As an American, there may be some useful advice I can offer my dear Serbian friends. Serbia has much to offer the United States and the world in general. Being myself from Seattle, and fresh back from my 6th trip to the Serbian capital, Belgrade, I’ll elaborate.
The most valuable lesson I think Serbia can offer to the United States is how to behave like a more civilized member of the world community and reenter the world of civilized nations, to come to grips with US war crimes and war criminality, and to embrace our American nationalist identity in a way that is at peace with the other nations of the world.
If America can somehow learn this lesson, a new civilization may just emerge that, barring some kind of armageddon, could endure beyond the coming ages of ages.
Future history will remember Serbia and the United States as traditional and long-time allies, who fought together through the centuries against religious and political fascism and imperialism.
Serbia helped the United States many times (not just by providing the NBA some great basketball players), and now stands in the entry of the US-EU dominated global corporate market empire, with one foot already in the now open door, watched with trepidation and anticipation, glancing about and prepared to warily step inside.
Sure they were Communist for a while, but Tito's Yugoslavia, with Belgrade at its heart, was always independent. YU was always outside the Iron Curtain; Allies with the USSR and US against the Nazis during WWII; separate afterwards.
Tito said no to Stalin. YU prepared for attack from either NATO (The US-EU military wing) or the Warsaw Pact (The USSR military wing), and with very good reason.
Yugoslav independence was useful to US-USSR interests, but this independence was wounded by Tito's death, and no longer needed after the Iron Curtain fell; much like NATO- which was supposed to exist to defend against a Soviet invasion.
The US-EU used this wounded independence- and Milosevic’s ego- creating a monster to rationalize the post Cold War existence of NATO. This monster was the Yugoslav Civil War and the brutality of the 1990s, the slaying of which resulted in the NATO occupation of much of the former Yugoslavia.
Tito's Yugoslavia liberated itself from the Axis. YU was open to the West- there was no Berlin Wall. People traveled to and fro between YU and US all of the time during the Cold War, even though it was not part of NATO. Then Tito died, the international order came to bear and Tito's Yugoslavia was destroyed.
YU is now gone- left in some hearts and minds. A fading oval sticker on a VW Golf parked on Emile Zola street in Cerak. A vestigial remnant; like the American Middle Class after another 10 or 20 years, perhaps? Zing.
I think there is a good case to be made that, even though the last few decades have been... complicated, and there is still a long way left to go, there is a good chance that the US will learn that lesson and help usher in a new civilization truly rooted of international peace and concord.
Or something else will happen.
This lesson, however, is not one for me to teach. It’s for me to learn. What I can do is offer some observations from my latest visit to Belgrade…
This lesson, however, is not one for me to teach. It’s for me to learn. What I can do is offer some observations from my latest visit to Belgrade…
