Our False Moralists

At the very beginning of the war in 1992, and all the way until the middle of the first winter of the war, a strange character operated on Pale television, which people in besieged Sarajevo, equating it with the newly founded agency, called "srna" (watched on "srna", published by "srna", Đogo on "srna"). His task was to write and sing Serbian patriotic songs and thus counter the authors in the besieged city, from Dino Merlin and Tifa, to Kemal Monteno (just two of his would make you explode), to Alen Mustafić, who re-recorded "Čavoglave". Anyway, this artist, in full combat gear, with the uniform and straps of the former JNA, was an indispensable factor in boosting the morale of all Serbs, and especially the Serbian army, which at that time, on the approaches to Sarajevo, was facing a formidable military force, armed mostly with pistols and M 48 rifles, better known as "tandžara", with only a few Kalashnikovs, bought privately, and Hecklers in the hands of reserve police officers. This creator was in his prime, he had as many as 18 words and two and a half musical notes, so his most famous work, which was full of metaphors and bravura stylistic figures, sounded something like this:

I look at this flag, I look at it waving,
I won't give up this sky, I won't give it to anyone.
Hey, Serbian Bosnia, fear for you is being fought,
Hey Serbian Bosnia, blood is being shed for you. (Let no one be surprised, at that time Karadžić's political project was called "Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina".)

This obscure "singer-songwriter", in addition to the astonishing poverty of words and tones, had no vocal abilities, and he performed each song with an affected facial expression, such as could probably be seen in poorly performed tragedies of provincial amateur theaters, so the whole phenomenon simultaneously evoked pity and ridicule. Only when the war ended and when we started meeting people "from the other side of the line" did I learn that his "boosting of army morale" had almost the same effect as the work of those war reporters, "artists of war propaganda" in the territory controlled by the legal authorities, which, if you remember, was worded like this: "In the last three hours alone, more than 5,000 shells have been fired at the positions of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina from the positions of the aggressor Serb-Chetnik soldiery, which testifies to their powerlessness!" Listening to something like that, people on the front lines, both those whose morale was boosted by the Pale artist and those who were "catching" those thousands of shells that testified to the aggressor's powerlessness, occasionally got an irresistible urge to leave the trenches for a while, to forget for an hour or two who they were fighting against, and to beat up the one who was "boosting their morale".

We later learned that this poet, in fact, only sang his shallow, pathetic works in front of the camera in uniform so that he would have some kind of war assignment and not end up on one of the nearby combat lines about which he sang "with so much emotion". He disappeared from the screen sometime before the spring of the second year of the war, along with his works, which cannot even be found on YouTube today, such is the mark they left.

Why would this man, after almost three decades, even come to anyone's mind now, let alone be the subject of someone's writing, any collected reader will ask. Because that uneducated, ignorant, destitute, and untalented lout was the first public example of how, for pathetic personal motives, quasi-patriotic clichés and phrases, which even their creator doesn't believe in, are peddled and sold on screen. And why would we talk about it today? Because the performances of today's influential political leaders are no different from his once tragicomic appearance on the screen.

It is enough to look at this seemingly fierce debate about the name of Republika Srpska, from the moment the Party of Democratic Action announced an appeal to the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, to the entire spectrum of Milorad Dodik's responses, to realize that there are small differences compared to the famous Pale "singer".

This is also an tasteless parade of false patriotism with a very limited vocabulary and with messages that neither their creators nor their listeners believe in from the beginning. These are also messages addressed to people who, unlike those who send them, are still fighting today - albeit not on the front lines, but with a difficult and meager daily life. This time too, many to whom the messages reach have the desire to briefly "leave the trenches" and beat up the senders of the message, but they cannot do so this time either. They would also gladly pose in military uniforms - of course, far from the front - but they cannot manage to transition from the artificially induced pre-war state to a real war. And today's faces on the screen are inexcusably poorly acting patriotic fervor and concern for those on the front lines and poorly hiding that their "singing" has only one goal – they "sing" only to protect themselves. And today's performances, at least among those who afford themselves the luxury of thinking with their own heads, evoke pity and ridicule.

However, two details in this parallel differ dramatically. The wind carried him away with the first signs of spring. These today will, in all likelihood, sing their song for many more seasons.