Цитаты — стр. 4

Чернобыль — это катастрофа русской ментальности. Вы об этом не задумывались? Конечно, я согласен, когда пишут, что это не реактор взорвался, а вся прежняя система ценностей. Но в этом объяснении мне чего-то не хватает…
Я бы говорил о том, о чем первым сказал Чаадаев — о нашей враждебности прогрессу. О нашей антитехнологичности, о нашей антиинструментальности. Вглядитесь в Европу. Начиная с эпохи Возрождения, она живёт под знаком инструментального отношения к миру. Разумного, рационального. Это уважение к мастеровому человеку, к инструменту в его руках. Есть замечательный рассказ у Лескова — «Железный характер». Что это такое? Русский характер — авось да небось. Лейтмотив русской темы. Немецкий характер — ставка на инструмент, на машину. У нас… У нас? С одной стороны — попытка преодолеть, обуздать хаос, с другой — наша родная стихийность. Поезжайте куда угодно, ну, например, в Кижи, и что вы услышите, о чем с гордостью воскликнет любой экскурсовод? Что этот храм построен топором да ещё без единого гвоздя! Вместо того, чтобы построить хорошую дорогу, подкуём блоху. Колёса телеги утопают в грязи, зато держим жар-птицу в руках. Второе… Я думаю… Да! Это расплата за быструю индустриализацию после революции. После Октября… За скачок. Опять же на Западе — прядильный, мануфактурный век… Машина и человек двигались, менялись вместе. Формировалось технологическое сознание, мышление. А у нас? Что у нашего мужика в его собственном дворе, кроме рук? До сих пор! Топор, коса, нож — и все. На этом весь его мир держится. Ну, ещё лопата. Как русский человек разговаривает с машиной? Только матом. Или кувалдой, пинком. Он её не любит, машину, ненавидит, презирает на самом деле, он до конца не понимает, что в его руках, какая это сила.

Goran Jelisić grew up in a working-class family in the small town of Bijeljina, which was about 40 percent Muslim. His mother worked, so he was raised by his grandmother. He grew up on a street where Serbs and Muslims lived together, and many friends of his family were Muslims. They played together, went together to school, to bars, to soccer games. He did not pay any attention to their Muslim nationality, nor did they to his Serbian one. He was never heard to utter an offensive word about anyone.

Serbs also have problems with the truth. In their eyes, they, the Serbs, are the biggest victims of both Milošević and NATO. Indeed, the Serbian society has suffered severe consequences—from embargoes to NATO bombing—as a result of the wars it waged against its neighbors, but the whole truth about what happened has not yet surfaced or become part of the public debate.

Only now can I understand how easy it is to start a war in the absence of facts. War does not come from nowhere; I saw in Yugoslavia that it must be prepared. It is easy for political leaders to use images like the ones that I remember, to use people’s emotional memory and build hatred upon it. Because in totalitarian societies, where there is no true history, each person has in his own memory a collection of such images, and it becomes dangerous if he has nothing more than that. Political leaders can appeal to these images, mix them with popular mythology, and stir emotions by repeating propaganda endlessly on television.

The beginning of the war in the former Yugoslavia did not differ from what Victor Klemperer wrote in I Shall Bear Witness, his diary from 1933 to 1941, when he described how, little by little, anti-Semitism became a normal way of thinking and behaving in Germany at that time. This perception also comes slowly to the victim: Klemperer, himself a Jew, did not want to see it and brushed it aside for years.

And the men who are most responsible for its falling apart and for the thousands upon thousands of victims of that war are today living not only in unity like brothers but in luxury. The life they lead in detention is the biggest antiwar demonstration one could imagine, except that it is being staged too late and that those nice guys playing cards, cooking, and watching TV are mocking the people back home who once took them seriously. They ridicule those who followed their orders. They make fools of those who have lost their dear ones. They make all the sacrifices meaningless.

When I was in school, I participated eagerly in celebrating Tito by writing compositions about him, taking part in performances for his birthday, reciting poems about him, and running in relay races in his honor. In our classroom the very same picture of Tito in his snow-white uniform hung above the blackboard, and we garnished it on every state holiday, just as we did at home. As a child, I thought it was normal to celebrate Tito in this way; everyone around me did.

The news came on; there was something about Milošević. I turned the sound up so as to hear it better. I was expecting news about him; he had been surrounded by the police in his Dedinje residence, and some sort of resolution was expected at any moment. In violent postwar Serbia (and considering his own family history), anything looked possible: he might shoot at the police, the police might shoot at him, he might commit suicide. “Slobodan Milošević surrendered to the police last night, and he is in Belgrade’s central prison now,” a male voice said on the radio.

Whatever it was that brought about her moral metamorphosis, Biljana Plavšić not only set a positive example; she also delivered a lecture on patriotism to her male colleagues, to war criminals like Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić, and to Croatian “heroes” like Ante Gotovina, hiding somewhere in Herzegovina. While he hides like a coward, she, a woman, had the courage to admit her own personal guilt, thereby trying to rid her people of the prejudice that every Serb must be guilty just by definition.

Still, we must ask ourselves: how does our neighbor become our enemy? How do we internalize the enemy, and how long does it take to do so? By the time the enclave of Srebrenica fell, the Serbian propaganda machine, especially television, had been demonizing the enemy—Croats, Bosnian Muslims, and Albanians—for almost ten years. Srebrenica’s fall and the mass executions that followed were made possible only by long psychological preparation. By 1995 the Muslims had become a nonpeople, much like the Jews during the Second World War.

But what is happening in Croatia during the trials in Rijeka and Split is just the opposite. It is as if we are all deliberately closing our eyes. Thanks to the brave female judge, Ika Šarić, who on March 24, 2003, sentenced Tihomir Orešković to fifteen years in prison, Mirko Norac to twelve years, and Stjepan Grandić to ten (Ivica Rožić and Milan Čanić were acquitted for lack of evidence), there is hope that Croats will be able to face their bloody past. This trial was important for another reason as well. It was the first time that the national doctrine claiming that in a defensive war Croats could not commit war crimes was finally questioned.