I do not know what to make of this site. The passage above seems to be a paraphrase in more abusive terms of the following comments on the site of the British Helsinki Human Rights Monitoring Group http://www.bhhrg.org/serbia/serbia%20parlia2000/Zoran%20Djindjic.htm
This relates to the Serbian election of 23rd December 2000
>Before entering politics, Dr. Djindji? was a professional Marxist
>philosopher. He left Tito’s Yugoslavia in the late 1970s to study under
>the German hardline Marxist philosopher, Jürgen Habermas. In Germany, he
>knew people associated with the radical left on the fringes of the
>Baader-Meinhof gang and the Red Army Fraction: in this respect, he
>resembles the German Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer. In 1979, Djindji?
>defended his doctoral thesis at the University of Constance on "Marx’s
>Critical Theory of Society and the Problem of Foundation" (Konstanz, 23rd
>July 1979), in which he developed an epistemological basis for Marx’s
>theory that a crisis is necessary in society for the old order to be swept
>away and a new one to be ushered in.
Or is the BHHRG report a moderated version?
Anti-War.com again:
>This theory of "crisis" was
>applied perfectly, and with great effect, in the Milosevic affair: with one
>blow, the ruthless Djindjic split the ex-opposition (DOS) and drove the
>Montenegrins out of the government coalition, threatening the nation itself
>with a split. That this maneuver might also abolish Kostunica's office, the
>Yugoslav presidency, is hardly a coincidence.
BHHRG again
>In 1984, Dr Djindjic participated in a symposium of philosophers from
>Germany, Yugoslavia and other countries on the Frankfurt School, the group
>of left wing thinkers around Max Horkeimer and Theodor Adorno who posited
>the end of family structures and the decline of authority in society as
>the keys to social revolution. The symposium was subsequently published as
>a book, 'Die Frankfurter Schule und die Folgen,' hrsg. Axel Honneth and
>Albrecht Wellmer, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, 1986. In his lecture,
>'Continuity in the criticism of liberalism from Marx to the Frankfurt
>School,' Dr Djindjic explained that he had come to Germany in the early
>1970s especially to study the Frankfurt school, which he considered to be
>the only legitimate continuation of Marxism. "There were at least two
>reasons," Dr Djindjic writes, "why the theory of the Frankfurt School
>supported gave crucial support to Yugoslav Marxism at a decisive moment:
>the political enthusiasm for socialism had cooled off, and the belief in a
>'dialectical necessity' had long collapsed. What we needed was a
>foundation for the theory of emancipation appropriate for a consciousness
>which was no longer naive. Furthermore, Marxist theory had encountered
>dangerous competition as a result of Yugoslavia's openness to the West,
>above all from the philosophy of Heidegger and from analytical philosophy
>which was becoming ever more popular." In other words, Dr Djindjic
>travelled to Germany to study the Frankfurt School in order to find there
>intellectual nourishment for his crusade to maintain and strengthen
>Marxism in a Yugoslavia which was for him already too bourgeois and liberal.
>
>What interested Dr. Djindjic most in the Frankfurt School was indeed its
>attack on bourgeois liberalism. He argued that the Frankfurt School had
>formulated the attack on liberalism better even than Marx, for it had
>shown that fascism was the result of liberalism. Fascism had not been the
>antithesis of liberalism, as Marxists had claimed: it had merely hidden
>from view its own underlying liberal elements. What Dr. Djindjic wanted
>was something far more anti-liberal than either Marxism or fascism, and he
>seemed to find it in Frankfurt. The key lay in the bourgeois society,
>which had begun in 1789 and culminated in Hitler. Nonetheless, Dr Djindjic
>also detected shortcomings in the Frankfurt School's theories of total
>social change: he thought that the school was incapable of either
>understanding modern complex society or of changing it. State socialism
>was failing on both these counts as well, concluded Dr Djindjic. "For
>those authors of the Frankfurt School who witnessed the uprisings in
>Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia (1956 and 1968) it must have seemed
>like a hopeless anachronism that these emancipation movements expressed
>their programmes in the categories of bourgeois civilisation."
>
>In the light of the energy crisis into which Serbia has been plunged since
>23rd December, the suspicion must be that some of Dr. Djindji?’s old
>theories continue to nourish his political thought. This power crisis is
>inexplicable as a technical shortcoming, since electricity supplies worked
>perfectly well throughout the Nato attacks on Yugoslavia despite the
>widespread use of graphite bombs whose function is to knock out
>electricity supplies. The new regime tries to blame the Miloševi?
>government for the electricity failures but such an explanation simply
>does not hold water: why did the electricity work then but not now? Could
>it be that the sudden series of power cuts have been deliberately
>engineered in order to create a sense of social crisis, in order better to
>implement a process of thorough-going social change? At least one of Dr.
>Djindji?’s admirers has emphasised how his revolutionary ideology prepared
>him well for the seizure of power on 5th October. Dr. Djindji? is quoted
>as remembering well "how Trotsky took over the bloodstream of the
>revolution" in 1917. ("October 5th – a 24 hour coup" by Dragan Bujošovi?
>and Ivan Radovanovi?, Media Centre, Belgrade, 2000, p. 302.).
Both these sources seem to emphasise conspiracies. Quite possible, though Djindjic as an ex philosphy student seem remarkably good at it. I am more sceptical of the Anti-War.com site source describing Kostunica in almost saintly terms.
Chris Burford
London