In Defence of Vuk (Unnecessarily)

By: Saša Janković

Dear Iljir,

Mila Pajić’s text “How You Destroyed Us, Karadžić’s Vuk”, which you write about, points to the harmful consequences of failing to confront the past and to the abuse of myths in order to evade responsibility.

However, regardless of how effectively written it is, please don’t look in it for the true causes of Serbian political decline and a political roadmap for our better future.

To connect, even metaphorically, terrible war crimes and today’s corruption of the government with the Serbian epic mythology, Vuk Karadzic who recorded it in writing, and above all with the dillema and choice attributed to Prince Lazar who choose “the Heavenly Kingdom” over the earthily one, is an effective hit – but in one’s own leg.

Should I even remind that this dilemma is not some Serbian peculiarity, but a universal human dilemma between the primacy of the spiritual and the material, between ideals and interests. And everyone knows what the morally correct answer is if one must choose between the two, even when they do not follow it in practice.

Even more importantly, the dilemma is presented falsely. Yes, a popular local song says that “only fools die for ideals,” but the real truth is that wars most often do not begin because of ideals and the pursuit of the “earthly kingdom”, but for the very “earthily” – power and money.

And those who incited to wards, have profited most from them and are still in power, aren’t they obsessed with the material? Do they not promise billions in so-called foreign investment, while destroying education, culture, science, the environment… hating above all the human need for freedom? “It only costs you! It is easier and more profitable to be with us!” they openly shout.

The essence of what we are taught by Lazar’s “Heavenly Kingdom”, by Marko’s ploughing of the Turkish roads, and by Vuk’s enlightenment, is precisely to resist them. And this is exactly what the author of the text otherwise is doing in practice, defying the regime, which I deeply respect.

But I am certain that a politics which elevates utility above principle, and the matter above the essence, should never become a primary political or life motto, regardless of the increasing number of the powerful who advocate for it in the world. I do not even think the author intended to suggest this, although it easily appears so.

The value of the text we are discussing lies in showing how some people hide from responsibility behind myths. Its weakness lies in identifying the wrong cause of evil.

Let’s look at what the governments in Belgrade and Pristina are doing today. How do we explain Banjska, the persecution of students, pressure on government critics, or the demise of institutions? The current arrests of directors of healthcare institutions treating Serbs, and the “sealing” of ambulances? What is mythical or heavenly about that? These are precisely the products of “earthly” politics – politics of blood and soil, ethnic cleansing in the service of personal interest, and the abuse of power.

I do not believe anyone will get very far by building the future or the politics on the condemnation of their own national myths. Not because they are untouchable, but because they are, across the humanity, rooted in ideas of justice, dignity, and resistance to force.

When someone injects into those very ideas, precisely because they are attractive to people, something that is their opposite, then it is the manipulators who must be rejected, not the ideals.

Or the British, for example, are wrong to keep myths about Robin Hood and King Arthur’s sword? Are the values from those legends responsible for slavery and Britain’s past crimes in the colonies? Nonsense.

Other moments in the text, such as “italic Cyrillic” which the author frames negatively, collapse even more easily under universal rather than “Serbian” arguments. The attempt to connect the mass grave at the base of the Special Anti-Terrorist Unit near Belgrade, the truck with the bodies of killed Albanians in Danube, and, believe it or not, corruption and the collapse of the Novi Sad canopy with Serbian folk poetry and Vuk Karadžić, I prefer to regard as overly creative carelessness rather than what another young man, in a separate opinion published in the same newspaper, called it.

So, Serbian (or Albanian, or anyone’s) particularities are not the problem; they are – a cliché, but also a truth – a treasure. I would not even renounce our proverbial “inat” (acting stubbornly and apparently self-harmingly “in despite”). After all, I belong to a people who, upon learning of a “useful” pact between their king and Hitler, took to the streets of Belgrade shouting: “Better a war than the pact!” And I am proud of that. Ultimately, differences among us also mean a greater chance for human civilisation to survive some future catastrophe.

But to return to the context most important to you – a large number of people in Serbia, myself included, feel that consenting to Kosovo’s independence would be an injustice that exceeds our individual interests and our time. I do not believe that feeling will disappear. And that subjective sense of injustice aside, if independence is insisted upon despite the opposition of Serbia due to the will of its citizens, then the objective question of respect for the international order remains.

I’d like to work towards a better life for all people living in Kosovo – with particular attention to minorities and with special protection of the Serbian cultural and historic heretage. I faild to se that declaring independence, even unitarily, contributed to that. Just the opposite, the authorities in Pristina present a blackmail – if Belgrade does not accept to our independence, local Serbs will suffer. For sure, Vuk Karadzic and Lazar’s “Heavenly kingdom” were not an inspiration for that.

That is why I believe the solution does not lie in sacrificing justice for pragmatism – successful politics requires precisely a combination of the two. If, at a certain historical moment, the two legitimate interests cannot be reconciled, it is wiser to postpone a final answer than to sacrifice one for the other and thereby lose one of the two foundations necessary for lasting peace.

And to avoid any misunderstanding, the probably most famous Serbian student – who began his education in a small monastery in Tronoša and completed it in Vienna – Vuk would surely have forgiven such a serious accusation to a young colleague because of her courage and sharp wit, so who am I to hold it against her; on the contrary – I am thankful for the topic of our latest conversation.

Yours sincerely,
Saša

New Voices of an Old Ideology?