April 15, 2009

Jasmina Tesanovic - The diary of a political idiot


Another voice from the bombed capital of former Yugoslavia was Jasmina Tesanovic, author of The Diary of a Political Idiot. Her writing reflects a new kind of war that unfolded on BBC and CNN, watched by those inside Belgrade, where they learn of air strikes within their city, bemused when the foreign news gets the story wrong. Following the trajectory of Yugoslavia into war, Tesanovic’s diary takes the reader inside the city and appeals to the outside for understanding.

Political idiots

The idiots of the title and chapter reference the Greek roots of idiot: “a common person without access to knowledge and information”. Tesanovic writes that she and the majority of Serbs are political idiots. It now looks to me that also the Western people were the same political idiots, due to miss-information and manipulation made by War leaders. In the name of democracy and tolerance, people were willing to believe the most incredible lies!


The book:
Tesanovic, Jasmina. The Diary of a Political Idiot: Normal Life in Belgrade. San Francisco: Midnight Editions, 2000
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Here you can read here Diary from Belgrade online.(on the same link is
the "DIARY OF SLOBODAN MARKOVIC" (EXCERPTS) a young student who wrote also a war-diary.

The film:
While her hometown was being blown up by 19 different countries and writing and uploading a diary, one day, a producer from German national TV phoned her. She’d been reading her online journal and thought it might make a good film.
Here about the making of that film.

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