[Alb-Educ] Message not deliverable

[Administrator]

             *** Albanian Educators Discussion List ***

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2000 14:07:30 +0200
From: "Sam Vaknin, Ph.D." <palma at unet.com.mk>
To: <Undisclosed-Recipient:@queue.unet.com.mk;>
Subject: Brendan Howley Reviews After the Rain

Blue Ear Global Writing Worth ReadingPLEASE SCROLL DOWN TO READ THE ARTICLE!

Buy my NEW book: "After the Rain - How the West Lost the East"
directly from the publisher - BUT...
PAY with a credit card through IFulfill.com -
Click HERE to purchase the book or to learn more about it:

http://www.geocities.com/vaksam/after.html

If you wish to be removed from my mailing list, please write to:
palma at unet.com.mk or samvak at briefcase.com

PERMISSION IS GRANTED
To reprint and publish this article under the following two conditions:
- That the author's full name be mentioned
- That, if published on a website, a link back to
http://samvak.tripod.com/guide.html be provided

Join my CEE and Balkans Listbot Mailing List here:
http://aftertherain.listbot.com

Buy my NEW book: "After the Rain - How the West Lost the East" and read
Readers' Reviews - HERE:
Click HERE:
http://barnesandnoble.bfast.com/booklink/click?sourceid=481444&ISBN=80238517
3X

Click here to read sample chapters:
http://www.geocities.com/vaksam/atr.pdf

The book is also available in its electronic version (e-book) at
Booklocker's - HERE:
http://www.booklocker.com/bookpages/samvaknin02.html

A Review of "After the Rain" in "The Reviewer" is available here:
http://www.jaalmag.com/thereviewer/28052000o.htm


or in my Author Archive at "Central Europe Review":
http://www.ce-review.org/authorarchives/vaknin_archive/vaknin_main.html

Download my Topical Encylopedia of Economics and Economies in Transition
HERE:
http://info.babylon.com/cgi-bin/template.cgi?id=2880
(Free Babylon browser HERE: http://www.babylon.com )

This article was accepted for publication in Central Europe Review
(http://www.ce-review.org )

The web address of this article - and many others - is:
http://www.geocities.com/vaksam/guide.html

http://www.blueear.com/articles/cheaplife_100800.html


All content
c 2000 BlueEar.com
or as specified.

Blue Ear Forum postings
c individual authors.
All rights reserved.

October 8, 2000

Life Is Cheap, History Is Dear

"When Milosevic falls, there will be a reckoning that will shake Europe from
Berlin to the Bosporus to Moscow," writes Brendan Howley, reviewing After
the Rain: How the West Lost the East by Sam Vaknin.

For us in the West, the Balkans are a kind of condensed Russia, dark,
knotted, unknowable. Macedonia, where author Sam Vaknin is an economics
advisor to the government, is the fulcrum of the Balkans, historically the
most polarized and violent of the Balkan mini-states; Macedonian terrorists
fomented a guerilla war in the eerily beautiful country south of Serbia in
1912 and set in motion the events which culminated in the assassination of
Archduke Franz-Josef and his wife in Sarajevo in July 1914.
The roundrobin Bosnian wars and the recent Kosovo campaign created a number
of subgenres of writing about the Balkans: the exegesis of war crimes;
deconstructions of the blood imperative expressed in ancient enmities still
on the boil; propaganda by all sides. Most Western journalism on the Balkans
is well-intentioned but often dangerously narrow in compass. In the media
surrounding the bombing campaigns against the Serbs in 1993 and again in
1999, the West's reportage was often dismally biased, largely through
ignorance, lack of real access, and the consequent temptation to scoop at
all costs.
This opened the doors to the likes of the KLA, an avowed terrorist
organization (now, it seems, armed and bankrolled by a multinational
narcotics web) metamorphosed into a romantic army of liberation. That's but
one example. Since 1993, one Pultizer Prize winner has openly questioned the
objectivity of his own prize-winning (and policy-changing) work in Sarajevo,
and a senior BBC-TV assignment editor has likewise questioned that esteemed
newsgathering organization's failures - such as failing to balance reports
of Serb atrocities at Sarajevo with Croat atrocities at Mostar - during the
Bosnian wars.
No, the Balkans are not a place where one can simply parachute in and start
writing and filming and hope to be relaying to an uncomprehending,
comfortable audience at home something like the truth. But then what is
journalism to be in a region so marinated in internecine conflict that there
may well be no single reportable truth?
I first met a Macedonian in a Toronto parking garage late one winter's night
after an evening at the theatre. He had maps and flags on his grimy wall and
spoke at once poetically and brutally about his lifelong enemies so far
away. He was in his late forties, a grandfather-to-be, who, when he
discovered I had been to Serbia and Montenegro in 1993, wanted to know what
I thought of the women there, rather as if I'd been to a new wing of some
distant human zoo. He proceeded, in an easy, conversational way, to detail
for some long minutes his hatred of these women, who had done nothing to him
that he chose to mention. His rant was as chilling as it was base. I am by
no means singling out Macedonians in this: I have been subjected to this
off-hand barbarism dozens of times in the Balkans, as has many a writer. A
Croat professor told me that Muslims are best set against one another, to
save Christians the trouble of killing them off - and then served coffee on
superb bone china, in a bizarre setpiece of hospitality. One effusive Serb
priest told me much the same thing at a famous Montenegrin shrine one fine
afternoon and a moment later invited me to lunch with his bishop. "A very
cultured man," he told me, as if he himself knew what civilization is.
I mention this because, in a profound way that Vaknin understands, life is
very cheap in the Balkans because history is so dear. We in North America
fail to understand this in a realistic way, because our own history is
shrink-wrapped and diluted by the immigrant experience and vast geographic
isolation. Rather, as Vaknin so rightly underlines in his dissections of the
West's failure via the IMF to do very little correct in Russia but a great
deal that's pernicious, we persist in believing in a culpably ignorant way
that Balkan peacekeeping will be a finite commitment, or that streamlined
neoliberal economics can be grafted onto deeply crippled societies and
resurrect them in an eyeblink.
I agree with Vaknin that most of the Balkan diseases are not those of the
heart, but rather stem from corruption and - much the same thing - prolonged
economic idiocy. Tito has a great deal to answer for in the Balkans, not
least the avalanche of paper debt he allowed the West to sell his
kludged-together country in the name of keeping first Stalin and then
Khrushchev and finally Brezhnev out. The average guy, as Vaknin well knows,
does not go hunting for his neighbour with an AK-47 unless the wheels have
well and truly come off his world. When, eleven years after Tito died, the
fiscal fiction that was Yugoslavia disemboweled itself, the bloodthirstiness
was rooted in religious bigotry, that's true, but hate was the symptom, not
the disease. One should never forget that the first war in Yugoslavia was a
short and sharp one, fought for the Slovenian customs posts on the Austrian
frontier, fitting metaphor for the economic disaster suppurating under the
Yugoslav skin.
What distinguishes Vaknin's writings on the Balkans from those before him?
He is an Israeli, trained in physics, with supplemental degree work in
financial theory. His technical mindset and skeptical but humane Jewish
ethos permeate his writing. Both are exceedingly useful in deconstructing
the mess the pseudoscience of Communism left behind in the countries where
he's worked, and the mess that Western pseudoscience of the New World
Order/IMF sort is currently brewing.
Most writers who have taken on the Balkans with some proficiency have been
English or English-educated: Rebecca West, Nora Beloff, Neal Ascherson,
Misha Glenny. Vaknin's considerable intellectual armory reminds me of that
of the ex-MOSSAD people I met in Poland in the early 1990s, retired spooks
now running trading houses: utterly realistic, Talmudically concise in their
opinions, and damn relentless. Vaknin is living in a political hothouse in
Macedonia; his fertile output for Central Europe Review -
http://www.ce-review.org/ - is fired by the urgency I recall when I first
worked in post-communist Poland: events demand recording, but the sheer rate
of change of the society itself is as draining as it is exhilarating.
I admire Vaknin's ability to keep his intellectual balance, no mean feat in
the circumstances. He is in the right place at the right time, because when
Milosevic falls, there will be a reckoning that will shake Europe from
Berlin to the Bosporus to Moscow. What will the West do if there is a Serb
civil war? Or a Serb incursion in Montenegro, Serbia's last link to the
Adriatic - a mobilization requiring only that the barracks gate be open for
the tanks to roll into Podgorica and Cetinje?
My father urged me to prefer small books over thick tomes, arguing that
small books meant the author saw clearly enough to write precisely. It's
advice I have rarely had cause to regret. After the Rain is the title of the
most famous Macedonian film of the past decade, a circular parable of memory
and blood feud and journalism that many film people of my acquaintance swore
was a new kind of storytelling. I am not so sure, but I do know it lived on
in my imagination for days after I saw it. I have the same memory of
Vaknin's small and beautifully produced book.
After the Rain is that rarest of reading experiences: principled and
thoughtful and irritating and prescient, all at once. Vaknin will be proved
right or wrong as history grinds on in the Balkans, but his is a book I will
return to.


After the Rain is published by Narcissus Publications (Prague, 2000).
It is also available as an e-book from the CER eBookstore.

Brendan Howley is a novelist and screenwriter based in Stratford, Ontario.
He is writing a novel for Random House about the Dulles family based on the
investigative work of former US Justice Department Nazi hunter John Loftus.
Howley's first feature film, LUCYLIGHT, co-written with Sheila McCarthy, is
to be filmed in Newfoundland in 2001.
 back to the top

_______________________________________________________
Alb-Educ mailing list: Alb-Educ at alb-net.com
http://www.alb-net.com/mailman/listinfo/alb-educ