As we emerge (though perhaps only temporarily) from the pandemic, other crises move center stage: outrageous inequality, climate disaster, desperate refugees, mounting tensions of a new cold war. The abiding motif of our time is relentless chaos.Acknowledging the possibilities for new beginnings at such moments, Mao Zedong famously proclaimed There is great disorder under heaven; the situation is excellent. The contemporary relevance of Maos observation depends on whether todays catastrophes can be a catalyst for progress or have passed over into something terrible and irretrievable. Perhaps the disorder is no longer under, but in heaven itself.Characteristically rich in paradoxes and reversals that entertain as well as illuminate, Slavoj ieks new book treats with equal analytical depth the lessons of Rammstein and Corbyn, Morales and Orwell, Lenin and Christ. It excavates universal truths from local political sites across Palestine and Chile, France and Kurdistan, and beyond.Heaven In Disorder looks with fervid dispassion at the fracturing of the Left, the empty promises of liberal democracy, and the tepid compromises offered by the powerful. From the ashes of these failures, iek asserts the need for international solidarity, economic transformation, andabove allan urgent, wartime communism.Surveying the world in a series of 36 lucid missives in an incisive book of just over 200 pages, iek finds hope and disappointment in equal measure.Sean Sheehan Matthew_tsimitak via Flickr (Creative Commons License) Slavoj iek is one of the most prolific and well-known philosophers and cultural theorists in the world today. His inventive, provocative body of work mixes Hegelian metaphysics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Marxist dialectic in order to challenge conventional wisdom and accepted verities on both the Left and the Right. LIMITS OF DEMOCRACYIn the weeks before the 2020 US presidential elections, different forms of populist resistance were forming a unified field, as reported in the Guardian: Armed militia groups are forging alliances in the final stages of the US presidential election with conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers who claim the coronavirus pandemic is a hoax, intensifying concerns that trouble could be brewing ahead of the election day. Leading advocates of anti-government and anti-science propaganda came together at the weekend, joined by the founder of one of the largest militia groups.Three dimensions are at work here: conspiracy theorists (like QAnon), Covid deniers, and violent militias. These dimensions are often inconsistent and relatively independent: there are conspiracy theorists who dont deny the reality of the pandemic but see in it a (Chinese) plot to destroy the United States; and there are Covid deniers who dont see a conspiracy behind the pandemic but just deny the seriousness of the threat (i.e. Agamben). But the three dimensions are now moving together: violent militias legitimize themselves as defenders of freedom which they see as threatened by a deep-state conspiracy against the re-election of Trump, and they see the pandemic as a key element of this conspiracy. In this view, for Trump to lose re-election would be the result of this conspiracy, which means that violent resistance to Trumps loss is legitimate. On October 29, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigan, a former Vatican ambassador to the United States and outspoken adversary of Pope Francis, made waves within the online world of QAnon after his open letter to President Trump was quoted in a post from the anonymous leader of the cult-like conspiracy movement. The letter hit many of the favorite themes of the pro-Trump conspiracy theory, attacking their familiar villains from the ominous global elite, to Bill Gates and the mainstream media. The fate of the whole world is being threatened by a global conspiracy against God and humanity, Vigan wrote, emphasizing the epochal importance of the imminent election, casting Trump as the final garrison against the world dictatorship.The jump to violence is easy from such a standpoint. In October 2020, the FBI revealed that a right-wing militia group planned to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan from her house, taking her to a secure location in Wisconsin where she would undergo a kind of peoples trial for her treason. As a governor, she imposed tough restrictions to curb Covid-19 infections and, according to the militia group, thereby violated the freedoms guaranteed by the US constitution. Is this plan not reminiscent of the most famous political kidnapping in Europe? In 1978, a key figure of the Italian political establishment who evoked the possibility of the big coalition between the Christian Democrats and the Communist Party was kidnapped by the Red Brigades, put to a trial by a peoples court, and shot dead . . .Angela Nagle was right in arguing that the new populist Right is taking over procedures that were decades ago clearly identified as belonging to extreme Left terrorist groups. This, of course, in no way implies that the two extremes somehow coincidewe dont have a stable Center symmetrically flanked by the two extremes. The basic antagonism is the one between the establishment and the Left, and the rightist violent extremism is a panicky reaction triggered when the Center is threatened. This became clear in the last presidential debate when Trump accused Biden of backing Medicare for All, saying Biden agreed with Sanders, to which Biden replied: I beat Bernie Sanders. The message of this reply was clear: Biden is Trump with a human facein spite of their opposition they share the same enemy. This is liberal opportunism at its worst: renounce the Left extremists out of fear of scaring the center.