OPINION

The lie and misery of transitology

One of the more popular techniques used by contemporary revisionists is to equate opposing ideological models in order to relativize, or completely hide, the bad sides of the system they currently advocate.
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Street art by Pejac
Street art by Pejac
Disclaimer: The translations are mostly done through AI translator and might not be 100% accurate.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the ideological matrix of the neoliberal transitologywas the basic narrative that explained the transition of the countries of Eastern Europe from the controlling totalitarian model of government and planned economy to democracy and the free market. The central thesis of this narrative is that the capitalist socio-economic system creates conditions for the establishment of political democracy. In addition to political and economic, this process also has significant ideological, educational and cultural aspects. The processes that have taken place in Europe since then have produced the opposite effect from what was promised and expected. After the initial euphoria over the demolition of the concrete symbol of division, there followed the favoring of totalitarian forms of government, stabilitocracy, hybrid regimes of the proto-democratic type, and the strong growth of ultra-right, xenophobic, extreme nationalist and fascist parties and political organizations. Many of these parties came to power in the countries of the Balkans and Eastern Europe. In the Balkans, neoliberal transitology created an interesting ideological and political collage with strong elements of authoritarian rule, anti-communism, classical liberalism, ethno-nationalism, populism, neoliberal economic doctrine, racism, anti-Semitism and fascism. All the mentioned ideological directions are present in Montenegro. Representatives of such political-economic and ideological constellations have been working devotedly for thirty years, among other things, on the revision of the modern history of the region. The utility value of a specific ideological model is primary in relation to beliefs and clearly defined program commitments. One of the unifying elements is the common disdain for the process of true democratization, because that process inevitably calls into question the legitimacy of the power of the elites who lead the country and the functionality, that is, the sustainability of the political-economic state created by those elites. Anticommunism has a special place in this hierarchy of useful political tools. For the relatively new political and ideological multi-practices in Montenegro and the Balkans, anti-communism is primarily a political mechanism that they use in an effort to win power. One of the more popular techniques used by contemporary revisionists is to equate opposing ideological models in order to relativize, or completely hide, the bad sides of the system they currently advocate. This is the essence of the aggressive presentation of the thesis about "equality of violence" and equating fascism and anti-fascism. In the Balkan situations, it is about equating the anti-fascist partisan movement with collaborators such as the Chetniks and Ustashas. Masses dedicated to Blajburg and Kočevski Rog, which celebrate criminal ideology, and the rehabilitation of Draža Mihailović as the so-called "first guerrilla" in occupied Europe, as well as the glorification of criminals, pro-fascists and anti-Semites such as Ante Pavelić, Jure Francetić, Nikolaj Velimirović, Momčilo Đujić, Pavle Đurišić, have become part of our everyday life. The Ustasha salute "Za dom spremni" is treated as a traditional Croatian salute, and we also got the category of "Ravongore partisans". For this ideologically induced imposition of lies, the universal conciliatory power of the term "victim" is most often used. By subsuming all collaborators from the Second World War under this term, the context and specific reasons that led to their suffering are completely marginalized, and the truth about their crimes is hidden. The fact is that anti-communism does not take into account the historical context. His goal is to justify the current political effort to seize power. It is not out of place to remind that the contemporary political use of the term "victim" in the context of the wars of the 1990s has the same marginalizing effect - hiding the truth for the sake of future "coexistence" and promoting oblivion as a virtue. Let's think of memorial plaques, memorial complexes and political speeches paying respect to "all the victims of the wars of the 1990s". In this process of dehumanizing the victims, the killers remain nameless, and the revisionists get a new incentive to question the crimes committed, or to deny them altogether. Those with an excess of ego, lack of knowledge and inadequate political imagination claim that this kind of historical revisionism represents a "sincere" effort and the "only" correct path to discovering the "complete" truth in order to achieve the "final" reconciliation of bloodied segments of the population. The Montenegrin and Balkan events are a small but integral part of a wider context whose historical arc goes directly back to the intellectuals and ideologues of fascism and Nazism. Local characters and epic-inspired political rhetoric of Montenegrin and regional politicians cannot obscure that historical arc from an analytical view. The thesis on "equality of violence" has its roots in the works of sympathizers of Nazism, such as, among others, Martin Heidegger, Karl Schmidt, Ludwig von Mises, Wilhelm Ropke, Ernst Nolte. In the Balkan framework, these were Stevan Moljević, Milan Stojadinović, Dimitrije Ljotić, Ante Pavelić, Eugen Kvaternik, and others. Heidegger compared the Soviet expulsion of Germans from the East to Nazi Holocaust policies, while Schmidt complained that focusing on the crimes of the Third Reich ignored the "genocide" committed by the Western Allies against German bureaucrats near the end of war operations. This thesis, that is, the revisionist interpretation of modern history, also fits the claims that the Nazi camps were a logical response to the "Asian barbarism" of the Bolsheviks and the Soviet Gulag. The desire to show that the racially motivated genocide committed by the Nazis was their response to the genocide committed by the Bolsheviks is rationalized by emphasizing Jewish participation in Russian and Central European communist parties and movements. The final result is the discrediting of anti-fascist movements by presenting fascism and Nazism as a copy of the true monster: Bolshevism. Anticommunism, which either rules or is part of the political opposition throughout Europe and the Balkans, is not just another in a series of criticisms of the historical experience of socialist states and societies. This ideological model is based on discrediting the concept of revolution as an emancipatory project in the name of a democratic and socially just future. It is not just a criticism of the October Revolution that anti-communists present as the logical source of Stalinism. The focus on the atrocities of the counter-revolutionary Stalinist processes is intended to discredit the purpose of the revolution. The contemporary manifestation of anti-communism within the framework of the neoliberal political-economic system in which we live is also a critique of the French Revolution as the source of our understanding of the very act of revolution: change in the name of achieving social justice and equality. In the final analysis, it is an attack on the revolutionary effort of the poor sections of the population. This is the point where, in Montenegro and in the region, ideological radicalism, political rigidity of the opposition, authoritarian tendencies of the ruling parties, and their shared lie about the desire to provide disenfranchised and voiceless segments of the population with a platform from which to articulate their frustrations and demands intersect.

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