– It’s the ones who have been present for years and decades. It started in the 90s with pluralism, when it was noted that the main critics of political elites were the citizens. Then the part with the money started, because here society was as such, there still were no groups that fought for themselves. When there was misuse of money, it was used to create a general image that civil society organizations are money launderers, even though we are perhaps the most transparent organizations that exist in the country. No other ones have so many financial reports. And despite the transparency, that image that exists in regards to civil society organizations cannot be erased, says Kocho Andonovski from the LGBTI Support Center – Macedonian Helsinki Committee at CIVIL’s debate “Black propaganda against civil society organizations”.
The second topic – values, is a bit more difficult to defend. In Zagreb there are group of activists, where we share different information and research. What can be noted is that what started spontaneously in the 70s in the United States, with Nixon, when the right-wingers realized they could use propaganda to their benefit, gained unseen proportions with the arrival of Putin. With the arrival of Putin and the start of this disinformation war, they took over our way of organizing and communicating. They took over the civil model, of civil society, which is developed by non-governmental civil movements. A network has already been built, and that is why the same narratives from Utah can be seen in Veles.
-Those people are reactionaries, they don’t want progress, because they don’t want certain groups, they don’t want to achieve equality. All this has a line of movement that is fed in a very specific way. This is feeding of a fascist monster that started very specifically with the global attack on Soros, which essentially is Antisemitism. One of the fundamentals of these reactionaries is Antisemitism. They continued with conspiracy and threat. The LGBTI movement that was presented in an extremely monstrous manner, which leads to dehumanization of an entire group of people, not only activists, leads to maybe for the center to be attacked. It was attacked six times. That group is no longer human. Antisemitism, dehumanization of entire groups of people, making enemies out of those groups, frightening people, says Andonovski.
Luckily, such monsters need to be fed every day, new and new groups are needed, people, until they become majority. What is frightening is that before it gets better, it will be worse. The latest outburst of all of this is the attack on the education reform. The attack is not by chance or naïve, it’s not an attack on the digitalization (though there is a financial aspect). However, the main thing is that Gruevski’s structure managed to incorporate strong patriarchy in the textbooks. This attack on the reform has precisely the purpose to avoid cleansing of the textbooks from strong patriarchal content that has been introduced.
They are carrying out total dehumanization of transgender people, they are no longer people, they are an ideology. That is dehumanization. And tomorrow someone can go and kill someone because they are not human but an ideology, concludes Andonovski.
Translation: N. Cvetkovska
