Deretic Against Porphyrogenitus: Advantages of Guerrilla Warfare

source: en.wikipedia.org

Serbs were a Slavic tribe that settled in Macedonia at the beginning of the 7^th century, invited by the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius. They didn’t like it there and decided to make a U-turn and ride back to the unknown parts of Central Europe - Bohemia, most likely - that they came from. As they were passing Singidunum, they changed their mind and asked the Byzantine commander of the fortress to broker another deal with the Emperor and give them another land to settle. Heraclius obliged and directed them to Dalmatia. This is according to Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, a Byzantine Emperor from the 10^th century, who wrote it in De Administrando Imperio, the most relevant source about the origins of the Serbs. Can anyone with a bit of knowledge of historical circumstances at various times actually believe this? How many of these Porphyrogenitus’ Serbs were there, fifty, no women and children? I mean, expecting me to believe that an entire people could move this fast and this large in numbers, on horses or on foot is plain offensive to my intelligence, let alone economically impossible.  But this is what’s become the official Serbian history kids learn in school. 

A people’s history is what shapes its identity, for the most part. Not knowing your history means not knowing who you are and why you are the way you are; in other words, it means not knowing your own self.  Serbs, so proud of their history, appear to have generally known very little of it. Entire premises that our understanding of our own past is mainly based on, stand on very shaky legs, are easy to challenge and should be revisited and revised, if found false.

I am not going to dissect and try and overthrow the Serbian historical delusions. The point I want to base this diatribe of mine on is that the Serbian history, including its oldest periods, is crucial in crystalizing dimensions and components of our identity, that these delusions were a great contributor to the Serbian disorientation of the present and that an effort must be made to renew the study of our history earnestly, honestly and scientifically, to identify and remedy the errors, even it meant revising the entire school of historical thought.

source: svastarnica.com

While understanding the ancients’ lack of sources and a lack of knowledge of the world beyond Greek colonies of the Pontus and Danube, I cannot accept or condone historical fabrications intended to fill this vacuum. The fabrications, generalizations, misinterpretations and substitutions, so outrageously abundant, are especially unacceptable in the light of the political motivation behind them. And of course, there has hardly ever been historical knowledge, and especially a lack thereof, that wasn’t manipulated to political ends. I know this because I and all my contemporaries are witnesses to the manipulation and fabrication of information going on presently. If a Serb in Belgrade in 2012, influenced by a set of fabrications, has a hard time believing that the Army of the Serb Republic did not commit genocide in Srebrenica only 16 years ago, how can we ever expect that the events of 1500 years ago haven’t been misconstrued and one point or another to serve a political purpose?

The central question of the Serb origins deals with the determination of whether Serbs were native to the Roman province of Illyricum or we settled it as invaders. This is a watershed question as the correct answer to it opens a truckload of conclusions that undermine the entire established school of not only Serbian history, but of our understanding of the Late Antiquity and the Great Migrations. Assessing historical sources and conclusions about this period necessarily lead to Jovan I. Deretic, the standard-bearer of the so-called ''Serbian historical school.'' Deretić claims that Serbs are the autochtonous people of the Balkans and the oldest civilized people of Europe. He added to the Serbian history entire eras, stretching back to the Vinča civilization of the 6th millenium B.C. I won't even touch trying to prove or disprove his theories, not necessarily because I agree or disagree. All I can say is that I strongly support his challenges and accusations directed towards the official version of the history of Serbs, although I do have a thing or two to object to his chosen ways.

source: rovasirasforrai.hu

The information age didn't start with the advent of new technology. It's a trick played on the common people to make them think they are more informed now because their access to more voluminous and diverse sets of information is easier and more versatile.  The points of this access have indeed multiplied in numbers, but so have the controls of the access points. The relationship between the access points and their controls is under an investigation that is greatly influenced by those same controls. Essentially, we are still being fed the information about our world, no matter how many different capabilities, aiding us towards obtaining the feed, we have acquired in the meantime. The basic assumption of Deretic's “historical school” is that the Serbs have been fed their own historical data and conclusions from sources unfriendly, even hostile to our identity and our integrity as a nation. Of course, we know who our historical enemies were and we must assume that a physical obliteration has not been the only manner in which they have tried to subjugate us. In accord with some of my earlier writings, one of the key problems of the Serbian psyche is that we are not capable of seeing an enemy assault until it manifests itself physically, which often is too late. This being said, Deretić correctly proposes reconsideration of the value of information about our own self that we have been fed in the past and that we have based the knowledge of our history on, mainly because our enemies have been providing us with that information and that fact alone should make the reconsideration a must. One has to be stupid to take the information provided by an enemy for granted, right?

Thus far in this diatribe, I have stood by Deretić and his frame of thought. Where we differ is crucial. Deretić came up with a whole alternative version of the Serbian history, intending to replace the knowledge generations of Serbs acquired. According to him, everything the young Serbs have been taught since the Berlin Congress of 1878 was based on false premises stemming from falsified, misinterpreted or incomplete historiography. Where we differ and what I oppose is the way he has chosen to attempt the substitution.

I do want future generations of Serbs to learn their history presented in as accurate a manner as possible. Now, we don’t have to know what’s impossible to know and we don’t have to present a clear picture if the clear picture just isn’t available. For that reason, an attempt to entirely replace one, dominant and standing version, albeit built on shaky foundations, with another version, which, I have to notice, possesses some fairy tale-like traits, points towards amateurism in both historical methodology and strategic negotiation of educational and marketing hurdles. Needless to say, the confirmation of the latter amateurism calls into question the strength of the building blocks of the Serbian historical school as a whole. If Deretić is going about educating the public and marketing his findings in an amateurish way, how could we take him for his word that he went about his research in a scientific way? If I have a reason to doubt efficiency of the educational approach, it will lead me to doubt the validity of the historical research the theory as a whole was based on.

The official version of the Serbian history is not only accepted by most of the living and educated Serbs, but also by the relevant international scholarship, as no people’s history is an island. It is not simple to overthrow it. No substitute can take its place in a meaningful and lasting way until the standing theory is overthrown, however. Of course, a change in the political climate can lead to a ruling political option imposing one theory over the other, but isn’t that what Deretić claims happened in 1878? Does he propose his version to come to dominate in the same way? Does such an overthrow make his version more legitimate just because he will support it with a set of data and notions that will go unchallenged? How does that make him different from Stojan Novaković, whom he accuses of planting the Trojan Horse that became this official version? It doesn’t.

source: eupedia.com

I know he’d say that he disproved every one of the historical fallacies we have been taught, and that alone makes his version legitimate. Even if he did so, which relevant scientific or educational circles have accepted his claims, his research and his version? To many quite educated Serbs, his claims sound off the wall, and I don’t mean it in any kind of derogatory or condescending way. Confronting an established historical knowledge, accepted by almost entire relevant scholarship for over a century and taught in school for generations, with an alternative version of that knowledge that, honestly, does sound far-fetched in many of its elements, is not a very good strategy. Deducing that every place name in Europe and Middle East containing an S and an R in a sequence somehow has Serb associations attached to it is plain linguistically unfounded and indeed amateurish. Deretić should have first attempted to overthrow fallacies in the official version through a scientific debate acceptable by the relevant mainstream historians. Many of his claims do sound legitimate and valid and are logical, if isolated from this greater theory, but it is hard for me to accept the greater theory whose other elements are just far-fetched and grounded in premises that are not solid. The Serbian public first had to accept the logic by which Dušan’s Empire did include Bulgaria, that Serbs did win the battle of Kosovo, that there were evidences of tampering with the relevant chapters of Porphyrogenitus’ De Administrando Imperio… These specific notions had to be adopted, had to enter textbooks, in order for the official version to be undermined further. A series of small battles had to be won before someone like Deretić could become an authority that could claim the entire official version of the Serbian history is based on false premises. A gradual conquest of the field would have accelerated the acceptance of the very idea that there was something inherently wrong about what we have been taught. Trying to overthrow the official version from the position of weakness, Deretić only caused further confusion in the mind of common people. He has his followers, but are they going to be capable of effectively furthering his war for historical revision or will they just be another current in the Serbian ocean of incoherent ideologies? Are they just going to parrot his findings until veins pop out?

Strategically undermining rather than frontally assaulting the enemy is the main trait of the guerrilla warfare. The Serbian historical school is incomparably weaker than the official version, the so-called Berlin-Vienna school, and some form of guerrilla warfare would be the only manner in which a gradual substitution may take place. ‘’Substitution’’ is probably too strong a word; ‘’merging’’ of the versions in which fallacies get scientifically removed is the optimal way. Serbo Makeridov should be left for some future generations of archaeologists and historians to search for.

source: nationalgeographic.com

Finding of the Serbian organic self would be greatly expedited by filtering through our history, weeding out fallacies and confirming what can be confirmed. An arrival to more solidly founded conclusions would strengthen our belief in who we are, which in turn, would do wonders for the purification and reorientation of our national being. Proving, for example, that we, as Serbs, or under another name, did live in our historical lands before the 7^th century, that the arrival of smaller or larger number of Slavs or some other invaders under other names were just additions to our nominal, racial and cultural definition, that our ancestors, born in Sirmium, Salona or Naissus actually got to rule as Roman emperors, would solidify our historical rights to our lands, better our understanding of historical cycles and improve our functioning in unity and in our surroundings. In order for this rise in consciousness to occur, the true history has to penetrate Serbian minds from the earliest age, through formal education, and that can be accomplished only if both the fallacies and the truth are officially accepted as such. Positing the two versions like Deretić did, as standing against one another, in confrontation, in mutual denial, the official one way stronger the one challenging it, only did a disfavor to the effort to recognize the organic self, by dividing the Serbian public further and facing it with a referendum on its own history.