On Ruins and the Place of Memory. A Bosnian Post-Script to Communism
On Ruins and the Place of Memory. A Bosnian Post-Script to Communism

Summary/Abstract: In this article, the author explores the nature of traditional wisdom and the ways it came under attack in the most terrible century of human history. The Bosnian town of Stolac suffered the violent depredations of fascists, Communists, and extreme nationalists, culminating in a veritable orgy of destruction, murder, and expulsion during the 1992 to 1995 war, with the systematic “liberation” of the town of every and any trace of the historical existence of difference or the other. The author sees this situation as arising out of the very nature of modernity, the age of alienation and human arrogance. We have become the slaves of our fantasies of mastery and domination, seeking justification not in the transcendental or the divine, but in the works of our own hands, in utopian dreams of this-worldly perfection, and in group identities in which we hope to hide the smallness of our souls. This work of disconnection, deracination, and ideological deformation has found its most terrible expression in great historical projects of destruction and slaughter in the name of Man, Society, and other false gods. This modern folly has turned us against our own cultures, our common spiritual heritage, and all forms of traditional intellectuality and wisdom. It has stripped us of compassion and respect for the other and of understanding for the different. It has made us deny our most crucial debts to the vulnerable and to the dead.

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