It is as if the student protests in Serbia have strengthened the entire, colloquial, region, in fact post-Yugoslavia, in its efforts to fight for a more just and humane society. In Sarajevo, students and citizens a few days ago demanded justice for the scale of the catastrophic floods that occurred a few months ago in the Jablanica area, about which the government is silent and avoids helping the people who suffered in every sense. The day before, the people of Zenica did the same, protesting against the enormous cost of living that narrows existence to a feudal framework of work just to eat bread, if that is even possible. Before that, students in Banja Luka expressed solidarity with their colleagues from Serbia. We are essentially true slaves of transition, in societies in which every meaning is devalued, there is nothing left but to raise our voices with the ultimate effort of searching for any meaning. It is very important that awareness comes, because for practically three decades we have been sinking deeper and deeper into nothingness, into hopelessness from which there is no way out. No matter how illusory every form of protest seems, no matter how impotence is our second name, no matter what is happening in the global framework, it is necessary to start thinking about what we can really do now and here.
Anyone who defeatist believes that nothing can be done should remember the protests that swept through BiH in February 2014. Although nothing has changed from them, it is clear that there is an unquenchable will in people to, when the real momentum comes, offer a different possibility and response to the tyranny of the authorities that have been playing with our lives for too long. So, it is possible for it to flare up, it is possible for the matrix to change, to shake up the reign of the fear paradigm that has blocked and kept us zombified for so long. In the protests 11 years ago, we were carried away by the energy that a different space of freedom is truly possible, we spent days discussing in plenary sessions what kind of society we want, it was collective psychotherapy, the authorities (in both entities) played the ethno-national conflict card, on the one hand they shouted, "Here we go again, those over the hill, dropping bombs on us," on the other hand they incited that the protests were directed against the Serbian people and that their goal was to destroy the RS. While the proverbial international factor asserted that, if the order is threatened, they will send NATO tanks to protect the government from the people who rebelled. So, the same matrix as it is today in cities in Serbia.
If something were to happen in the future, we would first have to overcome that nationalistic toxicity that is constantly blocking and distancing us. In that sense, there is something to be learned from student organizing in the neighborhood. There is no essential difference, our existence has all been brought to the brink together, which is why it is necessary to completely stop paying attention to the manipulations of the government, to rise above the differences that it sees as its only weapon. Only then, when we become aware of that equal captivity in camping on the edge of all dignity, when we nullify what divides us, is it possible to articulate meaningful resistance and finally try to take our own reality and future into our own hands. Yes, I know that I sound, like many others these days, optimistically enraptured by what is happening, but without that grain of hope, that it is possible to one day reverse our inevitable decline into ever-increasing social differences and misery that surpasses any form of human endurance, everything around us would completely lose its meaning, taste and color. Most importantly, the Yugoslav peoples have something to rely on in this struggle of theirs. If we remember the partisan and anti-fascist struggle, which was a unifying factor from which we still draw much today, then we need not be afraid of a seemingly much more powerful and better equipped enemy.
The issue of solidarity that has been shown in recent months when it comes to protests in Serbia, and in all the former fraternal republics, is the energy that most frightens the comprador ethno-nationalist authorities. All these years, they have kept us under anesthesia with the specter of another who almost rushed in to steal our property from us, and essentially this is the only way for these and such political bullies to preserve their power, only as long as the peoples - who, the most tragic thing, understand each other, because no matter how they label it, they still speak one language - are intimidated by each other, they exist, they can govern us in their mythomaniac phantasms. It is true, the world is changing inexorably, any kind of tutelage, those hands from above, if they ever existed, which solve problems for us are now absent, therefore this may be the last chance to do something, to restore a minimum of humanity and the right to decide our own destinies. This does not mean that it will be easier for us right away, but it is important to try, it is the only thing that makes us alive and it is only with this idea that it is possible to continue. The way it is now, it's obvious that none of us will remain even in the slightest, so even if we fail, let's do it with dignity and with the knowledge that we once tried to catch our breath.
Bonus video:
