mob rule

Reet, our next couchsurfing host, brought us into her house.  Belgrade was still under the shadow of the clouds, even though noon had already passed, there was still an ever present darkness that made it feel like dusk.  Her house was a lot lighter, with bright walls and a rounded, modern design, a complete contrast to the stark housing blocks outside.  Reet herself was a short, dark haired lady with the usual square face of an Estonian woman.  She had come to Belgrade working for the European Union, but found that she loved the country so much that even after her contract had expired, she decided to stay.  She was working on her own training consulting company, the Training Doctor, trying to teach Balkaners to have more positive training conferences and not just accidental meditation sessions.  

After we made ourselves comfortable, she made us some coffee and we all sat on the couches in the living room.  “So what do you guys want to do while in Belgrade?” she asked us. 

“I need to see some gypsy music while I’m here,” I told her.  That was my mission in Belgrade.

“You know, Serbs really hate gypsy music,” she told us.  “Or at least they say they do.  But you can always find a few Serbs hanging out around gypsy clubs.  It’s their guilty pleasure.  I know this really great gypsy club called Blek Panters.  It’s on a boat in the river.  I almost always take all my couchsurfers there.  There's a lot of boats up and down the river, but this one is the best, I think.  Most of the others just play pop dance music, but this one's always got a gypsy band.  Do you want to go tonight or tomorrow night?”

Pavlos leaned in, “I was thinking maybe we could do a couchsurfing accordion party tonight and the gypsy thing tomorrow night.”  He then told Reet about our success in Zagreb.  After Pavlos posted up an event notice on couchsurfing, we were set.  We went back downtown and explored the city a little bit more, discovering the Moscow Hotel, where they have one of the most comfortable cafes in Belgrade, with plush furniture, tall, Baroque ceilings and a pianist tinkling away on his chimes in the corner. 

We arrived back late to Reet’s house, but still with time enough to buy beer and prepare for some guests to arrive.  A few trickled in here and there, mostly Reet’s friends, who were almost all tall and friendly Serbian men.  I put a lot of space in between my accordion playing and talking,so that I didn't play all my songs for just the first two or three people, as I knew after I ran out of my twelve songs, I'd have to start repeating.  Not that people would notice or care, but I knew that I would.  

Also arriving was a self-labeled Communist, Sergei, who had seen that a “Georgian living in Ukraine” was there, which was a slight confusion on his part regarding my profile, which read “I was living in Georgia and I might live in Ukraine in the future.”  Since he didn’t speak English, the confusion was understandable.  This meant that much of the conversation that night about  economic and government systems and globalization was spoken in Russian.  Pavlos, an ardent free-marketeer from Greece, won his support by simply being Greek.  “Solidarity, brother!” Sergei called out.  There was an irony, in that the nationalist Greeks were protesting because they didn’t want to lose their large pensions from their government jobs, which is what the austerity measures would call for.  Sergei undoubtedly understands that, but Pavlos supports the protests from an anarchistic standpoint, seeing the austerity measures as something like Germany's version of the economic assassinations the United States performed in South America in the second half of the twentieth century.   

Sergei was a Russian born in Ukraine and who moved to Serbia during Milosevic’s reign.  He found Milosevic’s rule through nationalism inspiring and wanted to live there and try the new Serbian experiment.  The Serbians present in the room nervously smoked their cigarettes and drank their beers as the Russian talked.  “You’re talking about Fascism, not Communism,” I told him.  “Milosevic was not a Communist.  He centralized his power under the auspices of nationality and police power."   

“I am a Communist,” he said.  “And your accordion music has no soul.” 

“You are a Fascist and have no idea what Communism even is, do you?  And have you heard soulful accordion music, man?  That’s what it is.  Anyways, it’s fine if you’re a Fascist.  Whatever, I respect people of all political ideas, if they’ve got their own reasons, but at least call yourself what you are, man.  Communism is when the workers rule their own companies, it’s decentralized power given to small groups of people working for common causes.  Socialism is what you’re talking about, when you talk of your heroes being Stalin and Milosevic, you are talking of Socialism - when the government runs the businesses.  Not all Socialism is like that, mind you, as the politics can be different.  Like in modern Sweden and Germany, where they have more firmly established democracies.  At least just know what you’re talking about.  Communists were called Communists because they, at least the founders, saw worker power as the end result of their experiment, after a reorganization of society by a Socialist government.”

"Which should be achieved by force and national separation and empowerment."  

"The problem is is that force, coming from a government, cannot change people so radically - that kind of impetus has to come from the people.  In a social democracy, maybe that can happen, since the two are blended, but then you have the problem that Rousseau and the French Revolution landed into, which was that the Will of the People is basically mob rule and can't protect the minority.  But even now today, in capitalistic societies, we see moves towards communistic companies, where the workers have input in their own corporations.  But depending on the company, it might not even be a good thing, since democratic rule in a company can be too risk averse or slow to change.  The best economy is a mixed one, I'll always maintain.”

“I’m not praising Stalin and Milosevic, mind you.  Well, I am.  They were great men, but they were sick men.  That’s what Zinoviev once said.  Do you know Zinoviev, come I’ll show you some speeches on YouTube.”  I tried to play more music, so the other guests who were not so entertained by heated discussions concerning political history in a language they didn’t understand could feel more included on the liveliness.  But the self-apprised Communist continued to break into conversations and steer them back into talks of nationalism and anti-globalization – two points where at least Pavlos the Greek could relate.