Basara, Atlagić and Ataturk – Personal Attitudes

In his column titled Waiting for Ataturk, Svetislav Basara presents Atlagić’s attack on our extraordinary actress not as an attack on her and Serbian culture, but as an attack on the “dominant Serbian culture” against Seka Sablić.

Photo: Media Center

With this way of defending our actress, Empress Jelisaveta, who in her long career left a deep mark on the hearts of the vast majority of citizens of Serbia and the former Yugoslavia, Basara really wants to camouflage the irrefutable fact that this diva was exposed to faceless criticism from the current government. Later he recognized this anonymous university professor for his intellectual courage, only the spokesmen of our Most High.

That is, I did not read anywhere that those who represent almost a common theme of the radical criticism of Basara, that is, members of the “opposition to the boycott”, joined the scandalous criticism mentioned, nor that our pharaoh explicitly distanced himself from his lackeys. These lackeys, however much they present themselves as patriots, are in fact “silver lovers” or, if you like, patriots out of personal interest.

Showing these intellectual dwarves as followers of “Serbian mainstream” culture is just an attempt to demonize Serbian culture as such, with the exception of a few, including Basara, to relativize the catastrophic consequences of the regime rule they bring closer to Serbia to what can metaphorically be described as “limbo”. (lobby of hell or hell itself).

Basara concludes his column with an appeal to the Messiah in the form of Ataturk, who could lift Serbia out of all cultural primitivism, certainly alluding mainly to the supposed clerical tendencies that have always been at the center of the “mainstream” of Serbian culture. . it represents a “cancer wound” for the secular state.

It is true that Ataturk, especially by separating Islam from the state and granting women the right to vote, established Turkey as a secular and secular republic.

But Basara seems to overlook that the original name of this great reformer was Mustafa Kemal, while the Turkish parliament added the surname Ataturk (the father of the Turks).

Why?

Because he led the Turkish national movement and after the victory in that war for Turkish independence, he carried out the Turkification of Turkey, which ordered non-Turkish minorities to speak Turkish in public, in order to create the unity of the state. .

In other words, Ataturk was a liberal nationalist (no matter how much the phrase “wooden iron” means to Basara).

He, unlike our quasi-patriots, was a true patriot.

On the other hand, Basara, as a signatory to Appeal 88, wholeheartedly supported Milo Đukanović, who in an effort to complete his ethno-nationalism by subordinating orthodoxy to his autocratic rule, sparked massive litigation in Montenegro, in which not only the Serbs, but eventually lost their match. elections.

Although I am not a believer, as a liberal I believe that religious citizens are equal in rights to non-believers and agnostics, and that the liturgies indicated are an expression of civil disobedience due to the brutal interference of the authorities in the internal affairs of religious institutions, which calls into question the principle of countries.

To think that Aleksandar Vučić came to pay tribute to the late patriarch in Serbia is naive of the first order.

Finally, it must be said that the secular state, by its own definition, is neither atheistic nor theistic, but a neutral instance towards both orientations at the level of society.

He is the author and translator of numerous philosophical books.

Related texts: