1/ These two images are how I recall the world of 30 years ago. It is the 30th anniversary – approx. – of the release of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit. That’s the first image. It is also the nice, round 30th anniversary of the start of events that would push me into the... 
2/...wide world and bring me where I am today. That’s the second image, with Šibenik, Croatia, as the stage. How the two anniversaries are connected is what the following anecdote is about. And then I’ll tell you what I learned from having experienced state breakup, war, and...
3/...collective madness first-hand, and then from having researched and thought about it (too much, frankly) over the coming decades. First, the anecdote. It’s a bit sweet, but it’s mostly sour, so if that’s not to your taste, don’t bother. It’s September 1991, the war starts...
4/...my mother, I, and all other residents of our building have to go to the shelter. The shelter – really a basement - has no toilet so every day I climb up to the second floor and spend a few minutes in the space with the most exposed wall in the entire apartment, playing...
5/...Russian roulette with invisible, large-caliber ordnance. A paranoid fantasy if not for the fact that the top floor of that same side got hit by a missile from one of these things you see here, which left a bovine-sized hole where it landed. I’d normally be very quick, but...
6/...being the music-loving 15 year old I was, after I’d completed my ‘task’ I’d dart to the kitchen and turn on the TV to see if there was anything good on before returning to the basement. It just so happened that during those days, somewhere in the second half of September...
7/...1991, Nirvana’s famed single was on Croatian TV all the time. I forget my first reaction to that video, but the absurdity of the moment must not have escaped me: the staged teenage pandemonium of the video as a link to normality amid the very real pandemonium playing out...
8/...beyond the suddenly flimsy walls of home. The next two years would continue in the same incongruously absurd key: school, parties, music, beach, laughter, artillery showers, fascist iconography, fear and hatred. All of it very, very intimate and visceral and unavoidable.
9/ I’d depart for Canada in 1993 on a tourist visa that led to permanent settlement, and would see Nirvana in November of that year at the Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto. Didn’t matter. I’d always associate that song (and video) with the first week of war. The experience would...
10/...shape me to the point that I would do a PhD the basic purpose of which was therapy – figuring out what happened. Part of the answer to that question is contained in this book that is supposed to come out in November. mqup.ca/symbolic-state…
11/ I’ll have more to say about what’s in it later on. Here, I’d like to share a few observations that are not in it, or are largely implicit in it, notes about conflict and reconciliation, war and peace, identity and nationalism, and the pursuit of understanding of others and...
12/...oneself. First, conflict – including violent conflict – often (not always, but often) flares up because of conflicting stories about collective selves, and not much more. These stories come about for reasons that are far more random and arbitrary than we would like them...
13/...be, but are necessary because they supply meaning that we need in our lives. The fancy term for this is ontological security. Frequently our stories are about dignity and pride, not about existential things, but because we do not wish to appear irrational and capricious...
14/...we wrap our stories about dignity and pride in stories about safety and wellbeing (of our children, typically). When actual conflict flares up, the gap between the abstract and non-material character of the motives and the very tangible and material consequences of the...
15/...conflict is so enormous that it is rarely acknowledged. Second, truly horrible things happen only once violence starts. But, and this is key, the atrocities that happen after the start of hostilities are retroactively used as the reason why one’s own side had to resort to..
16/...violence in the first place in order to prevent the atrocities. Of course, one’s own violence is not framed as such. One’s own side took up ‘the struggle, fought, protected,’ etc. “Own” victims of that violence, particularly the civilian ones, are used to silence those ...
17/...arguing that violence should not have been resorted to in the first place (if they are willing to speak out at all). Third, very decent people are infinitely capable of using their own suffering – or even the suffering of ‘their own side’ – to justify the horrors...
18/...perpetrated by those claiming to fight in their name. This is because the first victim of any conflict is not the truth, but empathy. In fact, the demise of empathy is both a cause and a calcified effect of violent conflict, and circles back to stories that give meaning...
19/...to our lives. This lack of empathy continues long after the hostilities end. Fourth, and related, empathy requires the kind of counter-intuitive (in both cognitive and emotive sense) thinking that most people are not wired for. Empathy requires that we see and understand...
20/...the stories that ‘the other’ has about themselves, but that means we must relativize our own story. That might mean punching holes in our narrative, or even distancing ourselves from it. Empathy also requires the ability to see life as open-ended, to acknowledge and...
21/...accept contingency, randomness, accident, as much as intent and purpose. Except most normal people do not think that way. A normal person will try to explain an event by looking for factors that made it possible, not those despite which it happened. A normal person’s...
22/...explanation, in other words, overdetermines the outcome. University education – or at least good university education – goes against this quite natural tendency to provide a coherent narrative about X. It untrains us from this kind of perfectly normal thinking and urges...
23/...us to ‘read history forward’, understand that at a particular moment before X happened many other options were possible, to identify countervailing forces. But even this is no guarantee we will end up understanding the world better, nor does it guarantee empathy.
24/ Fifth, and last, this is why the way to reconciliation after conflict is not normally through reasoned debate and reconciliation of opinions. This is so difficult to achieve at the society-wide level as to be impossible. The way forward is indifference to the collective...
stories, both those of other people, and those of our own ‘side’. On this view, active fostering of reconciliation keeps those stories alive and stands in the way of its own goal. How that is to be achieved is something that is to be discussed. Now, this is not a particularly...
26/...cheery thread, but I did feel I had to stamp this anniversary somehow, especially since, frankly, I would like to start putting these thoughts to rest and moving on to a different set of concerns. Therapy, I suppose :). Peace, all.
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