THE RADICALS' PRANKS AND SKYLARKING WITH USTASHI: ORGANIZED WASTE OF TIME

By Teofil Pancic

Though Ante Pavelic has been pickling in Hell many a long day, the supporters of his criminal soldiership are still mushrooming. The matter is by itself strange enough, actually weird and demonic. But what's even more incredible than a genocidal Phalange's posthumous "offspring" is the fact these new Ustashi are mostly recruited - in Serbia. Out of all places in the world! The spooky Pavelic certainly perceives this fact as a part of his eternal punishment, a cynical spice to his hellish doom and gloom.

If the first paragraph is for you nothing but a morbid joke of mysterious cause and sense, you are probably not in the swing of things over here. Namely, judging by the statistics the Serbian Radical Party and its enlightened, kind-hearted, sweet-looking and honey-tongued Tomislav Nikolic meticulously keep, there must be more "Ustashi" in today's Serbia than in Croatia, the source of that cannibalistic movement. How much this Ustashi phenomenon has snowballed in Serbia is best mirrored in the fact that even her President, as big as life, is a Ustashi. At least according to Tomislav Nikolic's piercing eye and sophisticated mind - if he, by chance, tracks down the latter.

Of course, all and sundry are now raising a great hue and cry about the "scandalous" statement made by the Radical's leading brigand in the Motherland. However, his statement is far from being a spontaneous Mental Incident - the nervous Radicals are so prone to - but a segment of a larger "offensive" to be taken responsibly and seriously, i.e. in a radically different manner than the one characteristic of the leading clans of domestic "political analysts" known for their leniency (a nicer term for benevolence) for everything to the right of common sense and elementary human decency. To put it simply, the Radicals' discourse and doings these weeks convincingly and consistently deny the irresponsible and superfluous babbling of all those "objective observers" intent, all of a sudden, to prove that, with Seselj in The Hague, the Radicals have turned into "a normal, democratic party," almost a cool hand on a fevered brow. Well, the moment you look at, let alone listen to the above-mentioned Nikolic, the composed Aleksandar Vucic, the wise Milorad Mircic and the sophisticated Gordana Pop-Lazic you must be aware that those people have undergone catharsis (with banzai cry "I Catharzan, you Jane!") and now, purified as they are, rightfully expect to take over the reins of power to the joy of all Serbs and the neighboring world. Joke apart. In this trivial reality of ours, this is about an organization with dangerous intentions and fatal ideas, the people ready to set on fire everything standing on their way to the place of crime, i.e. return to power.

The statements such as those labeling Tadic "a Ustashi" and Djindjic "a mafioso" are just a symptom of something by far more serious. For instance, take a look at the Radical leadership's attitude towards the incumbent government and the protracted "Hague problem." Nikolic keeps messaging Ratko Mladic - and other fugitives for that matter - to commit suicide "if they come to arrest" him. To my understanding of justice and law, a statement as such is a crime. But, nobody is any the worse for it in this Wonderland of Serbia. Let alone the "Christian" aspect of that appeal.Then the Radicals organize a pseudo freedom-loving get-together at the Republic Square, wherefrom they message that it is everyone's "patriotic duty" to prevent Mladic's arrest and transfer to The Hague at all costs. This way or another, urging citizens to deliberately and systematically obstruct law also stands for a rather serious crime. The bottom line here is that the Radicals behave like those insolent, fire-eating rogues in the infamous "Balkan pub" wherein the light is turned off when someone shoots at a bulb (and then we have a specific form of National Merrymaking), while the authorities just stand and look at that riotous party, voiceless and motionless like a frog "fascinated" by a snake. Unless they wake up, they'll probably meet the same end - like that frog. Anyway, at least one half of the authorities would only be glad to politically smooch with the Radicals but (still) dare not, anxious about "what the world would say" (the world that mostly provides for them, rather than brotherly Libya, Cuba, North Korea, Belorussia, plus the confined brother Saddam H.). But who knows - if the things in our dear Motherland radicalize a bit more, this longstanding flirt might turn into a political romance that will be kept alive for 20 long years, as the picturesque-Alan-Ford-character Obren Joximovic put it.

And now we come to Serbia's crucial problem: the Radicals are that strong just because the rest are (more or less) that weak, anemic, listless and cowardly, because they lack ideas and vision, because they are unconvincing, because they um and ah whenever answering "tricky questions," because they neither have the strength nor consistent, responsible and nonconformist intellect that would take Serbia out of the limbo and the post-Djindjic standstill in which she has been living from hand to mouth for too long. What the Radicals have been telling is a worthless Pile of Nothing but that makes no difference since they clearly message their semiliterate "target group" we-mean-what-we-say. On the other hand, the feeble "democratic Serbia" is mostly afraid of her own shadow and even more afraid to freely use her brains, since the latter might lead her to embarrassing conclusions and thus jeopardize supra-patriotic taboos of sorts her mainstream doesn't know how, cannot and/or would not get rid of. This is how the Radicals are permanently served match points, for the game is played in their field and by their rules. The years wasted on Mladic & Co. and the empty-worded "patriotic" mumbo jumbo about Kosovo and Montenegro make no policy at all, let alone democratic policy, on the contrary. They reflect a trivial, cowardly escape from policymaking, responsibility and statesmanly strategy.

This is why the Radicals are that dangerous: they leisurely exploit everything the unsightly "democratic elite" has served them on a plate. And that's why the only "remedy" against them is to build up the Serbian society's immune system. This will be the exam for the present "democratic elites" - they will either pass it and emerge from it stronger and mature, or will definitely fail and probably take down with them the entire Serbian society by thrusting it into a another vicious circle of violence, hatred, dangerous illusions and other forms of organized waste of time.