The Student Blockade Movement in Serbia emerged in the midst of a broader student, secondary school, and civic uprising, which erupted in response to the collapse of the railway station canopy in Novi Sad—a tragedy that claimed the lives of 16 people. This catastrophe was the direct result of a botched reconstruction project carried out under the aegis of systemic corruption fostered by the regime of the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), led by the current President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić.

The movement itself has evolved into a broad popular front, uniting individuals of diverse political orientations—ranging from the radical left (including anarcho-syndicalists, communists, and other far-left factions), through various liberal circles, to those of conservative patriotic convictions, who, in numerical terms, constitute the dominant majority. Yet this patriotic majority, from the outset, has articulated a firm and principled rejection of all forms of ethnic and religious chauvinism.

Thus, the apogee of the movement was not merely the mass demonstration in Belgrade on March 15, which brought together nearly half a million people, but rather the preceding student march to Novi Pazar—a predominantly Muslim city—where Orthodox and Muslim students gathered in a powerful display of solidarity against Vučić’s corrupt regime. Their protest extended beyond outrage over the canopy collapse; it also addressed the regime’s overt intention to open lithium mines across Serbia. These ventures, designed to channel meager mining royalties to multilateral corporations while enriching the SNS clan, threaten to unleash an ecological disaster of unprecedented scale, one that could ultimately transform Serbia into a swamp of toxic tailings.

The solidarity expressed between students of Orthodox and Muslim traditions is significant not only for its role in healing the wounds of the wars of the 1990s but also as the beginning of a new relationship between the Serbian Orthodox and Bosniak Muslim populations—who together constitute the majority of the ethnically fragmented neighboring state of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a country that has likewise drawn the attention of powerful multinational lithium corporations. In this context, overcoming historical traumas is of crucial importance for building resistance to this new phase of neocolonial exploitation.

The most moving moment came in Belgrade, when veterans of the past century’s wars addressed Muslim students from Novi Pazar with the greeting “Es-selamu alejkum,” expressed remorse for the nationalist hate propaganda that had driven them into war, and pledged that all children in Serbia, regardless of their faith, were under their protection.

Precisely for this reason, the student movement has come under attack from all sides. First and foremost, from the regime itself, which has mobilized its entire media apparatus—from state-frequency television channels and vulgarist tabloids to the regime-loyal episcopate of the Serbian Orthodox Church, including Patriarch Porfirije Perić himself—to brand them as anarchists, traitors, foreign mercenaries, “Serbian Ustaše,” and “organizers of a color revolution.” This, despite the fact that Vučić’s regime functions as a full-fledged proxy of Western governments, and despite Western media either ignoring developments in Serbia entirely or presenting them in a distorted light that ultimately serves the interests of the SNS-led government.

The second source of attacks has been the liberal media, ostensibly in opposition to the current regime, for whom the protests were either too leftist or too patriotic and/or Christian—or, indeed, too Muslim in character. In truth, the political forces behind these liberal outlets are unsettled by a populace that largely rejects Euro-Atlantic integration, and by extension, opposes the very same pro-Western imperial alignment that the existing comprador coalition around President Aleksandar Vučić openly advances.

Yet the gravest danger to the protests arguably comes from within—from forces that adopt a patriotic, anti-colonial rhetoric but, in a most insidious manner, seek to smuggle in radically right-wing and revisionist narratives, particularly rigidly anti-communist ones. These narratives aim to relativize the collaborationist nature of Serbian right-wing movements during the Second World War—ranging from the openly fascist factions led by Milan Nedić and Dimitrije Ljotić to the tactically collaborationist Yugoslav Army in the Homeland under General Dragoljub “Draža” Mihailović.

The most prominent figure advancing such ideological repositioning is the widely popular literary historian, essayist, university professor, and author of the thesis on “Serbian self-denial” within the Yugoslav idea—and the need for a new Serbian national and cultural integralism—Milo Lompar. Well-known for his series of critical writings against the current regime in Serbia, in which he has rightly observed on multiple occasions that it functions as a colonial outpost of Western embassies, as well as for his accurate remark that Aleksandar Vučić and his liberal, auto-chauvinistic opposition are dialectically intertwined, Lompar used the large student rally in Belgrade on June 28 to call for a revalorization of the libertarian Vidovdan ethic: the mythologized memory of the Battle of Kosovo and the assassination of the Ottoman Emir Murad in 1389.

This Vidovdan ethos has inspired generations of Serbian freedom fighters—from the insurgents against Ottoman rule in 1804 and 1815, through the participants of the 1875 Bosnian-Herzegovinian uprising, to the Young Bosnia movement members who assassinated the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and finally to the communist Partisan People’s Liberation Army, whose commanders often referred to their soldiers as “new Obilići,” invoking the legendary medieval figure of the tyrannicide, duke Miloš Obilić.

And yet, despite these claims to scholarly balance, Lompar not only, on the eve of his speech—where he also declared that “professors do not divide students into left and right”—served as one of the promoters of a new book by the convicted war criminal Radovan Karadžić, timed to coincide with Karadžić’s birthday, but in his subsequent appearances reaffirmed his position that Milan Nedić, the quisling governor of Serbia during the Second World War, was a “tragic figure.” Lompar argued: “He is not a quisling, he is a collaborator; he cooperates with the occupier, yet ideologically is not close to him at all. It is like Marshal Pétain. He was placed under duress, and what he did was somehow to help the many refugees from Bosnia and Croatia… we may say, then, that he saved the Serbian people at the cost of his collaboration.”

Lompar also asserted that the execution of Draža Mihailović marked “the end of the Serbian national idea,” and claimed that there existed a “unity of purpose” between the ideology of the Croatian Ustaše (fascists) and the Yugoslav communists. “Simply put, those two movements had one goal—to dismantle Yugoslavia as a Greater Serbian construct.”

Leaving aside the complete baselessness and absurdity of these statements—especially when they come from a man who himself is a fierce opponent of Yugoslavism and, by similar analogy, could be accused of sharing a “unity of purpose” with the Ustaše—his reasoning becomes even more questionable when one considers his critique of Radomir Konstantinović. Lompar condemns Konstantinović for allegedly suppressing mention of communist crimes, particularly failing to address the Blajburg massacre—the retributive execution of the armed forces of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH). Yet it is remarkable that this same intellectual interprets Chetnik crimes exclusively within the framework of the Partisan–Chetnik civil war, a contextual lens that completely disappears when discussing Blajburg. What, then, is the real meaning and ownership of this so-called “unity of purpose”?

The fact that the Communist Party of Yugoslavia did indeed go through an anti-Yugoslav phase following its 1928 Dresden Congress—abandoned as early as the end of 1934 in favor of advocating for a federal Yugoslavia—by no means implies any adoption of the Ustaše’s racist and genocidal ideology. This is further underscored by the historical reality that it was precisely the Yugoslav Partisans, not the royalist Chetniks or other Serbian collaborationists, who in May 1945 finally destroyed the Nazi puppet-Independent State of Croatia.

Yet Lompar, who has managed to position himself as one of the most significant anti-regime intellectual figures, does not convey this to us; on the contrary, he repeats the old, worn-out right-wing mantra from the early 1990s portraying ideological and tactical collaborators with the Nazi occupiers as “saviors of the people” and tragic national strivers—precisely the same framework that Aleksandar Vučić’s current regime employs to justify its own collaboration with corporate capital.

We do not have the space here to elaborate on the thousands of German, Italian, British, American, Chetnik, and Partisan documents that completely disprove the narrative of collaborationist actions as supposedly idealistic and noble sacrifices for the nation—nor to delve into Nedić’s well-documented pre-war pro-Hitler sympathies or to address the fact that the Serbian national idea has had, and continues to have, far too many iterations for its supposed “end” to be located in the death of the rather uninspired Draža Mihailović. But we can note that Lompar, intentionally or not, undermines his own argument.

If Aleksandar Vučić’s role in Serbia is profoundly negative because of his servility toward foreign embassies, then how can those political options that embody nothing but collaborationism—complete subservience to the interests of great powers—be symbols of resistance and the end of “Serbian self-denial”? This applies regardless of whether such collaboration involved exclusively Nazi Germany in Nedić’s case, or both Nazi Germany and Britain in Mihailović’s. And this is without even addressing Dr. Radovan Karadžić, who, beyond his responsibility for mass war crimes against Bosnian Muslim civil population during the Bosnian War (1992–1995), was, according to the testimony of his closest associate Momčilo Krajišnik, aware as early as 1991 that he was participating in the reconfiguration of Bosnia and Herzegovina within frameworks set by the United States—making him, too, a highly insidious collaborator. This is further corroborated by the memoirs of another of his close associates, former President of Republika Srpska Biljana Plavšić.

Thus, the question arises: in what sense can Lompar be considered a genuine critic of Aleksandar Vučić’s regime if the alternatives he offers merely replicate similar—or identical—patterns? The answer: in no sense at all. He fits seamlessly into the dialectic with Serbian liberals, sharing with their recently deceased ideologue Latinka Perović the belief that Serbia’s primary problems stem from collectivist, socialist, and communist modes of thought—that is, from all those who insist that the country and its resources belong to the people, rather than to multilateral corporations and the rapacious local tycoons who resell them for paltry commissions.

In this light, the goal of Lompar’s rigid anti-communism is not to critique Stalinist, Khrushchevite, Brezhnevite, or other varieties of communism that have been defunct for over a quarter of a century. This rhetoric is not merely about flogging a dead horse—it serves to delegitimize any form of resistance to the existing order that dares to go beyond the hollow platitudes of so-called “national reflection.” As Berdyaev aptly observed, “In contemporary ‘national thinkers,’ there is nothing truly national.” His observation that “national-minded” Russians—those rigid “anti-communists” in tsarist exile—would have handed Russia over to Hitler, just as the “national-minded” Francisco Franco waged war against his own people with the help of Italians and Germans, perhaps best exposes the hollowness of national zealots like Lompar.

For the way pro-European liberals disdain the figure of Prince Lazar Hrebeljanović—beloved by the student masses as a medieval prince and fighter against the Ottomans—is in no way different from how Lompar trivializes him, placing him within the framework of what he calls “democratic nationalism,” which, according to his interpretation of historical events, was suppressed by the communist “trial of General Mihailović” (at which Mihailović was convicted for his documented collaboration with the Nazis). Thus, Prince Lazar, the centuries-old epic symbol of uncompromising resistance to the occupier, is now recast as the historical forerunner of a man who, in a civil war, relied on the German occupier—on whose leash stood the Croatian Ustaše, the very founders of the Jasenovac death camp.

What is more, opposed to Aleksandar Vučić we find an entire gallery of unworthy and monstrous figures—ones that can serve only to strengthen, not weaken, his technology of rule, especially when it comes to Radovan Karadžić, whom Lompar elevates precisely at a moment of historical anticolonial rapprochement between the Serbian and Bosniak peoples.

And why is this so? Precisely because the very same ideologues are attempting to hijack the student uprising, ensuring that Serbia continues along a path of total colonial subjugation—persuading the people to follow the “honorable tragedy” of Milan Nedić or Draža Mihailović, as though the only alternative were a repressive communism that crushes civil liberties.

Let us quote Berdyaev once more: “From the fact that there are leftists who betray freedom and humanity, it by no means follows that freedom and humanity are bad principles. Right-wingers have no problem with the lies of communism, with its inhumanity and violence; indeed, they like it and even envy it. What they hate is the ‘truth’ of communism—the principle of a classless, fraternal society free from the exploitation of man by man, the ideal of peace among nations.”

In other words, the rigidly anti-communist stance in the former Yugoslav republics—especially among Serbs, who comprised the majority of the Yugoslav People’s Liberation Army during the Second World War—has no real aim of offering a critical reflection on the period of Yugoslav communism. Its purpose is to erase the fact that the People’s Liberation Struggle of that era was the only genuinely anti-colonial movement, and thus a continuation of the Serbian people’s anti-colonial struggle in the 19th century and the First World War.

In the early days of the German occupation of Belgrade in 1941, the occupying authorities and the collaborationist regime issued a call to prominent Serbian intellectuals to sign the infamous Appeal to the Serbian People—a document that, under the guise of “order and obedience,” demanded “patriotism in the fight against the communists.” This call was made in an atmosphere overshadowed by the draconian decree that 100 Serbian civilians would be executed for every German soldier killed.

One professor at the University of Belgrade resolutely refused to sign. “I cannot sign an appeal against the Partisans when more than half of them are my students. What will they say when we meet again?” he responded to the mounting pressure. When a fellow music professor, worried for his safety, warned him of the consequences and asked why he refused, the philosopher replied tersely: “It’s easy for you. You play the bagpipes; I teach students ethics.”

In his Vidovdan speech before a crowd of 140,000 students and citizens of Serbia, Milo Lompar invoked this legendary professor—Miloš Đurić, author of The Vidovdan Ethic, who, for his courageous stance, ended up in a concentration camp, while his only son perished fighting in the Yugoslav Partisan Army.

But here the question arises: can Đurić’s life, work, and liberating concept of the Vidovdan Ethic truly be used to defend political concepts utterly opposed to them? The correct answer to this question may well determine the future of the entire student movement—and of the Serbian people—amidst the age of corporate dictatorships.

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