National Mythomania
In the minds of most people war is occurrence that erupts like natural phenomena – avalanche, hurricane or flood. Powerfully and out of control it breaks, kills, wounds and displaces people. Those who are technically running it – the military and the paramilitary, are presenting themselves as mere clerks of that war, almost as servants who are listening to the bloody and ruthless tasks of their angry warlord. Robbery is one of those tasks because the gluttony of the voracious mister War is immense.
Described representation of war, however, hides the truth. It is the delusion imposed by the planners and managers of destruction in order to hide plans and consequences of the horrors they are installing. To really hide the expected lucre by rule realized from the robbery and slaughter factory they are setting in motion.
Later when everything is over, when the dead are being buried, while the demolished houses are being fixed, and the disabled practice the use of wheelchair and wooden legs, while the survivors are quiet and thinking they got through – discourse, design and plot setup from the beginning of the enterprise is usually forgotten. While the population was packed in the fog of false promises, myths and hatred. When the war orchestra is well equipped and paid to roar and drum, to recruit its own and scare the “other”.
Merely fifty meters from this place where we are sitting right now, in front of the building of province administration, across the street, twenty years ago, in the summer of 1988, one of the key delusional shows was organized, orchestrated by the Milošević regime and secret service of Yugoslav state, that was at that time undermined and questioned by the converted leaders of all Yugoslav republics. The same leaders who were just few months or a year before that propagators of proletarian internationalism, multinational equality, self-management and peaceful politics of Yugoslavia. All for the sake of their own survival in power, at the dawn of the fall of Berlin wall, in fear and running away from democratization – they organize post feudal schism of the state, along with the tribalization of population in parts of the country/republics, they reign.
So, one day, in the summer of 1988 around the white building of province administration a group of few thousands “demonstrators” showed up explaining that they are starting “anti-bureaucratic revolution”. Minutes after watching the people and their slogans and after few conversations with them, it was quite clear that it wasn't a spontaneous gathering, but an action coordinated by the state authorities from Belgrade and the secret police, with the help of hundreds of police snoops whose task was to break the legal system and set of values that the former state was based on. Written and shouted slogans were directly spreading hatred towards other nations, demanding dismembering and recomposing the state, denying republic and national consensus that the former state had been based on. Police calmly watched the breaking of the law and cooperated with the demonstrators.
About that event, and many similar ones that followed during that summer, I will show a documentary footage from the docu-drama “Old timer”, which I have directed.
Three years after the state propaganda machinery had begun working - newspaper and television controlled by the political parties, along with the one-party communist structure working night and day throughout the entire ex-Yugoslavia on planning and creating “multi-party system” – conditions were ripe for the blood to start streaming, to embed the corpses into the foundation of new, now enemy states, emerged from the previous “brotherhoodly“ republics.
War was the technical realization of inter-republic power struggle. In the case of Yugoslavia it was actually the continuation – through the means of artillery – of the last, interrupted Convention of the Communist Union of Yugoslavia.
Next video clip from the winter of 1993/94, while the war raved on, is an illustration of the thesis that the population, scared and crazed by the events that landed on their heads, barely can recall the time when the war wasn't a part of the everyday life. Newly established system of values, where robbery, deception and conversion are so common – is being accepted as better alternative to being killed. It is a clip from the film“Tito Among the Serbs for the Second Time”.
War has a magnetic quality. Not only that the thin line between life and death becomes even thinner, but it is also a roulette where you get rich or lose everything you own – at a cosmic speed. There is no such economy branch, diamond or gold mine, which could, in a few days or months, create a profit that can be made in war by smuggling, blackmail and robbery. And the technical capacity is so economic: bullet in a barrel and a finger on a trigger. You don't need a mine, oil platform, a conveyor belt – amount of treasure that you'll get is the same as the one that took Rothschild seven generations to gather.
Collateral damage however, occurs: population, i.e. people that were promised and told that all the suffering they have to go through is for their own good in fact. People were promised to be defended from the enemy, that they will regain their dignity and that the medieval greatness and importance of “our ancient state and culture” will be restored. But, now, those people are out of job, in debts, factories are demolished, children have no future. And the new state is even poorer and smaller than the one that was being torn apart in the name of old greatness. People are slowly coming around, trying to figure out what has happened to them. Still afraid to ask, but they will ask: WHO PROFITED FROM ALL THIS? The next clip I'll show, from the film “Europe Next Door” we did in 2005, is exactly about that.
Years are passing by, new distribution of social wealth is established. On top of every type of profit and economic success is WAR PROFIT, father of all Balkan profits. Together with the helpers – from state, police, and military structures. New class distribution is established as well. These great achievements should be now defended. Hungry, degraded and angry “losers” – a majority of the population, aren't completely naive and harmless.
What story can we sell now?
Alright – we can always give them the Middle ages. In Serbia monasteries, in Croatia – Diocletian palace, Slovenians forgive Catholic church for its collaboration with the fascist regime, and Njegoš in Montenegro wrote Mountain Wreath and hated the chains.
But none of those things can be eaten. And a lot of it has been spent in the previous acts of grand guignol that was staged.
Political class, under the pressure of the emerging problems, almost unanimously, thinks of a “lifesaving” idea. Russia will help. The biggest country in the world! One of the richest! We shared communism with them in a short period of time, but orthodox religion always. Russia found another great formula: protect your own richest people. They are simply a part of the government. It even allowed its powerful companies to create military units. Well, that's a great solution! Forget mutiny among the workers, forget the unions, forget Council against corruption, nonsense!
One of the candidates for the president of Serbia, came up with the additional “imaginative” solution,… He suggests that the whole country should join to Russia. That is, in this situation, “very rational”. Because, it would completely answer the call of tradition and the past. All of us, South Slavic people anyway originate from those parts. It seems that Europe, where we live since the 6th century, did not work well for us. Let's all go back to the old cradle, they say! And leave here, on a mountainous Balkans, in the enemy Europe, our class of politicians and new millionaires – let them struggle with the rotten capitalists and sell them this small piece of inhospitable country, where we spent the last one thousand and four hundred years. If we don't do that – there is a danger that the hungry and uncomformed citizens reach for the bat and axe…
My last video is about that.