"The Eighteenth Example"

The Eighth Session seems to have become our new stronghold in mankind's most ordinary desire to place "things" in time - of course, later on in retrospect, when we reviewed its scope and noticed its inaugural importance for the subsequent tragic events. One, seemingly, routine communist plenum sprung into not only a party putsch, but also into our "eighteenth example"; Slobodan Milosevic carried out a Bonapartist coup on that occasion, and managed to reinforce the already greatly weakened legitimacy of the traditional communist movement (whose prostration can be ascribed, unfortunately, only to the natural demise of the One And Only) with nationalist sap which he, too, had until then greatly despised.

In that respect, Milosevic, as the founder of the "antibureaucratic revolution", really was the first in Eastern Europe. By invoking passions which unavoidably evoked first one, then another and now this third, but worst war yet, he succeeded in preventing (or postponing at least) the crack of communism in that distant past when its end was not clearly visible even in its expansive fatherland. The people of this country were most deeply humiliated when they agreed to have a communist apparatchik, brimming with Napoleonic ambition which evil intellectual spirits (who are now washing their hands of everything) imbued into his already quite unstable personality, sell them something for nothing. We did not lose freedom with the Eighth Session, rather many wretched persons, unused to or better still unprepared for serious consideration of real freedom, happily embraced freedom's paltry shadow: "freedom" to hate each other and wipe each other out for goals they are not quite clear about, "freedom" to forget how wretched, miserable and how more and more hungry they are, "freedom" to be squashed in public transport, to fear that somebody would beat them up to death round the next corner for reasons known only to that him... There is more of this: the destroyed social structure which had just started to take shape, hundreds of thousands of unhappy people without roots who wander around, maimed in every respect, the youth which is now flowing out on all sides, even suicide being better than returning to this sorrowful state... So, instead of the "easily promised speed", we have got a nice, easy death in installments void of uncertainty.