What we are witnessing these days is nothing less than a massive societal shift. Some claim this shift will have profound consequences. Looking at the origins and history of some of these changes, I sincerely hope not.

As William Voegeli writing in the American Mind noted, “For those who belong to the various victim groups, a life well lived entails finding new levels of meaning and attachment, getting deeper and deeper inside the experience of being black, female, gay, disabled, etc. The ultimate aspiration and resolution of identity politics can be considered in terms of how the question looks for those inside the identarian coalition, and then for those outside.”

But those of us not ‘from’ the anglosphere as it were, have seen all this before.

In other words, we have seen to date is the result of ‘Slavoserbianism’ – a term coined 150 years ago in the Austro-Hungarian empire to denote a situation where fake victimhood became a mythomania that in the end was wielded as a weapon against society itself, a war in which this slavoserbianism almost succeeded in destroying mankind.

The term 'slavoserbianism' began as a way to describe how the Slavic Serbian ethnic minority used invented and imaginary grievances to try and leverage political power from Vienna.

Over time, that same minority began to mass delusions like '1 million Serbs died in WW2', or ‘Jesus was a Serb', which in a way is very similar to what we’ve see in the US recently, where claims of craziness like: ‘Obama is a secret Muslim', 'gender is a social construct', ‘Trump won by a landslide', 'there are 57 genders', 'men can be women' and 'there is a pedophile dungeon under the local pizza shop’ is peddled by those trying to leverage power from Washington DC.

This mentality (or as some would claim, mental illness) has many names in the English-speaking (Anglophone) world - 'victimhood identitarianism', 'Critical Race Theory', 'Grievance politics', and of course, the now all-too familiar, 'wokeism', etc but in the end, all we are talking about here is good, old-fashioned narcissism and bullying.

Trans radicalism for example has exploded in most of the anglophone world, and hand-in-hand with it came those identifying as being 'trans', where in some parts of Australia, like Queensland for example, it has grown by 1100% over a 3-year period.

And as we’ve seen recently in another Australian state, Victoria, it has grown a propensity for violence.

‘Is the politics of victimhood moving into its violent phase?’ asks Brendan O’ Neill in Spiked. “It’s something we need to think about. There have been some febrile and heated incidents in recent years that suggest that hyper-victimhood, the belief that your identity group is the most put-upon of all and might even be on the cusp of eradication, is nurturing a vengeful attitude among activists; an unstable level of intolerance against all those you judge as your persecutors.”

But this so-called ‘trans radicalism’ is just another manifestation of slavoserbianization, albeit in a neoliberal framework, where violence is used as a tool for a political end - ie raw power. The only difference now is that this manifestation has been combined with the glorification and celebration of victimhood by the Western mainstream media.

At the same time, “Victimhood nullifies moral accountability, but oppressorhood demands it. Those who claim to be victims of racism can blame all their failures and transgressions on racism, but those accused of racism can never blame it on anything other than their own depravity or obliviousness”, writes Voegeli.

A practical example of this where the recent comments by US White House Press Secretary Karine Jean Pierre, where instead of offering solace to the victims of a mass shooting at a school carried by a trans person, she said in front of the world's press; ""Our hearts go out to the trans community, as they are under attack right now."

This absurd (and some would say thoughtless and provocative) statement was echoed by many liberal journalists as well as so-called radical trans activists who claim they are being what they term, 'genocided' and who have sought to justify the shooters’ actions by claiming equal fault lies with both the school and the victims – which is almost verbatim the language used by Serbian extremists to justify their Srebrenica massacre in 1995.

                                              

This was pointed out in an op-ed in Haaretz by Hikmet Karcic: “For many years, the Serbian media has pushed the narrative that the 1995 Srebrenica genocide is an international conspiracy aimed at defaming the Serbs. They have enjoyed a constant measure of success. During and right after the war, the Serbian establishment denied there had been a genocide of Bosnian Muslims or that Bosnian Serbs had been perpetrators in that genocide or any of the other mass atrocities committed between 1992 and 1995.”

In this, and many other ways, the West is becoming a society much in the same vein as Serbia, one that willingly celebrates a mentally ill and deranged psychopathic terrorist that sparked World War 1 by the name of Gavrilo Princip to (actual) sainthood (in 2015), alongside one that virtually beatifies a violent drug user with a long criminal record by the name of George Floyd.  

The West too has now openly begun to celebrate pedophilia, much like Yugoslavia did with its worship of a pedophile in the form of communist leader Tito (he was 29 while his wife was 14) and that too is also not all that far from the West that sees no problem with promoting autogynephilia ie a male's propensity to be sexually aroused by the thought of himself as a female or their top politicians cross-dressing and in one case, even stealing women's clothing.

But this kind of warped thinking can have dire consequences. As noted by Arab News in 2012: "When in 1914, Austria declared war on Serbia after a Serb called Princip had assassinated the Hapsburg heir in Sarajevo, Russia came to Serbia’s aid, and the first of two connected world wars began which would cost approaching 100 million lives."

The mythomania described here is much like Janus, the double-faced god of doors, gates, and transitions. Janus represented the middle ground between both concrete and abstract dualities such as life/death, beginning/end, war/peace, and barbarism/civilization. 

Therefore, so too can slavoserbianism have a range of dualities. Says the New York Times: "More than two decades after the fighting ended in the Balkans, many Serbs still dismiss war crimes in Srebrenica, where Serb soldiers massacred more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in 1995, and in Kosovo, where brutal Serb persecution of ethnic Albanians prompted NATO’s 1999 bombing campaign, as the flip side of suffering inflicted on ethnic Serbs."

And this attitude has manifested itself in other ways as well, in fact, 9/11 was the penultimate in this victimhood identitarianism and expression of grievance politics.

As UK magazine Spiked wrote a couple of years ago, "Twenty years on from 9/11, Osama Bin Laden is still viewed as the ultimate evil outsider. The foreign enemy who brought death and destruction to America. The implacable foe of the West, and of modernity more broadly... In many ways, bin Laden was as much a product of the West, and in particular of its politics of grievance, as he was its most feared terroristic enemy. His reign of terror can be seen as a violent manifestation of what has since come to be known as wokeness."

To ignore these societal lies is to approve, and in the end what the US is doing, as Noam Chomsky wrote in his book, 'Manufacturing Consent' is promoting these 'mass entertainment lies' that are the exact mirror image of each other and two sides of the one fake coin.  

For example, for nearly three years - in fact right up until a few days before the 2020 election, patrician democrats like Hillary Clinton in an interview (on their official mouthpiece MSNBC) claimed Trump was 'illegitimate', even after being 4 years in office.  

And thus providing a doppelganger to years of Democrats fake grievances, since early November 2020, former President Trump whined that Joe Biden and his electoral win itself are now also illegitimate. 

In other words, while years prior to that, as Democrats screamed that ‘Trump would steal the election', now Trump claims that‘Biden stole the election' and has used his Army of Despicables to try storm the US Capitol building in 2021 in an embarrassing attempt to ty and forcibly overturn the election result.  

And sure, thanks to our multi-facet communications platforms, we can all scream at each other at the same time and claim that ‘my personal truth is the 100% real truth', but all you are doing is participating in this same exercise of ‘Slavoserbianization', which like in the Balkans, in the West, was predicted (but not called by that exact name of course) a while ago by the likes of Aldous Huxley, Malcolm Mcluhan, Neil Postman, George Orwell and many others.  

In fact, this ‘slavoserbianism' was defined way back in the 19th century by Croatian parliamentarian, human rights advocate and political philosopher, Dr Ante Starcevic as being one where: “Slavoserbs are not so much a race as they are a particularly corrosive and backward mentality and an insidious political and cultural layer of society that infects our country and seeks to destroy it from within."  

This is what we are now seeing manifest out of the cultural sewer across the US, Canada, parts of the EU and also Australia, almost as if from the madrassas of Karachi and Kabul the poison flows directly to the lecture halls of Harvard and Yale.

“Al-Qaeda and bin Laden in particular were keen followers of the fads and thinking of Western opinion-formers, particularly radical and liberal ones. Of course, bin Laden’s speeches were peppered with the thoughts of Islamist ideologues and Muslim Brotherhood leaders,” wrote Spiked.

“But these seemingly religious declarations sat oddly alongside quotations from Robert Fisk and Noam Chomsky, a feverish embrace of Western conspiracy theories, concerns about climate change, and a bristling against ‘Big Media’ and ‘bloodsucking’ corporations. Bin Laden was an ideological magpie, always seeking the on-trend woke concern through which his desire to manifest his ‘intensely personal feelings’, to give voice or violence to his movement’s culture of grievance, might be most aptly and impactfully expressed.”

For the Serbs, playing the victim card, as influential magazine Foreign Policy pointed out, has long been perfected as a legitimate political power play – albeit one that at the same time has caused the deaths of nearly 2 million people since 1900.

                                                    Another outcome of slavoserbianism / Time.com

In the end, it took the combined might of NATO to finally quash what was an insidious and ultimately, genocidal idea.

For highly diverse and multicultural western societies, allowing a range of minorities to do the same could well prove to be their ultimate undoing, meaning that in a twist of perverse irony, the only way to destroy slavoserbianism may be by actually having more slavoserbianism.