On Milosevic

I have to brag about my famous brother and at the same time provide you with some quality reading about Milosevic and Serbia. Feel free to tranfer the ideas to the USA, the victimhood of the fundamentalist Christians etc.

First, here is an article about a talk my brother gave in Alberta the other day:

Lecturer examines 'poisonous zombie swamp' of Serb politics

and here is a little bit older paper, but excellent and still relevant paper (PDF):

KOSOVO IS THE MOST EXPENSIVE SERBIAN WORD: POLITICAL ENCHANTMENT AND MILOSEVIC’S RISE TO POWER

Update: As usual...no, as always, journalists get some things wrong. So, in the first article above, there are a couple of mistakes (you may also have noticed a typo on one of the copies of his last name).

First, he has no mixed feelings about Milosevic - his feelings are entirely negative. He said:

"I don't recall my exact words, it could be that I said something like "I haven't yet sorted out my emotions," but I definitely did not mean that my feelings were "mixed" - for "mixed feelings" could be interpreted as if I could also entertain some positive feelings towards Milosevic, or sadness over his death - and in that respect my feelings are not mixed at all - all my "feelings" toward Milosevic are decidedly, and quite unmixedly negative! "

Second, it says there that "....conspiracy theories make up a founding characteristic of the Serbian people...". He never said that. Conspiracy theories are universal - Serbs did not buy any exclusive rights to them. Also, no self-respecting anthropologist will ever utter the phrase "founding characteristic of X" as the anthropological police would immediately come to take him away (insert a winking smiley-face). Something like thet would belong in the genre of "national character", something he writes about only from a distance, mostly ironically, and he is in no way involved in studying "national characteristics of the Serbian people".