Fascism is Not an Idea to Be Debated, It’s a Set of Actions to Fight | Literary Hub
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“I still feel guilty and ashamed of my cowardice and naïve belief that if we only kept talking something might bring him back.”
In a kind of epiphany, I understood that the letter was written in a language I no longer recognized, not least because he was using a dialect and diction far closer to Gorski vijenac than to our past movie arguments. We were now so far apart that whatever I might say could never reach him, let alone convert him back into what I’d thought was the true and original version of my friend. I never responded to his letter, nor would I ever see him again, but he wrote a letter to my parents (who had been friends with his). There, he drew a little map representing the siege Gorazde, a town 60 miles from Sarajevo where he was deployed, proudly explaining to them that the Serbs did not care about the town as much as they wanted to capture the nearby ammo factory. My mother, who’d implored me not to end my friendship with Zoka for “politics,” wept over the letter, because the Zoka she knew was absent from it. I read it too. It was written not only by a stranger, but by an enemy.
My relationship with the war has always been marked by an intense sense that I failed to see what was coming, even though everything I needed to know was there, before my very eyes. While Zoka took active part in enacting the ideas I’d argued against, my agency did not go beyond putting light pressure on his fascist views by way of screaming. I have felt guilty, in other words, for doing little, for extending my dialogue with him (and a few other Serb nationalist friends) for far too long, even while his positions—all of them easy to trace back to base Serbian propaganda—were being actualized in a criminal and bloody operation. I was blinded, I suppose, by our friendship which had ended, I know now, well before our dialogue did. For all that, I still feel guilty and ashamed of my cowardice and naïve belief that if we only kept talking something might bring him back. I retroactively recognized that his hate and racism were always present and that there was no purpose or benefit to our continued conversation. I had long been screaming into a human void.