Remember the old Roman adage: the sins of the father shall be visited upon the sons. Today, Serbia has inverted that grim maxim. In a landmark retrial, the parents of a teenage school shooter have been sentenced to prison.
This is not justice. This is a society grappling with its own complicity, a desperate act of scapegoating dressed up as law. Yes, the massacre at Vladislav Ribnikar primary school in May 2023 was a national trauma: nine children and a guard murdered by a thirteen-year-old.
But locking up his mother and father? That smacks of an intellectual decadence we associate with the late Roman Empire, where blame was assigned not by evidence but by emotional necessity. The parents are not blameless, of course.
They owned the guns. They raised a child who would commit such an act. But the modern West, and Serbia with it, has become obsessed with accountability as a political tool rather than a legal one.
We see this in Britain, where we lock up social media executives for tweets, or in America, where we sue fast food companies for obesity. It is the death of personal responsibility, replaced by a diffuse, collective guilt that ultimately absolves the truly culpable. The government, the education system, the culture that glorifies violence: all escape scrutiny.
So we find a convenient villain. The parents are symbols, not defendants. This retrial was not about justice for the victims.
It was about a society proving to itself that it still has moral fibre. But real moral fibre requires a clear understanding of causation. A child who kills is a product of a thousand failures.
To pin it on two people is a legal fiction, a comforting lie. And like all lies, it will one day collapse. The Victorians understood this: they believed in character, in the formation of the soul through family, church, and community.
They would have wept for the parents, but also held them accountable in a more profound way. Today, we simply lock them up and feel righteous. We have confused punishment with understanding.
Serbia, you are better than this. But you are also, tragically, like the rest of us: too quick to judge, too slow to think.
