Written by: Ndue Ukaj
Kosovo today resembles a barren land, where wild politics reign, like a wilderness, and where few people care about political culture. And every time I think about the relationship between politics and culture, I remember Branko Merxhani, who said that "there is no politics, only culture." He wrote this in 1936, in a text published in the magazine he edited at the time, "Albanian Effort", trying to enlighten the Albanians who had emerged from the long sleep of slavery, in a land that had been left barren for centuries, as the enlightened minds of that time said.
Indeed, the Albanian lands had been left barren for centuries, the Albanians lived in the face of culture, without schools, without art, without books, simply cut off from all the benefits of civilization.
And this situation was an incentive for many intellectual patriots to do their best to enlighten the people – to bring them out of backwardness – and to plant the barren lands with cultural trees, the fruits of which would turn politics into something beneficial.
Albanians, tired, exhausted, at the end of the 20th century, became one with Western ideals, after centuries and centuries of slavery, and consequently, their historical destiny changed so much that for centuries and centuries, they could not find a more beautiful and favorable historical time, proof of their comprehensive development.
I see Kosovo now, how it is getting smaller, every day, how it is becoming more and more gloomy and more savage, because there is no idea of unity, because there is politics and not culture, because politics, with its wild thorns, daily sticks itself into the hearts of innocent people, subjugating them, stealing their dreams, I see how ignorance progresses, without anyone coming out to say stop to its ugly and savage face. I see how infidelity dwells among us, like a tree, which is maintained the most and best.
It is known that no society can stand on its feet without a great ideal, cannot move forward without a sound idea, and cannot develop without a sense of solidarity among its people, because solidarity and dialogue are engines of development.
Our country, unfortunately, today has none of these ideals in action.
Even the most beautiful memory of Albanians has been tarnished: the natural alliance with the West, which triumphed over centuries of savagery in this hot-blooded region, full of confusion and discord.
And now, on the contrary, in our country, I see shallowness, people who torment the palate and not the mind, crowds of fools who think of political battles as a jungle arena, hypocrites of a brutal scale, who think of principles as vegetables.
Our country, a few decades ago, had an authentic school of democracy, with Ibrahim Rugova at the helm, so it became the initiator of such processes in Southeast Europe, it had ideas and ideals, therefore, small Kosovo, thanks to great will, became great. It became great in the eyes of Europe and the civilized world, because it had great ideas. And this great Kosovo, today, foolish and savage leaders, have made a peripheral issue, small, to the point that it no longer seems like anything good on the map of advanced nations. They have darkened it so much that nothing positive is seen in it, except the fog of a language with barbaric political features.
Today, I see every day how people transform and become so inhumane that it saddens me to realize that such creatures have the power to determine the fate of a people, leaving our country, a desolate land, for generations to come.
Sadly, Kosovo is becoming smaller and smaller every day, because, at its helm, there are people with a small and shallow mentality, people without cultural formation, who measure reality with their representative power, to put it concretely, they measure everything with the power of control and power.
Perhaps the most appropriate explanations for our miserable state can be found in our relationship with culture, and more specifically, in our relationship with books.
The great writer, Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, said that a society without literature is doomed to become spiritually barbaric and even endanger its freedom.
Kosovo is on the verge of this border, as Llosa warned.
t7 live
