Fathers and post-communist children

Bizarre interest quivered for a short time on the margins of the world media, in sections reserved for information that is read the way it is forgotten: quickly and easily. In front of the port factory in Odesa, Ukraine, according to the news, a certain Aleksandar Milov transformed a huge sculpture of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin into a statue of Darth Vader from 'Star Wars' through artistic intervention. Under the recognizable mask, where the head of the fallen Jedi should be, a Wi-Fi hotspot was installed, and the figure of Comrade Uljanov remained intact, hidden under a long black cloak. At least it wasn't sent to the slaughterhouse, like other monuments that were massively removed after the local parliament, in April of this year, passed a law on the violent removal of all communist symbols, bringing to a logical end the processes of decommunization that have dominated the European post-socialist bloc for a quarter of a century anyway.

If Hungary crammed its gigantic statues of Lenin, Stalin and company into the muddy Szoborpark near Budapest, leaving them to the curiosity of idle tourists, and if the agile Croatian dynamists of the XNUMXs missed a partisan memento here and there, the Ukrainians, we see, decided to be thorough and consistent. Covering Lenin with the cloak of Darth Vader is not an exception, but an inexorable consequence of such a decision: after all, is there a more thorough way to cancel seven decades of a political system than to reduce them to mockery, is there a more consistent erasure of history than turning it into childish banter?

With the return of what was pushed to the surface of the civilized West, the thick post-political darkness tried: it brought us hatred towards refugees and immigrants who were displaced precisely by Western imperialism, right-wing extremism, violence instead of proclaimed tolerance...

In his essay Children of post-communism, Boris Buden once warned us about an unusual ideological trick that overnight, immediately after the fall of the communist regime, turned the entire Eastern European bloc into a kind of political kindergarten: a people who spontaneously, through heroic resistance, overthrew a powerful government, suddenly demoted to immature droolers who have yet to get over the 'infantile diseases of democracy' and master its basic lessons. Another name for this operation is depoliticization: reducing the freedom of decision-making to a one-way transition path that leads to the unquestioned ideals of the West. Perhaps that's why the oversized Anakin Skywalker action figure, which jokingly tells post-communist kids 'I am your father', should be taken more seriously than it seems at first glance: isn't the hiding of Lenin under the cloak of Darth Vader a precise metaphor for the more sinister, extensive and more far-reaching suppression of politics itself in ex-socialist societies? And isn't the complete erasure of the past just the opposite of the future that was predetermined by the iron transition logic?

After all, Ukrainians could learn something about the metaphors of childish concealment last year, when a candidate named - here's a happy coincidence - Darth Vader appeared in the prime minister's election: the man came to the polling station dressed in the corresponding black costume, but was banned from voting because he refused to remove his mask to be identified. And that news only briefly slipped into the marginal field of entertainment columns, so I guess that's why no one noticed the obvious: the infantile suppression of politics, namely, necessarily results in the termination of the power of political decision-making.

The basic trouble with repression, however, is that repressed content has a nasty habit of resurfacing: it does so mostly in unexpected places, most often in condescending forms. Just on the day when portals and newspapers were broadcasting an entertaining report about Vladimir Uljanovic Vader from the port of Odessa, from the other end of the continent, from the provincial Swedish town of Trollhättan, a somewhat different piece of news arrived. Twenty-one-year-old Anton Lundin Pettersson walked into a local school armed with a sword and killed two people and seriously wounded two others, before being shot dead by police officers. The truly morbid dimension of the massacre was revealed, however, only by a photo in which the killer, just before the attack, posed with two students: there we saw that he went on a campaign disguised as - you guessed it - Darth Vader. The metaphor of suppression, then, in Trollhättan unexpectedly turns bloody. It was soon discovered that Pettersson was not, as the first newspaper reports reflexively claimed, just a deranged weirdo, but an open sympathizer of the radical right and an admirer of Adolf Hitler: cruising the school corridors, he carefully chose his victims exclusively among immigrants.

With the return of the pushed to the surface of the civilized West - where the transitional maturation of post-communist children is carefully monitored - such a dense post-political darkness has tried: it has brought us hatred for refugees and immigrants who were displaced precisely by Western imperialism, violence instead of proclaimed tolerance, right-wing extremism that is on the rise after democracy was turned into a strictly controlled process without real elections... While Aleksandar Milov in Odessa presented his large sculptural toy for small Eastern European children, in the far West we finally, if only for a moment, saw the target point of the mythical post-communist transition. Beneath the black mask, suppressed in vain, the distorted face of fascism grinned infantilely at us.

(portalnovosti.com)