The issue of revaluation of the past, both the distant one and especially the closer one, the relationship to it in the post-Yugoslav reality, is one of the most schizophrenic neuralgic points of conflict and malignancy in the relations of once brotherly nations. Year after year, the public space is repeatedly filled with those narratives around which there is a complete overlap in opinion, understanding and understanding of events and personalities from earlier periods. On those fires, the ghosts of nationalist and fascist sentiments, which in these areas are always used as an effective fuel to ignite the masses, return in chorus. Of course, in the moments when it is necessary, new trenches are dug in the places of the old ones and the search of history along the lines of ethno-national exclusivity and the hatred associated with it begins anew. Of course, this is nothing new, nor something unknown, all our decades that have been eaten by the locusts of transition are constantly filled with ideological and symbolic weapons of revisionism. All those common points, places of connection, suffering, joy and living, are reshaped and modeled according to the needs of the current political momentum and turn into points of constant friction and clanking of weapons.
In other words, what was not put on the table and faced with the truth during the decades of some kind of community, whether it is about the historical role of individuals and groups or about the crimes that were committed in fratricidal slaughterhouses, today comes back to us and disturbs our spirits again. Hence, one constantly has the impression that we are never able to get rid of the past, in the sense that it finally ceases to be a comparative flow of reality or, moreover, the only reality we live. Existing under that membrane, we are not able to see the world and the time in which we live, trapped in the misunderstandings of the past, its repeated destructions, we are not able to create any predispositions for a coexistence that will be based on the desire to understand, listen to the other and to try to find some common meeting point with him. All our conversations about the past are maximalist and intense, we never get into a situation where communication is two-way, to avoid a wall of noise in communication, to give up the principle of exclusivity and a one-dimensional approach in looking at what is the essence of misunderstandings.
Where there is an excess of mythomaniacal wet dreams, and where everything is subject to cheap daily political manipulation, the essence of any conversation about what divides us is lost. Today, it seems really impossible to see the issues of the past, at least those that are boomeranging on our heads, in such a way that they would be used to encourage mutual understanding and solidarity. Because, regardless of all the imposed frameworks of differences and passing by, the former Yugoslav peoples still today have much more in common and what connects them than what essentially distances them from each other. The question is therefore where this discrepancy between reality and what is cherished as the official position of particular national narcissists of small differences actually occurs. That is, why do citizens of post-Yugoslav countries agree that, despite their personal experience of encountering others, they are demonized and labeled as hostile. It seems that this gap stems from the social and media generation of incendiary content that does not allow the confrontation with the past to take place in a natural way, through demystification, meeting and conversation between people. Although many overcome any kind of imposed borders, the revisionist machinery, which is generated from the ruling structures, still keeps the inhabitants of the post-Yugoslav countries in spasms and unable to cope.
Stepping out of the collectivist attitude of the nation means stepping into the space where the label of the one who is a traitor is acquired, for this reason silence or ignoring those topics that can be the subject of dispute is most often chosen. And that is the key problem of all our misfortunes, the pushing under the carpet of what we are not able to bring out openly in front of each other. This kind of ignorant attitude and rejection of self-confrontation opens up space for numerous manipulations, for creating time bombs of disputes, which every time return us to the same ravine from which we unsuccessfully try to get out, burying ourselves deeper and deeper.
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