By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
There is a Jewish proverb that says, I’m paraphrasing: if everyone agrees that a man is guilty, immediately let him go free – he is certainly innocent.
So-called public opinion, you see, was not appreciated much before. Today, public opinion is changing the truth, which people have renounced. The truth, according to us today, is what we agree is the truth. As if truth is a matter of consensus and democratic procedure. That is why today’s man is hostile to the truth. As well as to knowledge. And to competence. Because: what’s the purpose of them? He has his own opinion.
Hence, it is not surprising that apparently notorious follies are promoted in the great wisdom of our time. One of them is the thesis that there are events “after which nothing will ever be the same”; events that are game over, end of story. The thing that the ill-fated Fukuyama called “the end of history.” So, misinterpreting Kojeve, who interpreted Hegel, he concluded that the victory of liberal capitalism and democracy was, to be honest, the end of history. Today we see how the liberal-democratic consensus is collapsing into small pieces. It does not happen as a result of a war of ideologies. The liberal-democratic consensus was designed to serve the economic paradigm established after the Second World War – one in which, as Varoufakis vividly describes, America has secured for itself the role of a global Minotaur to which the whole world brings victims. Now the economic paradigm is changing and the liberal-democratic ideology is no longer useful for it. A new ideology, a new servant is needed.
We all resemble Fukuyama a bit – don’t we? Didn’t many of us think that the entry of Montenegro into NATO permanently solved a set of important issues? Yeah, right, it certainly did. Did many of us believe that 21 May 2006 brought Montenegro to the position that the DPS formulated as “1918 never again”? And what happened – a small-scale 1918, of course.
Before that, didn’t the unionists think that with the referendum for Milosevic’s “Yugoslavia” they permanently prevented the restoration of Montenegrin statehood? And then 21 May happened.
Didn’t the victors of 1945 think that the return of fascism was impossible? Then fascism brought down their Yugoslavia.
Didn’t the “unifiers” in 1918 think they had got the things done?
Etcetera. You know what I mean.
But to underline, nevertheless. My dear brothers and sisters: On 30 August 2020, you did not get the things done. For what you intended to do, after all, you did not have a majority – not even on 30 August. That majority was provided by URA and part of “public opinion” shaped by Zeljko Ivanovic and Miodrag Perovic. Even if you get the majority – it will not be the end. You will get it – the majority – but in vain, just as we got it but in vain.
History has no end: much less an end that is happy. Everything just continues, without resolution, without point and without redemption. It means this.
You will watch how everything you thought you got done crumbles to ashes. Just as we did.
(The opinions and views of the columnist are not necessarily those of the CdM editorial staff)
