Slavoserbianism and the Rise of Myth, Grievance, and Moral Erosion in the West

Abstract:

Drawing on historical patterns from the Austro-Hungarian empire and the bloody legacy of the Balkans, this essay examines how the weaponisation of victimhood—what 19th-century thinkers once called Slavoserbianism—has resurfaced in Western culture under new guises. The politics of pain, once marginal, is now mainstream, threatening the ethical and epistemological foundations of democracy itself.

A 150-year-old little-known Balkan concept offers a startling mirror to today’s Western malaise: a culture where identity trumps reality, victimhood grants immunity, and grievance becomes strategy. As ideological fractures widen, and emotional narratives displace rational discourse, the question arises—has the neoliberal order unwittingly adopted the very pathologies it once opposed?

What we are witnessing in Western political and cultural life is not merely a shift, but a metamorphosis of tectonic proportions. It is a turning of the soul—a slow drift into something at once familiar and foreign. To those outside the Anglosphere, it rings with an eerie resonance.

As William Voegeli, writing in the American Mind, noted, “For those who belong to the various victim groups, a life well lived entails finding new levels of meaning and attachment, getting deeper and deeper inside the experience of being black, female, gay, disabled, etc.” Identity, once a point of departure, becomes a permanent dwelling.

The ultimate end phase of slavoserbianismm / Wikipedia

It is a pattern those acquainted with the Balkans of the 19th century might recognise. ‘Slavoserbianism’—a term born in the Austro-Hungarian twilight—described how grievance, real or imagined, evolved into mythomania, and mythomania into political leverage.

Croatian political philosopher Dr. Ante Starčević framed it as less an ethnicity than a “corrosive mentality,” one that seeks to dismantle civilisation from within.

Note Dr. Ante Starčević meant all civilisation – western included.

It is as if one would dissolve all Seven Deadly Sins into a semi-coherent political theory.

The parallels to today’s identitarian posturing in the West are not hard to see. Mass delusions, once the province of Balkan nationalists like the claims of “one million Serbs” dead in WWII or that “Jesus was a Serb”—now echo in claims that “there are 57 genders,” “gender is a social construct,” or that “a paedophile dungeon lies beneath a pizza parlour.”

Slavic. Fibula by Sandi Susersky

These fictions, once confined to fringe conspiracy nuts, now play on the main stage, and at times, even at times in the Oval Office.

The barbarians, are well and truly within the gates.

Some have called this a psychological affliction. Others, a political strategy. Whatever its diagnosis, its modern names are many: Critical Race Theory, wokeism, grievance politics. But its character remains constant—narcissism, turned militant.

In global terms, think BLM, anti-Semitism, the overt racism of ‘From the River to the Sea’, as well as radical transgenderism and the continual obsession to slay some mythical creature known as ‘White Supremacy’.

“Is the politics of victimhood moving into its violent phase?”, asks Brendan O’Neill in Spiked. Recent rhetoric, he argues, suggests a dangerous mood—one that views opposition as persecution, and persecution as provocation for vengeance.

The term ‘Slavoserbianisation’ is apt. It is the instrumentalisation of grievance, often in tandem with violence. Voegeli notes that “victimhood nullifies moral accountability,” whereas the accused—branded ‘oppressors’—are afforded none.

Many recall Karine Jean-Pierre, the former White House press secretary, who, responding to a school shooting by a trans assailant, said: “Our hearts go out to the trans community, as they are under attack.” The cognitive dissonance was staggering—and chilling.

This reactionary empathy mirrors the rhetorical jujitsu of Balkan propaganda. As Haaretz’s Hikmet Karčić has observed, Serbian media for decades has characterised the Srebrenica genocide not as atrocity, but as conspiracy—a war crime reframed as a lamentable necessity.

Srebrenica. / Wikipedia.

The West now enshrines its own secular martyrs. Gavrilo Princip, who triggered World War I, was canonised in Serbia in 2015. George Floyd, a man with a highly troubled past, has been beatified by liberal America. The symbolism is powerful, and selective.

Just as Tito—Yugoslavia’s communist dictator—married a 14-year-old at age 29, Western culture too has blurred the moral and sexual lines. Autogynephilia, gender dysphoria as well as at times, multiple paraphilias, are no longer private conditions, but public identities, sometimes celebrated by political elites who, quite literally, cross-dress for the occasion.

And yet, the stakes are real. Arab News once reminded us that the assassination of an archduke by a lone radical in Sarajevo led to a war that killed nearly 100 million. Myth, grievance, violence—these are not harmless social fictions.

Slavoserbianism, like Janus, wears two faces. It offers victimhood and power, grievance, and righteousness. And as The New York Times recently noted, many Serbs still downplay their crimes in Srebrenica and Kosovo, viewing them as counterbalances to their own perceived suffering.

‘Serbia must die’ – cartoon from early 19th century / Wikipedia.

In this worldview, even 9/11 becomes a grievance. “Osama bin Laden,” Spiked argued, was a “product of the West,” a disciple of its “culture of grievance,” reciting Noam Chomsky as fluently as he did the Qur’an.

That culture is now a global lingua franca. As Jim Stewartson wrote in September 2023, we’ve allowed “aberrant psychopaths to change the way people think… [using] our ability to connect with each other as an attack surface to erase our humanity.”

And so, the playbook continues. Serbs perfected victimhood politics to devastating effect—despite there being over 2 million non-Serbs dead or ‘ethnically cleansed’ since 1900. It took NATO to stem the tide.

The West, in its multicultural earnestness, risks enabling a similar descent—one grievance at a time.

But there will be no NATO to save the West.

The irony is cruel: Slavoserbianism may now be the only way to defeat Slavoserbianism. As Donald Trump announces “reciprocal tariffs” on much of the planet, the United States has firmly claimed its place amongst the aggrieved.

Victimhood, weaponised, has reached the White House.

We are at DEFCON 4, culturally speaking.

The next war will not be fought abroad – it will be fought on the streets of London, Los Angeles, Paris and Berlin. And it won’t just be televised – it will be Live Streamed, Instagramed, Posted, Twitched, Discorded, and of course, Googled.

Source: Wikipedia.

The battlefields of the 21st century are no longer trench-lined nor jungle-dense. They are digital, ideological, and increasingly domestic. The culture wars now unfold not merely in the comment sections of newspaper websites or cable news panels, but in school board meetings, corporate HR policies, and the self-curated identities of online avatars. And at the heart of this conflict lies a paradox: a society that proclaims tolerance yet weaponises grievance.

This isn’t merely intellectual drift. It’s a structural transformation of how liberal democracies conceive of power, morality, and truth. The shift from merit to identity, from evidence to emotion, from dialogue to denunciation, has birthed a new orthodoxy—a secular catechism of suffering, where the loudest victim sets the terms of debate.

Slavic man by Vladimír Dlhý / Pintrest

In this schema, facts are less persuasive than feelings; contradiction is heresy. The figures of authority are no longer public intellectuals or elected officials, but social media influencers and ideological enforcers. We are ruled not by philosophers, but by performance artists in the theatre of pain.

And what is pain if not power? What Slavoserbianism illuminated—long before the West understood it—was that victimhood, once canonised, grants impunity. The wounded cannot be questioned. Their motives are sacrosanct, their rhetoric, inviolable. All opposition to the prevailing orthodoxy is cast as abuse. All dissent is now an act of symbolic violence. “Words are violence”, as the blue-haired gender studies majors would shriek.

This is how liberal societies begin to cannibalise themselves. The Enlightenment ideal of rational discourse has collapsed into a cacophony of competing resentments. The very infrastructure that once enabled democratic self-governance—universities, media, courts—now resembles a battleground of wounded egos and curated trauma.

The oppression olympics are open.

In this mirror world, even the extremists borrow from each other. The Taliban, once cloaked in medieval theology, now issues press releases with hashtags. American radicals, once symbols of free expression, now chant for censorship in the name of safety. Grievance is no longer the path to justice; it is justice itself.

One need not defend the old guard uncritically to mourn what is being lost. There is a reason why Orwell, Huxley, McLuhan, and Postman ring so loudly today. They foresaw the dangers not of tyranny from above, but of entropy from within—when language becomes a cudgel and facts dissolve into narratives. The Western world now bleeds from within its own semantic wounds.

Slavic diety by Vladimír Dlhý

And so, here we are, a civilisation enthralled by its own grievances, performing identity as destiny, adopting trauma as ideology. We have become, in some essential way, Balkanised—spiritually if not geopolitically. The lessons of Sarajevo in 1914, of Belgrade in 1999, of Kabul in 2001, have gone unheeded. The centrifugal forces once held at bay by common purpose and shared reality are now unspooling.

Slavoserbianism may have originated in imperial Europe, but its ethos—its deep distrust of pluralism, its reflexive tribalism, its moral absolutism, and most of all, its victimhood—has found fertile ground in the contemporary West. It is no longer merely a historical curiosity. It is an active virus in the bloodstream of liberal democracy.

Slavoserbianism comes of age / B. Miletic / Grok2.

We have seen its kinetic potential. On 6 January 2021, it breached the very citadel of American government. Armed not with ideology alone, but with a white-hot rage shaped by years of cultivated grievance, the mob came not to petition, but to punish.

This is the paroxysm of myth turned militancy.

Much like the Seven Deadly Sins, Slavoserbianism, in this context, is not confined to one culture or one nation.

Just like COVID, it has become a global affliction—disguised as empathy, expressed through outrage, and deployed as power. It flatters the individual while corroding the collective.

And it ends, always, in ruin.

Always.

The barbarians, in truth, never left the gates.

We simply invited them in.

And then gave them a home.