Coming to Serbia, I had some idea of what I was getting into. As the saying goes, the gunpowder of Europe is stored in the Balkans, and I knew their history rather intimately. During my high school years, my classmates and I participated in something called the World War I Trials. The goal was to figure out, through persuasive defense, what nation was least culpable for the Great War. The legal team of Grossman, Wolf, and Gabroy successfully presented our evidence, refuted the counter-evidence, and through a brilliant closing argument by yours truly, we won. Which was a pretty impressive feat considering Serbia had the actual smoking gun. Later, it seemed very strange that when I was defending Serbia for past crimes, they were committing current ones in the Yugoslav Wars. Mass rapes, murders, and other war crimes against humanity were being carried out under the orders of Slobodan Milosevic as Yugoslavia was dissolving.
It was during his attacks on Kosovo that NATO got involved. They strategically bombed Serbia’s national defense building and their state television station that was broadcasting Milosevic’s orders to go out and kill for greater Serbia. NATO did their best to minimize civilian casualties, while Milosevic’s numerous henchmen did everything in their power to increase theirs.
As I walked through the streets of Belgrade, under the flashing signs advertising the Russian behemoth of an energy company Gazprom, there was a palatable disdain for the West. Their defense building and television station were left in ruins with placards enumerating the many civilian deaths and many crimes of the NATO powers. There was even a monument memorializing the deaths of scores of children. It seemed incredibly tone-deaf considering the thousands of men and boys that were murdered in eternally haunting ways in conjunction with the ten of thousands of rapes of women and girls as Serbia was grasping for territory.
And all this lead me to an incredibly fortuitous conversation. My hostel had a wonderful social atmosphere. Instead of being the typical backpackers and students, there was an older demographic. I found myself sharing drinks with an absolutely gorgeous and tall Chinese woman in her mid-40s. She had numerous tattoos, including a sleeve down her left arm. She lived in Shanghai, married but divorced due to his abuse, and decided to see some of the world before heading home to start a business. Another member of this group was a young man in his 20’s from the outskirts of Belgrade that came to town to try his hand at some local rap battles. He spoke pretty good English but could rap in Serbian, Bosnian, Macedonian, and Montenegrin. The final member was a Swedish skinhead that had a swastika tattooed on his middle finger on his right hand. Only, it was a Buddhist one symbolizing the wheel of life, as opposed to the Nazi one symbolizing the wheel of death.
We were having a great conversation about all our different lives. The Chinese woman made possibly the most astute observation of my whole journey. She said that it was really amazing that people of such different backgrounds could come together and just chat and have a good time. She said that it is personality, not nationality, that determines how well people get along in the whole scheme of things. She had no idea how right she was.
One of the hostel workers had come to join our conversation. This bespeckled woman was the second person I met after the owner. When I removed my US Passport to be checked in, she looked at it for a very long time. Then she looked up at me and said, “Ah, an American Spy.” I laughed it off, but she kept her icy stare. I would see her around the hostel, and she would ask if I was reporting her movements back to President Trump. More incidents like this happened during my tenure, very nonsequitur and very weird.
When she came in, she was on a tear. She sat down next to me and went around the room insulting everybody. She insulted the Chinese woman by saying everyone in China was nothing but dirty money-grubbing whores. The young Serbian rapper, who she thought was Montenegrin because she walked in when he was rapping in that language, said that Montenegrins were “all faggots that love taking it up the ass.” Then she got to me. She said, “But Americans are the worst. Your country is run by Zionist kikes. But don’t worry though, I know where you sleep,” as she cackled. She then praised Putin as a real leader and how Serbia should be moving towards Russian and not the EU. Behind the bar, she found a kitchen knife and started waving it around, dangerously close to my face, as if to accentuate her insanity further. I moved quickly to the other side of the room, and then the Serbian rapper told her to shut up. The Chinese woman said she did not know what she was talking about. And the rest of the people there told her just to leave. Thankfully she did, eyeing all of us as she left, leaving the knife.
The other patrons that had been there longer were used to her and gave me a bit of her background. She was studying at a local university, which was a notorious propaganda factory. They could see I was rather disturbed by her awfulness. The skinhead told me not to worry about it, and a young Serbian lady that witnessed what happened came over and cradled my head to her chest as she apologized profusely. The words of my new friends echoed around me, “Personality, not nationality.”
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