The Great Nobody, From today, I am the Great Nobody

The Great Nobody,

From today, I am the Great Nobody.

From today, I am a free citizen, free, free.

Not because some new right was granted, but because a weight was lifted.

My voice will speak louder now that it has slipped the frame of a political role, the shackles of a “representative” mask that asked me to keep quiet so the machine could keep its order, that asked me to accept a sentence of oblivion so the “balances” would not be disturbed, that asked me to carry the mud, the sludge, the insults and slanders of a regime that feeds on contempt, and of those hollow heads and brain-washed minds, the social and anthropological monstrosities of a corrupt post-communism that, in thirty-five years, has dimmed both mind and soul.

From today, I am the great nobody.

And here, precisely here, freedom begins: when you are not obliged to appear, nor to appear obliged, when you represent no camp, no apparatus, no interest but your conscience.

I owe no further duty to “stay in the game” merely to prove endurance under absurd rules.

I return to the word that needs no tribune, to the proof that needs no permission, to the memory that needs no approval.

There is a bitter truth we must say aloud: we Albanians have a very bitter habit.

We often treat the best, the wisest, the most capable as superfluous, unnecessary, then we scorn them and trample them.

We have trained ourselves not to see them.

To leave them alone. To abandon them.

Look back: 14–22 November 1908, Manastir.

A handful of people, a whole generation of the National Renaissance, gathered to give the nation a unified alphabet.

Around that Congress stand names the walls still bear: Mit’hat Frashëri (chair of sessions), Ndre Mjeda, Father Gjergj Fishta (who chaired the commission that drafted the alphabet), Luigj Gurakuqi, Sotir Peci, Shahin bey Kolonja, Bajo and Çerçiz Topulli, Gjergj Qiriazi, and Parashqevi Qiriazi, the only woman delegate. They were few, very few.

They carried books, not shovels for mud. They brought vision, not a mob.

And how did we reward them?

In 1914–1915, while those men and women of the alphabet were still alive, the crowd rallied around Haxhi Qamili, in the pro-Ottoman revolt of Central Albania, the racket of the tambour drowned, once again, the voice of the word.

This is our most painful truth: again and again we choose the tambour and forget the alphabet; we follow the shout and leave the word, leave it alone, or worse, kill it.

I have felt this in my own skin.

I do not compare myself to them, the Fathers and Mothers of the Nation who made Manastir.

Never. I neither dare nor desire any such comparison.

I am a great nobody. And yet, within that “modesty,” within that “humility,” I have tried to do only the best, only the good.

I have endured abandonment as a wall, mud as a climate, sludge as a national sport.

I have watched the Haxhi-Qamilist armies of the twenty-first century march, ranked like a chorus of hooligans beneath the sigils of the regime’s major parties, and across from them the new surrogate parties, puppets of the system, shouting in the same register, only to thicken my silence.

I know what it means to pay with oblivion, to be erased from screens as if by magic, to be slandered and fabricated upon, to see mud and venom and curses hurled without end, at me, and at those I love, to be threatened, because I would not sell, because I would not become like them or join them.

But today I choose freedom.

Not the freedom that asks permission, but the freedom that springs by itself from the true word.

I choose to be a citizen, not a representative, a free voice, not an authorized one, a nobody who, precisely for that, becomes a somebody who will not surrender his constitutional rights or his personal dignity.

Because when the uniform falls, when the skin of the political role is peeled away, the human being appears.

And the human being, left alone with his conscience, becomes louder than any megaphone.

On 11 May 2025, citizens voted.

Yesterday a new government was sworn in, complete with its “Diella.” (Diella the New Mockery of Edi Rama by creating a New AI Minister)…

In that same hall stand the old opposition that was likewise voted back, and the new surrogate parties that were also approved.

Every vote bears a consequence, every consequence has an author: the citizen.

Whoever chose this reality should bear the consequences of this reality.

As for me, from today I do not compete, I do not represent, I do not speak any longer as a player in politics, nor as a marginal aspirant, forgotten and disregarded.

I have laid down the banner of leading a political community.

I have laid down the uniform, the sword, the daily battle in shifting sands of muck.

I lead nothing.

I represent no one.

I am alone. I am utterly alone.

I am the nobody.

But do not mistake me: my freedom is not an escape; it is the stance of a solitary man, a return.

A return to my constitutional right to speak, to my right to name good and evil without leave from anyone, to my right to remind us that Albania is not built by crowds but by conscience, not by hysteria, but by the alphabet.

Do not suppose that, left in peace, I would have kept silent.

Silence is the privilege of the comfortable.

I have neither the luxury of comfort nor an allergy to solitude.

I will speak.

I will speak without reckoning, without cease, in a stronger voice, without protocol, without a pass at the door.

I will speak to defend the very thing those men and women of Manastir defended: the dignity of the Albanian word and the dignity of the human person.

Even if no one takes notice, my word will stand like a foundation stone, not a facade.

For the day will come when the history of this land will not remember the loudspeakers and tambours of Haxhi-Qamilism, it will remember the alphabet.

Yes, I am the great nobody.

A nobody free who has nothing to lose, therefore has everything to say.

A nobody who will ask for no race, no pretension, no representation, no permission, no chair, at least not for some years.

I am the Nobody who will no longer pay with silence and compromise to make others comfortable.

The Nobody who knows that the only way to heal a nation is to speak the truth, even when it is worth no vote at all.

If Albania chooses again to follow Haxhi Qamilism, let it do so in full awareness.

Let it know it has looked into the eyes of the alphabet and chosen the tambour.

Let it know it has once more abandoned that precious minority which opens new paths.

I will be here, by the side of the road, not in its middle, and I will say:

Choose reading over howling.

Choose building over tearing down.

Choose remembrance over cursing.

For from today, I am a free citizen.

I am a free voice.

I am a free nobody who loves this country without conditions and without bargains, who does not beg and does not demand, but stands, speaks, and struggles alone so that the truth is not sold.

If one day we wish to be a mature nation, we will understand that freedom begins with the nobody, with the human being who needs no role to speak the truth.

And when the nobody’s path is cleared, the ears of conscience turn toward him,

and the homeland breathes.

Arian Galdini

Free citizen, free voice, The Great Nobody.