-----Original Message----- From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: 10 Ñåïòåìâðè 1999 ã. 04:06 Subject: Re: Cyber Yugoslavia
>Elena:
>>Nope. End-of-socialism romantics was about the realisation that it _could
>>NOT have been_ but we _can make it better_, and the nostaligia is about
the
>>10 years (hell of a time) that things got worse. One step forward, two
steps
>>back, sort of (and twist and shout).
>What sort
of discussion is going on, if any, beyond coping and individual survival --
in Yugoslavia or around you?
Ha! Yoshie, if I could answer that question in a satisfactory way, I'd organise the Purrfect Left Party, enlighten and organise the masses, and eventually the whole world will be a Beautiful Bulgaria (frankly, already started working on this as Secretary for Waterfalls after giving up the office for the emancipation of barbies and piggies in the yugo legoland). More practical would be do the research, sell the results and make a thriving PR company. Most probably - as it is - try to keep on kicking for some time, and then resort to e-mail crusading only. Sorry, couldn't help being flippant, though you are a scary opponent. Less flippantly, now. Intuiting thru studies, research and survey results, some (not much) action practice and personal experience. Sorry for the style; I couldn't think of another way to sketch the picture without writing volumes but if you are interested in any point in particular, we can discuss it in details, with appropriate referencing, statistics, etc - though, again, i am not approaching this as a party-insider, but, professionally, mostly, from the media angle.
> >What are people thinking in terms how "we _can make it better_"?
What _WERE_ people thinking would be the corect tense (I meant precisely the
pre-end period). In BG - in the mid-till end 80's whatever protests brew
were centred around isolated practical issues - for example, environmental
(like the group I took part in, which was concerned with one very definite
practical problem - the ecocide of my town Rousse by the chlorine
pollution), individual cases of exposure of corruption of some THEN Party
high- and middle-rank officials; undividual cases of violating human rights.
That is, you couldn't go out and declare "the system's wrong" although there
were hushed discussions about it, Derrida, Lucacz and Kristeva were
apocryphal reading, Vissotski and Konchalovski and Rostropovitch were
semi-banned but the outward practical expression of action, itself, was
peaceful demonstrations which only claimed attention to the single, isolated
problem each separate group was fighting against. My own most
"revolutionary" experience is not much to boast about - making some posters
and hiding them in the baby-pram during a demonstration, so that when the
militia snatched one poster, we would have enough replacements (the baby
saved us from arrest but ruined some of the posters). Not that we didn't
support each other's causes when we considered the particular cause worth
fighting - but, shame on us, no? - no-one (seemed to) realised that if
anything's to be done *against the system*, it would require close ranks,
not just kitchen talks. I most certainly didn't give it a thought, having
tried up to that moment effectively to escape the entrapments of Komsomol.
Maybe the "revolution" came too early to bring about change; and just
imagine the oh-so-much time and money wasted on teaching everyone in ex-soc
countries the basics of Scientific Communism... Besides, the vantage point
of today is also very convenient - now that we "know" what "really" happened
(I put the quotes to signal that you can easily contest that).
The coup d'etat was staged and carried out by the BCP itself (but it was just an internal party struggle externalised - like throwing an old Tolkien's dragon to the crowd) - and well under control until the second elections. It is interesting that every elections is termed "of crucial importance" - letting one escape into "ah, things might have been different if.." Still, I believe, that as it is, neither the _socialism as practice_ could have been different, nor _democracy we have now_ can. And the left *is* to blame; first, for not being able to react adequately to the situation of 89 (true, the party was not homogenous, they *did* win the first elections inspite of the UDF /union of democratic forces - oppositon/ so they had ab a year and a half to reform - but maybe that's too much to ask). As a result, the UDF won the second elections as easy as piece of cake - besides, they had funding, expertise (UK Conservative party agents were dispatched to assist with know-how in canvassing, advertising, designing election platforms, the UDF-leaning media were "briefed" accordingly, etc, etc). It seems very transparent now (my particular interest is politics and the mass media, especially political advertising) that our "left space" (not! limited to the socialist aka ex-communist party) was delivered the most severe blow then - the first two years, culminating in the elections won by the UDF. The left space (hope it's the right word - people supporting or inclined to support, wholly or partially, left parties without being actually registered members) was left (and still is) to scatter, dissolve, marginalise and dangle. I am not insider to the Socialist Party think-tanks - so it beats me, why they can't/don't want to? recapture the mass of fluctuating voters and the non-voters who probably (figures vary from survey to survey) constitute *their* potential voters? Is it a local/ cultural thing or is it the wrong party to do it? Still, the BSP is the largest left party, at least nominally. The UDF have very able advisers, I must say - they practically have drowned the left's capacity to evolve.
And, getting back to Yugo war - Accidentally or not, the support for NATO in Bulgaria started from "the top", it was "well" motivated, excellently planned, brilliantly carried out as a media campaign (which stumbled only over the spontaneous public protest in the country). What did it have to fight against? N-O-T-H-I-N-G! Disorganised, disoriented, amorphous mass of frightened people (whose protest was not political, that is against nATO ideology, but was motivated by sheer fear, instinct for survival; the protest never managed to become political) and the opposition (parties in opposition) was caught unprepared (I like the Bulgarian expression - caught by surprise in his white underware). There are lots of factors - apathy, lack of information, etc, etc. But the most important, in my personal opinion, which made it possible for Bulgaria to get involved, even if tangentially, in this shameful war was the practically total destruction of the left political space (the left may be not dead, but it certainly acts and looks like dead). This wouldn't have happened, if our "lefts" had exerted the effort to shake off their authoritarian, exclusive, sectarian, old-school-type-club type of practice and start doing their biz, or leave the game. Ten years is much time... Now this same thing is exported to Yugoslavia. When the looting started, a friend in Belgrade (Svetlana Djuric) wrote: "This time Milosevic needs no propaganda! I am and have always been a professional, a political analyst, and I tell you that this action killed all the opposition here and all the free media for good. Milosevic doesn't even need to use any force against them." Now the Eu & Co are trying to buy the opposition; suffocate free-media (in and out of Kosovo); and, shamefully enough, while the UDF in Bulgaria is offering brotherly help to Serbian opposition to mastermind their pre-election campaigns (yeah, they are good at it now!), there are occasional, amounting to hysterical accusations, squeaks from the (our) left to Serbian opposition not to betray their ideals (and freeze rather), in what is largely uncomfortably silent left media. And though that's not the way to do it, but the situation is urgent, again there are smallish groups of people who partisan to try and help in some practical ways (food, medicine, clothes, information, moral support, whatever). Anecdotally enough, my friend's baby who took part in those 88 and 89 demonstrations, is studying "Europe at School" and participating in a programme "NATO for Bulgarian Youth". You may guess that out of that "environmental protest group" people dispersed and sedimented in different corners and colours (red, blue, green, etc) Summing it up, cyber protest should be acceptable if even simple jumping is tinted, being the only political form of fitness here :-)