A sense of historical victimhood is widely considered a good thing when it’s blacks complaining about FDR’s redlining, Black Wall Street, and other dusty topics. For example, from the NYT opinion page:
Yes, Lynching Is Still a Thing
March 30, 2022By Charles M. Blow, Opinion Columnist
On a warm August night in 1955 on the outskirts of Money, Miss., about a hundred miles due north of Jackson, two men arrived with a flashlight and a gun at the house where Emmett Till …
But when it’s Serbs complaining about 1999 and 1914 and 1389, then it’s obviously self-destructive and all so tiresome. From the NYT front page:
Bound by a Sense of Victimhood, Serbia Sticks With Russia
Andrew Higgins
March 30, 2022,BELGRADE, Serbia — Mindful of the angry and still-unhealed wounds left by NATO’s bombing of Serbia more than 20 years ago, Ukraine’s ambassador appeared on Serbian television after Russia invaded and bombed his country in the hope of rousing sympathy.
Instead of getting time to explain Ukraine’s misery, however, the ambassador, Oleksandr Aleksandrovych, had to sit through rants by pro-Russian Serbian commentators, and long videos of Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, denouncing Ukraine as a nest of Nazis. …
Then there is history, or at least a mythologized version of the past, that, in the case of Serbia, presents Russia, a fellow Slavic and Orthodox Christian nation, as an unwavering friend and protector down the centuries.
Well, yeah, Russia has long thought of Serbia as Russia Jr. For instance, at the end of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Count Vronsky leaves Anna to go with his fellow Russian officers to fight the Turks in Serbia. And the Czar came to the rescue of Serbia in 1914 when Serbian military intelligence conspired to assassinate the Austro-Hungarian empire’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand. In World War II, the Yugoslav Communists and the Red Army fought the Germans, but after the war Tito evaded the Soviet grasp, which ended up leaving Russia more popular in Belgrade than in, say, Warsaw.
And then in 1999, the Russians at the last moment sent an expedition to Kosovo to help the Serbs. American NATO general Wesley Clark ordered a British column of tanks to open fire on the Russian soldiers. But British general Michael Jackson (not the pop singer) instead sent his tank commander James Blunt (yes, the pop singer) to charm the Russians, and the NATO-Russia war was called off (or perhaps just postponed).
But perhaps most important is Mr. Putin’s role as a lodestar for nations that, no matter what their past crimes, see themselves as sufferers, not aggressors, and whose politics and psyche revolve around cults of victimhood nurtured by resentment and grievance against the West.
Arijan Djan, a Belgrade-based psychotherapist, said she had been shocked by the lack of empathy among many Serbs for the suffering of Ukrainians but realized that many still bore the scars of past trauma that obliterated all feeling for the pain of others.
“Individuals who suffer traumas that they have never dealt with cannot feel empathy,” she said. Societies, like trauma-scarred individuals, she added, “just repeat the same stories of their own suffering over and over again,” a broken record that “deletes all responsibility” for what they have done to others.
A sense of victimhood runs deep in Serbia, viewing crimes committed by ethnic kin during the Balkan wars of the 1990s as a defensive response to suffering visited on Serbs, just as Mr. Putin presents his bloody invasion of Ukraine as a righteous effort to protect persecuted ethnic Russians who belong in “Russky mir,” or the “Russian world.”
“Putin’s ‘Russian world’ is an exact copy of what our nationalists call Greater Serbia,” said Bosko Jaksic, a pro-Western newspaper columnist. Both, he added, feed on partly remembered histories of past injustice and erased memories of their own sins.
The victim narrative is so strong among some in Serbia that Informer, a raucous tabloid newspaper that often reflects the thinking of Mr. Vucic, the president, last month reported Russia’s preparations for its invasion of Ukraine with a front-page headline recasting Moscow as a blameless innocent: “Ukraine attacks Russia!” it screamed.
… Mr. Aleksandrovych, the Ukrainian ambassador to Serbia, said he welcomed the change of tone but that he still struggled to get Serbians to look beyond their own suffering at NATO’s hands in 1999. “Because of the trauma of what happened 23 years ago, whatever bad happens in the world is seen as America’s fault,” he said.
… Serbia, he said, is “not so much pro-Russian as NATO-hating.”
Instead of moving toward Europe, he added: “We are still talking about what happened in the 1990s. It is an endless loop. We are stuck talking about the same things over and over.”
… Asked whether she approved of the war unleashed by Mr. Putin as she walked by the Belgrade mural in his honor, Milica Zuric, a 25-year-old bank worker, responded by asking why Western media focused on Ukraine’s agonies when “you had no interest in Serbian pain” caused by NATO warplanes in 1999. “Nobody cried over what happened to us,” she said.
… Predrag Markovic, director for the Institute of Contemporary History in Belgrade, said that history served as the bedrock of nationhood but, distorted by political agendas, “always offers the wrong lessons.” The only case of a country in Europe fully acknowledging its past crimes, he added, was Germany after World War II.
“Everyone else has a story of victimization.” Mr. Markovic said.
In my 2001 review of the movie “Behind Enemy Lines” with Owen Wilson playing, loosely, U.S. pilot Scott Grady, who was shot down by the Serbs over Bosnia in 1995, I noted:
The film industry has been looking for a new Ethnic Group You Love to Hate to replace Germans, who, let’s face it, are long past their sell-by date as Hollywood’s default villains.
Will Serbs work out as their replacements? After all, the Serbs were the Designated Bad Guys in the Balkan wars. Plus, there aren’t many Serbian-Americans, and, since they are white Christians, nobody cares if they complain about stereotyping.
Still, as movie villains, Serbs don’t seem like promising substitutes for Nazis. It’s so much more gratifying to watch some arrogant, facial tic-ridden movie German being thwarted from conquering the world.
In contrast, the morose Serbs seem to take a gloomy satisfaction in anticipating that ultimately the world will once again conquer Serbia, thus proving their conviction that everybody’s out to get them.
It’s just more fun to watch Hollywood heroes beat up on Nazi sadists than Serb masochists.
