On the evenings of July 7th and 9th, a wave of unrest swept through several Serbian cities – chiefly Belgrade – in opposition to an announcement from Vučić that Belgrade would return to the government mandated coronavirus quarantine lockdowns.
Largely the protests were peaceful if energetic, with the vast majority of protesters of all ages and walks of life observing norms and voicing their opposition to the announcement that quarantine would return.
Many of those protesting were not anti-Vučić per se, and their issues were not political in the electoral sense, but opposed the return to lockdowns which seem arbitrary and capricious at this point.
Vučić Responds Reasonably to Peaceful Protesters
In response to the protests, the Serbian government heard and understood the nature of the grievances, and did something quite rational – in a statement aired on live television, Vučić rescinded the return to quarantine order, which was otherwise to go into effect on the weekend of July 10th.
Because the government could not be seen as bending to opposition politics, and in part because it is also true, government talking points have stressed a difference between the peaceful protesters and the breakaway group of violent and radical opposition.
Additionally fueling the Belgrade and Novi Sad protests in Serbia were mixed grievances, which when unraveled are actually distinctly at odds with each other.
On the one hand is the criticism from the ultra nationalist right that the government used a more or less fake coronavirus as a pretext to move back the election date from April 26th to June 21st, and the social distancing provisions in place which precluded large rallies and gatherings as part of the campaigns.
Meanwhile, other grievances mostly from the Europhile liberal left criticized government for precisely the opposite – lifting quarantine lockdowns prematurely just in order to have an election – despite that elections were delayed already once until the coronavirus curve was ‘flattened’.
The opposition, whether liberal or nationalist, relies on such campaign rallies as well as U.S. deep-state controlled social media to promote their ideas and work. This is because local media – they claim with some justification – is overly sympathetic to the ruling party and Vučić.
Violence Erupts in Belgrade and Novi Sad
A more radicalized and younger break-away group of protesters took their grievances to the parliament building in Belgrade itself. This group was more ideological, composed of opposition parties, and always engage in protests against the government regardless of the cause.
By the numbers, the most serious incidents occurred in Belgrade, about 20 police officers and 17 radical demonstrators had injuries, according Politika. Giving context, Serbia has an extraordinarily high youth unemployment rate, and many look for opportunities in other countries in order to realize their aims in life.
Clashes between the break-away protest led by the U.S. deep state-backed opposition and police began after 8pm in the capital, when this part of the demonstration broke through the fence in front of parliament.
The more radical group there threw stones, bottles, bricks and firecrackers into the police line, to which law enforcement officers responded with at least 20 canisters of tear gas, according to opposition press releases. The cavalry and special force of the gendarmerie in full riot gear were called in to defend the parliament from further vandalism and fire.
The radical contingent continued stoning police in the central streets, where they were pushed away from the rest of the peaceful assembly. By 11:30 p.m., the main bulk of the peaceful protest eventually petered out and street cleaners began their work.
The Serbia case of the coronavirus response and the new Covid political reality is so revealing of the entire global situation, because all of the factors and international players involved in this bizarre new reality, are all present in Serbia.
Therefore to understand the Serbian situation is not only to understand the plandemic at hand, but is also to understand the balance of geopolitical forces in the Balkans and indeed the world, and to understand the theory and practice of the Color Revolution and how it combines with the newly implemented social control mechanism of the ‘plandemic’.
If at face value we accept the uncritical narrative on coronavirus, and do not know about Color Revolutions or the ‘plandemic’, then we arrive at the view that the protesters are out of their minds and have fallen victim to right-wing ‘fake news’, are ‘Covid deniers’, and that the government has handled this following long-established procedures and relatively sound recommendations.
But once we peel back a layer – the plandemic/scamdemic layer – we reveal that the government may indeed be manipulating the data towards political ends, because this is what we’ve already seen in nearly every country to-date.
Now the position of the protesters makes sense, and these mirror the anti-lockdown protests that we’ve seen in the U.S. From this, we would arrive at the view that the Serbian government is ‘on-board’ with the so-called ‘scamdemic’, and naturally there would be well founded sympathies with the protests and even with the joint opposition.
The problem is that there is still yet another layer to peel back – the Color Revolution. The ugly truth is that the same globalist forces that have manufactured this plandemic are those who are also trying to mobilize a Color Revolution against Vučić’s Serbian government.
And now we can see Vučić sandwiched between Color Revolution and the Covid-19 plandemic.
For Vučić to deny the plandemic only further enforces a western trope that Serbia is some pariah state, and opens him up to the same universe of conspiracy and intrigue that hit Trump last Winter when he said that aspects of coronavirus was a ‘hoax’.
Because Serbia is a small country with perhaps a third-tier level of sovereignty, condemnation from the WHO would open it up to all kinds of economic attacks from the western international community.
The simulacrum of the virus and the possibility of Vučić not responding, could create the possibility for a U.S. backed military coup combined with color revolution, with leading generals asserting that Vučić has disregarded the public health.
To go full bore on never-ending quarantine and social distancing on the other hand, as seen in places like Los Angeles, would open him up to criticism that he’s using the quarantine as a mechanism to suppress dissent, and would result in color revolutionary protests without end, against the lockdown – like what we saw in early-mid July in Belgrade, but on steroids.
What makes the Serbian government of Vučić credible is that it represents an amalgam of the median and average political views of the people, and whatever people believe about various anti-Vučić conspiracies (freemasonry, globalism, Russian agent, German agent, etc.), efforts to overthrow Vučić cannot have the veneer of public support without uniting the two extreme and incompatible ends of the very same political spectrum that situates Vučić as representing those median and average views.
Again, that is the primary contradiction of the Color Revolution against Vučić and part of why, so far, it has entirely failed.
Indeed, Vučić rescinding the proposed quarantine for the weekend of July 10th is an example of Vučić’s basic policy of placing himself in line somewhere between the median view and the average view of Serbians. In so doing, he has taken the wind out of any hope for a coherent opposition talking point.
This dynamic of the opposition’s composition is distinct from Ukraine, for example, because both nationalism and liberalism in Ukraine was anti-Russian, but nationalism in Serbia is pro-Russian. This made the Maidan in Kiev, a Color Revolution, possible to pull-off.
This looks like a mess, doesn’t it? And subsequently, opposition talking poi
The Incoherence of the Serbian Opposition
In general this incoherence is because the opposition itself is composed of two contradictory forces – the ultra nationalist right and the Europhile liberal left – which have merely been artificially cobbled together by the U.S. deep state, and its agents like Srdja Popovic and promoted by self-confessed CIA asset and publicist, Djordje Vukadinovic.
That same liberal+nationalist joint opposition tactic for the Color Revolution is exactly what was seen in the Maidan in Kiev. This is the playbook for Gladio B operations in former socialist states of Eastern Europe and the Balkans to make a Color Revolution.
A Color Revolution is not possible without uniting these contradictory forces behind a counter-rational narrative which by default must be steeped in emotion-driven beliefs and decision making. Because an analytic or coherent view would see that in terms of policy and worldview, Vučić is ‘the middle-position’ compromise candidate between nationalist and liberal forces.
In other words, the liberal opposition and the nationalist opposition share more with the very same Vučić whom they oppose than they do with each other. That is why fomenting the irrational cult of Vučić hate is the primary ‘solution’ out of this logical quagmire.
By making elections a ‘referendum on Vučić’, then Vučić loses. But elections are not referendums, they are choices – and in elections it is a choice between Vučić and someone else.
In the 2017 election, that someone else was Vuk Jeremic, a long-time U.S. asset and agent in the Balkans, whose campaign was publicly endorsed by the U.S. State Department, with components of it run out of the U.S. embassy in Belgrade itself.
This is also why opposition driven anti-Vučić criticisms on coronavirus handling are equally irrational and incoherent. The Europhile liberal left accuses Vučić of not doing enough, of lying about the health system’s equipment and preparedness, and for – yes wait for it – holding elections when it was unsafe to do so (!).
They cannot, however draw the natural conclusion from that line of thinking, that elections therefore should have been delayed further or even cancelled. Vučić is required by the constitution to carry out the election, and he had to fulfill that requirement.
Following the coronavirus logic, the end of June with its bright sunlight and a flattened curve, was much more prudent than April.
So here the liberal left attacks Vučić for not doing enough and lying about coronavirus fatalities in terms of under-representing deaths, to stage an election at the expense of public health.
And yet they cannot take that line of attack to its logical conclusion, because it stands at odds with the view of the ultra-nationalist right, that the coronavirus is a fake virus, and so they must fall back on the cult of Vučić hate which has always been about Vučić as some totalitarian dictator.
In the totalitarian dictatorship of Vučić, opposition parties are fully represented in parliament by proportional representation, the country functions as a social democracy, and people are free to criticize Vučić and call him a dictator – all proofs that it is not the case.
Indeed, the nationalist right accuses Vučić of precisely the opposite – that he is part of this globalist scamdemic, and is over-representing coronavirus fatalities and that there should have been no quarantine, no lockdown, no social distancing, and that implementing all of these was done because he’s part of the globalist cabal, and in order to make it nearly impossible to organize a strong opposition influence in the elections against him.
The view of the nationalist right, in the case of the charge of over-representing fatalities, is probably much closer to the truth – and if the whole story were confined to the above, it would be true.
And yet Serbia’s overall fatality rate has been significantly lower than in places like Italy, lending superficial credence to liberal accusations that fatalities have been under-represented in national statistics at Vučić’s behest.
That is why the final layer we peel back, the Color Revolution, puts all pieces together and makes sense out of what is otherwise senseless
The Color Revolution was first successfully pulled off precisely in Serbia, when it was still the central state of Yugoslavia. It was connected to a whole NATO war of aggression on Yugoslavia and Serbia.
Among their chief in-country stooges at the time, was Popovic, who for his part is a student of Gene Sharp and an employee of George Soros and has organized and advised the CANVAS/OTPOR type operations which led the Color Revolutions in Yugoslavia, Egypt, etc., and recently the BLM protests in the U.S..
President Vučić’s decrees on coronavirus quarantine and distancing, including lockdown – following the advice of Chinese and Russian advisors who were in-country through the Spring – were used to make the election campaign window even smaller, to the detriment of opposition parties.
Rightfully so, the opposition parties had seized upon that development to accuse the president of manipulating data, media, and policy surrounding the novel coronavirus.
There is strong evidence to suggest this is the case, which in the bubble of opposition talking points naturally includes leaked memos and emails, and off-the-record statements from insiders. But outside of the standard talking points from the opposition, there is something qualitative to consider.
Once the initial springtime quarantine/lockdown was lifted and campaigning for the new election date began towards the pushed-back election, the number of supposed coronavirus deaths averaged less than one a day, according to published government health sector statistics.
After the elections, this number jumped to nearly a dozen a day for no apparent reason. And so when the government had announced a return to the quarantine regimen based on these admittedly suspicious numbers.
But after the elections is normally a time when opposition groups might stage the standard protests to mobilize their base and create some public pressure on appointments and policies as the new post-election government is to be formed.
So the announcement from Vučić that numbers had suddenly spiked and now large gatherings would be illegal, was treated with due contempt. However, Vučić was able to maneuver this, by separating the real demands of the protesters which are against Covid-19 lockdown, from the opposition which has no real clear unifying line on this.
Vučić rescinded the quarantine order and in so doing, agreed with the protesters. The radical opposition, however, which always attempts to create mayhem and hyperventilates every situation, has been once again out-flanked and marginalized. They are associated with the violence and with an irrational perspective.
Exposing the joint opposition incoherence is relatively simple. They are overtly lying to the world and to themselves, and in standard form of the Color Revolution, are misrepresenting the actual views of protesters which are almost always nuanced, and more rational when compared to the U.S. backed joint opposition which has only one goal – an overthrow of the government.
And so confronted once again with a messaging crisis, the opposition has resorted to the same old inane mantras suited for the outside world (in the English language), which do not resonate with the world the way they hope they will.
The gem they have landed on, in the face of all evidence to the contrary is their standard trope, incessant as it is annoying, but moreover ‘not believable’ and so to that extent also useless:
And that final point is the evidence that Vučić maneuvered this successfully. The opposition returns to its mantra with no new ground made, with no growth, and no new-found credibility. What most voters will remember is the violent aspects of the break-away protests as negative, and Vučić hearing the peaceful protestors and rescinding the quarantine order as positive.
The 21st Century
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of 21cir.