The Knot

It is an evident fact intellectuals are silent when it finally comes to violence, or - as it used to be said over here with pathos "that muses are silent during war". As an aside, I don't think we even have a multitude of muses.
But there comes a time when it is a cosmic duty not to be silent. Even though I do not think I would have been okay had I been an adult during socialism, with the vantage point of the two decades, just about the only grudge I hold against the Communist Party is that they failed to remain true to their own ideals and arrest Slobodan Milosevic the very first time he called for violence.
In Croatia, we have once again reached a critical point. Yesterday, the Croatian war-time police minister reminded those present at a rally "arms are not that far away, not even today". Now, this is when I say authorities, a funny word when you think of it in terms of context and etimology, should bite it and arrest the chap. No, instead they arrest a couple of nobodies that tear the EU flag. Big deal, all flags are kitsch anyway.
They say science is an art that predicts. I must say there were a lot of practical humanists in ex-YU: those intelligent saw what was coming at least two years earlier. Croatians, on the other hand, were dubbed "geese in fog" some hundred years back by their very own leader.