(Rolling Stone) -- When I was young, on the eve of Yugoslavia's demise, I worked as a journalist for a Bosnian magazine frequently covering those distinguished individuals whose politics were indistinguishable from plain lunacy. Among them was Vojislav Šešelj, a former dissident turned leader of the Serbian Radical Party, staunchly commited to making Serbia great again, and railing about injustices inflicted upon his people by a world of enemies. Once we published a long interview with him under the headline Planet Serbia.
In 1991, Šešelj was one of the guests on a popular Serbian TV talk show. Fighting had started in Croatia, and a volunteer unit of Šešelj's followers was already in action there. Before a live studio audience, he joked about his men's devotion to slitting throats, saying, "We have new and improved methods: now we slit throats with the shoe spoon [that is, the shoe horn], and rusty too, so an autopsy can never establish what killed the victim, the slit throat or tetanus." A little later, Šešelj pulled out his gun to show it off. The audience was greatly entertained.
I recalled Šešelj after hearing Trump's instructive fairytale about General Pershing dipping bullets in pig's blood to shoot (extrajudicially) "terrorists"— the Filipinos resisting U.S. occupation — thus fixing "the problem." The well-instructed Charleston audience cheered in approval of being tough and vigilant, "or we're not gonna have a country, folks."