I am talking to a young man about the possibility that foreign investors in golf development in Croatia serve as fronts for illicit investment by top Croatian politicians. I explain how ill-begotten moneys can get out of the country to be placed into shady accounts in countries such as Liechtenstein, whence they can be laundered through foreign investment projects of all sorts. I turn to the connection between golf development and the disposal of vast tracts of land in government’s hands. And I touch on the influence the very same politicians can exert legally or otherwise to ensure that golf development projects sail through all the government’s vetting procedures back home. The young man just listens impassively. “When I imagine the reaction of most of my friends and acquaintances to everything you have told me,” he says quietly at last, “I cannot imagine any distress or anger, let alone revolt. Most of them would only think about ways in which they themselves could get involved in all the wheeling and dealing you are talking about.” Startled a bit, I turn to the spirit of 1968, when my views of the world were forged. The young man frowns: “What happened in 1968?”

Addendum (February 18, 2016)

The conversation with the young man that this piece is about crosses my mind quite often. In his mid-twenties, he was about to graduate from the University of Zagreb at the time. I knew him from Motovun, where he attended a summer school several years in a row, but our conversation took place at a café in the Croatian capital, where we met by chance. His reaction to my story about crooked golf in Motovun, which I learned about less than a week earlier, positively stunned me (Addendum I, June 16, 2009, to “The Motovun Golf Saga,” April 2, 2009). It demonstrated beyond a shade of doubt that corruption and organized crime had become a way of life in Croatia since independence. But, as the title of the piece shows, I was even more amazed at the young man’s innocence of 1968, when my idealism about the human species was forged. Come to think of it, the student uprising in Belgrade must have had little if any effect in Zagreb at the time. The same holds for the student uprisings in Paris, Berlin, and Prague. Well, San Francisco should also be added to the list. By the late Sixties, Croatia was in the grips of petty nationalism, which blossomed in 1971. By then, I was in the States already. Alas, times and places rarely match!