What do today’s shooting of Muslims at a mosque in New Zealand and the upcoming Russian thriller «Balkan Frontier» have in common? It may seem absurd to ask such a question. But, unfortunately, there is every reason to ask it, and the answer will be quite sad.
Many Western commentators have already noted the disproportionate influence of Serbian Chetnik figures, symbols and heroes on today’s terrorists. Here, for example, is a fragment of the names of the heroes who inspired him.
Bayo Pivlyanin, Milos Obilich, Novak Vuyoshevich — as we can see, Serbian names make up almost half of the names written on the bullets that killed Muslims today.
Moreover, in order to carry out his act of terror, which he streamed online, the killer listened to the popular song of the Serbian Chetniks, «Remove kebab» — a motto under which they and their Islamophobic colleagues from around the world imply the physical destruction of Muslims.
But the same heroes are essentially glorified, or at least their myths are reproduced and their mill is fed by a new Russian thriller — «Balkan Frontier». In the style of a solid Hollywood blockbuster, it shows Russian viewers how brave Russian special forces protect poor Kosovar Serbs from Albanian thugs.
Of course, these viewers are not told how, ten years before the events so colorfully portrayed in 1999, the Serbian army and death squads spread fear and terror among Kosovo’s Albanians in order to suppress their struggle for autonomy, which triggered the collapse of Yugoslavia. The collapse began because when its new leader — the Great Serbian Chauvinist Slobodan Milosevic — brought Yugoslav troops into Kosovo, another Yugoslav republic — Slovenia — did not want to remain in such a country, and Croatia followed suit. Without both, Bosnia did not want to remain in Yugoslavia, which was turning into Greater Serbia, and in response, Milosevic decided to punish Bosnia and Croatia by introducing Yugoslav forces into parts of their territories with Serbian populations. As a result, hundreds of thousands of Muslims were expelled from their homes in Bosnia, tens of thousands were killed, tens of thousands of Muslim women were raped, and in Srebrenica alone, some 8,000 Muslim men, all teenagers, were systematically and cynically executed, making it the largest massacre in post-war Europe.
None of this is told to the viewer, of course. Instead, they will be instilled with sympathy for the «suffering» Serbs, who are now heavily armed and incited by the Kremlin to pursue a confrontational policy that could lead to a new war, about which we have written many times.
Now, let’s combine points A and B and ask ourselves: if Serbian chauvinist propaganda could drive an obsessed individual on the other side of the world to shoot worshippers in a mosque, what effect can its dissemination in all the country’s cinemas have in Russia, given the ideology of Russian-Serbian Orthodox brotherhood instilled in this film (and not only in this film)?