Written by: Tomislav Marković
Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić pardoned four thugs, party activists who broke a female student’s jaw in two places with a baseball bat. He also announced plans to pardon the woman who ran over the same student with a car, causing severe injuries, including a fractured skull and brain contusion.
The pardon of these four men led to the fall of Miloš Vučević’s government. Meanwhile, Vučić and Vučević declared the quartet heroes, defending them as innocent. The driver who ran over protesters is also deemed innocent, in stark contrast to the demonstrators themselves, who haven’t harmed even an ant, yet are branded criminals, terrorists, and Nazis by the regime’s leaders.
Radical heroism
In the upside-down world of the ruling progressives, it makes perfect sense to declare baseball bat-wielding thugs national heroes. This fits seamlessly into the heroic narrative that nationalist propagandists have cultivated over recent decades. Four potential killers, armed with baseball bats, beating a defenseless female student, weaker than each of them individually, this is the true face of radical-progressive heroism.
Earlier in the political careers of Vučić, Vučević, and their associates, similar men were hailed as heroes, only better armed and not content with merely beating helpless victims.
The typical hero of our nationalists is an armed soldier who shoots civilians, women, children, the elderly, stuffs them into refrigerated trucks, buries them in mass graves, then bulldozes their bones to cover up his “heroism.” Such radical heroism has always been hidden from the public because most of the world has little tolerance for wild heroes who torture and kill innocent, powerless people. For most, these acts are the worst crimes imaginable, but not for politicians who built their careers on mountains of corpses, nor for the ruling elite who prepared and justified these massacres.
Justifying and glorifying criminals
The pardon of party thugs caused an understandable public uproar. This is the first time the president used his power to free someone from prosecution, yet it followed an almost endless series of symbolic pardons of various criminals, their deeds, and the ideological programs behind their crimes. Vučić, the progressives, the radicals, the socialists, and the ruling intellectual, church, and other elites do nothing but normalize, justify, and glorify the worst criminals and gravest offenses.
The Serbian Progressive Party’s Main Board includes Veselin Šljivančanin, a convicted war criminal. The Socialist Party of Serbia has one, too, Nikola Šainović. Top state officials, led by former justice minister Nikola Selaković, even held a formal reception for Hague convict Vladimir Lazarević, with the minister proudly holding his coat. Various war criminals, after serving their sentences, have turned to writing books, mostly fake memoirs portraying themselves as innocent, national heroes, and defenders of the homeland.
Under the progressives, cultural institutions have become platforms promoting these anti-civilization narratives. Some convicted criminals, like Šljivančanin, tour cultural centers and libraries across Serbia on permanent promotional tours. Much of this glorification is funded by the state budget.
Walls of evil and distortion
SNS official Bratislav Petković promoted Milan Lukić’s book Confession of a Hague Prisoner at his “Modern Garage,” a role that earned him a nomination as the first culture minister under the progressive regime. The same book, by a notorious war criminal who burned people alive, shot civilians, and threw them into the Drina River, was also promoted at the parish house of the Church of Saint Sava in Vračar. This is no surprise, given that priests blessed the “Scorpions” paramilitary before massacres, Bishop Vasilije Kačavenda hailed Ratko Mladić as the liberator of Srebrenica in July 1995, and Metropolitan Amfilohije praised mass murderer Biljana Plavšić as a new Kosovo maiden, among others.
War criminals are major TV stars, strategically placed on national channels, dominating studios and poisoning audiences daily with hatred, chauvinism, and distortions of recent history. Serbian cities, towns, and villages are covered with murals, graffiti, stencils, and painted names of Ratko Mladić, hailed as a Serbian hero. Anyone daring to throw eggs at a fresco of a war criminal, like Aida Ćorović did, is arrested and prosecuted, while the state hires shady characters to guard these bloody shrines from citizens who want to remove the disgrace. Serbia is surrounded by walls of evil and distortion.
Mass pardons
The regime has pardoned all villains, all organizers and perpetrators of killings, those who led ethnic cleansings, civilian murders, genocide, body disposal by refrigerated trucks, burial in mass graves, opening of concentration camps, and other atrocities from the shameful ’90s. Also pardoned are the intellectuals behind the Greater Serbia program: all ideologists and propagandists, supporters of the “humane relocation” of populations, all writers and poets who wrote with others’ blood, all who prepared and blessed the mass slaughter of innocents.
Also pardoned are SANU and its Memorandum, Dobrica Ćosić and Matija Bećković, Gojko Đogo and Rajko Petrov Nogo, Milorad Ekmečić and Vasilije Krestić, Antonije Isaković and Brana Crnčević, Dragoš Kalajić and Momo Kapor, Milovan Vitezović and Milovan Danojlić, hundreds of paper tormentors who contributed to the grand project of slaughter without plowing. This is not only the doing of the ruling circles and cartels who’ve controlled Serbia for decades, but also various other parts of society. An independent media company finances TV series based on Dobrica Ćosić’s novels (which serve as surrogate historiography), with producers insisting the father of the nation was not a nationalist, despite countless blatantly chauvinistic quotes from his works.
The Greater Serbian ideology remains alive and well, no longer carried out with fire and sword, artillery and howitzers, snipers, and excavators for removing bodies, but through political and financial influence, mainly via the church and professional Serbs in the region. Šešelj and his crew built Greater Serbia; Aleksandar Vulin promotes the “Serbian world”, and supposed opposition figure Milo Lompar aims to implement Serbian integralism. Same mindset, different packaging.
The demon of absolute unity
This so-called ideology is just a thin veneer over raw barbarism, a thirst for violence and murder, hatred of everything different, including itself. Behind it lies the well-known spirit of absolute unity, about which Radomir Konstantinović wrote. This demon sees human personality and its supreme freedom not only as an enemy but as pure demonic evil, a hateful presence threatening the existence and apparent identity of a false subject that finds fulfillment only in power, authoritarianism, and violence.
Unity is always violent, simply because it conflicts with reality; people are different by nature. That’s why the spirit of unity, whether nationalist or any other form, always manifests as violence. Sometimes this violence is radical, warlike, aggressive, criminal, genocidal; other times, it’s milder, depending on circumstances, showing itself through breaking jaws, trampling protesters, or beating a municipal president. The essence is the same; only the forms differ according to the situation.
That makes Vučić’s pardon of party thugs and potential killers understandable and logical. When you declare a criminal ideology, its spiritual leaders and operatives as the norm, nothing else can be expected. Anyone wanting change must not only address the current regime’s misdeeds but also confront the past, primarily the war-crime legacy, to find the root of the problem.
Asking for a pardon
Current talks about pardons inevitably call to mind Desanka Maksimović’s famous poetry collection Asking for Pardon, where the poetess holds a lyrical dialogue with Dušan’s Code. It’s an interesting book: Desanka’s poetic strategies sometimes yield great poetry, other times miss the mark. The latter usually happens when the lyrical hero’s perspective aligns more with structures of power than with the humiliated, marginalized, and suffering, in whose name the poetess addresses the emperor as a symbol of authority.
If Aleksandar Vučić wrote poetry, he might compose his version of the plea for pardon, slightly different from the one we know. For example, like this:
I ask for a pardon
For party thugs, killers, and murderers
For self-proclaimed masters of life and death
For war criminals and mass graves
For famous generals unjustly imprisoned
Just because they killed women, children, and the elderly
Who falsely presented themselves as civilians
I ask for pardon for the executioners in the name of the nation
For snipers whose greatest challenge was shooting children
Because children are easier targets than adults
For corpse looters, house thieves, and white goods robbers
For clever men, intellectuals, and academics
For all death poets and national firebrands
Whose words inspired tyrants and bullies
For mass murderers and their artillery
For bullies who break girls’ jaws
For all who trample the living and the dead, by car or tank tread
For party bandits, thieves, and robbers
For crooks, mafiosi, criminals, thieves, and thieves
For all who loot and kill under the protection of the state and nation
And for the creators of the nationalist narrative
Without which we’d be just what we are
Ordinary murderers, scoundrels, cowards, failures, scoundrels, and thieves
Not respected politicians, academics, writers, generals, and priests.
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