Did we make a truce or did we win?
On this day in 1918, the greatest bloodshed in the history of humankind until then ended. The holiday is marked in many countries as Remembrance Day or Armistice Day, and is dedicated to the memory of military and civilian victims of the First World War, and it is only natural that it is on the calendar of state holidays in Serbia, which is, given the total population at the time and the number of 1,247,435 victims, the participant of the Great War that suffered the most.
On that day, a truce was indeed signed at Compiègne, and that term also fits into the historical interpretations that the Second World War was a continuation of the First World War.
The citizens of Serbia, however, have entirely justifiable reasons to mark this holiday as Victory Day, because peace was not given to Serbia - it was the fruit of victory on the battlefield and was paid for dearly by the lives of our soldiers and civilians.
If peace had not come as the crown of the military victory of the Army of the Kingdom of Serbia in the First World War, the question is whether Serbia would exist today and where its borders would be. After all, Mestrovic's monument, erected in 1928 in the Kalemegdan Park on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the breakthrough of the Thessaloniki Front, was called the "Herald of Victory", and today we know it as the "Victor" and not as the "Conciliator".
Why do I insist so much on the word “victory” on this occasion? The reason is simple and stems from the fact that Serbia as a state, after five centuries of absence from the political map of Europe, did not rise as a result of political deals of the great powers, but instead gained its right to exist through the struggle of the Serbian people, first in two uprisings against the Ottomans, and then through a series of liberation wars.
Therefore, Serbia is a country of winners owing to the very fact that it exists. Winning mentality is what Serbia still needs today, not in the sense of military victories, but in every aspect of peacetime life.
Serbia has been winning in many fields, primarily in the economy, and in order for this trend to continue, we need a winning mentality. And that is precisely what many want to destroy and suppress, because Serbia, as a leader in the region, not only causes the envy of some in our neighbourhood, but also disturbs the geopolitical concepts of some powerful centres in the international community.
A loser mentality in Serbia was planned and systematically created for more than a decade after the so-called October 5th changes, so that many foreign meddlers and domestic "entrepreneurs" would buy large industrial systems for a dollar or a mark, which generations of our ancestors worked hard to create.
It is the losers that give away and sell their inheritance, the winners never do that, and that is why it was important to convince the citizens of Serbia that they are the periphery of Europe and the world and that as losers they have no right to their own will. I might not be writing these lines if the luminaries of the loser’s mentality were not still among us, if they did not sneak around the USA and European capitals and did not lobby for Serbia to be denied the right to choose again, and the right to a better, prosperous and stable future.
I do not agree to us reconciling as a nation instead of winning, I do not agree to the legitimacy of the opposition that wants to reduce its own state to the level of a colony, which compares Serbia to Nazi Germany between the two world wars, and does so in concert with those who send punitive expeditions against Serbs in Kosovo and Metohija.
I intentionally do not mention their names because I do not want them to be remembered. The citizens of Ephesus forbade the mention of the name of the man who burned the Temple of Artemis, because he was unworthy to be remembered even in shame. Likewise, the names of these arsonists of ours should disappear together with the darkest years of recent Serbian history, when this country of proud people and winners was brought to its knees and the brink of survival.
Instead, we will remember the names of heroes whose bones are scattered throughout Europe, in the military cemeteries that this country has renovated in the past few years, and those that we are about to renovate. Among them are those who rest in Slovakia, in Veľký Meder, on the site of the first Austro-Hungarian camp for prisoners of war.
At the time when the "greats" of our opposition were in power, there was a training ground for dogs on the graves of our glorious ancestors. Today, there and in many other memorial sites from the First World War, the names of these famous people are carved in stone, and flowers are sprouting on their graves for some new generations of victorious Serbs to see.