As an indoctrinated do-gooder postmodernist I have been trained that universalism is bad. This is the second time in a week (the first was Susan Buck-Morss, speaking at Ryerson last Thursday) that I have heard a big-league socio-political thinker I respect (and barely understand) advocate publicly in favour of universalism.

Zizek: ...so it's obviously that what Western powers — in so far as they are represented by Tony Blair — what they want was some changes which would basically enable the global situation to remain the same. [...] You know how often in our multicultural era where we are all suspicious about universalism, we like to hear how democracy is something specifically Western, you should understand different cultures and so on and so on, but what affected me tremendously... was how cheap & irrelevant all this multicultural talk becomes. There, where we are all fighting a tyrant, we are all universalists, we are immediately in solidarity with one another - that's how you build universal solidarity. Not with some stupid UNESCO multicultural respect - we resepect your culture, you ours - it's the struggle for freedom. Here we have a direct proof that, A: freedom is universal and B: proof against that cynical idea that Muslim crowds somehow prefer some kind of religiously fundamentalist dictatorship, whatever. No! What happened in Tunisia, what is now happening in Egypt, is precisely this struggle for dignity, for human rights, for economic justice - this is universalism at work.