Belgrade, Serbia

Conspiracy theorists of the world, unite!

Published: October 18, 2007

Translation of what the guy holding the press conference said:

I shall appear, on Sunday [in Kosovo], in the mass of 10 thousand of my followers, everyone of them carrying in their arms a glowing weapon, fire weapon, an atomic bomb ready to be thrown in the depths of hell at any moment that may seem as a neccessary thing to do.

Of course, on the day of the protest, there wasn’t exactly 10.000 people there, more like thirty or forty. They did not manage to get into Kosovo nor show their “glowing weapon” but it all points out that the weapon in question is a super-secret Tesla weapon, known as Elipton. Elipton was mentioned over a decade ago by Zhirinovsky, Russian politician famous mostly by his conspiracies and empty threats – promising that the Russian scientists have figured out Tesla’s drawings and that they will deliver it to Serbia. This fail-proof plan was backed up by another conspiracy theorist, Vojislav Seselj, famous for his lifelong quest to finaly debunk the great anti-Serbian plot.

I love conspiracy theories, and lucky me, Serbia is, like all the countries in the world, full of them – but the secret Tesla weapon is my favorite. One thing I love more than theories, though, are the theorists themselves and the way they try to convince others in believing them. As seen on the video above, the person holding the press conference clearly didn’t manage to gather 10.000 people to join him because his way of telling the story about the glowing weapon wasn’t convincing enough. However, Zhirinovsky and Seselj did manage to persuade a number of people that Serbs do posess Tesla’s secret weapon – most of the believers are today Radical party voters.

The story of the Tesla weapon was not invented by Zhirinovsky and Seselj, of course. Mentions of such a weapon go back to beggining of the 20th century and even inspired this 1940’s Superman cartoon where the main villain is actually based upon Tesla, destroying the city with it’s light-beam weapon. It’s no wonder many conspiracy theories surround Tesla – with his eccentric life style and great genius, Tesla is undoubtely The Mad Scientist of our time.

But, it wasn’t only us Serbs who had the secret weapon, it was America as well – or at least that’s what Svetozar Radisic, now retired colonel in the Serbian army thinks. During the NATO bombing he developed the theory that the NATO alliance used unconventional tactics known as the Neocortical warfare in their campaing. Such warfare consisted, according to Radisic, basically in NATO trying to mess up our brains with some kind of neuro-beams and subliminal messages placed all around us, including McDonald’s happy meal toys. Problem was that Radisic was at a relatively infuential position in the Serbian army when he developed this theory, so he even managed to issue a book dealing with this pseudo-science, thus diverting attention, to a certain point, from the real problems NATO caused. The theory is later easily debunked by Jovan Byford and is available for anyone willing to read it online.

One propaganda trick that did work, on the other hand, and that can be filed in the conspiracy theory cabinet, is the time Milosevic’s government managed to persuade people that the official name of the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999. was Milosrdni andjeo (Merciful angel). Unintentional poor translation of Noble anvil (the real name of the operation) into a name that had so much sarcasm in it (Merciful angel) added so much fury towards the already infamous NATO Alliance, that the government media decided to go with it. The effect of this trick is so great that most people today still think the operation was deliberately named in such a sarcastic way by NATO (not that it would lessen the bad image if they did translate it correctly).

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