August 2022
As part of the program Regional Initiative to Combat Disinformation, we present you a new analyses of fake news and disinformation narratives.
“Gay parades are one of the instruments for the peaceful destruction of Serbia”
The pro-Russian and anti-Western portal Vaseljenska.net, in the midst of the debate regarding the holding of EuroPride in Belgrade, publishes an article in which it states that the holding of the event is only “a continuation of the splitting and destruction of the Serbian nation.”
“Washington and Brussels globalists, through puppets in the conquered states in processes called transition and regionalization, put insufficiently intelligent and demented people under complete control of movement and mind, simultaneously with the reduction of the number of ‘useless eaters’”, this portal writes. Such events, they say, are “an obvious template for the fragmentation of states” and the creation of “bonsai republics”.
In the text it is further stated that for two decades the Serbian state has been weakened through lobbying from the West to hold Pride Parades. The text also has a dominant anti-gay narrative because it is insisted that homosexuality is still a disease, regardless of the decision of the psychiatric association to remove homosexuality from the list of mental illnesses in 1973.
Furthermore, homosexuals are also associated with the war in Ukraine in this text. The narrative continues that homosexuals and the fight for their rights are just an instrument for the hegemony and dominance of Western values. “Those who kiss, dance and walk are not dangerous – they are instruments of perverts, who caused the war in Ukraine”.
Due to the fact that the current government and previous ones from the 2000s allowed Pride Parades, according to Vaseljenska.net, that means that they ruled “against Serbia” and that they did not measure up to the “historical moment” in which the country was after the fall of Slobodan Milošević’s regime. According to this portal, any cooperation with the LGBTQ+ community and the West, which insists on it, represents “paving the path to Serbian hopelessness and disappearance”.
“Democrats and progressives simply allowed Serbia to be occupied, robbed and humiliated. In the processes of transition, privatization and regionalization, after the destruction of the infrastructure during the NATO aggression in 1999, the Serbs were demonized, sold, deprived and humiliated,” the text states.
Furthermore, the anti-Western sentiment can also be seen through the role of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in the country after the democratic changes. It is said that those two international institutions destroyed Serbia, and the authorities sold the country for “a handful of dollars”.
It is concluded that due to all of the above, this year’s EuroPride scheduled for September 2022 in Belgrade should be cancelled, because “the gay parade is one of the instruments for the peaceful destruction of Serbia, in the unfinished war of the West against the Serbs”.
“After all, the Serbs never waged war against the Europeans and Americans, but they (the US and the EU) did wage war against the Serbs, and now they are also waging war against Serbia. With new pride parades coming up, an old question arises: how long the pride parades will remind us every year that Serbia is occupied and that every desire and hope for the salvation of the Serbs disappeared without a trace”, concludes Vaseljenska.net.
In this text not so much of a fake news is used, as some information is referred to official data, academic articles and etc. However, the entire text manipulates those facts and puts them in an anti-Western and pro-Russian context, which appeals to the Serbian audience disappointed in the transition processes during which the country visibly achieved less progress than expected and promised.