Progress Made under the Pressure from Realities

The taste of bread

By Snežana Čongradin

You can’t have it both ways: kill several hundreds of thousands of people, literally, because you did nothing to prevent the killing (no matter how old you were or felt about it) and then, twenty years later, want to live and work as normal, ask for money and make it, want your society to be modern, progressive and sophisticated, want to criticize regressive trends, come up with new agendas and deal with people’s everyday lives. You simply can’t have it both ways because you are a monster.

You can easily realize what this is all about, and you do, but you still live you normal life, you work, have fun, have family, make friends with people close to you, try to look nice and be healthy, have an interesting life, make people love and appreciate you, help others…But you can’t have it both ways because you are a citizen of Serbia – a monster citizen.

True, were it not for you someone else would be the biggest monster – but his monstrosity would not be as monstrous as yours is now having committed the most monstrous crimes in Europe since WWII. This is what definitely and, therefore, solely defines you. Not confined to the experience of war crimes, direct or indirect, monstrosity of your being grows day in day out as years go by. Can you imagine how bigger monster you are now in the company of millions of monster than you were, say, ten years ago? Much bigger. And regardless of your age. No need to remind you of that, not even of the fact that you could have inherited it from older generations.

You need not be too compassionate, clever and good to pull up: to stop going with the tide and complying with the arbitrary interpretations of the wartime experience. In a word, you should seek normalcy: the only attitude towards the world one should take. The biggest catastrophe is before your eyes although the cries of the dead are no longer. And yet, you continue killing, you continue destroying by denying developments in the past, their consequences and the scars they left on the social tissue. No wonder, therefore, that regression in all spheres of the society is so immanent.

The present-day political, cultural and educational circumstances correspond to their root causes, twenty years back when the crime was everyday experience. Hence it’s not true the sins of the fathers are not visiting enough upon the society that committed genocide and most brutal crimes in the recent history of Europe. For living in a state with the war crimes record is a punishment enough. This fact determines all levels of social life: from the everyday of common folks, through culture to high politics. The war crimes pattern marks education, culture, some artistic forms, sports, entertainment – it even marks table manners and parenting.

War crimes are imbedded in social tissue. War criminals are now in power the same as their accomplices – those who fell from power but are after seizing it again. Moreover, war criminals are all those whom the tragedy of the war have not made miserable and deeply depressed for one and single day.

Under such circumstance any protest or action not staged against war crimes is an insult to humanity. The worst is to ignore the “outcomes” of war crimes everywhere around us. Such attitude towards the realities makes it possible for war criminals and their accomplices to resume power. And once they occupy social realities and institutions they also take over the taste of bread.

Even before they were born many children became war criminals, predestined to live as them. Like in any natural and logical process.