Was there ever really a “Druga Srbija”? The term spread in the 1990s as a catchall for the anti-war, antinationalist intellectuals who did their best to argue that the murderous (or in terms of the ICTY, simultaneously murderous and nonmurderous, and consequently not specifically directed to murderosity) regime of the 1990s did not represent the … Continue reading
“The paper that openly says what SPS secretly thinks” must have had a boring time of it when SPS was out of power. The periodic essays where Večernje novosti set out the boundaries of approved thinking were deliciously baroque (and always a bit more SRS than SPS anyway) in the days of Milošević – remember … Continue reading
Identify an issue that many people are discussing. Tie it to an anecdote that will make clear that the issue is really about yourself. Develop an ordinary, reasonable proposition related to the issue. Follow the proposition to the the point of absurdity. Wallow in the absurdity for several paragraphs. Revision phase 1: go back and … Continue reading
Probably you could say that the situation began with a ceremony: the 20-year anniversary of Republika Srpska. Twenty years, you say? But didn’t Republika Srpska become a legal entity with the Dayton peace accord in 1995? Is this a mathematical error? No, it was the point of the ceremony. People gathered to listen to an … Continue reading
The winner of the Nobel prize for literature was to be announced at 1PM today, and as people probably know by now it went to the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer. But around noontime this fine hoax page went up: The wags registered it to a site called “nobelprizeliterature.org”, and made it look fairly persuasive. The … Continue reading
One of the curiosities that emerged from the terrorist attacks in two places in Norway on 22 July comes out of the odd manifesto (document is an enormous PDF full of nonsense) that the killer produced and distributed shortly before the crime. In fact it might be hard to call it a manifesto: it has … Continue reading
Everyone could do with a little help from outside, even if they are making arguments about sovereignty. So the intellectuals in Serbia who want support in the ongoing border conflict with Kosovo are seeking it from Russia, and asked for it in a letter to the Russian PM Vladimir Putin. What they want, concretely, is … Continue reading
