Serbian Nationalist Quotes

I have often noticed that nationalism is at its strongest at the periphery. Hitler was Austrian, Bonaparte Corsican. In postwar Greece and Turkey the two most prominent ultra-right nationalists had both been born in Cyprus. The most extreme Irish Republicans are in Belfast and Derry (and Boston and New York). Sun Yat Sen, father of Chinese nationalism, was from Hong Kong. The Serbian extremists Milošević and Karadžić were from Montenegro and their most incendiary Croat counterparts in the Ustashe tended to hail from the frontier lands of Western Herzegovina.

SOME DAMNED FOOLISH THING in the Balkans,” Bismarck had predicted, would ignite the next war. The assassination of the Austrian heir apparent, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, by Serbian nationalists on June 28, 1914, satisfied his condition.

In 1914, Franz Ferdinand, the Austrian imperial heir, was shot and killed by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo. Do you know the motive behind the act? It was in retaliation for the subjugation of the Sebs in Austria. It was not.Franz Ferdinand had stated his intention to introduce reforms favorable to the Serbs in his empire. Had he survived to ascend the throne, he would have made a revolution unnecessary. In plain terms, he was killed because he was going to give the rebels what they were shouting for. They needed a despot in the palace in order to seize it. What's good for reform is bad for the reformers

This took place just before the war, in the relatively rosz times, when we were euphoric with the imminence of disaster – we drank and laughed and experimented with poetic forms into the late hours. We tried to keep the war away from the Table, but now and the na budding Serbian patriot would start ranting about the suppression of his people’s culture, whereupon Dedo, with his newly acquired elder status, would indeed suppress him with a sequence of carefully arranged insults and curses. Inevitably, the nationalist would declare Dedo an Islamofascist and storm off, never to return, while we, the fools, laughed uproariously. We knew – but we didn’t want to know – what was going to happen, the sky descending upon our heads like the shadow of a falling piano in a cartoon.

was assassinated in Sarajevo by a member of a Serbian nationalist group.

Furthermore, parents of these bullies also bullied Bosniak children by hitting Bosniaks with their purses (and other personal belongings) as they walked by them. These parents shoved into the shoulders of Bosniak children to make them suffer. Despite such tragic events, Bosnians face Serbian Chetniks and nationalistic Croats who publicly declare that they want to commit another genocide.

Serbs don’t forget, as the graffito goes, the atrocities that the Croatian ustashas committed against them in World War II. That was repeated in school over and over by history teachers when I was a pupil in Croatia. Many Croats don’t forget the slaughters that the Serb nationalist chetniks committed on the Croatian rural population, although that lesson was passed over in silence in our history lessons. My brother-in-law—who died of stomach cancer, and who had spent the recent war two hundred yards away from the Serb border toward Vukovar, from where his street was shelled almost daily—told me that when he was a child, during World War II, he ran into a ditch full of Croatian peasants massacred by chetniks. He never forgot, and wasn’t even allowed to talk about it because he would be jailed for spreading nationalist propaganda. He told me this in the park after my father’s funeral, at a moment when we were both talking about life, death, and souls. Which is better, to forget or to remember? Of course, to remember, but not to abuse the memories as Serbian leaders have done to spur their armies into aggression against Croats and Muslims. Croats will remember Vukovar. Muslims will remember Srebrenica. And what is the lesson? Not to trust thy neighbor? But that’s perhaps where the trouble began and will resume.

tried to understand what I’d seen. I felt as if I’d just stepped out of a limn on twentieth-century book burnings: gaunt, vampiric Goebbels screaming beside a seditious inferno; Stalin; Mao and his Red Guards; Iranian forces in the Republic of Mahabad burning anything in Kurdish; midcentury New York school kids incinerating comics in Binghamton; Ray Bradbury’s firemen; apartheid-era librarians; Pinochet; Pol Pot; Serbian nationalists setting fire to the National and University Library.

The assassination of Tsar Alexander II of Russia in March 1881 marked the beginning of an era of political assassinations that included the murders, in quick succession, of President Sadi Carnot of France in 1894; Spanish prime minister Canovas del Castillo in 1897; Empress Elizabeth of Austria and Queen of Hungary in 1898; King Humbert I of Italy in 1900; President William McKinley in 1901; and King Carlos I of Portugal and his heir apparent in 1908. And then, on June 28, 1914, at Sarajevo in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbian nationalists threw a bomb into the carriage of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, nephew and heir of Austria-Hungary’s Emperor Franz Joseph II, killing him and his young wife, Sophia.11 The scene was set for a world war.

On entering into the organization, every member must know that by joining...he loses his own personality; he must not expect any glory for himself, nor any personal benefit, material or moral.

Demagogy has discredited and abused political freedoms. To let it do that any further means to prepare a political reaction; for disorder, laxity, and insecurity cannot be considered the signs of freedom and democracy.

arms race,

the belligerence of newly powerful states such as Germany,