Prologue

THE LAST DAYS, WITHOUT DEFENSE
The Fall of Faustian Europe

”New Year will certainly also arrive to those who don’t wait for it. However, the entire magic is in waiting, not in New Year. It’s nice to wait for something certain to arrive. We waited for many things in life, we all know that, but only new years definitely came each time.”
That is how Dušan Radović spiced his greetings. He also knew that a few more things were arriving with cold inevitability, but we’ll skip that now. It’s not the right moment.
We are publishing the last issue in 2018. Many colorful lamps, which waited in ambush from September, are lit around us, but they cannot cover the fact that some important lights are extinguished inside of us. Our shops are full, but emptiness is spreading inside the consumers. We are looking in disbelief at reports about fights over cheap chicken in a newly opened supermarket, about injured people in the rush during the first hour of the winter sale in a shopping mall in Belgrade, about selling places in the night row in front of a mobile phone shop in Terazije. Does this look like a project of degrading people into herds, the hysterical Grand Farma, an abyss full of lamps? Three in one?
In 2018, we observed the hundredth anniversary of our victory in the Great War. After the way France organized it on November 11, in Serbian spelling and ethics, paris is written with a small letter. Even smaller than london or berlin. The workers of the Belgrade communal service are keeping watch on the old and meaningless Monument of Gratitude to France in Kalemegdan, but in vain. Yes, Faustian Europe is disintegrating before our eyes. The devil always comes to collect his debts and the canvas from the picture of Dorian Gray disappears. If we ever erect a monument to Europe, the inscription should state: ”We respect it as much as it respected us.”
Shall we make a toast anyway, it’s New Year?