How we hurt ourselves

If there is anything good in this vaudeville about the journey of our highest representatives from dislike to dislike, from Belgrade to sunny Florida and back, then via exotic Baku, detour to the fateful Moscow, to that famous military parade of the defeated army, as well as the treatment our officials received from their hosts, then it is the suddenly awakened interest in the history of our relations with the great powers and our (in)ability in endless attempts to get somewhere in it we weave the world's complicated web.

At the root of it is, in essence, a very simple question to which we never manage to give a clear answer - modernization or tradition. And the other dilemmas - world or palanquin, West or East, European democracy or Asian despotism - can be reduced to the question of whether Serbia wants to be a modern society or not. It is not difficult to notice that there is a very long list of situations when the Serbian political elite and the entire society in that sense made disastrously bad decisions with equally disastrous consequences. The majority of the bazaar, traditionally, is passionately engaged in weighing who has harmed the Serbs and their country more and hates them more, and who is our true friend, our closest relative, a friend to the grave. Others, with a knowledge of world politics equal only to that of Nušić's Arsa Popović, a retired major and his rival in the polemics of boss Mita Beaumarše, indulge in complex geo-strategic deliberations - I tell you, no American will want to; no matter what, when the Russian is there for him; it's all because of Arabs and oil, I tell you...

However, no matter how inspiring these discussions were, we have decided on a slightly different approach to considering the problems that Serbian society has to understand, recover and finally adapt to its position as a European country in the 21st century. Namely, here we will try to give a short, sometimes darkly humorous account of historical events and moments when we invariably made mistakes in our judgment, chose the wrong side or did things to ourselves, unjustified and unprovoked, that brought us here. The intention is to at least count all of our great stumbles for which no one is to blame but ourselves, and to hope that some intelligent minds will manage to recognize the causes in this infamous series and maybe, just maybe, offer some solutions to get out of the hole we've been in for too long. Well, for the sake of clarity, we can divide the mentioned events into foreign-political blunders and embarrassments, and our internal self-inflicted wounds in the leg, and sometimes in the head.

EXTERNALLY-POLITICAL FOOLS AND EMBARRASSMENTS

Many were surprised by the participation of our representatives in the military parade of the army that attacked and is currently waging war, along with a series of committed war crimes, against our friendly Ukraine. Many consider it not only a disastrous political assessment, but also a deep (im)moral offense. Many are having fun hunting for all the protocol ways the hosts beat our delegation, which went through a similar diplomatic hot rabbit a few days ago in the United States. There is also a large number of those who are worried about the economic and political consequences that threaten the country from its European allies after this Moscow parade. Russia is the aggressor country in this war, and it is difficult to find a rational justification for such a demonstrative placement on its side.

But one does not have to go too far in history to find other moments when our country made cardinal mistakes in assessing the international situation. In the middle of the war raging in Europe, on March 25, 1941, the country of that time officially entered into an alliance with Nazi Germany, Benito Mussolini's Italy and Japan. In the same summer, during the Nedić government, we became one of the few countries that had concentration camps on its territory, three of which were in the territory of the capital.

A little later, in 1989, the entire political elite of Serbia somehow missed the fact that the Berlin Wall had been torn down and that the Soviet Union had lost the Cold War. Thus, the unofficial offer, during the time of the now mythical government of Ante Marković, to accelerate accession to the European Union was flatly rejected, Marković was the most furious, and the SANU Memorandum was taken out of the drawer of the competent services, as a national program for the road of no return. It seems that even then, making the wrong decisions became a kind of habit, so during the wars for the Yugoslav heritage, better options were rejected as if on tape, and much worse options were immediately accepted. Misunderstanding of international relations, reliance on the wrong partners and failure to recognize one's own interests have already reached hilarious proportions. And now we are where we are. Always on the edge of the modern world, in contact with advanced democracies, on the threshold of modern civilization, but without the final readiness to cross that threshold. And it's not God knows how new either. In 1880, Serbia voted for the construction of the first railway with only a few votes of the majority in the assembly, with enormous resistance and arguments that the railway was an "anti-Serbian and anti-Orthodox devil" and that "it is known that where the railway passes, women give birth less".

INTERNAL SELF-WARNING

Apart from international setbacks, we also had those in which we combined international issues and our internal relations, with the aim of harming ourselves and at the same time embarrassing ourselves in front of the world. The example of our prince, a pig merchant from Gornja Dobrinja, comes to mind, who cut off the head of his godfather, then he had a local butcher and a certain Peri Turkey to taxidermy it, he paid them 35 groschi for that taxidermy project and sent it filled with straw to the sultan in Constantinople. The shipment was accompanied by a spectacularly humiliating accompanying letter to the sultan, written in the best tradition of courtship and humility, in which it was stated, among other things, that by sending Karađorđe's head, "we testify that our people will not rebel again under any circumstances, only if they have the courage..." Serbia.

But not all of our leaders deserve such treatment. For example, Prince Mihaila, who returned Belgrade to Serbian hands, expelled the Turks from other Serbian cities, modernized and strengthened the army and committed several other similar crimes, somehow, quite naturally, we shot in Topcider. His fatal mistake was that he helped Serbian artists and intellectuals, built the National Theater and now watch out - he wrote poetry. Hence, the urge of the assassins, some of the two Radovanović brothers, to not only kill the prince with a gun, but also to massacre them with knives, is quite clear. Mihajlo took cruel revenge on them by uttering his last words - "So, it's true" in French, thus permanently damaging his killers. They say that they went out to the shooting in a daze.

Another Obrenović, King Aleksandar, experienced a similar fate. The then Russian agency in Serbia, known under the marketing-thought-out name Black Hand, led by the aspiring colonel Apis, and taught by the example of its psychologically shaken predecessors, could not forgive him that, like Prince Mihajlo, he spoke French fluently and did so provocatively, publicly, in front of everyone, without any shame or leeway. In addition, the king did not have, according to their high aesthetic standards, a sufficiently attractive wife, so Apis's followers were, willy-nilly, forced to kill them both and throw them off the terrace of the Old Palace. When they took a break from that work, some year later, they managed to incite and arm a group of minors to kill the Austrian heir to the throne and his wife Sofia and thus provoke a war that cost Serbia a paltry 1.300.000 victims.

And if you think that the Serbs have had enough of that, of course you are wrong. We had other literate, polite leaders who should have been silenced. Next in line was Ivan Stambolić. Even his withdrawal from politics and public life in general and hiding from the world in the forest on Košutnjak did not help him so that Milošević and his frantic wife did not find him and send their mad dogs, ideological offshoots of the Red Orchestra, a specific agency within an agency trained, quite unexpectedly, again in libertarian Moscow. Serbian Lady Macbeth and her husband thought that Stambolić, even hidden like that, radiated too much normality, which could have a negative effect on their subjects, especially before the elections, so they decided that it would be best to bury him somewhere as far away as possible, say on top of Fruška Gora.

And of course, we haven't forgotten about those police officers, anointed on the head as if by a blessing from our barbarogens, self-proclaimed fathers of the nation, who decided to stop with a sniper any attempt to civilize Serbia and its approach to civilization. Zoran Đinđić hoped, and so did we for a moment, that something could be made of this land, and for that he was punished in the shortest possible time. Our hope is not as fine-tempered as it is in the decent world. In Serbia, Nada has been turned into a lady of questionable morals. The only similar ruler, who managed to avoid the long hand of the worst in Serbia, was Josip Broz. Admittedly, a total of 50 assassinations were attempted on him, both by local and by White World killers. By far the most persistent were, you guessed it, again the Russians and their officials here, who tried to convince the son of gentle Zagorje and the people's wishes to live like those imperialists in the West, exactly 22 times. The means were numerous, and one cannot deny a certain degree of creativity in their selection, so among them were a large-caliber pistol, a lady's pistol, a sniper, a hunting shotgun, various explosive devices, several types of poison, including some exotic, infected medical instruments and a tram. Yes, and the tram. In order to avoid all that, it is quite clear, you have to be a maher and a haji, so Tito was saved by his undoubted hajiluk and maheraj, as the only one of all the rulers who tried to modernize Serbia and who died unkilled.

And then, what should we do? It's hard to be sure. I'm afraid we have to rely on the letter of the famous Katz's law: "People and nations will act rationally only when all other possibilities have been exhausted". We can only hope that our persistence has brought us to this point.