I heard something about what war is the first time I started school in 1935, at the same time as math puzzles, the secrets of natural history, reciting poems learned by heart, the meaning of which I often did not understand. We learned how King Petar I Karađorđević passed through Albania and received the title Liberator, his son Alexander commanded the army, that he was called the Unifier. We also learned about color in Kosovo. In the beginning, all this was school material for me, I had to learn it, I had a good memory, it was not difficult. I didn't think much about how it all really was, how the people from that great history felt, but I sometimes asked my grandfather, I asked my father. Grandfather would smile, he once showed me four officer's sabers that he owned as a reserve medical captain of the Austro-Hungarian army. Dad was recruited in Austria-Hungary, went through an officer's school, was sent to Albania, he talked about "firing from the edge", they didn't know who was fighting against whom, the Serbian army, various Albanian tribes, corpses in the snow, he had deserted and he struggled to make his way home through war-torn Europe. He usually told me about it in the evening when we were sitting by the warm stove. I liked to listen to stories about the war, but he preferred to recite to me the ballads of Goethe and Schiller or read the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde. In my head, everything seemed like a story - ballads, sabers, wars, and red blood on white snow. I didn't realize that some of that was a reality for someone, like it was for me when I got the bike. Of course, I had no idea that a certain Adolf Hitler was preparing a new war in Germany - World War II.
That was more than eighty years ago. Am I, this old man who writes, the same as that child?
WAR AND DUMBIOUS PEACE
These days, constantly, now in real time, the concepts of war and peace are imposed on me in a different way. "War and Peace" is an excellent title of Leo Tolstoy's novel, one of the most important texts of world literature, it is logical that I remembered it and rejected it because now is not the most suitable moment to analyze the characters of the brave Andrey Bolkonsky, the beautiful Natasha Rostova and my dearest Pierre Bezukhov. Compared to Napoleon's battles, wars are fought today with much more terrible weapons, and countless more people die. War is a worry that haunts us day by day, even though I and my loved ones live in peace. However, no guarantee how long it will last.
With nice words "Peace of God!" Orthodox Christians will wish each other a Merry Christmas for a few days. "Shalom Aleichem", the Jews greet, "Salam Aleikum", the Muslims. Everyone wants peace in words, just about everyone, but they make war by calling on the god in whose name they greet each other, wishing for the peace they destroy. We live with terrible contradictions.
Discussions about the war arise both at the bar table and when we gather around the home table. It will be a topic for some on New Year's Eve and at the Christmas celebration.
We experience some wars today with nervousness and concern because they are geographically close. The nearest border of Ukraine is a two-hour fast drive away from us, a neighborhood so to speak, for more distant armed conflicts we shrug our shoulders or have not even heard of them. Admittedly, we in Serbia experience many things more painfully than other Europeans, especially the Scandinavians or the Swiss; not so long ago we felt on our skin what it looks like when bombs fall around you.
As a child, I listened to how in my Banat in 1940 they sang to the tune of the people of Beća, "We love that we are neutral". I didn't know what or who these neutrals were, but I liked the way it was sung, so I didn't immediately think to ask. The song didn't help us. In April 1941, Hitler's "pikes" unleashed their burden on Belgrade, and in April 1944, I found myself in Auschwitz.
THE TRADE OF SLAUGHTER AND THE INDUSTRY OF DEATH
History is largely an enumeration of wars, the creation and destruction of states, the emergence and disappearance of nations. The hieroglyphs in the pyramids testify to this, the prophets of the Old Testament tell. All that is happening to us today is nothing new.
Sigmund Freud, a researcher of man, and Albert Einstein, a researcher of nature, corresponded on various topics, so in 1933, Sigmund wrote to Albert: "I assume that man possesses only two types of instincts: either they are such that they want to preserve and unite, I call them erotic in the sense of eros in Plato's 'Feast', sexual extended to the popular concept of sexuality - or others, who want to destroy and kill; in short, I call them the drive of aggression and the drive of destruction".
Aggression as something positive, aggression of love? It seems to me that this analysis can be applied without further ado to the wars that occurred both before and after that letter, and in a special way to the wars fought throughout the late Yugoslavia. Some feel pleasure, almost sexual pleasure, when they kill, when they realize that they have the power to take another person's life. Perhaps nowhere was this more clearly expressed than in a place called Jasenovac. Something became clear there. Today, few people remember that the name of that place - where horrible manual labor was done, where people cut people's throats, executioners felt the blood of the victims splashing on their own hands - is so beautiful. The SS hated getting their hands dirty by killing, first they invented soul trucks, then gas chambers. They have built an industry of death, rising above the simple craft of slaughter.
WAR TO WAR
Just listing the wars in the 20th century makes my head spin: Second Boer War, Russo-Japanese War, First World War, October Revolution, Greco-Turkish War, Spanish Civil War, Japanese-Chinese War, Second World War, War in the Pacific , Korean War, Algerian Liberation War, Vietnam War, Cambodian Civil War, Sudanese War, Hungarian Uprising, Suez Canal War, Guatemalan Civil War, Bay of Pigs War Cuba, the Iran-Iraq war, civil wars in Yugoslavia, NATO bombing of FR Yugoslavia... In the 20th century, there were about ninety conflicts and civil wars.
I also list where all the wars have been fought during the last two decades: the fighting was fought in Afghanistan, we read about the war for the Ivory Coast, the Third Gulf War, the Chadian Civil War, the Houthi War in Yemen, the Sri Lankan Civil War, the Lebanon War, the in the Caucasus between Russia and Georgia over Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the civil war in Libya, the war in Syria, the war in Mali, the war in the Central African Union; right in the center of attention are Houthi attacks on ships in the Red Sea, so America and Germany send warships to ensure navigation, the war in Ukraine, Israel's war against Hamas, the Third War for Nagorno-Karabakh... In this, XXI century, we have already thrown up to twenty armed conflicts.
The essence of this enumeration is that part of humanity is constantly at war, and the other part, in the modern age, watches, and sometimes cheers for someone, on television and on the Internet. I envy Switzerland, but we are here where we are.
RUSSIA UKRAINIAN AND ISRAELI PALESTINIAN WAR
The war that Russia is waging in Ukraine is not only close to us, but somehow close to us. On television every evening I absent-mindedly observe the ruins of houses, corpses, artillery fire, drones and rockets, hard faces of fighters, crying children, desperate women. They speak in a language that is close to us, when they are sad - we understand almost everything. The citizens of Serbia understand their suffering better than all other Europeans, they recently experienced something similar. I do not hesitate to express my personal opinion: the siege of Sarajevo was more terrible.
Ukraine has an open border to the west, women, children, old people can leave, yes, it's terrible because they leave their fathers, husbands, brothers, property, but save their lives. Residents of the central part of Sarajevo could possibly escape only through a narrow tunnel under the airport, they were not only blindly hit by cannon shells, snipers from the hills even shot children if they dared to go to the well for water, because the water supply had long ceased to function . Is it really possible that among those killers from the mountain heights there were some of my acquaintances? I'd like to dismiss that thought, but can I? In Sarajevo under siege it was more terrible than now in unhappy Ukraine.
The war between Israel and the armed Palestinian organization Hamas stole Ukraine's place at the forefront of media attention. Like many conflicts, this one is actually a "surrogate war". On the one hand, America is with Israel, the countries of the former mass murderers, Germany and Austria, shyly cheer for it, on the other, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Kingdom of Jordan, and Turkey are with the Palestinians. In the Gaza Strip, children, women, and the elderly are starving, sick, and dying under the greatest torture, and they have nowhere to run and see no salvation anywhere. I argue that it is more terrible than anywhere in our country at the worst moment.
For me personally, it's even worse. I have close relatives in Israel, my uncle's sister, her children, her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I can't judge with a cool head, and until October 7, the bloody feast of Hamas, I was cheering for the Palestinians, for the state as envisioned by the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl - a common land of Jews and Arabs.
COMING WARS
And that conflict will somehow end. It will stop in a while. And wars in the future?
After the First World War, the Society of Nations was founded "so that something like that would never happen again". World War II happened. After his end, the United Nations was founded "so that something like that would never happen again". It's happening, except the whole world is at war at once. It is terrible to use the expressions "happening" or "happened" for such torments of hundreds of thousands of people. We don't have the right words for what is "happening", but we must not be dumbfounded.
The US and Russia are increasingly interested in the Arctic from a military point of view. Until recently, it was mainly an area under Russian control, but recently America can dispose of Swedish and Finnish bases and airfields. The situation has changed. A new arena for military clashes when one day the conflict finally freezes in Ukraine?
I am afraid that the horrors in Ukraine and in the Gaza Strip, the threats in the Red Sea and near the North Pole are small skirmishes compared to the mutual threats of China and the US in the Pacific Ocean. That largest body of water on the globe is not quiet at all. Looking for potential armed conflicts, it is no longer enough to look at the maps of individual countries, we have to look at the entire globe.
The supposedly open conversation between Biden and Xi was interesting. They walked in a beautiful park, secretaries and bodyguards did not see each other. The Chinese president is fluent in English. Presidents acted peacefully. Maybe it is the possession of weapons that can destroy the world that will guarantee peace in the 21st century. Be that as it may, America is no longer the world's policeman and judge, there is China, currently weakened Russia. Was the ominous Orwell wrong? Let's hope.
More and more often we see images of uniformed characters in darkened rooms using stickers and buttons to control missiles that target individuals and as "collateral damage" civilians. We call murdered children, women, men civilians because it is boring to say that they are innocent. I am afraid that more and more people will be killed from dark rooms. We saw the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Barack Obama, watching the killing of the enemy from a comfortable armchair on the screen. Where it is necessary to clear the grounds, if it is absolutely necessary to go "on the spot", they will send androids. What good will artificial intelligence do if it can't handle it?
Shouldn't New Year's issues of newspapers be cheerful, optimistic, a source of hope for happy days with a new date? Let's think about how all this previous pre-holiday ominousness is actually science fiction. Literature. Fiction. Fiction. Dear readers, you love to get goosebumps, don't you?
I play from YouTube Balašević: "Just so that there is no war!"
It remains for me to wish the believers and non-believers with all my heart the peace of God, shalom Aleichem, salaam Aleikum.
