Good morning! The identity agenda is being implemented slowly but surely. The new government is much better in one thing – in the subtle but also consistent implementation of that agenda.
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Expelling Latin script
Yesterday, a friend from abroad sent me a message and a photo of a post by Kotor activist Dragan Sepelj. I don’t know if Sepelj is still an official of the Democrats, but it is difficult to tie him to something, even though he was tied to a red tie for a while. In other words, he is more consistent than others with himself and what he considers to be truth and justice.
So, the other day, Sepelj published a photo from the temple of St. Luka or St. Nikola in Kotor. Both temples are used by the Serbian Orthodox Church (SPC). The first one was built by Austria-Hungary, and the second one was once, in difficult times, used by the Catholic Church. Latinists both.
Today, the Latin script is expelled from those churches. They say that names written in Latin will not be read in the church. Because God probably doesn’t read Latin. Cyrillic only. Therefore, Romanians, although Orthodox, will not go to heaven. The Greeks won’t because they don’t write in Cyrillic, but also because they betrayed Orthodoxy and recognized the autocephaly of the “separatists from Ukraine”. Georgians also with their script. Orthodox Arabs too.
Since the dismissal of DPS in many municipalities in 2016, “Cyrillic promotion” festivals have been organized in some of them. Under the guise of protecting the Cyrillic script, those festivals promoted the most outrageous ideologies. “Cyrillic Square” in Budva and “Cyrillic Square” in Herceg Novi were platforms for people like Matija Beckovic and doctor Jovana Stojkovic to promote their extremist ideas. Beckovic is more or less known to all of us, and doctor Jovana is an activist of the anti-vaccination anti-LGBT movement in Serbia. Muse of Leviathan and similar organizations, who used the platform of such a festival to pour out a barrage of insults against homosexuals.
Serbia and Montenegro, along with Bosnia partially, are the only ones from Yugoslavia that have maintained the equality of the two scripts as a principle, with the fact that Serbia has already come a long way in erasing the Latin alphabet from the public space. Some by kind subsidization, some by force, through administrative-bureaucratic procedures.
Both letters are a wealth of culture and diversity in Montenegro. Cyrillic is a traditional Montenegrin script, there are tombstones of all religions in Cyrillic and Latin. The previous government did a lot to protect the Cyrillic alphabet as a historical script. But that was not enough. Cyrillic today, unfortunately, has become a hate letter. Whatever you read in Cyrillic on social media, that content is usually fiercely nationalistic and hateful. In this way, an understandable but also unnecessary odium has been created towards that letter.
Nothing is achieved by force, and the new government is slowly but surely making the Latin script disappear from the public space. Try googling some content on government websites or the RTCG portal. In searches, the Cyrillic version will pop up first. Cyrillization and Cyrillism are not processes that are democratic, nor are they aimed at protecting a single letter. The aim of these processes is deeply discriminatory. In Budva today, the Cyrillic script is increasingly dominant to the detriment of the Latin script. Letters with which that city was created and built. That’s why all the initiatives from nameplates for street names, signs on the highway, all of that should be viewed through this prism.
These are all proofs that identity topics have not disappeared anywhere, if they have disappeared from pre-election campaigns. They just moved to another domain. Mark my words.
That’s all for today and this week. See you again on Monday.
Kind regards,
Ljubomir Filipovic, CdM analyst and columnist
(The opinions and views of the authors of the columns are not necessarily those of the CdM editorial staff)
