I still cannot come to terms with the fact that people find it completely normal that modern civilization rests on a handful of companies. If Google, Microsoft and Meta were to disappear tomorrow, half the planet would collapse given how many completely depend on their infrastructure. This by itself should be enough to induce a mania of local development and decentralized structures, but alas.
A small correction: there is no leader. The students themselves decide everything on plenary sessions and every decision is executed by working groups that are formed afterwards. You always have different people executing the decisions to avoid any one person being seen as a “leader”. And we are slowly shifting to citizens themselves forming local groups in their neighbourhoods with the same organisation.
But yes, the students asked that only Serbian flags be shown, because these are protests that have support from a wide range of people, from anarchist vegans to ultra nationalists, so they want to prevent any division. That doesn’t stop some right wing dipshits to bring Russian flags, even though Russia explicitly condemned the prorests as a “coloured revolution”, but what can you do.
While some EU representatives from the parliament have been supportive, the EU has a negative image because officials still act like everything’s in order. Ursula is set to meet with our psychopathic dictator, and Marta Kos wrote how she had a constructive talk concerning Serbia’s steps towards EU integration with the guy who tried to cause a bloodbath during the 15 mins of silence a few days ago. A guy who also officially (as a president under the Serbian constitution) has about as much say as I do concerning these things.
The part about the sonic cannon cannot be stressed enough. People were literally standing still in silence and our psychopathic overlord hit the crowded streets with a sonic cannon which could’ve very very easily created a stampede that would have led to thousdands of injuries and possibly even deaths. Honestly we were lucky that enough people managed to calm down and stop running after a few seconds.
Honestly, we avoided a massive tragedy at that moment. People described that it sounded like a car or airplane was coming at them at full speed, so they instinctively ran away from the roads. People further away didn’t see or hear anything, they just saw a crowd running in panic and so they ran as well. I was maybe 50-100m away from where it happened, and all we heard was noise, yells, and then people running, so the people around me also started running, but we all stopped after maybe 5s.
A lot of people think that our overlord wanted to cause a stampede which would lead to thousands of injuries and just chaos in order to discredit the protests. Or maybe they wanted to launch the cannon after the 15 mins of silence were over, which would cause mass confusion since nobody would have any idea what was going on, but triggered it early. In any case, the psychopath used an illegal weapon to attack people literally standing still and being quiet.
I’m convinced that at least 400k people were present, probably more. I’ve never seen such a crowd in my life, and I’ve been on most protests since 2020.
EDIT: The organisation that usually counts this stuff said around 300k, and maybe more, they couldn’t make a precise count because people were constatntly moving from place to place. Still the biggest one is Serbian history.
This was very depressing to learn. I know a lot of software engineers, some of them PhD students, who are really smart and clever people, able to abstract concepts, form connections in thought, recall relevant information and make intelligent conclusions every day. And then they say things like masks don’t do anything during COVID, the vaccines don’t work, Russia is defending itself, the wokes are oppressing everyone and destroying everything etc. It’s almost impressive to see someone seemingly intelligent act like the lowest Trump supporter with certain topics like someone just flipped a switch.