Srećko Horvat: ‘The current system is more violent than any revolution’
Up until the collapse
of Yugoslavia in 1991, foreigners were not allowed to visit the beautiful
Dalmatian island of Vis, then home to a major naval base. Two years ago it was
the location for Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, doubling as the fictional Greek
island of Kalokairi.
One way of looking at
the transformation from military redoubt to Hollywood idyll is as a triumph of
freedom of movement over draconian restrictions. But that’s not how the
Croatian philosopher Srećko Horvat sees the resulting media attention, rising
real estate prices and what he calls the “tourist occupation” of Vis, where he
now lives. “Where once there was
a sustainable local community,” he writes in his new book, Poetry from
the Future, “there are weekending easyJet tourists; where fishermen’s boats
once rode at anchor, now luxury yachts are moored.”
You probably haven’t
heard of Horvat, though you will have heard of plenty of people who have. He’s
friends with the former Greek finance minister Yanis
Varoufakis, with whom he set up the Democracy
in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25). He was a regular visitor to Julian
Assange, before he was extracted from the Ecuadorian embassy. He’s also in close contact
with Assange’s friend, the former Baywatch star Pamela
Anderson.
He is a staunch friend
of Slavoj
Žižek, the maverick Slovenian celebrity academic (they co-wrote a book in
2013 entitled What Does Europe Want?), as well as being on good
terms with one of Žižek’s most vituperative critics, the renowned American
academic Noam Chomsky. He also hangs out with the celebrated Mexican
film-maker Alfonso Cuarón.
But at 36, Horvat is
far from being some kind of right-on hanger-on. In fact he’s one of the busiest
leftwing political activists in Europe. Aside from DiEM25, which campaigns to
reform the EU into a “realm of shared prosperity, peace and solidarity”, and
for whom he’s standing in the European elections, he is a founder of the Subversive festival, an
annual jamboree in Zagreb of radical thought that has featured the likes of
Oliver Stone and Antonio Negri, he set up the Philosophical
theatre in the same city, whose contributors have included Adam
Curtis, Vanessa Redgrave and Thomas Piketty.
And he has been involved in everything from Occupy Wall Street to the World
Social Forum and protests about the 2017 G20 Hamburg summit... read more:
