By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
To put it in the language of Monty Python: after all, what did those communists do, apart from winning the war with fascism, uniting and building the country, clothing people, feeding them, educating them, employing them, providing them with free health and education, helping the emancipation of women, suppressing national and religious dullness, promoted unity and enlightenment, industrialized the country, modernized society, built infrastructure, led a brilliant foreign policy, led a country in which each of the Yugoslav peoples reached their absolute historical peak, ever did for us so that we do not urinate on theirs every day legacy?
It should be repeated as many times as necessary: the “AB revolution” was a counter-revolution.
It had multiple goals that can generally be divided into political and economic.
The latter are more or less fulfilled through a process that is euphemistically called “transition”, which means the general plundering and conversion of social property into the private property of the elite.
The political goal of the counter-revolution (which included a series of as brutal as possible ethnic and social adjustments) was not fulfilled. It wasn’t, because the counter-revolutionaries of 1989 in the period from 1997 to 2006 “betrayed” the counter-revolution. Instead of creating Greater Serbia, they restored the independent state of Montenegro. But not before the Greater Serbia project was militarily defeated in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. To the popular patriotic theory about the democratic and national maturation of Montenegro, which resulted in the magnificent restoration of independence, I would still assume the thesis about the defeat and entropy of the Great Serbian project, a defeat whose side effect was Montenegrin independence.
In order to correct this, a second counter-revolution was necessary: the one of 2020, which we remember as the clerical counter-revolution. We are now in the process of correcting the “right turns” from 1997 to 2006.
That project is the political equivalent of what art theory knows as pseudo-historical metafiction. An example. “The Man in the High Castle” by Philip K. Dick. Just as Dick’s novel begins with the idea “what would have happened if Hitler had won the Second World War”, the political project implemented in Montenegro starts from the idea: “what would have happened if Momir Bulatovic had won in 1997”. Parallel to that, two more narrative branches of fiction are developing that are becoming political reality: “what would have happened if the Chetniks had not been defeated” and “what would have happened if Serbia had not lost in the post-Yugoslav wars of the 1990s”. Three defeats should be turned into victories and shaped politically and realistically. It does not go without many, many, many resentments. And resentment, as Nietzsche explained, is the ideology of slaves. This means that retribution hangs in the air, like a raised “Hand of Justice” that is about to fall, like a guillotine in a Paris square, and cut off the “sick” tissue – all that grew between 1997 and 2006.
The census is one of the steps: by no means the last.
The counter-revolution of 1989, I said, was a certain success, thanks to DPS, which was born in that counter-revolution.
What did they “succeed” in? First of all, “transition”. Which, as you have certainly noticed, the continuation of the counter-revolution does not deal with. Of course not, because the transition is the fulfilled goal of the first, original counter-revolution of 1989.
Education, emancipation, industrialization, urbanization, and secularization were treated as achievements of the authoritarian system. Which, as such, had to be dealt with.
So, let’s see what we have achieved?
De-education. Perfectly executed. See PISA test results.
The process of emancipation reversed. That was very important, because: what is emancipated, will not listen. Job done. Look at the data on thousands of Montenegrin youth, in a large number of cases “urban” couples who end their pregnancy with an abortion, after finding out that the child is female.
De-industrialization. It’s over for you. Montenegro is a country that is no longer able to produce a jar of dried tomatoes in oil, juice, or even shovel salt into a bag on which it would stick a label. But don’t worry: our future is the “creative industries”, the IT sector and cryptocurrencies – we will flourish there.
De-urbanization: done. Montenegrin cities are getting bigger: they’re just not cities anymore. Because cities are not created on the principle of “wherever you find a good place, put a building there”. The difference between urbanization and construction is like the difference between science-based fertilization and crap in the meadow.
And most successfully after 2020, the work of de-secularization was completed. It was necessary in order to sell people the ideology of self-destruction.
All the listed successes opened the way for the success of the second, corrective counter-revolution of 2020.
It seems to me that the former independence elite still has a problem today in accepting the fact that the process of democratic, national and every other emancipation of Montenegrins and civil Montenegro was limited by the fact that it is inextricably linked to anti-emancipatory economic policies that originally belonged to the Great Serbian counter-revolution of 1989.
And as such, it was infinitely vulnerable.
(The opinions and views of the authors of the columns are not necessarily those of the CdM editorial staff)
