Milan Rakovac: ‘Fascists block progress’

Milan Rakovac: It’s important to raise our voices, of course, especially when Israel is executing journalists and innocent civilians. That’s a barbaric way to conduct war. Going back in history, my grandfather was taken to the Flossenbürg concentration camp [Germany] during World War II, and my father was killed during that same war. I was only five years old and became the heir of the family. Of course, I was just a child, but somehow that child was forced to grow up fast, to be a man.

I feel well. First of all, I want to say that I feel like one of you. Let me tell you something: I still vividly remember what Spanish fascism did. ETA was formed before the death of the dictator Francisco Franco, and for me, it felt as if we were in the same liberation struggle. To put it in perspective, my father was a member of the Communist Party and had ties with Italian anti-fascists. We faced Spanish, Italian and German fascists. In that context, I have always felt like a member of a minoritised people – just like you.

We moved to Zagreb when I was 13. I was an Eastern boy in the capital of Croatia, and I never felt particularly tame. I came from the working class, and it was the children of workers who saved me.

I started writing poetry when I was around 10 years old. I was terrible at football. I went to music school and played the violin. Then I began experimenting with writing. I read a lot. After a few years, I knew what I wanted to be: a writer. I think reading Herman Melville, Joseph Cornell and Jack London made me one. I also got it into my head that to be a real writer, I had to become a sailor – like them. So I enrolled in a military academy and became an officer in the Yugoslav Navy. Later I began writing novels.

Yes, of course – Charles Bukowski, Norman Mailer and John Dos Passos.

I might mention [Sergei] Eisenstein, but there are others too. I’ve had many influences.

At Croatian television, I was often considered a troublemaker. I made documentaries about fascism and anti-fascism. When I started doing this kind of work, everyone in TV was taken aback. You see, I’d ask the crew to start filming people’s shoes, then slowly move the camera upwards until it reached the top of the scene. ‘What are you doing?’ they asked. It was something new at the time. Over the course of my life, I’ve made around 200 documentaries on a wide range of topics.

We are living in an age of vanity. Art should be a free space. What we’re seeing now feels like a wild river overflowing its banks. This is the era of post-literature and post-journalism. No one cares anymore about the five classic questions journalism is supposed to answer: who, what, where, when and why. We’ve lost that. Journalism has sunk into vanity. It’s all post-this and post-that. Everything is superficial.

I believe it will. Not yet, but soon. I’m convinced AI will turn human intelligence into a mere ornament.

Minority languages and dialects are the only way for humanity to preserve itself. I hope they will endure. But the risks are real – everything is becoming more and more trivial and post-political. Fascists will keep throwing up barriers, because fascists block progress. Still, I hold on to some hope that humanity will move forward. [At the awards ceremony, Igor Devetak, editor-in-chief of Primorski dnevnik, gave the laudatory speech, highlighting Rakovac’s lifelong commitment to anti-fascism.]

First and foremost, you must love the craft. Then you need formal education, and you should learn languages. The more languages you know, the better. And those five journalistic questions I mentioned – they should be engraved on a bronze plaque, or made into a sculpture, like the Ten Commandments. A journalist must undoubtedly have curiosity and love.