menu : site index

 

On the eve of 20th anniversary

Memorandum SANU (1986) : p. 70 of the draft, typewritten in Serbian cyrillic

page # 70 of the Memorandum SANU, 1986

(draft; typewritten in Serbian cyrillic)

 

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.

 
 

 
2006-05-21
2006-05-14
2006-05-07
2006-04-30
2006-04-23
2006-04-16
2006-04-09
2006-04-02
2006-03-26
2006-03-19
2006-03-12
2006-03-05
2006-02-26
2006-02-19
2006-02-12
2006-02-05
2006-01-29
2006-01-22
2006-01-15
2006-01-08
2006-01-01
2005-12-25
2005-12-18
2005-12-11
2005-12-04
2005-11-27
2005-11-20
2005-11-13
2005-11-06
  
previous
 

WEBSITE  EDITOR:
Krešimir J. Adamić