Memorie.al / I. The Political Situation! In the political polemics of recent days, many names and surnames have been mentioned, a great noise has been made about persons, but very little understanding or comprehension has been shown to us; one could hardly say that any objective clarification about the situation has been given. Even though entire months have passed and although the discussions have greatly expanded and become clamorous, despite all that, practically nothing has been said to this day, in the name of thought this time. The remarks that have been made have been so limited, so vague and so poor that it is completely impossible for anyone to understand what is going on and where exactly we are headed. We do not at all wish to bring the noise of political polemics from daily newspapers into the columns of a cultural magazine. Because we see and follow that whole unsavory spectacle of personal insults and antipathetic rhetoric, which has no sincere substantive content, from a very different point of view.
Compared to the current of development of our country’s political-social life, the importance of four or five persons and their biographies is nothing. Our point of view is set upon a peak amid a land ruined far and wide, which is beginning to sprout new moulds, and before us we have the wide expanse of a horizon that opens up with all its unknown depth and with all its mysteries. For this reason, we say that we follow with a certain concern the personal political polemic that unfolds in the columns of the daily press – a polemic which, with the tendency it has taken today, contributes nothing at all to illuminating the dark signs of the age, which torment our conscience and are directly related to the most vital interests of the nation.
And we are saddened because that political polemic precisely lacks the profound meanings that reveal the fundamental changes in the system of understanding, and because the main part of the noise is swallowed up by a demonstration of certain past heroisms and services, the explanation and verification of which is not a task for today but is the work of history. Thinking politically – that is, thinking as a person who takes the phenomenon of Albanian political life in 1936 as a living social event and not as a simple relationship between a “good” person A and an “evil” person B – we see nothing else being done but a provoked falsification of some poor principles, which may perhaps create a superficial and groundless enthusiasm in a country where the spirit of anger and despair has reached its peak, but which is incapable of helping to discover the causes, to determine the goals, and to give us a bright and saving direction to emerge from the chaotic state of the countless errors and sins committed until yesterday.
There is a need for an honest, serious, intellectual effort, so that at last a little light and some illumination may arise within this darkness. “Our age is not self-explanatory. It needs analysis and illumination to be understood,” we wrote a short time ago in these columns. Are we perhaps going through a crisis? And what kind of crisis is this, then? That our age is not understandable is enough to indicate the state of a crisis – and indeed a very serious crisis. The age in which we live, and the new condition to which our action or our negation or even an inheritance is owed, we feel as something alien and outside us, and while it is the real expression of our life, nevertheless it gives us the impression of a parasite.
In our age, even the existence of an idea is called a paradox. Everything that is not analyzed – i.e., everything that is not found above the logic of the day and that does not respond to the demands of daily life – is classified not only as superfluous but also as something that does not exist at all. It is as if we have made it a habit to live in darkness and let ourselves be drawn blindly and without will by the wave of uncertainty, by the chaos of madness that drowns us within the labyrinth of anesthesia and ceaselessly feeds the filth of our anxieties. And so, on the one hand, politics has been exchanged for banal autobiographical literature, and on the other hand, ideology risks being reduced and turned into politics! …
Our age needs analysis and illumination. An age that is not self‑explanatory, a crisis that cannot be grasped – we are undoubtedly going through such a time. And this age has two distinct phases, two different fronts. The first is the phase that expresses the needs for a fairer and more progressive state presentation of our entire political body – i.e., the purely political phase, to which all energies and all passions turn, precisely because they seek to provide, at any rate, a more normal basis and, at any rate, a more substantial content to our organisation as a State. We seek to return to normality in the relationship between power and the people by overcoming the semi‑democratic tactic of closed responsibility that has been applied until now. This tendency, if it is sincere and if it truly springs, as we believe, from the desire to contribute to the normal development of our political organisation, can lead us to two kinds of conclusions:
1) To the stabilisation of an uncovered Autocracy, in the modern Western sense of the word, whereby the governing Authority comes from the expressed will of the people, by any appropriate means. In this case, the system of rule is in direct, daily contact with the people, without an intermediary body feeding like a parasite in between. This solution requires a certain preparation; it is complex, but at least it is sincere.
2) To the approach and adaptation – but a stable one – towards true democratic parliamentary rule. In such a case, the full implementation of the Statute, which characterises our regime as a constitutional parliamentary and democratic monarchy, must be accepted as a basis. This adaptation naturally presupposes free elections and a Government that emanates from Parliament and is based upon it. This solution is formally more normal, but it requires serious and conscientious freedom of the press, full will, courage, and mindful direction. And above all else, it requires: Light! These are the general lines of the political problem that are naturally being discussed in the newspapers – and which must soon take on a clear form.
And within the framework of such a discussion, nothing is as out of place and senseless as the distinction made between the “Young” and the “Old”: Politics does not mean ideology. Politics simply means reconciliation with Reality. Politics does not create ideology. It creates Psychology. And it uses ideologies according to the needs it feels for the fastest and most secure realisation of its conciliatory and practical goal. Those who in politics become enslaved to ideologies and do not possess the spontaneity to use them freely according to circumstances, and even at certain moments to eliminate them entirely from the order of their actions, those people build castles in the air, become victims of their own naivety, or remain in days like these, quiet in their own homes, reading newspapers only to satisfy their curiosity.
The Social Situation
The second phase of the age we are going through is that phase which expresses the problematics of an entirely social phenomenon, the main factors of which are the physico‑technical and sociological conditions of our collective life. The social phenomenon of Albanianism (Shqiptarizma) is a new phenomenon that seeks to find the path of its historicisation, after its appearance in the form of a State – completely opposite to the nationalist social phenomena of Western origin. We became a State before we managed to complete our formation as a Society. This is the reason why our State has a paradoxical one‑sided appearance, and this is the meaning of the “Neo‑” that we gave in the scientific expression “Neo‑Albanianism” (NeoShqiptarisma), here even eight years ago. Here we stand at the altar of culture, not on the stage of politics. To what extent can a relationship between these two meanings be stabilised? That is another matter.
It is a question of the future, not a question of the present day, which is filled almost entirely by the need for political formation – the first duty of which is to create a sincere and reciprocal meeting between the State and Society, and to cease being interested in the development of a point of rapprochement between culture and politics. The former (the State) is the work of men of action, the latter (Society = culture) is the work of men of thought. And precisely around this arises the great question: Without the help and cooperation of men of thought, are men of action alone capable of raising national life on sound foundations? No! A way must be found for free cooperation and unhindered development between these two functions, so that the conclusions of both movements intersect in a practical, living unity, from which, starting, we will move towards the new social form of national life – that is, we will move towards social change.
From the formation of the Tribe to the formation of the People, and then from there to that of the Nation. Inspired by these principles, as we wrote eight years ago in “Demokratia”, we are not interested in the form of the regime, but in the system of rule. Let any Government be in power, as long as it is a Government of idealists whose program is to assist with all its power in the action and free development of the new nationalist phenomenon – i.e., of “Neo‑Albanianism” – and to actively participate in the crystallisation of the idea of the Nation. Here is where the distinction between “new” and “old” has meaning. Here, upon the field of the social phenomenon, far and wide, the spirit of opposition, of heterogeneity and objectivity, reigns. Here, on one side the members of tradition have raised their trenches, and on the other side the members of progress and change.
We have no nationalist traditions. Our traditions are traditions of the Family, of the Tribe, and the most social of all are the religious traditions. Neither any one of them nor all of them together in their accumulation contain any synthetic basis that would contribute to the realisation of the idea of the Nation. These values of our moral division must change their form and content according to the needs that our national Society – which, we can say to a certain point, is today in its throes – manifests.
This is the goal of our effort. The work, therefore, is for an evolution, not for a revolution. The progress of our social formation depends on a change of conception, of the system, and not on the simple exchange of persons. It depends on the reform of our political institutions according to the new needs of life. A morally better person is often not so politically.
And our duty is not to assert everything, ending up in political Nihilism, but to create a transformative mechanism between the Chaos of the small, scattered Albanian societies and the life of the large, united Albanian society – between the present and the future, between the “old” and the “new”: Man can work only upon history, regardless of whether history is a ruin. Upon that historical foundation – which is our duty to illuminate from all sides, and to cleanse morally and materially – we have the generations of sons that life brings into society, and these we shall transform into new social geniuses, just as we seek the principles of the Neo‑Albanian social rebirth.
The man of today is closely bound to his own past. Two fundamental vices of his temperament – arrogance and obstinacy – have united together and enslaved him to the old values he has created for his own person. These things, which seethe with decay and spread the microbe of ruin and division, appear as the sole witnesses of his existence. He finds them visible, quiet, well‑arranged, and believes they are worth an entire world. And so he looks at his own work. He shows no desire to acquire new qualities, to create new values. This work would require an effort, and in the final analysis, he does not believe that effort is worth the trouble. He lies still and quiet inside the prison of his own past, and the thought of the future never enters his mind. For him, only the present exists.
But he forgets that outside those dark prisons, whole generations of young men are being born, a single one of whom is far more valuable than the accumulation of all past generations. The power that will direct the current of our social events is their Youth. One day they will seize the power to control the means of the wind from the hands of their parents. The majority of men living today are old, beyond what their age indicates. But young, too, are those who are born too late to grow up within a simple nationalist circuit. Here lies the deep source of today’s chaos. Here lies the true battlefield upon which we today draw the lines within which the generations that come after us will fight tomorrow…! / Memorie.al
Published in Tirana, 1936, original title: “Bardh’ e zi” (Black and White)
