"Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide" by Branimir Anzulovic [9]

CHAPTER FIVE: A VICIOUS CIRCLE OF LIES AND FEARS [continued]

Fear Transformed into a Spider: Poisonous Best-Sellers

The line "fear transformed into a spider" comes from a mediocre poem by perhaps the most infamous mediocre poet of the former Yugoslavia, Radovan Karadzic. This lengthy section examines the blood-soaked, revenge-obsessed, violent works of fiction and poetry by a large segment of Serbia's contemporary men of letters.

Besides Karadzic, Vuk Draskovic makes an appearance, as does Dobrica Cosic, and Vojislav Lubarda; not to mention the large number of writers and academics (notably Nikola Koljevic) whose work may not have been noted for the same nationalist fervor and near-pornographic addiction to violence, but who nevertheless played an important role in the nationalist movement of the 1980s and 1990s.

Also discussed: the odd, and rather creepy, near-fetish fixation on knives, and not just Draskovic's book "Noz" ("The Knife"). It is not enough, apparently, to focus on graphic descriptions of brutal violence, and to dwell on biased versions of the most horrible episodes in history; one must also write multi-page odes to one of the most intimate implements of killing mankind has ever created.

This section is rather lengthy, and well worth reading.

The Highlanders as Scapegoats

In this section, Anzuolovic makes short work of the frequent excuse made by some Serbs that the fighting in Yugoslavia was a product of the violent highlander culture and that the rest of the former Yugoslavia simply got sucked into their barbaric orgy of blood-lust.

Needless to say, Anzulovic shows that this simply isn't so; indeed, he makes it clear that the genocide of the 1990s was not a "bottom-up" expression of primitive tribal rage but a carefully cultivated campaign orchestrated by the political, military, intellectual, and religious elites of Serbia, who dragged the rest of their country--including the new haiduks, the turbo-folk loving urban gangsters--into a nightmare of their own creation.

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This concludes my review of this chapter. I will look at the final chapter in my next post.

"Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide" by Branimir Anzulovic [8]

CHAPTER FIVE: A VICIOUS CIRCLE OF LIES AND FEARS [continued]

The Fear of Vanishing

Anzulovic begins this section with this important observation:

"The Serbs' aggressiveness inspired fear, which was a source of their aggressiveness. This fear reflected the insecurity of a people dominated by a foreign civilization for five centuries, who enjoyed their own full sovereign nation-state for only forty years between the Congress of Berlin in 1878 and the entry into the ill-fated Yugoslav union in 1918."

The Serb fear of being controlled by an "other", it must be remembered, is rooted in actual historical experience even if contemporary forms of this paranoia are often irrational. There is nothing more pathetic than a self-pitying bully, but Serb nationalist distrust of foreign control was not created out of whole cloth.

This section discusses reactions among Serb intellectuals and academics to such events as the downfall of Rankovic and the decentralization of the 1974 Constitution. Anzulovic notes that the "fear of Serbia's demise became a prominent theme of Serbian intellectual life in the 1980s." Acclaimed author Milorad Pavic repeatedly called for a pan-Orthodox alliance of "Byzantine" countries.

As the world becomes "smaller" through improved communications technologies and travel opportunities, people often fear losing their identities and cling to exaggerated differences between them and "others."

The Academy Memorandum

A brief discussion of the infamous 1986 "Memorandum" by the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and of the role author and dissident Dobrica Cosic played in this intellectual validation of nationalist hysteria.

The Church Identifies the Devils

This section is a relatively extended consideration of the role the Serbian Orthodox Church has played in developing and disseminating the myths that drive and reinforce the worst aspects of Serbian nationalism. The anti-Catholic, anti-Western, and anti-Semitic nature of the church is discussed, as is its tendency to support autocratic rulers and accept sinister conspiracy theories. The Serbian Church often takes the lead in propagating the line that Serbia is and has been for five centuries the bulwark valiantly defending Europe from Islam, even as it disparages the non-Orthodox, non-Byzantine nature of the Europe Serbs allegedly are defending.

The traditional rejection of ecumenical dialog and cooperation by the Church has been articulated and defended by the most prominent theologians of the 20th Century church. The tendency of Serbian nationalists to hear nothing but their own complaints and to see nothing but their own grievances has been strongly reinforced by a national church which gives holy sanction to xenophobia, bigotry, and paranoia.

"Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide" by Branimir Anzulovic [7]

CHAPTER FIVE: A VICIOUS CIRCLE OF LIES AND FEARS

Fictional Data and Real Hatreds

The previous chapter covered the revived Serbian Kingdom, and pre-Communist Yugoslavia. This chapter picks up the story from there, and begins with this paragraph:

"Yugoslavia would have been less susceptible to violent disintegration if, at the end of World War II, there had been a reconciliation between the nations and factions that had fought one another. All of them, and especially the two most guilty ones, Croats and Serbs, should have admitted the mistakes and crimes committed since they entered the Yugoslav union and taken the steps necessary to prevent another conflict in the future. The enormity of the crimes committed by various parties made such action urgent. The reconciliation of France and Germany was a good model, but it could not be followed because one basic condition was missing: freedom, including the very important freedom of information."

I could not have said it better myself; this concise observation serves as an effective rebuttal to the "Tito was the only guy who could keep the hatreds in Yugoslavia in check" revisionists.

Much of this section is concerned with numbers--specifically, different estimates of the total number of Yugoslav war dead from World War II as well as the casualties for each individual national and ethnic group. The government, for years, continued to maintain the lie that 1.7 million Yugoslavs had perished in the war, a number that was based on shoddy demographics and which continued to be the official line long after independent analysis and study refuted this high number. In fact, the government itself had produced a comprehensive list of war victims (not including victims of the Partisans, since the list was for the West German government in regards to a reparations settlement) from 1964-1966; the total number was just below 600,000. Yet official history stuck with the obviously inflated 1.7 million figure.

Two independent Yugoslavs--Montenegrin Serb Bogoljub Kocovic in 1985, and Croat Vladimir Zerjavic in 1989--separately came up with nearly identical figures of just slightly over 1 million total war victims. The fact that Kocovic, the Serb, actually came up with lower subtotals for Serbs killed in Croatia than the Croat Zerjavic was just one testimony to the impartiality both these men brought to their work.

One would think that the discrepancy between their data and the long-accepted official total would have dampened the use of competing statistics by nationalist parties; sadly, the result was instead that propagandists and demagogues from all ethnic groups laid claim to large numbers of these 700,000 "uncounted" phantom dead. Such activities were carried out by all ethnic groups, mostly being published overseas; however, the domination of the Federal government by Serbia meant that Serb nationalist claims were able to be widely disseminated.

While Tito was aware that this situation was threatening to Yugoslavia's stability, he was simply unwilling to consider the one real solution--total freedom of information. His death in 1980 loosened controls over publication, but this mostly opened the doors to competing nationalist propaganda and outright lies--before long, Serb academics and intellectuals were claiming there were well over a million Serbs killed at Jasenovac alone (the real number of Serb victims was probably around 50,000). Other researchers have validated Kocovic and Zerjavic, to no avail.

Another myth of the post-World War II was the demonization of the Roman Catholic Church, which was outside of the control of the Belgrade regime; the campaign against Cardinal Stepinac is the most infamous aspect of this extensive effort, which began in the immediate postwar period and never really ended. False stories of Church complicity with, and support for, the Ustashe and the NDH were projected onto the Croats as a whole, even though only a tiny minority of Croats supported the quisling regime. Catholicism was being portrayed as an implacable enemy of Orthodoxy, and Croatians as fundamentally fascist and anti-Serb in orientation.

Other hatreds being nurtured in the postwar era:

"Belgrade propagandists avoided mentioning such facts as carefully as they hid the extent of the Serbs' collaboration with the Nazi, including their participation in the Holocaust. Instead, they directed particular effort at portraying the Serbs as traditional friends and protectors of the Jews."

[He then quotes Philip J. Cohen, author of Serbia's Secret War, on the subject; I will be reviewing this book in the very near future.]

"...ethnic Albanians were always a major target of defamation."

"The fear of the "Muslim Threat" was also used in the effort to mobilize Serbs in a nationalist front.."

And so on. Anzulovic wisely concludes this section with this depressing summary:

"The falsehoods spread by the Belgrade3 propaganda machine did not benefit anybody. The intention to obtain higher war reparation payments by means of inflated numbers of Yugoslav war victims failed; the tensions among various Yugoslav nationalities, caused by this and other lies, made life in the common state more difficult and contributed to its violent disintegration."

The Fear of Vanishing

"Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide" by Branimir Anzulovic [4]

CHAPTER TWO: THE ENCOUNTER WITH THE TURKS

Ottoman Religious Tolerance

Anzulovic begins Chapter 2 with this observation:

"The union of Serbian church and nation, a Byzantine heritage, became even tighter after the Ottoman Turkish conquest, when Serbia ceased to exist as a territorial and political entity. Since the nation was no longer associated with a state, its link with the national religion became still more pronounced. The myth of the Heavenly Serbia was a manifestation of the radical union of nation and church. The Ottoman domination contributed to the development of the Serb's self-image of a holy people whose moral superiority makes them victims of the immorality of others."

He is quick to point out that the conquest of Serbia within the Ottoman Empire was a genuine tragedy--with the notable exception of the Serbian Church, all national institutions were eliminated and Serbian society lost its entire elite stratum; the nation was "reduced to a society of peasants and small merchants in an empire dominated by a foreign civilization." Despite all that, the Ottomans cannot be blamed for all the problems and shortcomings of the Balkan states which began to emerge from the 19th Century on.

The rest of this section briefly illustrates the relative tolerance of the Ottoman world, at least until the economic and political declines of the later empire led to greater repression and resistance. Again, I am assuming that most readers of this blog are familiar with this material.

The Short-Lived Serbian Empire

This short section contrasts the glory of the historical memory of Tsar Dusan's empire with the reality--the empire mostly grew at the expense of a greatly weakened Byzantium; he ruled over many non-Serb subjects who had no love for the Serbian Empire; it lacked the administrative infrastructure to develop or last as a long-term viable state. It was already a fragmented ghost of itself by the time the Ottomans began picking it apart shortly after his death.

Resistance and Collaboration

In a nutshell, this section details the complex reality of the history of the eventual Turkish conquest rather than the national myths which obscure, rather than illuminate, this period. The obvious example is, of course, the 1389 Battle of Kosovo which did not--contrary to centuries of mythologizing--end in a Serbian defeat. Even more telling than the actual outcome is the fact that there was little solidarity among the Serbs and other Balkan Christians; many non-Serbs fought with Prince Lazar, and many Serbs chose not to. The historical record of this period is not as complete as one would like, but one thing becomes clear--the Serbs, like all other peoples in that time and place, had varied and often inconsistent responses to the Ottoman threat. Some chose to resist, some chose to fight with the Ottomans, some chose to stay on the sidelines. For example, the Serb Despot Djuradj Brankovic aided the Ottoman victory at Varna by preventing the Albanian leader Skanderbeg from joining his Christian allies.

After the conquest, Serbs were often resettled in lands depopulated by fleeing Christians; yet another complex ambiguity from the Ottoman period that modern nationalists would choose to ignore.

"Heavely Serbia: From Myth to Genocide" by Bramimir Anzulovic [3]

CHAPTER ONE: HEAVENLY SERBIA

The Birth of the Myth

I'm assuming that most readers of this blog already know about the Battle of Kosovo, the myths that surround it, and the long tradition of Serbian folk poetry and folk singers. Anzulovic briefly details how stories of that battle were transmitted through the ages--and transformed into a mythic/religious version of events, complete with a "Last Supper" and so forth.

Unheavenly Heroes

This section examines the troubling nature and brutal moral code of Milos Obilic (who, according the legend, used deceit to kill Sultan Murat, among other exploits) and the popular folk hero Prince Marko. It is no exaggeration to say that Marko is a bloodthirsty sadist and a stunningly callous misogynist to boot--the few examples Anzulovic provides of Marko's treatment of women, including his own wife, are absolutely loathsome. He was also, it is important to note, a frequent collaborator with the Ottomans.

Anzulovic notes that the Marko songs were popular in Ottoman-controlled regions in the first few centuries after the conquest, when life was actually pretty good and the Orthodox Church was prospering under Turkish rule, while the Obilic songs were popular in areas outside of Turkish control, and then later within those areas as economic conditions for Serbs declined and resentment, and later nationalist agitation, increased greatly. At the same time, folk singers

"...made Marko less brutal and more patriotic, so that both Marko and Obilic were seen as heroes of Serbian resistance against the Turks."

The Byzantine Heritage

Anzulovic considers the effect of the Byzantine legacy on Serbian nationalism. He points out the violence and cruelty in Byzantine culture (the regularity of assassination, mutilation, and the murder of families as a way of changing rulers, for example) but then points out there was violence aplenty in Western Europe; he also notes the high level of culture in the empire, as well as the relatively high status and level of rights afforded to women.

He also notes the important civilizing influence the empire had, and how central Christianity was to that effort. While I prefer not to get into a discussion on the value of religious belief, I will note that I do not agree with the author's premise that the "basic message" of Christianity and other religions, is essentially a good one. Be that as it may, he does believe that moral integrity of a religion becomes threatened once a religion becomes powerful. And in Byzantium, the church became subordinate to the state, losing its independence and therefore much of its moral and spiritual authority.

Not completely, though, since Byzantine society was genuinely and devoutly religious, so that state authorities always had to be somewhat deferential to ecclesiastical authority. The monastic orders had much more freedom from the state than the court-appointed patriarchs and bishops.

The formation of autocephalous Bulgarian and Serbian churches strengthened those growing states and their autonomy from Byzantine control; the Byzantine church increasingly became a "Greek" church. The "national" churches helped encourage division in the Orthodox world, as opposed to the universalist tendencies of the Roman Catholic church in the West.

It is also worth noting that the Serbs took the "state-heaven" relationship of Byzantium one step further; while Byzantines felt that the emperor and his court were heavenly and ordained by God, the Serbs felt that it was the nation itself that held this distinction. Anzulovic concludes this section with this paragraph:

"In authentic Christian thought the Church, that is, the community of believers, constitutes the mystical body of Christ. The identification of the church with the nation favors instead the concept of the nation as the mystical body."

Saint-Savaism: Radical Nationalization of a Church

This final section discusses the legacy of Saint Sava, the founder of the Serbian Church and the Nemanja dynasty; of the fifty-nine saints particular to Serbian Orthodoxy, twenty-six were rulers of members of ruling families.

This identification with the state outlasted the fall of the state itself--the church had a high status under Ottoman rule, and became the repository and conduit for national identity and myth. The church was much more concerned with culture and "quasi-politics" than with theology or spiritual matters. At the same time, the church did lose some power, prestige, and resources, leading to an upsurge in pagan practices and ideas, which became encoded into Serbian society and culture. Pagan notions of anger and revenge became fused with Christianity, so that some saints became celebrated for "unsaintly" behavior.

Anzulovic concludes this section, and this chapter--after a short examination of the irrelgious nature of Serb society from many, many years prior to Communism or even statehood--with a consideration of the propensity of Orthodoxy to accommodate totalitarianism, since the faith has a long tradition of "deifying the state." Among the Serbs, the particular blend of state, church, and nation often referred to by the Serbs themselves as "Saint-Savaism" is the most extreme example of this tendency.

"Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide" by Branimir Anzulovic [2]

INTRODUCTION

After noting that lamenting the loss of Kosovo has been a genuine element of Serbian culture for quite some time, the author further acknowledges that "significant loss of power is always a traumatic event." This is fair, as is the following observation that the "strong expansionist trend" Serbia displayed after gaining independence was typical of the countries which achieved independence as nation-states in the nineteenth century "after a long period of foreign domination or political fragmentation." It is important to maintain a measure of balance and to avoid demonizing an entire nation or group. One of the primary themes of this blog is the evil of collectivism, specifically collective guilt. Any attempt to deal with recent events in the former Yugoslavia, unfortunately, risks charges of being "anti-Serb" from various hysterical factions. I want to take special care not to lend any legitimacy to such charges.

At any rate, Anzulovic is careful to note that theories of a certain "fascist psychology" are wanting at best; the psychological impulse we need to understand is not some individual pathology shared by many members of a particular group but rather the universal trait of strong group membership, a trait which is not exclusive to our species but which in our case may have outlived its evolutionary usefulness. There is a pathology at work, but it is not an abnormal psychological trait peculiar to members of a particular group. The author notes:

"Thus, the primary driving force leading to genocide is not the pathology of the individuals organizing and committing the genocide, but the pathology of the ideas guiding them."

Anzulovic wants to examine how

"the old myth of an innocent, suffering Serbia, and the concomitant myth of foreign evildoers who conspire against its very existence influened the behavior of Serbs at the close of the twentieth century."

The rest of introduction summarizes each chapter rather neatly; if you ever come across a copy of this book while remaining unsure if you want to read it, I encourage you to at least read the Introduction, which serves to at least encapsulate the theme Anzulovic covers.

"Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide" by Branimir Anzulovic [1]

I am reading Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide by Branimir Anzulovic. The inside jacket states:

"In the 1990s Serbs brought death and destruction to Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo, and international condemnation on themselves. Heavenly Serbia searches for the causes behind the brutal and futile drive for a Greater Serbia. How did the Serbs rationalize, and rally support for, their genocidal activity?"

As you would guess from the title of the book, Anzulovic explains the violent expansionism of 1990s Serbs as an expression of their peculiar national mythology. Most readers of this blog will most likely already be familiar with the Kosovo myth, of Prince Lazar choosing the heavenly kingdom, the murder of Sultan Murat by Milos Obilic, and so on; as well as the tradition of oral poetry, The Mountain Wreath by Prince Njegos (and its genocidal theme), the the unique melding of nation, church, and state in the Orthodox world ; and so on. Therefore, I will not review this book on a page-by-page or at least section-by-section (within chapters) as I often do.

However, this excellent book does examine some aspects of Serbian and south Slavic culture and history which don't often receive attention in popular Western books on the subject, or at least the author manages to achieve a fresh and novel insight into what might at first seem to be well-trod ground.

Therefore, I intend to touch on and discuss at least a portion of what is novel and uniquely insightful in Anzulovic's book. I will begin doing so in my next post.