Guilt, Responsibility, and Denial. Eric Gordy
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media of Serbs-as-Ubermenschen, the oldest,25 most virtuous, and altogether finest people. Goran Marković offers an account of one Dr. Jovan I. Deretić,26 a self-declared “historian” promoted on television:
He was speaking about some Serbon Makeridov, a conqueror who lived long before Alexander the Great and conquered much more territory than him…. That Serbon, the father of all nations, was a Serb. That is to say, all his descendants, or rather all known peoples, have a Serbian origin. Contemporary Serbs, in fact, are just some of the many Serbs who, over time, became Greeks and Celts and so on. Serbs, according to this lively old fellow, are not a nation but a race. In fact, why hide it, all Indo-European peoples have Serbian origins.
Even that lesser conqueror than Serbon, Alexander, was named Aleksandar Karanović and he was of Serbian origin too. He conquered the world with an army that was recruited from areas settled by Serbs, our ancestors were so brave. And the most beautiful girls, who can be seen on ancient Greek vases, were also Serbs, there is indisputable evidence for that….
About this doctor. Of course, Deretić has the right to assert whatever he likes, just like the audience has the right to believe it or, like me, simply to ignore it. But something else is in question: the context of the story. It was disgusting, and at the same time typical. The host of the program, a Serb primitive who is delighted by every Serbian heraldic symbol, even completely nebulous ones, in archaeological digs, and who triumphally grins over every bit of “evidence,” even the most suspicious, of the Serbian origin of everyone and everything, and his interlocutor … were perfect partners in this pig’s race of nationalism. It was a real orgy of stupidity in the service of deceiving exhausted people, a last effort to inject hungry and scared people with the feeling that they still have a reason to live. I am not against nationalism a priori. I do not think that love for one’s people is negative by definition. What makes me angry is not even the falsehood or artificiality of what those two people were claiming. I am ashamed because my feeling of belonging to a nation has been made into something crude, used for dirty purposes, because my personal feelings are being sold publicly by TV Palma, like prostitutes in Gavrilo Princip street.27
Similar themes are apparent in other diaries of the period, in which a falsified collective pride, widely publicized, is perceived by the writers as an attack on individual pride, and massively promoted nationalist feeling makes national identity impossible.
A similar response is offered to the discourse of victimization. Arsenijević responds to the efforts of state television to promote a feeling of victimization with what seems to be insensitive rationality. Describing a television clip from a bomb shelter, he tries to place the rhetoric and its motivation in perspective:
“He is completely hysterical!” a young mother said in a shaky voice into the microphones of the state television news, squinting from the bright lights which were pointed right into her eyes as if she were at a police interrogation. In her arms she was holding a baby who did not seem the least bit hysterical.
“How does he behave?” asked the invisible interviewer, with pathos.
“Sometimes he laughs. Sometimes he cries,” the young mother answered.
But isn’t that what babies generally do? Sometimes they laugh. Sometimes they cry. All the time, even in the shelters when you are bombing them.
But I don’t think the problem is with the baby.
What is worse, it’s not with the mother either.28
Here the writers face an unusual rhetorical challenge. Faced with genuine danger associated with the bombing campaign, they simultaneously feel compelled to resist official media messages telling them that they are victims, and should feel angry and helpless. This requires dismissing some real troubles, or explaining away some real situations.
On the other hand, there is a distinct consciousness that, while inflated claims were promoted regarding “maintaining threatened identity” or “resisting the New World Order,” the countries making these were in fact small, remote, and politically marginal. Prodanović offers an ironic self-location which begins with an interrupted story:
organizations for the protection of animals began a campaign for the permanent protection of the striped-neck swan. These recently little-known birds have their habitat in…. Well, after all, it is not important where their habitat is—the average resident of the civilized world cannot pronounce the name of that country. The most important things are principles and the determination to sacrifice oneself completely for the sake of an idea.
These are just a few additional reasons why we, East Europeans, even after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the arrival of perfect democracy to our small and lost-in-East-European-space homelands, even when it is now possible to buy at our kiosks condoms in thousands of shapes, colors, flavors, and fragrances, and not just the Czechoslovakian “Tigar” brand like in the time of the single-party dictatorship, still try to emigrate to one of those states where so much attention is paid not just to the rights of people but also various types of animals, to one of those countries where order, peace, and mutual respect reign, where even in times of senseless racial violence one can sense an unusually high degree of political correctness.
The governments of the great democracies of the West, of course, would be faced with insurmountable problems if they tried to cram masses of morally, materially, and mentally neglected people from Eastern Europe into their clean cities, into cities with well-maintained facades and rows of well watered flowers, if they let these lazybugs into the hives where every worker bee knows its place. To prevent this undesirable migration, invisible barriers have been placed in the form of visas. People of the East, it is known, fear two things—drafts and bureaucratic procedures. About the East European fear of drafts, those murderous currents of air in rooms, about the awful diseases one can get by exposure to drafts, entire tracts have been written—the fear of bureaucratic procedure is less well researched, but no smaller. This fear is well known to great and small strategists in the West, and so in order to receive a visa, aside from the rigid conditions, barriers have been established in the form of numerous questionnaires, which people who wish to feel the enchantment of orderly countries, or even to settle in these countries, must fill out in the unpleasant waiting rooms of embassies and consulates, after long waits in line29
The passage suggests that the antipatriotism of these writers did not function as substitution. The transparent lies and overwrought nationalist rhetoric of the regime did not force many people to believe that the regime’s external opponents (whether these were regional competitors, the NATO alliance, or an abstractly conceived “West”),30 or even internal opponents (epitomized by the opposition political party leaders) were necessarily any better.
Instead, there seems to develop an ambivalent attitude among these Serbian writers toward their own identity as Serbs. This is bolstered not by some other nationally structured alternative, but by taking refuge in various aspects of individuality. Arsenijević explains his friendly relationship with the ethnic Albanian writer Xhevdet Bajraj partly by the fact that neither was nationalistically inclined, and both liked the same kind of music. Marković talks about his inspiration by (and eventual disillusion with) organizers of protests around Serbia after the end of the bombing campaign, but by the end the most probable vision of the future he can generate is:
When the moment of liberation comes, the most important assistance we can get will be—psychiatric. We will need a whole lot of good doctors who will have the will and the knowledge to wrestle with the effects that the last decade or more has left us.
And in that awakening of mental health it will be most necessary to establish a basic criterion: what is normal and what is not. I know that is not easy and that these things change, depending on the society and culture in question, but this will really be a special case, worthy of the deepest observation. This country will be an Eldorado for future scientists, something like a laboratory with live people instead of white mice.31
Under conditions where a small group felt prepared, like the writers discussed here, to offer some kind of more or less moral stories to their readers, but many more were certain that they have gone through a period of madness that may