I was not at all surprised when I read the sermon of the Archbishop and Metropolitan of Budimlje-Niksic, which he delivered on June 7th at the Podmalinsko Monastery, on the occasion of the memorial service for members of the First and Second Durmitor Chetnik Brigades and "victims of communist terror."
There is nothing problematic in serving a memorial service to any Christian, but, in this case and many similar cases, in its reduction to a cover for a political rally, in which the bishop is no longer the head of an eschatological community, but a politician speaking at a gathering under a tent and whose primary goal is not the accuracy of what is said, but the desired effect, that is, how what is said, even the most blatant lie, will strengthen the position and power of the speaker. Instead of the memorial service in Podmalinsko being an act of silent prayer for the souls of the victims, whoever they were and under whatever circumstances they died, without any political features and deliberately politicized announcements, it, as expected, becomes a platform for falsifying historical facts, within which the memorial service is transformed into political capital for deepening the tragic divisions in Montenegrin society.
Precisely because of the ideologisation and systematic misuse of the Church for political purposes, it is necessary, no matter how absurd it may seem, to look back at all the controversial elements of Bishop Methodius' speech. Although under normal circumstances such constructions – based on half-truths, euphemisms and outright falsifications – would be rejected as unworthy of any serious analysis, the present moment demands that we point out the danger they carry. Remaining silent on such statements, even when they are devoid of elementary logic and historical foundation, would mean tacit agreement with the misuse of the Church's mission and support for the formation of a new, pseudo-religious ideology, which feeds on mythical constructions, selective memory and, above all, political interest.
"Dragoljub Draža Mihailović and Pavle Đurišić were the first guerrillas to rise up against the fascists in Europe, but the truth about them was later covered up with lies. Since the end of World War II, a Tito-Ustasha coalition has reigned in these regions, trampling and killing, and committing the greatest genocide against the Serbian people."
It is not clear whether Metropolitan Methodius was a victim of manipulation by his advisors or whether it was his own invention for manipulative purposes, but anti-fascist armed resistance in several European countries preceded the Wehrmacht attack on the Kingdom of Yugoslavia by almost two years – in Spain (guerrilla resistance known as the “maquis"against Frank's fascist dictatorship, 1939), Polish Armia Krajowa, the largest underground resistance movement in occupied Europe (September 1939), Czech Republic Defense of the people (Mar 1939), French Resistance (June 1940), the Norwegian civil and sabotage resistance (April 1940), to which should be added the resistance of the Greek army to the Italian invasion as early as 1940 and the beginning of the Greek guerrilla resistance to the German occupier in June 1941, when Mihailović was just beginning to organize his forces on Ravna Gora, which he believed should avoid a direct clash with the occupier until the unspecified date of the landing of Allied troops in Yugoslavia.
While the officers of the army of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia – Colonel Bajo Stanišić, Major Đorđije Lašić and Captain Pavle Đurišić – began their days of rebellion on July 13, 1941, at the same time as the communists: Milovan Đilas, Božo Ljumović, Blažo Jovanović, Radoje Dakić, Savo Brković, Budo Tomović, Vido Uskoković, Krsto Popivoda and Periša Vujošević.
In this sense, even if we disregard the collaboration with the German and Italian occupiers documented later in the Ravna Gora, German, Italian, English and American archives, neither Draža Mihailović nor Pavle Đurišić can be described as the first guerrillas who rose up against the fascists in Europe, as Metropolitan Metodije assures us.
While the metropolitan may have an excuse for such a claim in his insufficient professional qualifications when it comes to historical facts, since he graduated in economics and graduated in theology with a thesis on "The Educational Importance of Monasticism", it is difficult to find an explanation for the completely somnambulistic claim that after World War II, the "Tito-Ustasha coalition" committed the greatest genocide against the Serbian people.
Historical documents, however, say that the genocide against the Serbian people occurred in the NDH, and that the NDH was destroyed by the NOVJ, which implies that the genocidal-assimilative policy of the Croatian fascists against the Serbian people in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina was thus ended.
It is unknown on the basis of which documents Bishop Metodije obtained the data on the "greatest genocide" against Serbs in the FNRY and SFRY, but this already falls within the domain of the media caricature of Jovanka Jolić and her claims about how the Serbs first lost Egypt and how the Chinese committed genocide against them, even though they had previously built the so-called Great Wall of China.
Of course, the metropolitan will not tell us anything about the flirtation of a part of Croatian leftists with the left spectrum of the right-wing ideology in the SFRY, which would give birth to Franjo Tuđman as one of the main ideologists of the dissolution of Yugoslavia, or about the role of the new phase of Croatian nationalism in the disappearance of the common state. He will not, because it is more useful to throw the ball with insane claims to Thompson's audience – 500.000 of them who will gather in Zagreb this summer to, among other things, listen to verses written by the Methodist mind, about hundreds of thousands of innocent Croats who were liquidated by the "Serbo-communists".
"Although they were abandoned by everyone at one point, they persevered on that crucified and cross-passionate path of Christ to the end - with pure faces and bright faces - and General Dragoljub, and Pavle the commander, and Ivan Ružić, and Nikola, and all the fighters, warriors and soldiers who defended the greatest sacred thing - their souls, their faith and their families and people - from that dark plague that loomed over us and that still looms over us... The greatest of our kind - they have no graves. There is no grave of Saint Sava, it was burned by those whose successors burned Dragoljub after him - and he has no grave either. Njegoš's grave was ransacked seven times, and today what stands over his grave - that is not a grave, that is a shame, that is a pagan mausoleum to an Orthodox metropolitan and bishop and saint - a sign of our humiliation and slavery that is still current and ongoing. Do not be fooled - if your salaries are a little higher, you will not be freer", said Metodije.
Here again, we cannot blame Metropolitan Metodije, because he does not have enough knowledge of historical facts, since in 1944 and 1945 the Ravnogors were not abandoned by their final allies - the Germans - but retreated together with them and the Croatian Armed Forces, and thus many reached Blajburg, where a sad fate awaited them in the coming reprisals, which were the most numerous of the Ustasha and Home Guards. It is strange, however, that he is unaware of the reports that appeared even in the émigré press, about how in 1945 Pavle Đurišić, under German auspices, sought to conclude an agreement with Albanian balistas against the NOVJ – the same balistas responsible for the massacre in Velica, which was a partisan village – or of the dispatches from Mihailović's officers openly warning him that, due to the scale of the anti-communist terror in Serbia, namely the paranoid slaughter of anyone accused of being a communist sympathizer, he was deeply hated by the people.
However, as a graduate theologian, he does not know, or forgets, that a martyr (Greek: μάρτυς – witness) in Orthodoxy is someone who: suffers voluntarily or inevitably for Christ and faith in Him, does not renounce his faith even under threat of death, dies in the spirit of love, forgiveness and unwavering testimony – and that he claims that Mihailović and Đurišić, of whom no one asked to renounce their faith and whose deaths can be linked exclusively to reasons of a political and legal nature, persisted on the Christ-bearing and cross-resurrection path – that is already a perfect example of the profanation of the sacred for political purposes.
If Pavle Đurišić negotiated an alliance with the forces responsible for the massacres in the Partisan villages of Piva and Velica – today, when the Church preaches that Christian martyrs were killed in those villages – what kind of crusaderism can we talk about on the part of the allies of their murderers? And what does all this have to do with the posthumous attitude of people of various eras towards Saint Sava and Njegoš? And how much salary should a person have to be happy? Wait – where did this topic come from? The author of these lines does not understand this. We will have to ask Bishop Metodije.
"And I, not by chance, greeted you with: Christ is risen, here, because it resurrects that memory, resurrects the presence and life and spirit of those heroes that we mentioned today. To the extent that we return to ourselves and God, we will return to the truth and to them. And then, from those allies in 1944, more of us were killed than the Nazis and fascists against whom we fought – in Podgorica, in Nikšić, in Niš, in Leskovac, in Belgrade, and in all the places and regions where the Serbian people live.
Let us again put aside the possibility that Bishop Metodije has never read a single historical work, and is therefore able to claim that the Allies killed a greater number of Serbs in 1944 "in all areas where the Serbian people live", i.e. in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, than the Germans, Italians and Ustashas - without substantiating his somnambulistic claim with any data - the question arises: what is the metropolitan alluding to in the first place?
If we are talking about the Allied bombings of Yugoslav cities (including Zadar, Slavonski Brod, Šibenik and Maribor), which are attributed exclusively to the directives of Josip Broz Tito by revisionist historians, and which undoubtedly claimed many victims, but not nearly as many as the Ustasha genocide (several hundred thousand) – it would be worth consulting the scientific work "The Yugoslav Royal Government, General Dragoljub Mihailović and the Allied Bombing of Targets in Yugoslavia 1942–1944" Velimir Terzić, about a whole series of Yugoslav cities, including Belgrade, whose bombing by the Western Allies, while he was still sitting on two chairs – the Allied and the German – was personally demanded by the general of the Yugoslav Army in the homeland, Draža Mihailović.
So, if the “resurrection of memory” is something that is of utmost importance to the metropolitan, then let it truly be resurrected in its entirety, and not just in fragments that blasphemously equate returning to God with those who, if we are to use the metropolitan’s yardstick, also committed “genocide” against the Serbian people – not to mention their crimes against others, especially Muslims, who, in these projections, apparently do not deserve the status of human beings anyway. That is why “trifles” like Đurišić’s massacre of five thousand innocent people of the “wrong faith” in Pljevlja and Priboj, apparently, are not even worth mentioning.
What more can be said about the claims that "when the Ustashas were leaving Zagreb, only 200 meters behind them, partisan units were entering, no one whitened their teeth, and did not leave the ranks", but that Bishop Metodije had never heard of the reprisals against the Ustashas and Home Guard troops in Bleiburg in 1945 and of what the Croatian right wing called the "Stations of the Cross"? Perhaps he should buy a VIP ticket to Thompson's upcoming concert in Zagreb to find out about it? Who knows, maybe he will then wonder how it is possible that Ljotić's men and (mostly) Montenegrin Chetniks found themselves together with that crowd, and how much pseudo-religious hype about the mythical cross-bearing nature of these people leads into the same camp as Ustasha revisionism, which seeks to compare the reprisals against the Ustashas and Home Guard troops with Christ's "Stations of the Cross".
What we have so far from Metropolitan Methodius is exclusively an inept attempt at relativization:
"All those who died, even on this other side – and there is no other, one was a liberating one – they were betrayed by that monster. (Josip Broz Tito, op. a.) to whom they erected a monument in the capital of Montenegro. Betrayed, sent in the most monstrous way to Goli Otok to torture them, to kill their human dignity, destroyed in the most cruel, animalistic way – people who fought with them in the same ranks.
There is no doubt that the torture of people, yesterday's comrades on Goli Otok, was monstrous. But in what way does that nullify, or rather justify, the crimes and collaboration of the Ravna Gora people? In what way do they, compared to Goli Otok, become cross-bearing saints? In what way is the torture of one's own comrades more terrible than the Ravna Gora reprisals against Muslims and the cruel slaughter of people, often only accused of being communists or communist sympathizers in Serbia? By what yardstick is Josip Broz Tito a "monster", and Pavle Đurišić a figure almost worthy of canonization?
How does the end of the metropolitan's sermon fit into all of this, in which he reveals that his father married a partisan named Milićević, of whom "one Milićević" brought two underage Ostojićs, apparently convinced that retreating with the Ustasha army was an act of Serbian patriotism, "returned from the Built Bridge" and that therefore in him, Metropolitan Metodije, "both sides that fought against the fascists were united"?
How about "both sides", if the other was a "dark plague" to such an extent that it could have served as an excuse for cooperation with the Italian and German occupiers, Ljotić's men, Nedić's men, the Ustashas, the SS Handžar Division and the Albanian Ballistas? Of course, there is no answer and there cannot be one.
The case of Metropolitan Methodius' speech is not just a simple oversight or personal attitude, but a serious symptom of a deeply disturbing phenomenon – a combination of complete ideological stratification and schizophrenic splitting of consciousness, as well as a reckless abuse of spiritual authority. The logical inconsistency that emanates from the metropolitan's claims is so obvious that even an elementary school child, let alone a theologian, could spot it, let alone a man standing at the head of an ancient diocese.
Therefore, it is high time to stop tolerating the practice in which the church robe becomes armor against criticism, and the insignia of spiritual authority a legitimation for uttering the greatest nonsense. The truth, no matter how unpleasant it may be, must be greater than anyone's robe or Ahmadiyya. Otherwise, not only historical science will suffer, but - in the first place - faith itself, which in its essence must be devoid of politicking, party intrigues and passionate falsifications. Indeed, with what moral integrity is one criticizing the revisionism of "historians" close to the DPS who are trying to whitewash the biographies of Sekula Drljević, Savić Marković Štedimlija, or Krsto Zrnov-Popović, or to erase all the "unpleasant" parts of Montenegrin history, if one acts from identical positions?
If the Serbian Orthodox Church wants to present itself as a moral pillar of society, especially following the example of Saint Peter of Cetinje and his legacy of forgiveness and reconciliation, then it must abandon the practice in which its voice is synonymous with revisionist hallucination. Because, when lies begin to be preached in hagiographic form, then we cannot blame those who do not perceive the Church as an eschatological and eucharistic community, but as a mere ideological instrument of certain political circles. In this case, obviously those in Montenegro and beyond who are interested in strengthening the existing trench positions and, ultimately, the final disintegration of Montenegrin society into easily controlled micro-communities.
The author is a historian; he is the editor of the portal Žurnal.me
Bonus video:
