It's an old truth - the bigger the words on the stage, the less real things happen... And that's how it's been, more or less, forever. These thirty years of ours: undoubtedly. Remember that string of transitions do agenda... When "transition" hit us, we had just finished "self-management". Those word games were actually a kind of smokescreen for the savage robbery that was going on there, around us, at every turn.
The words used were new, so they made people feel that they were dealing with a new reality. And it is hardly possible to be more delusional than such an attitude. Because that reality was, in fact, the oldest possible: corruption, robbery, humility... An outright fraud. Something, like, is happening…
Today, the actel mantras are "change", "reconciliation", even "liberation" is in play. Historically speaking, that word is astonishingly frequent, and is always indicated in the same way. Whoever enslaved someone, since the beginning of time, talked about "liberation". You almost think that history is a fundamental confusion of terms.
The word "change" is so popular in today's Montenegro, and it has such a mobilizing effect, that you almost get the impression that the DPS gang is sorry that they could not base their campaign on a call for change. (But it's not like they weren't trying.) Those would be real changes, for sure. Imagine how the DPS bigwigs are calling the people to vote for changes, voting for them... Does it seem perverse to you? No, we are only in Montenegro.
Big words sometimes serve as masks, both for the one who is talking and for what is being talked about.
Let's take the ever-present word "reconciliation", it deserves special attention. Word-mask. Reconciliation, however rhetorically appealing, must not become its opposite. Let's say, a way to rehabilitate criminals and criminal policies. The way some politicians talk about reconciliation today is nothing but that.
It bears repeating: for reconciliation to make sense, we must first unequivocally agree on what happened. Reconciliation is possible only when that kind of agreement is won. Because if the meaning of reconciliation is to present the darkness of the nineties as less dark, then it has another name: historical revisionism. Cheat. A hoax. A lie. Choose.
No matter how much the word "reconciliation" rings around us, I don't get the impression that this kind of reconciliation is being talked about. Our unfinished sins will continue to shape us. Until we are able to digest the living flesh of Balkan history.
The cheering at the final match of the cup, I believe, is a nice illustration of how far we have come with reconciliation.
The basic problem of Montenegro is that its experience and its culture are deeply monologic. The experience of dialogue was never appreciated, it was always perceived as a kind of weakness. Here, the number of representatives was always perceived as a more important category than the truth itself. Even today, politicians prefer calls for unity and monolithicity. You have the feeling that they seem more important to themselves as they call under (one) flag.
I guess that's why prudent words carry weight when they are heard, no matter how rarely they are... And we heard some just like that at the session of the CANU jubilee commemoration committee.
And until then, the whole country breaks down over the Basic Agreement... The way this topic is kept in the foreground also testifies to the current clericalization of Montenegrin society. The welcome of the new metropolitan and the accompanying dinner, thanks to some of the (childishly naughty) politicians present, could remind you of a special episode of a reality show... And I'm afraid that wouldn't be far from the truth.
Favorite Christian motif - public dinner and current Montenegrin reality shows: "Dinner with the Bishop". To keep everything in the right spirit, one of the participants addressed the voters/spectators, probably in the hope that they would save him from "relegation".
Bonus video:
