in "Central Europe Review" volume 1, issue 7)
The Balkans, an eternal crossroad of different civilizations and cultures even today, is considered to be the "navel of the world" or as Sam Vaknin puts it in his erratic, eruptive, intellectual volcano of a book, "After the Rain – How the West Lost the East" – "is the unconscious of the world" ("The Mind of Darkness") or worse, probably a navel, but "the Balkan is a body without a brain" ("Homo Balkanus").
There are a few other, similarly neuralgic points on Earth, but what distinguishes the Balkans from the rest is that it is precisely via its central part – Macedonia – that Christianity and modern literacy invaded Europe. The Byzantine civilization – traceable in today's Balkans as a junction of the Hellenic spirit and the wisdom of Byzantium, deeply rooted in the cultures of Babylon and the old Mesopotamian civilizations – is still of high interest to modern scholars of the Balkans.
Dr. Sam Vaknin is one of these contemporary detectors of the "transitions" in the East, who is trying to discover, understand and direct the Balkans and the East through his publicist work. In his book "After the Rain – How the West Lost the East", Dr. Sam Vaknin is a sincere investigator of the "Homo Balkanus", of the Easterner, his mind, culture and way of living, defining him "a full fledges narcissist". Immediately after that, in "The Magla Vocables" he says that even linguistically "it is impossible to really understand an Easterner", mocking or more precisely reaching the level of real offence in portraying the image of the intellectuals of the East ("The Poets and Eclipse").
Reading this large book of essays, however, one should bear in mind that the author is limited by the clichés of his framework of values and thinking given to him by the culture and system of rules from which he originated. Thus, his articles are provocative, turbulent, irritating, revolting. The impact of his writing is terrible with the strength of hurricane. His word often kill, his defeatism nullifies. Sometimes pretentious, still "After the Rain" represents a serious, lucid and transcendent effort to make the Balkan closer, to introduce the East to the West, ignoring for a moment the pessimistic assertion that the West already lost the East.
But if this were right, it would have meant that the West is lost, had disappeared in the East. The truth is completely the opposite: The West has yet to find the East. The East, which provided the foundation of contemporary Western civilization, literacy and Christianity, still hibernates within its traditional values as an essential element of the endurance of the people and perhaps as the unique salvation of mankind. The West has to burst into the wisdom of the East to keep the very roots of life, the wisdom to live in peace and in harmony with God and with nature. If this should not happen, we will all finish like in Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World".
Consequently, when reading these essays, it will not be asking for much to have a dose of restraint towards Dr. Vaknin's sometimes lethal "absolute truths" regarding the Balkans and the East. After you finish reading this book, you can find out not only what the East is – but also what the East is, indeed, not. This is because Dr. Vaknin observes the Balkan and the East only from the dark side, regarding its people as zombies who do not have any idea at all why they are walking on this Earth. Unfortunately for him, life, neither in the Balkans in particular, nor in the East in general, is a pathology as he enjoys saying. That is why some of his articles contain an overly heavy-handed personal touch, momentary sensations and impressions too strong, amounting to exaggeration, or, in other words, he puts things headlong.
In "The MinMaj Rule" his paranoiac fear of the "nation-state" can be felt. His perversity reaches a climax when he finds a justification for the West and its three months long NATO bombing of Yugoslavia (an act without precedent in modern history, which indeed resulted in the same pitiless kind of bombing in Chechnya) and in the acknowledgment that for the Albanian residents of Kosovo "it has not protected their right to self-determination".