image from antikvarne-knjige.com.

In 1895, Serbian writer Sima Lukin Lazić wrote:

“If I only knew that I would bring happiness to my kin and my people by doing so, believe me… I would lie day and night—I would lie like a dog.”

The Serbian Politics of Lying

In 1895, the Serbian writer Sima Lukin Lazić wrote in Dvije oskoruše: “If I only knew that I would bring happiness to my kin and my people by doing so, believe me… I would lie day and night—I would lie like a dog.”

Taken literally, the statement is a remarkably clear expression of a nationalist political ethic: if a lie benefits the Serbian people, then lying is justified. There is no attempt to disguise the moral problem. The national interest comes first; truth comes second.

What makes the quotation particularly significant is that Lazić was not merely theorising about this principle. His own historical writing provides an example of it. In Srbi u davnini, he defended claims that the Serbian name existed thousands of years before Christ and that Serbs had migrated from India into Asia, Africa, Spain and Italy. Despite there being no evidence for this.

These were not marginal embellishments. They formed part of an attempt to push Serbian irredentist ultra-nationalist history deep into antiquity and establish the Serbs as an ancient people with a history reaching far beyond the medieval Serbian state. Even contemporary Serbian critics condemned these claims as inventions and warned that they created “false ideals” for the Serbian population.

Serbian nationalist historical mythology did not simply consist of remembering so called “Serbian suffering”. It also involved the manufacture of fantasy-driven glorious and “ancient Serbian past”. When evidence was insufficient, ultra-nationalist writers could supply a larger historical story in which the Serbian people appeared almost timeless: ancient, widespread, heroic and repeatedly victimised by foreign powers. This despite the fact that there was no Serbian medieval identity. Serbia emerged as a Russian puppet state in the 19th centuy.

The purpose of such stories was obvious. An “ancient nation” has a stronger claim to historical legitimacy than a recently consolidated political community. A people that can be presented as having inhabited vast territories since antiquity can portray later territorial claims not as expansionism, but as restoration. The older the nation is made to appear, the easier it becomes to present contemporary political demands as the correction of historical injustice.

This is where the Lazić quotation becomes more than an interesting nineteenth-century curiosity. It exposes the underlying logic: if historical claims strengthen the Serbian nation, their usefulness can become more important than their truth.

The same logic appeared in different forms during the twentieth century. Serbian nationalist propaganda repeatedly transformed history into a political weapon. Albanian territories in Dardanian areas was not simply a medieval battlefield. It became the central symbol of an alleged Serbian “national sacrifice”.

Lazić’s sentence provides an unusually blunt formulation of this principle of lies. A lie is acceptable if it serves “my people.” Once that principle is accepted, historical accuracy becomes negotiable. Numbers can be enlarged. Ancient origins can be invented. Complex conflicts can be reduced to stories of eternal victim and eternal aggressor. Historical myths can be presented as facts, and political demands can be presented as the inevitable consequences of history.

That is the deeper connection between the nineteenth-century nationalist imagination and the propaganda of the twentieth century. The machinery changed, but the political logic remained recognizable: history was valuable not only because it described the past, but because it could be made to serve the nation in the present. And when the nation becomes the justification for the lie, there is almost no limit to what can be done in the name of historical truth – such as the Serbian genocidal crimes against Albanians and Bosniaks stretching from 1878 to 1999.

Source

Sima Lukin Lazić, *Dvije oskoruše*, Zagreb 1895, pp. 27–28.