The news that Dragoslav Bokan is set to give a lecture at the Serbian House in Podgorica on the broad, rhetorical theme “Will the Serbian People Survive?” is, in itself, hardly deserving of special attention. In Montenegro, we’ve become well accustomed to such low-cost provocations orchestrated by Serbia’s ruling SNS regime and President Aleksandar Vučić himself—especially when they conveniently serve to prop up their former ally, now to Belgrade’s great dismay, the opposition DPS party, which favors a rigid and aggressively anti-Serb strain of Montenegrin nationalism.
However, this is not just about Bokan. His appearance offers a useful pretext to lay bare the ideology behind the so-called bloc of “patriotic intellectuals”—a group to which he proudly belongs, and which forms the loudest chorus of apologists for Vučić’s regime. We are dealing with the same well-rehearsed figures who continue to shape public opinion in Serbia via state-controlled media, and whom the outgoing Minister without Portfolio, Đorđe Milićević, recently gathered into an “expert team” tasked with implementing the project “Serbian National Interests: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.”
The stated aim of this initiative? A campaign against “historical revisionism.” Among its chief architects are, unsurprisingly, Aleksandar Raković, Darko Tanasković, and the ever-present Dragoslav Bokan.
One could easily write an entire study on the headaches we’ve endured in Montenegro—and more broadly—from the Raković-Tanasković model of “defending Serbdom.” But before even setting foot in Podgorica, Dragoslav Bokan offered a statement that was, in every sense, quintessentially him—characteristically flamboyant, inflammatory, and revealing. In doing so, he essentially answered the very question posed in the title of his lecture on Serbian survival.
Here’s what he said:
“Opposition auto-haters, regional spies, Serbian nationalists consumed by hatred for Vučić, petty-bourgeois snobs, ultra-urban ‘city slickers,’ hyped-up ‘rebels without a cause,’ nihilists and anarchists, woke cultists, pseudo-zealots of the Artemije variety, flushed-faced kids, overinflated students… on March 15th, they will learn the hard way—on their own skin—what a state truly is… And what’s so tragic about a ‘civil war,’ if it carries within it something healing, something Njegoš-like—‘the purging of rot from the flock’—for the salvation of the entire nation?! The greatest tragedy is the internal rotting of the national soul, without any means of reaction, without any form of resistance to this infection.”
Let’s set aside, for now, the typical Stalinist-style listing of “enemies of the people” deemed a “contagion” to be eradicated. But to suggest that civil war, bloodshed, and “the purging of rot from the flock” are not inherently tragic? Where do such anti-Christian, sadistic, and merciless views come from—especially when voiced by a prominent intellectual and media figure who frequently speaks on state-funded platforms in the name of the Serbian Orthodox Church and the Christian identity of the Serbian people?
This is certainly not just a continuation of Bokan’s infamous screed published in Duga magazine back in 1992, where he ominously declared:
“There is a justified fear that in the near or distant future, once we finish the war with the external enemy, we will open an internal front…”
What remains profoundly underappreciated in Serbian society is the extent to which the neopagan and anti-Christian ideology of Dragoš Kalajić—Bokan’s intellectual mentor and guiding figure—permeated the Serbian right during the 1990s. What was then presented as a “return” to the ancient Serbian Christian tradition was, in truth, something entirely alien to that tradition.
Kalajić—who inspired the formation of the paramilitary group White Eagles, and who, as editor of the influential weekly Duga, maintained a close relationship with the Slobodan Milošević regime—exerted significant influence on the wartime leadership of Republika Srpska through figures like Dragoslav Bokan (one of the White Eagles’ commanders) and Sonja Karadžić (daughter of Radovan Karadžić, wartime president of the Bosnian Serbs). Kalajić had the ear of Radovan Karadžić himself.
And Kalajić was unequivocal in his contempt for the Gospel ethos. He openly rejected Christian humility and compassion, and unabashedly championed paganism and the blood-and-soil ideology—a worldview rooted in mystical nationalism, racial essentialism, and authoritarian violence.
If anyone finds Bokan’s bloodthirsty contempt for students—whom he regards as weaklings and “the wretched,” deserving of beatings and humiliation—at all surprising, they need only turn to the writings of his mentor, Dragoš Kalajić, on the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate. In the fourth century, Julian famously renounced Christianity and returned to a syncretic form of Roman paganism. Kalajić exalts this turn, contrasting it with what he saw as the degeneracy of early Christianity:
“Far beneath the ambiance of scholarly refinement, there spread the influence of a heterodox sect known as ‘Christians,’ conquering the souls of the wretched, the uneducated, and the easily led—encouraging and exploiting the basest instincts of the human element (ranging from social and cultural envy to mortal fear). It preached the superiority of ignorance over knowledge, ugliness over beauty, baseness over nobility, humility over dignity and pride, the law of the herd over the rights of the free individual… offering vengeful, lascivious delights in spectacles of the destruction of the world of values and the slaughter of the exalted. It promised collective ‘salvation’ for the chosen—or rather, for the members of the Christian party (thus rendering meaningless all personal striving and the fruits of self-cultivation), along with the eternal life of reanimated corpses in an eschatological utopia.”
Given that such views would be scandalous to most Serbs—whether devout or simply traditional in their faith—those promoting them resorted to mimicry. In 1993, in the midst of war and international sanctions, Dragoslav Bokan founded the glossy magazine Naše Ideje (Our Ideas), with editorial offices in both Belgrade and Pale. The publication brought together a number of right-wing figures—Isidora Bjelica, Dejan Đorić, Dragoš Kalajić, Sonja Karadžić, and others. In the very first sentence of the first issue, Bokan openly declared his true objective:
“Just as the walls of Serbian monasteries rest upon much older foundations of vanished Temples of a forsaken faith—thereby preserving the sanctity of these once-and-forever chosen places—so too does Naše Ideje rest upon the shattered foundations of that Europe which disappeared forever the moment people began to speak of its unification; that Europe which devoured itself in suicidal wars without victors.”
In other words—and unmistakably inspired by Kalajić—churches, monasteries, and the Serbian Orthodox Church as a whole were meant to serve as a façade for something fundamentally anti-Christian. In this case, it wasn’t merely a covert—at times even overt—apology for German Nazism and Romanian fascism, as expressed by Isidora Bjelica’s praise of the Iron Guard, or Dejan Đorić’s romanticization of Adolf Hitler. Nor was it limited to the promotion of racial eugenics, antisemitism, the neopagan and anti-Christian theories of Julius Evola, or the racist variant of Russian Pan-Slavism.
It also encompassed everything that the post-Yugoslav regimes of the 1990s embodied in practice: predatory privatization, the subjugation of the country to a colonial-style dependency, unspeakably perverse war crimes and sadistic violence against Bosnian Muslims, mass rapes, and the deliberate erasure of their cultural heritage during the Bosnian War (1992–1995). All of it was carried out under the rhetorical veil of a “return to eternal Europe,” and framed by declarations—like that of Isidora Bjelica in Naše Ideje, Issue 1, p. 39—that hailed Corneliu Codreanu, founder of Romania’s fascist Iron Guard, as an “Orthodox role model.”
All of this, ultimately, served the ideological rehabilitation of Dimitrije Ljotić, leader of Serbia’s minor but deeply fascist Zbor movement in the Second World War.
It is hardly surprising that such an essentially neopagan ideological hodgepodge found favor with Serbia’s ruling SNS government—not only due to the well-documented sympathies that, according to Vojislav Šešelj (a radical Serbian nationalist and leader of the Serbian Radical Party during the 1990s ) , Aleksandar Vučić (then a loyal errand boy for the Radical Party, now President of Serbia) held for Dragoš Kalajić.
Kalajić’s life, however, ended as ambiguously and opportunistically as it was lived. His close associate, Dragoslav Bokan, buried his ashes in a Serbian Orthodox funeral ceremony—deceiving the immediate family about the date and time of the burial. In the aftermath, Kalajić’s daughter publicly expressed horror at what she described as the desecration of her father’s remains, stressing that he was—and remained—a pagan with deep contempt for all existing forms of Christianity, with the exception of Orthodoxy, whose survival he believed could only be ensured through its full paganization.
This belief is clearly reflected in Kalajić’s final writings. Despite expressing some admiration for certain figures, such as the then-Bishop of Jegar (now serbian Patriarch Porfirije Perić), and even calling Pope John Paul II his “Slavic brother,” Kalajić remained utterly faithful to his ideological convictions. He went so far as to argue:
“It will become necessary to reveal to the faithful the truth that Christianity is but a single branch of the greater tree of Euro-Aryan religiosity, and that Jesus Christ is an avatar of the ancient Iranian Savior (Saošyant), also born of immaculate conception, who appears at the end of every cosmic cycle to conquer death and evil.”
In line with Nazi-era neopagans of the Second World War, Kalajić held that the Old Testament must be cast off as “poison,” and that the Book of Revelation should also be rejected—he had previously referred to it as “a bloodthirsty project.”
It is worth noting that one of the most prominent regime-aligned intellectuals, Darko Tanasković, described Kalajić’s persona and legacy as nothing less than:
“One of the most sovereign figures of our entire modern age—indeed, of all time—whom we have mostly been afraid to recognize and whose call we have feared to follow beyond the seemingly safe (sub)terrestrial borders of earthly mediocrity and the imposed codes of various ‘correctness’—be it moral, artistic, ideological, or political.”
Kalajić may be gone, but the project of vulgar, Nazi-inspired paganization of Serbian spiritual and cultural heritage continues through his ideological heirs. Like every ideology cloaked in the name of “Europeanism,” this one, too, hides behind a façade of order and patriotism while concealing its walking dead.
Disgraced pedophiles holding high positions in the Church, Saint Sava decorations draped around the necks of corrupt politicians, mobsters, war criminals, and murderers; pornographic tabloids offering icons as holiday gifts; the cowardice of the Church’s leadership in failing to take a clear stance against the tyranny and betrayal of the comprador elite; political talk shows featuring the same parade of so-called “patriotic intellectuals”—including Tanasković and Bokan—who preach that the SNS regime in Serbia and beyond is the best of all possible governments, warning that all dissenters will pay dearly unless they fall in line, and declaring that we are too blind to recognize the blessings of turning the country into a lithium graveyard.
What’s worse, this ideological framework is being actively exported to Republika Srpska (and all of Bosnia and Herzegovina), as well as to Montenegro. And not merely to entrench vulgar neopaganism disguised as Christian tradition as the dominant narrative among Serbs, but also because it enters into vulgar synergy with Montenegrin Dukljanism and Sarajevo’s neo-Kalajism—each a distorted spin-off of Croatian far-right pravash ideology.
Its primary purpose is to cast Serbian identity as a grotesque scarecrow, thus manufacturing the illusion of an authentic national narrative and anti-colonial posture. Yet if there is anything truly Christlike in Serbian history, it is the collective suffering in the name of freedom and justice—not the imitation of conquerors and oppressors.
What may be the deepest humiliation inflicted upon us by the Kalajićites—and one they continue to impose—is the insertion of the colonized into the colonizers’ own racist-esoteric narratives. The history of the Serbian people is many things, but it is certainly not a history of colonialism or the exploitation of other peoples in the name of a “higher culture” or a “superior race.” Quite the opposite: Serbian history is, by and large, the history of the colonized—of freedom fighters and warriors who eventually wised up and resolved never again to fight on behalf of foreign interests, especially not German ones.
Or, as Duke Aleksa Nenadović—father of Prota Mateja Nenadović—so powerfully declared at the close of the 18th century:
“…the Emperor is abandoning me and the entire Serbian people, just as his ancestors abandoned our own forefathers. That is why I am crossing back over the Sava, and though I have no scribes or other learned men, I will go from monastery to monastery and instruct every monk and priest to write it down—that never again shall a Serb place his trust in a German.”
And yet, by the end of the 20th century, we find ourselves saddled with an induced Stockholm syndrome—the belief that German imperialism wouldn’t have destroyed us, had we only learned European solidarity in time. Worse still, we are handed a leader who merely pretends to resist it. Vučić’s regime is the ultimate manifestation of that grand deception, so it is no surprise that Dragoslav Bokan is among its most prominent spokesmen. The “Iron Guards” he once lionized in the 1990s are now nothing more than modern-day gangs of thugs and human jackals who terrorize Serbia’s youth into silence and submission.
It can be said—without a shred of exaggeration—that the Serbian people survived Benjamin Kállay in the 19th century (the Austro-Hungarian governor of Bosnia and Herzegovina who sought to impose a German-conceived, artificial “Bosnian nation”)—only to be ambushed from around the corner by the Germanophile neopagan Kalajić. Little wonder, then, that his followers are so terrified of the new generation—because today’s youth are far too smart to fall for their dumbed-down ideological parlor tricks.
The post The Regime of Aleksandar Vučić and the Neopagan, Anti-Christian Right appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Vuk Bačanović.