An interview with Boris Nad
Open Revolt
The Revolution is Global. Case in point Serbian author, artist and revolutionary thinker Boris Nad. Open Revolt is happy to present this brief conversation between Boris and our own James Porrazzo.
Boris, thank you for the interview. To be honest we’re very excited about it. For our readers of Open Revolt who may be unfamiliar with your work, can you tell us a little bit about your history in “radical politics”?
First of all, thank you for giving me the opportunity to address to your readers in this manner, which for me is a special pleasure.
My interest in, as you say, “Radical politics” was particularly encouraged by extreme circumstances during nineties of past century: the dismemberment of Yugoslavia and the wars led for her heritage. Only at first cursory sight, those were “retrograde”, nationalistic and tribal conflicts.
In fact, the interests of capital for a radical reconfiguration of geopolitical space of the Balkans were hiding behind them. At its deepest level, it was a brutal aggression of Atlantism against Eurasia; war against identity, sovereignty, tradition and heritage of the people of the former Yugoslavia, the war of the sea monster Leviathan against Behemoth – land animal. Whether they are aware of it or not, in this conflict Serbs took up the position of the land, of Eurasia against Atlantism.
The book “Time of Empires” (Belgrade, 2002) presents a selection of texts from that period, published in the press of that time. “Time of Empires” was created in collaboration with renowned Serbian thinker, writer and painter Dragoš Kalajić, who also wrote the foreword for the book. Positions presented here are very clear: the return to the Eurasian geopolitics against Atlantism and global capitalism, for tradition, self-awareness and identity. There is also a rejection of the division into the left and right, the adoption of a peculiar “third way”; in today’s terms, this corresponds to the “fourth political theory.” Also, in the early nineties I had the opportunity to meet with the works of Alexander Dugin, who very strongly supported the Serbian side from the point of continental Eurasian geopolitics. The logic of “great spaces” is something that fits into the concept of the “Time of Empires”, where one of the basic thesis is that the era of nation-states has passed, and that the unipolar world in which the United States plays the role of inviolable global hegemon or “world policeman “, is on the wane, and will be replaced by a multipolar world, made up of blocks of the states of imperial scales. It is happening today, before our eyes. The era of United States as a planetary hegemon has irrevocably expired.
The circumstances at the time were extreme, but even now are not much better. Of course, it is about that the wars in the Balkans were just one of the episodes of the Third World War, which continues today in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria … It is war led by USA with its satellites against “the rest of the world,” but our position is by no means anti-American – it is on the contrary, since the American people is the first victim of American plutocracy.
“Time of Empires” is a political book, but its bases are metapolitical. It was subsequently presented in treatise “The idea of the center” (which was published in Serbia in 2008 and again in 2010), where some chapters are devoted to hyperborean myths, to war and peace, to technocracy, to sacred history, to the East and the West, to Land and Ocean, to order and chaos, to language as discourse of beings, to myth and tradition…
Your essay “The Return of the myth” is, in our opinion, one of the key texts of your homonymous book, which was published in Serbia in 2010. This text is now available in English translation. Can you give us a short presentation of its basic ideas?
According to a very rooted belief, totalitarianism was defeated in 1945 with the triumph over the Third Reich, or in 1989 with the fall of Berlin Wall, which is, from my perspective, “overly optimistic view of history.”
The idea expressed in “The Return of myth” is diametrically opposite: totalitarianism could not be defeated by destruction of the Soviet Union, because the notorious Eastern totalitarianism is only a reaction to the Western totalitarianism. In a nutshell: its deep roots should be sought in schism, therefore in the western version of Christianity, and then in the Reformation, which, in the end, produced Protestant fundamentalism. Its natural and logical completion is the “consumer civilization”, embodied in today’s USA or EU, which is apparently forming on the American model, and this is precisely the technocracy, in which the man is only the “consumer”, customer; addition of large technological systems. In this sense, it really is possible to speak of the “end of history” (of course, in a way different from that of Marx or Fukuyama). “Posthistory” differs from history in the fact that man here really is not a sovereign or lord; he becomes a toy in the hands of unknown forces. In mature historical period man ruled himself and the history was a consequence of his acts, thoughts, passions or will. Now something completely different and diversely is looming up: it is a technocratic utopia, totalitarianism in its final form, and what it actually is and how it will evolve in the future we can discern through the contemporary United States of America or the European Union. It should be underlined that neither the U.S. nor the EU has been created on the basis of an idea, but as a mere market – not out of courage and strength, but out of selfishness, cowardice and weakness. That is, in the last instance, only the result of internal capitulation of modern man.
All this implies deep changes in art, in culture in general, which is gradually turning into a “subculture”, a kind of commercial activities or social engineering, which will have the effect of anesthesia on its consumers, or drugs that relieve the utopian fantasies of the masses.
I would like to briefly touch on your novel “Victor’s Feast” (published in 2005), which is very reminiscent of Ernst Jünger’s “On the Marble Cliffs“.
That book can be seen as part of the anti-utopian literature, but, in contrast to Orwell’s, Zamyatin’s or Huxley’s anti-utopias, it does not terminate by any permanent condition. Therefore, Jünger’s “On the Marble Cliffs” or “Heliopolis” are closer to it than, for example, Orwell’s book. It’s also a story about the loss of freedom, which is completely voluntarily or with relief accepted by the most, while minority irreconcilably and bitterly opposes to it. Its heroes are constantly fighting for their own freedom and have just as much freedom as they themselves manage to cope.
One of the protagonists in “Feast” is dictator Big Carpenter, as one of the archetypal characters of dictators and destroyers, which really resembles the Head Forester from Jünger’s book. He is accompanied by his “redcoats”; his foray ends by destroying one highly developed civilization. His name associates him with the Carpenter Brotherhood, where carpenter handicraft symbolizes the art of creating neophytes from the crowd of “unsophisticated.” In the novel, he brutally opposes to Regent, whose totalitarianism is a bit “old-fashioned”, “more liberal” and a bit “historically misplaced.” In fact, both are just two sides of the same things.
Carpenter described in the book has the character traits of Yugoslav dictator Tito, and it also may look like the personification of Uncle Sam, just as this almost mythical character of vile and unscrupulous thug with a mask of a goody-good is perceived by oppressed all across the globe.
Boris care to leave us with some words for the “American” Globalists?
Oh, America, the land of outcasts. Oh, America, the land of the free, the land of opportunities and promises. Faces from billboards. Commercials, TV show. Asthmatic buffalo chests. Indian shadows, cemeteries, military cemeteries with thousands and thousands of identical, white crosses. The two towers, going down in flames. Warriors cyborgs equipped with unimaginable weapons, aircraft carriers, stranded in warm seas, somewhere near the Persian coasts… Explosions, ominous mushrooms which rise over the Pacific Ocean.
Good and Evil. The Devil and God, in whom you believe.
Amazing country, isolated island on the west of the world. Thousands of miles of empty roads, red mountains of Nevada and Arizona. Warm, bloody sky of the South. The poison from the desert. Drums and fires at night. Wet dusk. Whiskey Bar. Oh, America, obsessed with morality, faith in God, Good and Evil, you’re just a misunderstanding. You are misunderstanding of history and faith, faith in God, faith in history and its meaning, point of curved conglutination. Your face is both the innocent mask of Good and the mask of pure Evil. You have no soul, nor would you ever could have. You are cruel in your striving towards the Good and infinitely sensitive in accepting the Evil. Good and Evil, in your case, mean nothing.
Oh, America, alone against all. You’re not an empire; you’re not part of history. You’re an anomaly, an anomaly in the eternal cruelty of history. Therefore you’re not a winner and you cannot be defeated. The so-called moral values are your weakness. As long as you gravitate towards the good and moral, you shall be breeding evil, and while you’re gravitating towards unity you shall be breeding division, you shall be breeding death. Your ideals are your evil. Your moral values are your curse, your doom; your decomposition is your life and the last chance for humanity.
Oh, America, flag of freedom! Try to understand. Your freedom is not for you, but freedom for others. For those who shall rise upon your corpse, for those who shall feasts with your meat, for those who shall quench their thirst with your blood. That’s why you have to fall. Your death is your freedom – freedom for you and freedom for others. In fact, you are already dead, and therefore perfectly free. You once believed that you live beyond time and history, and that is why the awakening from your dream, a dream that is not life and that is not a way of life, but only a way to die, will be bloodier, more painful and more difficult.
You are dying; actually, you are already dead, not even knowing it.
There is no awakening from your dream about freedom, as there is no awakening from death or deep coma.
Translated by: Zorana Lutovac
http://openrevolt.info/2013/01/05/a-interview-with-boris-nad/
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