The families of three students and three adults killed at a Christian school in Nashville don’t care about the beliefs of the 28-year-old girl who took the lives of their loved ones in one of the latest assassinations in US schools.

Their world collapsed because of an armed psychopath, similar to the families of those who died in Belgrade and near Mladenovac. They are not interested in whether the killers had certain beliefs and values or who were their heroes. After the tragedy, their only interest is perhaps the sentence, just as the relatives of the victims from Mladenovac told Aleksandar Vučić a few days ago.

A return to the traditional values in Serbian society is offered as a remedy for the tragedy. This cure is mainly suggested by charlatans from the political sphere, that is, from the extreme right, advocating traditional and family values.

This deception starts from the following: families in Serbia are superior to other families anywhere else in the world, particularly in the US. Since the beginning of the year, there have been more mass shootings and murders in the US than there have been days – about 200 until the beginning of May.

I guess our families are stronger, more resilient and more harmonious than families in the US and Western Europe. Their families are broken and radiate evil, while families in Serbia are united and only raise angels.

There is a lot of racism in the story about the moral superiority of our “traditional” families compared to those in the Western world. Unfortunately, racism does not stop there but effortlessly turns into a general superiority of “us” over “them”. It is easy to recognise when you hear that we are to blame “Western values” for the deaths of children and that we naively accepted those values in our, until then, chaste society.

“We asked for Western values – we got Western values,” was the first thing that the leader of Dveri said after the murders in Belgrade. He knew his statement would be far-reaching, thanks to one of the Western values – freedom of speech and the media. If he didn’t have this legacy of Western civilisation, he would talk about failed Western values only at his home, and no one would hear him. A neighbour could overhear what he said and report him, which is a “value” that is still cherished in the East, not in the West.

He spoke about Western values in the parliament as well. Yet another legacy of the West, which we accepted with resistance at the end of the 19th century when its political traditionalist fathers were incomparably more numerous than the political enlighteners who established a parliamentary democracy in Serbia.

It seems like a paradox, but it’s not. Where else would all the defenders of traditional values and traditional families be angry at Western values if we didn’t have those Western values?

To simplify even more. What are “Western values” so we don’t mystify them and make a bogeyman out of them? A short list was made a long time ago. For example, by the European Union, in response to the question: What is it based on? It is based on respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law, and respect for human rights. This is the end of the mystery.

It would be nice to hear about the “traditional” values to which we should return and thus save ourselves from some future disaster that awaits us because we surrendered to “Western” values. Is it family harmony and mutual respect? Do they think that in the West, families try to be unhappy and separate?

Apart from being covertly racist, this mantra about returning to traditional family values as salvation from the destruction coming from the West is just a miserable political campaign that wants to take advantage of the tragedy of 18 families of those who died in Belgrade and near Mladenovac.

It is part of the war operation against the West, also conducted against Ukraine and its people using weapons, and in other places, including Serbia, similar to this – using manipulation and false narratives.

If it is any different, how could we explain the same tragedies in the “cradle” of those traditional values, for example, in Kerch, Crimea, five years ago, when a teenager killed 18 people, mostly his peers, using explosives at school?

Serbia is not different from any other European nation, not even in terms of the ethical principles by which its society and families live. Mentioning the West and the East in that context has nothing to do with values but only with the service to a violent political ideology and an aggressive state that confronted the whole world that wants to live by the description from the short list of EU values.

Whoever says that our society is sick because of the West and that we should renounce it to heal is not talking about Serbia, its society, or the family values because they are not interested in that. If they were concerned, they would ask us to renounce the rule of law and embrace tyranny, abolish freedom of speech, send people to prison for the spoken word, and strike at anyone who opposes our superiority and national purity.

A system of such “values” already exists and is destroying a country and its people, committing war crimes while keeping its fellow citizens in prison or under constant threat of imprisonment. Are these “traditional” values Serbia should turn to and save itself from evil? Or is this just pure evil that is a value in itself?