quote:

Situations like the Yugoslavia start years before the violence becomes noticeable, and the first rocks thrown are sometimes thrown by the people that find themselves against the wall.

Wit, for what I've read, violence in former Yugoslavia predates 20th century. It ecloded during WW-I and after WW-II it was "controlled" by the communist government. It is just like a coil: you can compress and hold for a time, but the potential energy is there all the time, just waiting to be released.

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Originally posted by Marvin Freestyle:

quote:

Originally posted by UberDog:
The HVO called themselves no such thing. The propaganda machine started to refer to the Croats as ustase in an attempt to swell the hatred needed to persecute the war in the way they needed to push it.

While some faction may have called themselves ustashe, the Croats as a whole did not. That term, from Nazi collaborators, was used to drive hatred and foment crimes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Croatia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_State_of_Croatia

This is the sort of "debating" I find weak, cutting and pasting as refined argument. But fine, here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usta%C5%A1e

I'm going to say that Croatians aren't Nazis. Me, out on a limb here.

quote:

Originally posted by Witness:
The problem with foreign correspondents is that there are rarely many of them at trouble spots before trouble starts.

Most of the time they arrive after the situation has reached a point where all the locals have been polarized in their positions, and they often don't have much experience or knowledge of either the current crisis or the broader situation. Sometimes they don't even share a common language with the locals.

They are to a large degree dependent on the locals to tell them what's going on and it's hard to get an objective idea of what's going on. Even if they see genuine evidence that what they're being told is true, they're vulnerable to be steered away from evidence that proves accusations against the people that they're talking to.

They aren't infallible and they shouldn't be treated as being infallible, nor should we take it for granted that they're being objective or even-handed.



Now, I'd like to point out that I didn't say that the travesty at Versailles or the other ignominies heaped on Germany reduced their responsibility for what they did. I think I may have said that specifically.

What Versailles and that same shabby treatment is responsible for is establishing conditions conducive to a rise of nationalist sentiment in the German people. Once that sentiment started to grow having someone like Hitler take advantage of it to gain political power became much more likely.

Nationalism seems much more likely to take hold in populations that feel like they're vulnerable and that feel they're being unjustly victimized. A society in the thrall of nationalistic sentiment is much more likely to start dehumanizing anyone that differs from the group.

Situations like the Yugoslavia start years before the violence becomes noticeable, and the first rocks thrown are sometimes thrown by the people that find themselves against the wall.

I'm advocating a radical new view of the way in which we interact with history.

Correspondents aren't infallible, obviously. But they are more objective than combatants. Most of them cover multiple sides perspectives and come to their own conclusions about what's going on. They don't simply ask the locals and post a story. Not any of the good ones. That isn't at all how they operate. They go, they get information by witnessing it, not by asking a local or having a local explain it to them.

That just isn't true for decent combat journalists, I'm guessing you expect that's what they do, but don't really know. I might have said the same before I did a bunch of research on the topic.

I could see Serbia becoming Nationalistic again because someone thunders the drum of victimhood for their own purposes. Which is what they did in 1991. Which is what the US has done with September 11, and so on...

But that doesn't mean history should enter into the debates about what goes on after it. It is an illusion that things happen within history, the reality, in my view, is that man is the victim of his own fictions we he no longer controls.

I agree with a lot of what you said, so I'll just comment on the small bits I disagree with.

I'm not worried about resurgent Serbian nationalism. They're not likely to get too far out of hand because they've got the world just waiting to smack them down.

It's Kosova nationalism that has me concerned.



I believe that history remains a factor. Not the generations gone grudges and "500 years ago my grandfather fought the Turks here which makes me more entitled to be here than you" sentiment. That's all bullshit.

But in 1991 it was the tail end of a decade of Kosova nationalists attacking Serbs and encouraging them to leave the province. There was intimidation, violence and the destruction of buildings of great emotional importance to the Serbs.

The atrocities weren't committed because Marvin's grandfather stole some Albanian's chicken or something obscure and lost in time. The increasing level of brutality on the part of the Serbs was motivated by an intention to stop behaviour that was still happening as the civil war started up in earnest.

That's personal history, which is slightly different I think.

Excising the tendons by which we are connected to our own history is an exercise in analysis and the like.

It's hard to tell someone not to want revenge for somehting that happened to them.

Still, I think the basic principle might be applied.

But that's a tangent that goes from the macro to the micro.

quote:

Originally posted by UberDog:

quote:

Originally posted by Marvin Freestyle:

quote:

Originally posted by UberDog:
The HVO called themselves no such thing. The propaganda machine started to refer to the Croats as ustase in an attempt to swell the hatred needed to persecute the war in the way they needed to push it.

While some faction may have called themselves ustashe, the Croats as a whole did not. That term, from Nazi collaborators, was used to drive hatred and foment crimes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Croatia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_State_of_Croatia

This is the sort of "debating" I find weak, cutting and pasting as refined argument. But fine, here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usta%C5%A1e

I'm going to say that Croatians aren't Nazis. Me, out on a limb here.

You're right. Completely lame post from my side. I don't think Croatians are Nazis. Although I know that the Ustase movement still has strong roots in Croatia.

Knowing a couple of war journalists, I might agree with Uberdog, if it were not because the correspondents do not choose what gets published or broadcast, the networks and editors do, based on their own interests/prejudices. Even if it is their report, judicious editing can change the message fairly easily. Those interests vary from country to country, so checking different origins (in the original language if possible, as often translations from foreign correspondents also get twisted to fit the publisher's line) is necessary to get a varied point of view.

The Serbians I have met (we do sell some compounds to Serbia, which itself requires some creative shipping and a thorough accounting through Cyprus, making some Turkish gentlemen rich just by facilitating trade) are neither nationalistic nor aggresive, though they are quite pissed off (both at their government and the EU) for the whole Mladic and Karadcic circus, and how Croatia did something similar with Gotovina and still made it in the EU (more or less).

As for the Kosovo intervention, it was the fact that refugees were leaving the country (unlike the Serbs fleeing Kosovo, who were Internally Displaced People, rather than refugees, in UNHCR speech) what brought about NATO's intervention, unwilling to have a new Srebenica non-intervention catastrophe in their hands, which could be argued it was the KLA plan all along. So the Albanian exodus started before the intervention, and it did not stop till KFOR was in place. Without such a justification, NATO would not have intervened.

My father has also visited Belgrade after the war, as a consultant for the EBRD (European Bank for Reconstruction and Development), and he really liked the place and the people. However the mistrust of the EU and its policies crippled the mission, unlike Romania or Slovakia, where things were quite worse in terms of infrastructure, but much better on terms of collaboration.

As for history, I do think that the problem is that many politicians share UD's views about history, which is why this kind of catastrophes happen, time and time again.

quote:

As for history, I do think that the problem is that many politicians share UD's views about history, which is why this kind of catastrophes happen, time and time again.

Wait, which view, the one I'm advocating or the one that where they use history as a tent pole for mad schemes?

quote:

Knowing a couple of war journalists, I might agree with Uberdog, if it were not because the correspondents do not choose what gets published or broadcast, the networks and editors do, based on their own interests/prejudices. Even if it is their report, judicious editing can change the message fairly easily.

My source material has been their memoirs and interviews they have done rather than their articles alone.

quote:

Originally posted by Marvin Freestyle:

quote:

Originally posted by UberDog:

quote:

Originally posted by Marvin Freestyle:

quote:

Originally posted by UberDog:
The HVO called themselves no such thing. The propaganda machine started to refer to the Croats as ustase in an attempt to swell the hatred needed to persecute the war in the way they needed to push it.

While some faction may have called themselves ustashe, the Croats as a whole did not. That term, from Nazi collaborators, was used to drive hatred and foment crimes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Croatia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_State_of_Croatia

This is the sort of "debating" I find weak, cutting and pasting as refined argument. But fine, here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usta%C5%A1e

I'm going to say that Croatians aren't Nazis. Me, out on a limb here.

You're right. Completely lame post from my side. I don't think Croatians are Nazis. Although I know that the Ustase movement still has strong roots in Croatia.

All people everywhere are crazy and sick.

Neo Nazis, or in this case, Old School Nazis? It's just craziness. They use history to support a cause, but they ignore the bit about history where the cause proved untenable and misdirected.

It's the Supermarket of Historocity!