The Balkans Outside the Balkanalian Violence of Uni-nationality

But before we take leave of the developed cultures around the Mediterranean, let us take another look at their noble origins, at the forms of life, the destinies and sudden turns of fortune of the people on the Balkan soil during the first centuries of their development. This is the time when the fundamental laws of social and political life, that determine us to this day, took shape. This is the time of myths, a time of transition from the realm of myths to the domain of philosophy. It is an age when the gods took leave of the world and let human beings take over. What we today call classic Greek tragedy still shows us the world of family murders, atrocities, injustices, abuse, betrayals and power games that we encounter in almost no other culture in terms of cruelty. In the heart of our civilisation, like a black hole in the middle of the galaxy, there lies a terrible institutional gesture that gave rise to the new world with violence with which today only anthropologists are concerned. All the rest invoke Socrates, a man who, due to his open cooperation with tyrannical Alcibiades, was found guilty and was self-liquidated. The question that we cannot avoid at this point is whether it is possible to be wise enough not to take part in high and mighty power games, leading to all kinds of criminal acts and similar abuse. May this scruple about the fate and public acts of the first philosopher, for the time being, suffice as an improvised warning. Is it a coincidence that his first disciple (and the founder of the academy) conceived of the idea of the state (politeie), which featured differentiating laws that applied to citizens who were or were not welcome in it? Thus a restrictive politeie governed by exclusivists, the socially privileged, a state of the excluded, based on the principle of excommunication that has been in practice since then on various occasions, and applied to various groups of people (of different sexual orientation, gypsies, ethnic minorities and the like) that do not fit into the dominant framework. And from there to the expulsion of entire populations was only a step. We could say that the world of Ancient Greece contained all the attributes of what three thousand years later we would attribute, as its veiled reflection, only to the events in the Balkans. In fact this is a kind of global basis that is valid for the entire Western world.
An attentive reader noticed long ago that it is not our intention to pursue a methodical discussion that would systematically expound a hypothesis that was initially only vaguely suggested. Our purpose is more general, as a leading grammarian in this neck of the woods would say. It is not our intention to again, step by step, proof by proof, develop a kind of historical analysis of orgiastic savagery, as the consequence of unbridled pogroms of the human beast, freed of every impediment and every prohibition, i.e., the bacchanalia or even better the balkanalia, in which sparagmos (ritual dismemberment) is no longer a matter of divine high spirits, but the practice of people beyond all ethics, that is, outside that which we call, with almost glassy eyes, civilization. And if we add to this the attribute of tribalism, that is, that mythical primitivism that ruled the world under to the wing of the gods in the “pre-political”, “earthly”, world of ancient fertility mysteries, we arrive at a well-rounded ideological concept, which was used as the officially sanctioned explanation for the Balkan atrocities. The Western world, which swept under the mentioned ideological mat a number of unpleasant details of its own, strongly prefers the displayed image to the original one, which carries an explicitly ecological attribute and which in the Westerner elicits unwelcome reservations about the dangerous and excessive production and emission of toxic substances into the atmosphere, turning similar forests into wilted plantations of terminally ill plants. Particularly if we consider the painful realisation that, without the vast carpets of chlorophyll and solar cells of oxygen, we will no longer be able, already in the near future, to count on an increased consumption of pneumatic pleasures, given the threat of various population growth statistics. This sick joke brings us closer to the universal meaning that it carries in the repressed and ideologically restricted presentation of the Balkans. What only recently seemed impossible soon became obvious. The Balkans is not a concept tied only to the mentioned geographic area, but also refers to something that has far-reaching consequences. To paraphrase the famous slogan about provincialism as a state of mind, the Balkans are a state of the world. What is taking place in the world today is the Balkans as (according to Ivo Urbančič) a “metaphor – meta-phero – the wording of the essence of being, as the essence of being is “transferred” into the word as conceived according to it”. This means that the Balkans is a word which designates/veils the perverted truth of the West, while the West uses it in the ideological sense as the image, which distracts attention away from the true condition of the “western democratic principles”. This Westerner is the Western world as a whole, which is placed, like a mirror on the opposite shore, from where he threateningly wags its finger at the Balkans, a gesture that he should more appropriately turn towards himself. A11 the atrocities that took place in the Balkans are the atrocities that take place within the reach of specific influences of the Western world and point at the hidden, fundamental truths that constitute and lead this world.
The truths that we encounter in the classic texts of Greek dramas are the truths of our own, contemporary world. In the mentioned ideological meaning, the Balkans represent the exposed core of the Western civilisation. In fact it is no longer hidden since in recent times, tinder the pretext of a crusade for the purest ideals of the Western democracy it is increasingly revealed as the apocalyptic menacing gestures of arrogance and power, which no longer make an effort to hide. Si vis pacem para bellum. Can we today believe this famous dictum any more than in Caesar’s times? Not very likely. Where the rattling of weapons is heard under the pretext of peace, not everything is clear. If a column of smoke is rising toward the sky, a fire will flare tip somewhere. If the principle of the strongest dominates as the decisive argument in international relations, then we can safely say that it is time to re-think history, but above all, we must measure the concept of Western democracy with the psychoanalytical yardstick used for psychoses. Not every utterance must be understood at its representative level, but rather, at the level of the overall effect that it creates. The noblest truths of the highest of all civilisations must be understood as ideological hypocrisy which displays/veils the frivolous and mortally dangerous arrogance of self-destructive power and Western violence. If we understand this as that hidden lesson that lies in the repressed core of the ideologised concept of the Balkans as something fundamental and universal, we cannot avoid anguish and worries. A sentence from some novel, essentially saying that the world has become savage, is no longer only a misconception of the main hero about the state of affairs, but a dangerous fact that must serve as a starting point for a serious reflection on how to continue. The fact is – and here we are at the starting point of reflections about the future events in the Balkans – if we think about the future of the Balkans, we cannot avoid thinking about the future of the world.