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On the eve of 20th anniversary
page # 70 of the Memorandum SANU, 1986
(draft; typewritten in Serbian cyrillic)
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Memorandum
SANU (Serbian Academy of Sciences and Art) appeared in the fall
of 1986, prepared by the leading Serbian intellectuals who claimed
it is their responsibility to react when their nation is in moral
and ideological turmoil. The document asserts rather realistically
inept conditions of the current political and economic environment.
However, the conclusions of the document are neither scientific nor
artistic: other nations in the Yugoslav federation are to blame for
the Serbian misfortunes and a forceful destruction of the federation
is anticipated. Slobodan Milošević, the President of the
Serbian Communist Party, was even more denotative in 1987: "We
shall fight to protect Serbian nation by all institutional and
extra-institutional means." The war started in 1991 with the
attack of Yugoslav Army (transformed into Serbian Army) on Slovenia
and Croatia.
The
association of intellectuals with violence occurs too often to be
dismissed as an aberration. Often it takes the form of admiring
those 'men of action' who practise violence. Mussolini had an
astonishing number of intellectual followers, by no means all of
them Italian. In his ascent to power, Hitler consistently was most
successful on the campus, his electoral appeal to students regularly
outstripping his performance among the population as a whole. He
always performed well among teachers and university professors. Many
intellectuals were drawn into the highest echelons of the Nazi Party
and participated in the more gruesome excesses of the SS. Thus the
four Einsatzgruppen or mobile killing battalions which were
the spearhead of Hitler's 'final solution' in Eastern Europe
contained an unusually high proportion of university graduates among
the officers. Otto Ohlendorf, who commanded 'D' Battalion, for
instance, had degrees from three universities and a doctorate in
jurisprudence. Stalin, too, had legions of intellectual admires in
his time, as did such post-war men of violence as Castro, Nasser and
Mao Tse-tung.
Paul
Johnson: Intellectuals, Harper & Row, New York, 1988.
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