Friday, December 28, 2007

Manufacturing Guilt

Commenting on Shirking Duty, Predrag writes:

The Serbs are generally conflict shame [sic] people, which will say it is very important for us not to offend even our enemies (up to a certain point). It may sound ridiculous but here are a couple of examples.
Even after all this wars that happened during the past decade I still have some “friends” of other Balkan nations. When I visit them at their homes, it is totally normal for them to have dozens of items showing their national insignia in their homes and they are proud about it. Serbs are different, when they are having a visit from a friend of another Balkan nationality; they tend to hide their national insignia so their visitor is not offended by it.


I've observed this phenomenon firsthand. It's perfectly OK to be a Slovenian, Croat, Albanian, "Bosniak" (whether with the lilacs or with the crescents, "Montenegrin" (of the Doclean kind) or whatnot, but God forbid you have an icon on the wall, let alone a flag or anything actually remotely national. It's perfectly OK for them to talk how they were "oppressed" and "victims of genocide," but when a Serb mentions politics that's "hurting their feelings."

Well, too bad. For them, I mean.

Here's how I riddle this. The whole conflict-avoidance/shame thing is an inferiority complex manufactured after WW2 to make the Serbs governable. Historically, Serbs are a tough lot to rule. Those princes and kings that ended up merely in exile were fortunate.

Consider also that the Communist Party of Yugoslavia had an overtly anti-Serb platform; their principal enemy was "greater Serbian bourgeoisie," i.e. the crown and the merchants/free peasants that supported it. Originally (at least since its 1928 congress in Dresden), the CPY championed the abolition of Yugoslavia and the "liberation" of Croats, Slovenians, Macedonians, Montenegrins... oh, and the annexation of "Kosova" to Albania (that's a subject for another article...). The Nazis did exactly that in 1941, but by 1945 - thanks to Soviet and British support - the Communists found themselves in possession of Yugoslavia. Suddenly dividing it up did not seem like such a good idea. But how could they hang on to power in Serbia, where they were extremely unpopular?

The answer was to manufacture guilt. Long before the term "moral equivalence" was coined, the children in socialist Yugoslavia learned that Chetniks (Serbian royalists who fought for the king) were no different than the Ustasha (Croatian Nazis who conducted a mass extermination of Jews and Serbs so brutally even the German Nazis were disturbed by it). Anyone familiar with "political correctness" of today will recognize the matrix along which the Serbs - defined as "oppressors" of everyone else by the virtue of their existence - were treated in comparison with Slovenes, Croats, Macedonians, Muslims and Montenegrins (the latter three given nationhood by Tito).

The reason Slobodan Milosevic became so wildly popular in the 1980s is because he dared challenge that matrix. When he said "No one is allowed to hit you" to the Serb demonstrators in Kosovo Polje (at the time getting clobbered by ethnic Albanian police) April 1987, Milosevic tapped into a vein of popular resentment that ended up bringing him to power.

Ironically, the West labeled Milosevic "the last Communist" and answered him with - Communist propaganda! The whole "genocidal Serbian aggressor" line, peddled since the early 1990s, reeks of it. Considering it originated with Slovenian, Croat and Bosnian Muslim separatists (who were the product of Tito's system), that should not be surprising.

Currently the torch-bearer for the notion of Serb Guilt are the so-called "reformers" - the media, NGOs, and political parties composed of erstwhile Reds who simply switched masters, and now work for the Empire (or the EUSSR). Every day, in every way, they peddle the line that Serbs are evil as a people, that they need to "reckon with the past" and "embrace the future" and atone and apologize and repent...

For sixty years (at least) the Serbs have been trapped in a matrix that insists their very existence is evil, abominable and shameful. This is how they've been kept enslaved. No man or woman who accepts being inferior can truly be free. But they are not kept in bondage by chains and whips, but by the force of ideas implanted into their minds.

Only by rejecting this manufactured guilt and by understanding who made it and with what purpose can the Serbs begin their path to freedom.

1 comment:

Flanders Fields said...

It is good to see that the PC process is understood and that the imposers of it are, too. It is not only Serbs who need to understand your message, but Free People everywhere.

The groundwork for the same process was laid long ago in the US, but it was not implemented in an observable way until the sixties and seventies. It has steamrolled since then. The US policy no longer reflects the policy of the US people, but it reflects the policies of the PC implementers of whom you speak.

You have a good blog. Come by to visit sometime.