Peter’s Blog

The curse of national grievance - International Herald Tribune

The poet laureate of the United States, Charles Simic, who is an expatriated Serb (at the age of 15), quotes his father as saying, “It’s exhausting to be a Serb.” This was in a recent autobiographical article in The New York Review of Books.

It has been even more exhausting for those who have to deal with the Serbs and with the consequences of their national illusions. Simic quotes family visitors in Belgrade, obsessed with a national history, as they recounted it, of “honor, heroic sacrifice, and endless suffering in defense of Europe against the Ottoman Empire, for which we never got any thanks.”

The Serbian nation allegedly was victim of all but universal conspiracies. Traitors were responsible for all that went wrong - “Serbs stabbing each other in the back. A nation of double-crossers, turncoats, Judases, snakes in the grass. Even worse were our big allies, England, America and France.”

I had a Serb neighbor and friend in Paris who, when I first wrote a newspaper article criticizing Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia in 1991 for invading Slovenia and Croatia, accosted me in the courtyard of our building to say: “I know why you wrote that! The American embassy told you to write that. The neo-Nazis in Germany are forcing America to back Croatia and crush Serbia!”

When I said it was not my practice to take my article subjects from the American ambassador (nor his to offer them), he said: “It’s the pope then. He’s forcing you to write these things; you’re a Catholic and the pope is allied with the Nazis and Americans to destroy Serbia and Orthodox Christianity!”

Conclusion: Serbs are bat-shit crazy.