Prerokbe Ognja Page #4

---

in which the border

between East and West

crossed Slovenia five times,

that list of influences

has expanded considerably.

Maybe this is why post-modernism,

with its endless appropriations,

came along as something the

Slovenes were already at home with.

More importantly, in a culture marked by

successive periods of denial

of one or another side of history,

Irwin's work represents a voluntary

endorsement of "outside" influences.

In New York, these influences

are once again visible

as building blocks of the

recombinant Slovene identity.

Not surprisingly, NSK's

authorless sublimations

of an East-West

cultural schizophrenia

have not always been well

understood or liked at home.

And the prevailing political climate

has inevitably played a role in this.

Before Slovenia's first

democratic elections,

a perception existed that NSK was

producing a fascistic, or right-wing art.

Later, their use of Eastern modernist

images resulted in their being

directly accused of working for

the discredited Communists.

Fascism under the guise of democracy

is the rule of financial capital itself.

- Laibach

The End of History.

Slovenia entered the age

of the electronic camera

at around the same time Josip Broz Tito

died in a Ljubljana hospital in 1980.

Adopting a Yugocentric view,

the global decline of Communism began

not with the rise of Mikhail

Gorbachev to the East,

but with the fall of the

founder of Socialist Yugoslavia

in the Westernmost

republic of his domain.

Everything else was just details -

including Gorby's visit to Ljubljana in 1988.

Another type of

communist was on the way.

The decline of the

ideology of 1917

paved the way for a

one-time Belgrade banker

preaching nationalist

fundamentalism.

Miloevic:
Comrades! There is

no price, and there is no force,

which could shake the leadership

of Serbia, and the citizens of Serbia,

in the struggle

for just aims!

We want weapons!

We want weapons!

I can't hear you!

I can't hear you,

but I want to give you the

answer that what you require

soon all the names

will be published!

And I want to tell you that

those who used people

in order to manipulate them, to

realize the aims against Yugoslavia,

that they will be punished

and they will be arrested!

This I guarentee you!

Elias Canetti has said that

each war starts with pictures.

Ex-Yugoslavia's contemporary

horror was started consciously,

on Serbian

state-controlled TV.

Years before fighting erupted,

a relentless tape-loop

of fifty-year-old war crimes

flickered in millions of

Serbian living rooms every night.

Among them the forced

baptism of Orthodox Serbs

by a Catholic priest in Croatia's

notorious Jesenovac death camp.

It was in Serbia that

Communism made its first

but not last

post-modern transition

to a televisual fascism.

It began as a return of

the repressed.

The century had vanished into the archives,

but the archives came to life again,

releasing stored demons that

started appearing in prime time.

Slovenia reacted to events in the South with

a kind of pragmatic rebirth of national feeling.

Slovenian secessionists were given a massive

boost by the Yugoslav National Army's

clumsy political trial of four

Ljubljana journalists in 1988.

A rally in Congress Square pounded some final

nails into the coffin of Yugoslav unity.

The proceedings bore an eerie

resemblance to those of 70 years before,

in which the first Yugoslav state was

announced, in a shower of hope and goodwill.

Mr. President!

The troop of the Territorial

Defense is lined up in honor

of the Republic of Slovenia

as an independent state,

and it is prepared

for your review.

Our history is honorable and clean.

Until now, history didn't

give us anything for free;

we had to work hard for everything.

That is why we still exist.

Slovenia's secession from the

bankrupt Yugoslav federation

recycled a time-worn dramaturgy,

bringing a familiar cast of characters and

costumes back into the limelight of history.

But there was a difference.

This time, for the first time, the rituals

of the state endorsed autonomy from,

rather than subservience

to, an external capital power.

If art can declare independence,

why not the state itself?

Ideology relies on rhetoric

because it constructs subjects

who subscribe to their own freedom.

- Bill Nichols

In March of 1989,

the year in which Slovenia took

it's first legislative steps

towards full separation,

Laibach made a risky decision:

to play a concert in the

center of Serbian nationalism:

Belgrade,

the Yugoslav capital.

part of the performance

was a speech,

delivered in a politically explosive

mixture of Serbian and German.

Brothers Serbs!

You are here

the alpha and omega!

You rule this land,

and we will not let you be raped.

This I guarentee you!

You believe in

God's penalties and rewards!

Your holy towns

will remain holy.

Saint Sava says that

this land has to be Serbian!

Profaned graves

we've thought

about it as well.

But He believes

in attack and honor!

Reality has a way of

taking its revenge.

The speech, which started by

appropriating two statements by

Serbian President

Slobodan Milosevic,

would end by directly quoting British

Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain,

the key architect of European

pre-war appeasement of Adolf Hitler.

NSK's "retrogardism" had

reached its closest encounter

with the very phenomenon

it had anticipated.

In both form and content, Laibach's

provocation in Belgrade that day

was as precise as

a chemical formula.

It seemed to crystallize the

exact moment of transition

between Yugoslav socialist speech and

Serbia's emerging ethnic nationalist rhetoric.

The first had always stressed brotherhood

and unity among the Southern Slavs.

The cadences of the second

had not been heard in Europe

since the dark day

of the thirties.

Listen!

The violence, the war, the love,

and eternal holiness...

Upon these premises we

guarantee you your borders,

and that means

peace in our time.

Language is a system of orders,

not a medium of information.

- Gilles Deleuze

Details of the past, transposed

as metaphors to the present,

are sometimes capable

of anticipating the future.

For the remainder of European history,

Chamberlain's voice will be synonymous

with the weakness of democracy

when confronted with fascism.

The carnage in the East came

via the Kum and Krvavec TV towers,

cross the ridges of mountains that

had protected Central Europe

from the Ottoman

Empire for 500 years.

These images of horror were

relayed across the new Slovenian state

to the great

democracies of the West,

where they were surrounded by late-night

pornography and ultra-violent movies.

The autumn of the century had

become the season of the channel changer.

Atrocity was replaced by entertainment,

or simulated atrocity as entertainment.

The Heaven Over Trbovlje

The Heaven Over Ljubljana

When Slovenia became the first

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes