Žikica Milošević, Editor-in-Chief
Dear readers,
Ewan McGregor, commenting on the second installment of the famous film Trainspotting (T2), said that the 90s had this tremendous feeling of optimism and euphoria and that Trainspotting, hand in hand with Oasis, depicted this optimism.
Wait, I remember the nineties. I am exactly the same age as Ewan. I remember Trainspotting and Oasis as rare dots of light in the vast ocean of darkness of the 90s – crime, wars, poverty, transition, hatred, rage and pessimism. Did we live in the same world? No. After the Berlin Wall tumbled down in 1989 we had an enormous amount of optimism, indeed, followed by first multi-party, democratic elections and freedom of speech. Unfortunately, it all came tumbling down, too, very quickly. I suddenly became acquainted with such names as Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia, Transnistria, Gagauzia, Abkhazia, Chechnya, Dagestan. I could name all the small towns in Croatia and Bosnia by heart. While the world experienced the dot.com boom, we did not even have the Internet. Everything seemed to be doomed, until 2000, approximately. Then the light was on and all of the ex-USSR and ex-YU republics started to grow. And the light went off in the USA on 9/11 in the very next year. Now, let us remember some countries where you could actually walk down the streets peacefully in 2001: Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iraq. I caught a coach in Odessa in the evening in August 2006 and I was in Yalta in the morning. Looked promising, everywhere, holidays in Egypt and Tunisia became commonplace. Now, there’s gonna be wall between USA and Mexico, lorries are killing people in Europe. The problem is that the world did not become shattered now. It just became shattered for everyone. We have lived in the shattered world for 25+ years. The rest of the world, please welcome to the shattered world.