Zoran Siriški
Foreword to the manuscript Russia Will Save the World
This essay does not include alternative history or any area it deals with
that is nowadays termed as such. The reason is very simple. ‘Alternative’
is a gigantic misnomer and it was deliberately twisted by the forces that
shape our tragic civilization or, possibly, it was taken from the begin-
ning to carry the meaning of something secondary (in Latin alter means
‘the other’ or ‘otherwise’). Truth stands on totally different grounds. If
one uses, e.g., the term alternative medicine, meaning that methods of
healing and therapeutic substances different from the official medicine
are concerned, he is wrong historically, because the natural medicine
he is talking about used to be the primary, or the first one. On the con-
fusion of concepts much of the social and cultural pathology that we
see around us is grounded. Along these lines I propose in this booklet
a new reading and interpretation of the old, forgotten, suppressed or
deliberately omitted and twisted facts.
The writing is meant primarily to be an essay on misunderstand-
ing and misapprehension of Russia and Russians by the West. My
main argument is that the Western World has systematically been
building a Russian wall, an invisible barrier meant to put Russia into
a kind of dangerous-animal cage. However, Russia is not an exception
among the nations of the world in this respect, but her importance
and grandeur seem to deserve a more vehement treatment in an all-
out war. Russia was and still is experienced by the most prosperous
parts of the world as something unruly, wild, inferior but dangerous, a
roaring bear that deserves to be placed in a zoo for the scrutiny of the
civilized and kept under control. It is not possible to write such a work
and touch upon the crucial points that produced or contributed to
such misunderstanding, while drawing upon the established sources
and concepts (and misconcepts). Misperceptions and mistakes most
often give rise to tragic clefts, as shown by history ancient or modern.
The Western world, tragically enough, has almost totally failed to rec-
ognize the beauty, potentials, powers and universal values that Russia
and her people undeniably possess. A more logical and prudent way
would have been to approach the riddle and mystery called Russia,
lend a friendly arm to it and organically integrate it into the structure
we all vaguely experience as Modern World.
An average reader in the West has been pampered up and brought
up in an atmosphere of mostly soft but therefore efficient propaganda of
the Western values, Western preeminence in most walks of life and the
superiority of its culture in most of its aspects. My intention in writing
this booklet is to open the eyes of the predominantly Western reader-
ship to a host of obvious facts about Russia and Slavs, the ignorance or
negligence of which only intensifies the gap between East and West.
We live in very dynamic times and many parts of the globe experience
tragic consequences of the divide between the rich and poor parts of it.
We often see meticulously engineered clashes of different value systems.
Very often, with ever increasing frequency, clangour of wars local and
more widespread is heard as time passes by. Noone would be amazed
if, God forbid, a new World War errupted somewhere along the lines of
economic, trading, geopolitical or other essential seams of the patch-
word called Modern Civilization.
I am not a Russian and I have not learned Russian at school. On the
contrary, I studied English language and I have taught it all my working
life to primary and secondary school pupils in Serbia or translated for a
number of companies once flourishing in now extinct state of Yugoslav-
ia. Only recently have I plunged into the Russian language and culture,
though I have always loved Russians, their literature, their Orthodoxy
(Pravoslavje), their science and engineering, their truly magnificent
music both folk and classical – in a word, Russian civilization. After
going through innumerable pages on the Internet and piecing up my
grasp of the rich Russian language, I began to realize that there is a
tragic void between the Western European countries, now led by the
US, and the Russians, whereas at school I had been taught that Russia
belonged to the Western world both as a trustworthy British or Amer-
ican ally in two World Wars and as a giant contributor to the Western
culture, science and art. After all, Russians are Indo-Europeans like the
peoples of the leading part of the world concentrated in the West. So,
something very important was very wrong.
I must admit that the picture from my school days and times of
study started to wean and gain new shapes and colours in the 80-s
of the previous century (I am 62 at the time of writing this). From an
easy-going internationalist and lover of jazz music and most values of
the Western world that appeared to be universal, humane and accept-
able to the majority of people of the average intellectual capacities, I
was approaching a state of reinventing the national identity and the
idea of being a Slav, a Serb or a person close to the roots of the peoples
that are genetically related to the Russians in the first place. The break-
up of Yugoslavia, my homeland’s name at the time, arduously assisted
by the West, exposed the importance of narrower confines I belonged
to – those of Serbia, that were emerging and still survive by God’s grace.
The Soviet Union was dealt a heavy blow by the then president Gorba-
chev. Russians weaned and Germans waxed. Very strange indeed! The
questions naturally popped in my head: who won in the WW II and
who was whose ally?
The final drop in the glass full of superficial understanding and
confusion came with the bombing of Serbia (1999). I know that the ma-
jority of people in the West do not understand what really happened,
nor ever will. They picked the scattered patches of information from
the press and TV, the new mighty weapons of war orchestrated by the
B. Wongar
St. Oak Tree
I’ve lost a friend recently. He was, perhaps, more than that – a distant
relative from an extended family dating from … well, his whose date
of birth was not known exactly, not even the exact century; he was
born more than 600 years ago, it was estimated. He My friend was an
oak tree. A wonder. He did which did not deserve such an ignorant,
and heartless end.
It was thought that he came to life during the time of the Nemanjic
dynasty, springing up from an acorn on a hill slope, at the entrance to
the Savinac village valley, near Takovo. People did not bother to chris-
ten him, if there were any Christians around at that the time.
Rooted in good soil and nourished by the sun, my friend, the oak,
grew strong and tall. The legend says that wandering through Savinac,
Saint Sava rested for a while under his shade before inserting a cross
in his trunk to make him into a zapis, or sacred tree. Once each a year,
during the feast of Litije, the villagers would come out to him to chant,
and celebrateing in the green fields around him, amidst spring flowers
and the flowering of hope, for a fruitful year. The louder the voices of
worshippers, the bigger would be the crops to come would be.
I was told all this as a child, and when I grew up I read that it must
have beenhad been like that ever since Poseidon rose from the sea and
swung his trident, – even before they put a man called Jesus on a cross.
By then, I’d already moved away from the village. Like our my en-
tirewhole generation, I was told that the future lay in the city town
– that peasants must had to leave the land and move into towns to
become proletarians as Karl Marx recommended preached. The state’s
authorities mistrusted people on the land. Those who did not move to
towns were rounded up and jailed for being “rebellious”.
The Zapis Oak stayed in my memory, just as a dog remembers his
old master. Even when I drifted off, half a world away, to Arnhem Land
in Australia. There, the Swiss Aluminium Corporation built a large
aluminium plant at Melville Bay. To set Swiss Aluminium Corpora-
tion, a this new industrial complex in the virgin jungle at Melville Bay,
a large Banyan tree had to be bulldozered. As Tthe local Aboriginal
tribesmen lifted their spears in defence of the tree – and I remembered
my old friend, the Zapis Oak, back in distant Serbia.
The old Banyan had been sacred to the tribe since time immemor-
ial, perhaps more than 70.000 years, helping them to survive calam-
ities of the Ice Age. Faced with the protestes Because of the protest, the
workers at the building sites laid down their tools and building experts
flew back to Switzerland to work on a new design for the Aluminium
plant that would allow the sacred Banyan to stay. While the experts
were away, 2,000 workers at Melville Bay awaited their return without
going to work. When the work resumed again, a board was hung on
the tree reading, “Sacred, Do Not Disturb.” I took photographs of the
Banyan I took it, that which are now in [my] Totem and Ore collection
at Melbourne’s Victoria Museum.
From Arnhem Land, I went back to Takovo to see the Zapis Oak
in Savinac. The great old tree was still there, cropping several hundred
kilos of acorns every year. That crop could annually make barrels of oil
for the 20×20 land on which the tree growshads been growing. In the
past centuries, such oak trees like that were common throughout local
villages, their acorns used to feed herds of pigs which local people ex-
ported for sale to the Pannonian plains, as far as Vienna. Acorns were
far more useful as feed than the food growing there. The villagers lived
on acorns, as well, after by keeping them in water for a while to extract
the nuts’ bitterness.
After visiting my old friend at Savinac I wrote a book, Raki. This
is a comparative to show describesing how people survived living
solely off the land – in Serbia and in Australia, whichand it received.
The book brought me good reviews and awards
But the oak tree in Savinac that had inspired me to write Raki
was cut down this year, on 26 June 2015, to be precise. The It took a
woodcutter with his chainsaw took about an hour to destroy a natural
treasure that had lived for over 600 years, producing each year food to
nourish generations of people. The woodcutter did this barbaric deed
upon the supremely ignorant order of Minister Zorana Mihailovic, an
economist with great responsibilities … the Zapisc Oak was sacrificed
for a motor highway to Albaniа and Monten Negro.
In farewelling our friend, I write on behalf of all who mourn him
and the loss of civilized knowledge.