By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
Whoever remembers 21 May 2006, remembers the hope: for a better, juster and progressive Montenegro. The future looked bright on that day, like the White Queen from Disney’s movies. And just look at it today.
Yes, that day was a triumph of hope in Montenegrin politics. It took a lot of evil to get there. A whole decade of misery and shame had to pass in which we – by following other people’s interests that weren’t even theirs although they still don’t get it – fell under sanctions, were ashamed in Dubrovnik and Herzegovina, from the country whose foundation was the unwavering defense of its own freedom, we have become those who attack other’s freedom, and finally: we have become a country that the West bombards with disgust, almost with sanitary goods, because they can no longer watch what we’re doing.
At that moment, we raised our heads.
But now it seems like we’ve bent them again.
Hope didn’t last long: while the Russians poured money into Montenegro.
In 2012, following the parliamentary election, speaking in a TV show hosted by Darko Sukovic, I said it was the last time that DPS won thanks to the politics of fear, with the message “vote for us, so that others can’t destroy Montenegro”.
I was wrong. They won by using that same policy once again, in 2016. Four years later it was over. In the end, everything we feared happened. It’s always like that. In the end, your greatest fear becomes your destiny.
The opposition is still in the same matrix. If their plan is to return to power by relying on the fear of a new majority, they can forget about it. Who’s afraid of a train that has already hit you?
The right is the politics of fear. Hope, whether you like it or not, goes to the left.
Spajic, who is by no means leftist, rules because he managed to offer hope. The “politics of hope” is a concept that he’s been using relatively often. Care for descendants; look to the future; “the best is yet to come” – these are all constitutive elements of the rhetoric of hope.
And then Spajic got back to the past and did exactly what Vucic wanted him to do. He agreed to the Resolution on Jasenovac. Yes, Jasenovac was a monstrous execution ground, and the NDH was a monstrous Quislin creation. Yes, Serbian victims are not and cannot be less valuable than others. It’s indisputable. That’s not what it’s about. It’s rather about the fact that with that Resolution Spajic steps into the “The dead are our greatest wealth”/”And we have the dead in the race” discourse that has dominated Serbian politics since the second half of the 80s of the 20th century.
I’m a pessimist. I think hope is undignified and intellectually inferior. But I write books and don’t want power. Nor would any normal person give it to me. I prefer truth to hope.
But politics, it’s different. It’s the area monetizing hope and lie.
In Nolan’s ‘The Dark Knight’, Batman says, “Sometimes the truth isn’t enough. Sometimes, people deserve more. To see that what they believed in is realized”.
Those who remember 21 May 2006 know that in the end we didn’t see what we believed in then.
I think differently. We didn’t see the realization of our hopes because we didn’t deserve it. We got what we deserved.
(The opinions and views of our columnists aren’t necessarily those of the CdM news team)
