The Serbian website Pescanik (‘Hourglass’) has lots of lively and nicely turned work available in both Serbian and English.

Try this piece on a profound local disposition to oppose change and modernity by romanticising primitivism:

Whenever you find yourself short on argument, it comes in handy to call your opponent, who is always an enemy, too educated or to say that his wife wears corsets and hats, which is not good – she should be wearing skirts and kerchiefs.

One of the most popular representatives often used to repeat his theory how “when there were less literate people here, Christ used to walk this earth”. Therefore, this is the concept – as soon as you get an education, you lift your head up from this warm cradle and that’s where all the problems come in.

When, for instance, there is a discussion on Belgrade in the National Assembly of Serbia how a loan should be approved for indoor plumbing or piping, the representatives used to say that Belgrade should by no means develop that way, because it would be unjust.

Here are a couple of quotes: “It would look like a barefoot dandy in a top hat” or “It would look like someone putting on a polished shoe, while his other foot is bare” or “It is like a peasant wearing a silk umbrella”.

The point being:

… equality here had always been embraced as a main value, but it was understood in a way that’s opposed to its original sense.

Here it was understood as social equality, not as legal equality – not as a right of all people to have equal social opportunities, but as a requirement for all people to remain socially the same – don’t anyone dare get rich.

That sort of understanding this ideal was a logical consequence of the type of society we had in Serbia up to WWII – a society of largely equal people, where peasants made up 87 percent of the population and 50 percent of those peasants had but 5 acres of land. To have 5 acres of land with a wooden plow and oxen meant that as soon as February you had nothing left to eat.

This is the social matrix they want to keep at all cost, so no one ever steps out of it, so the society never stratifies, never changes, so that it never modernizes – because in this equality lied some sort of protection, this is where we are secure.

Hmm.

That idea of a lumpen equality in mediocre idealised poverty seems to be what large parts of the Red-Green impulse demands for all of us, not just for Serbia.