When the tanks of the then JNA, strewn with flowers on Belgrade's boulevards, headed towards Croatia and Vukovar, few could have predicted that the country of self-rulers and proletarians, of brotherhood and unity, would slide into a bloody war that would mark the lives of several generations to come. Today we see that we are still living in the nineties. Although it has been 35 years since the official Belgrade, political, intellectual and church elite started preparations for the biggest showdown on the European continent after the great second military war.
Everything is the same, only he is not there. Nationalism, hate speech, inciting propaganda, corruption, reign of injustice, organized crime, turbo folk, brotherhood of pops, politicians and mobsters, unity of local stabilocrats, confusion of the so-called of the international community - all these legacy of the evil times even today, several decades after Milosevic set out to liberate Slovenia, then Croatia, then Bosnia, and finally Kosovo, from a neo-Nazi and a drug addict, all of you values, therefore, we live now.
New, young generations have grown up on them, for whom we cannot say, like Comrade Tito - a nation that has such youth is lucky. Because the majority of these new generations would not marry a Muslim or a Catholic woman, they would not have a Roma or an Albanian as a neighbor, the most exemplary of them beat LGBT people on the street in order to heal them, while there are also those who draw Andrić, Tolstoy or Tchaikovsky instead of murals those of Mladic and Putin. Today's youth, raised on the achievements of the nineties, are so sick that they chase "Shiptars" and "Ustashes" in water polo pools, and in football stadiums they stretch Ukraine presented, probably in honor of Putin, as a big cemetery.
Our generation, who during the criminal 90s were in their prime, on the threshold of real life, at the beginning of their careers and marriages, we who could not even in our wildest dreams imagine that our Vukovar would be razed to the ground, the city of Sarajevo strewn with shells while the last window does not break and fall, we who could not have dreamed that some of our fellow citizens, even most of them, would be ready to attack innocent Dubrovnik and Konavle, to rob, burn and kill there, we, unknown and taken aback by the evil times, cannot, that's why , believe today with your own eyes - that history, the terrible history of aggression, crime and destruction is repeating itself. In that same, one and short human life.
No, this is not possible, Ukraine is not burning, it's just a dream. I cannot believe that a couple of decades after the criminal Milošević, Comrade Putin followed in his footsteps, following the same pattern, with the same cynical excuses, even more brutally than Vožd, because his armada is much more murderous than that of Kadijević's JNA, and with the same goal - imperial. The drunkenness of the isolated Putin caused by nineteenth-century dreams of a great empire and the "Russian world" leads Russia into an adventure with unfathomable consequences and suffering. Similar to what the German philosopher Karl Jaspers painfully described in his letter to Hannah Arendt: "While I stand on the pyre of a razed and burned homeland, aware of the tragic consequences that few can imagine and that will be paid for generations, I for the first time, since 1939, somehow feel relief”…
This is called accepting and confessing the crime. And the awareness of the punishment that inevitably comes after it.
With small and, for the potential of his army, minor and symbolic interventions in Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, Putin gained the confidence that led him to invade one of the largest and most populous countries in Europe, after which nothing will be the same. Not with Russia, not with Europe, not with the world. The hardened dictator, like Milošević back then, was helped by conceited philosophers and a large part of the servile intellectual elite, the Russian Church, captured institutions, disgusting propaganda, oligarchs and the mafia. Already seen, then. The ideologue Dugin, Putin's Ćosić, smarter and therefore more poisonous than Dobrica, elaborated the Leader's vision of a great and independent Russia, a strange creation between the hateful West and the unreliable East, while all this was conveyed to the common people through liturgies and sermons by Putin's Church and Patriarch Kirill, the richest among to the bishops of the Orthodox world. In addition to them, all these years, the economic support of the imperial vision was provided by tycoons and oligarchs whom Vladimir knew to call cockroaches.
The international community also made a kind of contribution to the birth of evil in the form of the Russian dictator and now aggressor Putin. Merkel has been his patron for decades, although she might now be happy to give up that part of her legacy. Vladimir gave Angela the market of a large country, and Merkel gave Putin the illusion of a new Russian empire and unpunished crime. Neither the one in Georgia, nor the one in Moldova, nor the one in Crimea. Not even the one before Ukraine, the biggest - the dictator's crime against his own people, which left behind the murdered Nemtsov, exiled Shishkin, Kasparov, poisoned and then arrested Navalny. "I want to return to Russia. But what kind? In Putin's Russia, it is impossible to breathe - the smell of police boots is too strong", Shishkin writes these days in Vijesti. Merkel went over all the wrongdoings of Comrade Vladimir and was his best lawyer with Bush, Obama, Blair, Chirac, Macron... Even when, after the Russian occupation of Crimea in 2014, Angela complained to Obama that Putin had lost touch with reality, and how " he lives in another world", she only relativized his behavior and downplayed the consequences of the invasion.
"Today we all live in a world where the weak suffer and the strong do whatever they want," concludes the famous Bulgarian author Ivan Krastev. Hence my question for Merkel - what did the recent chancellor of the most powerful European country do to save the world from such injustice?! Nothing. Or certainly not enough!
That's why we are where we are. And where no one can predict the numerous consequences of Putin's aggression and violence against Ukraine! Just as Jaspers in 1945 could not see what was yet to come for his Germany.
What may be certain - Russia and the Russian people will pay the ultimate price in the end. Putin will bring to Russia the same or similar to what Milosevic brought to Serbia. Shame, isolation, perhaps the dissolution of the country within today's borders, poverty, suffering and a painful awakening that will last for decades and will be paid for by generations. "Russia is now not attached to Russian literature and music, but to children under bombs," concludes Shishkin firmly.
British Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab says that the war in Ukraine will last for months and maybe even years. And that the West must prepare for "strategic patience" and the struggle that will lead to Putin's collapse.
Sooner or later the life of every worthless dictator ends in one way or another. That's how it was with Milosevic, and Putin will go through the same thing. But the price of their policy and insane leadership will be paid by the people. Through generations. As long or even longer than us. So some Russian writer or chronicler in 2052, say, three decades after Putin's shameful war, will say that Russians are still alive in 2022! Just as we are living in 2022 in 1990. And we lack nothing. Even He is there.
Bonus video:
