The story of lustration sounds like greasing a spit while the rabbit is in the forest, and the forest is in another galaxy. But the story still has time, so it is worth criticizing what is said before it, as the writer would say, cripples the innocent.
The common man doesn't really know what lustration is, which is no wonder. Because the common man doesn't have the deceptive luxury of dealing with political matters all day long, and that's because the common man bends his back to feed his family and then seeks a way out of everyday worries in some kind of entertainment.
People mostly think lustration is great, but they don't know why. They imagine the expansion of the pavilions in Zabela (which this columnist also advocates with local patriotism) filled with lustrated bearers of bukagi. Maybe they imagine bonfires where sinful objects of lustration are burned.
The first among us and his people know about the perceptions of the common man, since they are engaged in propaganda more than 24 hours a day. The regime encourages this false image of lustration - "they want to arrest us all if they don't drown us in the murky Danube or lynch us with pitchforks and sickles first."
The propaganda conductor kills several birds with one stone. First, he sharpens loyalists and the party, which cuts deep into the ground to leave their hearts on the ground, beating them, firing them, to take revenge on critics in order to avoid the terrible flames of lustration. Second, he also sends a message to the little man, the SNS voter, that he will be left without everything when the terrible lustrators come, even if that "everything" he has is a pension or a job and the obligation to go to rallies with a packed lunch.
The impression is also reinforced by the voices in our bazaar attributing miraculous effects to lustration. In ancient Greece and Rome, lustrum was a ceremony of purification from evil, in which a pig, ram, or bull was sacrificed for its life. This was how curses were driven away.
There is no mysticism in modern lustration - the kind that can be carried out, and the only thing that makes sense to talk about it. It requires precise paragraphs and commissions that do their job by the sweat of their brow, knowing that in the end it will not be perfect. The thing is less a spectacle and more bureaucracy.
The idea is to remove from public work and the budget those who have used their positions to violate the rights of citizens. Those who have harassed the people instead of working according to the law. Politicians from parties organized like the mafia, police officers who beat and film for tabloids, BIA officers who spy on the opposition, prosecutors with deep pockets, judges who are dictated to. I would also say those who have embezzled public funds through tender schemes, as well as propaganda ringleaders because they are waging informational and psychological warfare against the population.
All of the above has nothing to do with which of the candidates for lustration can be caught by the classical hand of justice, and which cannot because no evidence was found or they fled. In other words, Zabela and lustration serve the same goal – in general, the creation of a normal state – but they are two different tracks.
In the gap between what lustration is (can be) and the fantasies it incites, there is a danger that some lustration enthusiasts will deviate from advocating a popular measure into pure populism, thus damaging the idea of lustration.
I say, it still seems like greasing a spit in the absence of a rabbit, but it is absolutely necessary to talk about it because without drawing a line, it will turn out that the chalk has been used for nothing, even if the government changes. If it turns out that it can be concealed or glossed over, if all crimes are forgiven except for a few prominent cases, then in a few years we will be in the same place, only the future Vučić will have a different name.
As important as it is for lustration to reach a few thousand elements of the anti-people system, it is equally important to limit it so that it does not become a Kafkaesque bogeyman even years after the change of government. No one should be allowed to deal with hundreds of thousands of SNS members or voters. That is not only unfair, but would also turn society into dystopian tribes from the "Hunger Games".
Since I woke up this morning all constructive, I propose a criterion - anyone who was a cog in the system, without having obtained benefits that go beyond the average quality of life in Serbia, is exempt from possible lustration. Party appointments to ordinary jobs are forgiven, provided that formal qualifications exist, because there have been a lot of such appointments since the founding of Serbia.
We forgive those who are working in Ćaciland for a daily wage (those who have not directly caused anyone any harm), we forgive those who keep quiet in institutions if they have not personally committed any wrongdoing, we forgive those who took the line of least resistance, even though that is not a moral virtue, but lustration is not playing the moral police.
Those who, by their actions or inactions, thought to elevate themselves above the people, whether to put money in their pockets and have a gram of cocaine for the weekend or because they were satisfying a pathological need for self-indulgence - nothing will be forgiven them. They must cut themselves off from institutions, political life and the budget.
This is not a matter of pulling horses' tails, but a matter that decides the meaning of opposing the system. Let those who have been lustrated then whine in a private capacity, let them write memoirs, and let whoever wants to read them, let the violin mourn behind them.
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