Fools are proud of what the wise are ashamed of – Serbian saying

Nebojša Pavković, a convicted war criminal and a former Yugoslav Army general who was sentenced to 22 years in prison for war crimes, died in Serbia, aged 79, after being released from prison in Finland on health grounds.

His funeral at Belgrade’s Alley of Distinguished Citizens was attended by members of his family, his wartime comrades, retired generals, and officers of the JNA (Yugoslav People’s Army), VJ (Army of Yugoslavia), and Serbian Army, including Vladimir Lazarević (also convicted before the ICTY), Ljubinko Djurković, Veselin Šljivančanin (you guessed it, convicted of war crimes), Ljubiša Diković, and Dragan Živanović. Also in attendance were Serbian government ministers Bratislav Gašić, Nikola Selaković, Milica Djurdjević Stamenkovski, Chief of the General Staff of the Serbian Armed Forces Milan Mojsilović, former government ministers Danica Grujičić and Aleksandar Vulin, as well as former Prime Minister of Serbia and Deputy Prime Minister of the FR Yugoslavia Nikola Šainović (yup, convicted of war crimes).

Fans of the Serbian basketball team Partizan said farewell to Nebojša Pavković at a game on the 24th of October in Belgrade.

https://twitter.com/PartizanNet/status/1981792236686950871

A Euroleague basketball match in Belgrade, Serbia, on October 14th between Žalgiris from Lithuania and the home team Red Star (Crvene Zvezda) started with a pre-match performance of a song dedicated to Russia, which was reported with glee by Sputnik Serbia, which couldn’t help but label Žalgiris as a “club known for its Russophobic attitudes“.

https://twitter.com/SerbiaBased/status/1978413012374421963

On October 11, both the student protesters and the government supporters held rallies in support of Kosovo Serbs, before the local elections in Kosovo, which were being held the next day.

And here we have approximately 250 student protesters who began a march towards Novi Sad in commemoration of the November 1st canopy collapse tragedy. Try spotting a difference in their appearance, messaging, and political iconography as opposed to that espoused by the ruling coalition. You couldn’t find any.

https://twitter.com/DnevnaDCacanina/status/1981988934558048594

The student protesters are the people whom foreign commentators, such as Florian Bieber, dub as “an extraordinary experiment in democracy”.

https://europeanwesternbalkans.com/2025/10/17/bieber-student-list-in-serbia-is-an-extraordinary-experiment-in-democracy/

In his interview for Savremena politika, Mr. Bieber goes on to say that “It [the student ticket] cannot offer a comprehensive political alternative, but it doesn’t need to. It doesn’t offer a complete programme, but I don’t think it needs to because it’s a nearly pre-political struggle in the sense that it seeks to establish the basic conditions for politics. 

Maybe this is a misunderstanding. It’s not saying “we offer a different policy solution for certain issues”. This is not what it’s about. It’s offering the conditions for having a discussion about politics.“

Florian Bieber is right on the money. See, the Serbian student and civic movement, just like Vučić’s big tent coalition, is a bit like the Pinhead from Hellraiser – terrifying yet so exquisitely empty. You can make out of them whatever you need at that moment – democrats, pro-Russians, left-wing, pro-Palestinians, Christian nationalists, environmentalists, whatever. It is a mix of scaring the bejeezus out of people with lunacies like honoring war criminals and Russian murderous imperialism, while displaying overt hyper-conservativism, but everything can be sanewashed by Biebers of this world and his local Serbian counterparts, who keep pushing the idea that this is somehow a referendum, established moderate opposition parties be damned.

It is no small wonder that in a country where war criminals are honored, Russia is adored, and lost territories are somehow still Serbian, that only the students and the ruling Progressives are legitimate options in Serbia. Every other political affiliation is not crazy and stupid enough to fit into the virtual reality where everything in existence is somehow the EU’s fault, and only mining in Serbia is an imaginary extraction of lithium, while Kosovo is somehow related to low-quality Chinese canopies.