Next time you share a spomenik photo, think about what it means (2016)
calvertjournal.com
calvertjournal.com
These monuments aren't 'their lived historical experience of a revolution' they are cultural artifacts.
This is the problem with monuments and artworks built to commemorate events or remember atrocities - they will always have some value as an artwork that will 'take away' some of the memory and meaning of the original event. They exist as cultural artifacts in their own right
Here is short version of how I understand author's pont: "if you look at something (piece of art, architecture, book), made at a point in history, you need to remember about all the struggle, that may be related to that thing".
This is pretty awful principle, to live by, in my pov.
Putting something in the context and appreciating the art are different things. Ivan Terrible was terrible tsar, but I will still appreciate that painting.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/Iv%C3%A1...
If somebody will put that picture into some gallery, like "100 pictures and classical music" in youtube, I will never notice that there is something wrong about it, albeit it is not that great. And it is fine.
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/13AD0/production...
""" Yet not only in Croatia, but in France, the USA, Britain, real, open fascism – fences, walls, racial laws, deportations, camps – is once again mainstream. The Yugoslav experience of fighting against it on the basis of intercultural solidarity — and, also, of failing to maintain that memory, and of its collapse in the 1990s into resurgent fascism — has much to tell us. These monuments are its concrete legacy, intended to speak of what Yugoslavs had emerged from, how they wanted to be remembered, and what they hoped for. They deserve better than to be glimpsed for a few seconds on Tumblr. """
The author is lamenting that these are usually naively enjoyed at face-value as absurd follies. As some typically weird thing that happens in those bad, socialist countries we[0] don't like, and therefore don't warrant any further inspection. Except not only is there more to them that tells us about Yugoslavia's history, many of them represent a struggle against fascism that we could even see ourselves facing in the present day.
The story of Tito and (by extension) how SFR Yugoslavia came about is fascinating. Fitzroy Maclean wrote a biography of Tito called "The Heretic" which tells it in detail if anyone's interested: https://archive.org/details/FitzroyMacleanTheHereticTheLifeA...
[0] - I'm using the voice of the naive person here, this is not my view :)
"Yet not only in Croatia, but in France, the USA, Britain, real, open fascism – fences, walls, racial laws, deportations, camps – is once again mainstream. "
Oh really? Fences are fascist now? And deportations?
And remind me, was the Berlin Wall fascist? The labor camps in Siberia? Or were those created by totalitarian communist regimes?
Am I the only one too dense to really understand what broader point is being made in this article? It contains so many sections like this:
...as she puts it, “our lived historical experience of a revolution becomes only a cultural artefact”. Sekulic argues that “a better way to engage with these monuments would be to use them as a tool do [sic] re-connect to the near past in which as a society we did not see space only as a commodity”.
Umm, okay, we should do what now?
The wall in Berlin is a good example that it doesn't take much to make this leap. It was meant to keep people in, and the walls now -- on the US border, the Mediterranean -- are meant to keep people out so in that way they are not the same. But if you look at them as a tool of preserving a way of life by forceful and brutal isolation then they are the same. If we conclude that the Berlin Wall was bad then surely the walls we see now are also at least bad. Only they are in the present and there is no textbook to spell it out that it's bad. And some might argue it's fascist, and I don't think we should dismiss it completely.
“If locking someone in your basement is bad, that means locking your front door at night is bad too”
Traffic between EU and other countries (Turkey) works normally except COVID restrictions. People can buy tickets, there is no need to climb walls or swim. We have embassies all around the world, it is easy to ask for asylum.
If you are comparing current situation to fascism and Berlin Wall, you are out of your mind.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Alan_Kurdi
If you don't think what is on the link above is brutal, then you are out of your mind.
Turkey is a safe country, and Greece has embassies there. There was no need for this boy to die.
Of these, the most accessible may be that of Umberto Eco. [1] While it has many points in common with other totalitarianisms by its very nature, there are traits unique to fascism that situate it as ultra-conservative, promoting imperialism based on a glorified account of the past, and using racism and mass culture as a propaganda tool; characteristics that not all totalitarian states share, and that taken together make an identifying profile.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism#Umberto...
I believe you lack some context here. There are a lot of migrants and refugees coming to Europe through the Balkans. Whether to let them in or leave them waiting in improvised camps in countries that are themselves very poor is a very hot political topic in the region and in most of Europe.
The problem is how those people are treated by the police in some places and how everyone, the government, the locals and the neighboring countries are complicit in this. They're constantly being beaten up, their belongings destroyed for no reason and so on. There exists a movement of right wing politicians, journalists and so on, that openly call for killing migrants that approach the border of my country. That's supposed to be a crime, but absolutely nothing happens to them.
I can understand the fear of foreign people and their culture. But the hatred and the fact that political parties actively participate and support that hatred sure sounds like fascism to me.
Fear and hatred are siblings. In this case, the fear is one of the migration waves cresting on a level unmanageable by Europe.
We could somehow (with a lot, lot of internal friction that put a strain on the intra-EU diplomacy) manage about two million immigrants in 2014-2021, but the potential for migration in our neighbourhood is orders of magnitude higher. Egypt alone could supply 50-60 million people in case of destabilization.
In such situation, deterrence seems to be a functional game strategy.
"Oh are walls fascist now" is a bit to obviously naive bad faith.
"Oh are racial laws and [detention] camps fascist now" a bit too unambiguous.
Fences and deportations though feel like things that good faith actors should debate though. By cutting a list of symptoms down to just those two it... Well we've got sibling posts debate the merits of analogies to the abstract concept of fences. Pretty successfully derailing a nice article about some interesting monuments.
Intercultural solidarity? Doesn't the article mention the Ustashe death camps? Didn't Serbia wage war on its neighbours before and after Tito's forceful union Yugoslavia, and even commit genocide in the recent past?
I think the broader point of the article is that you can throw words together that sound quasi-philosophical and create a problem where none exists, to draw attention to yourself.