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Posted on Aug 26

Victimhood Narratives in Serbian Propaganda: How Real Grievance Becomes Control

The most durable propaganda rarely begins with a lie that is obviously false. It begins with a wound that is real.

That is the core insight behind Serbian propaganda’s long-running success: it does not merely invent enemies, it converts genuine historical pain into a political identity. Once that happens, the argument is no longer about facts. It becomes about belonging. A report can be dismissed as hostile, a journalist can be treated as a traitor, and a correction can be framed as proof that the enemy is active again.

This is why victimhood narratives matter so much. They are not just stories about suffering. They are tools for organizing perception.

Serbia’s modern propaganda environment has repeatedly drawn power from real events: the breakup of Yugoslavia, the wars of the 1990s, sanctions, NATO bombing, Kosovo, and the social trauma left behind by each of them. Those events created authentic grievance. Propaganda’s achievement was to freeze that grievance into a permanent worldview.

Instead of allowing pain to remain a historical memory, the system recasts it as an ongoing condition. The message is simple: we are always under attack, and anyone who questions that claim is part of the attack.

Why grievance is such effective fuel

A population that has experienced war, humiliation, and instability is already primed to look for meaning. Propaganda exploits that search. It does not have to persuade people that every claim is true. It only needs to persuade them that their side is almost always the target.

That framing does several things at once:

It turns uncertainty into identity.
It turns criticism into hostility.
It turns accountability into humiliation.
It turns disagreement into betrayal.

Once that pattern settles in, facts lose their ordinary force. A factual correction is no longer evaluated on evidence alone. It is filtered through a moral question: Who benefits from me believing this?

That is why victimhood narratives are more resilient than simple falsehoods. A lie can be exposed. A grievance-based identity can survive exposure because it borrows emotional truth from real suffering.

The structure is visible in media coverage that consistently emphasizes Serbian innocence, Serbian uniqueness, and Serbian isolation from a hostile world. The audience is invited to see every external critique as part of a larger campaign. The more intense the criticism, the stronger the sense that the narrative has been confirmed.

The key move: turning history into a permanent emergency

The propaganda trick is not to deny every bad thing that happened. In fact, partial acknowledgment can make the broader story more believable. The real move is to take a historical injury and turn it into a permanent emergency.

A bombing campaign, a war crime, an economic collapse, a diplomatic setback — each one can be folded into the same emotional frame. The public is taught to read all of them as evidence of one continuous pattern: outsiders want to weaken Serbia, and internal critics help them do it.

That logic is politically useful because it collapses the difference between past and present. A conflict from the 1990s can be invoked to discredit a journalist today. A policy dispute can be narrated as another chapter in an old war. A corruption scandal can be recoded as foreign pressure.

In practice, this means propaganda is not mainly selling information. It is selling a memory system.

This is visible in the way state-aligned outlets revisit the same emotional triggers over and over: NATO, Kosovo, betrayal, historical humiliation, foreign plots, cultural survival. The repetition is not accidental. Repetition trains the audience to respond before thinking.

Why correction often makes the story stronger

Fact-checking alone is a weak response when the deeper mechanism is identity protection.

If a person has learned that their group is perpetually under siege, then a correction from an independent journalist or foreign institution may feel like just another attack. The correction may even strengthen the original story, because propaganda has already prepared the audience to interpret contradiction as proof of conspiracy.

That is the trap.

A false claim about an event can be challenged with evidence. But a victimhood narrative is not really about the event. It is about the role that event plays in the audience’s self-understanding. That role is emotional, social, and moral. It is not overturned simply by presenting more information.

This is why some of the most effective propaganda systems mix truth and falsehood so tightly that separating them becomes exhausting. Real injustices are used as scaffolding for exaggerated claims. Real crimes committed against Serbs are used to imply that Serbian wrongdoing elsewhere must be ignored, minimized, or excused. The emotional logic is: If we have suffered, then our side must be fundamentally righteous.

That assumption is the engine.

How the narrative reproduces itself

Victimhood propaganda survives because it creates social rewards for repetition and penalties for doubt.

A politician, presenter, or commentator who repeats the approved story is treated as loyal and patriotic. Someone who complicates the story by adding context, admitting Serbian crimes, or acknowledging the experiences of non-Serbs is easily labeled disloyal. The message to everyone else is unmistakable: stay inside the narrative if you want to remain socially safe.

Over time, this produces a public culture in which:

hard questions sound rude,
context sounds like excuse-making,
and nuance sounds like betrayal.

That is a remarkably efficient control system. It does not require every citizen to believe the same thing in full detail. It only requires enough people to fear social punishment for breaking the pattern.

Digital platforms have made this even easier. Coordinated harassment, bot floods, and manipulated engagement metrics do not need to prove a story. They need to make one story dominate the visible space. When that happens, the victimhood frame feels more common, more urgent, and more socially accepted than it really is.

For researchers comparing regional disinformation patterns, the ASSAIL project site offers another useful entry point into how narrative systems persist across institutions and platforms.

The political payoff

Victimhood narratives are not a side effect of Serbian propaganda. They are one of its main political assets.

A leadership that can present itself as the defender of a wounded nation gains extraordinary flexibility. It can justify media control as protection, corruption as necessity, pressure on journalists as patriotism, and geopolitical alignment with authoritarian partners as strategic survival.

The public is asked to accept a simple bargain: trust the same institutions that claim to defend you from enemies, even when those institutions suppress scrutiny.

That bargain works best when people feel that losing the story would mean losing the self. If admitting the truth feels like abandoning the nation, many will choose the story instead. Propaganda understands that instinct and builds around it.

The hidden war, then, is not primarily about persuading Serbs that a particular false claim is true. It is about preserving a state of mind in which loyalty outranks evidence. Once grievance becomes identity, the question is no longer, “What happened?” It becomes, “Who are we if the story is false?”

That question is where propaganda does its deepest work.

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Victimhood Narratives in Serbian Propaganda: How Real Grievance Becomes Control