After the Rain : how the West lost the EastVaknin, Samuel
History
After the Rain : how the West lost the East
Vaknin, Samuel
Europe, Eastern -- Economic conditions -- 1989-; Europe, Eastern -- Politics and government -- 1989-
Consequently, when reading these essays, it will not be asking for much
to have a dose of restraint towards Dr. Vaknin's sometimes lethal
"absolute truths" regarding the Balkans and the East. After you finish
reading this book, you can find out not only what the East is - but
also what the East is, indeed, not. This is because Dr. Vaknin observes
the Balkan and the East only from the dark side, regarding its people
as zombies who do not have any idea at all why they are walking on this
Earth. Unfortunately for him, life, neither in the Balkans in
particular, nor in the East in general, is a pathology as he enjoys
saying. That is why some of his articles contain an overly heavy-handed
personal touch, momentary sensations and impressions too strong,
amounting to exaggeration, or, in other words, he puts things headlong.
In "The MinMaj Rule" his paranoiac fear of the "nation-state" can be
felt. His perversity reaches a climax when he finds a justification for
the West and its three months long NATO bombing of Yugoslavia (an act
without precedent in modern history, which indeed resulted in the same
pitiless kind of bombing in Chechnya) and in the acknowledgment that
for the Albanian residents of Kosovo "it has not protected their right
to self-determination".
Dr. Vaknin likes to see the state as "a community, a majority of
minorities united by common rules, beliefs and aspirations ... no
longer utopian, it is a realistic model to emulate". In "Herzl's
Butlers", he even goes further and in the modern nation state he sees
"a reflection of something more primordial, of human nature itself as
it resonated in the national founding myths (most of them fictitious or
contrived)". Still, he is sufficiently honest to admit that "the Jews
(and Germans) came up with the 'objective', 'genetic', 'racial' and
'organic' nation". Indeed, through the periodically harsh critique of
the West's actions in the East, transferring into its body Western
malignant cells of mafia, drugs, organized crime, corruption etc., the
careful reader will discover the glorification of the subjugation of
the East by the West.
Dr. Sam Vaknin is not the first one to try to put all the books which
deal with the so called "world conspiracy" in the domain of illusion or
man's gullibility ("The Elders of Zion"). That was done before in a
fine literary manner mixed with factography by another Jew (by father),
the writer Danilo Kish from ex-Yugoslavia, in his novel "A Book about
Kings and Fools". But if Danilo Kish was exploring the world archives
to prove that it is only by coincidence or through an accidental knot
of circumstance that "the book of Nillus" about a "world conspiracy"
was created, thus far Dr. Vaknin is not only mocking the intellectuals
and ordinary mortals of the East, but he humiliatingly attributes the
existence of that "conspiracy" to the "paranoiac and schizoid nature"
of their minds.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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