Ամերիկացիները, Թուրքերն ու Սոդոմականությունը

Վերջերս շատ եմ հաճախում sobaka պարբերականը։ Հետաքրքիր նյութեր ունեն… կիսաճշմարիտ ու հեքիաթային… ինչեւէ, այս մեկը դեռ չեմ կարդացել, բայց օրերից մի օր կկարդամ։

Americans, Turks and Sodomy
What the Rest of the World Thinks of You

by Danilo Ljubovic
August 13, 2002

AMERICANS ARE GOOD PEOPLE. When they find out that someone hates them, they want to know why.

It is not false modesty as some people think. The Americans I have known are just not well informed about the rest of the world and what their government does to it. The view from elsewhere is of an American government stripped to the shoes, banging the Third World from the backside. The French, the British, and the others are spectators or voyeurs, watching in silence, muttering to themselves how horrible it is sometimes, but usually unable to look away from the lewdness in front of them. The American people are the old grandparents, cooking and going on with their life and not knowing at all what the children are doing.

Serbs are sure they are hated and don’t care. It does not bother us very much to know what the rest of the world thinks of us. Do we think it is justified? No, of course not. Because we are hated, we think that the reason no one likes us is because we are misunderstood.

“Who do you think invented the fork?”. Why, the Serbs did, of course. This is supposed to be something, I don’t really know what though. I guess the idea is that we were civilized beings when you were still trying to spear the meat with big iron spoons. This means that Srebrenica did not happen, that vans full of bodies do not exist at the bottoms of rivers, because we invented the fork.

Our knowledge of the fork also makes all of the things that we believe in correct. Like when it comes to the Third World, since we are a cultured and civilized people that have had clean fingernails the longest, our reasoning that the Albanians are terrorists or that the Bosnians want to turn us into fundamentalists like them is also correct. Since these people were also eating with very large spoons, you can’t believe what they say. You can’t even trust yourself, since you were eating with large spoons too.

We have other reasons for our dislike of Americans, though, reasons that are more complex than this spoon and fork argument. Committing your country to bombing our cities was certainly a part of that! Mostly it was because you were convinced we were evil from the start. Again, we don’t care if you hate us, but when you moved from a basis of misunderstanding to war, we are obligated to hate back a little. We also don’t like you because you patrol land that we think is ours, and we are obligated to hate people who do that here. I don’t think you’ll be here longer than a century, so there will not be any great epic songs written about you like there are about the Turks, but we might write some slogans now and again.

The misunderstanding that started this is now, in our eyes, the law in the Balkans. In Bosnia, under the Dayton peace treaty, the Serbs who speak against the state are removed from elected positions and banned from ever running for office. To be “against Dayton” is illegal, and presidents, mayors and ministers have been fired by the High Representative for that. In Kosovo, though, the Albanians who are in office, every single one of them, insist that Kosovo will be independent in less than five years. They are not fired for violating the UN Resolutions that Kosovo is a portion of Serbia, but rewarded with fancy titles and chauffeurs. This is your fault. Injustice like this makes people not think the best of you.

But back to American people, for a moment. They don’t know the details of this. The American government thinks nothing of firing an elected president or not. The American people don’t know.

When you ask them “Why do you think we dislike you?” Americans will sometimes say, “Well, your media said we were devils, that’s why!” They say the same thing about the Arabs. The Saudis dislike Americans because the newspapers say “Americans are evil,” television says it, and so on, and that media campaign against America and Israel is why they blow themselves up just to kill some of you.

Now, we had a little bit of free media in Yugoslavia, with some good debates which were legal if they didn’t go too far. So Yugoslavia isn’t a good example. But look at the USSR. Everything was blamed on Americans, Americans this and Americans that, it was the Americans who sabotaged factories and salted fields and that is why there were fewer automobiles and people were hungry. But when Americans were permitted to travel in the USSR freely, what happened? People were curious, they wanted to know all about you. I know this is true because they wanted to know about me, a little Montenegrin with an Italian camera taking pictures of everything. So the evil state media propaganda did nothing there.

Ironically, it’s you, with your free media, who are positive that the rest of the world is made up of brainwashed zombies who want to kill you because of your modern refrigerators. How many times on CNN have they interviewed a Palestinian who says, “We hate you for supporting Israel”? Thousands, probably thousands of times. Is it too much to think that these inferior people are capable of coming to their own conclusion? Is it hard to imagine they are telling the truth? their truth, not yours? When thousands of Serbs were in the street to party while NATO was bombing, were they brainwashed too? (Me, I wasn’t with them, so don’t accuse me of something as stupid as that was.)

It’s an American world, it’s stupid to question that. Great Powers like the Americans can do what they want, the morals don’t matter. We, who invented the fork centuries before your country existed, can take the long-term view of things and know what to do, to pass the time, because your empire will be like Austria-Hungary some day as well.

But you’re not content with owning it all, with snapping your fingers and having things your way, issuing ultimatums to the Macedonians or the Serbs or Croats or Bosnians. It’s not enough to grind against us. You also want us to smile as you give it to us from behind, telling you you’re the best we’ve ever had.