Writes: Slobodan L. Jovanović
Aliquid stat pro aliquo, or when something is replaced by something else is an old semiotic rule. Semiotics is the process of creating concepts, when a certain meaning and place is given in taxonomy, that is, in our cognition, to certain concepts in accordance with ideological motives and other intentions. When it comes to creating national communities, semiotics is considered one of the more important instruments for building national consciousness. Similarly, it can be an instrument in the assimilation of smaller than larger ones, or in some other strategies towards debts and different. Often, it is those who aggressively adopt others who use the maxim that, if you want to destroy a nation, take away its memory, applying this very tactic to change others’ taxonomic image of yourself with semiotics.
For more than a century and a half, it can be said freely from Ilija Garašanin's Drawings, Franjo Zah's Greater Serbia program on gathering South Slavs, Serbian scientific, cultural and other elites and the media are trying to erase Montenegrin memory and impose new semiotics on Montenegrin history and personalities. Montenegro is conceptualized as a part of Serbian history with a pronounced subordination of Montenegro to Serbia, imposing on Montenegrins the function of hyponyms according to the hyperonym of Serbs.
The commitment of the Serbian elites is best illustrated by the large number of forgeries that were very skilfully done with long-term and visionary feeling throughout the 19th century, adding in many documents the terms Serbian, Exarch of Peja, Serbian Mirror, etc., which are used today as irrefutable facts. An obvious example is the Code of Prince Danilo, printed in Novi Sad in 1855, where in Article 92, which deals with immigrants, M. Medaković inserted the words to the only Serbian in the sentence, even if there is no other nationality and no other religion in this country. …. Neither he nor many other Serbs who came and had an influence on the life of Montenegro can be denied the skill in perceiving the significance that their forgeries will have for the future great-power policy pursued towards Montenegro. The famous Serbian scientist, Jovan Cvijić, in his book Speeches and Articles from 1921, says: “… one thought and one will dominated all members of the Serbian people, so that their state territory reached the sea coast and Adriatic ports.”
Jakov Ignjatović wrote more than a hundred years ago that a Serb without his religious rites and customs does not consider himself a Serb, identifying religion and nation. In an effort to preserve the identity of its people, the Serbian Church raised the myth of the Serbian medieval state and its rulers to the highest degree during the Ottoman rule. The church undoubtedly has a great role, along with the cultural elite, in the glorification of the glory of the non-monastic state and rulers, which uses these myths abundantly in its interpretation, giving them a metaphysical meaning. Serbian national romanticism of the 19th century was an incubator of mythologized history and glorification of the Serbian ethnos and uniqueness. Since every religion has an instinct to spread, Orthodoxy has become an impetus for expansionist policies and the spread of Serbian ethnicity. For example, when, during the French occupation of the Bay of Kotor, Napoleon issued a decree in 1808 separating Boka from the jurisdiction of the Montenegrin Metropolitanate and after the act of the Austro-Hungarian Emperor F. Joseph I Nov. 6. In 1870, he founded the Diocese of Boka Kotorska and Dubrovnik, and instead of the cult of the old Christian saint, Abbot Saba the Consecrated, originally from Cappadocia, it proclaimed Sava Nemanjić its “protector”, through the church, the spread of the hitherto non-existent, ethnic Serbness.
There is no doubt that the Serbian Orthodox Church was the basic lever for Serbian expansionism, especially in the 20th century. She openly articulated her role with the emergence of Saint Sava's ideology (“Svetosavlje”) in the middle of the 20th century, which, as a national-political ideology, was created by a combination of Serbian nationalism and clericalism. Svetosavlje was conceived in the mid-1930s in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the name was sponsored by Dimitrije Najdanović, and the most important ideologue was Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović.
In addition to representing a national program based on the phrase one nation, one religion in one state that brings together all Serbs, the sainthood promoted the rejection of all foreign customs and superficial Western traditions, including democracy, equality, individualism, religious tolerance and other modernist values.
Najdanović was ideologically formed in the shadow of Bishop N. Velimirović of Žička, who in 1934 demanded that he join the D. Ljotić Choir movement, whose ideas he would remain faithful to for decades. According to him, the goal of the world is to be a holy organism, a holy people. Najdanović's starting point is that Serbian nationalism is Christ-bearing, overflowing from the gospel of love into the wisdom of our ten-year epic. He ritually repeats that our nationalism is the oldest in Europe, that a Saint Sava nationalism is possible and dry – Christianized nationalism as a nationalism of a higher order. Najdanović himself acknowledges the understanding of the nation identical with the Nazi and fascist one: Nazi and fascist totalitarianism of the two ‘Führers’ of Germany and Italy in recent days confirms in a classical way our position on the nation as an ethnobiological body…
Velimirovic also praises Hitler because he allegedly realized Luther's idea of a national church, claiming that he organized the national church with great difficulty from the Protestant part of the German people. However, respect must be paid to the current German leader, who, as a simple craftsman and a man of the people, saw that nationalism without faith is an anomaly, a cold and insecure mechanism. And here in the XX century he came up with the idea of Saint Sava, and as a layman he undertook the most important work in his people, which befits only a saint, genius and hero, said Velimirović at a lecture at Kolarac in 1935, entitled Nationalism of Saint Sava. Velimirović also claims that the nationalism of St. Sava is evangelical and organic, that our nationalism is really the oldest in Europe. Svetosavlje is being built as a totalitarian ideology according to the fascist model, which Velimirović himself does not hide.
It is worth mentioning that Velimirović says that for every Serb, the very thought that his church is run by someone from another country, that his priests are foreigners, is repulsive. The Serb, he says, is afraid of a cunning enemy who creeps into his country with a smile, to destroy all his national shrines.
In a sermon in Sremski Karlovci on the occasion of the creation of the structures of the united Serbian Orthodox Church in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, the Serbian patriarch, Varnava, says that St. Sava and the Serbian Orthodox Church are the only guardians of the Serbian national consciousness and the prisoner of the idea of liberation and unification of all Serbs into one people's state. In 1943, M. Spalajković wrote in the Spiritual Foundations of Saint Sava that the world was shaped by the “irresistible force of racial instinct” which confirms the duration and eternity of the “Serbian tribe” and thus establishes a racial paradigm of the world that expresses racial ideal patterns, which should serve the nation for prestige, as long as they last.
Saint Sava's ideology caused divisions among Montenegrins and thus formed internal opponents of the Montenegrin identity and state. The Saint Sava campaign on the entire Montenegrin cultural and historical past was organized, especially in the 1990s. Tito and Djilas are unified into one semantic entity, their cooperation in anti-Serbian activities and the division of the Serbian people into imaginary nations is revealed. A similar thing happened in Montenegro, where they tried to prove that Montenegrins, as a nation, are not of Serbian origin, writes the Serbian historian Bataković in the 2000s. In the New History of the Serbian People in the same year, it is written: On these ideological bases, it was possible to approach the creation of a special Montenegrin nation from an ethnically homogeneous branch of the Serbian people, and then the Macedonian nation.
The existence of the Montenegrin nation is denied, it is called a communist bastard, Montenegrins after all, the whole history of the Montenegrin people is semiotically changed meaning and given Serbian, completely uncharacteristic of Montenegro customs and sacral architecture are introduced, heritage is destroyed to erase all traces of authenticity. personality, denies the existence of the autocephalous Montenegrin church, despite numerous documents that unequivocally establish it… Religiously identifies with ethnic, curses and curses metaphysics disciplines the flock, changing everything in Montenegro promotes the thesis of Montenegro as a regional entity within the Serbian space and Montenegrins as similar to the people of Šumadija. Amfilohije Radović, Metropolitan of the Serbian Orthodox Church, the spiritual heir of Saints Najdanović and Velimirović, a student of Justin Popović and a follower of the most radical, most retrograde and most clerical-fascist current within the Serbian Orthodox Church, was in the forefront of all this.
New generations of Montenegrin citizens are being educated on the Saint Sava, fascist, racial and clero-nationalist ideology. They are offered deception and forgery of everything related to Montenegro and Montenegrins over the Internet. Wikipedia in all languages is being abused in order to present the history of Montenegro and its entire work and creators as part of the Serbian corpus. Theories and codes are invented that conceptualize national Montenegrins exclusively as allies of Croats, who betrayed their natural Serbness, connect or even synonymize Montenegrins and Croats, which gives Montenegro and national Montenegrins negative connotations, which Croats enjoy with Serbs. Hence the meaningless epithets for Montenegrins that connect them with the uprising from the NDH era and the stupid theory about the Red Croats. It is similar with the identification of Montenegrins with Albanians, Shiptars, as they are called.
Today in Montenegro, the Saint Sava's ideology represents the leading state ideology, under the auspices of the Saint Sava's ideology the government is elected and through it the being of Montenegro is completely changed by the action of that same government in conjunction with the Serbian Orthodox Church. The longer they are able to metastasize Montenegro, the further its future is from its authentic roots and values, as well as from European, modern civilization.