapse, deciding among democratic superpositions (to use terms from quantum mechanics).

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[1] 'Stop calling voters neo-Nazis and take them seriously' says German ambassador to UK (youtube.com). All quoted reader’s reactions are from this site.

[2] http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/6173212.Ruhollah_Khomeini.

[3] See Boris Buden, Zone des Uebergangs, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 2009.

[4] For a report sympathetic to these protests, see Ministers, MKs enraged by arrests of soldiers suspect of prison abuse - Israel News - The Jerusalem Post (jpost.com)

[5] The SHOCKING Truth Israel Hides from World (youtube.com).

[6] Op.cit.

[7] Sophie Wahnich, »Faire entendre la voix de la verite, un droit revolutionaire eternel« (manuscript, June 2010). All further non-attributed quotes are from this outstanding text.

[8] V.I.Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 33, 4th edition, Moscow: Progress Publishers 1966, p. 422.

[9] I owe this idea to Udi Aloni.

[10] See Patrick Stewart as Lenin (All Scenes) (youtube.com).

[11] See Khomeini and the Decolonization of the Political (Chapter 12) - A Critical Introduction to Khomeini (cambridge.org).