By Prof. Slobodan Antonic, Department of Sociology, University of Belgrade (Translated for the Saker Blog)

“Vatican hatred” is not a quote from a publication on the Croatian genocide against Serbs between 1941−1945. It is a phrase used by the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Thornton Wilder in his novel “The Bridge of San Luis Rey,” to describe a hatred that is strong, deep, persistent, and cruel.

Of course, not everyone in the Vatican hates, nor are all haters Catholics. However, nations belonging to the cultural domain of Eastern Christianity are sometimes genuinely amazed by the depth and intensity of hatred emanating from influential Western ideologues, some powerful institutions, and numerous “voluntary executors” of various extermination projects. Formally they also are European and Christian, but they belong to a slightly different tradition and culture.

Serbs got a taste of it several times in the 20th century. They face it even today. An example is writer and Nobel Prize winner Herta Miller, Romanian-German novelist, who said publicly what most Germans think about Serbs when she endorsed the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. And Germany, at least while Serbia’s current president was prime minister, was said to be our main Western friend. What are our enemies like then?

Serbs, at least when it comes to Eastern Europe, are not the only target of Western hatred. There are, of course, also the Russians. As one American woman of Serbian origin correctly remarked while watching TV over there, “the enemies of the Western world have been stable and unchanged for 30 years: Serbia and Russia. Terrible Orthodox Serbs who, in terror, slaughtered a huge number of peaceful democratic Muslims and no less terrible Russian communists who destroyed democracy and freedom in Chechnya.”

Entire scholarly monographs on the West’s hatred of Russia have been written, and three of them have been translated in our country: “Russophobia: Two Paths to the Same Abyss” (translated in 1993) by Igor Šafarević; “Russophobia” (translated by 2016) by Giulietto Chiesa; and “Russia and the West – a Thousand Years of War: Russophobia from Charlemagne to the Ukrainian Crisis” (translated in 2017) by Guy Methane.

The word “Russophobia” is in the title of all three books. That word can be misleading. Phobias are irrational and unjustified fears, like being scared of a mouse when it jumps on a table (musophobia), even though it is a creature that will not eat us or bite our leg. However, in the case of Russia, it is not a matter of phobia, but of deep and constant hatred – a good example was recently given by James Jatras:

“Moscow could return Crimea to Ukraine, escort Kiev troops to Donbas on a red carpet, and hang Bashar Assad on a flagpole in Damascus. Sanctions imposed by Washington on Moscow would remain, and even gradually intensify. See how long it took us to get rid of the Jackson-Venik law (a law that limited trade relations with the USSR, passed in 1974 and repealed only in 2012). The Russophobic impulse that controls American policy does not come from what the Russians do, but from who they are: Russia delenda est!”

Now, in Serbia, we have a newly-published book that talks about Russia hatred in our country. It is “Russophobia among Serbs 1878−2017″, by Dejan Mirović. Where did the Serbs get this from, given that the Russians helped us get rid of the Turks and rebuild a state, that because of us in 1914 they went to war with Austria-Hungary (and Germany), that in 1944 they helped us get rid of German Nazism, and that today they defend our claim to Kosovo, sometimes better than official Belgrade?

The first source of Russophobia in Serbia, in the last two centuries, is certainly the trickling down of anti-Russianism from the West. Serbia is perceived in the West as a small, Balkan Russia”, a traditional Russian stronghold in the Balkans. That is why all anti-Russian strategic projects allocate significant funds to suppress Russia’s popularity in Serbia, primarily through open anti-Russian propaganda.

Another source of anti-Russianism is the ideology of the local elite, which wants to “modernize” Serbia, but by Westernizing it. That elite, which existed in the 19th and 20th centuries, just as it exists today, wants Serbia to take over not only Western technology but also Western institutions, Western culture, and even the Western frame of mind (“Protestant spirit”). Since the model that Serbia should strive for can only be Western countries – France or Britain in the 19th century, and the EU today – Russia must be portrayed in the worst light, as it could not be a model for anything – not even in art, culture, or religion.

The third source of anti-Russianism in our country, during the last two centuries, were different political interests and different particular interests of the ruling elites of Serbia (Yugoslavia) and Russia (USSR). For example, in the 19th century, Russia wanted to take Constantinople. That is why the Bulgarians who inhabit the eastern Balkans – which could be considered the gates of Istanbul – were more important to her than the Serbs, who were geographically further away, in the west. The Russians, therefore, preferred Bulgarians at the time, supporting a Greater Bulgaria rather than a Greater Serbia. Thus, they endangered Serbian interests not only in Macedonia, but also in south-eastern Serbia. This was the real background of a certain coldness that developed in the policy of Serbian kings Milan and Aleksandar Obrenović towards Russia (a policy given a personal stamp in the “secret convention” concluded between Serbian Prince Milan and Austro-Hungary).

Another example of divergent interests is certainly the Titoist period, 1948−1989. Tito and his associates, after 1948, in fear for the survival of their regime, cruelly persecuted not only Sovietophiles but also Russophiles. A 20-year-old student, Vera Cenic, was tortured for two years (1950-1951) in the Goli Otok concentration camp only because she frequented the Soviet Cultural Center to watch Russian films, loved Russian literature and kept a diary in which she expressed her intimate reservations toward the official policy of keeping a distance from Russia.

Radivoj Berbakov was sentenced in 1980 to two and a half years in prison, which he served in the Sremska Mitrovica prison, for “enemy propaganda.” That consisted, among other things, of being “biased in favor of Russian art and literature, in the sense of exaggerating the merits ​​of art and literature in the USSR,” which fits in with his statement that he “loves Russians and that no one can forbid him to love them.”

Of course, the Titoist nomenklature knew that a political upheaval in Yugoslavia would lead to Titoists losing not only power but also their personal freedom. That is why, at that time, as Mirović shows us in his book, a significant part of the public in Serbia was being soaked not only with anti-Soviet but also outright anti-Russian propaganda and ideology.

When it comes to today’s anti-Russianism in Serbia, its basic source is a combination of the first and second factors. As a result, contemporary anti-Russian manifestations here range from the unconscious absorption of Western ideological and propaganda clichés, to unabashed Russian hatred articulated by pro-Atlanticist, self-hating Serbs.

As an example, a truly dark, threatening and dangerous “Vatican hatred,” of the kind that Thornton Wilder was alluding to, erupts regularly in the texts of some of the columnists of the Western-financed Belgrade daily “Danas”. There, we can read that “Tsarist Russia dragged Serbia into the First World War”, and also that “Russians” took part in the 2003 assassination of the then prime minister Zoran Djindjic, on the spurious premise that “the assassination of the Prime Minister was the first step in returning Serbia to the Soviet orbit.”

In Serbia, according to this view, there is a “quisling attitude towards Russia”, that is, in our country there is a “Russian network” with “extremist groups under the obvious control of Serbian and Russian security services”. The line propounded by these circles is that “Putin’s Russia is robbing us of the remnants of European sovereignty and identity, economic potential and common sense”, warning that an “evolution from Serbian chauvinism to quisling Putinism” is taking place in Serbia.

Their buzzwords are that “Putin’s regime recognizes men as oligarchs and men, and women as either whores or grandmothers”, that “the boss in Moscow is pressuring Serbia to deviate from the democratic international order”, and that for Serbia “EU integration is a priority”.

There is also in Serbia “anti-Russian incitement propaganda,” with preposterous allegations that “half of the ministers seem to have been smuggled in from the Donetsk Republic”. The alleged concept of “Greater Serbia” was initially the object of their disdain. Now they have come up with the idea that Serbia is “in danger of becoming a Russian province”. Serbs are being told that reliance on Russia “destroys our democratic institutions and introduces us to dirty sources of financial capital,” ultimately leading Serbs to “pathological Sovietophilia”, and also enabling “treacherous conduct on the part of government organs, and even circles within the Serbian Orthodox Church”.

Of course, no other privatization project in Serbia but that of NIS has been denounced as questionable for those ideologues. The only problem they see in the area of privatization is the sale of the formerly state-owned petroleum enterprise, NIS, to Russian interests. And there is also the alleged “Putin spy center”, a Russian Emergency Situations outpost located in the city of Nis, accused of “nurturing criminal traditions and destroying fragile democracies in the region.”

The Russophobic lobby maintains that in Serbia “since 2004, the media under the supervision of each government have been preparing public opinion not only for new conflicts with neighbors, but also for World War III, which we will fight on the side of Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela”. The author of this particular diatribe goes on to wonder “how Vučić can possibly position Serbia in the victorious camp in the emerging international conflict.”

Russia and China are, according to this lobby, “factors of world disorder” because, as they absurdly argue, “the annual total of victims of state-party terror in Russia and China is almost equal to the victims of Mauthausen”. Hence, if Belgrade – which according to them is a “stinking sh##hole” opts to side with Russia, “Serbia will remain as the Balkan GDR”.

Don´t you feel a terrible, deep hatred in these words, not only towards Russia but also towards Serbia – just because Serbia is also Slavic, nationalistic, Orthodox and strives to march to its own drummer?

That hatred is unleased primarily in order to turn Serbs into someone else: Western “Protestants” and “citizens”, more precisely a consumerist crowd that lives in a territory, not a country, and which tomorrow can be replaced by some other, more “modern” and “politically correct” population.

Eruptions of such hatred are necessary in order to mould the “Serbian-European”, whose brain is crushed and the terrible “little Russian” within him is torn out. There is no doubt that this is the ultimate goal of Atlanticist policy in the Balkans. But that cannot happen without enthronement in the Serbian society of the equivalent of “Vatican hatred” – deep, systematic and cruel.

It is important to be able to recognize that hatred. It is contrary not only to our essential interests, but also to our civilizational identity that makes us special as a people and as a culture. The general public rejects it intuitively. But in the context of the announced “international conflict” – which will allegedly finally “separate the wheat from the chaff” – it serves as an early announcement of totalitarian repression against each and every one of us who loves his country and thinks for himself.

So each of us must take the risk of falling victim to “Vatican hatred”. Even you who are reading this text, dear reader.