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Description
Dimitrije Tucović’s Serbia and Albania stands as a testament to the fact that, despite the reactionary policies of its ruling classes, Serbia has always had progressive movements and individuals who have consistently defended its honour and true interests. Tucović incontrovertibly demonstrates in this pamphlet how an oppressed nation, such as Serbia was under Ottoman rule, can become independent and quickly embark on its own imperialist conquests at the expense of another oppressed people, such as the Albanian people. The guises under which this conquest was undertaken, viewpoints expressed by Balkanicus and Dr. Vladan, demonstrated typical bourgeois “scientific” lies that a low level of development indicates racial inferiority. Dimitrije Tucović wrote: “Serious people today do not determine the elements that make a nation or the factors that define the conditions for a shared state life by measuring skulls and studying races; these factors are determined by history and sociology.” He also reminded the Great-Serbs that at one time, they too expressed the characteristics of a low level of development, and that the anti-Ottoman fighter Marko Miljanov once reminded the Serbs: “Know that dealing with Albanians is not as difficult as it seems to you, for you are not so far from them, nor they from you.” Later, Vaso Čubrilović and other figures of monarchist and pseudo-socialist Yugoslavia required the same basic teaching in materialist thinking.
Serbia and Albania dives into every aspect of Albanian life, the movement of the Albanians to gain independence and unify their nation, the ambitions of the Great Powers as well as Serbia to conquer Albania for access to the Adriatic Sea, and the utter failure of the reckless November 1912 excursion of the Serbian bourgeoisie into Albania, which resulted in the massacre of the Albanians. Dimitrije Tucović stated that this policy brought about a profound distrust by the Albanian people towards Serbia and that the only way out of it was the opposition of the most forward-looking sections of Serbia to these actions. If proletarian, working Serbia wanted to liberate itself, it also had to defend the right to self-determination of the Albanian people. The preconditions for this type of unity and peace in the Balkans were finally brought about by joint participation in the anti-fascist war, but these were destroyed by the anti-Albanian policies of the Yugoslav Titoites.