4. May 1995.

To the editors of the Belgrade Circle Journal

As the attorney for Professor Dr Mihailo Djuric, and with regard to the article published in the Belgrade Circle Journal 0/94, without date, under the title "Thinker on the Stage", I hereby request, on the basis of the corresponding articles of the Law on Press and Other Forms of Information, that you publish, in the next issue of your magazine, Professor Djuric's answer of 20. April 1995, under the title of "In the Vicious Circle".

Respectfully,

Vitomir Knezevic
Attorney-at-law

Enclosed: Text of Professor Ðuric's reply entitled "In the Vicious Circle"

In The Vicious Circle
Letter to the Editors

In an article entitled "Thinker on the Stage" published in the Belgrade Circle Journal, 0/94, pp. 227-228, your editor-in-chief has accused me of showing in an "authentic, inimitable way that nationalism was the last stadium of humanism", and of thus "furnishing our nationalist brutality with /a/ convincing theoretical background and clear philosophical conscience". He did not even try to justify these monstrous accusations, but gratuitously misused two quotes taken out of context from my book Experience of the Different (Belgrade, 1994), indulging in the true and tested method of slanderers and troublemakers of all kinds and colours.

There is nothing to debate with the authors of that article. Regarding his insolent twisting of the meaning of my words, it is sufficient to point out the following:

1) The quote from page 49, accompanied by the malicious remark that "his humanism took on specifically ethnological overtones", was taken out of its wider context which speaks about the causes of national tensions and conflicts in the modern world and precisely criticizes the phenomena of nationalist fanaticism and exclusiveness;

2) The quote from page 117, perfidiously described as a "programme of national self-redemption", was taken out of its wider context which speaks of the need to cultivate the national consciousness, that is, to refine and ennoble national feeling (and not to strengthen and enforce it by fire and sword). This, therefore, is a demand for educating the people in love for the fatherland (and not for poisoning it with hatred for what is foreign) so that together with other peoples it can take part in the activities of all mankind.

Evidently completely intoxicated with his imagined importance, your editor-in-chief quoted at the end of his pasquil a short sentence from page 225 of my above-mentioned book which has no direct connection with his senseless accusation, so this was presumably in order to entertain the readers. That sentence reads: "In order to know what we are to do, we should do that which we would wish to know". Miraculously, your irresponsible editor mockingly said that the sentence had "taken on cult status" and was "worthy of inclusion in any anthology", recongnizing in it the wisdom of Mao Zedong and Khadaffi! He did not notice -- even though his name and the title of "Editor-in-Chief" on the journal's cover are carefully accompanied by the description of "Philosopher" -- that this sentence is actually a condensation of an ancient insight of Aristotle's which is, by the way, described in detail in my book (pp. 59-87).

I ask that you publish this letter in the next issue of your journal, thus at least partly removing the suspicion that in this country, nearly as a rule, even every apparently new Other is, regrettably, always the old Same.

Mihailo Djuric
Belgrade, 20 April 1995.

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