![]() In Free World he has taken the same perspicuous and bitterly witty approach to the conundrums of the recent tensions between the key Western European states and the US. Although he is my political opponent, I always consider him worth reading for his wealth of precise observations, and as a reliable source on the vicissitudes of the disintegration of Eastern European Communism. Timothy Garton Ash would appreciate this tragicomic accident: it comes close to the spirit of ethically engaged irony that permeates his best work. ![]() The fate of this revolutionary was surely the fate of the people as a whole under Stalinist dictatorship: the millions who overthrew the ancien régime, and were then forced to build monuments to their own revolutionary past. If poetic injustice means anything, this is it. As a prisoner of the Communists, he was building a monument to himself and the rebellion he’d led. While he was there, he and other prisoners were detailed to build a monument to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the 1943 rebellion on Rab. ![]() After the war, he was arrested and put in a prison on Goli otok (‘Naked Island’), a notorious Communist concentration camp near Rab. In 1943, when Italy capitulated, he led a rebellion of Yugoslav prisoners in a concentration camp on the Adriatic island of Rab: 2000 starving prisoners disarmed 2200 Italian soldiers. The fate of a Slovene Communist revolutionary serves as a perfect metaphor for the twists of Stalinism.
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