How to move things, even a millimeter. Sometimes it seems like it's only going to get worse. And dumber. Well, that's the time...
An illustrative but equally incredible story comes to us from the region. It turns out, namely, that celebrating a convicted war criminal can bring a state scholarship?
Two female students, so delicate that they glorify and sing the praises of Ratko Mladić in Bosnia, eventually became media stars in Serbia, and the state proudly announced that the female students, as befits, received state scholarships.
One of them explained things like this for a portal, among other things - We thought it was normal for everyone to glorify their heroes... She wanted to say that she doesn't see anything inappropriate in everything.
That "normality" that this scholar's statement evokes is actually the most terrifying possible reality. Post-war societies in the region, in short, do not deviate from their war criminals. A convicted war criminal in Croatia recently explained that he wouldn't change a thing and that he doesn't regret it... The audience, led by priests, looked at him like a living saint.
We are not talking about war criminals from seventy or three hundred years ago - but about the time "yesterday", and, most importantly, well documented. But not with folk songs, but with bloody traces that are impossible to turn into metaphors and verses. That is, if possible, it would certainly sound completely different from those cheerful student songs... Folk songs usually serve to cover up such things - a friend said that there is no folk song in which there is no genocide or crime against humanity. Admittedly, that is another story, but in the close neighborhood of this current one.
What does all this tell us - this untouchable status of war criminals in ex yu societies?
That no catharsis actually happened, that there was no sobering up, that the European value system is about as far away here as the Easter Islands (Rapa Nui).
Does it make you nervous or anxious, or do you think it's okay? Maybe it will somehow pass, on its own? That really "economic" issues will cover all this, that the betterment of life will make people more rational? I would believe it too - if I didn't remember how the average salary of a thousand and a half marks did not prevent the wars of the nineties. On the contrary, the sats were the loudest...
There is no such area of spirit and knowledge that these Mladic cheerleaders will enrich, it is clear. So how did they earn scholarships before some poor, hungry and talented? (If such a thing still exists?)
Does this reaction of the Serbian state indicate another path to the scholarship, which could perhaps become popular in the region. For a scholarship, someone will need knowledge, and someone will have enough banal verses? People become imaginative when they hope for some gain. Scholarships...
The way in which female students became famous is not exactly a recommendation for an academic career. But there must be a job for them too. Here, look at Vulin. Then no one acts enough - unqualified.
The problem is that politicians think exactly like the two of them. Well, I guess it's normal for everyone to celebrate their heroes, right?
This is where the story gets somewhat more complicated. What is your/our hero? How does the Balkan hero industry work? In this area of ours, the path to heroic status was often party work. It's no different today - but it's interesting that here the path to heroism implies bloody hands rather than some kind of spiritual humiliation.
The second story is local, but it's not that it doesn't have global implications...
In the church in Nikšić, some commemoration turned into glorification of Russia, Putin and the aggression against Ukraine. Interestingly, the mayor's middle finger was there too. But he did not deal with the watch. What the mayor of Nikšić heard there, unlike the Montenegrin national anthem, does not cause him mental pain.
Bonus video:
