Harmoniously

I have withdrawn from public life and created an ambitious reading plan, ranging from Croatian history and "Lord" Owen to Foucault writing on subjectivity, or Krleža—this time focusing on the intellectual and an authoritarian regime in Central Europe. My phone hasn't rung for four days now, as incoming calls are blocked unless the "system" wants something—but that doesn't necessarily mean a lack of freedom. It is incredible how much time you have in a day when you give up on the "news," as well as cafes and the fools! And soon, it will be beach season. When I was younger, I believed that wrong-headed policy—which undoubtedly exists, otherwise we wouldn't find ourselves in these minor troubles—should be ruthlessly overturned. Through dismissals, for example. However, exclusively. Even on this blog, I wrote that the tax administration should be reorganized by firing absolutely everyone, because bureaucracy has a life of its own. Although such a policy has predecessors—notably Hitler and Stalin in the twentieth century—it was exactly what Tuđman applied. And Milošević. Meanwhile, the Western world, most recently in the form of Trump, became infected by it through technology and a fifty-year struggle against the USSR. In general, that Tuđman would change "officials" as easily as socks. In the case of the HOS—who actually wanted an alliance with the Muslims and a fight all the way to the Drina River, while he only wanted Herzegovina—he even employed political assassinations. Former JNA "operatives" who had even crossed over to "his" side were left without pay for six months in cold blood, and so on. Like Milošević, he turned parliament into a machine that could no longer even explain to itself why it voted one way one day and the opposite the next—for instance, in the case of the Hague. But his successors essentially inherited the same thing; the consequence today is that they are more or less powerless against foreigners, yet they trumpet about "national interests." And whoever is against them is against the nation. Exclusively. Milošević also believed that whatever wasn't on the Evening News simply hadn't happened. A similar consequence of the "exclusivity" I’m talking about can be seen in the EU: the falsification of reality. The EU was apparently ready to organize a referendum on Ireland's entry indefinitely, until the voters confirmed what the "large-toothed cattle" had not already mapped out in their wisdom. In the case of Moldova, the media has completely failed, so, well, we are expected to believe that black is white. Certainly, we must seek the causes also in the stunning passivity of ninety percent of the population, as well as a certain stubbornness among intellectuals. On the other hand, there are those voices—I still remember them—who were against "revanchism" or who occasionally advocated for consensus. I fear I belong to them now. After I pursued a certain justice—primarily by driving the HDZ's own policies to their logical conclusions and proving that I am not what the system declared me to be, "mad"—in my old age, I have mellowed. I believe in a certain amount of listening and questioning, and that in politics one should not—must not—use the "rabid, aggressive, or primitive." Because this last war in the Balkans was, in large part, a re-encounter between the village and the city. People from the villages tore down cities, both literally and metaphorically; and with media like this, they are given the right of way, and the circle closes. In my ivory tower, I am reading The Banquet in Blitva.