1. Once again these days, the ruling tribal clusters in Kosovo have shown their real face by issuing very poorly masked death threats to Jeta Xharra, a journalist who dared to discuss the issue of freedom of expression. As disgusting as it may be, the Kosovar reaction is expression of a vanguard.
2. Europe’s population is largely ignoring these days the elections to its own parliament. The distance between the citizens and the ruling clusters in Brussels (and absurdly in Strasbourg and Luxembourg) could not be bigger. At the same time, media have already started to deplore the swing towards populism for instance in the Netherlands, where the party of Geert Wilders came in second after the ruling Christian-democrats. It seems to be a trend that citizens don’t buy the inclusion rhetoric promoted by the political mainstream. Fear as a vehicle of politics is much more efficient.
3. Silvio Berlusconi, whom Jose Saramago today called ” a thing that looks dangerously like a human”, a “virus”, an “illness”, has secured his space in the headlines with a series of photos from a lush party in one of his residences, in naked attendance of the former Czech PM Topolánek. It is most likely not one of the villas, which he offered to the victims of the recent earthquake in L’Aquila.
Europe is in fear and disgust of populism, one might think if you read the mainstream media. Well, it is not. It elects these people. They are the impersonated expression of a development, which is not a crisis of democracy, but could prove to be its very end. We seem to have entered a phase, in which Berlusconian show-masters with a barely disguised criminal energy are confronting and outplaying political old-school dilettantes of the category of Gordon Brown or Jan Peter Balkenende. This is why Sarkozy is successful, this is why people like Prodi had to fail. This is why characters of the dullness of Barroso or Solana will never be able to sell the idea of Europe to its citizens.
Liberal and libertarian values are a thing of the past, we are entering a new totalitarian phase. Its exponents are playing into each others hands, whether willingly or without knowing it. Political correctness and its ever expanding catalogue of taboos and fake tolerance is playing straight into the hands of business interest groups, which are not only not interested in transparency, but which will do everything to hide it behind hollow formulations and bureaucratic procedures. The instruments are provided exactly by the apostles of political correctness in an amazing show of collaborationism. Just think of the incredible success of “social entrepreneurship”. Buy a beer and save the rain forest. Bollocks!. As for myself, I prefer the medieval Catholic practice of buying letters of indulgence to clear your sins. The depth of the usurpation of our democratic values has its visualisation in the handling of the current financial crisis, which has often enough been labeled as the end of capitalism and has opened the way for etatistic experiments, which will not only fail, but actually deepen the crisis into a political one.
But back to the Balkan tribal vanguard. Oddly as it seems, it shows us the way into the crisis. And if we were clever, we could draw conclusions from its development and avoid it for ourselves. What else are we dealing with here, but with totalitarian structures, dictated by tribal adherence? Whether tribal translates into blood ties, business clusters, religious belonging, or traditional inter-dependencies remains irrelevant. It remains tribal in its exclusive and exclusivistic logic. You are with us, or you are against us. US, not ME. As experienced by Jeta Xharra in contact with the Drenica clans, as heard by Macedonian students, who were qualified by their own president as “just atheists”, as experienced by the Croatian journalist Ivo Pukanic, killed by a car bomb in the centre of Zagreb. It is not healthy to be liberal-minded in the Balkans, it is disturbing the deals.
And in the end, political correctness helped creating the monster. A whole spiderweb of particular rights and special agreements has nurtured group egoism, not least that of ethnic minorities. Now the buzzword is integration. Does that sound familiar? Well, people in the Balkans don’t seem to like that rhetoric, either. At least they don’t vote for it.
Totalitarian Europe, here we come. Unless we wake up and have a debate on what we are and where we want to go. To use the words of Saramago, “if a deep vomit doesn’t succeed in ejecting it from the consciousness…, the poison will end up corroding the veins and destroying the heart” of Europe. Bureaucrats don’t vomit. They don’t know about the sweetness of excess. We do.
Vision? I arrest thee of high treason…
Let me say it from the onset: a rare occurrence in today’s cinematography of the Balkans, Atanas Georgiev’s Cash and Marry is a little gem. It is the story of a young man from Macedonia committed to break borders and boundaries and to find a woman in Vienna to marry him and thus provide him with an EU passport. On his quest, he enjoys the assistance of the Balkanites living in Vienna in more or less legalised circumstances.
The film, a scripted documentary, does away with any illusions one might have about those living on the fringes of the fortress of absurdity that the European Union has become. In the case of Austria, where the laws regulating the relationships between natives and foreigners are particularly strict, a vivid underground undermining these regulations has developed, helped by the Balkanites’ longstanding anarchic experience in evading the state and beating it by its own rules. Atanas Georgiev is taking these elements, presumably enriched by his own experience living in Prague, and turns them into an absurd story of a quest for the Balkanites’ Holy Grail - the EU passport, the item, which is supposed to cure all diseases, to solve all problems. Accompanied by his congenial counterpart and fixer, Marko Prica, Atanas dives into the parallel realities of Vienna and applies all possible techniques to find a woman who would be ready to marry him for money and documents, taking more or less useful advice from all sorts of stranded characters. When the ideal candidate is found, it is just more of a cliché – but see for yourselves. Sometimes reality jumps straight into your face and makes these clichés look pale and aged. The author’s sensitivity in capturing this while making you laugh your guts out is remarkable.
The actual tragic of the subject is that people are forced by circumstances to enter arranged marriages – which are illegal in Austria, as opposed to the forced and arranged marriages between residents. This decision condemns people to live under police surveillance, as if they were criminals, and to fake the most intimate aspects of their existence. What this does to people is one thing, what it says about a society imposing this behaviour is another.
The film takes this subject and turns it into a series of ingeniously absurd scenes, in some sort of “Monty Python goes reality TV” approach, laughing into the face of tragedy. This twist is the key to “Cash and Marry”, and will hopefully define its success. In the end, it is the Balkanic view on things, but without the flat, superficial kind of humour that has marked too many recent films from the region.
Foltin’s music should be mentioned as well. It follows the flow of the story and underlines its absurdity. Too bad that the band seems to forget these qualities in live concerts recently… Oh, and since this is the critical paragraph, I did not like the camera too much. While a video cam as a means of telling a documentary story is legit, the I’ve-made-my-Dogma-homework approach was a bit tiring at times. But not enough to make me stop laughing.
The film starts being shown at festivals these days. Best of luck to the team with it…
Vision! Handful of it, yes…
Setting: the mental institution in Bardovci, close to Skopje. Our inmate has become aware of the power that lies in social networks.
Scene: Night. Our patient breaks into a dark office room, where ten computer work places are properly covered, so the ubiquitous Skopje dust won’t destroy them. While our inmate uncovers one of them and boots the computer, the screen on which we see this scene unravel splits and in the right half appears the director of the psychiatric hospital, talking on the phone:
“Yes, of course we are computerized. We just received this donation from this ‘American Association of Christian Psychiatrists’. Yeah, I didn’t know such thing existed, either… Weird, eh? Americans… Have in mind they’re new. Ok, we can talk about compensation. My staff? They don’t need computers. The few who know how to work them, have their own. And the inmates are crazy anyway, haha! So, what’s your offer?”
The director fades out and we see our inmate creating a blog and writing a first entry. It is a story about how construction workers accidentally find the grave of Alexander the Great. He deviously smiles as he sets the location at a fictitious border crossing between Macedonia and Greece. With the work being done, our patient retires to his room, which he shares with three other inmates.
Within a day, Macedonian and Greek media go havoc. A ferocious debate erupts all over televisions and newspapers, whereby Macedonia’s most popular archaeologist threatens to lay down all his functions if this project is not passed on to him immediately.
An insert shows our inmate having a deep look into a mirror and smiling pensively. Slowly, his face turns into the face of the archaeologist, then into that of Alexander and back. He trots back to his room, where it is time to take his medication.
In the meanwhile, Greece is starting a diplomatic offensive, trying to prove that the site is actually on the Greek side and thus they would have the exclusive right to exploit it. To this end, they revive an old border dispute with Yugoslavia, which was never settled and which actually goes back to territorial claims from the time of the Second Balkan War. Maps are shown all over the media, the Macedonian side is very busy trying to find counter-arguments, archives are being searched, just to find out that probably all documentation about the dispute has been taken to Belgrade and disappeared.
The situation threatens to escalate. The Macedonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs issues a travel warning, appealing to its citizens not to travel to Greece for security reasons. TV stations show empty border crossings. The rhetoric is heating up.
Our inmate decides that it may be time to come out of the closet of his mental institution and denounce the whole story as a hoax, as a product of his otherwise under-employed imagination. The makes the necessary calls, send e-mails around, but only one not very popular TV station picks up the story and reports in half a sentence.
Close to despair, our inmate decides to play the media by their rules and to fight fire with fire i.e. to produce another hoax. “In a world of madness, only the madman is lucid”, he thinks, not being able to remember who had said this before him, but being fully aware of talking in quotes. Because he cannot travel due to lack of money and visa, and not because he is locked in a mental institution, he decides to act by proxy. He calls a cousin in the US and convinces him to take on the identity of a Macedonian historian and to arrange an urgent meeting with a clairvoyant in Florida. There, the cousin/historian makes the clairvoyant invoke the ghost of Alexander the Great. Alexander’s ghost gives out a message of love and peace, explains that he never conquered for the sakes of glory, but to bring civilisation onto far away lands. He of course also shows interest in the language of his heirs.
The media interest is enormous, the reactions from all sides are positive. Peace is about to break out between the two countries. But then, the church reacts, banishing our inmate from its community for having desecrated national symbols. Of course, nothing happens to our patient, as he is already a patient in a psychiatric hospital.
After a moment of almost peace, the national archaeologist is reinstated in all his functions and the tribal wars can continue. The rest is silence.
Vision? Not an artifact…
Of course it is not news to say that politicians are media whores, attracted like brainless moths by the red light of any running camera. But what could be seen today on the main square in Skopje was simply disgusting.
The story: as a reaction to the brutality experienced two weeks ago, some 30 NGOs joined the students of architecture and other initial organisers of the protest against a church on the main square in organising a protest scheduled for today in favour of the freedom of expression. A disappointing crowd of a few hundred protesters showed up. At some stage there were more police (openly and covertly) and media around than actual demonstrators. This is a problem in itself, that there seems to be no critical mass in Skopje to stand up against totalitarian reflexes in what we still would like to believe is a democratic society.
To make things worse, a plethora of politicians hijacked the protest for their own purposes. It was the who-is-who of an opposition that just hit rock bottom in three consecutive elections: from the presidential candidate of the main oppositional party to the outgoing mayor of Skopje. In between, a number of characters belonging to this self-styled elite. It was an assembly of redundant figures, of figures who all bear their piece of responsibility for the state Macedonia is in. And for the urbanistic misery that Skopje finds itself in, which the current power structure is looking at correcting through yet another, nationally and religiously tainted, unmitigated disaster.
Of course they had the media attention. Of course they delivered the argument to discreditate the youth movement as politicised and party-driven. Of course they did it with the best of all intentions, as if they were belonging to the group of Christian Taleban rallying two weeks ago: You shall have no other gods before Me!
A political “elite” with not a trace of dignity has just managed to asphyxiate and possibly give a deadly blow to an honest movement, a movement of young people driven by nothing but their will to live in an open city, in a city that respects diversity, that respects the individuals and their life-styles. Well done! It was your own children…
The government had previously issued a statement saying that it supports today’s rally. No official showed up.
Vision? Ah, knock yourself out…
For all those who still think Turkey should become an EU member sooner rather than later, have a look at the NATO disaster… It’s too good to be true.
But as long as we have a buffoon like Berlusconi to laugh about, we don’t need to face reality, do we?
And here’s an excellent analysis of all that (German only)
Vision! Not mine…
