| Mr. Tito | Dusan Velickovic |
DAYS OF BOMBARDEMENT AND MARTIAL LAW IN BELGRADE: true stories |
CNN is
broadcasting a speech by the American President. He speaks in a mild voice, and his
gesticulation is calm, as if he were talking to me personally. In fact, he is
talking to us, the Serbs. He mentions Tito and Tito's era. He says that Mr. Tito was a
wise statesman under whom we lived in peace. So we were not always the way that we are
now.
Simultaneously, on a German satellite program, a man is analyzing the body language of famous world personalities. He says that Clinton is making certain motions which are hard to notice, but these motions characterize aggression. I switch back to CNN, but I cannot concentrate on the body language of the American President. I am more interested in his reasons for mentioning Tito to us in this particular moment.
Do we truly need again a dictator who was made "ideal" by now non-existent international circumstances? In Tito's time, my then-country displayed its quasi-liberal face to the West (from whence the loans came) at the same time that it was proving its loyalty to the East (from where its real power came) by cruelly curtailing exactly those same freedoms of which it boasted to the West. We were not fighting wars, we were not being bombarded, we were not dying in battles, but we seemed to be preparing for all of that.
Some men and some ideas seeped through the invisible filter of this double game between East and West. Jean Paul Sartre (a man I am often quoting these days), was, in spite of all his ideas about an unsolvable existential angst and about man's right to individual liberty and personal choice, comfortably accepted in Yugoslavia, a country of official Marxist ideology, even before he wrote his The Critique of Dialectic Mind. The regime loved Sartre, because he was a critic of bourgeois society, and also because Aleksandar Fadayev, Stalin's commissar for culture, called Sartre "a jackal with a typewriter, a hyena with a fountain-pen". The fact that Stalinists attacked Sartre, while he himself never said anything serious against Stalin's rigged trials, was extremely important to a regime that permitted and sought criticism of Stalinism, but in fact remained firmly Stalinist in its essence. On top of it all, there is this statement made by Sartre: "Tito's Yugoslavia is the realization of my philosophy." I do not remember that anyone in this country, ever, quoted these words of Sartre, let alone utilized them for any propaganda purposes. We had an illusion that Sartre was permitted to us because we were a democratic country. That's how Mr. Tito did things.
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