Politics & Power Quote by Slavoj Zizek

Zizek is doing his favorite trick here: grabbing a moral certainty and twisting it until the comforting parts fall out. The “blessing in disguise” isn’t praise for tanks or repression; it’s a jab at the way political disappointment gets outsourced to a villain. If the Soviets hadn’t intervened, the story goes, “authentic democratic socialism” would have bloomed. Intervention becomes the perfect alibi: history was sabotaged, so the dream stays pure.

The subtext is psychoanalytic in a street-fight kind of way. Zizek is pointing at the political function of myths: they protect desire. A failed experiment is easier to mourn if you can say it was never allowed to become itself. The tragedy, in his framing, is that the intervention didn’t just crush a movement; it preserved a fantasy version of it, one that can be endlessly invoked without ever facing the mess of governing, coalition-building, compromise, and internal contradiction. “Saved the myth” is the tell. He’s less interested in adjudicating Soviet culpability (though he calls it “very sad”) than in exposing how opposition politics can become addicted to pristine counterfactuals.

Contextually, he’s circling the post-1968/post-1989 European left’s recurring impulse to locate the “real” socialism always somewhere else: in the road not taken, the revolution interrupted, the reform betrayed. His pessimism is rhetorical ballast. It’s meant to feel like a cold splash: maybe the alternative wasn’t a near-miss utopia; maybe it would have been ordinary, fractured, and hard. And that’s exactly why the myth is so useful.