Globalizing the Holocaust: A Jewish ‘useable past’ in Serbian Nationalism

[serbian army]

http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/portal/article/viewFile/90/58

Schöpflin has stressed the purposeful nature of collective suffering, endowing persecution and victimisation with meaning. The world ‘owes’ such nations—they have ‘suffered a special debt … the victims of suffering are helpless because they suffered for the wider world and the wider world should recognise this, thereby legitimating the group’s special worth’

He has placed Holocaust myths here, as well as myths which copy the Holocaust, appropriating its symbolism

especially since the 1970s and 80s, when the Holocaust arguably became ‘industrialised’

Holocaust imagery has formed its own generalized ‘useable past’ that can be used for Serbs, and indeed any other group seeking to advance itself.



Writer argues that there was no genocide against the Serbs and that Holocaust in industrialized in order for Jews to gain the lands that never belonged to them. This book is horrifying 

Throughout the conflict, the myth of the Battle of Kosovo was touted as a key moniker of Serbian identity, figuring as the locus of a historic defeat, but also the awakening of Serbian values and spirituality. In legend, Serbian Prince Lazar was handed an ultimatum, where he was either to pay homage to the Ottoman Sultan Murad I, relinquishing control
Portal Vol. 2, No. 2 July 2005 10
MacDonald Globalizing the Holocaust
of Serbian lands and taxation, or bring his forces to Kosovo Polje to face the Sultan’s army. Lazar was later approached in a dream by a grey hawk (or falcon) flying from Jerusalem, and was offered a choice: an earthly kingdom (implying victory for his forces against the Sultan), or a heavenly kingdom, (where the Serbs would be defeated in battle but become a divine and chosen people)

How we dare to mention Jerusalem as holy place

Now writer goes to say how bad it is to say the following:

This made the links between Serbian and Jewish suffering clear and drew what later became common parallels between Kosovo and Jerusalem:
The Jewish people, before the menace of their annihilation and by the miracle of the uninterrupted memory, returned to Jerusalem after 2,000 years of suffering, against all logic of history. In a similar manner, the Serbian people have been fighting their battle at Kosovo since 1389, in order to save the memory of its identity, to preserve the meaning of their existence against all odds.

So it is really really bad to think that Kosovo is for the Serbs what Jerusalem is for the Jews? We do not have any right to call this our sacred land and claim that Jerusalem only belongs to chosen people-the Jews?
So story continues my friends. We are terrible people for remembering genocides and our sacred lands.