Why shouldn't I also brag that I read French theory? Jean Baudrillard has a book ("The Illusion of the End") which is subtitled "The Strike of Events".
What is a strike of events in Baudrillard's sense and context, it is best to see with Baudrillard. We are interested here in how it looks translated into the current Serbian context. In societies with stable democratic standards, everything can have and follow its own will, including events. Most often, they happen when they want, without announcing to anyone. And changes in the distribution of social forces. And if they go on strike, that is also possible, but it carries the dangerous potential of accumulated frustration.
In societies governed by personal arbitrariness, oligarchic mechanisms and kleptocratic interests, however, events are undesirable and dangerous. Not for society, but for its managers of disputed legitimacy.
Here's how it looks on the field. Looking retrospectively at the past ten years of Aleksandar Vučić's reign, we will notice that, as it were, from day one, he dedicated himself to slowing down, lulling and then numbing events. And what are the events here? All that could threaten and shake his power, not immediately, for one mandate, but for a long, very long term. The events are, therefore, preemptively killed because they are deprived of fuel: the opposition is scattered and disillusioned, the media have become the official messengers of the Leader and the oligarchy, and society is intimidated and atomized, so that it is almost unthinkable to connect into something that would be an event. Of course, "something" still happens, but it has no real significance or power to produce any relevant social event. It's just a decoration on the lapel of a brat who successfully pretends to be extremely annoyed.
And what is the media doing in all this, those rare "free" ones? We scream from the front pages and from the prime time that events, very serious, started to appear from where the government did not expect them, and all this is true, but it still does not threaten the oligarchy. Here, even one Jovanjica - who cares? Everything is known, but nothing happens. It is, after all, a model that was previously successfully implemented in Russia, Hungary and Turkey. Don't Russians, Hungarians and Turks know that Putin, Orban and Erdogan are the richest and most corrupt people in the country? They know and - nothing. Because even those self-righteous people previously liquidated the events, to ensure their eternal reign by dismantling the possibilities of its ever ending. Of course, Putin always goes the farthest way, so it happens that the potential makers of the event suddenly fall out of the window and eat something very rotten.
And what is the local opposition doing in all this? Although she's barely existed for ten years, she's still trying to produce a crucial Event, or series of them, that's worth supporting, even though it's nearly impossible for her to achieve anything within a system designed to keep her on the edge of survival. Were not the spring protests, called "Serbia against violence" - and it would be more complete "Serbia against violence over events" - a noble effort to unfreeze society from absolute zero, so that the atoms start collapsing? Wasn't the lively parliamentary kermes from the other day supposed to serve the same purpose?
And yet, make no mistake, events are still in deep freeze. And so it will be until something unsuspected by us unfreezes them and unfreezes them, and then, who knows, maybe there will be too many events at once. History has its own mechanisms of self-defense against those who would stop it, lest they place themselves in the epicenter of the eternal Now. Those mechanisms sometimes grind slowly, but there has never been a time when they didn't grind someone.
In the meantime, it's not bad to think about what happened to us since nothing happens to us.
Bonus video:
