By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
If the spirit of 30 August is still alive, there it is somewhere in the dark, banging its head against a wall and screaming in agony.
Because the spirit of 30 August sees a Montenegro that is not governed by it, but by its hated counterpart, the spirit of 21 May.
30 August promised constitutional changes concerning the language, anthem and flag. It promised the annulment of the decision to recognise Kosovo and the lifting of sanctions against Russia. The spirit of 30 August was an anti-NATO and anti-EU spirit, carrying, loudly unspoken yet inherently and ubiquitously present, the promise of annulling Montenegro’s very independence… The embodiment of that spirit was Amfilohije Radovic, from whose death it — the spirit of 30 August (and Amfilohije himself) — never recovered.
Had Amfilohije been alive, things would not have gone this way. By now, the processions would have been filling the streets, with the leader and the man most responsible for the 30 August victory bringing down the current government as traitorous.
Milan Knezevic remains faithful to the spirit of 30 August. So does Metodije, especially when he spits on the West and turns the genocidaire Mladic into a saint, as he did the other day.
What can I tell you: it’s all a misunderstanding. As we would say today: it was poorly communicated. Everything would have gone faster, more smoothly and with far less tension and stress if you had simply told us from the outset that you intended to screw over your own voters and accept everything we had been asking for: independence, the constitutional identity package, Kosovo, sanctions against Russia, NATO and the EU.
Spirits are powerful. What’s more, it doesn’t matter to their power whether they even exist. Because, as we know, what people believe in despite its not existing has a far greater impact on reality than what does exist but people do not believe in.
In Shakespeare, the ghost of Hamlet’s father sets in motion the action of one of the most famous dramatic works ever written.
In Derrida, Specters of Marx’s demand justice for the great philosopher. Btw… in Specters of Marx, Derrida introduces the term hauntology — the study of spectres. In doing so, he opens up, I have to say, a potent play on words. Since the letter “h” disappears in the French pronunciation of “hauntology” — it is there but it isn’t, just like the ghosts themselves — the word sounds identical to “ontologie” — ontology. The study of the spectre becomes the study of being. In the end, we turn into what haunts us. What we hid from, what terrified us at night, becomes our very being, what we are.
The ancient Greeks believed that the dead were weak shadows. Nothing like Gothic ghosts or Islamic jinn. Those are more like the proletariat: constantly demanding something, claiming some injustice has been done to them, showing hostility towards the new owners of the house, the wealthy. In death, the Greek dead lost their grasp of what was happening in the world, as well as the power to intervene in it. Many people become the Greek definition of a ghost while they are still alive. They become shadows before they die.
Greek ghosts loved games. Understandably: when you’re dead, you have time to kill, and back then there was no Pornhub. The Greeks imagined the dead as pensioners pulling chess pieces back and forth in front of their building: nobody needed them, and they spent the whole day playing some kind of game. It is difficult to imagine how they passed the time, because the Greek dead could not think. What can you play when you have no brain? Stone throwing comes to mind. Or, even better, politics.
Because you don’t have to be smart to do politics — just look at the government and parliament. All you need is to be sly and a liar.
As if, over time, the boundary between the Greek world of the dead — those who can no longer think — and the world of the living — those who supposedly can — has been erased, even though all the evidence points to the contrary.
Maybe it’s because of mobile phones and apps; maybe because people are led by evil spirits, like those of Ratko Mladic and Pavle Djurisic — I don’t know. Whatever the reason, the whole world seems like a field across which the powerless wander, those incapable of thinking; a field over which, like a shroud lowered onto a corpse, a thick, sticky fog has descended, spreading ghostly sounds that suggest movement whose destination and purpose no one can make sense of anymore; ghostly sounds that testify not to presence, but to absence.
Post Scriptum
Ghosts were once capable of action. When Nikola Koljević, a Shakespeare scholar and one of those who politically directed the genocides, sieges, ethnic cleansing and mass rape in Bosnia, committed suicide by shooting himself in the head, Marko Vešović said: “Poor little Nikola, he was killed by a criminal hand.”
Post Post Scriptum
The radically left-wing, anarchist Canadian post-rock giants Godspeed You! Black Emperor have a song called “Mladic.”
In it, they tried to capture the sound of the spirit of a horrific crime. The song, which sounds like a field recording from Hell, was released in 2012. Today it appears almost prophetic, because it ends with the rhythm of celebration and delight in genocide — something happening before our very eyes and ears today. What is missing — because, as we said, the dead cannot think — is the mind that could draw the painful conclusion: what does this mean? And what is missing is the honour that would reject the evil spirit with contempt.
(Columnists’ opinions and views do not necessarily reflect those of the CdM editorial team)
