By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
A clip about Sava Kovacevic has been shared on social media and Viber groups these days. Some claim that Sava turned off the water to the occupied Niksic. The Italians inform Sava that they have captured his cousin – whom the occupier allegedly didn’t hate – and that they will kill him if Niksic doesn’t get water.
Sava allegedly responds: kill him and I’ll immediately turn on the water for you.
According to the story, Sava’s cousin survived the war. It ends by telling that our contemporary, a middle-ranking politician, who also doesn’t hate the occupier, is his grandson. I don’t know if the story is true. I don’t want to mention names, because I don’t want to lie. I find no justification for lying. Lying for our so-called cause is not noble. You can’t defend anything by telling lies, except lies. By lying, one lies – and that’s all.
There are stories completely true in terms of facts, but are telling a lie. The author’s interpretation of the facts makes them so – false. And there are others: stories that may not be true, but are true.
So, the Internet’s truth about Sava Kovacevic is about us as prisoners of the past. About us as voluntary prisoners of our own ancestors. No one is to blame for the crimes of the ancestors. Just as their greatness, if any, is not ours. Just as no one is a murderer because his grandfather was, no one is erudite because his grandfather was it.
These things are not transmitted through blood. You don’t get tradition by birth, you get it by upbringing. You accept tradition. Or you refuse it. Ultimately, each of us chooses our own tradition. For this reason, one may be faithful to the tradition of the tribe, and another to the tradition of the Enlightenment. Ethnically, I am a Greek. But Homer is mine as other men’s in the world who know and want to read.
The idea that man is a radically free being is obviously disturbing for many.
Obsession with history and tradition implies that the living act in line with the supposed will of the dead. It implies that the will of the living obeys, harmonizes with the supposed will of the dead. The living thus become a continuation of the dead by other means. Our political decisions are then nothing more than the result of a referendum conducted among the dead.
The problem with such an intention is obvious: who knows what the will of the dead is?
The question: how Peter I or Njegos would act today is irritatingly stupid and thoroughly manipulative. Those who ask the question supposedly know the answer. And you can’t know it: only imagine it. The story about how our ancestors would have acted in our place is a fiction. To the request that I behave in accordance with the instructions of the one who turns his own, ideologized fiction into a moral imperative, I can only say – go to hell.
Njegos who would read Foucault, study at Cambridge, fall in love with a Muslim woman – so that he will love her for the rest of his life – and as a student smoked Afghan hashish would think, write and act the same as that historical-mythical Njegos?
No matter how hard it was for some to accept… One and the same statement in two different contexts produces two different meanings. One and the same man in two contexts – not the same man. The values of a past time can often appear as stupidity, and even more often as the dullness of another time.
No one is obliged to defend their ancestors at all costs. Just as they have no right to adorn themselves with their feathers. If one’s ancestors slaughtered Muslims in Foca in World War II, it doesn’t mean that one should try to justify it, even less does it mean that it should be repeated. It’s not an act of loyalty to tradition and family. It was monstrous then, as is monstrous now. And we had so many chances to see those pissing on those same ancestors and their ideals.
The partisan movement fought against fascism and for freedom. No revision of history can change that. Every attempt to intervene in the past, every parliamentary declaration equating that movement with fascists is a lie and does no one any good. It’s just a dead text.
A man, a descendant of the losers in World War II, who accepts the values of anti-fascism, doesn’t commit any sin against his ancestors who fought against those values. And descendants of the victors who agree to historical revision… The essential problem of their action is not that they did the opposite of their ancestors, as they did. But the fact that they gave up on anti-fascist values.
F**k, freedom is hard to get.
The views expressed in this text belong solely to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of the CdM portal.
