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of the Belgrade Coup
Editor & Webmaster
Leon Chame - 2008
Yugoslav Associates:
- Zoran Radojicic
- Dejan Vukelic
- George Orwell
Contributing Websites:
- Original Sorces
- Transnational (TFF)
- Fair sources
- WSWS
avgust 20, 2008
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When Others Converted, the Serbs Didn't
LONDON, June 3 - Early this morning, we received by fax from the U.K. a
copy of an article written by a Briton of Polish descent, headlined "Serbia's Art and
Soul." The following excerpt from it may help
you understand why the Serbs fought and died for Kosovo: "Gracanica? A strange church, as I remember it, with too many domes crowded
above too small a nave, located a few miles outside Pristina, and started in 1313. The
Turks burnt it down a few decades later. So the Serbs rebuilt it. Burnt down and rebuilt,
burnt down and rebuilt-the famous ecclesiastical sites of Kosovo kept the Serbian embers
glowing, for century after century, with remarkable success.
So. When the Bosnians converted to Islam, the Serbs didn't. When the Albanians
converted to Islam, the Serbs didn't. For 500 years they believed themselves to be
fighting a Christian jihad on behalf of civilised West against the invading eastern
Muslims. When the Turks were finally expelled, in the false dawn
that preceded the Great War, in came the Bulgarians. And the Austrians. And the Italians.
Then the Nazis. Even more clearly than my people, the Poles, the Serbs have had to define
themselves through their opposition to their neighbours. And their churches, packed to the
rafters with so much stern and rousing and ancient religious propaganda, have been the
chief artistic focus of that opposition. So. When
the Croats sided with Hitler, the
Serbs didn't. When the
Albanians sided with Hitler,
the Serbs didn't. Until,
finally, in about 1960, under the wonky tarpaulin of Tito's communism, the Muslim
population of Kosovo, swollen by wholesale illegal immigration from the mightily poor
and pseudo-Maoist Albania, and fattened by the strict Muslim forbidding of birth
control, finally overtook and out numbered the indigenous Serb population. And 40 years of recent history began the
process of attempting to outweigh 700 years of historic struggle. Monasteries had stones
thrown through their windows (many had already been converted into mosques.) Graves were
desecrated. Churches were torched. It is to the defense of those churches that the Serbs
clearly believed they were rushing when they invaded, so brutally and quickly, Kosovo and
Metohija.
The coverage of the Kosovo conflict has, time after time, struck me with its high-tech
ignorance of these powerful low-tech causes. Not a word is ever mentioned about the great
Church art of Serbia. Not enough has been devoted to the deep historical roots of the war.
A few brief references have been made to the
historic Battle of Kosovo of 1389, but not with any deep ambition to take it seriously.
Not a line, that I have read, has been quoted from the marvelous cycle of epic Kosovo
poems with which the Serbs, "a nation of (black)birds," have been indoctrinating
their children, from birth, since the victory of the Turks."
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