THE FORMER POLITICAL PRISONER, MAKSIM RAKIPAJ, THE GREAT DENOUNCER AND EXPOSER OF THE DICTATORSHIP AND COMMUNIST CRIMES
Memorie.al / Dear Maks! I do not wish to dwell on your talent, nor on your artistic mastery, or the culture with which you have written your books. For as much as I have followed your creativity, I prefer to emphasize something much more important that characterizes you – whether as a writer, a citizen, or a patriot – and which compels me to call you, just as your name implies, that for this value, you truly are: “the greatest” (Maksim/Maximum).
I am speaking of your clarity and unwavering courage to denounce, condemn, and expose the monstrous crimes of communism against this unfortunate people, whom for nearly half a century, they impoverished, massacred, humiliated, alienated, and discredited.
You paid for your clarity and courage with many years in prison, accused of agitation and propaganda, when in fact, those who sentenced you should have been the ones imprisoned for that charge – for they were lying, while you were telling only the truth…!
After these three decades of democracy, as we see that the mentality, practices, and the self-interested, unprincipled nostalgics, as well as the maneuvers of war to gain as many followers as possible by power-hungry politicians who have left our fatherland in the hands of foreigners, are flourishing in Albania – the indifference, sluggishness, silence, or to put it bluntly, the fear of intellectuals, and especially of historians and writers, is inexcusable.
Speaking on this matter, our world-renowned writer and several-time Nobel Prize candidate, “Honor of the Nation,” Ismail Kadare, has said: “Authentic literature is incompatible with dictatorships. The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorships.” Not that articles and books dealing with these problems have been absent during this period, but compared to the tragedy inflicted upon this country, they are far too few.
In analyzing the order Orestes received from Apollo to take revenge for his father’s murder, Janis Benekos wrote: “The cleansing of crime was an unshakeable law for the ancient Greeks. If the wicked remained unpunished, then evil would multiply and society would be destroyed.”
Are these words not relevant for every country and every time? Someone might say that we have started a different journey. But Franz Kafka taught that: “Belief in progress does not mean that progress has been achieved. That would not be a belief.” Someone else might say that phase has passed and now we must only look toward the future and leave these things to history. I am convinced that such people must be reminded that history also has its trash bin.
Pausing at this moment, in a piece of mine published a few days ago, I quoted something monumental from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s famous book, “The Gulag Archipelago,” where anyone can find an even uglier copy of our own fate in that Hell. He said, textually: “But they themselves, those who had put the handcuffs on our hands, now quietly raised their hands and said: Don’t!… The past must not be disturbed…! He who mentions the old… should have one eye plucked out!”
However, the proverb concludes: “But he who forgets should have both plucked out!” In one of his speeches, the President of the USA, Ronald Reagan, not as a film actor but as a politician, said: “A communist is one who reads Marx and Lenin (about whom you have published a very significant and mask-tearing document). An anti-communist – he continues – is one who understands Marx and Lenin.”
You, it seems, dear friend, belong to that category who has understood them well, without forgetting the “Vlad Tepes Draculas” of modern times: Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, and Enver Hoxha. And precisely for this reason, you never cease your stigma for a single moment.
The fact that you do this from Italy, where you have resided for many years, is not only a responsible and courageous act but also very meaningful. It is, ultimately, the example that each of us should follow.
I am convinced that you act as a missionary, not for division, as you have understood the message given by Oriana Fallaci: “Along with oppression and bloodshed, vulgarity and bitter taste, the main characteristic of a dictatorship is ignorance, contempt for culture, illiteracy.”
And to close, I am borrowing again her words from 46 years ago, which should serve as a lesson to us all: “I have found in disobedience to oppression the only way to use the miracle of human life.”
You are on this path; you write prose and translate masterpieces of world poetry into Albanian – continue, dear friend, and I wish you always success!/Memorie.al
