Veljko's Blog

As regards yesterday's individuality, one must limit the argument, at this point, to Western or quasi-Western democracies. Though we like to think that we are oppressed, mankind has more opportunities for individual expression than ever before! Just twenty years ago, there was NO internet. Accordingly, there was NO Facebook and NO YouTube-no outlet where we could express ourselves for all the world to see. Today, we have all of the artistic tools at our disposal that we had twenty years ago-PLUS some that we did not. If we speak about the oppression of government, twenty years ago, could we just “log on” to a web site and download the text of the budget of our country? Could we read the annual report of any major company in the world? Could we access libraries halfway around the world at the click of a mouse or the touch of a screen? Granted, there are several social groups that suffer unabated oppression in many countries. I have in mind, first and foremost, the LGBT p...

From the No-Globals, through the Occupy Wall Street Movement, on to the Stop ACTA Movement, the revolutionaries of our time are not linked by a common thread. They are linked by a common rope, off of which only a few individual threads succeed in peeling off. The slogans and the publicly manifested roots of today's mass protests are well-known. There is a struggle. A struggle against a faceless, nameless, new world order (although the New World Order is a name, it is not the name of any actual order, much less a definition or description thereof, novelty not being, in and of itself, substance).  According to revolutionary legend, that new world order (or New World Order) seeks to dominate and enslave the human race. It aims to crush hard-earned and battle-won human rights. It desires the elimination of privacy and individuality. Just like Huxley's nightmarish Brave New World, it wants to make us all the same or, at best, all the same within a given social class....

I could not help laughing bitterly out loud when I read, on the website of B92, one of Serbia's leading media outlet, a story picked up from Alex Jones' Infowars ( http://www.infowars.com/occupy-wall-street-affiliated-with-professional-revolutionary-organization-otpor-cia/ ). The fact that a reputable, mainstream media outlet relies on Alex Jones as a news source was not the reason I was laughing this time, oddly enough. The gist of the (conspiracy) story is as follows: the shadow powers in America, possibly the CIA or a similar organisation, have procured the services of the leaders of Serbia's "Otpor" (Resistance) movement-yes, the same one that was instrumental in bringing down Milosevic in 2000! The part of the conspiracy theory that connects Otpor to foreign agents is well-known. This is not, of course, the first time that allegations of Otpor involvement outside of Serbia have been made. Serbian "know-how" has also been linked by some media o...

I'm back! Sorry to have been away so long...it's the day job that's been giving me a headache, you see. My trouble of the day comes from a joke a man made last night: he told me that he is politically a "fascist liberal." Go figure.... As we say in Serbia: every joke is half true. That got me wondering...what, if anything, could fascist liberalism be and how did we get to making such jokes in the first place? The absence of ideology from modern politics is plain to see. We have right wing parties that speak for the workers, left wing parties that are "business friendly".... Nobody wants to make any radical moves either to the left or to the right.... The revolutionaries of our day are people who fight against existing structures without any idea of their own (the anti-global movement, or how to present being an urban bum as a political statement). Alternatively, they fight for causes based on evidence churned out by the global elite (e....