|
|
Despite everything, Yugoslav “totalitarianism” did not at all resemble the Bulgarian, Romanian or even Czechoslovakian or Hungarian one. Perhaps the definition by one of my friends portraying it as an “enlightened socialist monarchy” is the most suitable description. A regime which could send national poets and philosophers to jail or silence critical journalists was, of course, undemocratic, repressive and stupid, but it was not automatically a totalitarian communist dictatorship. Unlike the quiet majority, I have always, in the Voltairean sense, acted for those who thought differently to have the right to express it. But, I could not, neither then nor now, share the paranoid passions of national intellectuals, especially not their cultural racism which was often expressed by the syntagm “We Croats, one of the oldest cultural nations of Europe...”, we were dancing Viennese waltzes here while those “Byzantine savages” were not even using forks over there...
|