I wrote about Pescanik (“Hourglass”) some time ago, and recently mentioned the site redesign here, but for those of you who missed it, in essence – it’s a weekly radio program broadcast on B92 committed to criticizing the government (current and all previous governments, and I hope all the future ones) and nationalism in Serbia. Criticism coming from Pescanik is sometimes rushed, sometimes missing the target, but most often it hits the spot – aiming the bad things in Serbian church, Serbian politics and, generally speaking, bad things and trends in Serbian society.
The format is the same since the beginning – three or four guests every show, talking in great detail about current political and social issues bothering them that very moment. All interviews are later transcribed and uploaded to the website – www.pescanik.net.
Primary target of the show these days is Serbian president Boris Tadic, just like Kostunica was in focus during his reign, and just like Milosevic was during his. Not even Zoran Djindjic was spared the criticism while he was the prime minister of Serbia.
Pescanik radio program has an audience of about 150 – 200 thousand listeners per show, which is not a lot in a country where turbo folk shows and mainstream political talk shows on TV can attract an audience of couple of million people.
At the same time, it’s not that small of an audience either, considering it’s not a TV, but a radio show. Besides the radio show, there’s the mentioned website, and live debates being organized throughout Serbia, as well as several books with best bits from the radio show transcribed. Considering this modest, but significant opinion-making potential, it’s maybe no wonder that from time to time you can hear listeners complaining that the radio show broadcast has been jammed, and that the website is now down more for than a week due to a hacker attack. Also, the car of one of the editors has been vandalized, all happened in to much of a short time span to say it’s just a coincidence.
In support of Pescanik, here’s a quote from Danilo Kis on nationalism:
First of all, nationalism is paranoia—collective and individual paranoia. As a collective paranoia, nationalism is born out of fear and envy. But above all, it appears as a result of an individual’s lost consciousness. Therefore, collective paranoia is nothing else but a summary of many individual paranoias brought together to a level of paroxysm. If an individual is not able to “express” himself within the framework of his given society, or if that given society does not stimulate him as an individual, or if disqualifies him—that is, if the society does not allow him to discover his own entity—then that individual is forced to look for his entity outside the society’s identity and outside society’s social structures. In so doing, the individual becomes a member of a clandestine group whose goal and task is, or seems to be, to solve problems of monumental importance: a survival and prestige of that group’s nation. It seeks to preserve its national tradition, values, and relics, its national folklore, philosophy, ethics, literature, etc. Obsessed with that secret, semi-public or public mission, our Mr. X becomes a man of action, a national tribune, a pseudo-individual.
Hope we will have the website back on air soon, the crew is working on moving it to a more secure server – I’ll let you know the moment it’s up again.
