Before now, the only mass protests in Bosnia and other post-Yugoslav states were about ethnic or religious passions. In the middle of 2013, two public protests were organized in Croatia, a country in deep economic crisis, with high unemployment and a deep sense of despair: trade unions tried to organize a rally in support of workers rights, while right-wing nationalists started a protest movement against the use of Cyrillic letters on public buildings in cities with a Serb minority. The first initiative brought a couple of hundred people to a square in Zagreb; the second mobilized hundreds of thousands, as had an earlier fundamentalist movement against gay marriages. Croatia is far from being an exception: from the Balkans to Scandinavia, from the US to Israel, from central Africa to India, a new Dark Age is looming, with ethnic and religious passions exploding and Enlightenment values receding. These passions were lurking in the background all the time, but what is new is the outright shamelessness of their display. Even if the protests gradually lose their power, they will remain a brief spark of hope, something like the enemy soldiers fraternizing across the trenches in the first world war. Authentic emancipatory events always involve such ignoring of particular identities. And the same holds for the recent visit of the two Pussy Riot members to New York: in a big gala show, they were introduced by Madonna in the presence of Bob Geldof, Richard Gere, etc: the usual human rights gang. What they should have done there was to express their solidarity with Edward Snowden, to assert that Pussy Riot and Snowden are part of the same global movement. Without such gestures which bring together what, in our ordinary ideological experience, appears incompatible (Muslims, Serbs and Croats in Bosnia; Turkish secularists and anti-capitalist Muslims in Turkey, etc), protest movements will be always manipulated by one superpower in its struggle against another.
Posted on: Mon, 10 Feb 2014 18:40:10 +0000