And why Timothy Snyder should go sit on a cactus after writing “The Student and Civic Protest in Serbia“.
A Serbian human rights activist, Natasa Kandic, called for paying respects to Albanian civilian victims, dozens of them were children, found in mass graves in Serbia, a remnant of the Kosovo War. Then the apolitical, pro-democracy students called for Natasa Kandic to be prosecuted for “subverting the Constitution”.
But the apolitical, neutral Serbian students had a lot of sympathy for Gaza. On June 18th, a rally, somewhat ruined by torrential rain, to protest the arms sales to Israel, was held in the Muslim-majority town of Novi Pazar, Serbia.
Their student colleagues in Belgrade held another one on June 22nd.
In their plenum communique, the students of the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade lament over the people of Russia “suffering under cruel sanctions”, Serbian business people profiting from Serbian arms sales to Kyiv (notice how people who refer to Ukraine as “Kyiv” are always Kremlin sympathizers), and calling the atrocity committed on October 7th 2023, by murderous Hamas barbarians “the attack of the joint Palestinian organizations on the territory of Israel near the Gaza Strip”.
Mass murderers from the Gaza Strip do have something in common with war criminals from the Yugoslav Wars – they both committed their crimes on tape.
In one of the ghastly episodes of the Srebrenica genocide, a Serbian paramilitary unit Scorpions, videotaped the execution of Bosnian civilians. The same way that members of Hamas and PIJ made GoPro videos of the atrocities they committed.
Does the Constitution that the Serbian protesters are “upholding” against our local anti-war activists have a clause that says “Hamas must be our kind of people”? Yeah, I don’t think so.
Funny how there aren’t any pro-democracy civic and student Serbian sadface shindigs against the arms sales to the apolitical Myanmar and neutral Saudi Arabia.
When people like Snyder write “A New Hope for Democratization” refering to Serbian protests and base their opinions on regurgitating emails from a Serbian university professor, then they fail to notice that, in reality, Serbia has only two groups of people, one pro-government, the other anti-government, waving giant pro-democracy crosses in the middle of the night.
Yeah, they TOTALLY don’t look like the KKK.
Other nonsense includes “jobless growth”, a common trope in Serbian political discourse, telling us how the Milosevic government was re-elected in 2012 because of imaginary economic hardships in the 2000s. Ya know, when people get extradited to a war crimes tribunal, they tend to lose their jobs, starting with Milosevic. After the democratic changes in 2000, it became much harder to telephone any friends holding some office to intervene to get something done, because they became “jobless”.
It is only natural that political parties after Milosevic were unpopular, not many people in Serbia like the rule of law. Milosevic, though, has mucho popularity even beyond the grave, as evidenced by his grotesque public funeral in 2006.
Snyder tells us how “…Another special aspect is students’ inclusiveness and ability to bridge political, cultural, and ethnic divisions. Spectacles of unity of Christian and Muslim students in Novi Pazar have demonstrated that the Student Protest also has a potential to overcome dark legacies of the 1990s.“
No. The ruling coalition already sports its “loyal Muslims”, the protesters found their own. People here wearing traditional attire and hugging each other are a union of conservative, illiberal political affiliations, not an expression of multiconfessional harmony. An allies of convenience against those yucky librul values.
The photo that illustrates the blog post with the banner “Students will change the world” is an excellent representation of Serbian narcissism, The Smartest and The Most Beautiful People on Earth (in their minds), that has a failed state.
The government-affiliated infosphere is the same.
Endless talk show panels on Serbian nationwide coverage televisions with guests waving their hands over their heads because they think it makes them look smart, telling us how “Iran is not medieval, it’s all Western propaganda that also targets the Serbs”, and media outlets referring to Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists as “operatives and “activists”.
To illustrate that point, here is Vojislav Seselj, a convicted war criminal and a well-known Serbian politician, sporting a keffiyeh:
Look, Mr. Snyder & Co., we appreciate the sentiment, but please stop helping already.
Serbianism 