National Mythomania

Zelimir Zilnik
Novi Sad, January 26th 2008, 14:00 -14:30

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Screening of the inserts from Žilnik's movies: OLD TIMER (1988), TITO'S SECOND TIME AMONG THE SERBS (1994), EUROPE NEXT DOOR (2005) and WILD CAPITALISM (2008). Inserts are illustrating thesis how former Yugoslav political elite since the middle of the 1980s, after longterm conflict around Tito's inheritor and heritage, dismissed internationalism and self-management as axioms of the state's foundaments. Engineering of tribalizing of people was put in motion, together with ideology of nationalistic mythomanie and re-sentiments. In difference to the other former socialistic states, this enabled ten more years of plunder of the common goods, to the feudalized and comminuted governing elites of Yugoslavia. Newly produced class posses goods, but it ruined the state and economy, and the people are getting poor, unemployed, sick or leaving the country. New capitalists trends, especially through the example of Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia and Montenegro, are bringing over again the spirit of fatalism to the Balkan, which reminds us to the last decades of reign of Ottoman Empire. Political and cultural discourse in Serbia is drowned in the Kosovo myth. It is substitution for both past and the future, including the real state. Does in 2008 political class teleports Serbia to year 1808?