By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
We were unworthy of Yugoslav communism. Today, of course, it’s fashionable and profitable to talk shit about how communism was no good. But no: it wasn’t communism that was no good — we weren’t, and still aren’t.
Already by the late 1980s, the scum to whom communism had given everything — the wretches who would still be herding sheep if the communists hadn’t brought their fathers to the cities, taught them to read, given them jobs and apartments — had begun to spit on the partisans and, once drunk, tell lewd jokes about Tito. But that’s how it goes — the communists should have known better: no good deed goes unpunished.
The rest, as they say, is history.
The initial fascistisation of the 1990s (which went hand in hand with the initial economic transition) of our societies was carried out symbolically by the sons and grandsons of the victors over fascism in 1945.
Ratko Mladic, who would go on to commit genocide in Srebrenica, wasn’t trained in the Hitler Youth, but in the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) — the army that defeated fascism. Another, no less important point concerns the fascistisation of these societies in the 1990s, and Montenegro was by no means an exception. What matters is what emerged from that fascistisation. You can’t keep escaping from the story of fascism in the 1990s (and 2000s, for that matter) back into 1941 to rant about partisans and Chetniks — because the answer isn’t there. It’s here, today.
The Serbian fascism of the 1990s wasn’t created by the Chetniks, but by the heirs of the communists. Tudjman wasn’t an Ustasha émigré, but a high-ranking officer — even a scholar — in the communist system. In Montenegro in the 1990s, it wasn’t the Chetniks who held power, but the youth wing of the Party. Let’s return to the monster that rose like Godzilla out of the fascistisation of the 1990s. Let’s go back to the creature of transition, whose rise to the stage was paved by that same fascistisation. That transition, after the wars in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, became the Fourth Post-Yugoslav War — never officially declared, but no less devastating for it — a total war against the very idea of social justice.
That’s why fascistisation, the wars, and the transition in the former Yugoslav space must be treated as a single, unified process: fascistisation led to the wars, and the wars prepared the ground for the transition. The poor, in that process, were not only victims, but also the recruiting base of our various fascisms. The story about blameless, misled workers and eternally innocent poor folks is one that only students at plenums can keep telling each other—between two soy milk coffees served with gluten-free, stevia-sweetened cookies—until their fellow fascist students beat them up and chase them off campus. That leftist fetishisation of poverty is not just hopelessly stupid—it’s eerily similar to nationalist discourse. For nationalists, their own nation is always the innocent victim—just like, for outdated leftists, it’s the class.
Tito’s army, the JNA, once the protector of “our peoples and nationalities,” ended up shelling Yugoslav cities and murdering non-Serb populations, fighting for the goals of the Chetnik movement. That once-glorious communist army died like blood-drunk fascist scum.
That’s how it began.
Today, in Montenegro, it ends with the complete triumph of the Chetniks—some of whom were joined long ago by the grandchildren of partisans, while the rest cower before them, smaller than a poppy seed. And then there’s that sad, pathetic refrain: “Montenegro is founded on the values of anti-fascism,” which now sounds like someone played Arsen Dedic’s “House by the Sea” in the middle of a DJ set featuring Breskvica and Desingerica. The crowd, drunk and roaring with laughter, can’t wait for the DJ to quit screwing around and get back to the real music.
Montenegro is a Chetnik country today. And it’s nothing compared to what it will be tomorrow. There are no more devout Christians than the offspring of communists. If the priests were to slap them, they wouldn’t just turn the other cheek—they’d turn their umpteenth cheek.
But here’s the problem with cheeks: you turn the other one, you get slapped again. And again. Until you have no face left.
Nothing bothers them. And least of all are they bothered when Metodije and Joanikije ritually urinate on their grandfathers, whom, truth be told, they had already disowned.
They lead their children and grandchildren like lambs to the slaughter, to be baptized by men who tell them to their faces—like a slap followed by a gob of spit launched straight into their mouths—that their nation doesn’t exist and that they are shameful traitors. They don’t mind being called bastards from Tito’s testicle. They don’t mind when their family is called criminals, when lies are told about them every time a priest opens his mouth—because those priests are physically incapable of speaking the truth, as if they believe they’ll get cancer if they don’t lie.
On the contrary: the church is the institution they trust the most.
No humiliation is too great for them. No act of submission is too degrading for the descendants of the 13 July insurgents and the victors over fascism, who now grovel at Chetnik altars.
Stop lying. This didn’t start on 30 August 2020. That day was Montenegro’s second counterrevolution. The first happened in 1988–1989, and that counterrevolution is still falsely called the “Anti-Bureaucratic Revolution.” That first counterrevolution finished the job in the economic sphere, but not the social one. Due to a radical detour between 1997 and 2006, the process of fascistisation, revisionism, desecularisation, and assimilation was not fully completed.
Those who brought the first ones to power put the second ones on the throne—to finish the job. And there is no democratic process, least of all elections, that will stop them.
(Columnists’ opinions and views are not necessarily those of the CdM editorial board)
