<quote>
I remember my initial shock when in the center of Belgrade in 1991 I first saw Chetnik insignias on bearded young thugs peddling chauvinist cassettes and blood-curdling pamphlets. This was a sign that the old system was breaking down; for much less than what those thugs were doing, the student newspaper _Student_ had been banned the previous year at the insistence of Slobodan Milosevic himself. The young nationalist thugs looked like caricatures of Chetniks from the Second World War. This was not surprising. The only models the young had were from the war movies that glorified the Communist partisans and treated the Chetniks as collaborators, rapists, looters, and killers. That, of course, was precisely what had made the Chetniks attractive to the new converts! They were a Serbian folk version of the skinheads and young neo-Nazis in the West. Similar cultural blends in the Croatian paramilitaries mixed Ustashe symbols with heavy-metal, skinhead, and Rambo images, sometimes topped off with Catholic prayer beads and a cross. These were the groups that would do some of the fighting and commit most of the atrocities in the wars that started that summer.
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>From _Ethnic Nationalism: The Tragic Death of Yugoslavia_, p. 178, by
Bogdan Denitch
And yes, this is the same Bodgan that co-wrote that awful article in the Nation last week that was posted in lbo-talk. Still, the book is very good. And I don't mean at all to defend his present position, but I feel I should point out that he is coming from a very different perspective from almost all other bombers. He is calling on NATO to bomb "his" people. I put "his" in quotes because he is a Yugoslav who fought as best he could from beginning to end against the idea that his cosmopolitan identity as an left-intellectual Yugoslav could be reduced to that of a single, homogenous, micro-nationality. He is a Serb who lived in Croatia for four months a year for 25 years, and considered it his home, the place he'd lived the longest, the place where his daughter was born. He was politically active and nationally prominent, and he was a vehement left-wing critic of Milosevic back in the mid-80s, back when Milosevic was just a head apparatchik, and being Serbian was just a cultural ethnicity. Stunned by the suddenly rising nationalism of Serbs and Croats he describes in part above, Denitch joined with others to found a League of Democratic Yugoslavs out of non-communist, left-leaning intellectuals of all nationalities; it was essentially still-born. Frustrated, he and his colleagues attempted to form social democratic oppositions in each republic, hoping to contribute to coalitions that would be mutually tolerant in the regimes to come. Like leftists in Weimar Germany, they could not believe the wrong side could win so totally and so quickly and were hopeful to the end -- most of all, as he ruefully relates, in cosmopolitan Sarajevo. Suddenly, he had a choice of becoming a citizen of Serbia, where he would be in danger for his political opinions, or Croatia, where he would be in danger for his ethnicity. He chose to run for office in Croatia, which he considered his home geographically. And while he heard from many people who thanked him for how the campaign had given them hope, he was also forced to go about with bodyguards and sidearms because of brownshirt-type gangs. And their candidate for PM got 5 percent of the vote.
In short, he dreadfully misses the cosmopolitan Yugoslavia, and although he has a subtler grasp than most of us of the faults of all sides, he hates Milosevic with a pure hate as the party most responsible for bringing it all about, and the single man who could have stopped it. And, judging from his comments on the rise of Seselj [this book came out in 1994], he is furious at his fellow Serbs in Serbia -- many of him his ex-friends, and ex-leftists -- for their support not only of Milosevic but fascism (by which he means Seselj, who last election got the plurality of the vote.)
At least I think that's where that article came from. He wasn't speaking from lack of sympathy. It was rather from a very personal hatred and fury at his "own" people and the leader he regards as truly representing them, and being to the left of half of them.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com