However, Yugoslavia was not inherently unsustainable. Generations born in the '60s or later (i.e. my generation) were, if not content with living in Yugoslavia (we would rather be living in the U.S. or, particularly, Amsterdam), at least acquiescing to Yugoslavia as *their* country. We fought each other in soccer stadiums, listened basically to the same music (British), watched the same movies (American), smoked the same shit (Moroccan) and hated the same system (communist). Rock bands from Serbia and Bosnia were filling stadiums in Croatia and Slovenia, and vice versa.

This natural bonding among youth was discouraged by the top brass, who considered rock'n'roll too western, too American, too decadent. They hated the idea of letting anybody escape their ideological control. But, abruptly abandoning their anti-nationalist policies, which they ruthlessly and relentlessly enforced as their ideology for fifty years, Yugoslav politicians in the late 1980s just grabbed the ancient nationalist flags, smooching them shamelessly all over, learned to mumble some basic Christian prayers and a few words of the popular nationalist songs (mostly left over from the Nazi period), and over night they became NEW leaders. They came up with their simple, no-fine-print, ostensibly anti-bureaucracy populist "Contract With [fill in the name of the state]" programs, promising to deconstruct communism and offering us national salvation if we agree to blame the "other side" for their failure to stop the headlong dive of the national currency and the rise of an enormous national debt. In those last years of Yugoslavia, interest on the national debt consumed even more of the GNP than the defense spending. Ustashe (Croatian Nazis) and Chetnitsi (Serbian Nazis), whose memory was used by the Party to scare us throughout our formative years, meanwhile became amicable national heroes.

The key in their success in making this war possible is communication or, more precisely, lack of it. Yugoslavia was a country without national television and almost without major national dailies. Benefiting from the 1974 Constitution, designed to allow greater autonomy for the republics, each republic had its own major media, which were controlled by the local (republic) party nomenclature. Since there was only one political party and six republics, disagreements would run along national instead of political lines. Once the leadership of six different republics turned against each other, their six national TV-s started a vicious propaganda war. Independent, alternative media (weeklies, magazines, low-power FM stations) were rarely distributed nationally. When they were, they were promptly confiscated by the police as the Slovenian (Mladina, a youth anti-militarist paper) was when it appeared on the streets of Belgrade in 1988. Major party-controlled media never tried to cross republic lines: they had their target audience precisely defined. Mass communication was preferred to individual communication: there were more households with a TV set than with a telephone (there was a steep connection fee and a ten years wait - or a large bribe).