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Radio War Nerd EP #561 — Serbia Protests, pt. 2: Year One, feat. TENE (Patreon)

Published:
2025-11-14 12:30:45
Imported:
2025-11
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Guests: Boris Mamlëz and Rey Katula, The Empire Never EndedRecorded: November 11, 2025

In part 2 of our series on the Serbian protest movement (part 1 here), the good folks from The Empire Never Ended podcast describe what triggered the protests, how they organized and developed, and the many ridiculous ways that the Vucic regime has tried and failed to quash them.

Check out The Empire Never Ended podcast. Follow TENE on Twitter.

Further listening:-The Serbian Red Berets, pt. 1-The Serbian Red Berets, pt. 2

*Images (courtesy of TENE)

Total time: 1:59:20Direct link to this episode's mp3 here

*

Buy & review John Dolan's new book, They Should Have Been Hanged: War Nerd Essays on the U.S. Civil War

Subscribe to Radio War Nerd at patreon.com/radiowarnerd

Sound production by Telescope Audio

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Comments

A. Savagé

Got mine as an email, but there is also a post with the PDF and EPUB link in the Patreon feed

Schaeffer Mallory

Fantastic episode. Would love more episodes on this as it develops

CR

I think the French yellow vests was because the instigator event was the fuel tax that would obviously harm people who drive a lot, because it turns out not everyone in France lives in Paris, and the vest was a universal symbol because every car is supposed to have a yellow reflective vest as part of the required emergency kit.

CR

I’m American. It will be a cold day in hell before I actually look this up.

etienne

great story about a movement that did everything right beat by beat and didn't do a single strategic mistake and then just completely ignored by the govnerment lol

Cathode Ray Dude

What happened to the War Nerd? Is it his head injury?

CR

And they live in a small (geographically and population-wise) and fairly concentrated country. As Mark pointed out, the Populists didn't have a fucking chance 125 years ago even more impossible to achieve in the U.S. now.

CR

These two episodes touched on something very critical. The right-wingers don't actually understand shit about fuck, including what a "high-trust society" actually is. Seeing the response from Japanese people to their claims, for example, elicits laughter. The point is, though, that one may call it gullibility or stupidity/ignorance or brainwashed by propaganda, or any other thing, but people actually believe the government and people in power. In the same way that polls don't matter when it comes to whether politicians do what people want or not, polls about trustworthiness or confidence in X institution or Alpha person or source is, it doesn't actually matter that no one has faith in Congress or the President or anything but the military (Which, of course, gives liberals a hard-on to see because they can always put their anti-democratic dreams and hopes on "Well, the people would accept a military coup and the military is on our side," which is what Hindenburg et al. also thought. But I digress.), but they love THEIR representatives and their institutions and their sources and overall the public, and especially the public that doesn't treat politics as a sport and generally give no fucks about the details of what those in power do, they still think that even if Fox News or CNN or the fucking Epoch Times is full of shit they are still Americans and they still have lines of demarcation and life, death, war, and so forth are being reported and acted upon legitimately. We are the far far outsiders who treat mainstream and elite institutions as being somewhat to fully corrupt and illegitimate. 90% of Americans don't buy that in any substantive way. Was it Borges or someone who said magical realism could only come from Latin America because there was a distinct and nearly universal divide between believing your lying eyes and believing what you have to say and do publicly. That is, basically Soviet hyper-normalization. Thanks to Adam Curtis for letting us in on this bon mot. In contrast, I've seen multiple judges and legal figures speak of protecting truth and democracy and so forth while being the preeminent figures of a profession that is fundamentally anti-democratic and plays fast and loose with facts and truth and freedom and liberty as a matter of course. They genuinely, with their whole hearts and minds, believe their own bullshit. Carlin described the U.S. as being the largest producer and distributor of bullshit. It's basically the only thing the U.S. makes and it makes more of it and the best quality bullshit in the world by far. And Americans are so good as making bullshit because Americans are the biggest consumers of bullshit. We believe. We communicate in stories. Flat-out that is why Clinton and Obama and Trump are the such immensely charismatic figures that they could personify Max Weber's charismatic authority all the way to the presidency in spite of being the most brazen and obvious backstabbing liars on Earth. They sell stories and they sell them well in exactly the way people want to hear (literally the same people in the cases of people who have voted for Obama then Trump or Clinton and Obama and Trump, and there are lots of those people. And chances are if they voted in 2000 and/or 20024, they voted for Bush). The point is that this is what a high-trust society is. And then look at a small country like Serbia and how many very obvious, direct, visceral betrayals by the state and elites it took for the people to react even to this level - which is still stuck at a loud minority that can't get anyone to do anything because everyone else is still indifferent. The EU states and affiliates are on an entirely other level of trust and simplicit belief in the legitimacy and integrity of the state and authorities. And then you have the U.S., which is on an even higher level of difference from EU trust than the EU citizens are compared to Serbians. And so on one hand, this is great. It means the genuine capacity for internal dissent and violence is impossibly low. Even the biggest dipshit you know who talks about insurrectionists or civil war knows there is not a chance in Hell of any conflict - physical, economic, legal, or anything other than shitposting online - occurring. Not now. Not in ten years. Not in fifty years. Barring a miracle, it cannot happen. The problem, however, is that it cannot happen absent a globally cataclysmic event. Trust that everything will stay the same is a necessity and people are vested in the belief that everything important will continue as before tomorrow and next week and next year and next century. To get into deep-ass nerd shit, the U.S. is so high-trust that public confidence is the true God-Emperor of the universe in a permanent form of belief/disbelief that keeps the the Warp (the global political and economic order) navigable and keeps Chaos from destroying everything.

CR

tl;dr: The reason Civil War was a comedy is because the actual conditions necessary for an American civil war would end most of the rest of the world and there would be massive foreign intervention (out of necessity to keep an internal U.S. conflict from literally ending the world) that wasn't even considered. Of course, that problem is something the CBS series Jericho actually covered obliquely, which is that no other country or group of countries has or has ever had the force projection capacity of the U.S., so other countries projecting force (even in humanitarian terms) would have to first build it. And if things in the U.S. became so bad that internal factions were exerting violent force towards each other, then that becomes a huge secondary story. Countries like Russia and China would want to develop that capacity out of self-interest and defense, but that itself is one of the things that would keep internal factions united to keep them from being able to do that. But the whole thing was a stupid allegory at best attempting to tell a story that, hey, war sucks for civilians. This could be you. But that is how insulated and well-off we are and will remain for a long time. There is no way to actually convince anyone incapable of a minimum amount of abstract thought of how to empathize because it's so genuinely unfeasible to reach such a breakdown of everything. It would require to genuinely give up something that is so ingrained it is probably more genuinely genetic than genetic memory or epigenetic or any of that horseshit.

Isaac Suárez

The fact that student demonstrators are leading an effort to democratize society in Serbia is phenomenal! This is the kind of effort that deserves to be studied- YET NO ONE IN THE WEST TALKS ABOUT THIS MOVEMENT (EVEN ON THE LEFT!!!!!!) I’m sure this is distinct to Serbia and its history (a bit like the protest movement in Sudan, which grew from local institutions and traditions of self organization- before it was crushed by the coup and civil war.) However, this really is remarkable to learn about- and the silence from the rest of the world is deafening.

Ian Firstenberg

Great episode guys. I noticed I wasn’t able to listen to the red berets episodes. Wouldn’t load on Patreon, maybe RSS feed would solve