The Same Old Story

Written by: Aleksandra Bosnić Đurić

It’s the same old story. A story of evil traveling through time. Of the macabre continuity of inciting violence. Of bloodshed that’s allowed – permitted. Of those who fuel the mindless dehumanization of others, anyone different, dissenting, or simply not the same. That dehumanization lies at the core of every justification for killing and extermination.

And then come the lies: that nothing happened the way it did, that what we see isn’t real, that nothing matters – not an honest reckoning with the past, nor a clear-eyed view of the present. Nothing matters, so long as the fate and lives of others are determined by the authors of false, because bloody histories. By the writers of bad books, for whom war and mass executions came more easily than intellectual or moral responsibility.

That’s why there’s no room for surprise, no matter how painful each new cycle of violence, torture, and suffering is for those living through it in real time. It was far too naïve, careless, and absurd to believe that the architects, would-be enforcers, and ideological cheerleaders of a "Unified Serbia" – those tireless warmongers lost without the profits that pseudo-patriotism always brings, allergic even to the idea of peace, which demands a functioning system, democratic norms, and the rule of law – would ever stop.

This uniquely destructive strain was never going to let go of its dream of eternal expansion and unending rule, its mass hypnosis, its constant unmooring of the public mind. And once again, it has succeeded through a politically engineered hallucination called the "Serbian World."

And so, the lucrative dream of Serbian unity, whatever name it takes, depending on the time and context, has once more returned as part of our collective nightmare. Effortlessly, almost by muscle memory – because experience breeds routine – they’ve reoccupied the cultural and political space of Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, some twenty years later.

This ideological bestiary is back.

There’s no point in being surprised. The early warning signs were missed. And recognition, when it comes, will come the hard way. It’ll come in front of police lines, beating and arresting students, activists, professors, doctors, and pensioners in Serbia. It’ll come in front of riot squads defending, with tear gas and batons, the award-winning writers and public promoters of the "Serbian World" in Montenegro.

Two countries, one repressive heart – always repeating, tirelessly: if you won’t listen to reason, we’ll use force.

Back in April 1991, at the first session of the Belgrade Circle, Radomir Konstantinović warned of just how predictable this violence was:

“We live under a nationalist totalitarianism, growing more bloodthirsty by the day. Kupres is soaked in blood; Sarajevo is drowning in fear. Did we think this wouldn't happen? Three years earlier, in March 1989, during a conversation in Sarajevo marking twenty years since 'The Philosophy of Parochialism', I said: ‘Make no mistake – our lives are at stake’.

This violence is predictable because violence is embedded, like nationalism. Nationalism, by demanding absolute unity and a lack of contradiction, is doomed to clash with reality, which is, of course, full of contradiction. It is condemned to violence”.

Konstantinović also warned that totalitarianism is an infection – violence as a method, as a goal, as the universal answer. Not just toward others, but toward oneself. This totalizing violence overtakes and distorts everything it touches, twisting it into monstrosity.

And what he foresaw in the 1990s came true. The monstrous became the new normal. Under the weight of nationalist totalitarian violence, we gradually began to accept the unacceptable – “the monstrous as natural.”

What tragically links two dates – July 11, 2025, marked by the United Nations as the International Day of Remembrance for the Genocide in Srebrenica, and that dark collapse into civilizational monstrosity on July 11, 1995 – is the unspoken message:

Your hands are still bloody.
Your thoughts are still poisonous.
Your deeds are still deceitful.
Your humanity is still broken.

One thing, however, is certain – history will remember you.

The way it always remembers those who tried to annihilate human dignity – it never forgets them.