Good morning! Happy May 13 – Security Day of Yugoslavia / holiday of our collective paranoia. This date used to be celebrated as the day of state security of the SFRY – the day when the power of the apparatus that knew everything, saw everything, recorded everything was celebrated. Today there is no more Yugoslavia or SDB, but the spirit of the UDBA remains, instilled deeply, transgenerationally, through family conversations, legends and stories made up in pubs.
Montenegrins – Paranoid Nation
The spirit of May 13 still watches over these areas, but not as a sophisticated apparatus of state control – rather as a collective psychosis, an obsessive need to see a conspiracy in everything. Because in Montenegro, as in the wider Balkans, the people do not trust anyone – except for theory. They don’t trust common sense, but that’s why they believe that “they up there” are hiding a cure for cancer, they put chips in our vaccines, that the CIA knows everything, that the Freemasons, the Illuminati, the Vatican and who knows who else have already decided everything in advance, intending to destroy us completely.
I was devastated at reading the information from the latest EU Barometer, suggesting that a large number of Montenegro citizens, regardless of religion, nation or gender, believe that the state is hiding a cure for cancer. I just don’t know who’s hiding it. Ours certainly haven’t found a cure for cancer, that’s why they doubt Brussels or Washington. I guess there – in the basement of the European Commission or the Pentagon, next to Tesla’s death ray – there is also a cure for cancer, it is just that they do not want to tell us. They have not yet agreed over it in the world congress of conspirators.
How did we get there – that a large part of the population of a country aspiring to the EU – believes that the state, the West and science are united against them? Or have we always been like that?
It is more likely that it is a longer chronic illness. Superstition, half-educated people, hereditary suspicion against authority, idolatry of power, and general distrust of science and institutions – all this makes fertile ground for manipulation. It’s not that it happened yesterday. It’s a decades-long project, culminating in the digital age when anyone possessing a YouTube account has more authority than a doctor.
And how can we trust the institutions, when they betrayed us, lied to us and covered up the truth so many times? Nor is paranoia without grounds – but paranoia as a dominant political culture is deadly to a democratic society. Because where everyone believes in everything, no one believes in anything. The state is just an empty shell.
Secret services have become our totem. Everyone knows someone “who’s working in the service”. Everyone “has information”. Everyone has an acquaintance who “knows how it goes”. We don’t trust the court, but we trust “a man who knows someone from ANB, BIA, CIA” and has “an aunt who works at the embassy”. So, we are entering a loop where no one is seeking to find out the truth, only the confirmation of fear.
There is no political option in Montenegro that has not been accused of being a “foreign project”. There isn’t a leader we didn’t suspect was an “agent of some services”. Except for those we know and who openly say with pride they serve Serbia and Russia. And then such a climate brings us the worst: the reign of propaganda, the silence of science and the triumph of improvisation. Instead of doctors and professors having a say, TikTok shamans and Twitter relatives from Florida or Munich have it.
So, on this holiday of security, I propose a modest reform: to believe more in things that can be proven. Let’s start learning, instead of guessing. To read studies, not comments. Let’s talk to doctors, not Miroljub Petrovic.
Or we will forever remain a nation that knows everything – and knows nothing. Constantly stalked and disturbed by someone.
That’s all for today. Enjoy the rest of your day.
Kind regards,
Ljubomir Filipovic, CdM observer and columnist
(The opinions and views of our columnists aren’t necessarily the opinions or views of the CdM news team)
