Jovan Byford

The emergence of antisemitic conspiracy theories in yugoslavia during the war with NATO

Byford and Billig examine the emergence of antisemitic conspiracy theories in the Yugoslav media during the war with NATO. The analysis focuses mainly on Politika, a mainstream daily newspaper without a history of antisemitism. During the war, there was a proliferation of conspiratorial explanations of western policies both in the mainstream Serbian media and in statements by the Yugoslav political establishment. For the most part such conspiracy theories were not overtly antisemitic, but rather focused on the alleged aims of organizations such as the Bilderberg Group, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. However, these conspiracy theories were not created de novo; writers in the Yugoslav media were drawing on an established tradition of conspiratorial explanations. The tradition has a strong antisemitic component that seems to have affected some of the Yugoslav writings. Byford and Billig analyse antisemitic themes in the book The Trilateral by Smilja Avramov and in a series of articles published in Politika. They suggest that the proliferation of conspiracy theories during the war led to a shifting of the boundary between acceptable and non-acceptable political explanations, with the result that formerly unacceptable antisemitic themes became respectable. This can be seen in the writings of Nikolaj Velimirovic, the Serbian bishop whose mystical antisemitic ideas had previously been beyond the bounds of political respectability. During the war, his ideas found a wider audience, indicating a weakening of political constraints against such notions.

Psychology and history : interdisciplinary explorations

Foreword Kenneth J. Gergen Introduction: psychology and history - themes, debates, overlaps, and borrowings Cristian Tileaga and Jovan Byford Part I. Theoretical Dialogues: 1. History, psychology and social memory Geoffrey Cubitt 2. The incommensurability of psychoanalysis and history Joan Wallach Scott 3. Bringing the brain into history: behind Hunts and Smails appeals to neurohistory Jeremy Burman 4. The successes and obstacles to the interdisciplinary marriage of psychology and history Paul Elovitz 5. Questioning interdisciplinarity: history, social psychology and the theory of social representations Ivana Markova Part II. Empirical Dialogues: Cognition, Affect and the Self: 6. Redefining historical identities: sexuality, gender, and the self Carolyn Dean 7. The affective turn: historicising the emotions Rob Boddice 8. The role of cognitive orientation in the foreign policies and interpersonal understandings of Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1937-41 Mark E. Blum 9. Self esteem before William James: phrenologys forgotten faculty George Turner, Susan Condor and Alan Collins Part III. Empirical Dialogues: Prejudice, Ideology, Stereotypes and National Character: 10. Two histories of prejudice Kevin Durrheim 11. Henri Tajfel, Peretz Bernstein and the history of Der Antisemitismus Michael Billig 12. Historical stereotypes and histories of stereotypes Mark Knights 13. Psychology, the Viennese legacy and the construction of identity in Yugoslavia Cathie Carmichael Conclusion: barriers to and promises of the interdisciplinary dialogue between psychology and history Cristian Tileaga and Jovan Byford.

‘Serbs never hated the Jews’: the denial of antisemitism in Serbian Orthodox Christian culture

ABSTRACT Over the past five years, the Serbian Orthodox Church has been criticized by liberal public opinion in Serbia for maintaining organizational and ideological links with Christian right-wing groups whose political discourse includes antisemitic themes. Byford looks at two specific responses to this public criticism, one from the Serbian Orthodox Church and the other from the Christian right, and examines the rhetoric employed to counter the allegations of antisemitism. The dominant discourse in these responses is denial, stating that there is, and never has been, any antisemitism in Serbia or within Orthodox Christianity. In examining various aspects of this denial, Byford demonstrates that generalized statements about Serbian and Orthodox tolerance manage the moral accountability of those who find themselves under criticism by turning public attention away from the ongoing controversy and by confining the problem to a small number of individual extremists on the far right. He also argues that, by helping to generate a consensus about Serbian tolerance, the denial implicitly perpetuates the very same xenophobic and antisemitic elements of Serbian nationalist discourse that it is meant to negate and refute.

The emergence of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in Yugoslavia during the war with NATO

Byford and Billig examine the emergence of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in the Yugoslav media during the war with NATO. The analysis focuses mainly on Politika, a mainstream daily newspaper without a history of anti-Semitism. During the war, there was a proliferation of conspiratorial explanations of western policies both in the mainstream Serbian media and in statements by the Yugoslav political establishment. For the most part such conspiracy theories were not overtly anti-Semitic, but rather focused on the alleged aims of organizations such as the Bilderberg Group, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. However, these conspiracy theories were not created de novo; writers in the Yugoslav media were drawing on an established tradition of conspiratorial explanations. The tradition has a strong anti-Semitic component that seems to have affected some of the Yugoslav writings. Byford and Billig analyze anti-Semitic themes in the book The Trilateral by Smilja Avramov and in a series of articles published in Politika. They suggest that the proliferation of conspiracy theories during the war led to a shifting of the boundary between acceptable and non-acceptable political explanations, with the result that formerly unacceptable anti-Semitic themes became respectable. This can be seen in the writings of Nikolaj Velimirovic, the Serbian bishop whose mystical anti-Semitic ideas had previously been beyond the bounds of political respectability. During the war, his ideas found a wider audience, indicating a weakening of political constraints against such notions.

Accounts of a troubled past: psychology, history and texts of experience

The article considers the contribution that discursive psychology can make to the study of accounts of a troubled past, using, as relevant examples, testimonies of Holocaust survivors and confessions of collaboration with the secret police in communist Eastern Europe. Survivor testimonies and confessions of former informants are analyzed as instances of public remembering which straddle historical and psychological enquiries: they are, at the same time, stories of individual fates, replete with references to psychological states, motives, and cognitions, and discourses of history, part of a socially and institutionally mediated collective struggle with a painful, unsettling, or traumatic past. Also, the examples point to two different ways in which archives are relevant to the study of human experience. In the case of Holocaust survivor testimony, personal recollections are usually documented to be systematically archived and made part of the official record of the past, while in the case of collaboration with the security services, it is the opening of the ‘official’ archives, and the fallout from this development, that made the confessions and public apologies necessary. The article argues that discursive psychology’s emphasis on remembering as a dynamic, performative, and rhetorical practice, situated in a specific social and historical context, offers a particularly productive way of exploring the interplay between personal experience and the institutional production of historical knowledge, helping to address some of the challenges encountered by psychologists and historians interested in researching accounts of troubled past.

Distinguishing ‘Anti-Judaism’ from ‘Antisemitism’: Recent Championing of Serbian Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović

The well documented revival of the far-right in post-communist Eastern Europe was accompanied by the widespread rewriting of the past and the rehabilitation of controversial historical figures from the 1930s-40s, many of whom exhibited antisemitic and pro-fascist tendencies. The paper is part of a broader project that examines the rhetoric of post-communist revisionism in Serbian society, using the example of the recently canonised Bishop Nikolaj Velimirovic (1880-1956), the controversial Serbian Orthodox Christian philosopher whose writing includes overtly antisemitic claims. The paper focuses on the representations of Bishop Velimirovic in Serbian Orthodox culture around the time of his formal canonisation in 2003, and looks at the rhetoric deployed by the bishop’s supporters to manage his moral accountability and counter accusations of anti-Jewish prejudice. The rhetoric of denial of Velimirovic’s antisemitism is shown to consist of the attempt to work up the opposition between, on the one hand, the seemingly legitimate ideas of Christian anti-Judaism (to which the Bishop’s views are said to belong) and, on the other, the anti-normative ideology of (Nazi) antisemitism. By exploring the blurred nature of this distinction, the paper reveals how the discursive dynamic of denial helps to present antisemitism as a satisfactory, unproblematic and even normative aspect of Christian identity, thus ensuring its persistence on the visible margins of Serbian Orthodox culture.

The Collaborationist Administration and the Treatment of the Jews in Nazi-Occupied Serbia

In Serbia, as elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the 1990s were marked by the widespread rewriting of the history of the Second World War, including that of the Nazi ocupation of Serbia.1 For the duration of the regime of Slobodan Milosevic, reconsideration of the history of the occupation was not officially sanctioned by the state, but was for the most part the provenance of various influential national(ist) institutions such as the Serbian Orthodox Church and the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Art which were aided in their revisionist endeavours by selected fringe right-wing publications and nationalist political parties. Their combined activities helped to shatter the view which had dominated the preceding decades about the treacherous nature of the wartime activities of Serbian collaborators, and instituted a significant change in the public perception of people such as Milan Nedic, Dimitrije Ljotic, and Dragoljub Mihailovic.

Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović: ‘Lackey of the Germans’ or a ‘Victim of Fascism’?

In May 2003, the Assembly of Bishops of the Serbian Orthodox Church announced its decision to canonize Bishop Nikolaj Velimirovic: (1881–1956), the prominent twentieth-century Orthodox Christian theologian and cleric, who is at the same time also one of the most controversial figures in the modern history of the Serbian Church. Although there had been no hint of the impending canonization prior to the official announcement on 19 May, few in Serbia were surprised by the Assembly’s decision. For more than a decade leading clerics in Serbia had been referring to Velimirovic: as ‘the Holy Bishop Nikolaj’. In religious circles, he was routinely compared, in terms of importance, to St John the Baptist and St John Chrysostom. In the Diocese of Sabac and Valjevo, where Velimirovic: was born, he had been celebrated as the official patron saint since 1987. In fact, in the official communique from the Church, the canonization was announced as little more than a formality, an act that merely confirmed and institutionalized ‘the widespread belief in [Velimirovic:’s] sanctity which exists not only within the Serbian Church but throughout the Orthodox World’.1