Milosevic: The People's TyrantBloomsbury Academic, 23. jul. 2004 - 256 strani Slobodan Milosevic - Belgrade's tyrant and successor to Tito, 'Butcher of the Balkans' - represents, in many ways, the final shudder of that particularly aggressive 20th-century brand of the creature that was nationalism. His life story is a study in evil: in the 'banality of evil' to use Hannah Arendt's famous phrase. With all the intensity and horror of personal experience, Vidosav Stevanovic, perhaps Serbia's greatest modern writer, tells how Milosevic, a man devoid of any true qualities, climbed his way to the top in slow, silent, murderous steps. But, behind the facade of a grey bureaucrat, is a character of tragic, near-Shakespearean proportions. 'Sloba', as he came to be known, had a loveless childhood, son of a defrocked pastor and school-teacher mother. When Sloba was very young, his father went insane, and killed himself in front of the strange stones to which he preached every Sunday in a nearby field, with a bullet to his temple. Little Miriana, Sloba's future wife and his succour and accomplice in politics, was born in prison, heralding the execution of her own mother, condemned as a Nazi collaborator. |