You are a raving lunatic Alban. I mean “All of you Serbs born with a dysfunctional brain“?

A proud Albanian living in the USA. Yet another one of the lost generation of emmigrants, cut off from their culture and homeland and compensating by becoming bigots and fanatics.

I know, and pity, your type. What I don’t do is bother talking to you.

“Shut the fuck up you son of a moster nation”.

Charming work there, Albi, you are really winning neutrals to your cause

The processes of instilling in Serbs feelings of victimization and of entitlement to
grandeur, and of their uniqueness, and of fears of various sorts of conspiracies
against them were not all orchestrated. Neither the Serbian Church’s “Appeal on
Behalf of the Serbian Residents of Kosovo and Their Holy Shrines” (of 1982) nor the SANU Memorandum (of 1986) was part of a strategy orchestrated by the political establishment; the former came on the initiative of some of the priests in the Church, while the latter was the result of the autonomous decision taken by the Academy at a time when the ruling party of Serbia (a branch of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia) was still holding to the line that “every nationalism is (potentially) dangerous.” But after Miloševiæ’s seizure of power in the Serbian party in late 1987, that party quickly took up the tasks dictated by that Memorandum and at that point, the continuation of these processes of ‘neuroticization’ or even ‘psychotici-zation’ of the Serbian public became a matter of official policy. Not only were the Serbs unique among the peoples of the planet, even constituting in some extra- spatial sense, their own planet, but they enjoyed the special favor of God. In talking of ‘heavenly Serbia’, the clerics of the Serbian Orthodox Church laid claim to divine sanction for the program of Serbian territorial expansionism and, in the pages of Pravoslavlje, offered historical arguments for Serbian annexation of portions of eastern Slavonia. Later, it would even be claimed that God had specifically bequeathed Bosnia to the Serbs.
Karadžiæ himself claimed to be doing God’s work and was, in turn, described by Dragan Nedeljkovi as “one of the heroes of this end of the twentieth century.”
But in spite of these changes to the national ego, which – as is well known –
came at a time of shrinking economic capacities and general economic crisis, the
collective ‘super-ego’ remained, as already mentioned, an obstacle even though, by early 1990, if not before, Miloševiæ had decided on war against Croatia and perhaps also other republics.
To convert an already fearful population into soldiers prepared to fight against their former neighbors and friends (often in a literal sense), they had to be released from moral constraints and infused with hatred for the target peoples. As osi noted in a widely read work of fiction, “[D]riven by hatred, all men will fight…; hatred is the force which gathers and unites all energies.”
Moral disengagement, as Albert Bandura, a widely respected expert on the subject, noted in a 1999 article, can be achieved through a combination of displacement of responsibility (with, in this case, the Miloševiæ government assuming moral responsibility for the war), diffusion of responsibility (so that harm can always be attributed to the agency of others or to peer pressure), distortion of the consequences (aptly represented by the Bosnian Serb newspaper Javnost’ s representation of the massacre at Srebrenica as the “cleansing of a blot on the map”), and, perhaps above all, dehumanization and demonization.
In Serbian war propaganda, as is well known, Croats were routinely described as fascistic and genocidal by nature, referred to as “Ustaše”, and accused of wanting to revive the NDH (a charge which was true of some Croats, to be sure, but not of the majority of Croats). In the eyes of Serb propagandists, all Bosnian Muslims were “Islamic fundamentalists” and all Albanians were “rapists” and secessionists. Demonization specifically makes it possible for perpetrators of atrocities to maintain a positive self-image even while victimizing innocent civilians – on the argument that “no one is innocent.”

Thus, paradoxically, Serb nationalists engaged in the war typically upheld two contradictory theses: that they themselves were innocent victims of Croats, Albanians, Bosnian Muslims, et al., and that all sides were guilty and no one innocent! Since they never uttered these sentences sequentially, the blatant absurdity of this belief system was never, as far as I am aware, exposed by the media of any nation. Even the demonization of Germany for its alleged responsibility in plotting the dismantlement of socialist Yugoslavia and for its alleged culpability in starting the war in the first place through its advocacy of the recognition of Slovenia and Croatia (after the outbreak of hostilities) played a useful role in Serbian war propaganda. As Voltaire later Serbian claim that the tensions between Croats and Croatian Serbs began only after the election of Franjo Tudjman to the Croatian presidency is therefore contrary to fact. once said, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
We know that the process of moral disengagement was still far from complete at
the time the war broke out (it was, in fact, never complete as such), because many of the JNA soldiers expressed confusion as to why they were suddenly fighting their fellow ‘Yugoslavs’, while many others went AWOL, even fleeing the country, rather than serve in the subsequent war against the Zagreb government. But several processes contributed to further stilling the stirrings of the Super-Ego.
First, as the violence continued, it became part of the daily routine, it became unsurprising and many people ceased to be as shocked and outraged as they were when the fighting first broke out.
Second, the role of some of the hierarchy of the Serbian Orthodox Church in sanctioning the violence first in Croatia and later in Bosnia-Herzegovina made a significant contribution toward moral desensitization. After all, if some of the official guardians of spirituality and morality have no qualms about supporting the war, why should ordinary Serbs worry about it? Moreover, insofar as the Church placed itself, thus, in alliance first with the Miloševi regime and then with Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžiæ, the classic syndrome of the agentic state came into play. Experiments conducted by S. Milgram more than 30 years ago demonstrated that the desire of individuals to obey and please authorities is often sufficient to override moral reservations, even in the absence of any feelings of having been victimized by those on whom the experimental subject was prepared to inflict harm.
In the agentic state, individuals do not abandon their moral principles. Rather, they engage in moral rationalization, thereby convincing themselves that their actions are, in spite of appearances to the contrary, consistent with their core moral standards.
Other processes used to dull the moral sense include(d) the use of euphemistic
language (in which mass murder and the forcible expulsion of non-Serbs were
prettified by the term ‘ethnic cleansing’), advantageous comparison (in which
Muslims and Croats were said to have behaved far worse than the Serbs: for example, Patriarch Pavle joined Karadžiæ in claiming that there had been no rape camps operated by Serbs and no systematic rapes carried out by Serbs, even while accusing Croats and Muslims of having done precisely those things), diffusion or displacement of responsibility, and instances of blaming the victim. The last mentioned tactic was employed not only in the obvious sense of claiming that, for example, Tudjman’s firing of Serbs from positions in the police justified an insurrection against Zagreb, but also in the more brazen sense of actually blaming the victims for the atrocities which they suffered. Thus, in Serbian propaganda, it was the Croats themselves who had rocketed Tudjman’s presidential palace in 1991, it was the Croats themselves who had laid siege to the port city of Dubrovnik and were shelling the Croatian seaside town of Šibenik, it was the Muslims themselves who had fired upon their own co-ethnics in the Pirkala marketplace in 1994, and it was the Muslims themselves who had carried out the massacre at Srebrenica with the help of German and American operatives.
The Serbs even had an explanation for the alleged, consistent idiocy of
their antagonists: they did these things in order to make the Serbs look bad.
These various methods of moral rationalization and disengagement had some
unintended side-effects.
The first was that the habituation to violence led to an
escalation of violence within the family, with husbands beating wives and fathers
beating children.
Second, moral disengagement made it impossible to return to
the behaviors and patterns of the pre-war days. As Jo-Ann Tsang explains, in an
article published in the Review of General Psychology, “…the commission of immoral behavior makes it more costly [in terms of self-image] to act morally in the future, increasing the likelihood of further evil.”
After all, to take pride in subscribing to an ethic of, let us say, non-violence, is virtually impossible for someone who has established a persona based on killing large numbers of “enemies of the nation.”
UNLEASHING THE LIBIDO
If modern warfare may be thought of as a libidinal state, then mobilizing people for war requires more than redesigning the national ego and stilling the super-ego. It also involves and requires an unleashing of the energies of the libido in the service of the national fantasy. As I have already noted, the process of unleashing the libido began simultaneously with the redesigning of the national ego, indeed was, from the beginning, an essential part of the Serb nationalist strategy of transforming the mood, values, expectations, hopes, ambitions, and thinking of ordinary Serbs.
Sometimes the libidinal character of Serbian war propaganda was implicit, for
example when Vuk Draškovic said of the Serbian Army, “This is an army with the soul of a girl, the behavior of a priest, and the heart of Obilic.”
At other times, sexuality was made explicit, whether through the use of highly attractive young women dressed in uniform to beguile young men into associating war with sex or by explicitly advising young men that soldiers were sexually attractive to young women or through the sublimation of sexuality into the fetish of weapons, as in the refrain, “My companion is my rifle,…My bride is now my cartridge belt.”
But, as Freud knew, the libido embraces much more than just sexuality, and war
finds its libidinal character not just in sex, but in violence itself. Richard Morrock
notes how “in lynch mobs…[t]he killers do not look like people forced to take
unpleasant measures in order to protect their communities from criminals – their own rationalizations for their sadistic acts. Instead, they look like they are having a good time.”
The positive pleasure experienced in violence is reinforced by moral
inversion (in which the Serbs imagined themselves as “remnants of a slaughtered
people”, as Serbian writer Matija Beèkoviæ put it) and by the belittlement of one’s
antagonists. Again this results in paradox: if one’s enemies are threatening demons, how can they be fools? Or if they are fools, how can they be taken seriously as demons? But propaganda does not have to be consistent to be effective. On the contrary, by playing on contradictory themes, propaganda may actually be more effective than if it were entirely consistent.
Here the psychiatrists of both Belgrade and Zagreb played their part in creating
belittling national stereotypes. Zagreb psychiatrists E. Klein and M. Jakovljevi both portrayed Serbs as suffering from a collective inferiority complex, with the latter attributing patterns of “pathological possessiveness” to the Serbs as a nation. Belgrade psychiatrist J. Maric, for his part, found (in a work published in 1998) that Serbs were well-meaning and pacifist and had “never resorted to bad-mouthing or vilifying other peoples,” while Croats were allegedly “egoistic” and were “not keen on giving themselves to other human beings” having been “enslaved by objects” (unlike the Serbs).
Jovan Raškovic, at one time professor of psychiatry at the University
of Belgrade and the later co-founder of the Serbian Democratic Party in Croatia,
famously discovered that Croats were, as a people, suffering from a castration
complex, living in fear that “something terrible” was going to happen to them and
irrationally “afraid of being deceived.” Judging that Serbs had “aggressive oedipal traits,” Raškoviæ concluded that “people who have a castration type of personality structure are obsessed by a fear of those who have aggressive oedipal traits.”
But belittlement need not be confined to national groups, as proven by the
Serbian propaganda machine’s charge that Tudjman had tried to kill himself “in
order to spite Serbia.” Of course, this portrayed Tudjman simultaneously as self-
destructive and as a bungler unable even to kill himself; in combination, this
suggested that Tudjman was an unworthy adversary. Moreover, it is well known
that in rape situations, it is common for the rapist to insult and disparage his victim, thereby communicating to her that she “deserved” to be raped.
Nationalism does not have to assume a libidinal form, perhaps not even in war.
But in order to conduct an offensive war it is a huge advantage if those engaged in
it, first, actively, even passionately, deny the fact of the war’s being offensive, and
second, succumb to a libidinal fever in which the murder of one’s adversaries
becomes both pleasurable and the object of cult worship. One need only think of
the cult which grew up around Serbian war “hero” Željko Ražnjatoviæ ‘Arkan’ to see the point. And yet, this embrace of Thanatos and Libido – death instinct and life instinct – at one and the same time banishes the nation to a “spectral” world
occupying the twilight between life and death. Indeed, in the species of “eroticism”, if that is the word, represented by a well-known (to Serbs) poem by Desanka Maksimoviæ,
Love exists only if it is deprived of touch, only in some sentimental, trashy
suffering, from a distance, which is, however, the condition of [the] possibility of
love, since [the] very closeness, every touch, deadens love; the body is the death of
the life of love, the other is loved only as apparition, only as the spectre that is held at a distance: “Oh no, do not approach, I want from [a] distance to love and kiss these two eyes of yours”; in fact, we are not bodies at all, we are not alive either, we are somehow un-dead (to say nothing about the fact that the dead themselves can also approach us)…[O]ur bodies are not alive, or [rather], they are living graves; they are not in any way a source of enjoyment, and that is why the love relation should be spectral, un-dead.

As Ivan Olovi has recounted in a brilliant work first published in 1997, the Serbian national political myth – which is to say, the set of propositions in wide circulation in Serbia – holds that Serbia is the oldest nation in the world, the nation from which all other nations developed, so that, as Relja Novakovi has urged, the peoples inhabiting states “from Great Britain to India” may ultimately trace their national origin back to the Serbian Urvolk.
Serbs were wont to boast about their martial prowess and about their fierceness in battle,but also claimed some special advantage in the sexual realm as well. As Danilo Kiš put it, in a gloss on a poem written by Jan Kollár,

“[O]ther peoples have good fortune, tradition, erudition, history, ratio, but genitals are ours alone.”

And hence, the Serbian Insurrectionary War (1991—95) offered the prospect of the dawn of a new age for all of Europe, if not for the entire world. Serbia, compared variously (in the pages of Pravoslavlje and Književne novine ) to Job, to the Jewish people, even to Christ himself, offered itself as the new savior. And just as Christ had to die on the cross, in order to rise again after three days, to claim his place in the Kingdom of Heaven, so too Serbia, whose tsar, Lazar, had renounced the earthly kingdom for a heavenly one in 1389, had to wait for six centuries before rising again, to claim its earthly kingdom, earned through long suffering. This grandiose redesign of the national ego was, at the same time, libidinal in nature in that it began the process of unleashing the energies of the libido and bringing about the conquest of the national ego by the nationalist libido. The claim that “All Serbs should live in one state” was, moreover, not universalizable, because it was premised on the notion that lands with mixed populations (Serbs and non-Serbs) should be assigned to the Serbian national state rather than to the national state of one or another non-Serb nation. This claim was, thus, a claim to unique entitlement, a claim which could be
registered only in the realm of the libido.
As the national myth gained in strength, Serbian society became convinced of
its unique role in history, its special suffering, and its entitlement to realize “heavenly Serbia” on earth. As Lerner noted in 1987, this entitlement “…is experienced affectively and motivationally as an imperative, a sense of requiredness between the actor’s perceived outcomes and the person’s attributes or acts.”
Or, to put it another way, as the 1980s wore on, Serbia was reaching the point that Raskolnikov reached in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment as he reflected on whether he occupied some unique niche in the moral universe. But for Serbia, as for Raskolnikov, there were moral reservations to the fateful breach of the moral order – expressed by the Serbian students who bravely marched on the streets of Belgrade on 9 March 1991 or by the anti-war protestors led by Patriarch Pavle on 14 June 1992, who demanded that Miloševiæ resign. But these reservations, though significant, did not carry the day. The Super-Ego would be stilled.

“Particularly poisonous was Vasilije Kresti’s 1986 article, “On the Origin of the
Genocide of Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia”, which argued that the “genocide against the Serbs in [Ustaša] Croatia is a specific phenomenon in our [Serbian] centuries-old common life with the Croats. The protracted development of the genocidal idea in certain centers of Croatian society…[which] did not necessarily have some narrow – but rather a broad – base, took deep roots in the consciousness of many generations [of Croats].” ”

Prof. Krestic is one of the most prominent Serbian historians of the 2nd half of the XX century, and surely one of the greatest authorities on Serbo-Croat relations. You can like him or not, but the man has done his scientific researches. His books are stuffed with evidence to every claim he made. More sadly, the RESULTS of the Croat Nazi genocide are even more obvious. Or you have a more common problem of DENYING the Ustasha genocide? You know, there are some folks who are into that stuff and they are usually called the Holocaust deniers. The fact that the Ustasha campaign campaign of mass SLAUGHTER of Serbs, Jews and Roma was actually the FIRST chapter of Nazi “final solution” is not some Serbian fringe cartoon, but the phenomenon studied and explained by such Holocaust experts as the late Dr. Raul Hilberg and Dr. Jonathan Steinberg, among others. Moreover, Dr. Krestic has NEVER accused the WHOLE Croatian people, as you imply. In fact, if you check out his “History of the Serbs in Croatia and Slavonia 1848-1918″ (available in English, but not-easy-to-find) or “Through genocide to Greater Croatia” (available in English, over at the US Serbian Unity Congress website), you won’t miss his effort to EMPHASIZE any progressive strain in Croatian politics related to Serbs. Even at the expense of the historical odds, ie. he insisted on the importance of pro-Yugoslav and more democratic wings in the Croatian politics of the XIXth century, despite the saddening fact that the most rabid, disgustingly anti-Serbian, racist, proto-fascist ideology dominated through the most part of it. I’m talking about Ante Starcevic and his lunatic crowd, anti-Serbian pogroms of Zagreb and elsewhere in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s and the fact that this unholy tradition of Croatian politics sinisterly inspired the (Hitler/Musolini/Horthy-backed) Ustasha movement of 1930’s and the monster Ante Pavelic himself. The result is known. Its name is Jasenovac. Or Jadovno. Or Jastrebarsko. And at lkeast a SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND of Serbian victims, along with the TENS OF THOUSANDS of Jews and Roma. Women, children, elderly people… Or the hundreds of unmarked mass graves of Bosnian, Herzegovinian and Lika Serbs, massacred in the manner so brutal that it ashamed even the Ustasha masters, the Nazis.

Shame on you for denying the Balkan Holocaust.

I just wandered onto Michael Totten’s blog and this response. Since it is next to impossible to reply to all the Mr. Totten’s outrageously racist views and holier-than-thou-ignorant-Serbs presumptions expressed there (and, unfortunately, here, some of them), I’ll try to address an especially ugly label, the anti-Semitic one. Which you seem to be supporting, sadly.

Now, this:

“It is true that the lunatic fringe and the Radical Party peddle absurd anti-Semitic and anti-American conspiracy theories”

is a shameful lie. And you know it. I mean, c’mon. “Radicals peddle the anti-Semitic garbage”. When and where? I might not be particularly delighted with the Radicals (or any other of Serbia’s conservative/patriotic organizations) for a whole bulk of reasons, but discrediting any of them in such a dishonest manner is simply a dastardly little prank. The truth is (as can be checked easily in ANY of their views expressed on the subject) that the Radicals (as well as Kostunica’s DSS, or any of the smaller nationalist NGOs, such as “1389″, or “Dveri”, “Miletic” et al) STRONGLY OPPOSED AND CONDEMNED any attempt made by a lunatic fringe (mostly, US-style, be they self-loathing ‘white nationalists’ or conspiracy freaks) to inject the anti-Semitic crap into the mainstream Serbian ideology.

Having said all that, it is almost too obvious that the conspiracy fringe and the Sorosite NGO and media scene act almost in a brotherly harmony on that attempt. There is no more than a handful of lunatics, present almost entirely on the Internet and boycotted by ANY self-respecting Serbian organization or individual, and there are TV B92 and Soros/NED-funded NGOs (along with Mr. David’s party, LDP) to popularize their abominations by constantly reporting about their shameful activities. And that is the whole truth. And you know it, if you live in Serbia. And I can offer the tons of stuff to support my claims, and I’m asking you to back up yours with one (ONE!) relevant source. If there is such, please, share it with me. So I can join the ranks of fighting fascist crap peddled and expressed by the Radicals. If not, please, stop slandering them with such heavy accusations. See, it’s a very emotional question to us Serbs. Serbs and Jews (along with Roma population) suffered TOGETHER in the the most brutal genocide during the WW2 committed by German, Croat, Hungarian and Albanian Nazi units who occupied our country.

And yes, like it or not, the Serbian nationalism of the 1990’s variety is the ONLY Balkan nationalism COMPLETELY founded on the grounds of “1941, never again” sentiment. Esp. among the Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia. While the neighboring groups had their ways in REVIVING the old traits of waving the fascist flags their fathers used to fight under. Esp. in Croatia, whose ruling party, the HDZ, seized the power in 1990 with the OPENLY Nazi Ustasha agenda, and an outrightly stated anti-Serbianist and anti-Semitic sentiment. Not to mention the current Western darlings, Kosoovo Albanians, who name their “army” units with the SS-Skanderbeg names and open the bizzare restaurants designed in Hitlerite fashion. Or de-Serbicized Sarajevo, where one can buy the “heroic” DVDs of the “brave” mujahedeen mutilating the captured Serbs, along with Nazi SS-Hanjar paraphernalia being sold on every downtown corner.