After Long Years | Page 4

R O D U C T I O N

This is a series of articles written and published in 1996-2000 in

Macedonia, in Russia, in Egypt and in the Czech Republic.
How the West lost the East. The economics, the politics, the geopolitics,
the conspiracies, the corruption, the old and the new, the plough and
the internet - it is all here, in prose, as provocative and vitriolic and
loving and longing as I could make it.
From "The Mind of Darkness":
"'The Balkans' - I say - 'is the unconscious of the world'. People stop to
digest this metaphor and then they nod enthusiastically. It is here that
the repressed memories of history, its traumas and fears and images
reside. It is here that the psychodynamics of humanity - the tectonic
clash between Rome and Byzantium, West and East, Judeo-Christianity
and Islam - is still easily discernible. We are seated at a New Year's
dining table, loaded with a roasted pig and exotic salads.
I, the Jew, only half foreign to this cradle of Slavonics. Four Serbs, five
Macedonians. It is in the Balkans that all ethnic distinctions fail and it
is here that they prevail anachronistically and atavistically.
Contradiction and change the only two fixtures of this tormented
region.
The women of the Balkan - buried under provocative mask-like make
up, retro hairstyles and too narrow dresses. The men, clad in sepia
colours, old fashioned suits and turn of the century moustaches. In the
background there is the crying game that is Balkanian music: liturgy
and folk and elegy combined. The smells are heavy with musk-ular
perfumes. It is like time travel. It is like revisiting one's childhood."
How were the articles and essays contained herein - many of them
translated and published in local languages - received by people
everywhere?
My readers from the Balkans reacted to these essays with an admixture
of rage and indignation. They erected defensive barricades of
self-aggrandizement and of my devaluation. And they let their
ingrained paranoia run rampant (Jewish conspiracies, Western spies,

world plots). I asked a resident of this tortured region to write the
foreword to this book. People from other parts, from Central and
Eastern Europe, were more argumentative and contemplating, though
much less passionate. And Westerners - especially those with interest
in these regions of the world - reacted with great, cathartic enthusiasm.
In reading this book, I wish upon you the joy and the revulsion, the
dark fascination of this region and its surrealist dreams and nightmares.
This is what I experience daily here and it is my hope that I succeeded
to convey the siren's song, the honeyed trap, the lure and the allure of
this tortured corner of the earth.
Dr. Sam Vaknin
Skopje, February 2000
Return

After the Rain
How the West
Lost the East

The PEOPLE

The Author of this Article is a Racist

Or, so say many of the readers, who react vehemently - not to say
minaciously - to my articles. They insist that I demonise, chastise,
disparage, deride and hold in contempt groups of people simply and
solely because they are born in a given geographical area or are of a
given genetic stock. Few stop sufficiently long to notice that the above

two accusations contravene each other. A territory as vast as CEE
cannot and is not inhabited by one "race". It is an historical cocktail of
colours and origins and languages and bloodlines. Disregarding the
pan-Slavic myth for a minute, a racist would find the CEE a very
discouraging neighbourhood.
Am I a racist? If this is taken to mean "do I believe in the inherent
inferiority or malevolence or impurity of any group of people (however
arbitrarily defined or capriciously delimited) just because of their
common origin or habitation" - then of course I am not. I am not an
adherent of genetic predetermination and I think that there is very little
point in discussing fictitious entities such as "pure races". That people
are what they are made out to be by their up-bringing, society, and
history and by the reactions of other humans to them - is what I
subscribe to.
Yet I do believe in the temporary inferiority, malevolence and impurity
of groups of people who experienced and were subjected to prolonged
corrupting and pathologising influences. Historical processes exact an
exorbitant toll. Ideologies, indoctrination, totalitarianism,
authoritarianism, command economies, statism, militarism, malignant
nationalism, occupation - all carry a hefty price tag. And the currency is
the mind of the people: their mental health, their socialization processes
and, ultimately, the social fabric. Beneath a thin veneer of kultur - the
masses were savaged, the individual was crushed into a moral pulp. I
do believe in mass pathology: mass hysteria, mass personality disorders,
mass psychoses. I