The Time of Corona as an Era for Writing a Masterpiece

Our well-known writer Rumena Buzarovѕкa in a column for Belgrade’s “Vreme” complains about her endangered personal rights during the restrictions caused by the fight against the coronavirus. She believes that the state of emergency is a product of the pressure from the elderly, and the victim is herself as part of the creative and free-minded people who need to live, work and move

Author: Ljubomir Kostovski

The right to life is the highest-ranking right – emphasized in a blog post of one of the political victims of the previous regime, after elaborating their views on the freedom of movement, the right to free opinion and everything that had been taken away from them for years. At the same time, we have emerging opinions that emergency measures violate human rights, which as an argument, of course, will be increasingly present in public communication as the duration of emergency measures increases. Not to mention the presence of such arguments in private communication.

In the column of one of the most translated Macedonian writers, Rumena Buzarovѕкa, in Belgrade’s weekly newspaper “Vreme”, entitled “Look at me, I too suffer”, prevails the climate of endangerment of personal positions and feelings of repression during emergencies. The author and translator in the subtitle of the column states:

Suddenly, my comrades in the fight for human rights have confidence in the police and demand that they keep us safe. Some require full quarantine. Among them are those who spent their lives smoking and drinking in the cold of the beautiful Skopje restaurants. Now they are not in good health, they have become older, so they require others not to live, not to work and not to move.

The author, and it seems other segments of the Colorful Revolution, some of them professionally determined to defend human rights, has acquired aversion to everything that is a symbol of the executive power, primarily the police and the military. The new line of demarcation in that bloc of human rights fighters is now being made on that line (whether or not there are restrictions on the movement of citizens), then regarding the bad habits of some of their former comrades (they drank and smoked in restaurants) and, in the end, their line-up according to their age, indicating that some of them are sickly and frightened people (unusable), who are now hiding behind the uniformed part of the state and long for its protection. But even if we can imagine them as sickly, with high temperatures and timid looks behind the curtain, they appear to be an obstacle for creative and free-minded people to live, work and move.

Measures for protection against the pandemic are present all around the world, both in countries known for their brutal regime (North Korea) and in liberal ones (the United States, Italy, Spain), but also in countries that have previously relied on fighting the coronavirus through the phenomenon of collective immunity, basically in a fight to the end for the interests of business that do not want to accept rest, but, as it seems, are concerned about the protection of human rights as its political justification for further profits. And now, country by country, as well as those who were the hardest applicants of that tactic are giving up (Sweden, for example) and are on their way to copy us, just as we copied others who faced the disease little before us.

So, the assessment of what the fight against coronavirus will look like in most of the world is not only about politics, or it can be said that it is less about politics, and more about the assessments made by the medical staff, because they are the ones who are managing a process that needs to save human lives, which, I hope we agree, are on the pedestal of rights. The executive branch is assisting people in white coats, and police and the military are involved in creating the scene of naked salvation. The impact of decisions on what that fight will look like if it was not lead by the medical staff is far more visible where the other model was chosen, hidden behind the alleged protection of human rights, where NBA players had to play in front of an audience until the devil decided to joke (so now top stars are in the hospital). A similar example are the English Premier League players who played too long in front of spectators, and that is why the political representative of that logic (Prime Minister Boris Johnson) himself ended up in front of the doctors so that they could save his life. Additionally, some cabinet members have been also infected.

In countries with a high sense of civil rights, the death penalty will not be allowed and euthanasia will not be carried out, although it is, after all, an explicit wish of the patient whose chances of survival are extremely low. These countries are protecting the right to life as a top right. The divisions over whether someone drank coffee and smoked in restaurants and, after becoming sickly called for police protection are pointless at this time and become an indication of a kind of obsessive preoccupation with uniforms. After all, in many Western countries, the “boomer remover” movement is spreading through social networks. It is a movement in which the traditional thinking about older fellow citizens, relatives and neighbors described in the movie “The Ballad of Narayama” returns, for example, when those who have passed their 60’s should be removed from the home. Well, this pandemic is considered welcome to have the role of a terminator for people who have “lived their lives”.

In the current conditions, there are always ways to express one’s engagement, and even to communicate directly to those who are healthy and full of work energy. Especially for the people of the pen – Jean-Paul Sartre wrote the play Bariona ou le Fils du Tonnerre as a prisoner of war, in a camp (1941). In occupied Paris, he published the books Being and Nothingness, The Flies and No Exit. These were times not only of prohibition, but also of naked repression. Nobel laureate Ivo Andric, in the most difficult times of Belgrade’s military occupation, wrote “The Bridge on the Drina”, “Bosnian Chronicle” and “The Woman from Sarajevo” and they were published in 1945. Not to mention Bocacho’s Decameron, a book written during the time of the plague in Italy, while a small group of people managed to hide in a village. The work turned history upside-down… Should we count further? Or is this enough to encourage creative minds to use the time of the epidemic in writing a masterpiece?

All comments and remarks regarding this and other Vistinomer articles, correction and clarification requests as well as suggestions for fact-checking politicians’ statements and political parties’ promises can be submitted by using this form