Barbarian-Genius for the Hague

If Karadzic and the others are tried in the Hague at all, the issues of cultural aethiology or the ideological background of the crimes they are accused of must not be disregarded. If Karadzic planned and ordered the crimes, or at least failed to prevent them, who was his spiritual mover and instigator? Who are the ones whose thoughts stand behind the principles of a policy we can today qualify as the viewpoint of a contemporary Serbian barbarian-genius or as a contemporary form of Spartan patriotism?

In the summer of 1991, Dobrica Cosic offered the Serbian people two alternatives: one rational, along the lines of European and world integration, a federation of Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia, and the other - should the first fail - a Serbian state on the ethnic territories of the Serbian people (several months before that, he was explicit: unification of all Serbs in one state). As he assessed the latter alternative as the end to the Serbian people's two-century struggle "for its liberation and unification" and as the fulfilment of the dream of an ethno-democratic utopia, i.e. as an opportunity the Serbian people cannot miss - "to create a new state in which it will set up a free and democratic society", it seems that Cosic used the first, rational alternative as a rhetorical prop or merely mentioned it as a theoretical hypothesis, while he actually wished for and suggested the other, irrational one, in which freedom and democracy would flourish independent of European and world integration processes.

Four years ago, when philosopher Mihajlo Markovic said we would suddenly feel the magical lightness of existence as soon as we no longer had our neighboring brothers leading us, deluding and confusing us, and added that the Yugoslav People's Army should begin liberating territories where Serbs made up the majority: such as Zadar, Karlovac, Sisak and Vukovar, his words were completely devoid of philosophy, but, for anyone who failed to understand it differently, they teamed with barbarian-genius, mythomaniac statistics, xenophobia and aggressive mongering.

When philosopher Ljubomir Tadic simultaneously declared that the Serbian national interest dictated to the Serbian people to remain in one state wherever they constituted the majority and added that he was not for peace at all costs, this was not philosophy, but, for anyone who wanted to understand him, an enthusiastic militant instruction of an awakened Serbian barbarian-genius cloaked in the ceremonial robe of the Academy and philosophical erudition.

When, four years ago, Matija Beckovic spoke of the refuse of the Serbian people and Serbs who were not Serbs, and when he now glorifies Selimovic's and Kusturica's settlement in Belgrade (odd, he forgot Cimic), reducing their flight from their own ethnical cage and placing it in the function of negating the Muslim ethnic identity, his words are those of no one else but the Serbian barbarian-genius turning Serbianism into the sole mental horizon.

This is why it should be no surprise that this same writer today scorns peace movements, brushing them under the carpet of school didactics, morally disqualifying them by claiming that "human misery loves to enrobe itself in grand and holy principles" and counterposing the crown argument "as if no one cared who is right"!

When the writers Rakitic, Vukadinovic and Vukovic stated on behalf of the Association of Writers of Serbia (AWS) in the "Statement" of July 25, 1995 that "it is unnecessary to reiterate that the AWS is for peace, that it is against Fascism, racism and all other forms of discrimination, but AWS is not against its people", they have surreptitiously, by using the conjunctive "but", let barbarian-genius have his hand in their "Statement". The conjunctive "but", it is not difficult to notice, juxtaposes the two groups of listed values in the position of potential opposites and allows them to become competitive, even disjunctive at a future time, in a possibly awkward historical constellation. The authors, in other words, allow for the possibility (or already accept the reality) of the interest of the Serbian people being contrary to the interest of peace, that the state of war (or non-peace) implies chauvinism, racism and any other form of discrimination. Have the three writers just awkwardly expressed themselves or was it impossible to express this ungainly orientation more deftly? Barbarian-genius, that unfortunate symbiosis of Bogdan Popovic, who lamented over Balkan crudeness and licentiousness, and Ljubomir Micic, who was enticed by them, is today reflected in such and similar statements, above all in Cosic's confusion and indecisiveness, and Karadzic's determination to understand and apply that confusion and is actually the world of that continual regression resisting civilization.

Karadzic was undoubtedly not short of sources (and their relapse) upon which he could feed his Herostatic teleology and his lethal national vitalism. If they cannot eliminate his possible guilt, they can at least mitigate it.

If the Hague trials take place and if, by any chance, an expert in the defendant's profession does not establish that the light emanating from these sources totally determined his will or obscured his mind, it is certain that Karadzic will not sit alone on the dock. He will share it with the ideological shadow of the imaginary Serbian barbarian-genius, distorted by dual misunderstanding, its of Europe and Europe's of it - keeping us to the end wondering whether it is right that the defendant is the one who should have been so unbared and accused, or whether his cultural roots should have been dragged to the Hague along with him.