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Political Notes
CHAPTER 3
Political Notes
19. South America is predominantly Catholic, North America is predominantly
Protestant. We have the same division (south-north) in Europe, and what can be
noted everywhere is the greater openness to progress in Protestant rather than in
Catholic nations. In general, Protestantism is a more powerful impetus in history
than the Catholic form of Christianity.
24. The request for the abolition of the death penalty is an integral part of the
tendency in criminal law to take more care of the criminal than the victim of the
crime. The arguments are problematic. Thus, for example, they describe to you
the details of the execution of the death penalty and ask you if you are in favor of
it. They could also describe the details of the execution of the crime and the
horrible state it left on the side of the victim and family, and ask the same
question. However, this is pushed aside, as if two murders do not exist, but only
one-the death penalty that would be carried out against the murderer.
34. No doubt corporal punishment contradicts sense of honor and human dignity,
as everyone would easily agree. However, seen from the other side, experience
shows that, unfortunately, there is the existence of people without the smallest
amount of honor and human dignity. The Qur'an says there are people who are
like animals, "even worse than them." One who has spent some time in prison
with petty criminals can easily be convinced of this. It is peculiar that people in
office write criminal codes, people not usually familiar with this human "material."
It is unimaginable to think of doctors who have never stepped into a hospital or
interacted among patients. This is exactly what happens with criminologists. Most
of them, in the best of cases, have met delinquents during a hearing or during a
court trial, and what has to be taken into account is that criminals, unlike
ordinary people, have a greater power of transformation. Criminals are never
naive; there are, more or less, experienced people. Their accounts of life can be
wrong, but not due to naiveté, rather due to a commitment to evil, which in most
of them is final and incorrigible. In prison, I have seen a great number of people
serving time for pickpocketing and street robberies. Not in a single one have I
noticed a readiness to begin any type of honest work after leaving prison. On the
contrary, they encouraged and instructed each other and exchanged experiences.
I have noticed a bit of remorse only in murderers, but even among them the
penitent ones were not in the majority. In one scene of a film I watched in the
prison theater, a man was attacking a girl with the intent to rape her. While she
struggled like captured prey, the majority of the viewers- prisoners-were noisily
encouraging the attacker.
Petty thieves and pickpockets are particularly unscrupulous types of criminals.
They amuse themselves by telling each other how they, month after month, stole
the entire earnings of miners. They mentioned a case of some miner who, after
realizing he has lost his earnings, committed suicide.
One of them, showing me his hands, told me: "Can't you notice that they are not
for work, they were created for something else." And indeed, he had beautifully
sculptured hands with long fingers. I told him that some claim that it is the type
of work that creates the hands. He answered that it, work, surely did not create
his. Then I thought he does not deserve such beautiful hands and that it would be
completely just he did not have them, only to later remember that the sentence
of the Shariah would be just that.
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Naturally, one should be very careful in sentencing, but if I were to write the
criminal code in prison, and while taking into account all of my prison
experiences, I think it would more and more look like the Shariat penal code. As I
have before had certain reservations toward corporal punishment, it seems to me
at times that God sent me here to compare His wisdom to mine.
48. While reading through the history of a nation or a period, it appears to us at
times that some events, victories or defeats, the evil or just destinies of some
nation, were a result of fortunate and unfortunate circumstances, that is, of
coincidence. However, if we examine things a bit more closely, we usually arrive
at a conclusion that the "coincidence" was not as coincidental as we were first
inclined to think.
49. I do not know, or do not sufficiently know, the past of my nation. But I know
the present, that is, the result. From this present I can conclude a lot about what
preceded it.
50. To know a nation or a period, it is in no way enough to read written histories
about it. Without Balzac's novels, not even a ten-volume history of France will
offer a clear picture of the life of French society. Only with these can we say we
know the life of French society of the nineteenth century.
Histories inform us of events, while novels, poems, epics, stories, legends, and
fables inform us of life of a man-individual, that is-of that which really existed.
The one is external, the other internal history. External history is that much more
insufficient, for it most often speaks of emperors and kings and events concerning
a limited group of people at the court and around it. And I cannot say I know the
history of a nation if I know the emperors it had, wars it waged, all the places
where it was victorious or defeated. Furthermore, I cannot even say I know that
nation even when I know its legislature and culture. I have to know how an
individual lived in his home, how he related to his wife, children, servants,
authorities. Only by combining both of these pictures, external and internal, I can
say I know, in certain measure, that nation and its past- of course, only when
taking into account all the limitations and reservations one should have
concerning writers and their texts.
52. In history, as in nature, everything is diversity and continual change. I cannot
ask for or expect a single situation or condition to become stabilized in history, for
history to stop, just as I cannot ask for one of the four seasons to be forever
fixed. In history, as in nature, there will always be forces which will cause change.
And I, with my wants and actions, am only a minute participant in one of these
continual changes.
53. Something over 100 years ago, the United States purchased a piece of land
on the west coast of Africa and founded Liberia, the first free Negro state. It was
an attempt by the United States, to an extent, redeem itself for the shameful
"black cargo" (ill-famed trade in black slaves). A number of descendents of the
Blacks who had been caught in the vicinity and forcibly taken across the ocean as
slaves had been returned to Liberia. And what happened? These returned slaves
became masters in Liberia and, in an unprecedented manner, subjugated the
mainly black population from whom they were descended. This rule of the black
caste was known as the "reign of terror of 100 families," lasting almost 100
years; it was ended only by a military putsch in 1980. After all this, we can
conclude that life sometimes makes a crude joke of noble thoughts or that
intentions, good or bad, have no particular significance in historic life. Thus will
happen that positive consequences will result from selfish motives, and negative
ones from the most noble of motives. On the other hand, the delineated case
indicates how in slaves and those who suffer lurk veiled oppressors, and how
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much depends on circumstances. As people often say: God knows what he is
doing. People, in actuality, can be only externally divided into masters and slaves,
oppressors and victims. From the moral standpoint, in every man there exists
both a master and a slave, and sometimes it is only a matter of circumstances
what someone objectively will be, that is, which of these two possibilities can
actualize in historic life.
68. While reading the chronicles about the developed phase of one society or
civilization, we shall come across historians informing us of spiritual and moral
decadence, stating resignedly that in the midst of plentitude and luxury, there is
less and less of a man. Only moral dwarfs remain, waiting for the relentlessly
approaching demise. Here and there appear great personages, but those are only
the rare individuals powerless in the midst of general weakness. Their greatness
appears even larger the more it is in contrast with the general state of spirit.
69. Nations enter history as morally affluent and materially poor. When they exit
history, the situation is usually completely reversed. This is confirmed in the
histories of almost all significant peoples: ancient Persians, Romans, Greeks,
Arabs, even the modern Western nations. From this ensues a conclusion that a
civilization (which is only objectified, materialized knowledge) can be explained
through historical development, while morality cannot. It is precisely morality that
is not a result but a prerequisite for a historical, external power, and one could
say that people, fulfilling themselves historically, live at the expense of this moral
supply, spending it, just as a prospective plant sprouts at the expense of the
supply of food in the seed. At first, we always come across a man and with him
examples of very pure and exalted religious awareness and morality. As the
historical development proceeds, religion is either abandoned or it deteriorates, to
finally have, on the eve of demise, godlessness and complete moral deterioration.
Morality, therefore, is nowhere a product, we find it in the consciousness and life
of people in its original form, most often without the ability to explain it. It can be
found as an integral part of the "human material" that announces its entrance
onto the historical stage.
What has created this original morality? Nothing, if we take this word in its literal
sense. That morality is not the result of life, but life itself, or a source of life that
is only to begin. The debauchery and depravity that appear at the end are only
the expression of the wasting and loss of ideals. They are the gray hairs of a life
that is approaching its end. Debauchery is an expression of weakness, not
strength. Why are all young races moral (puritan), while decadent ones are
immoral? "Sexual revolution has its turn when any other positive revolution is
impossible. It heralds the time when there is no strength nor will for any other
ideal. It is a mark of the lack of true will and purpose. For everything that is good
is a laborious 'ascent up the mountain'" (Qur'an 90/11).
88. Dictatorship is immoral even when it prohibits sin, democracy is moral even
when it allows it. Morality is inseparable from freedom. Only free conduct is moral
conduct. By negating freedom, and thus the possibility of choice, a dictatorship
contains in its premises the negation of morality. To that extent, regardless of all
historical apparitions, dictatorship and religion are mutually exclusive. For, just as
in the body-spirit dilemma, religion always favors the spirit, so in the choice
between wanting and behaving, intent and action, it will always favor wanting and
intent, regardless of the result, that is, the consequence. In religion, an action is
not valued without the intention, without "intent," that is, without an opportunity
or freedom to act or not act. Just as coercive starvation is not a fast, so the
coerced good is not good and is from the religious standpoint valueless. That is
why the freedom of choice, that is, of action or lack of it, of abiding or
transgressing, is the prerequisite at the basis of all prerequisites of all religions
and all morality. And that is why the elimination of this choice either by physical
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force in dictatorship or obedience training in utopia signifies their negation From
this the idea follows that every truly human society must be a community of free
individuals It must limit the number of its laws and interventions (degree of
external coercion) to that necessary extent in which the freedom of choice
between good and evil is maintained, so that people would do good, not because
they must, but because they want to. Without this intent for the good, we have a
state of dictatorship or utopia.
94. When one world loses the ability of great politics, diplomatic hairsplitting
"diplomatic state," as expressed by Hegel) begins.
100. People and a crowd (a crowd of people) are not the same. This difference is
well known to demagogues, so they amply use it for their purposes. People are
degraded into a crowd when they lose an internal principle of awareness, morals,
ideals. People without awareness equals a mob (crowd). A mob is an amorphous
crowd of people without ideals, a sum of individuals in which each lives for
himself and has only one's own interests or desires without the awareness of
something higher and communal, without even a name. People still have ideals, a
mob only has wants. We find it at the end of the historical road, on the eve of
demise. A typical example is the Roman lumpen-proletariat before the demise of
the Roman Empire.
103. When social life loses its true meaning, or cannot find it, individuals,
depending on their personal dispositions and character, escape into thought and
mysticism, or give themselves to sensual pleasures. The situation in which there
exist only two kinds of people-ascetics and practicing epicures-is a reliable sign
that a society is diseased.
104. When ideas are concerned, there are two kinds of prohibitions. The first is
the resistance of those in power toward advancing ideas, the time for which has
come. The second is the prohibition of something that is receding, moribund, for
example the edict of Emperor Theodosius against pagans. In actuality, paganism
was already dead, and this prohibition was only a death certificate, the
announcement of the natural death, which had already occurred. Both
prohibitions are without purpose. The former is useless, since it cannot change
anything, the latter unnecessary, since the change has already occurred.
110. When laws are concerned, it is very important that principles of some state
system or order are based on the spirit of people, for these to live in people even
in a form of vague notions that the system then only articulates, names, brings to
full awareness, makes a reality. If some fundamental values are not known or felt
by people, the noble lawmaker will be in a difficult position, since his laws may
remain empty declarations. It is one situation if people believe in the equality of
people, another if they have deep-rooted racial prejudices. In the latter case the
constitution regarding equality will be "digested" with difficulty and will have little
chance of being brought to life.
254. Democracy and stability are mutually conditioned. We need democracy
because of stability and stability because of democracy.
271. What do we need: people who believe or people who think? Do these
exclude each other?
274. If you read some publications between the wars-it was then fashionable to
find so-called sociological explanations for all events-you would, for example,
come across the assertion that the increase in the criminal act of rape is a result
of sexual repression, conservative morality, etc. Expansion of this offence in the
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United States and Western countries, especially after the so-called sexual
revolution, shows that the sociological explanation was not correct.
285. Henry LeFebvre claims that for twenty years the Communist Party of France
has ignored the existence of Khrushchev's secret report of the Twentieth
Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
293. As in historical events, people are not only motivated by interests but also
ideals, history is not predictable. To the contrary, that would be one causality that
would differ from the natural one even if only in principle. As historical events are
interfered with by the spirit (in the form of morality and ideals, or the motives of
justice or injustice), in other words, because its actor-man- is motivated by pain
and usefulness (interest) but is not its slave, history cannot be predicted. It
continually makes its forecasters "lie." The last example is Marx's failure to
predict history. I am thinking, of course, of the absence of world socialist
revolution.
297. More than half of humanity today (end of 1984) lives in about twenty federal
states. The organization differs from one country to another. Differences are
mainly contained in the degree of independence of federal states with respect to
the central bodies of government. 298. History has shown repeatedly that serious difficulties in every great
undertaking appear only in the later phases of its implementation. This is
indicated equivalently by the histories of Christianity, Islam and socialism.
301. In the preparations for the new post-industrial era, especially after the "oil
crisis" in 1974, two million workers were fired in the countries of the European
Economic Union, resulting in the number of unemployed rising to over 12 million
people in 1984. The question, then, is in which way are we meeting the new era
that is inevitably coming? Development, especially of the third (tertiary)
activities, offers opportunities exclusively to small, dynamic companies. It is
estimated that during the computable period since 1977, in the United States
600,000 companies are established and 40,000 companies go bankrupt annually.
Currently there is a battle that relentlessly imposes the market, and in which rule
the steel laws of Darwinian selection. Newly founded effective firms are usually
small companies with fewer than 20 workers.
315. During the Congress in Bad Godesberg in 1959, the Social-Democratic party
of West Germany abandoned Marxism as a "method of analysis of social events."
This party preferred the "welfare state" to battle between classes. Swedish social
democracy achieved this turn almost thirty years earlier.
317. Currently in effect is the process of constant decrease in purely industrial
working posts in the economy of all highly developed countries. On this basis,
Alen Turen alleges the gradual disappearance of the classic working class. The
number of unionized workers is also on the decline. In France in 1984, for
example, only 30 percent of workers were members of one of four large unions.
318. In America during the last century, a thief used to be hanged for stealing a
horse. That was considered completely natural.
319. In 1984 in San Quentin Prison (California) alone, 155 convicts were waiting
for execution.
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329. When we speak of differences between the sexes, we think of men and
women, not feminists. Unlike women, who are one principle or element of the
world, feminists mean nothing. They are like plants pulled out by their roots, and
thus outside of any sort of comparison and consideration.
331. It would be normal to expect large differences between old and new
generations in our time. A child who has grown up with radio and television
discovers from earliest childhood that there are people at the other end of the
world who think, live, and feel differently. This should have as its result a greater
degree of tolerance and less chauvinism of every kind. For a child sees people
who believe in different things, but are equally good and evil, just like the
environment to which he belongs. Greater tolerance would be a logical result of
this experience. But, is life logical? 332. In spite of everything, in our century there has been a democratisation of
relationships among people. The one who doubts that should read the obliging
inscription of I. Kant (in the foreword to the Critique of Pure Reason) to some
anonymous bureaucrat (or minister) in Konigsberg. Kant, "an obedient servant,"
dedicated to him "all the interests of his literary career." Meanwhile, the
expression of subjugation, deep bows ("to the ground"), was something that was
at that time encountered at every step.
333. Television keeps incessantly hammering into the consciousness of people the
standardized messages and images that correspond to the official philosophy and
ideology. That is why television is a powerful weapon in the hands of totalitarian
regimes. However, new technological developments in this area (cable TV, more
channels, satellite TV, private stations, videorecorders, videotapes, etc.) break
this ideological and political monopoly. It will be amusing to see how totalitarian
countries, which have rushed to introduce TV, will offer resistance to the
introduction of these innovations. They are already doing this, since they either
ignore or avoid these developments. It does not suit them.
334. A totalitarian society is inclined toward uniformity in the upbringing and
education of people, as that makes manipulation easier. The behavior of uniform
people can be more easily controlled, it is predictable, and it fits better with
already existing forms.
339. Every fact of life and everything that is related to a man is complex and
cannot be explained nor solved with a simplified theory. Still, this is a century in
which people believed in theories. The Bolsheviks in the workers' power, Germans
in the superior race, criminologists in the futility of the punishment (for the
behavior of the offender is absolutely conditioned by biology and social
circumstances). Further still they went in Italy when they abolished insane
asylums and let the sick people out on the Street. They believed in the theory
that illness is of a social origin and that insane asylums were purposeless.
Although there is some truth in the assertion that a disease is socially
conditioned, by abolishing insane asylums, a service was not done either to
society or the patients.
343. As can be rather well seen, every technological advance is first the advance
of espionage and the military, and then all else. It has always been so. Today that
is only more apparent.
346. During the early 1950s of this century, the president of the International
Court of Justice in the Hague, who was arbitrating a dispute between the British
and Iran, was a Briton. In this dispute he voted against his country. British people
were angry, but they have not declared him a traitor to his homeland.
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350. High technology (high-tech), does not necessarily lead to unemployment, as
is commonly thought. Toffler states that in the period between 1963 and 1973,
Japan had the highest rate of investment in new technology and concurrently the
greatest increase in employment. To the contrary, Britain, which had the smallest
investment in machines, recorded the greatest decrease in workplaces.
351. Changes in the economic life of a post-industrial nation: in 1980, in the
United States, of the 85 million employed, only 20 million produced material
goods for all of the 220 million inhabitants of the country. The remaining 65
million "manipulate symbols" as Toffler says, that is, work in non-material
production.
352. Some leading American firms achieve greater profits-or have greater lossesthrough currency and financial manipulations, rather than through production
itself. Therefore, in the majority of corporations, one often increasingly comes
across the position of the "director for international cash transactions," actually, a
man who participates in the world electronic gambling-houses. His task is to
search for the lowest interest rates, the most propitious currency transactions and
the quickest turnover.
369. Mercator's projection of the globe does not suit us well. It incites
Eurocentrism. By distorting real relationships, it made the northern, developed
parts of the world disproportionately large, and in such a way fuels the feeling of
the greatness of the colonial powers with respect to the colonies (Scandinavia
larger than Congo, although opposite in reality).
382. This persistent pressure for employment of women outside the home, her
inclusion into production, also has its psychological form: it consists of not
acknowledging all of the economic values a woman creates at home, by giving
birth, raising children, and maintaining a family. The homemaker, that worker
who puts in 10 to 12 hours daily, is represented by our statistics as unemployed
and categorized under the heading "non-working element." All of us know how
busy a woman is, and at the same time we pretend not to see it. This neglect of
woman's work is yet another, this time moral, form of pressure on a woman to
leave home and turn her back on the family. Islamic culture must head the other
way. The beginning of this would be the acknowledgment of the work of the
mother and homemaker.
383. Alvin Toffler predicts that alcoholism costs American industry $20 billion
annually, while these numbers are even more adverse for Poland and the Soviet
Union. Fyodor Uglov, a member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union,
suggests passing a law on the complete prohibition of alcohol in the Soviet Union.
"Otherwise, the Soviet nation will disappear," says Uglov. There are over 40
million alcoholics in the Soviet Union. Each year over a million people die as a
consequence of alcohol, and every sixth child is born handicapped because one of
its parents was an alcoholic, claims Uglov (Osmica, March 14, 1985).
386. Even American Christianity was contaminated with racism. On many
churches, even around the middle of this century, one could read a sign that that
church was for whites only.
403. Even if power can be gained through promises, it can be only kept with
results.
420. Alcoholism became a first-rate problem in the Soviet Union. It has been
determined: in the twenty years between 1960 and 1980 the production and
consumption of alcohol increased eightfold. In 1980-30 liters of alcohol per capita
and 40 million alcoholics. According to one analysis of the Academy of Sciences in
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the Soviet Union, alcohol is a direct or indirect cause of death of more than -1.5
million people yearly-which equals the effect of 13 atomic bombs dropped on
Hiroshima. Alcohol is the cause of the 25 percent decline in birthrate, and of the
40 percent growth in death-rate. Some claim the benefits of alcohol. This too has
been calculated. The gain (for the state budget) 49 billion rubles, a loss of over
150 billion rubles ("There is some good in it too, but the harm is greater than the
good" (Qur'an, 2/2 19). Ninety percent of all resources intended for health are
spent only on the treatment of alcoholics. Alcohol is the main culprit in 90 percent
of the crimes registered annually in the country. Academic Fyodor Uglov even
suggested the complete prohibition of alcohol in the country, for "otherwise, the
nation will completely disappear," he claims (Politika, Belgrade, May 15 or 16,
1985).
421. Andre Breton claimed somewhere that he would like to live in a "glass
house" in which there are no secrets, in which everything is transparent. I
presume he was a socialist fanatic.
425. I believe that the world is made of individuals, that is, that the world
consists of individual people and individual things. For everything that exists,
exists individually: nothing general exists-it is construction of our logic, and not
reality.
434. Erich Fromm defined the "socially structured defect"-which he considered an
event whereby some clear depravity or inhumanity becomes not only normal, but
even desirable in one equally depraved and inhumane society. A good example is
an aggressive and unscrupulous individual in some markedly militaristic society
(that individual is already "well adjusted" and will not become neurotic), or
pornography and marital infidelity in a society following "sexual revolution" where
marital fidelity is ridiculed, etc. That which is sick and hideous becomes normal.
435. In the nineteenth century, white traders used to send tons of opium to
China. Around 1840, there were so many drug addicts among the Chinese that
the Chinese government came to the decision to destroy 20,000 cases of opium,
after which followed a declaration of war on China ("The First Opium War"). After
the peace agreement in Nanking, China was forced to pay Britain for the
destroyed opium, open its ports to British traders and surrender Hong Kong.
Bound by contract, China had to decrease its import custom-duties, so that cheap
British goods flooded the Chinese market and thereby almost completely halted
the industrial development of China.
437. There is a conspicuous similarity between Soviet admonition of "decadent
art" (conceptual detailing is ascribed to Plehanov) and the Fascist rejection of
"degenerate art," under which Fascists implicitly included all of modern art. In
any case, this almost equivalent relationship of communist and fascist
theoreticians with modern art is not coincidental and points to deeper equivalence
and similarity.
442. Statistics tell us that every living human today has about 20 million
ancestors. This calculation has been done according to some presupposed age of
humankind.
450. Historical time is always bounded by apocalypses-many little wars between
two big wars.
451. One of the characteristics of social realism: pseudo-classic architecture, and
enormous monuments, tastelessly pathetic and violently symbolic.
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455. Finally, there exists this inhuman, but unavoidable and relentless fact of the
power of the atomic bomb: Everything we consider must take into account this
circumstance, must adjust to this relentless fact.
456. Huxley speaks of a population of slaves who can be made to love their
slavery, and that task in today's totalitarian states is assigned to the ministries of
propaganda, newspaper publishers and teachers.
462. Sexual freedoms in the so-called socialist countries become a replacement
for political freedoms. Authorities are well aware of this connection.
467. When the Soviet Union introduced non-working Saturdays, the consumption
of alcohol rapidly increased.
476. Social realism does not paint true life, but an imagined life in utopia. The
picture is usually optimistic, but false. Realism, in spite of the dark sides which it
presents (for example, Balzac), captures us with its truth. Social realism repulses
us with its falsehood. This could be called the "unbearable lightness of utopia."
483. Some facts: In classical Greek art, the greatest development was
experienced by sculpture and drama, while we do not find music. During the
Renaissance, poetry experienced powerful revolution and, a bit later, music and
architecture as well; during Romanticism, lyricism came to the forefront, and in
the rationalist nineteenth century, the novel. Some nations seem to have certain
arts particularly suited to them: music for the Germans, poetry for the French,
artistic prose for the English and Russians, painting for the Italians. All this is not
exclusive, but some rough divisions can indeed be noticed.
510. Between 1968 and 1980 there were 6,700 terrorist actions registered in the
world, of which 2,206 occurred in Western Europe and only 62 in the countries of
the Eastern bloc (Intervju, July 5, 1985). Terrorists evidently abuse freedom.
511. In the book How to Succeed: Messages from the Most Successful American
Companies (Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman, 1984), there is a conclusion,
based on analysis of the 62 most successful American firms, that the most
significant factors of success were not inyestments or automation, but the worker
himself. The book presents the assertion: "Good management is the one which is
able to create a working atmosphere in which each individual gladly cares about
the company and society in its entirety." This conclusion, in complete opposition
to Marx's vision of development, even better confirms the case of Japanese firms
and their economic expansion.
512. Here is the "famous" sentence of Max Rafael concerning the dependence of
art and development: "A painter thinks he is completely free in his choice of
material and forms, while in reality this choice is conditioned by the state of
material and spiritual production, the artists' class, and especially by the history
of the art of painting itself." Materialists have always been passionately proving to
us that we are not free. Even where freedom is most obvious, as in this
inauspiciously chosen example of Max Rafael, they are convincing us we are
bound by three heavy chains: (1) state of spiritual and material production, (2)
class membership and (3) the entire history. Nothing in the likes of freedom
brings their vision of an enslaved world into question.
513. There are some characteristic symptoms regarding the newest developments
in the world: (1) in the Scandinavian countries, a movement against feminism
and pornography, (2) in the United States, alcohol-free disco clubs, and a new
young generation that accepts work and discipline with pride, (3) the
reawakening of an interest in religion in the youth, (4) the precipitous fall of the
influence of Communist parties, in both the West and the East, (5) critical
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reexamination of Darwinism and especially Freudianism and (6) passing legal
measures against alcoholism (in the Soviet Union, Scandinavian countries,
England, West Germany, etc.).
531. In Norway the "Action Group Against Pornography and Prostitution" (the
opposition immediately called it "The Coalition of Hypocrites") was established in
1981; judging by its support and influence, it represents some type of a national
party. The movement gathered approximately 400,000 members (out of about 4
million inhabitants of Norway). Ideologists of this movement claim that "after the
atomic bomb, pornography is the greatest danger to humanity." They demand the
complete prohibition of prostitution. The most radical followers and advocates of
the movement are precisely the feminists, who claim that pornography (and
prostitution) is a direct attack at the human rights and dignity of women. Both
the Conservative and Social-Democratic Parties compete in offering increasingly
piercing paragraphs against pornography. It was the Social-Democratic Workers'
Party that was the initiator of the introduction of changes in the Criminal Code
that sanctioned the sale of pornographic publications, pictures, films, video
stores, etc. (NIN, Belgrade, June 30, 1985).
574. Huxley taught us two things: (1) that utopias are possible and just because
of that, dangerous, and (2) that not all people like freedom and that people
should be called to or taught freedom, just like everything which is elevated and
noble. Freedom is not a natural, but a cultivated state. The largest number of
people would easily substitute it for security and enjoyment. The history of the
twentieth century confirms this.
575. American judgments and opinions appear, at times, too naïve to Europeans.
Americans have heard of Hitler, Nazism, war, gas chambers, Stalin's clean-ups,
etc. from the newspapers, while for Europeans there were immediate and bloody
events. This is where the certain idealism of Americans and certain cynicism and
incredulity of Europeans come from. In question here is the enormous difference
in the measure of that which we call historical experience.
595. When we speak of European civilization, if exaggerated enthusiasm
sometimes carries us away, let us remember that Nazism and Bolshevism were
also products of this civilization. That memory cannot be avoided.
597. In Ethiopia, when thousands of people, mostly children, died of hunger
(between 1984 and 1986), the military spent over a billion dollars for weapons,
and, of course, did not feel the dearth (Duga, No. 299/1985).
599. Ideology asks how and from what people live. Religion asks why and what
the people who live so are like. That is where the continual misunderstanding
between ideology and religion comes from. There where ideology finds progress,
religion sees utter relapse, for it does not find any people, but beings who only
function and consume.
606. Revolution is bounded by no laws-the attitude in the classics of Marxism.
608. Some sentences of the New Testament sound anti-Semitic.
618. Gorky thought that (the disappearing) religion would be replaced by art, and
that "esthetics is ethics of future." An artist or a writer would occupy the place of
a priest. And to the question of one party official as to what will replace churches,
Lenin answered: theaters.
624. One of C. Milosz's psychological analyses (concerning the dream of Piotr):
"It was-said he-a dream about complete protection.... When a man is given to a
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Political Notes
force which is stronger than him - said Piotr - he reaches a limit where that which
he hates becomes the object of admiration. He does not want to admit this to
himself. It is very unpleasant. But then, actually, there is no other salvation but
being closer to the center of that force. That is where kindness and beatitude is"
(C. Milosz, Conquest of Power). Actually, Milosz attempts to uncover individual
factors that make people suitable for the acceptance of one totalitarian system.
Milosz' s hero becomes partial to Stalinism under the decisive influence of terror,
faced with a force stronger than himself, and in order to propitiate and tame that
force, he accepts its totalitarian logic" (Nikola Milosevic in the foreword to the
Captured Mind).
625. Passion of destruction-the dominant tendency of the radical left.
626. In 1984, Latin America paid an average of about 40 percent of export
income toward the interest payment on its debts (some countries even more:
Argentina 52 percent). It is thought that, without harming development, one can
set aside a maximum of 10 percent of foreign-currency income.
628. With regard to the theory of reflection,, one can justifiably ask the question:
If art and literature are truly a passive reflection of socioeconomic circumstances,
why then is the engagement of writers and artists in socialist countries so
energetically demanded? From this request, one could sooner conclude that ideas
are creators of reality, and not the other way around. The contradiction is
obvious.
630. "They have killed your father, and that is why they appear stronger to you,"
says Teresa, in Milosz' s novel Conquest of Power. Faced with relentless and blind
force, Piotr attempted to turn the object of hate into an object of admiration. - In
the foundations of the majority of primitive, pagan religions, exists a similar
feeling as well. Primitive people did not revere their gods because of love or
respect. Personified in those gods were the forces at the mercy of which they
were left exposed. Wrestling with fear, a primitive man attempts to propitiate
those forces; he offers his submission, admiration, reverence. The same is done
today by some people before omnipotent authorities. People subjugate
themselves, not because of respect or good will, but out of the feeling of utter
powerlessness before its nature. C. Milosz has shown by his outstanding
psychological analysis how one arrives at a paradoxical result: Not having a
choice, man turns his hatred into admiration. The greatest good is to be "in the
good books" of the people from whom one can expect only trouble. Does not
Orwell's hero Winston end up loving Big Brother?
632. Herbert Marcuse, the greatest critic of capitalism outside the Soviet Union,
admits that capitalist mass democracy is not based upon terror and indigence but
on efficacy and wealth, and on the will of the majority of the governed population
(H.M., End of Utopia). Having this as his starting point, Marcuse concludes that a
capitalist regime can be overthrown only by out-of-parliament means, therefore,
by the means of terror and violence. He advocates this route.
643. According to the study of economist Ruth Sivard (conducted in 1984- 1985),
the amount of an unpaid woman's work, meaning domestic work, totals
$4 trillion a year, which equals a third of the total world production.
The majority of countries in the world today officially recognize the equality of
men and women. Women account for one-third of the world workforce, and they
realize only one-tenth of the total income. Working women, as a rule, have a
double working day, one in the office and one at home. Some statistics show that
working European women have less free working time than their husbands do, by
half. A similar case is also with working women in other countries.
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Political Notes
656. There is no defeat for which the defeated nation bears no responsibility. In
the "dumpster of history" there are no innocent ones. For to be weak is a fault
from the standpoint of history. To be weak is immoral in history.
660. Is it true that only "empty stomachs set history in motion?"
664. In times past, people killed in the name of religion, today, in the name of
ideology. In this century millions of people were killed in the name of ideology.
673. Ordinary people hold the conviction that AIDS is a price that modern
civilization pays for "sexual liberation." This conviction has been stimulated by the
reminder that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by fire from the sky as a
punishment for unnatural lechery.
674. Investments into research and development (R&D) programs in the world.
In 1985: In Milan a meeting was organized that was supposed to answer the
question of how Europe and European industry would respond to the technological
challenge given to the world by the United States and Japan. The question was in
fact, how certain countries relate to technology and how ready they are for the
upcoming technological game. Cohn Norman, one of the experts in this field,
estimated that at the end of the 1970s, over $150 billion was spent on R&D
worldwide. Of course, the main impetus of this race is the current confrontation.
The main areas of investment are: electronics (especially microelectronics), the
chemical and pharmaceutical industry and space. In the United States, these
investments (R&D) amount to more than 2.4 percent of the Gross National
Product (GNP), but together with resources invested in it by industry, this rate
increases to 4 percent. Japan follows with 2.11 percent, or 6 percent of its GNP if
the share by the economic sector is included. For space exploration in 1980,
Japan spent about a billion dollars a year, and what has to be pointed out is that
reliance on technology is the only chance Japan has, literally, the precondition for
survival. West Germany sets aside about 2 percent of its GNP, Great Britain 2.2
percent. In the USSR this work is coordinated by the Gosplan, Committee for
Inventions and Discovery and the Academy of Sciences (established in 1724, now
having 800 members). It is estimated that there are about 1.5 million scientific
workers in the USSR (in 1980, five times more than in 1958); in 1980, 23.8
billion rubles was spent on R&D. Among the countries of the Third World, only
China and India have more developed scientific and developmental politics. It is
estimated that there are about 2 million scientific workers in China and that about
1 percent of the GNP is set aside for R&D. India estimates: around 2.5 million
scientific workers and engineers. Since 1947, a continual growth of funds for
research and development has been recorded.
677. History is not mathematics, and in it there is no mathematical necessity.
Engels has stated in many articles, interviews and letters between 1891 and 1895
that the impending conquest of power by the social democratic party is a
"mathematical necessity." That did not happen, and when it did, it was no longer
Engels' social-democracy but Bolshevism, in fact, the totalitarian power of former
workers.
679. When Spain and Portugal become full members of European Union (1986),
"The Twelve" will have 318 million inhabitants-significantly more than the United
States (232 million) and the USSR (275 million). In addition to this there is a
great cultural and scientific tradition, as well as resources for development. When
one adds the investments into scientific research of only three countriesGermany, France and England-one gets an amount equal to that invested by the
United States, and twice that of Japan. But the effect of these investments, due
to the present fragmentation, is significantly smaller. These drawbacks should be
eliminated by EURECA (European Research Cooperation Agency).
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Political Notes
683. In manuscripts recently found and published, Marx said that he built his
historical method precisely while reading Machiavelli's History of Florence, in
which the history of class struggles in this city was presented. Machiavelli
separated politics from ethics. He divides morality into individual and public and
subjugates the former to the latter. Machiavelli also emphasizes "public interest"
as the aim of the community, but his theory might have served to show how
much the so-called public interest can be immoral or amoral. His The Prince is a
cynical manual for all autocrats, and "Machiavellian" a synonym for that type of
methodology of conquest and preservation of power.
686. What is the "Swedish model of welfare state," which has been being created
by the Social-Democrats for almost 50 years? On the basis of mutual solidarity,
society attempts to provide humane conditions of life for every member of
society. Every child older than 18 months has a secured place in a child-care
institution. When he goes to school, he will have free books and school supplies,
as well as a meal. When he finishes school, he will get a job, and if there are no
jobs, the state will create one for him through public work or subsidies to the
employers who hire unemployed individuals. That is why in Sweden
unemployment is less than 3 percent (1985). When he marries, he will get an
apartment or will buy it, depending on his prospects. When his children are born,
he gets privileges. If he becomes ill, he will get 90 percent of his pay from the
first day of his illness. Even if he refuses to work, society will give him minimum
support. When he grows old, he will get a pension, regardless of the number of
years he worked. If he grows weak, he can get a place in a senior citizen's home.
The downside of this system is that it is rather bureaucratised and therefore
rather expensive. Health, education and social assistance are the greatest items
in the state budget; as a result Swedish taxes are some of the highest in the
world. As is known, during the 1985 elections, the Swedish Social-Democrats
launched a program of "workers' funds." The idea is that workers pay in the
excess of their pay into these funds, through which they buy shares and so
become co-owners of the companies and factories (Danas, September 1985, and
NJN, May 6, 1985).
687. Do we want to be governed by people or events, mind or coincidence?
If people, which and what kind?
688. Separate ministry for science (or for research and development - R&D)
- Why not?
692. The 1984-85 elections in Scandinavian countries (Sweden, Norway,
Denmark) show the movement of the voting body toward social democracy. This
tendency was registered somewhat sooner in Spain, France and Greece and
finally very clearly in Portugal (fall 1985). There is definitely a difference between
European socialists and social democrats. Explaining this difference, Leonid
Zospen, the first secretary of the Socialist Party of France, said in one analysis
(1985) that social democracies in essence only engage in "better and more just
redistribution of social wealth (income). They, as a rule, do not engage with
changing the type of ownership and reorganization of the production relations in
society." "We, socialists, however, have in sight both of these components of the
socialist transformation." My comment: all such concepts are in visible recession
starting with the 1980s (I think, of course, of the latter-the socialist ones).
698. According to statistical data, during the 1970s and 1980s the number of
women in high positions declined in Western countries. There are fewer women
ministers, ambassadors and parliament members today than 30 or 40 years ago.
The only exception is Sweden, where the number of women holders of higher
functions increased.
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Political Notes
717. There are occurrences (or events) that in themselves collect all the
dispersed characteristics of one phenomenon, and thus become a symbol.
730. Freedom and anarchy-two concepts destined to be confused with each
other. They are not the only example (damage-sin; useful-good; God-nature,
etc.).
744. "The results of bourgeois emancipation must be preserved. Socialism
without constitutional rights is utter nonsense."-Jurgen Habermas in one
interview (NIN, November 24, 1985). Habermas is considered to be the most
significant Marxist writer of the modern age. This was not a hindrance to his
appointment in the 1970s to the post of director at the Max Planck Institute for
Research of Life Conditions of the Scientific-Technological World (West Germany)
(in this capacity he wrote the book The Problem of the Legitimacy of Late
Capitalism). In a reversed situation (if he wrote in Communism against
Communism) he would get, like myself, 14 years in prison. That is that "certain"
difference.
754. The most important economic resource is good quality personnel whose
knowledge and capabilities are created and objectified through scientific work and
education One dollar invested into scientific research work is returned after ten
years as twelve, and in the case of information technology, even double. In
Japan, national income has increased in the period between 1970 and 1980 from
$1,806 to $12,000 per inhabitant annually, but the expense for the development
of information technology was $350 per inhabitant annually (Danas, Zagreb,
November 26, 1985).
777. French sociologists claim that alcoholism is "the mass genocide of a less
valuable and superfluous population," for the life expectancy of alcoholics is on
average 20 years shorter than of people who do not drink. Alcohol is one of the
evils that strictly conform to the "principle of equality," for it equally attacks
intellectuals and workers, young and old, rich and poor, peasants and artists,
men and women. Children of alcoholics become alcoholics themselves. In 1951,
the World Health Organization conceded alcohol the status of a "virus"-a scarcely
curable disease of society and family. Among treated alcoholics in Yugoslavia,
there is the greatest percentage among workers, around 90 percent. In
Yugoslavia, three million of people drink often and vast amounts, of whom one
million are chronic alcoholics, while only ~ to 4 percent are abstinent. Out of
1,000 surveyed students, every third one started drinking between the ages of 11
and 15, and every tenth had wine before he was five, etc. (NIN, December 15,
1985).
778. "There where a man wants to be complete, the state will never be
totalitarian" (Denis de Rougemont).
780. When Denis de Rougemont invited Europe to unite immediately after World
War II, his appeal was greeted with ridicule. But 40 years later, this unity is
becoming a reality to an increasingly greater extent, and that which is happening
in this direction is undoubtedly one of the most significant facts of this century.
791. The true differences between people, societies and political systems are not
in aims, but in methods. Therefore, do not ask much about the aims, for
proclaimed aims will always be noble and good-ask about the methods or observe
the methods. That never deceives.
814. Over 100 nations and ethnic groups live in the USSR, and they formally have
their own national republics or autonomies. The Union contains 15 federal and 20
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Political Notes
autonomic republics, eight autonomic districts and ten national regions (Danas,
December 17, 1985). In spite of this, Russian hegemony is felt throughout.
815. During the last census in the United States, when asked about ethnic
background, as many as 83 percent of Americans stated some ethnic
identification, and only 6 percent stated they were Americans. In spite of the
"melting pot" theory, it was shown that ethnic identity is extraordinarily stable,
ethnic homogenization did not happen, and thus America has remained a
pluralistic community in the ethnic sense.
828. Positivists are proving that differences in the role of a man and a woman in
a society are not natural, but created by long practice and upbringing. Without
those artificial conditions, it would be possible-they claim-to equalize these roles.
Furthermore, it is claimed that even for the different choice of games and toys
that boys and girls make, where boys imitate handymen and soldiers and make
weapons and vehicles while girls make houses, dolls and pay social calls, it is
societal pressure that limits the freedom of choice, activities and toys for children
(ex. Vesna Janjevic, psychologist). The advocates of this theory claim that
children do not make this choice spontaneously, but that parents, teachers and
pedagogues habituate them to it, etc. This does not sound convincing.
831. French poet Louis Aragon wrote an ode to the Soviet secret police. His is the
verse: "Long live the GPU, the dialectical expression of heroism." He is also an
author of the "famous" sentence: "We put Stalin above Shakespeare, Rambois,
Goethe, Pushkin." Later he changed his opinion. Historical distance is necessary
to all, especially poets and writers!
836. Total population of Earth-estimates (NIN, December 29, 1985):
1985-4.8
2000-6
billion
billion
2025-8
2050-11
billion
billion
The number of inhabitants of the white race is decreasing in relative terms. In
1985, white people constituted 34 percent of the world population, in 2000 they
will constitute 25 percent, and in 2025, 18 percent. Does that signify the twilight
of the race that dominated the world for centuries?
The black population of the United States is growing twice as fast as the white.
Today, 320 million people live in the European Community, but the rate of growth
is only 0.5, so it is predicted that by the end of the century, the number of
inhabitants of the European Economic Union will fall to 280 million. The USSR
today (1985) has 276 million, but at the end of the century a number between
310 and 320 million is expected, with growth exclusively to the advantage of the
non-Russian nations.
In Algeria, every woman gives birth to an average of seven children. Of the 35
poorest countries, 23 are in Africa.
In the white communities of Europe, the United States, and the USSR, fewer and
fewer children are being born. Reasons: late marriages, egotism ("I want to live
for myself and not for a child"), career, divorces, employment of both parents,
decreased fertility, drugs, venereal diseases and mass abortions. The causes of
demographic crises are in greatest part of a moral nature.
839. Racism has no scientific basis: 99 percent of the genes that represent the
inheritance of the individual are common to all people. One percent of the genes
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Political Notes
conditions the physical appearance of a human being, that is, his racial identity.
Modern genetics refuted the old explanation for the differences between races.
844. What are the driving forces of technological development: economic
mechanisms, the people who are always searching for something new, the race
for extra profit, military contention for dominance, state administration?
In the Far East a series of little countries (Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia,
Singapore, Hong Kong) is powerfully advancing. This is an imitation of the
Japanese model, but which forces were active in Japan itself? In some cases a
desperate attempt with the aim of military domination was shown to be the most
powerful driving force (the United States is a good example with Reagan's
Strategic Defense Initiative, SDI-known as "Star Wars"). Half of the amount spent
for research and development by the United States is spent on defense. The case
is similar for the USSR. However, in the United States the results of research in
the military sector are quickly transferred to the civilian one, which is not the
case in some other countries. Can one go faster? The example of these countries
shows that one can, they have achieved a degree of development in half the time
taken by Japan. The first phase in the development in each of those countries
lasted less than five years. Its main characteristics were: reliance on the world
market, private initiative, administrative deregulation, opening up for foreign
investments, low custom duties, symbolic taxes and abolishment of different
taxes and permits. In this way, Singapore became the largest world exporter of
diskette units for computers in 1985, and Malaysia the largest exporter of
diskette electronics. The Japanese model is founded on so-called soft
government, that is, the incessant process of consultations between businesses
and state administration. In India, as opposed to other countries, the driving
force was politics. At the head of the Department of Electronics is the president of
the government himself. In the world, it is otherwise not usual for bureaucracy to
incite technological development. It is usually the force of the status quo.
845. From lack of understanding to aggressiveness is but one step.
851. For the first time in its history, humanity faced the possibility of its own
annihilation, actually self-annihilation. This feeling has a sobering effect and will
influence the behavior of all future generations. Let us hope!
868. Algerian poets are dissatisfied with the slow process of Arabization. They
know what significance the act has of returning to their country a language that
has been so cruelly taken away by French colonial politics.
913. Even since the seventeenth century, the school system in Japan was so
developed that the percentage of illiterate was the smallest in the world.
Japanese lettering is very complex. This does not depend on lettering, but on
people.
915. "When Japan opened toward the West, it invested all of its efforts into the
education of people, and in a much more liberal way. I was shocked that here in a
village, about thirty kilometers away from Paris, where my son attends
elementary school, there is no piano, no drawing lessons, and not even the
natural sciences are being taught. All of that existed for a long time even in the
smallest village school in Japan. And the French are surprised how the Japanese
could rise so quickly" (Japanese painter Jase Tabuchi, NIN, January 19, 1986).
927. One society excludes itself from the civilized world if it falls behind in the
area of knowledge (science) beyond a certain historically tolerable measure. What
are we to conclude about our future in light of this fact?
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Political Notes
931. In 1985, in the United States, four-member families with an annual income
of less than $10,609 had been assigned to the category of "poor." This category
constituted 14.4 percent of the population of the United States, or 33.7 million
people. A great majority of this category consists of black people.
937. Culture is before all a sign or the evidence of the existence of one people.
939. When civilized societies retrogress, they do not return to the traditional
forms of life (traditional society), but are de-civilized. That is the customary case
when, because of insufficient material development, the trend of civilization
cannot be followed. What happens is complete material and spiritual
impoverishment.
941. One of the rules of bureaucracy: Better to do nothing, for one who does
nothing makes no mistakes, and one cannot be accountable for inaction. That is
why bureaucracy is the factor of the status quo and opposition against every
innovation.
942. No freedom is possible, or is real, if from above (decreed). Freedom is not
gained, it is taken.
947. The motto of all sailors (after all shipwrecks and damage): "One must sail."
949. Crime in the world increases yearly at the average rate of 2 percent. These
numbers continually grow, despite the fact the efficacy of the police in the last
decade has increased by 50 percent, and financial resources invested in the fight
against crime nearly doubled. This can be concluded from the report of the
General Secretary of the U.N. at the conference dedicated to the question of
crime in the world (Delhi, 1985). During this gathering, it was determined that
"Crime today is a phenomenon which exceeds national and international
dimensions, leading to the slowing down of political, social, economic, and
cultural development, and hindering the actualisation of both human rights and
elementary freedoms."
950. Democracy, by its definition, contains as well the possibility of misuse of
democracy. Who attempts to "cure" democracy from this danger kills with this
cure democracy itself. Freedom should be accepted as such, with all of its risks.
There is no choice here.
951. If a book, a record, a film, if all these are only merchandise, then uncultured
consumers decisively affect cultural politics, for they have purchasing power at
their disposal, which opens doors to trash and kitsch.
959. Newly composed music actually "newly composes" the consciousness of the
people.
972. The Italian Mafia was created in the fight against the Bourbons who ruled
the "Kingdom of Two Sicilys" (with headquarters in Palermo and Naples), which
helped it gain from the people a certain patriotic or romantic halo. But later, a
stratum of the rich separated within the Mafia (as happens with any power
without control), and under the slogan of the fight against foreigners, increasingly
concentrated power in its own hands. Since the beginning until today, the rules of
the Mafia have remained the same. These are: animosity toward authorities,
conspiring (omerba), clear social division of the powerful and obedient, and
periodic redistribution of power among families-clans (cozahe), which leads to
mutual merciless confrontations (faida). Otherwise, the Mob today is a typical
criminal organization. In 1980, only from the sale of drugs abroad, it earned four
times more than the entire public budget of Sicily.
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Political Notes
975. Two opposite statements on freedom of thought: Richelieu: "Give me two
sentences written by the hand of even the most honest man, I will find in them a
cause to hang him" (writes Mrs. De Motwille in her Memories). Voltaire in a letter
to Helvetius: "Dear Sir, I do not agree with your opinion, it is revolting to me, but
I will defend your right to hold it until the end."
986. There are people who are good not out of goodness, but out of stupidity or
weakness. They are, to say so, objectively good, not subjectively. However, as
much as this goodness out of narrow-mindedness (or timidity) is without real
moral value, one cannot ignore its objective value, that is, value for other people.
Those people are at least not harmful. If they are not morally useful, they can be
socially useful, so no single realistic politic will ignore them. There where the
questions are asked about intentions and motives, and not results and
consequences, their lives are of no value. Those are two different worlds: moral
and social.
992. An odd paradox is in effect: while churches in the West are frequented less
and less, they are increasingly filled in the socialist East. According to
sociologists, in both cases this is due to the crises of the institutions: in the West
of the religious, and in the East those of the state.
1023. The Chinese "Cultural Revolution" was the most radical and far-reaching
attempt in human history to remove not only the influence of the diverse past
from present and future generations, but also to erase from the consciousness of
these generations even the memory of it itself. We do not know if anyone put
before themselves a similar ambition. Perhaps Kemal in Turkey during the 1920s.
1024. Jonedij Masuda, one of the leading Japanese experts on computers, claims
that our knowledge-rich future will direct us to replace the interest in material
things with interest in spiritual values. Within this perspective he also sees a
future world religious renaissance. As is known, Adam Smith developed a similar
thought in his work Wealth of Nations, a hundred years before. For now we know
that the optimistic predictions of Smith about man's turning toward the spiritual
life in prosperity did not come true.
1028. The Qur'an, and its spirit of mercy and justice, has become people's
feelings and the everyday philosophy of ordinary individuals. This source was
alive and active, even when it seemed it had run dry. Even then-in the times of
decadence-although it did not directly affect social-political life, it did affect the
formation of people's feelings, which will be and which are (today or tomorrow)
the source of laws. Those laws, if they express the spirit and feeling of people,
will be laws of justice and equality.
1032. In April of 1986, Pope John Paul II visited a Roman synagogue. That was
the first time in history that the head of the Catholic Church crossed the threshold
of a Jewish temple. In the Vatican it was announced that this act represented
extending a hand to a people that had, for the last twenty centuries, been
accused of the murder of Jesus Christ. Somewhat earlier, in 1965 during the
Second Vatican Council, via the declaration Nostra aetat, Jews had been officially
released of this accusation. In 1985, Pope John Paul II visited Morocco and spoke
before 80,000 young Muslims about "our common God of Abraham," which was
an argument that could have equally been offered to Jews as well. (In Rome, in
the sixteenth century, following the order of Pope Paul IV, the so-called Roman
Ghetto for Jews was established. It was abolished over three hundred years later,
in 1870.)
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Political Notes
1039. It is important for a nation to always "want something." Let us take
India: In the 1950s, Nehru emphasized the motto of industrialization, in the
mid1960s the "green revolution" (the advancement of agriculture), in the early
1960s the motto "Garibi hatao" ("Root out poverty"), in the mid- 1980s the
technology (computerization) of Rajiv Gandhi. You will never achieve everything
you intend to. However, you especially will not if you do not intend anything, and
that type of apathy and inertia we find, unfortunately, in a large number of
countries.
1045. The German Kaiser Wilhelm, otherwise a very average man, wrote this
comment under some painting, "reminder to peoples of Europe to take care of
their 'holy goods' before the danger from the East." This was much before the
revolution in Russia. Hesse writes about this in 1919 (in an essay on
Dostoyevsky) and says that the Emperor felt some vague fear of the masses from
the East, which could be set in motion against Europe. This "vague fear" came
true many years later.
1052. According to data in the magazine Journal de Brazil, out of the $100 billion
of foreign debt that Brazil had in 1985, one-third, or $35 billion, had been
effectively used, while all the rest was "eaten-up" by the mechanism of
"refinancing of original loans" (Vjesnik, April 14, 1986).
1107. There exist two terrors of the twentieth century: the Gulag and Nazism.
1113. That which we sometimes see as a disease of an individual, is in fact a
disease of times or society.
1115. Even the most beautifully invented institutions grow old after a certain
time, are petrified, lose their internal life, even their true and original meaning.
1127. Mind (or human spirit)-is it the ruler and lawgiver of life or only its
interpreter?
1128. Are laws at variance with freedom? Do both morality and laws limit
freedom? Will life, if it is freed from the laws, start acting against itself and selfdestructing? Do we have experience with this situation, and what does it say to
us?
1146. The iconoclastic attitude of Islam has two meanings and both are relevant.
The first is literal-fight against the concretion of God, against his degradation to a
painting or statue. And the other: against many little Gods, infallible, all knowing,
magnificent, "one head above the others," untouchable, sons of God and sons of
the leaders, Fuhrers, the greatest ones, etc. This multitude of "little Gods" was
abolished by Islam and it was proclaimed: La illahe Illallah - there is no other
divinity but God1. These two iconoclastic meanings "Al-Akida" are in mutual
relationship and complement each other.
1166. There are many parallels between Nazism and Stalinism, but one is both
more conspicuous and more important than the others: In both systems the
individual does not exist and means nothing. From this fundamental equivalence
followed all others.
1
Note from editor an of the OCR-ed version of this book:
A translation closer to the traditional translation of "La illahe Illallah" might be "Nothing is Holy, except
for Allah (God)" or "Nothing is worth worshiping except Allah (God)". IH
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Political Notes
1182a. Conflict and social dissatisfaction in the ten most developed countries of
the world 1973-1982.
Country
Austria
West
Germany
Japan
Sweden
France
United States
Great Britain
Spain
Italy
Conflict Inflation
Index
1
6.3
3
4.9
6
3
16
35
39
68
100
Unemployment
8.1
10.9
11.3
9.0
14.9
1 7.1
17.2
Social
Dissatisfaction
2.0
8.3
4.2
9.1
2.0
1 .6
5.1
7.7
6.1
6.2
7.2
10.1
12.5
16.4
16.7
21.0
23.3
24.4
Notes: Conflict Index = relationship between days of strike and total employment
(Italy = 100); Social Dissatisfaction sum of percentages of inflation and unemployment.
Source: Table composed by the Italian economist Paolo Silos Labini-NIN, May 11, 1986.
1183. Paolo Siles Labini (see the table in the previous note), Italian economist,
and author of the book The Social Classes in the Eighties, a bestseller in Italy in
1986.
Main ideas:
(1) Economic, social, and political inequalities have been progressively
decreasing in the last two centuries; there is, therefore, no inescapable
social polarization of the society, as announced by Marx. Impoverishment
(proleteriatization) did not happen as well, just the opposite-class
differences were reduced.
(2) The class problem is a characteristic of European societies that had passed
through feudalism. In the United States, which did not pass through
feudalism ("in which not even blood was of the same color"), class
divisions did not have the significance they had in Europe. In India and
some Asian countries, class division follows from castes.
(3) Development is characterized by drastic diminution of the agrarian class
and the rise of the urban, as well as by the increase in the number of
clerks and continual decrease of the number of workers.
(4) There exists a permanent revolution-but a revolution in education. "A
monopoly on the highest education was the first element of the
domination of social groups," claims Labii.
(5) What is noticed is a continual diminution of the difference between the
average pay of clerks and workers: at the start of this century in Italy this
relationship was 4:1, and in the United States 2.3:1; today (1986) it is
1.2:1 (Italy), and 1.3:1 (United States). Labii believes that prospects are
that a worker's pay will surpass a clerk's pay;
(6) There no longer exists the acute "peasant question" that for long
preoccupied political parties before World War II. Reason: not that the
conditions have noticeably improved, but that the peasantry has
practically disappeared as a class. Thus, today in the United States,
independent farmers account for only 1.5 percent of the population (in
1890: 22.7 percent), in Italy 7.6 percent, in France 6.2 percent, in Great
Britain 1.3 percent, in Greece still 29 percent, in India 50 percent, in Egypt
34 percent. Will the same happen to the working class (and the "worker
question")?
(7) Class differences in highly developed and post-industrial societies are
expressed as cultural differences. Even in general, holds Labini, class
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Political Notes
battle was politically relevant because it was intellectually relevant. Those
who have insisted the most and worked in the direction of radicalization
were intellectuals, not workers.
(8) The working class is changing quantitatively and qualitatively-the latter
especially under the influence of informatics and robotization.
(9) In the United States, the main contrarieties are not class ones, but racial
and ethnic. The ethnic picture of the United States in the 1980s:
Anglo-Saxon group one-third, Hispanic group around one-quarter, Blacks
about 12 percent, and one-third of different little groups from Slovaks to
numerous Oriental peoples. Even the particular kinds of crime are
ethnically determined.
(10) Three ideals of the French revolution, equality, liberty and fraternity, are
still topical today, the first two being in the foundation of all aspirations
and topical political movements in the world, while the third-fraternity,
"sounds pathetic, and as opposed to the first two, cannot be easily
institutionalized." The coexistence of the first ideals is difficult but
necessary since in egalitarian societies without freedom, different forms of
privileges and inequalities soon take roots, and crude shows of economic
inequality autocracy lead to autocracy.
(11) Social picture of Russia before the revolution: 80 percent peasants
(including kulaks), 14 percent workers and craftsmen, 6 percent
bourgeoisie (traders, landowners, and imperial functionaries). In this
situation equality, and not freedom, was the first ideal. However,
repression of freedom in today's USSR is becoming a problem, not only
politically but also economically: development is halted. "Weakness in
technological innovation is the Achilles heel of the Soviet Union." There
exists almost no technical innovation that the USSR has exported to the
West. The reverse is the rule. During the last two decades, stagnation in
the economic development of the USSR could be noticed. The main
problem is the ruling class of the "nomenclature"-the ruling people in the
state and party apparatus, directors of larger companies and academics.
They, alongside the power, enjoy significant material privileges as well
and show no readiness to renounce them. These privileges have outlived
all other political and economic changes in the USSR (so-called reforms).
It is thought there are around 700,000 members of the nomenclature.
That is the strongest conservative force (force of the status quo) in the
USSR.
(12) A shocking fact: The average life expectancy in the USSR is on the
decline. The death rate of newborns has increased as well in the period
between 1965 and 1981 from 23 to 28 per thousand. (13) In the West,
there is an increasing number of workers and union organizations among
the owners of joint-stock companies. Additionally, the increasingly
greater development of small companies, which show themselves to be
very effective, takes away all allure from nationalization, which was so
popular immediately after the war.
1189. Erich Fromm has shown (in "Escape from Freedom") that dictatorship,
totalitarianism and a state of the lack of freedom in general do not have a base
only in social and political institutions, but also in a man himself, in his character
structure. Freedom is not something that is understood by itself or realized as a
value. People need to be taken or called to freedom as true religion. For some
people, freedom is an excessive burden. Therefore, escape from freedom. Fromm
reminds us of Germany in the 1930s, when "millions were as eager to surrender
their freedom as their fathers were to fight for it" (p. 19).
1203. At the foundation of all the progress and power of the West in the last five
centuries is the cult of work, which appeared at the beginning of this historic
period and remained a main value in the eyes of the greatest number of people
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Political Notes
until the present. Linked with it is a particular concept of time, as something
valuable, that cannot be wasted. In Niirnberg, even since the sixteenth century,
clocks sounded the quarters of hours, which reflected a new feeling for time,
which is passing and needs to be economized. The first law of morality became
industrious and honest work, and the first sin indolence and unproductiveness.
The main objection to both clergy and monks was that they were not productive.
What are the origins of this new spirit that suddenly reigned over millions of
people? It is most often ascribed to Protestant ethics. However, regardless of its
source, one thing is certain: it contains the main factor of superiority of Western
civilization.
1214. Communists claimed that classical freedoms have only formal nature and
no value. What is the value of freedom of religion, that is, the right to believe
according to your own choice-they say-when an individual loses an internal ability
to believe in anything that cannot be proven? Or, what is that so much praised
freedom of speech for, when much of what man thinks and says is in actuality
that which others think and say. Or, what is it worth to you that you are free from
external authorities (kings, dictatorships, church) when anonymous authorities
such as public opinion and the press have even more authority? These internal
authorities have greater power over man than the external, etc. My response to
this: Give us as many of those "formal" freedoms, and do not worry about our
health. It has been shown, namely, that this objection to formalism of freedom is
in fact justification for a totalitarian system of government. For, those who have
talked of formal freedoms did not instead of those give real ones, but have
abolished both the one and the others. This hypocritical game continues and
repeats itself, surprisingly with success.
1216. The principle of true capitalism is not spending, and therefore not luxury or
prodigality, but accumulation and, on the basis of it, new, increased production.
1221. In authoritarian systems that last, and where the prospects for resistance
and change of conditions have been reduced to a minimum, resignation appears
and, with time, acceptance of such a state of things. In Poland in 1985, a turning
away from "Solidarity" was noticed, not because of the rejection of the movement
as such, but because of the loss of hope that even after ten years of resistance
anything could be changed and that every violent attempt would end up with
further aggravation of the conditions (for example, direct Soviet occupation, such
as in Czech lands.) Dictators are not usually satisfied with only the absence of
resistance. They demand to be glorified and celebrated, and usually succeed.
Psychoanalysis gives the following explanation: Suppressed feelings of hate turn
into acceptance, and even into blind adoration. This reversed (sick) logic was
shown by Orwell in his 1984, and E. Fromm in Escape from Freedom has very
convincingly written about it as well.
1224. Hypnosis and similar techniques prove how - we can experience some
suggested thoughts and feelings, which have no objective basis, as our own (for
example, a hypnotist suggests to the subject that the potato he holds in his hand
is a pineapple, and the latter eats it, enjoying it as if he were eating a pineapple).
Television, with constant repetition, becomes something similar. Millions of
viewers accept, as their own, opinions that sometimes have no real basis and are
often completely foreign to them. This is mass hypnosis, which is achieved
through persistent repetition of some opinions and attitudes.
1230. "The right to expression of opinions has meaning only if we are able to
have our own opinion" (E. Fromm, Escape from Freedom). Beautiful thought, is it
also true?
Can the free expression of an "imposed" opinion in Western democracies be
equated with the prohibition of expression of any different opinion in the countries
Alija Izetbegović - Notes From Prison, 1983-1988
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Political Notes
of the socialist stock? Even if theoretically this seems very similar, the practical
difference is large, especially since an imposed opinion is never imposed in its
entirety. Even when accepting some opinion, an individual himself has had some
contribution, has colored it, even to a certain degree, with his personality. It is
hypocritical to equate the position of the citizen in a democratic society, where he
is exposed to the influence of commercials, TV, partisan propaganda machinery,
press, which "help" him accept (actually impose) some kind of thinking, with a
citizen of some totalitarian state, where only a single opinion is served and all
others are persecuted and rendered impossible. Pluralism itself, which is
characteristic of democracy, and the freedom to think differently (as theoretical
as it may be, and hindered with many real limitations) draw a boundary between
these two different situations in which an individual can find himself.
All culture and upbringing are in a certain sense limitation of spontaneity and
freedom: a request to do something (because it is good and beautiful), or not to
do it (because it is bad and ugly). Looked at from the outside, culture is
repression and is in opposition to freedom. Does there exist an imposed behavior
that is in accordance with freedom? Is every externally imposed opinion (or
behavior) a limitation of freedom? Is a parent's insistence, for example, that a
child brush his teeth or treat adults respectfully an attack on the child's freedom?
Impeding expression of opinion for a long duration in the life of an individual or
society leads to the disappearance of one's own opinion. People will avoid
developing thoughts and feelings that they will not be able to express or that will,
furthermore, represent a burden, even danger.
Finally, it is possible to imagine human beings without opinions. How much they
are still human beings is another question.
1237. Adjustment is the greatest negation of one's own "I." It is forcing one to
want what one must want, or accept as good and beautiful that which one has to
consider as such, or finally, to accept another's opinion and taste as one's own.
As long as you express that opinion aware that it is another's and that it has been
imposed on you, things are not hopeless. Manipulation is complete when you do
not notice that those are others' opinions or tastes, or you start to deceive
yourself that they are your own.
1266. I wrote somewhere: "Hamlet cannot be translated into scientific language,
nor <text missing> But there have been attempts. Hegel attempted to make a
philosophical analysis of Hamlet and Antigone, wanting to show through this
interpretation how ideas in these poetic works are identical to those from his own
philosophy. How successful this analysis was is another question. Besides, it is
not difficult to prove that the reduction of a work of literature to an idea, to a
rational concept, leads to the abolition of literature (and art in general) and, as a
further consequence, to an absolutism of ratia. All this, in the end, is an integral
part of the authoritarian spirit.
1269. Not all that a Marxist is writing is Marxism, nor is everyone who thinks he is
a Marxist one. If we compare what individual Marxists in this century wrote and
said about some important questions, we will find more differences among them
than similarities. In general, we are often victims to a fallacy that subjective and
objective attitudes match, and that is much more rare than we think.
1279. Reading novels confounded Don Quixote's mind. He stopped differentiating
imagination from reality, truth from the story, dream and waking state, past and
present, finally, that which is written in books and that which is real. But it was a
fallacy of a noble kind.
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Political Notes
1327. England-industrial revolution; France-political revolution; Germanyphilosophical revolution. That which the English and French have done in the field
of economy and politics, the Germans did in the field of thought.
1382. Moliere, with his cutting satire of the vices of the ruling classes before the
French Revolution, prepared the confrontation with them. It was not the
revolution that created Moliere, but Moliere that created the revolution ("In the
beginning there was a word").
1422. Herman Hesse clearly expresses his own view of history when he puts
words into Tegrearus's mouth, according to which history is "something so
revolting, at the same time banal and devilish, at the same time horrible and
boring, that it cannot be understood how can a serious thinker engage with it. Its
content is only human selfishness and the eternally same fight for power, for
material, brutal, animal power. . . . World history is a story without an end of
violence of the stronger over the weaker. Race with time, race for profit, for
power, for wealth. . . . Spiritual work, cultural work, artistic work, on the
contrary, is completely opposite to that, it is always an escape of man from
temporal slavery to another plane, into the eternal and timeless, divine,
completely nonhistoric, and even against the historic" (Hesse, The Glass Bead
Game).
1428. What is world history? Is it a continual shifting of the center of gravity? Are
we not standing now before one such shift?
1434. "In the beginning there was a word"-it has always been so: the French
Revolution (1789) was preceded by the "philosophical revolution." In 1776 David
Hume died, and in 1778 J.J. Rousseau. The printing of the Encyclopedia (Diderot,
D. Alambret, etc.) was completed in 1780. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason came
out in 1781. Great political events that have changed the world and started with
the French Revolution were preceded by human thought.
1451. The state in Italy (especially Florence) at the end of the thirteenth century:
"Popes and Emperors have for long forgotten the great aims their predecessors
were led by. Ambition, thirst for power and wealth, were the only motives of their
actions. The Church stopped protecting the oppressed and had long since taken
on the role of the oppressor. Bribery and the rights of the powerful ruled the
courts, ministries were given to lechery and priests would go from night orgies to
church to perform services" (Cohen, History of West-European Literature).
1461. Copernicus's discovery was a cultural-historical, as much as an
astronomical fact. It was not only a turning-point in the field of astronomy, but in
culture as well. Copernicus had shown to man that not Earth, and not even he
himself, is the center of the universe. This realization affected his dignity, as well
as his haughtiness. On that basis, a different feeling about the world was born,
and thus also a different culture, which had to have different life and moral
concepts and political views.
1465. Anti-Semitism in Germany is very old. Even at the beginning of the
sixteenth century, renowned German humanists Reuchlin (1485-1522) and Urlich
Kohn Guter (1488-1523) wrote piercing discussions and pamphlets against the
Jews and advocated an imperial decree for the confiscation and destruction of all
Jewish books. In this conflict, intellectual Germany was divided into two camps.
The University of Cologne supported action against Jewish manuscripts, and the
University of Erfurt put itself in defense of freedom and against any persecutions.
This was more than 400 years before Hitler appeared.
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Political Notes
1471. During the entire Middle Ages, Jews were the object of the cruel hatred of
Christian society. They were deprived of the right to participate in public life and
were left with nothing else but to dedicate all of their attention to earning an
increasing amount of money. In that way trade and banking became the main
occupations of Jews.
1474. In The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare dealt with the centuries-old
problem of the West-anti-Semitism. In the strong character of Shylock,
Shakespeare paints a Jew as he sees him to be during that time: biblically wellread, a passion for wealth and money, vindictiveness, fickleness, formalistic
respect for tradition, formal understanding of the law (the letter but not the
spirit), but simultaneously: dedication, perseverance, diligence. Shylock sends
word to the Christians: "The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go
hard but I will better the instruction" (III, i).
1482. In Shakespeare's tragedy, Caesar is a worthless personality but is a carrier
of the principle that triumphs. And vice versa, Brutus is a great man, "the most
honorable Roman," but he represents a concept that has been historically
destined to defeat. For in that moment, republican thought was already dead,
people were ready for slavery, they could not imagine Rome without emperors,
regardless of the name of that Caesar (people asked Brutus to be Caesar).
1489. Milton's celebrated tract on freedom of the press, which appeared in 1644,
is equally topical even today. His was the idea that censorship presumes that the
censor is smarter than the writer, which is preposterous. Censorship humiliates
the writer and readers, as well as the censor himself.
1496. The English Revolution happened under the influence of two contradictory
teachings, which is normal for England. It at the same time proved the sanctity of
the principle of the monarchy and the sovereign power of the people, two, at first
glance, inconsistent principles. The clearest explanation of the former can be
found in Hobbes' s Leviathan, and the latter in Locke's discussions on knowledge
and civil government.
1504. Read Moliere's comedies and you will get a picture of the spiritual and
moral state of French society in the seventeenth century. Cohen, describing the
state in France after the death of Louis XIV (the beginning of the seventeenth
century), writes in his History of West-European Literature the following:
"Searching for pleasure became the only impetus in life of the higher classes.
Religion was ridiculed, the family did not exist, marital fidelity and love were
considered lower virtues. And besides all this, the failed aristocracy kept using
extraordinary privileges and rights. Their representatives were given high
functions in the state. Both external and internal government of the country was
in their hands. They kept looking disdainfully onto the rest of population, valuing
above all their only advantage-heredity. Both legislature and state power served
to support their privileged position. It is not necessary to point out that the
aristocracy never even thought of using those advantages for state interests.
Higher officers rarely went to their garrisons and had spent most of their time in
Paris. Also reveling in Paris were aristocratic landowners, completely neglecting
their estates in the provinces. Bishops were not far behind, spending a greater
part of the year outside of their parishes. Thus the country was almost without its
higher officials, as they enjoyed themselves in Paris, squandering and reveling."
1505. The results of our actions do not depend much on our intentions.
Rousseau, for example, was explicitly against revolution and violence, but his
Social Contract became the gospel of the revolutionary movement, and
"revolutionary leaders brought his conclusions to a terrible end by themselves"
(Graham Grey).
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Political Notes
1506. Rousseau's abstract "state" religion based on his "social contract" had two
main principles: belief in God, and belief in the afterlife, where the good are
rewarded and the bad punished. His social science changed the world; his
religion, because artificial, was quickly forgotten.
1517. The main characteristic of the capitalist system: free game of talent and
personal abilities. From this follow all good and bad human sides of capitalism.
Beaumarchais illustrates this nicely in the character of Figaro: "People disturb my
work-says Figaro-and I take revenge by disturbing theirs. That's what everyone
does. Well, could it be different. There is a mob before you. Everyone wants to
catch up with another, they rush, push, choke, curse one another: those who can,
succeed, others struggle. It has always been like that" (The Marriage of Figaro).
1518. The Thirty Years War set Germany back. Contemporaries spoke of the
unruliness and general spiritual backwardness that marked the entire second half
of the seventeenth century in this country. The recovery started at the beginning
of the eighteenth century, with the awakening of people's awareness, revival of
Germanic tradition and resistance to foreign influences. Every rebirth starts with
the feeling of respect toward oneself. If it is true, it does not implicitly include
fencing off the rest of the world, rejection of every form of communication. It is
the choice of one's own path and two-way communication with the rest of the
world. That is true rebirth. 1522. In the world mainly two models of the fight against drugs exist:
rehabilitative and legal. According to the former, the offender (who can be one
who grows, produces, distributes and uses drugs) is re-educated, according to the
latter, punished (in some countries very severely). In theory and practice, the
first model was for a long time predominant, but with very poor results. Recently,
the course of punishment can be noticed everywhere in the world. One group of
American authors who used to be known as liberals now advocate criminalizing
even when only the use of drugs is in question. Some have experienced this
change as society's admission of defeat in this fight. Taken generally,
undeveloped countries are mostly the producers, and developed countries the
users. There form the different aspects of the problem.
1532. Let us notice how much more convincing and more powerful are the words
of Karl Mor (Schiller' s "Robbers") when he speaks about the overthrow of the old
order than when he speaks of the building the new one. When he appears in the
role of the preacher of positive ideals, the words of Karl Mor turn into undefined
dreams.
1533. Let us pay attention to the following facts: the freethinking ideas of the
Encyclopedists in France ended in revolution, and in Germany-with great
philosophical and artistic works. In the former case with practice, in the latter
with theory.
1535. Goethe was not an adherent to violent overthrows. He wrote somewhere
that people should "drucken" (press), but not "uberdrucken" (oppress).
1537. The French Revolution and Encyclopedist ideas brought to the society of
the early nineteenth century double disappointment: first, with the power of the
human mind, and second, with the practical results of the social overthrow.
People were convinced that neither the Revolution nor reason fulfilled their
promises: reason did not open a path for the creation of the ideal society, and the
revolution did not establish freedom, equality and fraternity in the world. The
reaction to this was Romanticism.
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Political Notes
1538. Completely unexpectedly, since it fought against dogmas, Rationalism
established its own dogmatism, nothing short of the dogmatism of the Church.
Someone humorously noticed that just as Louis XIV ordered the trees at
Versailles to be trimmed, and thus subjected nature to rules and order, so the
French Encyclopedists trimmed historical facts to fit into the framework and
boundaries of their theories.
1540. Intentions and our personal feelings have no influence on the world of
politics. Metternich, an absolutist, and other protagonists of the St. Alliance,
known for their cruel politics, were Romanticists. Romanticists awoke the interest
for the past and history, and thus inadvertently stimulated the development of
Realism, that is, ensured the premises for the shift to Realism.
1542. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, as a consequence of the
economic disturbances of the Napoleonic Wars, there was general
impoverishment in England. One contemporary wrote that the majority of the
population of Manchester lived in sod-houses. In order to get into a sod-house,
one needed to descend a couple of steps into the ground. In those pits, there
were often continuous puddles; through the muddy floor, dampness perpetually
exuded; the air was teeming with stench. And still, entire families lived in those
sad holes in the ground; they slept one next to the other, on the wet and dirty
floor (Cohen, History of West-European Literature, p. 341).
1545. How poorly Romanticists see reality is well illustrated by the case of Lord
Byron. He saw in the Greece of that period the "spiritual leader of the people." It
was shown that this had nothing much to do with reality. A great poet, but no
politician. Fantasy is necessary for poetry, but detrimental to po1-itics.
1546. Two different views of freedom: for Rationalists "freedom is a right to do
that which laws permit" (Montesquieu), and for Romanticists, it is freedom from
all laws and limitations (for example, the freedom that rules in a wild tribe or the
freedom of some hermit under the wing of nature). The latter was described by
Rousseau-who else?-in his New Heloise.
1549. A wolf lives in a pack, a lion is a loner. What can be said for man?
1557. Although industrial civilization was in close relationship with new rationalist
and materialist philosophy and with the ascendance of science, it still affirmed
human spirit and man as a spiritual being. The predominance of machines, which
are the products of the mind, impressively symbolizes the predominance of
human awareness over matter.
1558. Capitalism, thanks to the automation of production (or the continual
technological revolution) creates enormous wealth, but at the same time also
posits the problem of the distribution of that wealth. In its creation participate
both capitalists and workers. How to divide this wealth among them? Originally,
these two groups were in opposition to each other. The capitalist had to lean to
the increase of profits, and according to Marx, he could do that only by
decreasing wages, therefore, through exploitation. Only much later, it was seen
that this relationship is much more complex, and that the impoverishment of the
working class is neither inevitable nor the only route in the development of
capitalism.
1563. Sometimes I have an impression that almost all new ideas for which the
New Century is famous for were born in England. France accepted and translated
them into a practical program, and then turned them over to Europe.
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Political Notes
1566. In the first half of the nineteenth century, England was an example of
economic exploitation and political oppression. English poetry of this time
"registered" this state. The poet Ebensher Eliot paints horrible pictures:
deterioration of the poor family, auctioning of its miserable property, intoxication
of the father of the family who falls into despair, mother who while in a state of
mental disorder kills her hungry child, daughter who due to destitution gives
herself to prostitution. Those dark pictures end with a curse on the wealthy: "0
God, why is bread so expensive, and body and blood so cheap! ?"-a seamstress
asks herself, ill with overwork and destitution in the Poem on the Shirt by Thomas
Hood, written in 1844. "Work, work! Work, as soon you hear the first cocks, work
even if your stars shine with blood! The one who wears this shirt will not know
the price paid for it." This state was faithfully and universally represented in the
realistic novels of England and Europe of the nineteenth century (Dickens and
Thackeray in England, Balzac and Zola in France).
1578. For the indigent world whose income is constantly smaller than the
necessities, especially for homemakers whose husbands do not earn enough,
one's entire life turns into an "endless arithmetical task"-continuous calculation of
how to make ends meet.
1580. The question is: should social institutions or human hearts be changed?
The only true answer is: both. Still, where is one to start? The heart, of course, if
that is possible, and if you know how.
Political Notes 79
1589. North-South scientific key:
Switzerland invests $361 "per capita" for research and development, Pakistan
only $0.49. These facts say and explain all (source: Politika, Belgrade, July 22,
1986).
1593. French Utopian Fourier (1772-1837) is the author of the expression
"negative production," under which he implies the production of goods or services
that do not serve to the satisfaction of man's natural and justified needs. Not all
production is useful.
1598. Competition among firms is a new form of "war of all against all," with all
that war signifies.
1601. From whichever angle one observes work, it will not be able to be reduced
to a single dimension. At the end of the analysis, one will always find two
contradictory components, (1) work as means of survival and (2) work as a pure
human function. In the former case, the purpose is external, in the results of
work, and in the latter case, work serves its own purpose. The moral significance
of work is no less than the material one.
1614. In nineteenth-century France, battles were not only waged between the
adherents of republic and monarchy, proletariat and bourgeoisie, indigent and
wealthy. An equally bitter battle was waged between the adherents of Classicism
and Romanticism. When Hugo's play Ernani came out in theaters (around 1830),
destroying all classical canons, two opposed camps were created, no less fanatical
and bitterly at variance than were the Republicans and the Royalists. This
spiritual conflict, actually a fervent interest of the public in one question of spirit
and arts, indicated that great days were coming for France.
1617. Paradoxes: In contemporary (capitalist) civilization, the superhuman
exertions and merciless competition of minds and talents leads to the unimagined
development of science, technology and art but also simultaneously stimulates
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egotism, mutual annihilation and perishing of the weak, all this not as a
byproduct, but as the condition or the inevitable consequence of the former.
1631. The true patriot is not the one who puts his homeland above others, but
the one who acts so it would be worthy of that praise. More than glory, he cares
about the dignity of his homeland.
1634. E. Zola (1840-1902) was a typical bourgeois both by descent and way of
life-he earned significant wealth early on and filled rooms of his palace with the
glaring luxury of the parvenu-but that did not stop him from becoming a very
cutting critic of bourgeois society. He is not the only example of spiritual attitude
not being very dependent on "class."
1647. One different opinion about democracy: "Democracy levels and vulgarizes
humanity, makes it crude, and drowns it in economic interests. . . . Victory of
democracy will bring the rule of metal craftsmen, tanners, and peasants who hate
everything that is beautiful and that is above them" (Przybiszewski in Homo
Sapiens).
1658. Democracy in society and realism in literature went side by side and
supported each other. I think a similar parallel can be drawn between socialist
ideas and naturalism in literature. Democracy to realism is as socialism is to
naturalism. Socialism is naturalism in politics. These relationships are not
abstract. For it is obvious that socialism is the child of democracy just as
naturalism is the child of realism.
1677. Marx was Darwin's student more than he might have been aware of.
- ,~ Darwin proclaimed the ruthless battle of species in the biological world. Marx,
the ruthless battle of classes in social life. In both cases, ethical considerations
have no part, neither in the battle nor its outcome: not the better but the
stronger wins, moral values are proscribed by a winner. Socialism does not
triumph because of some ethical considerations, but because it represents a more
advanced form of social life, reasons Marx. Marx's reason is utterly Darwinian.
1686. A lie in personal life is immoral. However, it has been shown that in many
cases the lie is an unavoidable actor in social life or the condition of stability and
peace in society. Unfortunately.
1699. In the mid-80s of this century, the movement that aims to push the state
from the area of economy and property is in full momentum. That process is
present, in its own way, as well in the Socialist East, Hungary, China, even the
USSR. This is a true renaissance of private entrepreneurship. The state is accused
of being the main obstacle to swift technological development and innovation and
the main cause of accumulation of budget expenses, that is, taxes. In Britain,
they even want to privatize the national water-supply network, in America
prisons. The "sell-out" of the state is talked about. Great Britain, which went
furthest with it in the era of socialization, is now the quickest to move in the
opposite direction. The government is preparing to hand over almost all state
property to private auctioneers. Twenty giant companies found themselves in
private
hands,
among
them
TELCOM
(the
complete
system
of
telecommunications), as well as many giant automobile, gas, and airplane firms,
docks, etc. The minister of finances stated that the initiated program would
continue until all the industry in state ownership is returned to where it belongsthe private sector. A similar process is happening in several developed capitalistic
countries. In Japan, privatization of the railway is being prepared, while the
French government, since the elections of 1986, is preparing, as a first step, to
privatize the 65 largest companies and banks, the value of which is estimated at
$40 billion. (All situations pertain to the end of 1986.) In the United States, the
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Political Notes
increasing role of the state in American economy was characteristic for decades,
and then Reagan won twice, promising to "take the state off the people's back."
In Spain we have a paradox: conservative Franco nationalizes an entire line of
companies that the socialist government is returning to the private sector. The
practice in socialist countries has shown that alongside nationalization of the
economy came "nationalization" of political and personal freedoms.
1749. "To be able to rule over them, one must be one of them," the king says
resignedly in the Eternal Fable by Przybiszewski, after realizing the futility of his
efforts to raise the people and warm them to noble causes. "The true victory is
not to force slaves to obedience by force, for they will remain slaves anyway. The
true victory is to escape from them into pure contemplation," ponders the king.
1753. In Czechoslovakia the number of divorces in the entire postwar period has
been increasing. According to some data, every second marriage in Prague
disintegrates. Having the same laws, more divorces happen in the Protestant
Czech part of the country than in Catholic Slovakia. That is probably one of the
causes of the significantly lower birthrate in the Czech part. As a result, the share
of Czechs in the total population of the country is decreasing. Among other
things, it is thought that the main reason for the disintegration of families is the
economic independence of women. One-third of the children in Czechoslovakia
are children of divorced parents (Politika, Belgrade, August 31, 1986).
1839. Socialism announced the withering away of the state. But what is actually
happening? Instead of the state, the economy is withering away. The state, on
the contrary, is growing fat and strong.
1842. Poland, one of the victorious countries in World War II, after the "victory"
was left "smaller" by 79,000 km2. At the end of the war, the USSR annexed
about 180,000 km2 of Poland's territory (in the east) with 12 million people, and
as compensation gave Poland the "western provinces" with an area of 101,000
km2. It is thought that during and after World War 11(1939-1956), in the area of
prewar and postwar Poland, 22 million people were moved from their homes
(Arso Milatovic, Five Diplomatic Missions).
1858. There are people of continuity, but also those who are "break-through
names" in the history of science, art, politics, and so on.
1862. Gunther Grass invited writers to deal with modem problems, not to seal
themselves in ivory towers, to illuminate the background of events, their human
dark side, and "catch politics before it camouflages itself as history" (from the
exposition at the Congress of International PEN in Hamburg, 1986). Clearly, in
politics "camouflaged as history," many important aspects of life are no longer
visible-one cannot see living people, their habits, vices, fallacies, hesitations,
enthusiasms, prejudices, etc. Only the surface is visible, events, phenomena and
results. Perhaps Alexander the Great was not great at all, and Ivan the Terrible
might have had some human feature. Perhaps many little, ordinary people (which
history did not record at all for they were that nameless mass who fought and
died) were true heroes, while heroes wreathed with glory, about whom children
learn in schools, were cowards, etc. The latter can be revealed to us by literature,
not history.
1878. To Dostoyevsky has been attributed the statement: "Save me, God, from
fanatics!"
1883. Yes, although Bosnia is "both fasting and bare, cold and hungry, it is
defiant from the dream" (Mak Dizdar).
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1888. Anti-Semitism first consisted of religious antipathy toward Jews, later to
gain the character of racial hatred. Ghettos appeared in the Middle Ages. Jews
were called "Christian murderers," "ritual murderers," "devil's children," etc. Jews
were banished from England in 1290, from France in 1306, and from Germany,
Austria and Spanish cities during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. As is
known, they lived freely in Muslim Spain, and after the Inquisition they suffered
the same fate as the Arabs-exile. A large number of Jews then found haven in the
Balkans, in parts under Turkish rule. Bloody Cossack pogroms over Jews were
recorded in Poland in the seventeenth century. Where literal banishment was not
in effect, all kinds of restrictions toward Jews were everyday occurrences. AntiSemitism appeared in a very cruel form in the twentieth century: the physical
destruction of six million Jews under Hitler. Depending on the political needs of
the persecutors, Jews were pronounced capitalists, a communist danger, or
sometimes both (for example, in Nazi Germany). They were blamed for lost wars,
stimulation of liberalism, for revolutions, intellectualism, moral decadence, for
vulgar materialism, spiritual pacifism, and freemasonry, and what not.
1893. Europe is strange. It considered itself the cradle and teacher of democracy
and has simultaneously shown an extraordinary "ability" for dictatorships and
totalitarian ideas.
1894. The majority remained the highest, if not the only criterion in democracy.
It is true, it is beautiful, it is moral-that which the majority says is true, beautiful,
moral. The majority, though, does not have the reliable criteria of truth and
goodness. It is governed by passion and desire. Democracy is the process that
cannot be halted. What could the final result be with democracy itself?
1906. Analysis of the movements in the most developed countries of the world
show that small businesses have 25 times more innovations than large ones, and
through the introduction of modern information technology, they achieve a
reduction of up to 80 percent of business expenses. That makes them much more
competitive. In the United States, those little companies launch more than threequarters of new products on the market.
1908. J.S. Huxley wrote somewhere that a nation is based upon the fallacy of
common descent and on the feeling of aversion toward neighbors, therefore two
negative facts: fallacy and aversion.
1912. The truth and light of the idea are turned by people into the lie and
darkness of ideology.
1914. Many followers of Sigmund Freud joined Marxism (Freudian Marxist groups
of Wilhelm Reich and Otto Fenihil).
1940. In all schools in the Muslim East, I would introduce classes of "critical
thinking." As opposed to the West, the East did not go through this cruel school,
and that is the source of its many weaknesses.
1993. If Western Europe or the "welfare states" are observed, one comes to a
paradoxical conclusion, that different socialist aims in health, education, leisure,
culture, a standard in general, are achieved in capitalism. It seems that only the
capitalist economy was productive enough to sustain these large expenditures
and still remain capable of extended reproduction. Socialist economy could not
answer to both of these demands.
1997. Anti-Semitism is a phenomenon of Christian countries. The current
confrontation between Arabs and Jews is not of that kind. It is interesting how the
Israeli writer Ephraim Kison explains this phenomenon: "Christians usually think
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Political Notes
that Jews are the people who killed Jesus, forgetting that he himself was a Jew.
For two thousand years the Christian Church narrated this and I call it antiSemitism. When I was in Japan and talked about this, everyone was amazed, no
one understood what I was talking about. They have no complexes about Jews,
because they do not belong to the Christian Church" (from an interview with a
Belgrade newspaper, October 1968).
2015. Even socialist societies have, somewhere openly and somewhere curtailed,
offered unlimited sexual freedoms as a compensation for denied political
freedoms. It is interesting how some traditional societies under socialism have
quickly traversed the gap between sexual strictness to abolishment of all
limitations. It has been shown that these latter "freedoms"~ are not dangerous
for the ruling classes, but on the contrary serve as a good vent for emptying
social and political tensions. Only the government that believes in itself and in its
path can take the risk of denying the "social sedatives" such as drugs, alcohol,
sexual freedoms and other tranquilizers.
2017. The one who does not understand the value of individuality and freedom
should read Huxley's Brave New World. However, there are some who will be
thrilled by the delineation of Collectivity, Sameness, and Stability. There is no
help for those. It is futile to speak of the beauty of a rainbow or a sunset to one
who was born blind. Do not respond to one asking what is wrong with the "brave
new world." His question reveals that your every effort is futile.
2021. Propaganda, indoctrination, is based upon the psychology of conditioned
reflexes, thus, on animal psychology. It aspires to the creation of the "associative
pairs" in consciousness. Thus, for example, in atheistic propaganda, the concept
of religion is persistently linked with the concept of backwardness and
superstition. This is done since day one in school and continued. For someone
who has been "processed" like this, even the mention of the word "religion"
inevitably (therefore, automatically) invokes as its twin one of the mentioned
associations, of course always negative. Prejudices of that kind are so deeply
rooted in the consciousness that they are maintained even in spite of sometimes
utterly evident inaccuracy. I had an acquaintance who had been brainwashed that
religion is nonsense, and he believed it. However, he at the same time loved Leo
Tolstoy very much, claimed he was his favorite writer. It has never become clear
to me how he reconciled these two obviously contradictory things, and it seems
to me he did not even notice this contradiction. In fact, he was a victim of
"conditioned reflex," that is, an associative pair: religion-superstition.
2033. Reject idols, keep ideals!
2057. For the simple reproduction of population, it is necessary that every woman
who lives through her reproductive years gives birth to a little over two children
(precisely 2.15 children).
2058. It is time to stop speaking badly of Germans. There are Goethe's Germans
as well. These better Germans are in exceptional prevalence.
2077. In economy, one phenomenon was manifested: the stronger (harder) the
state, the weaker the currency, finally, they both perish.
2081. Development sometimes strays into a blind street, from which there is no
further path. Examples are socialist states. One can feel the absence of spirit and
meaning, and some monstrous enormity. Are these not a historical error in the
development of society, like dinosaurs in biology or the zeppelin in technology?
The main trouble with these "mistakes" is that this is where further development
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Political Notes
is stopped, that one must return to the crossroad from which the deviation
originated.
2117. The integration of the EEU is advancing. In 1992 the internal borders of 12
countries that were in the past at war with each other will be open.
2118. For some, pornography is one form of freedom and democratization of
society. Pornography is underestimating the moral integrity of another person,
especially woman, etc. There are two international agreements on combating
pornography; it is characteristic that they are both from early in this century:
1910 in Paris, and 1923 in Geneva. After that, as far as I know, there are none.
"Democratization" does not tolerate them.
2125. One Indian economist calculated that in his country, more is spent on
astrologers and fortune-tellers than on schools. Some are convincing us that the
situation is no better in other countries as well, including some developed ones.
Sounds incredible.
2129. I do not want democratization, I want democracy.
2140. What has overthrown feudalism? Many things, but before all-gunpowder.
2141. I think that the time of armed revolutions, at least in the developed part of
the world, has forever gone. Due to the complexity of the weapons the modern
state has at its disposal, chances are on the side of the authorities, and almost
none on the side of the insurrected people. During the American and French
Revolutions, there were very small differences in the weapons that were at the
disposal (or could have been at the disposal) of the people and the weapons with
which the groups in power defended their positions. Let us compare that to
today's state: tanks, rockets, airplanes, helicopters. What revolution can take that
into account? Tactics and methods of future overthrows will have to be
completely different: passive resistance, general strikes, civil disobedience of
mass proportions, etc., simply everything that is not in the form of weapons.
Armed rebellion suits power-holders since it gives them a 100 percent chance.
2142. On the frontispiece of Gandhi's autobiography is a picture of all the things
Gandhi owned at the moment of his death. It is estimated that all of it together
was worth about 5 pounds (G. Orwell in his essay on M. Gandhi).
2145. Regarding the word "Satyagraha," usually translated as "passive
resistance" in the West, Gandhi opposed this translation. In the Gujarati language
that word means "perseverance in truth."
2158. History is mainly a just judge. There are no undeserved defeats. People
come down from the historical stage with fate they deserved. The same thing
with civilizations. They do not live through violent death. They die of their own
diseases. The raid by barbarians is only the coup de grace for a civilization that
has lost the ability to live and to protect and defend itself.
2162. Men are (as a sex) more often than women unsuccessful, frustrated and
maladjusted. One of the interpretations is that a man is a "more complicated
machine" and that his social role is more complex and difficult.
2182. Why is the EEU so important? It is not only a significant political integration
but also a strong epicenter of concentration of economic and intellectual
(technological) forces.
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2236. In the confidential report that a Moscow administrator delivered to the
authorities of that day, he wrote, among other things, "Count Tolstoy is scribbling
something." For the authorities of that period, War and Peace and Resurrection
were "scribbling."
2244. Only in the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic are there about half a million
illegitimate children born annually. The Russian family is in crisis mainly because
of the changed position of women. In a family, a woman dominates, and in some
fields even in society: There are six university-educated men for every ten
university-educated women. Divorces are on the agenda. A new very widespread
problem: the loneliness of a woman. The motto of a young woman: I want to be a
mother, I don't want to be a wife. After youth passes, this wish changes (Politika,
Belgrade, January 4, 1987).
2263. The excessive emphasis on the social character of man as a social being
leads to the negation of individuality, and from there to dehumanization. From
the claim that we are "social animals," that we are members of the herd, to the
"logic of the herd" is only one step. The true preparation of man for life in society
leads via the opposite path: the development of his individuality. The social
animal never becomes a social human. All human experience confirms this.
2266. In 1952 Japan had $162 and in 1986 $12,000 of national income per
inhabitant (Danas, January 13, 1987, p. 53). It is thought that Japan can thank,
above all, the high level of education and two traditional characteristics of the
Japanese, diligence and thriftiness, for this "miracle." Even today, the Japanese
have the largest number of working days in their calendar and the greatest
savings per inhabitant. In addition to this, during the entire postwar period,
military expenses were extremely low (only 1 percent of national income).
2281. In the book Farewell to the Proletariat, Andre Gorz (Marxist or postMarxist) claims that the working class in the West is integrated in the system of
reproduction of capital, that is, that it participates in the "game of the
development of capitalistic production forces." Revolutionism cannot be expected
from such a working class. According to Gorz, this is not some subjective fault of
the working class but is about technological development, especially automation
and robotization, which change the content of the concept of "working class"
itself. Work in the classic sense is increasingly disappearing.
2304. The economy of Sweden according to the concept of a "welfare state":
around 85 percent of the economy is in private hands. When compared to other
Western countries, unemployment is low (around 2.5 percent) but inflation and
working expenses are greater, which reduces the competitive ability of the
economy on the world market. Pol-Martin Meyerson in the book Eurosclerosis:
The Case of Sweden analyzes the Swedish model and points to its deficiencies. He
recommends "re-modeling" the Swedish model, transforming an unwieldy state
apparatus and abolishing some forms of pre-dimensioned social care that is
expensive and de-stimulating. In Sweden, around 85 percent of the workers are
organized within the Union, which is not the opposition, but an equal partner in
the triangle: capital-work-state (employer-Union-state). Will transforming
actually mean "dismantling of the welfare state?" Since the Napoleonic Wars,
Sweden has not been at war. The gross national income per capita is $11,400
(1986). In some companies and banks, employees participate in the profit, but
they get it in the form of stocks that they cannot cash until after retirement. It
has been shown that the worker-co-owner works and saves better.
2308. The word "holocaust" is originally from the Bible, and was derived from the
Greek words "holos" = "whole, entire" and "kaustol" = "burnt."
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2323. Social salvation is always communal, morality is by its nature personal,
individual. That is because moral salvation depends on the man himself, because
only he, and no one instead of him, can deserve it, not even actualize it. Social
salvation as well as social ruin often does not depend on the man who is caught
in it. They happen without merit and without fault.
2371. Many analysts consider the phenomenon of the disappearance of the
classical worker as related to a rapid decline in the authority of the Communist
Party (CP) of France. As opposed to the Italian and Spanish CPs, the French CP
held itself closer to dogma and continued to emphasize its "worker" character,
while the workers this party had in mind and was referring to decreased in
number as the days progressed (more on this: Vjesnik, February 8, 1987).
2393. In France, after the victory of the right, denationalization of state
companies followed. Among other things, the Saint Gobain Company, a glass
giant, one of the ten largest companies in France, employing 150,000 people in
16 countries, changed to private hands as well. Privatization was accomplished by
the sale of 30 million shares, which were bought off by 1.5 million Frenchmen,
mostly young depositors, and the demand for shares was 14 times greater than
the number of shares put on the market. A similar thing happened with shares of
the French bank, Paribas, which were acquired by over three million people. "I
think the French are now promoting a new system of popular people's
capitalism," stated then general director of Saint Gobain on this occasion. The
price of a single Gobain share was 310 francs.
2404. Strictness and clarity of thought are the products of Western civilization
and the standard of thinking that it established. Therein lies one of the sources of
power of the West.
2423. Lawrence Durrell called the Mediterranean basin "the womb of civilization
because of the large number of cultures and spiritual revolutions that had their
cradle exactly here or in the near vicinity.
2428. International PEN held a symposium, "Writers for Peace," on March 3, 1987
(PEN day). The topic of this symposium was: "Falsification and misuse of historysource of conflicts and crises." Writers of the world should fight for truth in
history, for the veritable representation of the past.
2431. Modern society feels increasingly less classed. Classes from societal poles
are disappearing in favor of something that could be called the middle class.
2434. To the question of one journalist whether the revolution will soon inflame
Switzerland, Lenin, who resided in this country as a refugee, answered:
"In a country with 3.5 million inhabitants and 3,800,000 saving accounts, this can
be hardly expected."
2437. Marvin Minsky, mathematician and psychologist, one of today's best
experts on artificial intelligence, considers psychology and artificial intelligence as
"the same thing." Obsessed with an idea of constructing a robot who thinks,
speaks, and sees, he once presented a thesis that hundreds of little machines and
mechanisms without some center operate in our head. "The individual is," says
Minsky, "actually a cooperation of all those mechanisms, all those machines"
(from In Mind's Company). My comment: the same positivistic position that too
easily slights some questions, for example, how does a machine "learn"? A
machine can be unusually complex, but its essence is that it does not learn.
Regardless of its sophistication, it remains incapable of learning.
2445. Non-sovereign people will atrophy politically.
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2447. Two coefficients, employment and fertility of women, stand in a reciprocal
relationship. Some nations could pay a high price in the race for the increase of
social wealth. Perhaps the ominous prediction that everything will be there except
people will come true. The question can be posed: How much material wealthsteel, automobiles, rockets-is a happy childhood worth? Does a happy childhood
with a mother have a price, and can it be compensated for by something else?
2453. Totalitarian regimes quickly understand that stupid, incapable and cowardly
people pose no threat, so they support and encourage them.
2480. For, what else is this much-vaunted "state cause" in our times but the
expression of the same will or self-will of the power, expressed in the ancient era
by "Quidquid principi placuit habet legis vigorem" (Everything the ruler orders has
the force of the law). The essence of authoritarian power, named differently in
different times.
2489. The way in which Marsilili (1280-1342), a legal theoretician from Padua,
saw "people" of that time: he divides them into popolo grasso (fat people) and
popolo minuto (thin people). The former is the aristocracy, and all the rest-the
poor.
2492. When it has weapons and power, stupidity does not appear that stupid.
Then we see it as strictness or danger. When it loses that power, stupidity
becomes what it has been-stupidity.
2512. The origin of the names "right" and "left" is linked to the debate about the
Constitution in the French Assembly in 1789. The advocates of large
empowerment of the king sat to the right of the president, while the advocates of
the large empowerment of parliament sat to his left. That division later acquired a
general meaning, with those on the left being those asking for changes, and
those on the right for the status quo. The left-right division has other meanings,
this being only one of them.
2517. The position of the ruler, or authority, is almost an unmistakable measure
of the civilization of one people. Tyranny over truly civilized people is not
possible. Such people traversed all those complex degrees of internal and
external development that are necessary for government to be put under the
control of law. With primitive peoples, the government is always above the law.
According to this criterion, all so-called socialist countries are still at the level of
barbarism.
2526. Before the end of the Empire, the Roman military consisted only of cavalry.
"They conquered the world as an infantry, lost it as a cavalry."
2533. Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), the greatest jurist of the Western world, did not
consider slavery neither unnatural nor unlawful. For him freedom was alienable
good.
2553. As opposed to materialists, for us a man is always the cause of things, and
not the consequence. For Marx, "It is not the consciousness of people that
determines their being but vice versa, their being determines their
consciousness"-man is a product, a consequence. In the world in which the first
postulate of philosophy is that man is a consequence, "clean-ups" and "Gulags"
are an unavoidable (law-abiding) result.
2559. Hegel yet discovered the role of wars in consolidating the state, the fact
that was known to conquerors from before. "Happy wars, opposite from the
wonderful time of peace, prevent internal unrest and help in consolidating the
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power of the state, although they put its existence at stake" (Hegel, Foundations
of Philosophy of Law).
2560. "World history is the world court"-Hegel's renowned saying according to
which the power of ideas, states and movements is only evaluated according to
their destiny in world history, that is, practice.
2573. Exponential growth is characteristic of human knowledge. It is thought that
all knowledge produced up until 1900 was doubled by 1950, then this knowledge
was doubled by 1960. The same now happens every 7-8 years. Through
qualitative change of the educational system, in a short time, decades and even
centuries of normal development can be leaped. The example of Japan and South
Korea confirms this. At the end of the last century in Japan, after the famous
Meiji Revolution, there was sudden expansion in education. The Constitution of
Japan at that time had only five articles (!), and the last ended with the sentence
"knowledge should be acquired wherever it can be found." This sentence played a
crucial role in what is known as the Japanese economic miracle.
2710. In politics it is not important what really is, what exists-it is important what
people believe is, believe exists.
2711. The British believe that sometimes not only unsuccessful, but also
successful governments should be changed-for they will either become ineffective
or become oppressive. Not a single government that stays too long is goodaccording to British thought.
2732. In the Far East a miracle is happening, and some are beginning to
remember a few ancient prophecies. The Far East is today the most productive
industrial area of the world. It seems that inhabitants of those countries can
produce everything we can-only cheaper and better-says American economist
George Goodman. They called them yellow-colored Americans. These countries
are Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and. Hong Kong. One of the explanations: the
specific quality of the culture of the Far East, which is 2.5 thousand years old and
which to these people is an inheritance of a tradition of work, education,
modesty, thriftiness, and natural loyalty. In monetary terms there is the
expression "Confucian capitalism," which synthesizes all these characteristics.
2737. Galbraith' s prediction that we are approaching the exclusive power of large
corporations did not come true. On the contrary, small elastic firms adapted
better and faster to the demands of new technologies and are winning a battle in
the competition with large corporations.
2842. When Margaret Thatcher was appointed the Prime Minister of Great Britain
in 1979, it was expected that more women would be in significant political
positions. But this did not happen. Only one woman came to the position of
assistant Minister.
2848. In the 1987 election campaign, Margaret Thatcher promoted the slogan of
so-called people or mass capitalism. She said that capitalism is a superior system
because it creates possibility for an increasingly larger number of people to create
goods available previously only to some, and that, by continuing down this path,
a day of general ownership will arrive. Nationalized companies were sold to small
shareholders, which today number 10 million in Britain.
2858. I have heard that in America even a piano concerto by Tchaikovsky on TV
is interrupted by commercials. Still, you can choose between 30 and 40 channels,
so my objection does not stand in the American case.
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Political Notes
2860. The number of computers in use is doubled every three years, the cost of
their production is cut by half. The third medium-term plan by UNESCO (19901995) speaks of developed countries establishing general control over less
developed ones through education. The global social relations will first depend on
the strength of individual countries in the area of education, science and
communication. This is global promotion of intellect as power. At stake are not
only the massive participation but also the quality of education. Fast
"informatization" of education by introduction of microelectronics is being done.
The emphasis is on natural sciences and foreign languages. Current trends in
production, actually constant introduction of progressively newer technologies,
forces people to adapt during their working lifespan or even change their
specialty, always with increasingly stricter criteria of knowledge. Even Americans
are dissatisfied with their system of education. In 1983, a report with the panicky
title "Nation at Risk" appeared, prepared by the National Commission for
Education. A series of radical changes in education was suggested, with an aim to
prepare the American nation for the expected global "economic war." Massive
reforms are currently in effect in the USSR, West Germany, Japan and England.
The "brain drain" from undeveloped to developed countries continues, which
further intensifies the already existing gap. Where are we?
2870. The amount of coercion in a state is in an inverse relationship with its true
authority.
2871. One of the declared aims of the feminist movement is "fight against the
glorification of motherhood."
2873. The participation of women in the parliaments of some Western countries:
Italy 7 percent, West Germany 15 percent, Ireland 8 percent, Norway 30 percent,
West-European Parliament 20 percent (in 1986-1987). In Italy, there are 52
percent women and 48 percent men in the general population, and there are
more women at universities and higher-education institutions. Still this is not the
case for the decision-making positions. One of the reasons: when women vote,
they do not vote for female candidates, but for men.
2875. In the nineteenth century, books over 20 (double) pages in length were
excepted from censorship, it was assumed that only a few people read them, so
they could not be dangerous.
2898. One interesting explanation for the stagnation of Oriental societies: the
absence of the so-called middle class. It is interesting that the same reasonabsence of a middle class-explains still another phenomenon: eruption of the
"social revolutions" in Russia, China, Ethiopia, Cuba, etc.
2899. Progress is a contradictory process. The idea of social equality is as old as
man, it had a large impelling force, although it is in a literal sense pure illusion.
Every progression is expressed through differentiation in which the
more able and strong win.
2921. Medieval folk culture-it is a mixture of folk tradition and official church
doctrine.
2133. In Carter's time, the Law on Ethics was passed in the United States,
concerning the behavior of the government. The purpose of this law was to return
the shaken belief of the public in the holders of responsible functions after
Watergate. Still, during the first four years of Reagan's government, more than
100 officials were faced with investigation due to warranted suspicion that they
transgressed the norms of ethical law. Government either dangerously corrupts
people or offers an opportunity to corrupted people.
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Political Notes
2135. First we had military-political colonialism, then economic, and now finally,
so-called technological colonialism, that is, the almost complete technological
dependence of less developed countries on the most technologically developed
ones. The gap is incessantly widening. The progress is so fast that particular
technological solutions become antiquated in three to five years. Where are we?
2203. Impersonal, collective humanism does not exist, and neither does
impersonal, collective freedom. Every type of humanism and every freedom is
before all freedom and humanism of a free individual, a free person.
2237. The conservatism of workers and radicalism of the so-called middle classes
are now being mentioned, while the Marxist Habermas states that the "utopia of
work lost the power of persuasiveness."
2238. It is beginning to be understood that the position of the woman in the socalled civilized countries has changed but not improved. On the long list of
imperiled categories, alongside the inhabitants of regions with no perspective and
youth with poor qualifications, in first place are women, because their
emancipation was followed by the disproportional increase in professional and
social responsibilities and obligations.
2239. The origination and development of new social necessities is linked to the
great oil crisis of 1972-1974. This was undoubtedly the turning point for the
accelerated movement toward new technologies.
3059. I have read somewhere that in Cleveland, Ohio (United States) as many as
eighty different nationalities live, each of which is proud of its symbols, it
cherishes them, and respects those that are different. No one is cramped for
space in Cleveland.
3060. When water comes up to the throat, it is not advisable to undulate.
3070. What is the difference between a statesman and a politician? Answering
this question Churchill said: "A statesman thinks of the state, and a politician of
the following elections."
3076. Law and justice are not always in accord. If that is not the case, for a true
man, the former is the latter.
3095. Legend says that it took 40 years for Moses to lead his people out of Egypt.
Why so much time for something that could have been done in a week or month?
Because the legendary "departure" was not mere travel, but a rebirth of one
people. Egypt here is not a country but a metaphor for slavery, just as the
"Promised Land" is metaphor for freedom. The path from Egypt to Palestine is the
path from slavery to freedom. One people started from Egypt, and after
wandering and suffering, another arrived into the "Promised Land."
3096. High Yugoslav official Draza Markovic writes at one point in his memoirs:
"One comes to the old question if Yugoslavia is the state of Yugoslav people, or is
it a state of Slovenians, Macedonians, Montenegrins, as well as a state of
Albanians, Italians, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Slovaks, etc." (Diary Notes, Belgrade,
published in NIN, September 6, 1987). Where are the Muslims here? Draza
mentions Italians and Slovaks, but is "blind" to a people of over 2 million
individuals. Why?
3102. Why is the destiny of utopias to produce tyrannies? The link is indubitable,
but what are the real reasons. Maybe in an answer to the question: can an
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Political Notes
"earthly kingdom" be conceived without God and against God? Every utopia
implicitly or explicitly advocates just that: kingdom without God.
3105. In Stalinism, the Marxist, anti-individual philosophy and the imperial,
autocratic, despotic tradition of imperial Russia "happily" met. Stalinism is a
synthesis of European doctrine and Russian notions of relationship manpower. Or
more simply: Stalinism = Marxism + Russia. Stalinism is a product of these two
factors.
3107. It is estimated that since the end of World War II, in the period between
1945 and 1987, more than 100 local wars have been waged, mostly among less
developed countries and on their territories. In these wars, about 22 million
people lost their lives.
3109. In the book The Control of Foreign Politics, Dr. Smilja Avramov emphasizes
that the brutality of the two world wars and barbarian methods of totalitarian
systems instigated the odium of common people toward the state, whereby the
state was identified with violence and trampling of elementary human rights and
freedoms.
3114. Tourism, following the oil and automobile industry, is becoming the third
most powerful economic branch in the world. However, many analysts point also
to its negative consequences for the host countries. The opinion is being
expressed that "tourism devours lands, nature, cultural goods as a new colonizer
and destroyer of environment" (Josta Krippendrof, Traveling Mankind). 3133. Adam Smith noticed as far as 200 years ago that the man who cannot
acquire property has no other interest but to eat as much as possible, and work
as little as possible.
3145. On the 1977 world map, deserts make up 2 percent of European land,
19 percent of American, 31 percent of Asian, 34 percent African and 75 percent of
Australian land. About ten countries in the world are exposed to a high risk of
desertification, among which are Iraq, Pakistan and Turkey. Through comparison
of satellite pictures of Sudan from 1958 and 1975, it was determined that the
edge of the desert extended an entire 100 km. This expansion of the desert is not
a natural process. It is mostly due to the human factor (excessive grazing,
irrational wood clearing, lowering the level of subterranean waters by intensive
drilling though underground currents, etc.).
3147. In Animal Farm Orwell has shown what happens with equality when pigs
are the ones deciding on it.
3149. Wars destroy, but also create. Peter Kalvokrezi and Guy Vint in the book
The Total War (Rad, Belgrade, 1987) showed how the unprecedented competition
of the warring sides in World War II accelerated the development of technology
and achieved new breakthroughs, in the areas of aviation and shipbuilding. These
efforts led also to creation of new industrial branches and revival of economic
development of many undeveloped fields. In the concluding chapters, the writers
gave an account of the deep changes the war instigated in the area of
technology, demography, international relations, the way of life and political
philosophy of people.
3151. Prof. Rasi Batra in the book "Great Depression 1990" announced that in
three years the world would undergo a much larger crisis than the one in 1929.
We shall see how realistic (unrealistic) the prognoses are. The writer is of Hindu
descent, and is an assistant professor at Southern Methodist University in the
United States.
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Political Notes
3154. "It was our turn, getting onto bus, taking our seats. Behind us two young
men who were, while waiting in line, completely unnaturally and unpleasantly
raving about, and now they sat, put on earphones from their walk-mans, and
disappeared. Listen, my friend said,. . . in this country, only Blacks know how to
enjoy life, only they know how to be happy, to truly rave about, to express
happiness they are alive. This is one human desert in which New York is somehow
like a miracle, like a mirage, like a giant saguaro cactus in the Sonoran desert....
And this here is not a way of life but a strained, frantic attempt to live, to be
alive. Black people try, through crime, through their money, through their
religiousness, to prove to themselves they are alive, and every such
demonstration is realized in exaggeration" (from the travelogue of New York by
Tvrtko Kulenovic). My comment: there surely is truth in this description, but it is
not all truth. I do not know why all foreigners see America through New York.
Who are, and how do they live, the millions of people in the little cities outside
New York, Chicago, and Detroit? I think that, mostly, they live a normal life. The
strength of America rests on them.
3155. Why can one's country not be abandoned? It cannot be done, since tombs
cannot be taken with us, and the tombs of our fathers and grandfathers are our
roots. The plant pulled by the roots cannot live. We have to, therefore, stay.
3157. Traditions correct the negative influence of civilization. That is why one
must treasure them. According to some information, for four decades in a row,
crime in Japan has not increased. In 1986, almost the same number of offenses
was recorded as thirty years before. Pickpocketing is almost unknown. The
institution of the type in Japan is unknown. If there is a robbery or theft of a
wallet, the perpetrators of the crime are regularly foreigners. In Japan, there is
270 times less stealing than in the United States. However, not even the
Japanese are immune to some types of crime such as tax evasion, bribery,
business fraud and machinations (information from the article "Japan: The Safest
Country in the World," Novosti 8, November 12, 1987).
3158. According to some information, 50,000 rapes are reported yearly in West
Germany, in the United States almost 250,000. It is interesting that the so-called
countries of sexual freedom are at the same time at the top of the list for the
number of rapes. The actual number of these offences is most likely larger, for
many attacked women, especially from conservative environments, do not report
the attack. The data show that rapes are about one hundred times more common
in countries of sexual freedom than in those which we call conservative.
3187. The status of the so-called continual neutrality of Switzerland had been
determined at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 on the basis of the decision -by the
Swiss Confederation and the international agreement, signatories of which were
the great powers of that time. After World War II, a similar status was gained by
Austria, also through international agreement, in 1955.
3190. For the inanities you sometimes hear from the mouths of politicians, you
cannot always blame just them. Often their public is "more deserving" than that.
A politician sometimes, against his own convictions, says things that are expected
to be heard from him. True and intelligent messages are often unwanted and the
public would not accept them. That is how the wisdom of people having leaders
they deserve is realized. But that is why we have the appearance of intelligent
but hypocritical politicians, on one hand, and the refusal of intelligent and
honorable people to be involved in this work at all, on the other. In authoritative
regimes there is less political hypocrisy, but it is not about the honesty or
morality at all. In question here is ignoring the public. We do not pretend before
those whose opinions we do not care about.
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Political Notes
3192. Hannah Arendt wrote somewhere that totalitarianism - both leftist and
rightist - is based, among all else, on pedocracy, the mobilization of the youth,
which is always invited to overthrow the "old world."
3212. They elect themselves (self-elect) and bestow honors upon themselves.
3214. You and I would have difficulty in convincing people that communism leads
nowhere. Only communists could have convinced them of that, with total and
complete success.
3237. Technology produces forces, both productive and destructive ones. The
latter with even more success. For, today's technology cannot create, but is able
to destroy the world. When the destructive force of today's resources is in
question, we usually have in mind the sight of deadly weapons of mass
destruction. We forget the more subtle ones-television, for example, which
steadily destroys the traditional way of life and which brings crime and violence
into our homes, bringing up our children.
3256. It is normal that in every dogmatist, mental activity weakens. What can I
think, when everything is already thought of? Thinking, in that case, is
necessarily experienced as retrogression, as an inevitable introduction of
confusion into something that is clear and certain.
3269. According to the definition finally adopted by the General Assembly of the
UN in 1946, genocide is "an action which has as its aim the complete or partial
destruction of some social group (national, religious, or racial)"; this action can be
carried out directly or indirectly, therefore not only by physical destruction, but
also indirectly by "placing a group in such living conditions which lead to the
disappearance of its political, social, and cultural institutions." Genocide is
considered an international crime against humanity.
3271. While we would hope that disturbing facts about stories are the products of
a sick imagination or horror story, it is not always the case. For instance,
prostitution in Brazil. In a report from the "International Federation for Human
Rights," prepared by a group of researchers for the OUN, it is reported that in
Brazil there are about 7 million underage girls (age 8-12) who make their living
from prostitution. In the region of Dorado (Mato Groso), there are over 1,200
brothels, of which police recently closed down 400 only because there were
underage girls, under ten years old, employed in them. It is estimated that in the
city Recife (around 2 million inhabitants), there are over 90,000 prostitutes
(official information; it is believed that the real number is larger). Almost all
suffer from venereal diseases. According to a report from the Brazilian Ministry of
Health, about 6 million Brazilians suffer from sexually transmitted diseases, of
whom 200,000 have chronic syphilis. Now the disease is expanding with a
geometrical progression. Film director Glauber Roca writes: "Girls from poor
families quickly enter the world of prostitution. Parents sell them, masters rape
them, and pimps use them to amass money. After that, they die very young from
tuberculosis, hunger, knife wounds, gun shot wounds, venereal diseases. They
give birth to their first children when they are 11-12, which they then leave on
the doorsteps of churches or orphanages, on the streets or garbage dumps.
Others kill their children, claiming they died, as the result of an unfortunate
accident, to accumulate some change which, according to folk custom, is doled
out at the funeral" (Duga, Belgrade, January 9, 1988). Can there be any horror
story to equal this one from reality?
3273. While destroying the Weimar Republic in 1933, the Nazis claimed that the
Weimar Parliament was a mere prattle-house (parliament-prattle-house), and
discussions in it empty babble.
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Political Notes
3276. During the last years of Cromwell's power, the wisest Englishmen were
invited to take over power. This "cabinet of the saints" or "cabinet of the sages,"
as it was called by the English, soon disintegrated and was compromised,
showing that perhaps the sages are not the most suitable people for solving the
entangled problems introduced by life.
3278. Plagiarists of the great artists always lived better than the artists
themselves. That is the rule.
3282. About a hundred years ago, the main raw material for energy was coal,
50 years ago that place was taken by oil, and now that important place has been
taken over by gas. The country with the greatest reserves of gas (according to
present information) is the Soviet Union, followed by Iran, the United States,
Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Mexico, Holland, Qatar and Norway, but the
reserves of the first two countries (U.S.S.R. and Iran) make up 60 percent of
world reserves. In the future, gas will be used more as a petrol-chemical, rather
than energy producing raw material (Vjesnik, Zagreb, January 16, 1988).
3287. A certain immaturity or naïveté of America that is mentioned here could be
a consequence of the fact that America did not have a Middle Ages. It did not go
through this cruel school that was traversed by Europe and that can be felt in the
views and style of America. It does not even have the almost two thousand years
of Christianity that Europe possesses. That is probably why its religiousness is
slightly strange and perplexing to Europeans. German writer Martin Walser noted
in one interview (1987): "The worst thing I have seen in America is their relation
to religion. Their television preachers are something much worse than can be
possibly imagined. In spite of that, their influence is enormous. For me it is one
special disease of the capitalistic entrepreneurs, which are treated as religious
entrepreneurs, large religious companies which literally sell religion, in a way
unimaginable to Europeans."
3288. The five "w's" -five laws- the five golden rules of the press: who, what,
when, where, why. Actually five rules of truthful, timely and complete
information. As in other cases, laws are there to be broken.
3316. From the report of the EEU, which illuminates the current situation in
Yugoslavia: "The agreement signed in Belgrade in 1980 [reference to the
agreement between Yugoslavia and the EEU, my comment] is defined as an
agreement sui generis, in the sense that political motivations prevailed over the
economic ones, firstly due to growing tensions in the country, then due to the
increasing role of the SEV zone in the Yugoslav external trade, and due to the
delicate political moment which followed the death of president Tito. Based on
motivations of political nature is almost a complete lack of obligations of
Yugoslavia in the reciprocity of concessions" (written in Article 2, point 17, of the
report by Giorgio Rosetti, an ambassador in the European Parliament, submitted
on behalf of the Commission for Foreign Relations). The report was accepted at
the session of the European Parliament, in January 1988 (Integral text of the
report in Star, February 6, 1988, pp. 6 1-63). A clear example of a pragmatic
approach in lieu of one that is principled. Europe has stopped fighting for the idea
long ago. Everything has turned into a calculation.
3336. According to Ortega Y Gasset, the leading minority of one people can be
neither too small nor too large. If it is too small, it is powerless to direct the
majority in the desired direction. If it is too large, it will be divided, and start
dealing with itself, becoming exhausted with mutual rivalry and conflicts.
3342. The quality of the laws and the respect for them are often in inverse
relationship with their number and long-windedness. These facts comment on
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Political Notes
this: The Decalogue (God's Ten Commandments) that changed the world contains
fewer than a hundred words. The longest constitution in the world is that of
Yugoslavia (406 Articles), and the shortest is the American with only seven
Articles (with 36 amendments added during the 200 years of the existence of this
Constitution). The country that is taken as an example of a legal state- Englanddoes not even have a constitution in the formal sense of the word. Nicaragua has
a voluminous Constitution-336 Articles. I presume that legality is not
proportional. The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Montenegro, a federal
unit of Yugoslavia, which has half a million inhabitants, is larger than the
Constitution of India, which has 700 million inhabitants, around 30 federal units
and a large number of different ethnic and religious groups. A short constitution is
most often a sign of the continuity and stability of the system.
3343. Goebbels called radio the "spiritual weapon of the state," of course a
totalitarian one. There is no reason not to believe him (in this respect). Still in
1925 he proposed that every house in Germany should have radio.
3344. For ancient Greeks, barbarians are the ones who still cannot even speak,
which can be seen from the etymology of the word "barbarian." one who stutters.
3359. According to predictions of Igor Bestuzhev, a director of the Institute for
Social Prognostics and Social Design of the USSR, the population of the Asian
parts of the USSR, inhabited mainly by Muslim peoples, increased by more than
three-fold from the end of the war (in the last 40 years), and will double in
respect to the present number in the next 15 years. In the remainder of the
USSR, the opposite process exists: depopulation, single-child families, a large
number of single people, unstable and easily disrupted marriages. In his opinion,
about 60 percent of marriages are destroyed due to the alcoholism of one of the
partners (Danas, Zagreb, March 15, 1988, pp. 74-75).
3366. "Pornography-theory, rape-practice," words from one women's manifesto
against pornography.
3367. The creation of the so-called people's capitalism in Western countries is
done in accordance with the continual expansion of the number of small
shareowners. The system created by this has been shown to be economically very
effective. The number of shareholders in Great Britain in the last couple of years
(1980-1988) rose from 2 to 9 million. In 1982, the British government sold the
state transportation company, National Freight Corporation, exclusively to the
workers employed with the company. The shares of that firm, which had
previously been working at a barely profitable level, are today worth 50 times
more, thanks to the direct interest of the employee-owner. Excellent economic
effects have also been recorded in 16 other large state firms that the British
government sold to private individuals (among the other renowned firms Jaguar,
British Airways, PTT, airports, etc.). The main characteristic of this process was
that the shares were bought by millions of small investors. In France, a similar
process was put into action after Chirac' s arrival to power. In three years the
number of French shareholders increased from 1 million to 5.5 million. It is
interesting that neither the Labour government in Great Britain nor the socialist
opposition in other European states claims that it will, if elected, again nationalize
that which the governments of the right put into private hands. The idea of
nationalization and state ownership, sometimes very popular and "revolutionary,"
seems to have completely lost its attraction after an evidently bad experience.
3369. Democracy (and freedom) is not in that we do everything we want, but to
want everything we do (according to Tolstoy).
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Political Notes
3370. Why does the so-called sixty-eight, which blew over the world like some
fever, remain only as a memory? It had to remain so. It once again attempted
that which was not to be achieved, that which history had already surpassed. It
attempted to bring to life ideals of the past, and those ideals were no longer
realistic. Everything that occurred later-the conservative movement in the West
and religious renewal around the world-shows that the ideals of 1968 were out of
its time and the general historical trend. The ideals of the generation were not as
innocent as they were at the start of the twentieth century, for they were already
weighted down with the sins of their application.
3384. Hegel thought we lived in the time of the twilight of art and that perception
about art is becoming more important than art itself, as intellectual reflection
replaces spontaneous creation. Hegel stated this over 150 years ago. Once again
the prognoses failed. Events did not confirm this claim of Hegel's. History cannot
be predicted.
3386. There was someone who said "we only have differences in common."
3388. A man cannot be a resource. Every use of man is misuse.
3392. The French Revolution called to Reason, and in name of Reason guillotined
thousands of reasonable ones.
3404. Whoever goes to the people to teach, but does not to learn from them as
well, is a conceited fool. That meeting will not bring him or the people any good.
3409. I have just read that the centers for the posture, movement, and balance
of the body are in the cerebellum, and for human creativity in the cerebrum.
Some people obviously have a more developed cerebellum than cerebrum.
3440. True democracy is not only a government of the majority. Just as every
right is the protection of the weaker, so is democracy the protection of the
minority. Without the latter, the government of the majority would be a tyranny
like any other.
3446. In the Western world, work gained its dignity for the first time in one of
Luther's 95 celebrated theses. That thesis runs: "Ora et labora" (pray and work).
This is the basis of the renowned Protestant work ethic. Formerly, work was until
then equated with suffering and slavery, and physical work unworthy of the free
man. With "ora et labora," Luther placed work in the same line with prayer as
also one of the ways to serve God, and thus established the practical foundations
of Protestant ethics, and even the power of the people who accepted it.
3447. Genghis Khan-the "atomic bomb of his time" (as called by one historian)destroyed Afghanistan's state and the civilization brought to it by Islam in the
thirteenth century. He burned the cities, destroyed beautiful edifices, dams and
irrigation systems, turning prosperous lands into desert. Even today, Afghanistan
still has not recovered from this misfortune: Great parts are today still deserts
due to this unprecedented devastation.
3449. Bosnia and its "dark beauty" (Andric's expression)-"land of historicalcivilizational discontinuities."
3456. In the period starting from 1961, around 7,000 Afghanis finished military
schools in the USSR and countries of the Eastern bloc, which practically amounts
to the entire staff of Afghanistan's army. If it is worth mentioning at all, political
indoctrination accompanied military training. The result is known.
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3463. Developed countries earmark significant resources for different programs of
social protection of the poor and underprivileged classes of the population. In
1987, in the United States, $491 billion was provided for these purposes, $511
billion is predicted for 1988, which amounts to 11% of the gross national product.
These resources will be spent for health protection of the poor and unemployed,
subsidies for rents, vocational training, additional education, as well as for direct
help in terms of food by granting "food stamps" and the gratuitous distribution of
agricultural excesses that the state bought from farmers. The greatest part of this
sum still goes to social, health and pension insurance. In the United States the
poverty limit for a four-member family is an income of $11,000 a year. It is
thought that one-fifth of Italians have a standard of living that necessitates help
from the state. Statistical data for France states that 15 percent of the population
lives in poverty or on the border of it (according to their standards). According to
EU standards, those who have less than 50 francs at their disposal daily are
considered poor. It is thought that in West Germany there are about three million
poor people, with the same amount surviving exclusively on social aid. An
additional 2~2 million receive help to cover rent, food, or clothing. The most
important institution for this kind is the obligatory contribution of 2.3 percent of
income from all employees and employers, which provides 50 billion DEM yearly,
the initial purpose of which was to help the unemployed. Out of 56 million
Britons, more than 8 million receive some kind of assistance or have some social
privileges, for which $90 billion a year is set aside ("New Poverty," Danas, May 3,
1988, p. 8).
3466. (Anti-Semitism-some historical facts that concern the territory of present
Yugoslavia): Between the fifth and eighth centuries, Byzantium passed laws that
forcibly converted many Jews in Macedonia to Christianity. In Dubrovnik, in 1502,
11 Jews were accused of "ritual killing." As a result of the trial, one was strangled
in prison, four were burned alive, three died from torture, and the rest were
exiled. In 1797, the "Council of the Entreated" passed a law that prohibited Jews
from entering cafés. In Split, in 1553, all Jewish holy books were burned and
Jews were ordered to wear a yellow sign, first introduced in Venice in 1314. In
the area of Slovenia, all Jews from Koruska, Stajerska and Ljubljana were exiled
by the decree of Emperor Maximilian. In Vojvodina, they were not allowed to
inhabit cities, in Serbia the opposite: Milos' s son, Mihajlo, prohibited Jews from
leaving cities and going inland. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Turkey prohibited
them from dressing like Muslims-wearing a turban and dressing in green; they
were also not allowed to ride a horse in the city and wear weapons. At the
Congress of Berlin, Jews were formally granted all civil rights.
3483. In the book Macedonian Muslims, Then and Now, author Jakim
Sinadinovski, professor of sociology at the University of Skopje, opposes the
thesis on Macedonians converted to Islam that claims that Muslims in Macedonia
are a separate ethnic group that significantly developed under the influence of the
religious factor. Muslims differ from Macedonians in linguistic expression, dress,
custom/moral norms, culture of residence and food, and even the type of
economic life-which gives this group a separate identity. The book caused a
strong reaction in those who claim that Muslims in Macedonia are Macedonians of
Islamic faith, that is, Macedonians converted to Islam and as such, a part of the
Macedonian people. The book was issued in early 1988 in Skopje.
3486. Some want to literally equate a man and a woman, not in rights and
human dignity, but in the way of life, type of work, dress, behavior, thus in
everything in which these two sexes differ by their natures. On the other hand,
even psychologists claim there is even a "masculine" and a "feminine" way of
writing, masculine and feminine literature, even a "masculine" and a "feminine"
way of reading. Milorad Pavic wrote two versions of his Hazar Dictionary- one
"masculine" and the other "feminine." When you travel by train through the
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Soviet Union, along the track during a winter storm at minus 20 degrees Celsius,
you see track-workers, women, not as an exception, but hundreds of them. That
is that "equality."
3501a. A program and people are often in disagreement. Often quality people
advocate a completely unrealistic and retrogressive program, and vice versa:
good program, bad people.
3504. "Let us build trade, and a historian of the world will see that trade was the
principle of freedom, that it colonized America and destroyed feudalism, that it
made peace and that it maintains peace and that it will abolish slavery"
(Emerson, Diary). Compare the Qur'an: "God allowed trade and prohibited
interest" (2/275).
3505. "The harvest will be better kept and will last longer if it is in private
storage, in the shed of every farmer and basket of every woman, than if kept in
state granaries. In the same way, the same amount of money will last longer and
be better used if every man and woman use it for their own needs, feeling that
the money is theirs, than if it is spent by a powerful Governor or state
representative of the Minister of Finances. If you take away the feeling that I
have to depend upon myself, if you give me even the slightest indication that in
reserve I have good friends and assistants who will support everything readily, I
will immediately loosen my diligence,. . . and certain slackening will expand to the
conduct of all of my work. Here is a $100 bill. If it comes into the hands of a
profligate, who did not earn his estate and who knows how to spend. you will see
how little change this will cause in his affairs. At the end of the year he will be as
far behind as ever. But if it goes into the hands of a poor, sensible woman, every
little part of it will be used to reduce debt, or add to present or permanent
comfort, fix a window, buy a blanket or fur coat, or get a stove instead of an old
hearth." This was written by Emerson in his Diary in December of 1842. I give
this long quotation for it took 150 years and the wandering of 100 million people,
the loss of trillions in national income, to understand this simple truth.
3506. Weak people are the advocates and support of authoritarian government.
They lack the feeling of self-worth, from which the desire for freedom and
independence stems. A weak man runs from freedom and responsibility. An
authoritarian government is a refuge from this burden, without which one can
comfortably live. The precondition for this is known, why repeat it?
3515. Strong and spontaneous aspiration for knowledge, as in the case of
American lyceums in the mid-nineteenth century, most eloquently speaks of the
great future of one nation. A lyceum, one type of a public university, is a specific
American movement that flourished between 1830 and 1860. A group of citizens
would associate, collect money and invite lecturers to be guests in their homes
during winter. When this movement was at its height, there were over 2,000
lyceums in America.
3516. They like to speak of independence of state, but reluctantly speak of
independence of citizens. That independence, without which there is no freedom,
can be hindered (destroyed, taken away, reduced) equally with intimidation, as
well as with persistent persuasion and "brainwashing." Regardless of what
method is used, the result is the same: a dependent, un-free man who is
everything, but not a citizen.
3517. Napoleon had predicted the great future of America as far back as the early
nineteenth century ("in 25 years, the United States will dictate the political order
of the world"). Clearly, he was not only a great soldier. He had an undeniable
sense for history. He is known to have made a similar prophecy before the Battle
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at Valme: "A new period in human history is beginning, and you can say you were
present" (cited by Goethe).
3520. What is the meaning of the story of the creation of the first man in the
Qur'an (Qur'an 2/30-34)? It contains at least two critically important things:
(1) All people are, if not brothers, then some far cousins, and as such, equal, and
(2) First there was a man and woman, and then persons and people. Ensuing
from this is that "human rights" are older (and more important) than peoples,
tribes, communal and state ones. Human rights are primary, the rest are
deduced.
3523. In her book The Real World, Marguerite Duras dedicates the largest chapter
to the home as a woman's universe.
3524. From the General Declaration on Human Rights: "Everyone has the right to
freedom of opinion and expression. This right includes the freedom of keeping
one's own view and accepting information and ideas from all media regardless of
borders" (Article 19 of the Declaration).
3525. The most widespread form of violence in the world is the one happening in
the family. However, this violence in the greatest number of cases remains
undiscovered and unpunished, for it happens within the walls of the "inviolable"
home and private life.
3526. It is interesting how, in one study, the inhabitants of the future United
States of Europe (the present EU) made a list of the ten values they find worthy
of their personal engagement. In first place they place the equality of sexes, then
in declining order: protection of the environment, peace in the world, battle
against poverty, national defense, religious freedom, unification of Europe,
personal freedom, human rights and (in tenth place) revolution. The study was
done in early 1988 (Vjesnik, Zagreb, May 28, 1988, p. 5).
3568. Politics (after all, like life itself) is full of paradoxes. For example, only
certified anti-Communists, Nixon and Reagan, could agree with the Soviets and
even make certain concessions. Anyone else would be accused of selling out to
the Communists or being politically naïve.
3572. Americans gave $93 billion to different charities in 1987 (Oslobodjenje,
June 29, 1988). Giving to others, mutual help, is a natural thing among people. It
appears everywhere in the world as an integral part of civilized life.
3577. Marie Ebner-Eschenbach said that the greatest enemies of freedom,
alongside tyrants and bureaucrats, are happy slaves. Danko Plevnik commented
on this thought: "These are those plain little people who add to the pyre of
bureaucratic short-sightedness their dry twigs of blind faith in their inanities."
3624. A man of self-realization and original spirit is either a hermit or an apostle,
says Leo Beck. A hermit relates passively (introverted), an apostle actively,
dynamically toward the world. The former changes only himself, the latter
attempts to change the world, that is, the people around him. This latter,
dynamic type can predominate in one group or people. According to Beck, Jewish
people are a specific example-perhaps most pronounced-of such dynamic
personality. Furthermore, such spirit can exist only in a small community or small
people.
3627. (Factor of time): An American asked an Englishman how he manages to
grow such wonderful grass. "Nothing simpler," said the Englishman. "We water it
regularly and cut it every morning and evening." "That is the same thing I do,"
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said the American, "but my grass is pitiful." "Yes," said the Englishman, "but we
have been doing it for 400 years."
Today my little granddaughter Jasmina turned five. She was born on
August 11, 1983, during my trial. My dear Jasmina.
3641. Japanese industry developed quickly. Thus, for example, the motor vehicle
industry was started in 1930. That year only 458 trucks and buses were
produced. In 1965, around 1.9 million vehicles were produced, and in 1986, 12.3
million. Japan today (1988) is the largest producer of automobiles in the world
(followed by the United States and West Germany).
3648. Human communion is specific. Some animals, for example, hunt together,
but eat the catch by themselves. While all animals provide food only for
themselves and their young, group distribution of food is characteristic only of
humankind. Anthropologist Glina Issac says: "If a chimpanzee could describe the
characteristics of human behavior, he would first point out that that being shares
food with other members of the group."
3654. American psychologist Carl Rogers, in the book How to Become a Person
presents an "efficacious rule for discussion," which is, according to Rogers, this:
One can speak for oneself only after one correctly repeats the ideas of one's
collocutor, and in a way that satisfies the one who spoke before. "But if you
attempt to do that, you will discover that it is one of the most difficult things you
have ever tried to do. However, when once you are able to understand another
person's point of view, your own judgments will be drastically changed.
You will also find that emotions are disappearing from discussions, that
differences are reduced, and those which remain are rational and
comprehensible," writes Rogers. To be a person, therefore, means, among other
things, to be able to understand one another in the best way possible, that is, to
be able to put yourself in another's position, live for a moment in someone else's
skin. That is one of the reliable signs of a mature person.
3656. West Germany paid 9,000 DEM to Romania annually for every member of
the German minority who was allowed to leave the country. In this way, West
Germany, as reported by the BBC, "bought back" around 100,000 fugitives. When
this was discovered, many reacted with bitterness, especially Hungarian
intellectuals whose compatriots were also endangered in Romania. In the
statement by the Democratic Forum of Hungary in August 1988, it is said: "We
are filled with apprehension, for people are turning into worthless goods. The
price is not only a cash amount, but moral and political support to one of the least
humane dictatorships of this century" (Vjesnik, August 25, 1988). In relation to
this, one could cite a statement by Prof. Ivo Banac, an American historian of
Yugoslav origin, author of the book The National Question in Yugoslavia, who
speaks of an unexpected paradox of the unsolved national question in almost all
socialist countries. He said: "I will be ironic: today one can speak of 'proletarian
nationalism' and 'bourgeois internationalism.' Just observe what is happening in
the Soviet Union, what are the relations between Hungarians and Romanians, not
to mention Kosovo" (Danas, August 25, 1988).
3658. "Culture demands slaves, and if there are no slaves to do the ugly, difficult,
and boring jobs, culture becomes impossible. Human slavery is wrong and
demoralizing. The future of the world will depend on mechanical slavery- the
slavery of machines" (Oscar Wilde). Currently, there are about 180,000 robots in
the world. This, which Wilde stated, might perhaps explain the persistence of the
institution of slavery, which was abolished only in the nineteenth century (slavery
and culture).
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3662. The development of criminal law and the related sciences (penology,
criminology, process) was marked with what it usually called "humanization" in
the last one hundred years: the mitigation of punishment and conditions of its
execution, abolishment of corporal punishment, especially the death penalty. But
what have theoreticians of criminal law who advocated these ideas known about
the people who were perpetrators of criminal acts? The greatest number of those
theoreticians, even prosecutors and judges, most often did not know the life and
the kind of people about whom they spoke. They wrote books without ever
getting to know the offenders, who those people are, what they are in fact like,
what kind of "human material" they are made of. That is one side of the problem.
Due to this, humanization on the side of the perpetrator most often meant
complete indifference or complete oblivion toward the victim. The abolishment of
the death penalty clearly represented a great relief for a murderer, but has surely
also meant diminishing the security of innocent people, potential victims of the
crimes. Humanism toward the perpetrator meant inhumanity toward an innocent
man-a potential victim. As a reaction to this, a separate discipline was recently
developed-victimology, which attempts to establish a balance and observe the
crime from the position of the victim as well. One should expect that this new
discipline will introduce more justice in criminal law and act as a redress to the
continual tendency to give understanding and mercy in circumstances where
there is little cause for consideration and mercy.
3663. We are not only divided into good and bad people, but into good and evil
within ourselves. The division does not go between people, but through them.
There is also a division into good and bad people, but it is a secondary one,
derived according to some balance of good and evil in a man. The primary
division is on the good and evil which resides in people. That conflict is thus
imminent, internal, dramatic and not externally social. True conflict is in the soul.
3667. To the spirit, and even culture, the principle of hierarchy is imminent. It is
foreign to democracy. The question, then, should state: What is the relationship
between culture and democracy?
3671. In the book Nations and Nationalism, Ernest Gellner expressed an opinion
that nationalist activity is not a permanent characteristic of people, but that it
becomes topical in the time of crisis.
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