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Milošević and nomenklatura nationalism

anecdote · Slovenian/Yugoslav · retold in 3 talks

The communist nomenklatura, sensing the end of socialist legitimacy, intuitively grasped that playing the nationalist card was their only way to retain power, Milošević as the paradigm case, and the moment Yugoslavia effectively died.

As told 2

“the communist nomenklatura saw the end of the system. And they grasped...that the only way for them to retain legitimacy was to play the nationalist card”
“The nationalist will not tell you: I live in an open society with no orientation so I flee into the nation. He will say: this regulated society has no freedom. Nationalist identification gives you a false freedom. That is the key moment.”

What it carries

one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)

Its cast and sources

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alongside works

Every retelling 2

The communist nomenklatura, sensing the end of socialist legitimacy, intuitively grasped that playing the nationalist card was their only way to retain power, Milošević as the paradigm case, and the moment Yugoslavia effectively died., illustrating ideology,nationalism,Yugoslavia's collapse
Žižek endorses Tijanić's analysis that Milošević's nationalist mobilization functioned as a carnival: followers felt pseudo-liberation, permission to kill, drink, drive recklessly, rather than disciplinary subjection; Adorno had already analyzed Nazism in the 1930s as this same structure of false liberation rather than mere repression., illustrating carnival nationalism,false transgression / false liberation,active nihilism vs. passive nihilism