Serbs Worship Gavrilo Princip

~ Clarissa

Yesterday Serbs unveiled the new monument to. . . Gavrilo Princip in Belgrade:

Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic described Princip as a freedom fighter and a hero.

“Today, we are not afraid of the truth,” Nikolic said. “Gavrilo Princip was a hero, a symbol of the idea of freedom, the assassin of tyrants and the carrier of the European idea of liberation from slavery,” Nikolic told the crowd.

Serbia’s nation-building (which has caused a shitload of problems to the world as it is) still takes the weirdest forms imaginable. If I’m not mistaken, Serbia wants to be part of the EU, so it’s quite bizarre to glorify Princip in this context. Obviously, Princip did not start WWI, yet there is nothing he is known for better than creating a pretext for the horrible carnage.

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Published by Clarissa

20 thoughts on “Serbs Worship Gavrilo Princip”

  1. IME Serbs are quite proud of Princip and don’t care about the non-Serb death toll of WWI at all. In their view it helped the Serbs and that’s all they care about.

    AFAICT Serbian nationalism is perhaps the most infantile on the planet (though Croatian nationalism is not terribly far behind).

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    1. “Serbian nationalism is perhaps the most infantile on the planet”

      • YES. You can’t be for Princip and for Europe simultaneously. The Russians, at least, have chosen one thing and are sticking to it. But the Serbs want to sit on two chairs with one ass.

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    2. ”In their view it helped the Serbs and that’s all they care about”

      -I cannot believe my eyes reading this?! For gods sake, Serbs ended up having more than 1 000 000 dead and even more wounded or cripled for the lifetime on their side during WWI, or – in other words – a half of their entire population by that time!!! What a tremendous benefit!!!

      As for Princip, it takes just a sketchy, superficial overview on his biography to realize that he was everything but a Serbian nationalist. He was a member of ‘Young Bosnia’, a truly multinational and multicultural organization (among other members, there was Ivo Andrić, natural born Croat, later a winner of The Nobel Prize For Literature). Just go to Wikipedia and you can read that Pricip’s attack happened to be the second one commited against Franz Ferdinand the very same day: the preceding, unsuccesful bomb attack, had been commited by a Muslim and a Croat, both of whom got caught after their failure in commiting suicide and later undergone to a bestial torture on the purpose of revealing the names of their companions, on which subject they let not a single word escape their mouth. The funniest thing is that, later, Princip was denounced by a Serbian member of the group, who accidentaly got cought.

      All of this makes me wonder what kind of bullshit I would have read from you, guys, if the first of the attacks happened to be the succesfull one?

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      1. All of this is very well-known to everybody (except the part where you assign the label “multicultural” to people who lived long before the term arrived at today’s saccharine usage). I’m not sure what your outrage is about. Are you disputing that the statue has been erected? If not, then what are you disputing?

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        1. Please, correct me if I’m wrong, but : was all of this about promoting Serbian nationalism and using Princip in that purpose?

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          1. “Please, correct me if I’m wrong, but : was all of this about promoting Serbian nationalism and using Princip in that purpose?”

            • What’s “all this”? The statue? Yes, of course, the statue has zero artistic value, so its only purpose can be nationalistic.

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            1. Though my first comment wasn’t primally addressed on you, but on the guy
              whose words I quoted at the beginning of my comment, these words are sent directly to you:

              I strongly disagree with you on this subject (and not just this).
              Princip and Serbian nationalism go hand-in-hand the same way a salt and a wound do.
              It can be discussed about some kind of ‘Yougoslav nationalism’ (which is,
              by the way, the oxymoron) when you have Princip in mind, and that’s the point
              where all the connections stop. Both Serbian president and prime minister were the members
              (even the leaders) of the ultra-nationalistic (maybe pro-fashistic) Radical Party
              Of Serbia for a pretty long time (which is the thing they don’t like to be reminded of,
              at least not very often) and that’s the political party which cultivate the ideas totally opposite to the ones ‘Young Bosnia’ had fought for.

                  So, errecting a monument can only be viewed as a miserable attempt of 
showing their new 'Europian, anti-nationalistic, anti-hegemonic' face to the world 
wich was, like it or not, the face 'Young Bosnia' had.

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              1. “Princip and Serbian nationalism go hand-in-hand the same way a salt and a wound do.”

                • Erecting statues that are not works of art only has one meaning: bolstering nationalism. Can you think of any other reason to put up a statue of a historic figure?

                “Both Serbian president and prime minister were the members (even the leaders) of the ultra-nationalistic (maybe pro-fashistic) Radical Party Of Serbia for a pretty long time (which is the thing they don’t like to be reminded of, at least not very often) and that’s the political party which cultivate the ideas totally opposite to the ones ‘Young Bosnia’ had fought for.”

                • This is, once again, a very very common trick of nationalism. Historic (or artistic) figures are emptied of all actual meaning and ideas that are useful to today’s goals of nation-building are assigned to them. In Spain, for instance, the defenders of Numancia in 153 BC (!!!) were branded as the heroes of SPAIN. Obviously, no Spain existed at that time, and it would have been impossible for these people to see themselves as Spanish.

                In short, it is completely irrelevant what Princip did or did not believe 100 years ago. The only thing that matters are the meanings that have come to be linked to his name.

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      2. Tell it to the people who put up the statue or the Serbs who keep his ‘hero’ myth alive (or the online idiot who gloated about how he made Europe pay for slighting Serbian national ambitions).

        “natural born Croat”

        And you cannot imagine how little I care about the micro-differences between Serbs, Croats and Bosnians (and now Montenegrins) who working together with nationalistic idiocy in their hearts managed to dismember a major European language and turn it into a bunch of micro-dialects no one in their right mind cares about.

        I’ve known and liked a number of people from former Jugoslav countries but they would have been better off staying one country.

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  2. The real instigator was the head of the Serbian Secret Service, code name ‘Apis’ who funneled the money to the Black Hand. He died before a firing squad for his pains. They probably don’t like too much about him.

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  4. I’LL PLACE THE COMMENT OF ANONYMOUS HERE BECAUSE WORDPRESS CUTS IT IN HALF VERTICALLY AND I WANT IT TO SHOW IN FULL:

    Though my first comment wasn’t primally addressed on you, but on the guy
    whose words I quoted at the beginning of my comment, these words are sent directly to you:

    I strongly disagree with you on this subject (and not just this).
    Princip and Serbian nationalism go hand-in-hand the same way a salt and a wound do.
    It can be discussed about some kind of ‘Yougoslav nationalism’ (which is,
    by the way, the oxymoron) when you have Princip in mind, and that’s the point
    where all the connections stop. Both Serbian president and prime minister were the members
    (even the leaders) of the ultra-nationalistic (maybe pro-fashistic) Radical Party
    Of Serbia for a pretty long time (which is the thing they don’t like to be reminded of,
    at least not very often) and that’s the political party which cultivate the ideas totally opposite to the ones ‘Young Bosnia’ had fought for.

    So, errecting a monument can only be viewed as a miserable attempt of

    showing their new ‘Europian, anti-nationalistic, anti-hegemonic’ face to the world
    wich was, like it or not, the face ‘Young Bosnia’ had.

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    Reply

    1. But, what makes you think the ideas of Serbian nationalism have ever been linked to Princip’s name? By the time WWI began, Serbia had already reached it’s full independence, but Bosnia didn’t exist at all, not even as a topic (except in a geographic sense). There was, literally, not a single university in that part of Austro-Hungarian Empire, they only had high-schools, teaching German language, history, culture…I read your blog-posts every day, Clarissa, and I can see that you are strongly devoted to literature, so I can recommend to you reading Petar Kocic, the famous Bosnian writer of that time, and his story ‘Badger before the court’, it tells very much of the position of Serbs, Croats and Muslims living in Hungarian Empire that time.

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      1. “But, what makes you think the ideas of Serbian nationalism have ever been linked to Princip’s name? ”

        • The fact that the statue was erected. As I repeated only 3 times, there is no other reason that statues with no artistic value get erected. Can you think of any other reason the statue was erected?

        “I read your blog-posts every day, Clarissa”

        • I’m glad to hear that. 🙂

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        1. ”Can you think of any other reason the statue was erected?”

                    - Yes, I can think of several other reasons. If you ask me, Serbian government wanted to remind the world, especially The European Union, simbolically, that in WWI Serbia was on the same side France, The Great Britain, USA and several other countries were. On the other hand, they wanted that same world to know that they won't accept, just like that, every ultimatum being put in front of them (so Pricip is supposed to be used as a symbol of resistance)

          Of course, all of this has a purpose of persisting in carring-out the imposible  mission called ''Russia and Europian Union at the same time''. As you can see, in this part I must agree with you, but I strongly disagree it's got anything to do with nationalism.

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  5. Pingback: Gavrilo Princip | David's Commonplace Book

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