Good call, redstar.

Recently I read through a book titled "The 33 Strategies of War". Inadvertedly, it interestingly clarifies world's political pattern today, illuminating once more who are real seekers with a Grand Strategy, who are anti-strategical imitators of governing and competition, how clues for rationalization and acceptance are provided, etc.

For one thin, it shows that we have a nice class warfare going on; all strategic knowledge is there. A Grand Strategy goes back to Reagan, Thatcher, Pinochet, quite apparently. Just remember: what is called "socialism" now, was common sense policies in the West around the Nixon times. By now the political left and the majority of population are certainly divided and conquered by all Roman canons:

In 338 BC Rome defeated its greatest enemy at the time: the Latin League, a confederation of Italian cities that had formed to block Rome's expansion. With this victory, however, the Romans faced a new problem: how to govern the region. If they crushed the League's members, they would leave a power vacuum, and down the road another enemy would emerge that might prove a still greater threat. If they simply swallowed up the cities of the League, they would dilute the power and prestige of Rome, giving themselves too large an area to protect and police. The solution the Romans came up with, which they later called "divide et impera" - "divide and rule", was to become the strategy by which they forged their empire. Essentially, they broke up the League but did not treat all of its parts equally. Instead, they created a system whereby some of its cities were incorporated into Roman territory and their residents given full privileges as Roman citizens. Others were deprived of most of their territory, but granted near total independence. And others were still broken up and heavily colonized with Roman citizens. No single city was left powerful enough to challenge Rome, which retained the central position. As the saying goes, "All roads lead to Rome". The key to the system was that if an independent city proved itself loyal enough to Rome, or fought well enough for Rome, it won a chance of being incorporated into the empire. The individual cities now saw it as more in their interests to gain Rome's favor than to ally themselves elsewhere. Rome held up the prospect of great power, wealth and protection, while isolation from Rome was dangerous. And so the once proud members of the Latin League now competed against one another for Rome's attention.

Is that not how the globalization and the infamous rat race works? Some emergent markets are labeled as tigers, some countries are declared failing (much more often than ever before). Similarly, social positioning was enforced (say, in freed Eastern Europe) with praise of innovative "wealth makers", contempt of "white trash" and other loosers, all or nothing financial and social games, political intimidation. We are all confused, terrorized and ambushed like Iraqi citizen, with all these financial shocks, hypocritical elections, endless reforms, accelerating technology, rupture of social fabric. The world is so corrupt - the Romans did not know it. When a US congressman seeks Energy and Commerce Committee chairmanship with open confidence that God will not allow catastrophic climate change, how close are we to Abrahamian theocracy and old-fashioned religious warfare on "false" believers?

We'll get our Flood, Christian or not.

My guidebook for the future is
"Canticle for Liebowitz"

Align culture with our nature. Ot else!

Just wanted to thank you for posting this. I let my NLR subscription lapse several years ago, but Zizek nails this. I've been thinking about these same issues a lot lately, particularly this part:

the misery of today's left: there is no positive programmatic content to its demands, just a generalized refusal to compromise the existing welfare state. The utopia here is not a radical change of the system, but the idea that one can maintain a welfare state within the system.

This matches my own thinking. There is plenty of effort being expended right now to defend the US welfare state from attack. We're right to try and stop the Catfood Commission from destroying Social Security and Medicare, but the progressive movement seems to think it is sufficient to mount that defense, without realizing that as long as we have a neoliberal economy dominated by financiers, there will be a constant imperative to destroy the welfare state.

I also feel the pull of the part redstar bolded, where Zizek says "we have to risk taking steps into the abyss." I'd already decided to leave my job at the end of the month to work on a book about the collapse of the 20th century American Dream and the construction of a social democratic 21st century American Dream (signed the contract last month) so it's a fitting thing to read. Maybe I'll find some income once the book is done.

And the world will live as one

..was good in the old--education, healthcare, basic social services.

That is a good program, but it's missing the key point. And along with it everything. The human right to land.
The left works everywhere against that right. They are pro rentier, pro mortgage bankers, pro finance capital, pro monopolies, against private entrepreneurship. To some degree they are even against basic social services. How can they have anything positive to say from that platform?