Silence has brought us here... "The worst thing is when people are silent, when they don't explain themselves, so every doubt has the right to live" (M. Selimović).
Two weeks ago, I was harshly attacked by local politicians for not respecting the so-called "electoral silence", although the column (Duet) was not a propagandist call of one type or another, but a look at a campaign. And, more importantly, to a society where meaningful debate is traditionally absent. That is why bursts of stupidity and deception marked this campaign as well. The absence of meaningful debate is, in fact, a dangerous symptom of the disease of society.
As long as politicians believe that they can impose on citizens the fantasies of the most unimaginative apparatchiks and propagandists of Goebbelsian morality, without any responsibility, it will be as it is.
After all, pre-election silence should last for one day, and make people think in peace about everything that was offered to them, and that is, in principle, a noble idea. Although it was created in an age of incomparably less media dynamics.
Much more ominous are these other silences. They are not limited to one day, but as a rule are longer lasting, and generally have the opposite effect. Instead of understanding (in) reality, here we have the effect that after a certain time of the dominance of silence, people simply do not recognize reality. And then, as is known, they are ready for anything.
Probably, we are defined as much in life by what we kept silent as by what we spoke. We easily forget that: it is possible that we are defined equally by what we have remembered and what we have forgotten.
And we should not forget that Montenegro was silent during most of its turbulent (and noisy) past.
Some later turned those silences into "wisdom", almost all of them into some kind of earnings. Little where there was silence - a small economy. Many people lived from that work. Generations, as it were.
Montenegro remained silent in front of bishops and lords. In front of statesmen-merchants and savage powerful.
Montenegro remained silent in front of committees and half-literate party secretaries. The Montenegrin hills and gorges echoed from such a loud silence. That was the popular Montenegrin anatomy: the party in the heart/stomach and the tongue behind the teeth... As if today is much different. Such habits do not disappear very easily and simply. They are transformed into new forms of heathenism and inhumanity. A man deprived of the "power of speech" (B. Petrović, that is a holy and great power), is a shell without human substance.
I guess from such accumulated experience of silence, the habit of always waiting for the seal of power, which "mines" everything, including science, art, and knowledge, remained.
In Montenegro, many writers were honored by what they kept silent about, not what they wrote. And that is perverse art, if there is one. That's why a good part of Montenegrin literature looks like an endless workshop of treated lovers of socialist realism.
In any case, it is too much silence for a people who believe that in their glorious past they said everything - as it should be and to whom it should be...
Montenegro was mostly silent in front of Milošević's putschists, the transitional rulers of Montenegro. But from what was not silence, the emancipatory Montenegrin movement was born. That's where it all started. From one refusal to - be silent. It's always like that. The habit of not being silent is beautiful and important... Whatever these or that small townspeople ("silence is gold") think about it.
Goethe believed that silence is "hiding under the tongue". Perhaps, in our eyes, in these laborious and sometimes unaesthetic processes, a Montenegro is being born that no longer "hides under the tongue".
Bonus video:
