Someone please notify Guinness: we've broken another world record. We have a session of a political party that has been going on for thirty-seven years. Not a party - a session! It started on September 23, 1987, and it never ended. Maybe not, at least until the Sun turns into a red dwarf. The session - I suspect that there are more and more people who don't know it - is called the Eighth, and it is held by something called the Central Committee of the Union of Communists of Serbia.
Neither that party nor its committee have existed for a long time. All the main protagonists of the session have long since died, except for those who were killed. That is, the main winner of the session had its main loser executed and buried in the forest like some mangy beast, thirteen years after the beginning of the session. Winner, loser? Yes, the outcome of the session was clear already on its second day; the wiser will say that the outcome was clear even before the start: such sessions are not convened before the winner is known. Well then, why is it still going on?! Eh... the shorter version of the answer is that we can no longer live without the Eighth Session, and that its purpose, after all, was not to end once but to never end. The longer version of the answer is every one of these mighty thousand days since we've been living in it.
Ivica Dacic he likes to imagine that since Slobodan Milošević was permanently prevented by the victory of nature over society, he is the one presiding over this historical phase of the Eighth Session. It's an illusion: he doesn't have that format. I mean, it has volume but it's practically empty of content, so it would blow away like a balloon if it wasn't tied to some stronger and more grounded object. But don't worry about him, he always knew how to fasten himself well and fasten himself. But one thing must be acknowledged: he never abandoned or betrayed the ideas and ideals of the Eighth Session. So, could it have been otherwise? Yes, he is not a genius, but he perfectly understood that in the world before or without the Eighth Session, he could not be anyone and nothing, possibly a secondary character from a domestic television series in the style of the early seventies, like Burdus or Citizens of Luga Village. The one who pinches the songstress gets a slap and goes into oblivion. And for the check-out rush hour, if they remember it - they do.
Anyway, Ivica Dacic, for whom the day of the beginning of the Eighth Session is a red letter in the calendar, these days he uttered several words and thoughts that should be thought about carefully, not because they are correct but because they are correct. Sometimes there is no deeper difference in the world than the one between correct and correct... He said, namely, that the Eighth Session, with its outcome, long-handedly traced the path of Serbia (and radically changed the direction of its previous movement), which is true, he could not be more precise. He also said that Serbia (despite occasional short deviations from the path) is still on the road to the Eighth Session, which, the session, is still going on, only the generations of its protagonists are changing. I wonder, by the way, if any of the personnel who were in charge of refilling the doses of acid water in September 1987 are still in service? Namely, professional debaters then worked on sour water; today, one would say, they work more on coke.
Ivica D. said more sadly accurate things, but one is by far the most important: "The Serbian state leadership then, for the first time since 1918, sided with Serbia, not Yugoslavia." Why is this sentence so important? Because it is de facto the first to clearly and unequivocally "from the other side" confirm what the "losers of the Eighth Session" and those who will later be declared, justified or not, their ideological successors have been claiming all along.
First, it "takes sides" where there is a conflict. With the eighth session, the conflict between Serbia and Yugoslavia opens (which in the following stages turns into a schism, then into a war). Ethnic nationalism and the point of view through which any historical or current controversy is interpreted from all official places is starting to be radically narrowed down to what many years later - shall we say, both Ivica and us: The eighth session is still going on! - one professor, raving about the long-ago blunders of the young Crnjanski, called it the "Serbian point of view".
It would not be so unusual - it also happened in better houses - if it was not all the time covered with enormous layers of hypocrisy. Namely, the eight-seventh party claimed all the time that they were the only ones defending Yugoslavia, and that everyone else was destroying it. As they defended her, so they defended her. And in that pathological and monumental lie, they were so callous that they even called the provisional state created on the ruins of Yugoslavia - Yugoslavia.
Well, Freud would also be speechless there.
What is even more bizarre is that at the same cost they set back the epoch and embarrassed Serbia, the one "on whose side they stood". So much so that even to this day she cannot begin to recover, but sinks deeper and deeper into the abyss of disorientation and self-delusion. And how long will it be like that? Well, at least until the Eighth Session is finally over.
