Polyparty-ism - Search for Common Ground

Yugoslav state, along with its
nations and ethnicities, made a
huge contribution-with no lesson
for the future naturally!
At that time, at least here in
Macedonia, the vast majority of
the population was preoccupied
with their new idol Miloshevich.
Due to the new rhetoric, new topics,
the "merciless" settling up
with the fat cats began. The
lumpen proletariat engaged in
famous yogurt marches. Ferocious
hatred was aimed at the stand-in
Negroes or Jews: Albanians. The
final settling up with the unambiguous
frog spawn in post-Tito,
committee-union-socialist association
structures began.
Miloshevic in the dirtiest possible
way stimulated the lowest individual
and social passions of the
maximally pauperized crowds,
whose minds were undergoing a
final phase of brainwashing with
the help of semiliterate journalists,
as well as the help of the fiery and
frenetic offensive of turbo-folk
music and other kitsch stuff.
Only a handful of people dared
to view the world and what occupies
it differently, and tried to
draft the future differently while
searching for the most suitable
patterns or models to prevent the
heartaches that (as we know today
with certainty) the projected chaos
would bring.
It was very clear that there
would be nothing left of the common
fatherland and it was even
clearer that any sudden movement
could produce great uneasiness
among the ranks of the already
angered soldiers, who were managed
by an almost virtual, or best
said, by a distant central command.
Macedonia, being small,
had not been clearly positioned on
that famous paper napkin, as if
Churchill's hand had shook while
drawing the zigzag line, like a
seismograph.
In all that turmoil and all that
chaos, we still had strength and
plenty of optimism to think of
Macedonia as a country with sufficient
prospects. We made efforts
within the boundaries of the possible
to further build in the direction
of a new, civil, market-oriented,
NATO-defended, EU-style civilized
state. With all the handicaps
that cling to this neighbourhood of
petty and dirty Balkan imperialists,
ambitious pyromaniacs who
are all nothing more than extended
handshakes of global sharks.
(It became clear that our world
would start at Gevgelija and end at
Tabanovce, that the song "From
Vardar to Triglav" had turned cynical
and that the curse laid upon
people from this area would
become the reality: to be born in
one state and-without ever having
moved from it-to die in their old
age in another state) Over those
several years perhaps we wasted a
lot of time, but we also lost many
human relationships, we lost
many people, we lost sincerity
and, fortunately, perhaps even our
naivete!
We believed that Yalta had
broken up, that the Komintern had
broken up and that Warsaw and
Brussels had broken up. We
believed that the murky committee
people and similar socialist
time-wasters had found irreversible
political retirement, that it
was over and done with, all that
ideological-party qualifications
and disqualifications. We believed
that the new world, the new order
of things-despite the degree of
suspicion with which we viewed
it-would still represent the start of
something different and more
beautiful! It was not because we
did not know all the leftist criticisms
of capitalism, including all
the moral and immoral aspects of
the world, where the final
accounting begins and ends. We
knew this, but we also understood
that that model, that civilization is
more vital and the worker lives a
much easier and richer life in the
capitalist hell than in the socialist
heaven. Especially not in the
heaven, whose psyche in recent
years was totally ruralized; in
Macedonia it was governed by a
degenerated structure, some kind
of mixture of youth and smalltime
party officials, wheeler dealers,
already deeply and immorally
tied to criminals and "appropriate"
police structures manned according
to criteria of "loyalties"
invented by semi-literate cops
whose horizons never reached any
further than the holes in their outhouses.
This was approximately the
9
Ten years of pluralism, December 2000