Between the Academy and Show Business

One of the keys to understanding political and social circumstances in contemporary Serbia lies in the study of revived political myths, above all the most common ones, i.e. ethnic nationalist myths.

It is wrong from the aspect of methodology to reduce Serbian ethnic-nationalist myths, or myths in general, to several contradictory mythological ideas, or a catalogue of clearly defined ideas, because myths are characterized by fragmentariness, fluidity and ambivalence. It should not be forgotten that a myth is a story, both a discreet and a self-deceiving story. In spite of this, I have decided to make a abstract of several of the most glaring topos of our ethno-nationalist myth stories. They have just been defined "experimentally" and linked together logically, while in reality they are to be found in a dispersed state.

The Serbian people have, since time immemorial lived in Serbian lands. It is part of their flesh. The Neretva River is the aorta of the Serbian blood stream, the Drina River is the Serbian backbone or windpipe, while the Bosnian and Serbian mountains on either side of the Drina River are Serbia's lungs. This land is part of its people, a living organism, the mother of every Serb.

The Serbian people are the oldest people on earth, i.e. all other nations originate from it, just as all other languages have their roots in the Serbian language. The Serbs are the youngest and freshest of nations and the embryo of mankind's or at least Europe's renaissance. This is possible because the Serbs stand apart from the wear and tear of history. The Serbs live in an eternal present, at the same time both old and young, in an eternal conference with the dead, the living and the unborn.

The Serbs' links with the mother earth's body and the interlinking of Serbian generations, which is often termed the Serbian cause, lasts thanks to the preservation of this same connective substance - Serbian blood. It flows in a double blood stream. One is passed from generation to generation, the other inundates the soil of Serbia with the sacrificial blood of fallen heroes. This is why places where this blood has been spilled - cemeteries and graves, pits and places of execution - have exceptional symbolical value. These are the origins of national renewal, which implies sacrifice and death, and the roots which link the people to ancestral soil. This is why graves are Serbia's natural borders.

The Serbs have remained such as they are to this very day, even though other peoples are more numerous, richer and militarily stronger, and are constantly trying to exterminate the Serbs biologically or spiritually. Serbia's enemies have always been helped in this by ungrateful and false brethren and neighbors, various traitors and treacherous Serbs.

The fact that the Serbs have managed to survive in spite of everything is due to fate, God's will, the Serbian cross. The Serbs have been fated to sacrifice themselves for the standards which Providence has entrusted in their keeping: the Soul, the Cross of Honor and Freedom. This commitment for the salvation of the highest human standards in a merciless battle against the world's power wielders was proved by the Serbs in the battle of Kosovo, and this why it is called the Kosovo Vow.

The Serbs are the keepers of the rarest and most important human standards - the heart and the spirit. In the soullessness of the contemporary world's materialism, in a civilization of false material wealth and cowardly pacifism, they are pioneers in the battle for ideals of the, at one and the same time, natural and holy man - warrior. In this battle they do not fear death, because without death, there is no national resurrection.

Their battle is directed against all forms of unnatural contemporary life, against the mixing of races, faiths and languages in unnatural mixed marriages, in degenerate and unhealthy cities with a cosmopolitan and democratic spirit, in multiethnic states, the embodiment of all evil, that human melting pot - America.

Today Serbia is a bone in the throat of the usurious-atheist and satanic international which is pushing nations into the New World Order. Because the Serbs are a proud nation and want to build their state on a healthy and natural foundation, a state in which all will be together, in the Serbian lands, one nation, one state, with one leader, one Serbian faith, a common Serbian language, one Serbian script and one Serbian idea.

Ethnic nationalist myths have no place for universal human values, for man's generic identity, they deny the other humanist idea of man, the idea of the freedom of the individual. Man is denied here on two counts, both as a human being and an individual.

The ethno-nationalist myth turns him into an unimportant specimen of the valuable national kind. His personal name requires an ethnonym, he is only allowed to embody and share the fate of his people.

A Serb exists only as the offspring of his race, and this means that he exists before birth and dies even before he is born. This determining ethnic substance (blood, genes, tradition, ethnic archetype, etc.) which he is made of, always links him to his whole race, to the dead and the unborn Serbs at all times. He himself is nothing, and like an ant or a leaf, totally unimportant in his individual existence. "I was born in Kosovo, and before birth was in Kosovo", sings a well known psychiatrist. "We all died in Kosovo before we were born," adds another myth creator, a poet and academician.

When speaking of political myths today, one expects to hear something about reality, even though, doubtless, myths are part of reality. This is why it is difficult and dangerous to rule in places where people question the truth of the myth. However, we must know how, and to what extent, today's ethno-nationalist myths coincide with similar myths in other countries, and together with them differ from the political and cultural reality of the modern world.

Political mythology must be criticized where there is a need to set up rational criteria of political and social life. This does not mean that it is necessary to keep down all forms of irrationality in society, because it has a legitimate and important place. There is such a thing as "positive irrationality". The problem of irrationality and the problem of the myths appear today as problems of environment: skill and suitability.

(This is a shortened version of a paper read at the "Culture as the Self-Defence of Society and Individuality" Conference, held in Belgrade 1-2 March 1995, and organized by the Democratic Center.)