In July 2020, a series of eighteen essays appeared on the Disorder of Things blog under the umbrella title, Yugosplaining the World. The project brought together 30 former Yugoslavs in the West to reflect "on what their lived experience can teach the US and other countries that are facing outbursts of nationalism, violence, and racism and help provide some avenues for addressing it or understanding it better." The Yugosplaining symposium also aimed to reclaim the authors’ own narratives from those presented by outsiders in order "to show Yugoslavia as a historical political project in a useful and relevant light."
One year later, what did Yugosplaining get right (or wrong? What impact has the project had (if any)? What are its possible futures?
With Aida Hozić, Jelena Subotić, and Srdjan Vučetić.
The Remembering Yugoslavia podcast explores the memory of a country that no longer exists. Created, produced, and hosted by Peter Korchnak. New episodes two to three times per month.
In July 2020, a series of eighteen essays appeared on the Disorder of Things blog under the umbrella title, Yugosplaining the World. The project brought together 30 former Yugoslavs in the West to reflect "on what their lived experience can teach the US and other countries that are facing outbursts of nationalism, violence, and racism and help provide some avenues for addressing it or understanding it better." The Yugosplaining symposium also aimed to reclaim the authors’ own narratives from those presented by outsiders in order "to show Yugoslavia as a historical political project in a useful and relevant light."
One year later, what did Yugosplaining get right (or wrong? What impact has the project had (if any)? What are its possible futures?
With Aida Hozić, Jelena Subotić, and Srdjan Vučetić.
The Remembering Yugoslavia podcast explores the memory of a country that no longer exists. Created, produced, and hosted by Peter Korchnak. New episodes two to three times per month.
[JINGLE]
PETER KORCHNAK: This is Remembering Yugoslavia, the show exploring the memory of a country that no longer exists. I’m your guide Peter Korchnak.
Last July, a series of eighteen essays appeared on the Disorder of Things blog under the umbrella title, “Yugosplaining the World.”
AIDA HOZIĆ: So the origin story is probably Trumpism. And the fear and the angst and the kind of PTSD that he inspired in many of us who are from the former Yugoslavia.
PETER KORCHNAK: The project brought together thirty former Yugoslavs in the West to reflect—
JELENA SUBOTIĆ: —on what their lived experience can teach the US and other countries that are facing these outbursts of nationalism, violence, and racism and help provide some avenues for addressing it or understanding it better.
PETER KORCHNAK: Edited and managed by Aida Hozić, Jelena Subotić, and Srdjan Vučetić, the Yugosplaining symposium also aimed to reclaim the authors’ own narratives from those presented by outsiders in order—
SRDJAN VUČETIĆ: —to show Yugoslavia as a historical political project in a useful and relevant light.
PETER KORCHNAK: It’s been a year since Yugosplaining came out. I find the occasion a good opportunity to look back on what Yugosplaining got right (or wrong), what impact it has had (if any), and what its possible futures may be.
In today’s episode of Remembering Yugoslavia: Yugosplaining the World, one year later.
[BACKGROUND MUSIC – “Happy Birthday Effect: Toilet Roll Tube 2016” by All Sounds]
But before we mark one year since Yugosplaining the World, there’s another anniversary I’m celebrating in this episode. Can you guess what it is?
Yes, it has been a year since I launched Remembering Yugoslavia!
Over the past year I’ve worked hard and enjoyed bringing you 37 episodes, including this one, totalling some 26 hours of conversations (featuring 74 awesome humans), stories, analyses, and music exploring the memory of a country that no longer exists.
I’ve learned a lot. The technical aspects of making a podcast, of course. But more importantly, what Yugoslavia means to the world thirty years after disappearing from the map, what lessons it still has to teach, and what impact it still has on people’s lives. And speaking of learning, the podcast has made it to at least one university course curriculum.
I’ve received a lot of great feedback from listeners, via email, direct messages on Instagram, comments on Facebook, and reviews on Apple Podcasts.
“Your podcast has really moved me and allowed me to take a glimpse into this country that I love and yet barely know.” wrote Ivan from South Africa. “Your podcast is helping me so much in discovering the land my parents left in the 60s; it helps me to understand so much more of the life I may have had if things had been different.” wrote Tania from Australia. “[T]hank you for all the work you’ve done bringing the memory of the old country to those who know little or nothing about it, to those like myself who were too young to remember much of it,” wrote Bojan from Ireland.
You know, when I hear words like these, when I realize that what I do out of passion and for my own reasons, resonates with people from former Yugoslavia and beyond, scattered all over the world as you may be, it really makes it all the more meaningful. So thank you all for listening and the kind words and the inspiration.
What really stokes the flames of Remembering Yugoslavia is listener support. Researching, writing, interviewing, recording, editing, and publicizing Remembering Yugoslavia takes countless hours and dollars every month to sustain. Now this one-man labor of love is a one-year old. So if you’ve heard any ideas, information, inspiration here; if you’ve been educated, entertained, or encouraged in some way; or if you simply like to help keep Yugoslavia’s memory alive by means of this podcast, please consider making a donation today. However much you can afford, it means a great deal and helps even more than you can imagine. Of course, if you’ve already donated, thank you.
Head over to RememberingYugoslavia.com/Donate: become a sustaining supporter with an automatic monthly donation via Patreon or Paypal, or become a spontaneous one with a one-time contribution of any amount. It really doesn’t take any longer than the span of this interlude, a soundtrack for your generosity.
[MUSICAL INTERLUDE – “Barbara” by Detective Spook]
[05:27]
PETER KORCHNAK: Welcome back. And meet the co-editors of Yugosplaining.
[05:30]
AIDA HOZIĆ: My name is Aida Hozić, I’m an associate professor of international relations at the University of Florida. I was born in Belgrade, in Yugoslavia, in 1963.
[05:40]
JELENA SUBOTIĆ: My name is Jelena Subotić, I’m a professor of political science at Georgia State University in Atlanta. And I was also born in Belgrade, in 1970.
[05:49]
SRDJAN VUČETIĆ: My name is Srdjan Vučetić, born in Sarajevo, 1976, now a professor of international affairs at the University of Ottawa, Canada.
The Origina Story of Yugosplaining the World
[05:58]
PETER KORCHNAK: The story of Yugosplaining goes back five years.
[06:01]
AIDA HOZIĆ: So the origin story is probably Trumpism. And the fear and the angst and the kind of PTSD that he inspired in many of us who are from the former Yugoslavia. But it was also watching my friends, Americans, kind of grapple with the rise of Trumpism in complete disbelief and not knowing how to respond to it. And so my initial idea was that the Yugoslavs, who in one way or the other lived through similar outbursts and violence of nationalism should get together and, you know, offer some advice, basically, to Americans who are trying to organize at the time.
Then I approached Jelena, and then Jelena, Srdjan, and I met at the Millennium Conference. This was actually right before Trump actually came to power, 2015, when we sensed that this was coming.
We approached various different possible, you know, sponsors to help us organize and meet and have a discussion and conversation among these ex-Yugoslavs, who are living in the United States, on how to respond to this virulent nationalism here. No one wanted to give us any support really, so we started organizing by ourselves.
[07:06]
PETER KORCHNAK: The plan that emerged out of several years of percolating was to organize a forum at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in May 2020.
[07:13]
AIDA HOZIĆ: Then when we saw that we couldn’t meet, we kind of collectively solicited essays and short essays, and Srdjan kindly offered to host this on the Disorder of Things. I mean, there was really not that much of a kind of organization or… There was a lot of prodding, but we did not tell people what to write, if that makes any sense. And I think that that’s what made these essays so much more powerful and beautiful because they really came from the heart.
[07:39]
JELENA SUBOTIĆ: Mostly we presented this as an opportunity for people from the former Yugoslavia to reflect on what their lived experience can teach the US and other countries primarily in the West but not only in the West, that are facing these outbursts of nationalism, violence, and racism, and what our experience can bring to this discussion and help provide some avenues for addressing it or understanding it better.
And also the flip side, to see if, upon reflection, so many years after the collapse of Yugoslavia, what’s going on now in these other countries can also help illuminate from this vantage point and help us understand our own experience a little bit better.
And we left that very open to people’s disciplinary priorities and preferences. And there were people who approached this from the vantage point of political science or international relations, but others from the vantage point of art or photography or literature or poetry or architecture or anthropology and any other form that they wanted to express this in.
[08:56]
SRDJAN VUČETIĆ: The topic of discussion was kind of a given: our history of war and by that I mean genocide massacre, forced expulsion, exile. All of this experience we knew what it was organized in the name of: it was ethnonationalism, fascism, and the like. And we felt this has educated us, or should have educated us, to recognize and stand up to that violence when it happens to us again, but also to others, Americans, among others, and it makes us intellectually and morally obligated to speak and act against it. And really, the instructions were minimal. Everyone knew what to do, whoever participated in the project.
[09:38]
PETER KORCHNAK: What united the people the trio had approached to help Yugosplain the world was being from former Yugoslavia and having been educated or now living slash working in exile in the so-called West.
[09:48]
SRDJAN VUČETIĆ: To be honest, we were trying to get something approximating a representative sample of the old country. So in this original email that had you know, 50-60 people, I think, we were conscious of the fact that we wanted as many you know, folks claiming some kind of Yugoslav or ex-Yugoslav experience or identity to be present. From Ljubljana to Skopje to Priština. And we ended up perhaps reproducing a familiar power structure that smacks of old structural inequalities of Yugoslavia. And that was one of the issues that came up on Day One.
[10:25]
PETER KORCHNAK: By my quick and likely inaccurate count, 13 of the contributors are from Bosnia and Herzegovina, 7 from Serbia, 4 from Slovenia, 3 from Croatia, two from North Macedonia, one from Kosovo, and none from Montenegro. The editors received a number of critiques of this distribution. None more eloquent than that from Vjosa Musliu, from Kosovo, who pointed out how “class, race, socio-economic disparities…are all constitutive of our understanding of what Yugoslavia was and the memory of it today;” that the term Yugoslavia is in itself inherently colonial “bound to alienate, silence, and limit subjects and subjectivities;” and that it “renders us as scholars and our multiple other identities into a memory of a federation.” You could certainly direct this critique to this podcast of course, but let’s stick with Yugosplaining here today.
Summarizing the essays in Yugosplaining the World, wide in their range as they are, would take an entire episode of Remembering Yugoslavia. Having read them a year ago and again for this episode, I have my own favorites and biases. So I encourage you to read each and every one of them for yourself. Type “Disorder of Things AND Yugosplaining” in your favorite search engine and you’ll get there.
What I will say is that I couldn’t help but detect a great degree of alarm that ran through the pieces like a line on the floor marking an emergency exit route.
[11:41]
AIDA HOZIĆ: I think a lot of what informed these essays was that many of us—and as you can see, we are from very different generations, some people were born actually just as the war started, who participated in the project, whereas some of us and I’m the oldest, I could watch that unfolding through the 1980s—that a lot of what we were writing about was actually also about that naivete and not seeing the wars come about. So the alarmism was directed to some degree to people who are still not seeing that possibility of breakup or violence here in the United States, regardless of the fact that it’s actually already happening, if I may say.
You know, the rift between the blue and the red states is really kind of getting deeper and deeper every day. And, you know, the violence on the streets is frankly kind of, you know, very often close to a civil war in practice. Personally, I have always been fascinated by the ability of Americans, particularly of Americans, not to see what’s happening amidst them, ever since I came to this country.
[12:54]
JELENA SUBOTIĆ: I think partly what the project was about is to break this myth that what happened in Yugoslavia is kind of sui generis. It’s something that happened in the Balkans, always violent, bad things always happen, it was tragic, but it has nothing to do with us, it has nothing to do with anybody else, it’s nothing that can happen anywhere else. It’s just something unique to the area.
And I think we very successfully managed to pierce that myth and say, no, actually, if you follow some of the patterns that we’re describing, in various ways, those patterns can be replicated in other countries, including countries that we would consider consolidated democracies. So I think that that was a point of interest for a lot of people who are very concerned about erosion and destruction of democracy in many countries that until recently we thought were pretty stable.
[13:45]
SRDJAN VUČETIĆ: The purpose of Yugosplaining was kind of similar to the purpose of your project, Peter, which is to to show Yugoslavia as a historical political project in a useful and relevant light. Not only should it not be bracketed out or temporized or explained away, but you know, it should be used as a carrier of a message to everyone in the United States, elsewhere, friends and colleagues in countries where all of us find ourselves in, and especially address this idea of exceptionalism. It’s a problematic concept in almost any context.
Yugosplaining vs. Westernsplaining
[14:20]
PETER KORCHNAK: In one of the essays, a sextet of artists underscores how Yugosplaining is in fact a significant element in their art. “Yugosplaining in our work is meant to counter forms of Westernsplaining,” they wrote. Meaning, people from outside the region telling those from or in the region what’s what. The term Yugosplaining may be a bit ironic here, Srdjan told Al-Jazeera Balkans, but explaining as such always has some specifics of its own.
[14:43]
JELENA SUBOTIĆ: Yes, I mean, the region has been Westernsplained forever. And there were always experts with very little knowledge, or very superficial knowledge, making very broad claims and statements that then become taken as conventional wisdom, and then in the extreme examples even become part of actual, you know, international policy. And yeah, we’re all sick of it, I think and tired of being told what we had experienced by others who, you know, really not, not only experienced it, but even had the kind of a marginal connection to it. So that certainly was part of the experience.
Just a caution, I guess, is that I sometimes feel that some of this outrage against Western mistakes can be a little bit of a waste of time, only in the sense that the outrage then kind of becomes its own thing. And I think we also forget how often people in the region make, you know, sweeping claims about the West or other countries in the region without knowing much about them either. And so I think there’s a lot of ignorance going around, it’s not only one directional. It’s not as if, you know, when I talk to people in the region, they make very nuanced claims about American politics, and know the differences between the parties and all of that. So I think some of this generalization goes in multiple directions. And it’s not just from the West to the East.
But I absolutely do think that part of our motivation was not so much the Westernsplaining but, as I said before, this idea that what happened in Yugoslavia was unconnected from anywhere else and it’s like a completely unique case that nothing can be learned from for the broader world. And I think that was— we really strongly rejected that argument. And the project was, at least for me, motivated in large part by putting this the story of Yugoslavia into the larger historical timeline and explain really, what what are some of the implications of it for how we understand unraveling of countries and democracies and political systems in other places.
[16:48]
AIDA HOZIĆ: Just the very idea that we were actually speaking from that Yugoslav experience about America is also in, in and of itself, dismantling that, you know, boundary between the insiders and the outsiders. I think the sensitivity of even some of our colleagues, who work on the Balkans who’ve done some fantastic work, that this was exclusionary was really not about saying that someone who comes from the outside cannot understand what’s happening in Yugoslavia. In some cases, they probably can understand that much better than many of us can, just like we pretend to understand America perhaps better than Americans can.
But I think that there was a part here, which was important of kind of reclaiming the voice, okay, that in many of these situations, we have found ourselves quite literally in places in conferences and meetings, where someone would speak over us, you know, and where we would not be heard, and where, you know, you would have the preference for the kind of the authoritive [sic] voices that come from elsewhere in the West over these past three decades has actually been something that has led to this, this feeling that, that we really can’t speak for ourselves.
And I think that that’s important; it’s important not for Yugoslavia only, I think it’s very important for the entire kind of Central or Central Eastern Europe, for the post-communist world, you know, to end this endless period of transition, in which the outside experts are the ones who are explaining the region to you whereas the insiders are there only to provide kind of empirical knowledge, to be informers. There was an attempt here to stop just being informers and kind of reclaim the knowledge that we have about both the region but also about the rest of the world as well.
The Yugosplaining Talk
[18:37]
PETER KORCHNAK: Yugosplaining garnered some media coverage. Aside from the aforementioned piece in Al Jazeera Balkans, Vjekoslav Perica penned a long review on the Peščanik blog where he judged the Yugosplainers’ case to be overrated and their arguments interesting but questionable and far from fresh. The historian Catherine Baker, who by the way in 2016 drew parallels between Brexit and Yugoslavia’s breakup, wrote a thoughtful review as well.
As you might expect, the bulk of the debate the project engendered took place on social media, spurred in large part by the editors and contributors and their networks.
And, the editor of The Intercept, Peter Maass tweeted, “A gift to our civilization is this series of essays on “Yugosplaining the World.” If you want a reason to not be depressed about the anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide, or about the state of things in America and elsewhere, dip into these essays.”
The writer Jonathan Bousfield tweeted “Pretty much everything in the #Yugosplaining series deserves a second read.” and “Increasingly convinced that the outstanding publishing project of the year so far is the #yugosplaining series… All articles had urgent things to say and were fantastically written.”
And this past February, Stanford University convened an online panel to discuss the project; unfortunately I was unable to obtain a recording by this episode’s deadline.
Now, here we are, one year later, and having witnessed the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, the essays bring to mind the phrase, “I told you so.”
[19:58]
SRDJAN VUČETIĆ: Yes, I mean, the told-you-so aspect of it was inevitable. Many of us saw where Trumpism was going.
[20:08]
PETER KORCHNAK: The most prominent of these voices and one of the Yugosplainers, Alexandar Hemon, rang alarm bells as early as February 2016. In a piece for the Rolling Stone magazine, he cautioned against dismissing Trump as a clown because he, Hemon, had seen how dismissing the later convicted war criminal Vojislav Šešelj as a buffoon backfired. I quote, “Accepting the possibility that someone like Šešelj (or Trump) could advance so rapidly from bombast to mass murder requires questioning the fabric of reality before it unravels and shows itself to be fragile and disastrously dependent on an assumed ethical consensus. What I’ve learned is that people are addicted to the inertia of their common reality, to the desperate belief that everything shall continue as it is simply because it’s been going fine up to this point. Šešelj taught me what lies beyond this point. Trump and his troops are killers in making.”
Hemon wrote on the subject of impending political violence again in LitHub. And his May 2020 article for The Intercept was titled, “Trump’s Nationalism Advances on a Predictable Trajectory to Violence. His Supporters Will Kill When They’re Told To.”
Hemon opens his Yugosplaining piece titled “Speaking Trumpese” with these words: “As displaced former Yugoslavs in today’s America wake up every day to an avalanche of violent aggression on common humanity, accompanied and enhanced by maliciously outrageous lies, they’re likely to find the moronic Trumpian inferno resembling a preamble to war.” And he ends with, “Only after the fact of war did I realize that the frequency of nonsense was really the frequency of violence.”
[21:38]
SRDJAN VUČETIĆ: So basically since then, until we started doing this project, there had been essays written by Yugoslavs saying, you should worry about mass violence when it comes to election, which is exactly kind of what happened on the evening of January 6, when most of us felt that democracy, peace, and order was over. Rioters had just invaded the Capitol Building as a sitting American president was egging them on, and they were organized, they were motivated. They were anti-system or anti regime mob, they were trying to block the process of democracy itself. And, obviously, you know, we’ve lived through all of that. So here we are to say that, you know, the cloud of doubt over all of this is is not it’s not gone away; the threat is ever present. And it’s not just threatening the United States, it’s threatening is the entire system that we’d like to call you know, the West.
Yugosplaining (and) Today
[22:39]
PETER KORCHNAK: After four years of Trump it seems a sort of quietness, or at least more hushed tones of better manners, has descended upon American politics. It could be I’m just in my own filter bubble but at times I even sense a bit of complacency, like we dodged a bullet by not re-electing the guy and it’s all good now.
To be fair, there are voices in the US, smarter and better informed than I am, raising alarm about the erosion of democracy. Just as I was writing these words The New Republic ran an opinion piece with the headline, “We’re Already Forgetting the Trump Era. His Supporters Won’t Forget Us.” But since the bulk of these warnings tends to come from the left flanks of the left, I do wonder how the Yugosplainers see this post-Trump period.
[23:17]
JELENA SUBOTIĆ: I certainly don’t believe, and I’m pretty sure that Aida and Srdjan either don’t believe, that anything has been dodged. Yes, certainly this is a much better outcome, I mean obviously, that’s too obvious to point out, but the structural problems that led to Trump, if anything, have deepened. So the way that I feel, I guess emotionally even though things are quieter, I feel that it’s like, you know, you’re kind of underwater and you go to catch [a] breath for, you know, 12 months, and then there’s another collapse, because, you know, this is just a little maybe inter-period of peace before, you know, we start to see the consequences of voter suppression in the midterms and, you know, structural advantage for minority rule and real erosion of democracy in its most fundamental way. And so, if anything, this actually should be the perfect moment to continue the work because it is a little bit quiet, and we have time to not deal with kind of the daily atrocity but to plan for what might be [a] more long-term problem for democratic governance.
I don’t know about the complacency part. I think— I’m not even sure I would use the word complacency. I would say maybe people are catching their breath. Because I just think that anybody who’s followed and has thought through the real political problems in the United States and other countries that are seeing the backsliding on democracy, that this is not something that is going away. The problems are too structurally embedded in the political system to just go away with one person who, again, has not really disappeared because there’s an entire political movement that continues to be loyal to him and continues to capture the imagination of 30 to 40 percent of Americans.
[25:09]
AIDA HOZIĆ: The problem was never Trump himself; Trump was an accelerator. This process of both really deep, profound structural inequalities, but then also of kind of ever present danger of nationalism, of elite dissociation, of democratic deficit, all of these issues were with us, you know, very much since, at least since the end of the Cold War. And that’s precisely why Yugoslavia was important because at that time, it was explained as a sui generis thing, it was explained as something that happened in this backwater of the Balkans. If you put it back into the narrative of the last 30 years of, you know, since the end of the Cold War, then you realize that perhaps these three decades were far from being this wonderful kind of belle epoque as some of my friends in Central Eastern Europe think, but that they were very problematic for a number of people, not just in that part of the world, but elsewhere as well. I mean, there was a tremendous amount of hypocrisy, political hypocrisy, that was structural, you know, not just kind of one person lying, but really structural hypocrisy over the last three decades. And this is what we are seeing the fruits of right now.
People are making now these comparisons to—and those who understand Yugoslavia, know Yugoslavia, will figure out what I’m saying—there are comparisons to Ante Marković, between Biden and Ante Marković—
[26:33]
PETER KORCHNAK: Ante Marković was Yugoslavia’s last federal prime minister. In 1989 and 1990 he instituted a set of popular economic reforms and (ultimately unsuccessfully) worked to preserve the country as a federation and transform it into a democracy.
[26:47]
AIDA HOZIĆ: This is exactly that moment, when you kind of think you’re catching your breath, and, you know, you focus primarily on the economy because you think that all these political issues will go away if you just fix the economy, and you give people some money in their pockets.
In the meantime, the global right, not just American right, keeps on organizing. And at this point, I think it’s far better, it has a much greater capacity for organization for, you know, for linking across borders, for learning from each other across borders, than a very disorganized left does.
[27:20]
SRDJAN VUČETIĆ: To me, Yugoslavia is in addition to being a historical political project, it’s also a cultural space that keeps reproducing itself, you know, under various monikers. It’s a conduit for the circulation of ideas, but also of emotions, right, in a sense of affect and feeling, right, so you constantly have that.
And why? Well, sort of what we’re talking about just now, right, is Trump is out. But what does that really mean, right? To say that Republicans have doubled down on Trumpism and on policies based on Trumpism is simply an understatement, right? And so most, most folks in this Yugo crowd who happened to be on this thing called the left would agree with that statement, right? They would look at Republican elected officials, they would look at Republican voters, they would look at you know what’s happening in Jelena’s, Georgia. I mean, in January, Georgia was like the poster child for the great democratic victory, for Ante Marković, and now it’s what, Biden called it the example of the Jim Crow in the 21st century.
We those are the kinds of things that you know, we really constantly concentrate our collective mind, so to speak, and that’s where this Yugo conduit for circulation of ideas and emotions comes in for me.
The Future of Yugosplaining
[28:42]
PETER KORCHNAK: As for the future of Yugosplaining, in the coda post last July the editors invited others to engage in the project, pledged to continue building upon the network of authors, and expressed interest in hearing from the younger generation of scholars to speak up and Yugosplain. One year later—
[28:57]
AIDA HOZIĆ: I can just say that we are ambivalent. We’ve been going back and forth on kind of plans on whether to continue, whether to do an edited volume, to kind of at least mark the moment when these voices were assembled. I think some of that really does depend on how to attract new contributors, how to, you know, expand the range of people who are participating and have participated. All three of us were very busy with other things over this past couple of months and this pandemic year.
So it’s really still an open question. Do you want to freeze the moment? Do you want to expand on the moment? Or do you just leave it as is?
[BACKGROUND MUSIC – “Rubikovata sfera” by Detective Spook]
[29:48]
PETER KORCHNAK: I’ve had a couple of Yugosplainers on the show and a few more are already on the schedule to share their respective expertise in a range of stories. That their experience of Yugoslavia’s breakup and wars remains relevant and applicable to what we’ve seen here in the US and elsewhere since last year adds a strange flavor to those conversations.
When I watched the events at the US Capitol this past January, I was upset, I was distraught, I was worried. And I continued to be worried when hearing people around me dismiss the insurgents as a misled minority or mock their intelligence. I thought, be they the way they are, they have a purpose, they have a leader, and they have guns, and the next one—the attack, the leader—will be worse.
Having experienced Yugoslavia’s breakup from afar, I can’t say I connected its lessons with the events in the US quite as directly as the Yugosplainers. But I did see in those scenes from the Capitol a replay of so many similar events I’ve watched over the years in other places around the world. In fact, back in 2016-2017, I saw great many parallels between Trump and my own country’s authoritarian in the 1990s, Vladimír Mečiar.
I tend to focus on Yugoslavia’s positives on this show and I tend to avoid talking about its disintegration. This is Remembering Yugoslavia, not Remembering Yugoslavia’s Breakup, after all. But I can’t deny the end of Yugoslavia and how it came about constitutes both Yugoslavia’s memory and its legacy. The rest of us better stay vigilant.
[BACKGROUND MUSIC – “Rainmaker” by Petar Alargić]
[31:26]
PETER KORCHNAK: Next on Remembering Yugoslavia:
VLADIMIR KULIĆ: We deliberately structured the exhibition in a kind of political way, if you will.
The 2018 exhibition “Toward a Concrete Utopia” at the Museum of Modern Art gave the Yugoslav architecture an unprecedented boost. What did the exhibition aim to accomplish? What has been its impact in the region and beyond? And why should anyone care?
On the next episode of Remembering Yugoslavia we’ll venture “Toward a Concrete Utopia.”
Tune in wherever you listen to podcasts and subscribe to make sure you don’t miss out.
[OUTRO MUSIC]
[32:06]
PETER KORCHNAK: That’s all for this episode of Remembering Yugoslavia, thank you for listening. Find additional information, links, and the transcript of this episode at RememberingYugoslavia.com/Podcast.
And once you’ve arrived at the Remembering Yugoslavia website, make your next stop the Donate page and celebrate this podcast’s one-year anniversary with a contribution. Whether you sign on to be a sustaining monthly supporter or a one-time spontaneous fan, every dollar, pound, euro, kroner, counts.
Outro music courtesy of Robert Petrić. Additional music by Detective Spook. Music by Petar Alargić and All Sounds licensed under Creative Commons. Special thanks to Martin Petkovski and Bojana Videkanić.
I am Peter Korchňak.
Ćao!