Srdja Trifkovic
Serbs and the West: Roots of Misapprehension
An international symposium to be held in Belgrade on January 24-25, 2000
The NATO war against Yugoslavia marks a significant turning point, not only for the United States and NATO but also for "the West" as a whole. The principle of state sovereignty, and of the rule of law itself, has been subverted in the name of "humanitarian" intervention. Facts have been converted into fiction, and even the fictions gave up all pretense to credibility. Old systems for the protection of national liberties, political, legal and economic, have now been subverted into vehicles for their destruction.
But so far from demonstrating the vigor of Western nations in their ruthless pursuit of an ideology of multi-ethnic democracy and international human rights, the whole Balkan entanglement is seen - by an increasing number of Western thinkers - as a disturbing revelation of the West's moral and cultural decay. In the words of Thomas Fleming, a prominent American author and journalist,
Western democracies, incapable of telling the truth or assessing reality, anesthetize their citizens with massive doses of pop culture and political propaganda. To counter the bold moves made in Europe by a newly insurgent Islam, the West offers only irresolute compromises and world-weary defeatism.
The significance of what has come to pass in the Balkans over the past decade therefore transcends the immediate destiny of Kosovo, or the rest of Serbia. A group of Balkan affairs analysts at The Lord Byron Foundation has therefore decided that it is time for Serbs and Westerners to get together and assess the implications of these developments. According to the Foundation's chairman, Sir Alfred Sherman,
They need to scrutinize the real significance of the rampant Western Serbophobia, and the equally incomprehensible Serb incoherence. They need to contemplate their future, to find the courage and the means to rebuild the different wings of their common civilization.
As a first step toward understanding the challenges that we all face, the Foundation is organizing a conference in Serbia at the end of January that will seek to define the quandary of "the West" as manifested in the Balkans and to offer positive strategies to those Serbs who wish to remain part of the modern world without becoming helots of a "post-human" new international order.
On January 24 and 25 foreign panelists from four countries will come to Belgrade to hold a two-day symposium, jointly with the Union of Writers of Serbia. They include former Canadian ambassador in Belgrade James Bissett, Dr. Michael Stenton from Cambridge University in England, Dr. Fleming, Sir Alfred Sherman, and Jürgen Elsässer who is the editor of Konkret Publishers in Hamburg. Serbian participants will include Slobodan Rakitic, Dr. Vojislav Kostunica, dr Kosta Cavoski, dr Nikola Milosevic and others. It is expected that The Lord Byron Foundation - established in 1994 as a non-partisan research institute - will thus further contribute to its goal to correct the current trend of Western policy and public commentary, which tends not to understand events but to construct a propagandistic version of Balkan rivalries.
Over the past five years the Foundation has provides a forum and a platform in five countries and three continents for specialists and commentators who wish to reassert their independence against the neo-imperialist trend that has been strongly present in the mass media treatment of the Balkans over the past decade.
The organizers of the symposium in Belgrade hold that the problem of the Balkans under the ?New World Order? is inseparable from the quandary of America under the bipartisan regime inside the Beltway, or that of Europe "united" under Bonn and Brussels. Can any meaningful unity of nations sharing European heritage be restored? To what extent, how, and why has the modern, secular, "post-Christian" West inherited the antipathy of West to the carriers of the Byzantine tradition? How do those two traditions converge, and how do they diverge, amidst the continuing onslaught of New World Order secularism?
The purpose of the conference in Belgrade will be to consider whether such old historical animosities, fanned by new political ambitions, can be countered by the upholders of traditional values. It will seek to monitor the role of the West along the old fault lines of Eastern and Western Christendom in the former Yugoslavia. Such issues are not merely political. They are as much "cultural" as theological, and they have been political all along. It is on the way we deal with them today that the future of our civilization will depend.
Accordingly, the participants will seek to counter prejudice and ignorance about an area of the Old Continent which need never be the "powder keg of Europe." Though the Balkans, however delineated, contain many states and even more nations, they have one thing in common: for most of history they have not been masters of their own fate, but objects of policy by dominant outside powers. Though sometimes depicted as generating wider conflicts, the peoples of the Balkans in most cases had these conflicts foisted upon them by powerful outsiders. The way in which the Realpolitik practiced by outside powers blew up in their faces time after time is a leitmotif of Balkan history. According to the chairman of Foundation, Sir Alfred Sherman,
Even if all history - as a philosopher argued - is in some measure contemporary history, it need not be dominated by the obsessions of the day. The work of The Lord Byron Foundation is based on the belief that the cause of tolerance in a troubled region can never be advanced by misrepresentation or by the sentimental lapse of seriousness which judges one patriotism as admirable and condemns another as inadmissible. Our work, therefore, is not only about the Balkans; it is not only about Western policy in that region either. It is not only about the problem of globalist hubris, nor is it only about the decline of Western civilization. It is about all of the above. Each problem in the equation is inseparable from the rest.
After the two-day event in Belgrade the guests from abroad will travel to Podgorica for a one-day St. Sava Academy that will be organized by the Metropolitenate of Montenegro and the Littoral on Wednesday, January 26. It is intended to publish a book with the proceedings of the conference as soon as possible.
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©1999 Serbian National Defense Council of America - contact: editor@snd-us.com
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