By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
They say taste is character, and character is destiny.
Our aesthetic choices have a very real bearing on our ethical ones, and those, in turn, define the way we will live and die. The sentence “I find that distasteful” often refers neither to a cake nor to a dramaturgical choice in a popular Netflix series, but to an act born of a moral or ethical decision. Far be it from me to suggest that refined artistic taste implies high ethical standards. Quite the opposite: history is full of concentration camps and execution squares where sublime classical music rang out before the gas was released and before heads began to roll.
If we have learned anything, it is this: higher cultures are the most efficient at exterminating people of lower cultures. There is no barbaric act that cannot be justified if it is committed for cultural reasons. Just look at the filthy European right-wingers whose stupid and shameless “wise” elaborations Knezevic and Mandic are trying to imitate – and they are hardly the only ones. When Europeans barged into other people’s countries, cultures and lives during centuries of colonial oppression, they were said to be spreading faith, culture and civilization.
When people from the former colonies are coming to the West, however, it would be good that we defend our way of life and traditions. When we break into your house and rob it, we are spreading the teachings of Christ and our magnificent culture. When we break into Venezuela and steal its oil, we are spreading democracy and the rule of law, i.e. civilization. But when you come here to work for our capitalists because we ourselves are too expensive as labor, you are barbarians and therefore a threat to our faith and culture. Obviously, when we looted your pyramids and ravaged archaeological sites, when we filled our museums with your cultural treasures, it wasn’t theft but culture in action. Because European fascists say: “And you can take that kebab of yours, the one you sell outside the museums where we still make money exhibiting what we stole from you, shove it up your ass, and get back to your deserts, you goat-fuckers.”
Do you know why the Great Pyramid of Giza is still in Egypt? Because it was too big to move to the British Museum. What can I tell you: the Louvre is a museum, but it is also Ali Baba’s cave – a place where stolen treasure is kept.
But that’s not what I want to talk about today.
From Toma and Šaban to bloodshed is only one step – that is today’s thesis. Forgive the brief digression: the only thing worse than love songs about women are love songs about the motherland. As bad as ‘Ej, od kad sam se rodio’ may be, ‘Pljuni i zapjevaj moja Jugoslavijo’ is even worse.
Please consider the unbearable whining of beta males in our songs. She left him; he goes to the tavern and drinks excessively, inconsolable, waiting for a swift end, thinking of her day and night, deep in the self-destructive spiral into which she sent him when she said, “No. Not anymore”.
Men here are taught from childhood there is something sublime about suffering for the woman they love. They are taught to be betas instead of having this drilled into their heads: when she doesn’t want you anymore, you say, “Thank you. All the best. Next”.
But no. Sinan wails, Kićo Slabinac wails, everyone is inconsolable and will forever love the woman they will never stop loving. Davorin Popović hopes she can hear the pain, because he sings for her alone. Goran Bregović, who is an alpha but played music for betas, loves her but wishes her the worst. He wants punishment: if there is a God, you will burn in hell, he says. Bora Đorđević cries in a public toilet where some welfare case asked him for two dinars to get in, as though he couldn’t sob somewhere else, somewhere that stinks a little less.
Man, it’s okay. You’ll find a woman, just wash yourself and pull yourself together. We are not going to send women to hell or curse them because they don’t want to be with us. There is always one who will: it is merely a matter of statistics and overcoming the fear of rejection. Even if you are the absolute worst, you will find someone. You just have to ask enough times and eventually you will get a “yes.”
But no, as I said. The culture here produces a whole template of women destroying men. They cheat, throw everything away, leave, betray. His feelings, meanwhile, are sincere and profound – the opposite of the lies she told him.
And there we are, already one step away from some moron shooting the woman who left him: because there is no life for him without her, and if there is no life for him, there will be none for her either. Powerful resentment leads, as a rule, to crime. Resentment is an important cause both of femicide and of the war crimes committed by the beta cunts around here.
So: femicide here is profoundly culturally conditioned; it stems from the culture itself. And it can’t be prevented without cutting into that culture. Changes to the legal framework are not enough. The point is not to punish femicide, but to prevent it.
Let us now mention some positive examples, the opposite of the beta whining of the abandoned male. Take ‘Voli te tvoja zver’ by Divlji Andjeli, for instance, a masterpiece of Yugoslav pop in which this song stands entirely apart, something with neither predecessor nor successor.
That’s how it’s done, yeah.
I will also use the opportunity to praise Stoja, who, in songs that are admittedly hideous and unlistenable but lyrically and ideologically intriguing, betrays the idea of the Balkan sister-wife-mother-martyr. There is no whining with Stoja: when they hurt her, she sets the river club on fire.
Stoja, let us recall, suggests that he parade her around for everyone to see, from Paris to Vienna to Rome. In return, she asks for half of everything he owns. I mean, if your entire fortune is €200 and you give her a hundred, fine… Anything beyond that is profligacy of the kind associated with dispossessed aristocracy.
And just when you think there’s no man suffering to that extent to pay her that amount, you remember that, actually, there is one. There is Zeljko Samardzic saying that everything of his is hers as well, that he does not ask the price, but the only condition is that she wants to be with him.
Where men spend forty years wailing because a woman left them, no healthy and rational economy of relations between men and women is possible. Nor can there be a regulated sexual marketplace where men agree to anything and never ask the price. It seems that antitrust laws are needed there too, to limit the arbitrary power of wealthy sufferers.
(The opinions and views of our columnists aren’t necessarily those of the CdM news team)
