By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
All those numerous international, so-called expert organizations that are paid to assess the state of human rights and democracy in other people’s houses and courtyards, a kind of municipal police of the “democratic west”, can hang their football boots on a peg and start earning a living by doing other work – digging canals, cleaning the gutters or politics.
According to the estimates of these organizations, Serbia and Montenegro are approximately at the same stage of democratic development – Serbia might be a step forward.
It’s like measuring with a Geiger counter in 1990 that the level of radiation in a village in Kenya – where the only source of pollution is a skinny cow from which the whole village lives and which tends to shit in the middle of a village avenue – is many times higher than in Chernobyl. It is a measurement error that permanently disqualifies you in the work you do. Like, for example, when Chomsky makes a mistake with Cambodia, and continues to give political judgments for another half century. And then, of course, he makes a mistake with Srebrenica too. Because a logical-ethical instrument calibrated in a way not to detect the problem with the Khmer Rouge will not detect genocide either.
Sufficiently enough, the fact that Dritan Abazovic is the Prime Minister of Montenegro, says that the assessors of our democratic development either do not know what they are talking about, or they are well paid to talk like that.
It is possible in Serbia for the parliament to vote for the Albanian prime minister, without hundreds of thousands of people protesting on the streets of Belgrade, right?
Of course, I did not criticize Dritan because he is Albanian and Muslim – on the contrary, I think that is the best thing that can be said about him. Albanians are, as I have written many times, a serious, old nation which I respect and have neighborly affection. And Muslims – I really like them. Serbian tabloids do not call me Mula Nikolaidis in vain.
No: I criticized Abazovic because he made moves as if he were not a Muslim and an Albanian. And more importantly: as if he is not a free citizen of Montenegro.
Let us be critical of ourselves. That is the only way to be better. I know us, fuck us. But that’s also true: I know you, I fuck you. One thing is self-criticism, and the other is that someone jumps on your open brain and convinces you of something that is obviously not true. And you suffer for the sake of “higher good” – because jumping on the open brain, like supporting Amfilohije’s clerical counter-revolution back then, and in the name of “inclusiveness”, “social emancipation” and “getting out of the hybrid regime” – is an integral part of European integration, let’s say.
The fact that the Albanian was elected Prime Minister of Montenegro and that there were no – or were marginal and negligible – chauvinistic outbursts in public, testifies that Montenegro reached the level of civilization that America, as the leading democracy in the West, achieved by electing Obama. It reached it, and immediately after that, with the election of Trump, it plunged into the abyss.
We are what we are, and we are worthless – this is a question of elementary self-esteem, it is a question of fidelity to our own anti-imperialist tradition (and that is the tradition I hold to) to state the obvious. In this small country, the children of peasants and hard manual workers, regardless of their religion, nation, or complexion, went to schools and colleges at the expense of the state, while on the streets of St. Augustine, Florida, marched the Ku Klux Klan, looking for an African-American to be set on fire on a cross and black children were forbidden to get on a bus carrying white children to school. In this country, women engaged in diplomacy at the time they did not have the right to vote in Switzerland. And no, this is not “we ate with golden spoons when Europe didn’t have a toilet” Greater Serbian discourse.
Theis my attempt to try to tell you this: people who have been convinced that they are worthless, primitive, unworthy, and that therefore, for their own good, they need a foreign administration – will get a foreign administration. And the foreign administration, no matter how persistently the colonial service claims just the opposite while drawing its power from ties with foreign embassies and foreign funds, is not the way to emancipation.
Such emancipation, while the world was still young and we still had some ideals, was once called slavery.
