By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
It can be found in the New Testament, the most beautiful text written in the Greek language.
You know what happens when Pontius Pilate, faced with horror, literally washes his hands of what will follow. He has the power to prevent a catastrophe, and yet he doesn’t do it. Because it’s not useful. Because it’s not profitable for him. Because Rome needs a dead Christ. So he dedicates himself to personal hygiene.
Like Pilate, Zeljko Ivanovic washes his hands today. A day before his column in which he announced that he was afraid of the worst, the war, the URA champions, Adzic and Marovic, did the same. Like Pilate, the three of them speak from a position of power: Ivanovic above all. Because the power belongs to him: he installed it himself. His own people are in it. Like Pilate, he does not use power to stop the collapse – to overthrow the government, for example. He is just washing his hands from the disaster.
Aside from the fact that those hands are impossible to wash. He’s wahing them in a fecal water: it was his paws that enabled the sewage of hatred, segregation, apartheid and unbridled revenge to flood this country.
Ivanovic prays: “if only there was no war.” But … who is he talking to? Himself in the mirror. Because, as we said, he’s the government: it’s he, Miodrag Perovic and their partners in the government and the Church of Serbia who decide whether there will be a war. Like Pilate, they try to escape their own misdeeds by declaring themselves incompetent. He will succeed in this as much as the Roman procurator of Judea succeeded.
They agreed to the Faustian bargain with Amfilohije and the darkness of clerical nationalism which the latter wholeheartedly supported. They promoted the “emancipatory potential” of his clerical counterrevolution. They presented the explosion of Greater Serbian nationalism as a struggle for democracy. They minimized Vucic’s influence on the election in Montenegro. They took the lead in defaming anyone who dared to speak out against religious processions and the Serbian World. They searched for dirty acts in the biography of Amfilohije’s opponents. Where they could not find it, they made it up: as if it didn’t matter what was said, but who said it. They represented the Serbian World as an illusion. They did everything to present the Democratic Front as an acceptable partner in power. They ridiculed the petitions and appeals by which conscious and courageous citizens warned what would happen, and after the election: what has been happening. Any opposition to the Greater Serbia nationalism that trampled on Montenegro was declared “Montenegrin nationalism”.
They systematically equated nationalism responsible for genocide, elitism, ethnic cleansing campaigns, sadistic sieges of cities, snipers who killed children in parental arms, concentration camps, and the four Balkan wars of the 1990s (a nationalism that, incidentally, managed to lose four wars in one decade, which is undoubtedly a world record that needs to be congratulated) with nationalism for which no mother has cried yet.
Their party, URA, turned Amfilohije’s electoral defeat into victory. They minimized the ethnic cleansing of Montenegrin bodies through party recruitment.
And then Ivanovic, frightened by what was happening and what was to follow, as Rastoder and Rakcevic had done before him, cried out: I want to wash my hands. The most futile of all futile acts.
In today’s column, Ivanovic calls the Democratic Front, but wants to sound as if he doesn’t – “quislings”. Nevertheless, he and Perovic received a salary from those same quislings. One of them, Milan Knezevic, submitted invoices to the media confirming that his coalition had paid half a million euros to Ivanovic and Perovic’s newspaper – for promotion.
The same quisling in the Montenegrin assembly asked Ivanovic whether it was true that ‘Vijesti’ received 1.7 million euros from Vucic’s M:tel in two years – for the fight against Greater Serbian nationalism. It’s easy to guess. Finally, Ivanovic’s and Perovic’s brainchild is having an extended coalition intercourse with those quislings, without condoms.
However, announcing that the Front members are quislings, Ivanovic admitted what’s obvious: that Montenegro is occupied, that the Front government is a puppet and that the ruling ideology is criminal. Which did not bother him to back the occupation and get the money for promotion of today’s ruling quislings. Namely, Vidkun Quisling was the head of the puppet government during the Nazi occupation of Norway. What would you call the people and the newspaper to whom Quisling, by his own admission, paid half a million, and Hitler allegedly 1.7 million for media services?
“I’m washing my hands”, so….
You know those people who have been lying, stealing, whoring and trampling on human beings who stand in their way all their lives? So, in the end of his life, such a man became frightened and suddenly became pious to deserve salvation in that way. His penance is just another deception, just another maneuver of a desperate man.
There are, on the other hand, though rare, sinners who truly repent. Those who refuse to ask for mercy, because they think that they do not deserve mercy. There are people who have been scoundrels all their lives, only to find the strength for a true ethical act towards the end: those who refuse to whine for mercy, those who raise their heads and go for their punishment. Paradoxically: only such persons, and not the frightened church mice, are worthy of mercy.
Be like that. Stay a scumbag to the end.
History is an orgy of abominations, greed, betrayal; a chaotic monument to the fall of man, to which those who narrate it subsequently try to give order and meaning.
History includes every kind of people: the occupiers, the collaborators of the occupiers, those who would like to wash their hands, as well as those who have decided to persevere to the end in their own disgrace.
There are so many things. But the Faustian bargain with a happy ending hasn’t been recorded yet.
