The sixth chapter The innocence of the torturer: victims in propaganda Serbian of the book The Temptation of Innocence: Living in the Age of Entitlement, published in 2000 in New York by Algora Publishing.
By: Pascal Bruckner
Selected and translated by: Rexhep Maloku
"The day when crime overtakes innocence, with a curious flood that is specific to our time, it is innocence that must justify itself" - Albert Camus, "L'Homme révolté"
"Not being able to empower the just, we have succeeded in making the powerful just" - Pascal, "Pensées"
"We are the Jews of the world at the end of the twentieth century. Our beloved Jerusalem is being threatened by infidels. The whole world hates us; the fickle enemy, a hundred-headed hydra is sworn to destroy us. All our children already wear the invisible yellow star sewn into their clothes. We are the ones who have suffered the worst genocide than the one committed by the Nazis against Jews and Gentiles, and like the Jews, we too must begin the journey through the desert, even if it will last five thousand years.
From whose mouth do these words come? Any exalted messianic leader, from the head of some fundamentalist Protestant cult that rivals Judaism for biblical accuracy? It's not even a question!
Such statements have been made daily, in one form or another, for years by partisans of the Milosevic regime in Belgrade. The novelist Dobrica Qosić, the chief inspirer of Serbian nationalism and president of the new Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro), wrote until June 1993 that the Serb "is the new Jew, at the end of the twentieth century - a victim of the same injustices, if not of the same persecutions: the new martyred people". But the Serbs are more Jewish than the Jews themselves, to tell the truth, since they were "victims of a genocide that exceeded the proportions of the Nazi genocides in terms of method and ferocity", as Qosić wrote in relation to the policy of extermination exercised by the Croatian Ustashas against their compatriots his between 1941 and 1944.
The war that destroyed the territory of the former Yugoslavia since 1991 and which was premeditated by Belgrade, was based on a fantastic misinterpretation: the torturer presented himself as a martyr and Europe, in agreement with the torturer, presented those who were attacked (Croats, Bosniaks, Kosovo Albanians) as responsible for the tragedies that had befallen them. If they had a problem, they were said to have asked for the black one – it was their fault!
Why this terrible mistake, why for almost a year, western intellectuals, politicians and journalists, had eaten the bait of Serbian propaganda? And how could a person as informed as François Mitterrandi state on November 29, 1991 (in an interview with the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" at the very time when the city of Vukovar had just burned to the ground and when a quarter of the Croatian territory had fallen under the control of the former federal army), that "Croatia, not Serbia, belonged to the Nazi bloc?"
Because Milosevic and his loyalists were smart enough to conquer public opinion and justify the war before starting it with propaganda writings about the misfortunes that the Serbian people suffered throughout history. By constantly showing pictures and footage of massacred, trampled and tortured women, children and old people, or endlessly quoting in debates and meetings the list of those who died in Jasenovc (one of the most terrible concentration camps of the Croatian regime under Ante The pro-Nazi Pavelić, where Jews, Jews, Serb and Croat partisans were exterminated by the thousands), this propaganda provided wide moral ground, and from the start it took the breath away from anyone who might doubt it: Look at my suffering and dare to tell me it's equal! This is a case study that clouded our knowledge of the conflict and became the source from which misjudgments later flowed: the indifference, hesitation and wait-and-see policy of Europe and America.
Therefore, the Serbian rulers, before launching their offensive in Croatia and Bosnia, had already won the battle of the mind, a certain level of kindness had already been expressed to them by the international community. This explains why Belgrade, like few conquerors in recent history, was not cut off; why Belgrade was favored with his theses discussed, commented, listened to and evaluated with great attention; why he enjoyed this kind of privilege. Countless documentaries, essays and reports had been published since 1991, detailing the crimes committed during World War II by Croats, Bosniaks and Albanians who had joined the Nazi regime – although the collection of these horrors would somehow compensate for them. the horrors committed during the same time by the militia of Belgrade. Undoubtedly, after a year this exclusive preference for Serbs was given up. But, in order to avoid an immediate retreat, the foreign ministers invented another fable: that all the camps were equally terrible. Thus the equal principle triumphed: things were not put in their proper perspective, but all parties were engaged in the same flight of tribal savagery. And, in May 1993, regarding the events in Bosnia, Warren Christopher made this confusing statement before Congress: “It would be easy to compare all of this to the Holocaust, but I have never heard anything about any genocide being committed by Jews. against the German people". Many people even today continue to find justifying circumstances for Serbian nationalism and cannot approach this topic without immediately falling into the trap of confounding Croats, Bosniaks, Slovenes, Albanians and Macedonians.
And, the trick worked. The Serbian hypnotist, seeking the great vindication for his horrific crimes, had only to disguise himself as a victim to be forgiven. Where did we go wrong with the Yugoslav crisis? The same, as with the eternal mistake we made with communism and with our support for the Third World: We have allowed ourselves to be blackmailed by the rhetoric of the victim. The terrible lesson of the century is this backlash that transforms the oppressed, upon taking power, into dictators, that transforms the proletarians into tyrants, the colonized into new rulers. Conscience does not kill those who were persecuted. And the people from whom we expected justice and equality, actually rule with despotism, which is even more frightening since they came to power with aspirations for freedom and justice. It is this form of subversion, because we are not able to pronounce it - as if it was written once and for all that if you were once a victim, you will always remain a victim. That way you don't risk slipping into violence and totalitarianism. This was the power of Milosevic's propaganda (apart from – or because of – its fantastical aspect, to which he also attached the tradition of Slavic folklore). He remembers all the blacks that his people have suffered, especially those between 1941 and 1945, giving him permanent immunity, putting himself above the law. Nothing was more discouraging than to see how this trap was being accepted and swallowed by the public (and often in the name of strict democratic vigilance).
Few people, at least at the beginning, understood that these same people who appeared as resisters of fascism, (Serbs) had already borrowed the methods of fascism, that the wolf had entered the lamb's skin; few remembered that the victimizing ideology was part of fascism, which is not only the doctrine of the superior race, but of a humiliated superior race. Thus, with impeccable skill, the Serbian extremists succeeded in disguising their appetite for conquest as a concern for the protection of their minorities, their warlike will as a love of peace, their ethnic cleansing as a burning desire to preserve Yugoslav Federation. In short, the proverb sums it up best: "Even the devil likes to quote the Bible".
What is victimizing identity for Serbs?
It is a tradition forged by literature and the Orthodox Church, and has deep roots in the long history of suffering, from the time of Turkish colonization and the Habsburg feudal system, which generated exaggerated patriotism, and which encouraged dramatic acts of heroism. It is the sense of permanent insecurity created by the constant influxes and border changes, the angry migrations and exiles of citizens who had fled from hostile territories. And the skirt is an inherited element that took off from the defeat of Prince Lazar on June 15, 1389 before the Ottomans in the Battle of Kosovo ("Field of Thorns"), a historical event whose legacy is remembered for centuries. The Serbs were in front of a glorious destiny - they were supposed to be the builders of the new Byzantine kingdom, but everything slipped from their hands. Today, the trampled heirs of an empire that never existed, do not accept the loss at all. There is pride, even beauty, in the way they celebrate their defeats, since God has chosen this very people to test them with adversity and make them the instruments of his purposes, as if it were written that earthly debacle would be forever transformed into triumph. heavenly against the forces of the devil. The Serbs seem not to feel poisoned by the evils they have been affected by, and they cultivate, especially in their epic poetry, the exaltation of these judgments, believing unshakably in their martyrdom.
The whole people is incarnated with the conviction that it is written to suffer and that it is the descendant of this type of aristocratic dignity: if it is seen with such contempt, it is mistreated from the beginning, and this can only be the work of God!
Since coming to power, Milosevic has adapted to the anxieties of his compatriots, reawakening the past of his predecessors to use it for the political and military plan for Greater Serbia. (Greater Serbia, let us remind you, does not only mean the unification of all Serbs in one state. It also means, and more importantly, the expulsion of all non-Serbs from that state). This obsession with mourning, death and disappearance, perfectly created in itself, is seen with ever more suspicion when it is used by a leader of a state and transformed into an ideological weapon for the legitimization of war. Thus, Milosevic's Serbia, towards the end of the 1980s, felt that it had not been hurt so much by the injustice of the economic situation that had resulted from the misadventures of the Second World War and the suppression of Yugoslavia, but by an essentially metaphysical injustice that it has its roots in 1000 years of history. In this respect, Serbian national communism is an interesting hybrid: from extreme nationalism it borrows the obsession against mixed blood (a recurring theme in Dobrica Qosic's novels), the phobia against impunity and the urgent need for separation, to know who is what. "Our heart and identity," declared Karadžić, leader of the Bosnian Serbs, "can survive only through division. You can't mix water and oil. The Balkans are not like Switzerland or the United States of America. The pressure cooker has never worked, regardless of successive foreign invaders." It borrowed the style from Communism, a claim that is thought to have originated from the old cultural heritage, as we have seen. This horrifying mishmash clouded the vision of our sharpest anti-fascists: this is not Nazism - Milosevic is not Hitler and ethnic cleansing is not the final solution - not even staunch Stalinism, but the denatured product of their recent marriage combined with a pluralist facade and mafia economy. This is why the Serbian cocktail can be used as a precedent for peoples who have recently emerged from communism; its seductive power stems from the combination of two movements (which used to be measured against each other) at war against their eternal enemy: liberal democracy. It pairs Stalinist methods with the cracker exaltation of identity, magnified and exalted in its own purity, against contamination and interbreeding. And, above all, it offers the policy of humiliation to countries that do not feel they are their masters and for which independence is only a shaky foundation. It shows them how, in the name of yesterday's misfortunes, to fabricate the hallmark that makes them untouchable, that discharges them from their debts and, moreover, gives them license to hate and punish as they please.
However, little Serbia is always haunted by the shadow of Russia, which is tied to Serbia by religious, emotional and ethnic knots – the shadow of a new Orthodox Pan-Slavic arc. For all those in Moscow and elsewhere in the ruins of the Soviet empire who dream of revenge against the West and who feel humiliated, Milosevic's Serbia offers the successful model for stunning communism. There is a danger that the truth resides here. The Belgrade regime's hypocrisy is not so much based on the expression of goals that may be legitimate - all the former Yugoslav republics were unhappy with their lot, but on the fact that it has chosen to correct them through violence and ethnic cleansing , thus violating the great promise on which modern Europe built itself: the prohibition of war. No more invasions, mass destruction, extermination on our continent - such was the pact that bound the states of Western Europe since 1945 and that governed the Franco-German reconciliation. Therefore, our disputes must be resolved by dialogue and arbitration, not by arms. The "Yugoslav laboratory" (Roland Dumas) has reopened "Pandora's box": the prospect of forceful modification of borders. Believing that it will buy peace by tearing Bosnia apart, Europe only encourages war as a means of solving problems. (Moscow's brutal intervention in Chechnya would not have happened without Vukovar and Sarajevo). Finally, Europe once again authorizes crimes against humanity as instruments of occupation in its own backyard.
Genocide as rhetoric in Serbian propaganda
It is not the intention to dismiss the scale of the massacres carried out by the Ustasha from 1941 to 1945 (which were terrible, but were carried out only with the approval of a minority of the Croatian population) and the terror it sowed in the hearts of the Serbian people. Pavelić's Croatia remains behind Nazi Germany, "the bloodiest regime in all of Hitler's Europe. Neither Fascist Italy, nor Vichy France, nor Slovakia, Hungary or Romania experienced anything similar".
In this sense, one of the mistakes of President Tudjman, at the time of Croatia's independence, would be not offering a solemn apology to the Serbs for the Pavelic regime; he did not go (as Willy Brandt did, let's say, when he went to the Warsaw ghetto) to bend his knees in Jasenovac, to assure them that the new Croatia would no longer produce such hatred. A gesture like this would not disarm Belgrade's aggressiveness at all, but it would have an immediate symbolic impact – it would prove that the new republic, anxious to join Europe, was reaching out for reconciliation and justice. (Franjo Tujmani waited until January 15, 1992 to condemn the mass murders of Jews by the Ustasha - through a letter sent to Edgar Bronfman, president of the World Jewish Congress. As the author of a book where he also writes about the genocide, Tujmani, in addition, he repeated, on several occasions during his election campaigns: “Unfortunately, my wife is neither Serbian nor Jewish.” He justified himself for his “denial” book in a letter sent in February 1994 to the president of “American B'nai Birth.” As often happens in similar cases, the benevolent, but too late, approach to atone for the terrible mistakes that lead to the bottom of the well.
As for memory, the genocide always evoked by Serbian extremists is an inexhaustible source of hatred, revenge and anger. Embodied with the bad luck that distinguishes them, these extremists have eye marks: they claim not just one, but three genocides committed against Serbs in the twentieth century alone. So, a certain Petar Milatović Ostroski, a Serbian writer who defends his country from the "international conspiracy", believes with the top of his mind that "the Serbian people in the twentieth century have been victims of three waves of genocide committed by the Croats". The first occurred from 1914 to 1918, the second during the independent state of Croatia, and the third since the inauguration of Franjo Tudjman, Tito's general and Pavelić's historian. To the greatest shame of the Serbs, this genocide is still going on today. But Petar Milatović Ostroski in his great madness forgot another genocide: the genocide of the Serbs for the subjugation of the Albanians of Kosovo. "The physical, political and cultural genocide of the Serbian population of Kosovo and Metohija is the greatest defeat that Serbia has suffered in its struggle for liberation since the battle of Orashac in 1804 until the uprising of 1941"; so it is written in the Memorandum of the Academy of Sciences of 1986, a document based mainly on the ideas of Dobrica Qosic, and which is said to have inspired the "Cultural Revolution" of Milosevic.
From an actual genocide, perpetrated by the Croatian Ustasha, the official language inscribed expands this broad expression to cover any protest or challenge to Serbian policies. In January 1994, a certain Daniel Schiffer, a "philosopher" and propagandist living in Western Europe and representing the Belgrade regime, accused certain French intellectuals of new treason in their approach when it comes to Serbia.
"The vast majority of French intellectuals have committed moral genocide to Serbia, practically a pure and simple cultural (if not spiritual) lynching, as if every Serb was actually a potential Nazi."
That anti-Serbism can only be the modern avatar of anti-Semitism, suggests Daniel Schiffer again, apostrophizing his mediators: "With your often poisonous way, with which you continue to accuse only the Serbs, thinking that you are standing up against crime, you have just invented in the eyes of the international public opinion a new strain of racism: an anti-Serbism, like the anti-Semitism that existed in the 1940s, in the time of our fathers".
And in 1991, the Serbian writer Milorad Pavić wrote that "at this moment the Serbs in Yugoslavia are once again on the lists for genocide as were the Serbs and Jews during the Second World War. But it is the first time that Serbophobia in Europe, but also in the whole world, is more furious than anti-Semitism". What is not genocide for Serbs, I ask you? The least criticism, the least reservation being shown towards the dimensions of a total crime; the fanciful exaggeration that destroys the impact of the word by denying it to infinity. If criticism against Milosevic makes one feel guilty of "genocide", then this should be the easiest word to use with the greatest care, risking losing its meaning entirely. The Serbian ruler is clearly not responsible for the devaluation of this term: this abuse of language is common among all parties in the Balkans, where it tends to be used to describe international tensions, but here in the West, as we have seen , is used and overused incorrectly. Let us simply point out that for the followers of Milosevic, anyone who opposes them is a "Nazi" and any attempt to hold them accountable can be described as "genocide". Addressing the representatives of the states in Geneva, at the same time protesting against the sanctions against Yugoslavia on December 9, 1993, Milosevic declared: "When the day comes that your children learn the truth, I don't know how you will explain to them why you killed our children, why did you declare war against three million of our children and by what right did you turn twelve million inhabitants of Europe into the basis for genocide, I hope, the last genocide in this century".
Thus, the anathema is transformed through the process of tragic distortion into a rhetorical cliché, into a propaganda formula that has the simple function of disarming possible objections and suggesting that: you owe us everything because of all the blacks we have suffered; you can't refuse us. The idea that the whole world owes such a group and country and that they should be allowed to do what they want, is well known and strongly associated with the Russian extremist Zhirinovsky.
"Russia in the past saved the world from the Ottoman Empire by sending its armies to the south. Maybe, if it wasn't for Russia, the whole of Europe would be Turkified, the Turks would take Budapest, surround Vienna, and there would be only a short way from there to Berlin, Paris and the English Channel. Seven centuries ago we cut the road to the Mongols. We could give way to the Turks or submit to their domination. What would then be left of Europe? We have saved him several times; in the south, in the east and in the north when the fascist hata was triumphing in Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Greece. Thanks to the Russians, Europe was freed from fascism... Other peoples should be grateful to the Russians for this work".
And the current Greek Minister of Culture, Melina Mercouri, in great trouble to defend with persuasive force the opposition of Athens to the recognition of Macedonia, has also declared on January 6, 1993 that Europe "must repay its debts to Greece", " Europeans have obligations to us" because it was Greece that gave them "the initial idea of democracy and the roots of the development of their civilization".
In short, whenever a state or a people wants to put itself above the law, it consciously remembers the great deeds and sufferings of the past to quietly claim that it deserves this small exception in relation to international standards.
Collecting genocides as if it were a question of collecting diplomas, it almost makes possible the comparison between Serbs and Jews, a comparison based on the blacks that both sides suffered in the concentration camps of the Ustashas. However, a little research into history would be enough to demonstrate the flaws in this analogy. We must remember, let's face it, that in the occupied Yugoslavia of 1941 there was a Serbian government that cooperated with the German vacationers (led by Milan Nedić, "Pétainitserb"), and that from October 5, 1940 - which is quite a long time before the arrival of Wehrmacht - there was a law with a number of articles on the price of admission of Jews to colleges and universities, and which prohibited them from engaging in certain fields of trade, to put it bluntly, restricted their rights; that before the war, there was a fascist party of Lotić, who later organized the Serbian volunteer corps, whose task was to round up Jews, Roma and partisans for execution; that on October 22, 1941 in Belgrade (under the Nazi yoke) the great anti-Masonic exhibition was opened, where the communist and Judeo-Masonic conspiracy to dominate the world was denounced - the exhibition was considered quite successful; that during the occupation, the Orthodox leaders (unlike the Catholic clergy of Croatia) ordered the forcible baptism of Catholics and Muslims, but forbade the Jews to convert, thus handing them over to the German extermination machine; that the final solution (and the introduction of the first children and women into the gas chambers) had begun and ended in Serbia thanks to the active cooperation of the local authorities, the clergy, the National Guard and the Serbian police force, which led to the liquidation of the Jewish community of Serbia; and finally, in August 1942, Dr. Harald Turner, director of the Nazi civil administration of Serbia, declared that this country was the only one where "the Jewish question and the Roma question" had been resolved.
This does not in any way affect the fact that the Serbs were among the first to resist, with Tito, as he himself publicly admitted; and that at the same time does not atone or mitigate the hatred of the State of the Ustashes; but which gives him the vague, if not dubious, automatic identification of the Jewish question, but which the nationalists of Belgrade immediately rush to appropriate as a claim.
In Serbia, as elsewhere in Europe, there was a strong anti-Semitic tradition, which is still so today, at least hidden behind the Orthodox clergy, although many Serbs suffered the fate of the Jews against the Nazis during the war, even though the small community the Jewish community, which remains in Belgrade, faces absolutely no threat (no more threat than it may feel in Zagreb), since both sides sacrificed enough to never fall into this category.
Jews as rivals and model of Serbs
Just like anti-Semitism that narrowly succeeded in its goal by Judaizing the "Gentiles" in countries where all traces of the Jewish presence had disappeared, or where they had been reduced to a handful of people - as has happened with many peoples and groups - the desire for being Jews instead of Jews suddenly turns into something competitive as people fight to claim the privilege of being the chosen people.
In general, two great strains of anti-Semitism can be distinguished: religious, of Christian inspiration, which accuses the people of Moses of killing Christ, and which persists in their error after the evangelical proclamation; and the nationalist one, which denounces the powerless minorities as a source of impunity which, in fact, is prejudicial to the being of the nation. A third, more surprising trend of anti-Semitism, has been added to these traditional objections in the second half of the twentieth century: envy of the Jew as victim, the perfect model of bad luck. Thus, the Jew becomes a model and an obstacle at the same time, he usurps the position of the people who deserve all the rights attributed to blacks, Palestinians, Serbs, Russians, Poles, those rights that originate from the French revolution and others.
Traditionally, Pan-Slavism and Pan-Germanism (which have been imitated in this respect by many peripheral nationalisms), ascribe to themselves a divine origin, some special connection with Providence, sealed by trials and sufferings; this is usually designed as a way of self-exaltation by the Jews.
By considering itself the chosen people, it is possible for an unstable or dispossessed group to transform marginalization into a basis for greatness, to indulge itself in investing in the messianic vocation. So Dostoyevsky, in his militant Slavophilia, temporarily made Holy Russia the Christ of the nations, in order to be able to revive its greatness the next day, and Radovan Karadzhiqi explains it similarly today: "Serbia is God's creation. Her greatness is measured by the hatred of her enemies" (March, 1994).
It does not matter that this tribal mystique is rooted in an error in the Bible, where choice is a burden that God passes on to Moses and his people - to inculcate humanity, since Judaism has "moral sovereignty," "the responsibility that a nation not deviate", while in these ideologies it has been transformed into a new variant of racist thought, a means of affirming the superiority of one ethnic group over another.
"Serbs", emphasizes Radovan Karadžiqi, "are the superior people in the Balkans". If the people fill their minds with the fact that they are distinguished and distinguished by God, they almost consider themselves as the best race and see their neighbors as inferior peoples, who are different from them, others are necessarily lower. But in their metaphysical exaltation, these nationalist movements invariably "rush to the age-old claim of the Jews in their claim" (Hannah Arendt).
On the one hand, their claim of divine selection sees "the Jews as their only serious rival," "their most fortunate rivals, the most fortunate, because from their point of view the Jews found the means of building a new kind of society , a society to which neither the visible representation nor the normal political context can be transformed into a substitute for the nation". In addition, this claim was strengthened by the "superstitious approach, a fear that, above all, maybe it was the Jews and not themselves who were chosen by God, and to whom success was guaranteed by divine Providence. There was an element of absurd resentment against a people who, I thought, had received the reasonably incomprehensible assurance that they would one day emerge, against all odds, as the ultimate victors in the history of the world."
And nothing illustrates this form of envious hatred better than Hitler's famous statement to Hermann Rauschning: “There cannot be two chosen peoples. We are God's people. And there is no other".
But since World War II there is another great reason for nations or minorities in difficulty to want to take the place of the Jews: Jewish suffering has become the standard of reference and the Shoah the key event by which we judge and punish crimes against humanity.
"The victims of Auschwitz", emphasized Paul Rcoeur, "are the most worthy representatives in our memory of all the victims of history". But through a fundamental misinterpretation, those who want to be the new bearers of the yellow star do not see genocide as the height of savagery, "that terrifies the sun" (Claude Lanzmann), but the occasion of being singled out through misfortune, prominence, the potential to win immunity or indisputable non-liability.
And this is why the term "holocaust" has been so shockingly misused since 1945: to be able to say that you are the subject of a new holocaust means primarily that you are clearly making your case; it also means stealing the ultimate disaster and declaring yourself the sole rightful owner, ridding yourself of all other claimants.
Instead of being a catastrophe and a warning to all humanity, genocide is then transformed through the process of confiscation into a source of unlimited moral and political advantages, a kind of magic key that allows all forms of abuse and forgives even the gravest mistakes.
To Judaize yourself, as the Serbian extremists have done (if necessary even by declaring yourself more Jewish than the Jews, who are not valid as a role), provides them with a disadvantageous situation for victory, some eternal continuity of honor for immorality. This leads to the ambiguity of ethnic theology that is based on identification, on the Judeophile passion that by internalizing the Jew in themselves, they could get themselves out the other side, like the work of inverted gloves.
Serbs often cry that they have been demonized, that they have been uprooted from the family of nations, and they see this universal hatred as an a posteriori justification for their war. They are right, because they are alone against the world. But let's not forget that since 1986, Belgrade's propaganda has been devoted to the systematic smearing of the peoples that they had the mercy to defeat: first of all, all the Kosovar Albanians, these "disgusting fascists", to put it in the expressions used in the Memorandum and "ferocious terrorists", rapists of Serbian women.
Speaking about the war waged by the Kosovo Albanians against the Serbs since 1981, the authors of the Memorandum specify: "The uprising in Kosovo and Metohija shortly before the end of the war, organized with the cooperation of Nazi units in 1944-45, was suppressed militarily, but it turned out that it had not been violated politically. Under the current spirit, disguised with new content, it develops with great success and is close to triumph. Ultimately, we have not done work with fascist aggression once and for all, the current measures have only removed the external signs of this aggression, while its final goals, inspired by racism, have been strengthened again" (quoted by "Dialogues").
VK Stojanović, president of the Association of Scientists and University Professors of Serbia, wrote in an open letter in the issue of February 8, 1990 in the daily "Politika": "Today the wild Albanian terrorists are boiling in Kosovo and Metohija, attacking and destroying everything Serbian, burning down Serbian houses and terrorizing the few people left there." (Quoted in "Le nettoyage ethnique", Fayard 1993, p. 286 of Mirko Grmeck, Neven Simacut and Mark Djidaras).
As for the Croats, they have been a genocidal people for four centuries, claims Serbian historian Basilje Krestić. A "rotten" people, according to the words of the Serbian ultranationalist leader, Sesel, who recommended on a Serbian television that their heads be cut off "not with a knife, but with a rusty spoon", a suggestion he is said to have asked them through a letter his militia in Bosnia and Croatia. After all, the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina are "victims of gut frustrations that encourage them to loot their property and indulge in their fanatical behavior," are the powerful words of psychiatrist Dr. Jovan Rashkovic, another theorist of Serbian nationalism. In addition, Islam is nothing more than "sexual terror" with "hereditarily genocidal" and rapist foundations, claims Biljana Plavšić, muse of the Bosnian Serb regime.
"Rape, unfortunately, is a war strategy of certain Muslims and Croats against Serbs, Islam considers it normal, since this religion allows polygamy. Historically, during the 500 years of Turkish occupation, it was perfectly normal for high-ranking Muslims to exercise the right to rape Christian women. It should be noted that the Islamic religion considers that the national identity of the child is determined by the father... This sexual terror is also exercised against men and takes on a genocidal character." ("Borba", September 8, 1993). It is noteworthy that this well-known Serb accuses Muslims of the same mistreatment that Serbs inflict on Bosniaks and Croats on a large scale, especially mass rape as a means of racial cleansing!
"Where a Serb died, there lies Serbia"
The characteristics of the victim, like those of the torturer, are passed from father to son: fascism is a contagious disease, its genes are passed from one generation to another. It is a non-immune trait embodied in a people, and history cannot modify it no matter what happens.
This propaganda has a pathological and farcical aspect, which would be a good subject for psychoanalysis if the yoke did not directly generate terrorism. As it oscillates between pure arrogance and moral deception, Serbian rhetoric has not always been taken seriously, and that is a pity since it has always said what it will do and always done what it said.
The crazier it sounded to our Western ears, the more we had to listen to it. These words are used as doctrines of the state. They have not only planted the seeds of anger in people's heads, but have also spent the gunpowder. These words were weapons, these words have killed.
So, it's not that the world demonized the Serbs, it's the Serbs who started by demonizing all their neighbors and gradually the whole world (minus some friendly countries, like Greece, Russia and Romania) by inventing a conspiracy against themselves, a complicated conspiracy which includes (sorry the list is very short) Islam, the Vatican, the Comintern, Germany's "Fourth Reich", the Freemasons and many Western secret services.
And what are the permanent paranoid delusions? They go hand in hand with megalomania, enabling him to blow his small country to planetary proportions. That the Serbs wanted to be a "heavenly people", that could start world wars and that they were convinced that they are the target of a planetary aversion that urges all humanity to attack them. "The whole world is committed to demonizing the Serbian people, an unparalleled phenomenon in the history of civilizations. The conspiracy against the Serbs is above all a conspiracy against the truth: ... the conscience of humanity ... as well as the fate of the world is connected with the Serbian problem". Affected by the illusion of grandeur, these nationalists (which also include men of renown and education, professors and scientists), merge with the permanent conspiracy thinking that allows them to think that they are important signs.
"If the whole world is at war with Serbia, then a world cataclysm, a great flood will sink the whole world, except Greater Serbia".
This fantasy of being surrounded by an "Islamist-Vaticanist-Hitler conspiracy", this self-belief of "terrible hatred against the Serbs ... which makes us, the Serbs of the diaspora, the real damned", these "monstrous anti-Serb rituals" that they are part of an "incredible symphony of the devil" (Komnen Beqirović), thus feeding a radical Manichaean Serbia, the only bulwark against the entire universe!
By bowing down to the ethnic groups on which it intends to declare war, by dedramatizing their exile or death, it tries to cover up their disappearance as an insignificant mistake of history. This acceptance must be accompanied by total humiliation of the other in order to exalt and elevate oneself at the expense of the other.
The more monstrous the planned crime, the more monstrous the victim's future must seem; the victim's crimes are, in fact, predictable. The victim warns the crimes claiming that the same will be committed against him.
And just like the extreme right that always attributed a superhuman power to the Jewish International - the aspiration for world domination - the Serbian extremists also attribute to their enemies the darkest intentions and the fantasy of absolute power that makes their extermination urgent (however, in terrain, the balance of forces has always been in favor of the Serbs, who are masters of artillery and gunpowder).
The accusation leveled at another is the engine of the attack that one tries to undertake on one's own. By raising the suspicion against another of ethnic cleansing, it simply means accepting and accelerating the plan you plan to implement against him.
So all that remains for him to do is to attack the other's future with accusations which, in fact, he will later blame himself. (It was even more painful to hear the tone of slander presented in the Western media, to equate it with "Croats with Ustashi", "Bosnians with fundamentalists", to see that this propaganda was flourishing under the pens of writers who are supposed to be well informed).
Consequently, aggression can clothe itself in the uniform of openness: like a nation of angels exonerating itself to the end of the world from its past troubles, the Serbs never attack, only defend themselves. They are righteous, even when they kill; they are protected by impenetrable and absolute innocence, far superior to the evil deeds they may have committed.
If they continue to show contempt for pity and gnawing conscience, it is because they were not the ones who slaughtered, they only justly trampled on some noxious, vile insects that only outwardly look human. And a World War II veteran came to welcome Zhirinovsky to Bjelina in Bosnia in February 1994, telling an American journalist: "Albanians, Croats and Muslims, and anyone of their ilk, do not deserve to live."
"This tragic sincerity of the killer" (Gaston Bouthoul) drives him to dehumanize his enemy in order to eliminate him with a clear conscience and not feel a single trace of guilt (with the notable exception of the Serbian democratic opposition that publicly apologized for the destruction of Vukovar, Sarajevo and Dubrovnik, and for the encirclement of Bosnian enclaves).
This type of killer has a clear mind that he is acting within his rights with the constant reminder of the past. So in the late 80s, the Orthodox clergy and people with real public power beat the war drums and went so far as to exhume the remains of World War II in order to fan the flames of the fire of revenge.
"We will exhume the remains of our martyrs and dedicate them a deserved place. The remains should be rested closer to heaven, since the Serbian people have always been the people of heaven and the people of death," wrote Dr. Rashkovic at the end of the 80s.
And this endless army of the dead had rushed to the attack against the living in order to wash away with blood all the insults experienced. This is funeral propaganda, the worship of mass graves and skeletons, a kind of almost masked necrophilia that gives new meaning to the already well-known slogan: "Where a Serb has died, there lies Serbia".
In his ambitious Easter message in March 1991, he sought to "rekindle the spirit of brotherhood and fraternity in prayer with our victims, the holy innocent dead... during the last fifty years," Patriarch Pavle of Belgrade quoted "Archbishop Nicholas the Great of happy memory", emphasizing that "if the Serbs were to take revenge in proportion to all the crimes committed against them during this century, what would they have to do? They would have to bury men alive, throw the living into the fire, flog them alive, tear the children to pieces in front of their parents. Serbs have never acted like this, not even towards wild beasts, let alone towards human beings".
Now what is amazing about this text is that it describes exactly the crimes that the Serbian troops would commit from June 1991 onwards, as the war broke out. If the tragedy, as Claudeli says, is "a big horse in front of a grave that has not been properly closed", then the entire Serbian territory, watered with the sacrifice of the martyrs, gasps for revenge. The roots of this tribal nationalism are washed, spoken in the same language, in the blood of innocents who died for the motherland for more than seven centuries. And this land is sacred to us, "because it is a large cemetery filled with those who died without tombstones".
This is the reason why Serbian soldiers have visited the front since June 1991, joining hands to speak to those who died in 1914-18 and 1941-1945, accompanied by all those who were martyred during the previous centuries, in order to complete the unfinished business and turn a millennium of insults into an orgy of redemptive murder. This endlessly gloomy procession was accompanied by the prayers of the archbishops and the songs of the ballad makers.
That these murderers are also poets is also shown by Karadzhiqi, who himself harasses the Muse in his idyllic hours; and in this conflict, crime comes to the arms of epic poetry, and the worst reptiles are able between the two massacres, to weave a modest stanza full of terrine and gall.
Milan Kundera had identified a good example of this alliance of lyricism and crime under Stalinism, because "this war was incited, prepared and undertaken by writers and carried out by the hands of writers" (Marko Vesovic).
Finally, this defensive lesson explains the abominable nature of this conflict, in which, at least initially, an army of professionals confronted unarmed civilians, with campaigns of beheadings, torture, mutilation and killing of prisoners and countless acts of sadism detailed and detailed in the reports of the United Nations, this will to exterminate the other, to remove even the memory of his existence from the face of the earth.
For information, it should be known that the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic, a former psychiatrist, was working with his patients in Sarajevo before the war on the fantasy of cutting the body in two - which he believes is present in all the men.
In its Benin version, victimization is a paradoxical form of snobbery. In its cracked version, it is an active denial of the concept of humanity, an open call for murder.
Angelic killers
Greater Serbia's rhetoric must always be taken differently, interpreting each sentence in the opposite sense of the manifesto; we must get used to the idea that violence speaks with the language of peace, and fanaticism with the voice of reason; we must learn that the denial of genocide is being used as the engine of a new crime against humanity. Nothing sums up the behavior of Greater Serbia better than the sentence that George Steiner attributes to Hitler in one of his books: "You will follow my methods until at once you reject me."
Thus, through a great deception, those who should sit in the dock are sitting in the prosecutors' benches; therefore, Serbian nationalism, which stands out for masking horrors under the noble guise of the fight against fascism, culminates in the most disgusting revisionism.
In Belgrade, the war in Bosnia has been called an "anti-genocide liberation movement", and in Serbian detention (and extermination) camps, Bosnian and Croat hostages were tried for "crimes of genocide against the Serbian people", when it is well known that their only crime was why were Croats or Bosniaks born; in Belgrade during 1992 a book was published with the title "Sarajeva, concentration camp for Serbs".
By mid-August 1993, when Sarajevo had been under siege for more than a year and 70 percent of Bosnia's territory was under Serb control, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) asked the Hague Tribunal to The official government of Sarajevo to put an end to the "acts of genocide against the Serbian ethnic group". Serbian tourism operators organized trips to Vukovar to verify "on the spot" the genocide committed by the "Ustashe" forces.
Finally, at the height of misery, in January 1992, an exhibition was planned at the Cultural Center in Paris (and at the same time in Belgrade) with the title: "Vukovar 1991, genocide of Serbian cultural heritage" (the exhibition caused great outrage, and never was also opened in France).
Whereas the once glorious Austro-Hungarian city of Vukovar had been razed by the Serbian army in 1991, and its population liquidated or dispossessed, while the aggressors shamelessly claimed to be its defenders and that its inhabitants were the ones who razed everything to the ground. .
We know very well that this propaganda has misguided the meaning of the word "genocide". However, it has also been enriched by giving it new meaning: henceforth any nation that massacres or destroys another can boast of having suffered from genocide.
Most of the terrible crimes committed by Serbian troops are blamed on their victims: there is something like the work of Christ in this beacon of deception for souls, in this diversion of martyrs - but it is a shameless Christ, in fact an Antichrist - who he kills and then he wants them to express pity to him.
This is a supreme trick of the Devil himself: blame the victim for the devil that has been unleashed on him. From this perspective, the Germans would be justified in claiming that they were the target of genocide at Auschwitz on behalf of the Jews and Roma, the Turks would be able to accuse the Armenians of their massacre in 1915, the Hutu extremists would be able to accuse tucit, and so on.
This is the shocking flood of truth: the killer is the victim of his victim, and if I kill you, it's your fault—in fact, you're the one who kills me. (Another alternative to this behavior: punish malevolent victims who force you to martyr them). It is a double trick; the oppressor appropriates the drama of the oppressed and, at the same time, erases all traces of his own crime.
So, you can enjoy the worry that surrounds the loser, while enjoying all the benefits of being a winner. (In certain cases, vampirism reaches its peak. According to the Endangered Peoples Association, many Serbian war criminals hide abroad after assuming the identity of those who exterminated them.) An archangel covered in blood, the torturer can then cry himself out with a clear conscience, even in front of a pile of corpses.
Of course, the conflict in the former Yugoslavia is not just between the Belgrade regime and its neighbors; he pits the open, liberal, pluralistic Serbia against another, mostly rural Serbia, which is backward and very proud of its barbaric primitivism, reeking of ethnic mixing, filth in Belgrade and generally, in most cities, speaking in words of an extremist, from "those pigsties, where those bastards from inter-ethnic marriages were born". (This runs exactly parallel to the way the Croatian nationalists of Herzegovina set their necks against Mostar, the symbol of Turkish-Slavic syncretism, where they completed destruction after the Serbian bombings).
And the "friends" of Serbia, in France, would be strongly inspired to support the most enlightened faction of the Serbian people, those who aspired to peace and a united Europe, instead of supporting a terrible dictatorship that brought the country, hysteria and military adventure that, perhaps, will engulf the entire region in flames.
Finally, the drama of the former Yugoslavia comes about because with Europe unwilling to enforce the law, the law of murderers became the law for all ethnic factions, and purification became the common denominator between the three camps. What is unseemly when talking about war is the inevitable complicity that ripples between enemies who think they have nothing in common but end up at each other's throats over and over again.
Without a democratic tradition, without a leader who could measure up to the diabolical mind of Milosevic, miserably armed and cracked by tweaks to close ties and with the great privilege enjoyed by the aggressor, and specifically abandoned by the people of to whom they begged for help (Europeans and Americans), Croats and Bosniaks, each at a different level (and never reaching the level of savagery of the troops from Pale and Belgrade), turned first to the Serbs, and then to each other ( during the war that lasted until February 1994). It was the mistake they had experienced from their common aggressor.
Milosevic's perverse genius mind enabled him to divide his enemies, injecting them with the poison of ethnic hatred, which he would turn into a kind of a posteriori justification: “Do you see how contemptible (or bigoted) they are? How right we were to be separated from them".
A shocking imitation of the role of the victim: the model of the conqueror has (partially) contaminated that of the subjugated, and the general confrontation justifies the supposed cause of the outbreak of the war – the idea that it was impossible for the two communities to live together.
And it is simply amazing that in Sarajevo and other Bosnian enclaves (and in Croatia, where hundreds of thousands of Bosnian refugees live), Serbs, Croats and Muslims managed to coexist for so long, managed to maintain their dignity and tolerance despite of bombs, sanctions and hunger. In this regard, despite the madness that seems to have been propagated on all sides, the culpability of the Milosevic regime goes beyond any doubt (although the regime now, through political opportunism, preaches apostolic peace, an Al Capone masquerading as Mahatma Gandhi).
However, everything went to the bottom of the well in war or diplomacy. The Serbs eventually lost the gilded crown of martyrdom that past history had instilled in them. And this is how the Serbian opposition leader, Vuk Drashkovic, viewed this: "In these terrible crimes of the war, which is still ongoing, and the end of which can hardly be predicted, the difference between the book of shame and the book of light has been erased. to the last point. And this is the biggest Serbian defeat, the only defeat of our people in the history of its existence". And Milosevic's Serbia has brought to life what Marek Edelman summed up best: "Hitler's posthumous victory".
Throughout the conflict, in each case, nothing (by the international community) has been done for those under attack, whose only transgressions have been maniacally analysed, while the attackers have been scot-free since day one. The only crime of the Bosniaks (and the Croats before them) in the eyes of the Western governments was to resist rather than surrender themselves to the slaughterhouse, upsetting the accounts of the great capitals who had counted on a quick victory for Serbia, the only power that could to maintain order in the Balkans after the disintegration of Yugoslavia.
To punish those who had been attacked (who were also separatists), we used and abused the fatal sophistry which suggests that every victim is a potential future villain, and we refused to help them because they might become evil people. What else could constitute a greater travesty of justice?
Is a child drowning before your eyes? Great work, let it sink, or else it will turn into a monster later. Why should the victims be innocent and without evil? Have we forgotten that the French and Allied resistance had once committed terrible crimes? Neither the Bosniaks nor the Croats have behaved like angels, but no one would ever help anyone if we insisted that the injured party should be gentle as a lamb. We do not condition our help to people at risk on whether they "deserve" it.
Punishment of crime as a condition for reconciliation
The pattern of fanning the flames has developed where we avoid getting involved, at least when our interests are directly affected. After all, the slightest nudge from Saddam Hussein would be enough to mobilize the entire navy, and no one would give a damn about the democratic nature of Kuwait; similarly, Serbian crimes and the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda were met with half-hearted measures.
In this great terrain of ambiguity, when all the combatants are crushed, we avoid acceptance in order to be able to argue for inclusion. This triumph of the principle of equivalence - they are all the same - is nothing but negation. Just imagine if we had to reinterpret the Second World War according to the same principles: in that case, it would no longer be possible to distinguish the good from the evil, and the Shoah would be only a complementary party to the Soviet threat ( as in the favorite thesis of the German revisionist school).
The "refusal of Manichaeism", which some people pride themselves on as intellectual exploitation, the refusal to come between, is disguised as active pity for the aggressor. Not taking sides in a confrontation between the strong and the wicked is tantamount to siding with the stronger side and encouraging his ventures.
Neutrality is another name for complicity. And don't ask about the victims, who have been robbed of even respect for their suffering – confusing them with their tormentors; and don't ask about the victims of Prijedor, Omarka, Sarajevo, Vukovar and Gorazde, killed and maimed for the second time by our indifference. In the embarrassment that we have turned our backs on, we also confiscate their suffering, deprive them of the right to remain in the memory of the living!
Three great crimes have occurred since 1941 in the mental sphere of the South Slavs: that of the Ustashes – the most terrible of all, until proven otherwise; that of the Chetniks – about which very little is known; and, finally, that of Tito and the communists – from liberation to the death of the red dictator.
None of these three crimes, due to the official truth imposed by Bolshevism, was judged or put in the right place, nor was it analyzed and explained correctly (remove the propaganda claims) until the outbreak of the war in June of the year 1991. The accumulation of these three painful events explains the fierce wickedness in the Balkans and the fact that every community oscillates between amnesia and the will for revenge.
Hatred and anger flared up again against the abomination of mass graves, and friendship between peoples did not withstand the waves of blood that date back a long time. This is why it is imperative to punish the fourth crime, that of Milosevic – to try the murderers from each side; this is an inevitable condition of any reconciliation between peoples and giving up vindictive rhetoric that collectively accuses everyone, since it is difficult to identify those who are solely responsible.
Could it be that the Yugoslav example is, at least, opening our eyes: consider a people who aspire to sanctification because of their suffering, who begin to unfold their wounds and count their dead. He is planning a dirty job, instead of preventing the recurrence of mass murders, he is reminding them just enough to carry them out once more. Dressing in the garb of sanctification, the killers, before sharpening their knives, are seeking permission from the civilized world—while waiting, perhaps, to one day turn their knives against it as well.
Princess Bibesco used to say that "the fall of Constantinople is a misfortune that happened to me last week" and cultivated "the possibility of coming and going, of turning the hourglass, of changing the fate of our time, of life in the bodies of to others…”
There are indeed certain peoples and certain creatures who retain a certain unspiritual intimacy with their ever-present past; the creatures and peoples who express an unforgettable ability to be contemporary with past centuries, whose adventures they tirelessly revive as so many episodes of their daily lives. And there is no overcoming or nostalgia when the countries of Eastern and Central Europe try to reclaim their history, to bind closely the children of the bond broken by decades of propaganda and communist roots. Getting one's memory back is the first stage of freedom; acceptance is, above all, acceptance of the other's traditions, even if only to be able to separate them from yourself or put them in a new context.
Memory can also be used not only to promote unity, but also to traumatize, to celebrate the blacks that have fallen on the neck of a people and for which the people cannot mourn because they are not being separated, they are not coincide pleasantly with the barn of history; they continue to hurt even after many years.
Then memory turns into warning, auxiliary vigilance. "Remember," says the great genocide museums (Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Tuol Slang in Phnom Penh). Never forget what was done in the name of race or revolution by the Nazi regime, Pol Pot's dictatorship.
These millions of men, women and children, who were killed to atone for the crime they were born with, should remind us that there was a terror that no one can stand idly by. This is the reason why the Holocaust, due to its unique nature, became a reference genocide, an absolute crime compared to what we judge as similar crimes.
Not that rudeness was reserved for a specific people, but the real devil changes a hundred faces and despises all mankind, using as an example a Jew or a Roma. A crime against "man's humanity in general" (V. Jankélévitch); crime against the fact that people exist. But memory in return can be distorted in two ways: by insult and incompatibility.
When it is far from reviving martyrdom, it submits itself to the dictates of aggressive nationalism and turns into a catalog of retributive events, when it confines itself obsessively to reviving suffering, in order to reopen the wounds in order to gain more legitimacy for the will to punish .
Then it turns into an extended hand of anger, of contempt: it takes on a cracked character, it reconstructs the past like one who changes faces, it degenerates into a myth, a fable, a mercenary memory that is less concerned with remembering the dead than with launching reprisals against the living. It will delve into unresolved conflicts dating back to ancient times, inflame tensions and exaggerate animosities as if all of history were just a slow-burning fuse destined to explode today.
This is why there is something extremely important in Ernest Renan's expression: "Whoever wants to make history must forget history." If all the people who had been hurt continued to return to their respective grievances, there would be neither peace nor harmony on the face of the earth.
Every state, region, even village could name some evil that had been done to it within the last 500 or 1000 years, and for every buried hatchet, every family would become point-and-five for the same reasons, without being able to overcome all common disagreements. When the wrongdoer would be tried and punished, and the damages would be compensated, and the victims would be pardoned if they judged it necessary, then comes the moment when, with the time it has made itself, we must draw a line, let the dead mourn the dead, and let their hate and their woes be buried with them.
If we wish to live in peace with our contemporaries, we cannot excavate all the bitter points of our history. Forgetting is one of the things that creates space for the living, for newcomers who don't want to carry the weight of old enmities on their shoulders. As Hannah Arendt says, forgetting gives future generations the ability to start all over again.
There is another side to the challenging memory that paradoxically teaches the new rudeness hard. In our time, indeed, repeated commemorations of yesterday's massacres are entwined with confusion and disregard for today's massacres. The more we deal with yesterday's torture victims, the less we care about today's.
There is a way of "sanctifying the Holocaust" (Arno J. Mayer), of turning it into an event that is so closely related to ourselves that we have no regard for the victims of other disasters. We cling so tightly to the dead of Auschwitz with their horrifying secrets that we hold no one else accountable.
Guardians of the unbearable, no present-day event pleases us, nothing can approach the scale of horror we cultivate for beauty: today's wars, contemporary massacres, we push aside with the slap of the hand. They seem futile compared to the great drama of which we are agents.
Such an approach, instead of raising our aversion to injustice, traps us in the comparison: what should be the direction for clarity to turn into detachment? Therefore, there is a risk that the exclusive commemoration of Auschwitz would constitute an inappropriate interference in the current situation.
What good are our anti-totalitarian magic words if we try to dislodge Hitler or Stalin retrospectively, instead of confronting today's despots and blood-sucking charlatans who bring destruction to their ranks? Should we wait until the carnage reaches Shoah proportions before we act?
True courage does not mean becoming a hero who defends the fact and denounces Nazism in 1995, but fighting dishonor right in our time. It is more a matter of opening up the commemoration of Auschwitz to all those who were massacred and tortured, with the benefit of not conflating one crime with another, but to recognize that there are different manifestations of genocide, all of which are crimes, but that do not challenge the rare character of the Shoah, "that masterpiece of hatred" (Vladimir Jankelevitch).
In other words, two mistakes must be avoided: 1) the idea that everything is equal, the tendency to elevate the smallest crime to the height of a mass extermination, without realizing that there are degrees of humiliation, that not all murderers are the same; and 2) discrediting any other crime on the grounds that it is not the Holocaust and cannot be compared to the gold standard of terror.
There is no choice between the memory that keeps alive the age-old antagonisms and the erasure of memory, that atones for tragedies and forgives torturers. The only necessary memory is that which keeps alive the essence of the law: it is the pedagogy of democracy, the intelligence of indignation. The order given to those born after the Shoah and the Gulag is not so much about the weight of memory, but more about ensuring that these crimes, even in the mildest possible form, are never repeated. This is our great debt to the martyrs of the century; to prevent the recurrence of hatred, in whatever dimension, form or face it may take. But to achieve this, memory alone is not enough; memory is not security. For men at a certain moment in their history to resist rudeness, some immeasurable element is needed, a great turning point, a miracle that would save them from dishonor and make them say "no" , to take the side of the helpless. It is this great turning point, this decision that absolutely inaugurates freedom, by which a generation will be judged.
Bulk plots
Defending the 1993 law that compels Greek citizens to state their religion on IDs, the Holy Synod spokesman accuses the "American Jewish lobby" of trying to destroy Hellenic national unity by contesting this law (which is more than welcome to the Orthodox Church).
When his film Do the Right Thing narrowly missing the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1990, African-American director Spike Lee blamed the failure on white racism. The head of the legal and political commission of the GIA (Islamic Armed Group), one of the main terrorist movements in Algeria, Saif Allah Jaafar, explains: "We attack the Jews, the Christians, the infidels, because they are followers of the colonialist conspiracy non-religious. They are living symbols of the conquest of Algeria, as well as of other Islamic countries; in the land of Islam, these foreigners are only infidel spies".
Zviad Gamsakhurdia, the last president of Georgia, blamed his fall from power on a transnational conspiracy controlled somewhere in Washington, which was trying to extend its ruling hand around the world: "The scenario of a permanent coup in Georgia has already been proven more than once times in other parts of the world... All this happened to us because we did not want to be subject to the dictates of Western countries... and become a colony. Only a servile power is suitable for the West. This is one of the reasons for the military coup that brought to power the figure of Shevardnadze, who is a CIA agent, a direct agent of Euro-American imperialism".
Leonard Jeffries, director of the Department of African American Studies at the City College of the State University of New York, explains the slavery his people suffered with these words in May 1991: “The Jews are the leaders. the main slave trade, and they were its financiers. They are the ringleaders of a conspiracy planned and organized by Hollywood to destroy black people."
On August 2, 1994, at a time when Italian freedom had taken a heavy toll, the Minister for Labor, Clemente Mastella, a member of the National Alliance (of the extreme right), blamed the "international Jewish lobby", in which he suspected that they might want the new Italian neo-fascists. Again, during the summer of 1994, the Egyptian fortnightly magazine, El Chaab, denounced the UN Conference on Population Development, which in September would welcome American and European efforts to impose "libertinism and abortion" and to "exterminate oppressed peoples, including Muslims, but has encouraged bleeding".
Ivan Czurka, a leader of the populist right and a staunch nationalist, points to the existence of a cosmopolitan conspiracy "against the Hungarian economy" as the reason why international backers continue to give handouts to the ex-communists, who still control part of the state apparatus. . It is unclear why the Jews occupied some of the important positions in the old nomenclature.
For Alexander Zinoviev, a former dissident who favors the restoration of communism in Russia, the West was there to cause his country's downfall, paying Yeltsin and Gorbachev to destroy Sovietism and suppress Holy Russia. "They represent the fifth column of the West, which bought them ideologically to get rid of them once and for all and together with Russia".
The theme of the plot is a guarantee for the explanation of all events as the realization of the action of mysterious forces. But naming the Great Satan can work in two ways: either it is a form of surrender (what is worth fighting for when a higher intelligence is commanding infernal purposes against us?), or it identifies a sacrifice, an enemy who must to be destroyed in order to restore the lost harmony (as Serbia or Algeria is doing today). The notion of a conspiracy is unassailable, since any argument against it can be used as evidence of the pervasive power of the conspirators' corruption. (And, as the paranoid says, "it's my fault why I'm always right?"). The idea of conspiracy injects those who think they are its target against the pain of criticism, of contestation. And then, it offers them supreme comfort: it makes them feel that they are important enough to someone, somewhere on earth, to try to destroy them. And the worst conspiracy is that of indifference: How many of us would escape the idea that we don't give enough love or hate to justify the slightest evil from someone else? /Magazine "Academia"/Telegraph/
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