The Serbian democratic miracle and lithium corruption

Something beautiful happened in Serbia. Something old and rare. Ancient wisdom broke through. “A leaderless revolution has swept Serbia, postdoctoral researcher Aleksandar Matković wrote for The Guardian.

Serbia is challenging the very foundations of Western Civilization and its fetish for the Great Man. Western Civilization has failed in its most basic duty to protect life, to protect soil, to protect water, to protect air. It has turned the world into a Growth Death Cult and its every “solution” digs a deeper and faster grave for our environment. We desperately needed a different model, and in Serbia we get a glimpse of what that might be.

It’s not simply that our leaders have miserably failed us. The entire political, economic and religious system is rotten and corrupt to its very core, its very essence. This modern world is all built on a depraved white male supremacy culture. It is eating itself alive because it feeds on hate, greed and dominance. Have no doubt, it will come for the leaderless Serbian people and it will seek to utterly crush them, whether it is the EU doing the crushing, the mining oligarchs, or Putin’s gang. For what Serbia has done is an existential threat to our dear leaders.

However, even the “Great Men” cannot fully extinguish the leaderless, vibrant community idea, if we keep the idea alive in our hearts and minds. The idea that we don’t need leaders. The idea that leaders are the problem. That a leader must be corrupt because all leaders seek power for themselves.

The EU had selected the remote and beautiful Jadar in Serbia as one of its European Green Sacrifice Zones. Europe is greedy for green metals, for its fake green transition. Hungry for the killing metals too, for war is big business again with lots of growth potential!

“Nothing grows where they drilled,” Nataša, a community member from Gornje Nedeljice, said, describing the damage caused by Rio Tinto’s drilling for lithium in the Jadar Valley. This is the story of mining. Green lithium is wasting the world wherever it is mined. It is devastating the Andean communities, bringing genocide and ecocide. It is wrecking Indigenous communities in Brazil. Over 100 new lithium mines are planned in the USA, many of them on the land where Native Americans live.

GRABBING THE CASH

The endemic corruption which caused a prime minister to resign in Portugal was lithium mining all over. Meanwhile, we are being sold the idea that lithium batteries will save our environment. Batteries? How utterly absurd. Super-toxic batteries, full of a cocktail of toxic poisons, including the devastating forever chemicals are here to bury what left of our environment.

“Move everything in at night and move everything out at night and tell the locals nothing.” When the local community discovered late-night intruders drilling prospecting holes for lithium in the Wicklow Mountains, this is the policy the drillers confessed to, when they were confronted. In Ireland, as in Serbia, as all over the world, when the mining oligarchs come, the communities are on their own. “This international regime tilts the balance in favour of extractive projects by strengthening foreign investor rights and facilitating alliances between foreign investors and national elites,” Nicolás M. Peronne, Professor of Economic Law, University of Valparaíso, Chile, explained.

Members of the group Ne damo Jadar (We will not give Jadar) at a protest in 2023. Photo: Emilija Knezevic

In Serbia, hundreds of thousands took to the streets and the fields to protest against the Rio Tinto lithium mine. They found that the entire political system was against them, as Rio Tinto threatened a massive court case if the mine did not go ahead. The people were on their own. Was this the last straw that helped birth the Leaderless Movement? There were so many straws to choose from. Serbians turned to themselves, to their communities, to their students, the young and idealistic. What’s the problem?, they asked. What’s the real problem?

“Great Men.”

You dig deep enough and you’ll always find a greedy great man’s hands strangling the good in us, or grabbing the cash. This macho system, it’s rotten. And so the students and the people got to work. No leaders and long, long meetings, talking and discussing, talking and discussing. Seeking community consensus. Doing everything this whole modern world propaganda machine has relentlessly told us is the exact opposite of what you need to do, if you “want to get things done.”

WORKING THINGS OUT

The despised committee is always holding back the heroic individual, holding back innovation, and progress, we are told by the great men.

The Serbian committees, communities, students and people, came together and – without leaders –tore down the rotten, corrupted political system. Like the students and people of Brazil recently held back the wave of fascism that was sweeping Latin America, the Serbian people rocked the system to its very core.

Our environment is not dying. It is being killed by greedy elites and these elites have names and they are nearly always great men. Can more of us not recognise, before it’s too late, that male supremacy is a Growth Death Cult that will burn everything to the ground, to boast about being the last man standing? These men have failed us on every level that matters: life, soil, air, water, nature.

The Ju/’hoansi of the Kalahari Desert are the oldest known human group, tracing their roots back some 200,000 years. When they have a problem, they talk and they talk and they talk, often for years, to work out a solution that is in the best interests of everyone.

Like so many other Indigenous people, the Ju/’hoansi don’t even understand the concept of a leader. And so the Serbian students sat in 6-hour meetings doing what so many of us humans have done for the vast majority of our existence: talking and working things out together, without leaders. Men, women and children, as equals.

Right now, we are trapped in a global Male Supremacy Growth Death Cult. If we come together, we can walk away and build a truly sustainable life. What have we got to lose that’s worth more than life, soil, water, air, nature?