Friday, October 20 - What a day... Such brotherhood and unity of Serbian and Montenegrin nationalists has not happened since that winter six or seven years ago, when the long-deceased Njegoš was accused of genocide.
Then special representatives of both nations declared war - on all Bosniaks.
Trying to bring both the topic and the vocabulary back into legal channels, I tried to explain that the statement of one man is not the voice of the whole nation. And that the individual accusation of genocide should not be equated with the demand that Bosniak children be freed from the obligation to study the Gorski vijenc.
In vain, all four virtues that the original Christian tradition considered natural were missing: moderation, justice, restraint and moral purity.
Few people publicly showed understanding for my effort to understand (also) those Islamic believers who perceived some of Njegoš's verses - "Odža riče na ravno Cetinje" - as an insult, hatred...
And that it was his defenders who taught them the wrong reading. Those Montenegrins and Serbs who in the XNUMXs threatened their less numerous fellow citizens with the lines "Let's rid the city of leprosy" or "Let's cleanse the country of unchristianity"...
That initial voice of reason was retaliated with an even fiercer speech of hatred towards Bosniaks...
Which could only be canceled by canceling commenting on the column...
* * *
Saturday, October 21 - And what annoyed the believing readers so much yesterday that they don't even notice how high a level of Serbian-Montenegrin brotherhood and unity in hatred they managed to achieve...
The truth, in fact only a fraction of the truth that I have been repeating for decades...
That there are no Montenegrins in the portfolio of the Serbian patriarch.
And that it is a good thing that in Podgorica he spoke only to Serbian believers.
But not because he - like all his predecessors - denies the existence of the Montenegrin people and the believers of the Montenegrin Church...
But because the SPC is a church of Serbian believers.
And believing Montenegrins have their own.
What they have turned it into as an institution in recent decades cannot change the facts of its centuries-old existence.
After all, the church is not made up of priests and monasteries, it is, in its original sense, a spiritual community of believers that cannot be abolished.
Just as, in worldly life, abolishing the Ministry of Culture or Justice does not abolish either culture or justice...
Simplifying?...
No, with Christ it is even simpler...
And what raised the pressure on the Montenegrin side?
Also ignoring historical facts, as one of the consequences of three decades of manipulations by the former regime...
And the spread of half-truths, which is only partly a consequence of ignorance of the Montenegrin past...
That regime tried to legalize the most dangerous manipulations and half-truths.
Thus causing his own downfall, which is good.
But also the rise of religious and national hatred, which is very bad because we will have to deal with this miracle for decades to come...
Not clear?
I will simplify: the church dispute, which has been going on for a hundred and odd years, cannot be resolved by projecting the present into the past.
Nor by creating a false history according to which all Orthodox churches in Montenegro are the property of the Montenegrin Church.
They are not, and the biggest ones...
And the Cetinje and Ostroški monasteries?
Well, for the change of owner in their real estate list, believing Montenegrins have to go to court...
As for Ždrebaonik, with the fact that the diary of its construction allows the SPC to eventually prove the ownership of the foundations and five centimeters of the wall...
Regarding the village Orthodox churches, which were mostly built by the locals, the answer to the question about ownership will be given - a list...
* * *
Sunday, October 22 - I have known these and almost all other answers to the religious - and national, of course - question for forty-odd years...
It's my birthday, sixty-five, I'm participating in my own mourning...
God regrets the last four decades spent writing...
In vain, when there are fewer and fewer readers in Montenegro, and more and more readers who respond to the voice of reason - by killing the messenger...
This is how it happens in a country where 58 percent of surveyed citizens admit their own nationalist orientation...
Which kills any hope of an imminent return to civilized societies...
* * *
Monday, October 23 - I encountered the aforementioned nationalism for the first time in June 1977 in Belgrade. And the last one, which concerns not only that city but also the rest of Serbia.
Nationalism had a Serbian sign, performed by a Russian language teacher who was Macedonian.
And that what she expressed towards me was called nationalism, I realized only later, after the reaction of my ethnologist professors...
- Colleagues, how do you think you can master the Russian language when you don't even speak well with your native Serbian - she provoked me during the exam in front of students from all departments, not only my...
- Professor, I am Montenegrin and I am not ashamed to speak Montenegrin. If you don't understand me, we better switch to Russian - that's how I answered her.
And she seemed like she couldn't wait:
- Okay, tell me in Russian how many pigs Miloš Obrenović exported to Austria-Hungary, one thousand eight hundred and... - I don't remember the year...
I have not forgotten the politely worded cheeky answer even after half a century:
- Professor, excuse me, do you want data for pigs of both sexes separately or together - I replied in fluent Russian...
Of course, I achieved a five in two more terms, and then several professors gave me a six.
* * *
Tuesday, October 24 - Since grades didn't mean anything to me and ethnology was a lot, I didn't take the professor's explanation that their colleague's outburst was nationalistic seriously...
It was like that until I returned to Montenegro, where I spent a year visiting all the museums looking for a job in the profession.
I didn't find it, and I realized the reason only when a group of communists from the Central Committee launched a hunt against the ethnologist Dr. Špir Kulišić because of a scientific paper published after my graduation.
The title was "On the Ethnogenesis of Montenegrins", which was also my specialty.
Our main conclusion was essentially the same - Montenegrins and Serbs do not have any special ethnic ties except for their Slavic origin...
In 1980, Josip Broz died and - there were no more obstacles for the spread of Serbian nationalism.
There was no Montenegrin nationalism either, although any resistance to the rewriting of Montenegrin history was declared an attack on Serbia.
After a 35-year hiatus, for which Broz is responsible, that rewriting has heated up...
Despite the name, first at the Montenegrin Academy of Sciences and Arts.
In it, a few years before the 1986 SANU Memorandum, an (im)legal document appeared under the working title Third Yugoslavia.
The foundations of both documents were the same: Načertanije from 1844 and Homogenous Serbia from 1941.
That's when my serious encounters with Serbian nationalism began... And they continued at the meetings of the editorial offices of the Encyclopedia of Yugoslavia in Zagreb and Titograd, and the Lexicographic Institute of Montenegro, etc. etc...
Until the Assembly of the Union of Writers of Yugoslavia in Maribor, on the eve of its dissolution in 1985, when it became obvious that the end of the SFRY state was approaching...
We know what that end was like.
What are the consequences - also...
Despite their weight, even during the war nineties, it never occurred to me that one of them would be - the birth of Montenegrin nationalism...
* * *
Wednesday, October 25 - And he was born, his rocking is in progress. And not that it is swaying, but for a month and a half, Montenegro is shaking because of it.
And if it was not clear to any reader until now what my today's reminders of early encounters with - then only Serbian - nationalism are for, here I am to clarify...
Politicians, analysts and journalists who really think that this battle over the census is just part of the usual conflicts between the opposition and the government or just part of the preparations for another election before the deadline are seriously mistaken.
He is and that, but on the public stage, above all, the confrontation between two nationalisms takes place.
Mass public hate speech has already surpassed that of 2019 caused by the so-called by church law...
And threw into oblivion the chauvinist farce from 2016 caused by the so-called coup d'état...
* * *
Thursday, October 26 - So, what are we going to do now?
Nothing, while there are politicians who really believe that in a month or three here - as their equally wise colleagues from the EU would say - better political conditions will be achieved...
That is why I sincerely wish Montenegro to return DPS to power as soon as possible.
And that her government gets at least a two-thirds majority in the parliament.
And to ban criticizing that government for five years...
Lest anyone notice that the threats to boycott the census were just another brilliant mastery of manipulation.
And that the method has been the same since 1990:
First they create a problem…
Then they use it for the election campaign.
Then they promise a solution and...
And then - they win...
Meanwhile, anywhere from a hundred to nearly two hundred thousand citizens get a three-month collective aMNESia and forget who caused the initial problem...
And so at least twenty times in 35 years...
And that's why never ask what that party will do for you, than you have done for it...
Well, you can't vote immediately, but you can overthrow the government as soon as it is elected...
A country with a party like this should not worry about its future...
Because she hasn't been there since 1988...
And the other side, did I forget it?
No, only after the census billboards I have nothing to say.
And I don't mean that sloppy advice "Ask grandpa", because - if they listen to him - it could turn out that 90,67 percent of Montenegrins live in Montenegro.
But to the well thought-out message "It's not Montenegrin if it's not Serbian"...
Which is not just nationalism...
But also chauvinism as its extreme form...
And because of that, preventively - Death to fascism and...
... Freedom to the individual...
Because we misunderstood the freedom of the people...
Bonus video:
