It was a clear message to the rest of the Serbs: "I am building a new house because I will remain in power even after these elections. You cannot replace me by voting nor can you topple me by force!"
Therefore, there will be no cost-free parting of the people with their former idol. Sloba believes, as I have already said, that his contract with the Serbs is for life. All he is doing during this pre-election campaign is warning the Serbs that the price of a unilateral breaking of this contract will be exceptionally high, that it will be payable at once and in blood?!
On the basis of such "an offer that cannot be refused", his vassals explain to the voters that it is actually better for every normal Serb to pay for gradual decline in easy installments.
It's completely logical! Milosevic is a good banker and he knows that the historical loan which was taken out at one time - with almost the entire nation serving as the guarantor - needs to be taken back with interest, obligatory charges and a mortgage on the life of its backers.
The Serbs will never again be in a position to see as clearly as in these elections that the Serbian system created according to Sloba's recipe is, in fact, the American system!? Namely, Milosevic's propaganda, which purposely borders on mental terror, is plagiarized from the American theory and practice of totalitarian television commercials, which are bringing up generations of television viewers/imbeciles. Their economic and political systems, style of rule, concepts of legality and justice are traced from an early phase of war among American mafia-style gangs.
As contractors for such projects, he perforce chose the most ruthless lobotomized sycophants, displaying canine-style loyalty, those for whom war is a home, hate and stupidity a homeland, and power a religion!
How then did the Serbian nation hazard coming into a conflict with a man who is the creator and owner of the State of Organized Lies? This was done in a purely Serbian fashion. This nation still does not have the itch called democracy and thinks it can live well enough without it. But since we cannot continue living like This and That needs to be changed, the Serbs have come to the typically Serb conclusion that they are not prepared to pay any price and bear any burden just in order to get rid of Milosevic.
So they came to a Solomonic decision: They themselves would leave! I speak figuratively. However, they didn't invite to him a duel of any sort, they didn't crucify him, they didn't organize a revolution or a counterrevolution, they didn't condemn him or pay for his requiem to the three bishops who kiss his hand more reverently than they kiss Pavle's [His Holiness the Serbian Patriarch]. None of these things! They just turned their backs on him. Until they feel truncheons on those backs, they won't even look back. They want to forget him and themselves during this time. They don't want him even as a negative example.
They have done what they were going to do, now he will do what he is going to do. A convincing majority no longer believes him when he says that the impossible is realizable, that the false is true, that poverty is wealth and that hunger is contentment. Serbs who once believed this no longer exist; the Serbia created in accordance with this belief no longer exists! Except if we take into account Slobo's Serbia, which is like a star in a distant galaxy which exploded six years ago and whose image we still see in the sky traveling toward us. When in fact it doesn't exist.
In order to convince us that such a Serbia still does exist, Milosevic a week from now must organize a series of dramas interconnected by his will. That is why what we are dealing with here is not an election, has nothing to do with any kind of referendum, precludes a civil war or a revolt by the opposition.
Here one nation is demolishing by looks the gargantuan monument that they themselves constructed at one time, and settling accounts with itself. With a decade of fanaticism, hate, lies, deception, preternaturalness, complete with hordes of false national prophets and soothsayers of all kinds, apostles of death, marketing representatives of crime, with a falsified history and a counterfeit future.
Today Serbs take away the right of Milosevic to speak in their name. After today, he can only speak for himself. No matter what he does, no matter what orders he issues to the members of his phalanxes, no matter how he fixes the election computers and no matter what his media claim that evening.
His Serbs, who until now have been enthusiastically impervious to fact, experience and intelligence, who now feel they are on the threshold of a new, specifically intra-Serb evil, for the first time are doing something that is good for all. By turning their back to the regime, they confirm, no matter how late in the game, their European identity. An awkward, self-taught, ill-versed but nevertheless - a European identity!
In fleeing from Ottoman sultanism, they primarily demonstrate the wish to live in the future, not in the past, to live among the living, instead of lying down in the grave next to the dead. It was enough for the Serbs to regain their own sense of what was good for them and Milosevic was finished!
The Serbs, I say, have said what they were going to say. It is up to him to decide. Communism throughout the world has fallen without a single shot being fired, the Berlin wall fell without a single casualty, the Soviet Union went bankrupt without a single death. No regime to date has used force to stop a new time from coming. However, considering that no one in the past half century has bound his own fate in Europe so tightly to remaining in power, I don't believe that Sloba will willingly pack his bags.
So what? He is already defeated. When he will be actually forced to leave is a question of secondary importance. He is defeated because he could not use force to prevent a consensus on the number one item in the national interest: Milosevic must go! He could not use force to prevent a consensus on the national program, item one: this regime must be replaced with a normal system!
The Tiger knew all this. That is why he waged a campaign to practically discontinue the multiparty system, the media and the judiciary. He transformed the state, the army and the police into personal services with the task of eternalizing his completely unlimited power. This is the essence of the political theory and practice of SLOBISM, a system hitherto unknown in history. Only now can we see why this experiment with the Serbs was conducted, why we died, why we killed, why we endured these 12 years and why we huddled in a country which a sparrow can fly over in half an hour.
On the other hand, united against him stands the majority Serbia. Not political parties, not Otpor [Resistance], not G17, not the independent media but Serbs hungry for hope. It is in their name that Kostunica tonight asks Slobodan: "What is the punishment that you have prepared for your Serbs who want to part with you in peace? What is there that you have not yet done to them and what do they still have to pay you with for what you will now give them?!"
It is now up to us as upright men and as Serbs who are no longer turbo-charged Serbs, to choose our own fate. It is up to him to organize three Siberian winters after this warm autumn. We have seen everything and we have been through everything. There is no turning back any more. We have had enough of him and his ways!