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Comparative and International Politics Branimir Anzulovic, Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide (Annandale and New York: Pluto Press in association with New York University Press, 2000), xiv + 233 pp., $33.00, ISBN 0 8147 0671 1.
What can an intellectual do when confronted with human destructiveness, injustice, and ideologies like nationalism, fascism and the like? If they feel deeply that they are on the right side of the conflict and that they must do something, what are the possible courses of action open to them? On the one hand, they can engage in an ideological battle betraying the search for truth and accept a `little bit of distorting the truth' under the excuse that the end justifies the means. In the heat of ideological, and even more of real, wars, it is difficult to keep `scientific objectivity', the capability to look at reality from different angles, even those which are not favourable for their side in the battle. The attempt of Branimir Anzulovic to discover the ideological underpinning of Serbian ultra-nationalism presents a good example of a solid scholarly work on a topic that provokes passion and is far from being 'neutral' for the author. The motives of the author in undertaking this analysis were not that of a dispassionate analysis of the structure, history and development of Serbian nationalism. The motives were the attempt by the author, who belongs to one of the victimised groups, to understand the destructiveness of Serbian nationalism at the end of the twentieth century. But in spite of this, those who will expect another contribution to longstanding nationalist propaganda will be disappointed. We have here a well-researched attempt to understand the evolution of the mythical component of Serbian nationalism.
The model which Anzulovic presents is characteristic of all nationalisms in the region. There is a myth of a specific 'calling' of the nation. Almost every Christian nation in Eastern Europe has a self-image of the 'bulwark' against the Ottoman (Muslim) inroads into Europe. Ask...