ChatGPT, Zizek, and a Tunisian fascist discourse

Over the last two weeks, Tunisia has witnessed a collective racist hysteria. Facebook and other social media were flooded by content that incites hate speech,bigotry, and paints the other as a foreign invader seeking to disrupt what was previously a harmonic coexistence. This narrative ended up producing several organized attacks against sub-Saharan African living in Tunisia.

The Tunisian nationalist party(الحزب القومي التونس) -it is beyond me how people still have the audacity to name a political party in that matter in the 21th century- was one of the main driving forces behind this content up until it was institutionalized by the president of the republic. The adoption of such discourse by the state personified in Kais Saied’s declarations can only be described as a grave precedent in modern political Tunisian history .

Within this context, i made the acquaintance of chatGPT and embarked on a quest to ask it to help me write scripts with which i can further understand the ideological nature of the narrative circulated by the Tunisian nationalist party. After going back and forth with chatGPT i ended up creating a tool that first extracts all relevant links in their website ( links that leads to their propaganda’s pages) and prints them into an excel sheet:

part of the code that extracts links

part of links that were extracted

The script then accesses all this links and scraps the words inside these pages and pastes them in a word documents separated by commas:

the script that scraps the words

part of the words extracted in the word document

Finally the script goes through the documents and counts how many times each word is repeated to display an excel sheet with the top 100 words used in the “party’s” website and how often it was used:

part of the script that lists the top 100 most used words (the script could be optimized to not count irrelevant words)

Top 100 most used words in the website

The goal of this process is that by having access to a 135 page document containing all the words used in their narrative and reducing them to the top 100 most used words, i can capture the essence of their ideology. While i was anticipating to find words like الأجصي ( a word used to group people coming from different countries,cultures and backgrounds into one category) on that list, i was astonished that the word was used almost 600 times in their texts!!! along with words that incite violence and spread conspiracy theories.

After further contemplating this list, i started seeing something even more interesting. Not only does this list contain hate speech but it also contains words such as الدولة (the state),ميزانية (the state’s budget),إقتصاد (the economy),المالية (state finances),الفلاحة (agriculture),and الفساد (corruption). these words in fact represent legitimate fears and concerns that the Tunisian citizen thinks about. and this is where Zizek enters the frame:

Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian philosopher that among many things starred and scripted a movie entitled “the pervert’s guide to ideology” in which he seeks to criticize ideology through analyzing popular films and media. in his critique of the movie Jaws by Spielberg ( for those unfamiliar with the movie its about a shark that attacks people) Zizek asks the question of what does the shark represent? Unlike other critics that perceive the shark as a metaphor for a specific fear ( capitalism, natural disasters…), he argues that “The function of the shark is to unite all fears and replace them with one fear alone”. Zizek goes on to say that this is exactly how a fascist narrative functions, seeking to reassert traditional social hierarchy without addressing the inherent social tensions that are a natural result of societies living under capitalism, fascism seeks to “generate an ideological narrative which explains how things went wrong,not as a result of inherent tensions in this society but as a result of the foreign intruder”.

And if this is not what we have at hand, the list of the top 100 most used words seeks to replace all fears (الدولة (the state),ميزانية (the state’s budget),إقتصاد (the economy),المالية (state finances),الفلاحة (agriculture),and الفساد (corruption)) for one fear alone (الأجصي). out of all the words in that list, there is only (الأجصي) that fits the picture of an enemy.

While inconclusive, i think that this list serves as an empiric evidence that the discourse adopted by this political party can only be perceived as fascist and regressive.

Note: kids, stay away from fascism.