Slavoj Zizek's Multi-Cultural/Ethnic Statism

The Slovenian (Marxist?) philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, in a contribution to day's Guardian (Comment is Free), “Liberal multiculturalism masks an old barbarism with a human face”, clearly expresses his belief in Multi-Cultural/Ethnic Statism and its justifying universalistic (catholic) ideology (“One-Human-Racism”), which denies (and suppresses as “racism”) the importance to ethnicity in determining an individual's sense of personal and group, i.e. national (Gr. ETHNOS = nation), identity.

Quote from article:

“This vision of the detoxification of one's neighbour suggests a clear passage from direct barbarism to barbarism with a human face. It reveals the regression from the Christian love of one's neighbour back to the pagan privileging of our tribe versus the barbarian Other. Even if it is cloaked as a defence of Christian values, it is itself the greatest threat to Christian legacy.”

OED definition of UNIVERSALIST: A person advocating loyalty to and concern for others without regard to national allegiances.

The New Catholicism

The New Catholicism is the universalist ideology of "colourblindness" (feigned - perhaps subconsciously - indifference to ethnic difference), of "race doesn't matter", i.e. is of no social or political significance, except to evil "racists" (the exact, but equally extreme, opposite of Nazi racial ideology, which initially it was an understandable overreaction to, along with the inhuman ideologies associated with Jim Crow and Apartheid, but which political and economic opportunism consolidated in its present extreme form) and which, like the Catholic Church before it, has been embraced by the state as representing the moral high ground which legitimizes its own authority and power.

Its an irrational and nonsensical ideology (like that of Catholicism), because no one is really "colourblind", i.e. indifferent to ethnic difference, unless they subconsciously suppress and deny it, even to themselves, which I suspect many do, because of the massive social, political and economic pressure everyone is under, just as they were in the Middle Ages in respect to Christian ideology.

Added to which, ethnicity (which relates to one's ancestors and their history) must surely be a central component of any deep and meaningful sense of personal and group identity - which, of course, the state doesn't want its subjects (I beg your pardon, "citizens") to have, because it needs them to identify with its self-serving and superficial self.