Dobrica Cosic Former Serbian President “We lie to deceive ourselves, to console others; we lie for mercy, we lie to fight fear, to encourage ourselves, to hide our and somebody else’s misery. We lie for love and honesty. We lie because of freedom. Lying ie is the trait of our patriotism and the proof of our innate smartness. We lie creatively, imaginatively, inventively.”
Six pivotal themes in Serbian propaganda are
1. Victimization, in which Serbs were constructed as collective victims first of the NDH, then of Tito’s Yugoslavia, and more specifically of Croats, Albanians, Bosnians, and other non-Serbs.
2. Dehumanization of designated ‘others’, in which Croats were depicted as ‘genocidal’ and as ‘Ustaše’, Bosnians were portrayed as ‘fanatical fundamentalists’, and Albanians were represented as not fully human. These processes of dehumanization effectively removed these designated ‘others’ from the moral field, sanctifying their murder or expulsion.
3. Belittlement, in which Serbia’s enemies were represented as
beneath contempt.
4. Conspiracy, in which Croats, Slovenes, Albanians, the Vatican,
Germany, Austria, and sometimes also the Bosnians as well as the U.S. and other foreign states, were seen as united in a conspiracy to break up the SFRY and hurt Serbia. In this way, the Belgrade regime’s obstinate disregard for the fundamental standards of international law was dressed up as heroic defiance of an anti-Serb conspiracy.
5. Entitlement, in which the Serbs were constructed as ‘entitled’ to create a Greater
Serbian state to which parts of Croatia and Bosnia would be attached, under the motto,’ All Serbs should live in one state.’
6. Superhuman powers and divine sanction. The Serbs were told that they were, in some sense, “super”. They were the best fighters on the planet, they could stand up to the entire world, and they were sanctioned by God himself, because of Tsar Lazar and the fact that Lazar had chosen the heavenly kingdom. Moreover, since Lazar had chosen the heavenly kingdom, the Serbs, encouraged to view themselves as Lazar’s heirs, were entitled to the earthly kingdom which Lazar had repudiated, as their patrimony.
Serbian society began to stray down the path to war more or less unwittingly.
Already in the years 1981—86, long before the other republics experienced anything
like a ‘national awakening’, Serbia (and here one may include Kosovo too) was
already sliding into a syndrome in which myths, threats, the allure of victory, and
belligerent rhetoric filled the public discourse, giving Serbs a sense of common
destiny but also separating them, psychologically, from the other peoples of socialist
Yugoslavia. That this was an unhealthy state of collective mind is clear from the
prominence of the themes of victimization, conspiracy, national entitlement, and
divine sanction of the Serbian national project, as well as from the insistent campaigns of dehumanization, demonization, and belittlement of Croats, Bosnian Muslims, and Albanians, as well as other peoples and states, which began at this time. This syndrome, in an individual, would be considered psychotic; to the extent that it permeated much of Serbian society, perhaps especially in the countryside, one may speak of Serbia having been sucked into a kind of collective psychosis. And to the extent that Serbian war propaganda aimed at reinforcing and stimulating this state of mind, we may say that it aimed at inculcating and reinforcing neurotic and
psychotic syndromes in Serbian society. This psychosis had its cultic saints – portraitsof Miloševiæ and Chetnik leader Draža Mihailoviæ were often displayed alongside those of saints canonized by the Church – had its bards (such as Simonida Stankoviæ and Ceca Ražnjatoviæ), and even had its official music – “turbo-folk”, a pop mixtureof folk-ethnic style with a rhythmic pounding beat. Moreover, this psychosis could even transport those infected to a state of consciousness which they mistook for a better world. Miloševi, for example, arriving dramatically at Kosovo polje in a helicopter on 28 June 1989, told those gathered for the six hundredth anniversary of Serbia’s mythic confrontation with its national destiny, that in that
the – century battle, Serbia had defended not just herself but all of European culture and civilization. Fine oratory might even be called the elixir of national psychosis.
