| ** SPECIAL WORLD WAR III EDITION ** | Melbourne, Australia |
SCUM AT THE TOP | 2 April 1999 |
| Editor: Harold Hark | Volume 1 Number 7 |
The twentieth century began with senseless, random killings by angry Serbs, which gave us WW I, which gave us WW II, which gave us modern Yugoslavia, which has given us senseless, random killings by angry Serbs, which could give us WW III. THREE TAKES ON THE BALKAN DILEMMA
The Real Butcher Of The Balkans Is Slivovitz Why is Slobodan Milosevic the Butcher of the Balkans? The answer is simple: Milosevic drinks Slivovitz. (All that Scotch is only for show.) Have you ever imbibed this potent plum brandy? Gort Slypesunder has. Once upon a time, he set out on a hitchhiking journey from London to Mother India. One approaching twilight he found himself on the outskirts of post-Tito, pre-Slobodan Belgrade. As the passing parade of lorries and Ladas had petered out to the odd donkey-driven cart, he decided to look for sustenance in a rather large concrete bunker nearby, which was in fact a typical Yugoslavian roadside bar. Inside, a handful of Balkan happy chappies welcomed him with (he later realised) advanced Slivovitzian cheer. After a few minutes of incomprehensible chat, the snappy fellows chipped in to buy round after round of the dreaded schnapps for the affable foreigner. Your correspondent had never heard of Slivovitz before, but with a long haul ahead, he felt a little fortification might serve him well. As glass after glass of the clear, burning liquid sailed down his alarmed yet easily seduced throat, he found himself joining them in various rousing anthems of national glory in the heretofore unknown language. The glee of the bibulants, had he been in any condition to observe, mounted with each of his heroic draining of the tiny tulips of fire. When finally he bade them farewell, they broke into a thunderous applause, which flattered his inflated ego and warmed his bloodyidiot bloodstream. Outside, with the night almost upon him, he warbled gaily by the side of the traffic-less road, his thumb wagging beneath a sputtering arc lamp in rhythm to his wobbling head. Suddenly--an instance of Pompeiian suddenness, actually--his euphoria became embalmed. With a lopsided smile still on his face, his body stiffened into a rigid plank. Slowly, ever so slowly, the plank pitched forward and crashed, unbendingly, onto the soft earth. In the morning, he repaired to a hospital in Belgrade with a broken nose full of dirt. That day, with nose bandaged securely, he passed through the unearthly beauty of Kosovo's valleys and into Macedonia. In Skopje, he lunched on the local bread, upon which he promptly chipped a tooth. Arriving in Greece by nightfall, he stopped at a typical Greek roadside bar where he proceeded to drink Ouzo to kill the multiple areas of pain in his face. He stayed in Thessaloniki for the next two days, nursing a terminal hangover, his broken nose, and the throbbing tooth. He resolved that if he ever got to India (where he remained in a dysentery-induced religious ecstasy for several months), he would return home by air. The moral of this story is that anyone foolish enough to have a second go at Slivovitz should be permanently confined to his village and never be allowed to enter the corridors of power. Tribalism Begets False Warriors The answer to the civilised world's burning question, What is it with the Serbs? can be found in Belgrade's number one cultural attraction, its Military Museum. There we find a detailed inventory of several centuries of feisty defeats cloaked in chest-pounding illusions of greatness. It all began with a bloke named Lazar who lost a 14th century battle with the Turks but won eternal worship from subsequent generations who have refused to accept the loss; an admirable quality in a footy team, but unfortunate on the field of human relations. From Lazar's time to the present, the Serbs have been a pugnacious tribe of wooden-spooners ready to commit medieval mayhem on anyone who looks cross-eyed at them. They are the equivalent of a muscular teenager with a persecution complex aggravated by heavy confidence problems. Every defeat in battle has been interpreted as a call to fight on until glorious victory over real or perceived enemies should some day be attained. The Nazis were terrified of them; unfortunately, so are their neighbours. This quasi-religious hubris is not unique. Tribal nations from time immemorial have laid claim to superiority over the tribe across the border. In times of war, they set about a course of righteous genocide, slaying all who beg to differ. In times of peace, the warrior class within these tribes, for whom aggression is like oxygen, restively foment anger and hatred--at first legislative, then military--until their beloved oppression and slaughter can once again spray the hills and valleys with enemy blood. Militant Serbs, incited to murderous nationalism by the current regime in Belgrade, regard the Kosovars (and the Croats and the Bosnians) in the same way orthodox Jews, emboldened by the Netanyahu government, regard the Palestinians: as trespassers on their holy land, their piece of dirt on the planet, itself a mere speck in the mind-boggling Universe. The differences in punitive applications by these religio-nationalistic squattocracies are at best a matter of sophistication, and are based on hearsay and half-truths derived from antiquated myth and legend. The efficacy of NATO air strikes are moot. The United States seems to have gone into this action without a Plan B. They insist that ground forces are not an option, when in reality, hundreds of thousands of ground troops are the only option. And by the time those forces might effectively be deployed, Kosovo will be a wasteland. (Furthermore, how much credibility does America have when it trumpets moral superiority over Milosevic, while trying desperately to quash the extradition to Spain of General Pinochet!) US foreign policy is so riddled with stupidity and deceit that when they do the right thing, it is almost always for the wrong reasons. It needs to be said that while most Serbs and Jews are content to live peacefully with their historical nemeses, their leaders and the self-serving nationalistic rhetoric they spout have been allowed to flourish because the powers who could have stopped them have had vested interests or a failure of will, and because the rest of us have been too caught up in our own little lives to give a damn. Lament For The Brotherhood Of Man The hopeless situation in the Balkans brings to mind a couple of old sayings. The human race is its own worst enemy, and Property is theft. That is, the so-called brotherhood of man can never be attained as long as some of us believe others are inferior, and to prove it, set about planting flags on mounds of dirt to honour our sovereignty over them. In the face of eternity, we are fools revelling in the limitations of a pinprick consciousness so dimly watted that it can only shine on one or two concepts or events at a time. Those rare occasions of clarity, when the skin becomes transparent and the very real fragility of others is heart-wrenchingly apparent, are swallowed immediately by the muddied forgetfulness of day-to-day. Each of us is a grab bag of opinions and beliefs which inevitably imprison us, effectively turning us into convicts of our convictions, from which most of us never escape. When a few do manage to think things through enough to comprehend that what is truly at stake is not just the maintenance of our own gravity-bound happiness but the quest for universal well being, we are recognised as heroes. Weary Dunlop and Aung San Suu Kyi, come immediately to mind, but of course there are countless others. We forget ourselves continually. Our minds wander into a contact-less stasis for much of our lives. During those times, we are quite literally not at home. We suffer within an irresponsible solipsism, that narrow corridor we run up and down in for a lifetime, a claustrophobic barrens which contains the narrow world view from which we shall not budge. Socially, we run with herds of the like-minded, shouting with them the righteousness of our causes, almost all of which eliminate compassion, the lone guarantor of a fruitful, expansive life. It could be said that humanity is divided into three camps. The awake: comprising no more than a handful among the billions of us; the wakening: those who to varying degrees are trying to shake the larval state of xenophobic unawareness; and the sleeping: those who are completely unaware that their petty ambitions do not reside at the centre of the universe. The unending struggle between consciousness and unconsciousness seems to be the ultimate definition of life on Earth. One wonders how it came to be this way. |
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