Politics & Power Quote by Slobodan Milosevic

An aggressor’s lament is still propaganda, and Milosevic’s line is built to do one job: turn anxiety into permission. By framing “foreign command” as a cultural solvent that melts history, symbols, and even “their own literary language,” he escalates politics into existential threat. Not policy disagreements, not economic pressure, but a slow-motion erasure of a people. That move matters because once a community is cast as being on the brink of extinction, almost any “defensive” act can be sold as necessary, even if it’s brutal.

The language is a deliberately crowded inventory: history, past, tradition, symbols, way of living, language. The repetition functions like a drumbeat, creating the feeling of total siege. “Quickly forget” is the sly trick. Forgetting sounds natural, almost innocent, as if subjugation works by osmosis rather than by censorship, violence, or coercion. It also shifts agency away from perpetrators and toward an abstract “foreign” force, making accountability harder to pin down.

Context sharpens the cynicism. In late Yugoslavia’s collapse and the wars of the 1990s, claims of cultural endangerment became a political accelerant: the rhetoric of protection that rationalized domination. Milosevic wraps nationalist grievance in the language of cultural preservation, a softer wrapper for hard power. The subtext is not “remember your history” but “submit to my version of it,” where memory is curated, dissent is suspect, and “foreign” becomes a catch-all for neighbors, international institutions, and internal critics.

It works because it weaponizes intimacy: your language, your symbols, your daily life. You’re not asked to support a program; you’re asked to defend your mirror.