Category Archives: Extremism

New Nationalism and Barbarism in Vukovar

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Extremism, Hate, Serbia

 

Michael Ignatieff visited Vukovar shortly after the Croatian War ended and described it in his wonderful book Blood and Belonging, long before he started wasting his time and his talents on being the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and proved himself hopeless as a politician.

He pointed out that the Yugoslavian Army, then controlled by Serbia, lobbed 150,00 shells into the city. Not that the Croatians were entirely innocent either. The Croats dynamited parts of the city so that when the Serbs took over, they would gain nothing but rubble.

All wars are brutal, but particularly wars between brother nations. Civil Wars or Wars of Secession.  They bring out a particularly nasty hatred that brooks no restraint. Instead, in such wars, the hatred spews out like a fountain—a fountain of blood. That is one of the reasons people should resist the voices of extremists who demand a country breaks up. Separatists in Canada and the United States should remember this.

Ignatieff went on his journeys in order to write a book about what he called the new nationalism. What he found was not very pretty. Particularly in Vukovar, Ignatieff learned a lot about nationalism:

“It was in Vukovar that I began to see how nationalism works as a moral vocabulary. No one is responsible for anything, but the other side.  In the moral universe of pure nationalist delusion, all action is compelled by tragic necessity. Towns must be destroyed in “order to liberate them. Hostages must be shot.  Massacres must be undertaken. Why? Because the other side started it first.  Because the other side are beasts and understand no language but violence and reprisal. And so on.  Everyone in a nationalist war speaks in the language of fate, compulsion, and moral abdication.  Nowhere did this reach such a nadir as in Vukovar.  The pistol-toting hoodlums, holed up in the ruins of the Hotel Dunav, who came out and threatened to kill my translator simply because he was Hungarian; the Krajinan Information Minister who had no information that was not a lie; the mayor of Vukovar, who went around the Vukovar handing out Serbian flags to men whose legs ended at a bandaged stump—not one of these creatures ever expressed the slightest sense of shame, regret, or puzzlement that the insensate prosecution of their cause had led to the ruination of their own city. For all of them, the responsibility was solely Croat.”

The only thing new, about the new nationalism, is that it is even more bloody than the old.

Vukovar: The Croatian Stalingrad

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Extremism, Hate

 

 

In Vukovar we went on a walk through town led by Marda a local resident. This is one of the buildings we saw filled with bullet holes.

Among other things, she talked about the war in Vukovar that started when Croatia tried to break away from Yugoslavia.  Serbians who dominated Yugoslavia did not want it to leave. Perhaps like Ontario might feel if Quebec or Alberta would leave.  Or how California might feel if Texas tried to secede from the United States. Such ideas are what sparked the American film Civil War a couple of years ago. As the Wendy Ide of the Guardian explained it, “In that film, near-future US has turned its anger against itself; a new civil war is raging.” [1] In that film a president of the United States, who sounded a lot like the current president, was practicing his speech in front of a mirror.  This is what he said, “Some are already calling it the greatest victory in the history of mankind.” But those brave words were completely removed from reality. And brutal violence followed.  But Vukovar was real. It already happened.

 

What was really appalling about the destruction in Vukovar was that it was necessitated by no military objective.  It was entirely senseless.  As Michael Ignatieff said,

 

“The pulverization of Vukovar made no military sense.  When I asked a Serb tank commander why they had done it, he shrugged his shoulders.  ‘War has many such tragedies… Leningrad… Stalingrad…”  But these were battles with a military objective. In a nationalist war, on the other hand military objectives were driven by a desire to hurt, humiliate, and punish. The JNA (Yugoslav National Army) could have bypassed Vukovar and sent its tank columns down the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity all the way to Zagreb.  Instead, it sat on the other side of the Danube and pounded Vukovar into rubble, as if to say, with each outgoing shell, ‘So you want to be independent, do you?  This is what it will cost you, and what you will have at the end if nothing but ruins.’”

It is hard not to think, as you stand in the shattered graveyards, convents, churches, and homes, that someone derived deep pleasure from all this destruction.  All these ancient walls, all these crucifixes, church towers, ancient slate roofs, were demolished by people whose ideologies ceaselessly repeated that they were fighting to defend the holy and sacred past from desecration. In a way, the artillery expressed the essential nihilism of what people called conviction more honestly than all the nationalist pieties about fighting for the sake of the sacred motherland.

Some uncontrolled adolescent lust was at work here.  The tank and artillery commanders could not have seen what they were hitting. It was all as abstract and as satisfying as playing the machines in video arcade. It didn’t even seem to bother the largely Serb commanders that a significant percentage of the population being bombed, perhaps as many as 20 percent, were ethnic Serbs (maybe as high as 33%). Now many of them lie on the city’s outskirts beneath one of the bare, nameless crosses in a mass grave.”

 

Here is a building that speaks to the violence. It is filled with bullet holes from that conflict. For some reason, the owner chose not to fix it up.

 

They said they wanted to prevent desecration, but how could anyone say that the destruction they inflicted on their own city was anything but desecration?  It reminded me of the American soldier, standing inside a city completely demolished, hardly a building left, thousands killed, many more injured, who said what the coalition forces did in Fallujah was “a great victory”. Calling that a great victory is a great desecration.

 

Vukovar was like that. Almost every building destroyed. The few that remained were pocked with bullet holes and artillery holes, like the one above. And the Flower House that now looks like this:

 

 

The city was defended by 1,800 lightly armed soldiers of the Croatian National Guard together with some civilian volunteers.  They fought against as many as 36,000 JNA soldiers and Serb paramilitaries equipped with heavy armour and artillery. During the battle, shells and rockets were launched into the town at a rate of 12,000 a day. At the time it was the fiercest and most protracted battle seen in Europe since 1945. Sadly, that record was soon exceeded by the siege of Srebrenica during the Bosnia segment of the Yugoslavian Wars. As a result of the 87-day siege of Vukovar it became the first city in Europe to be completely destroyed since the Second World War. 

When Vukovar fell on November 18, 1991, several hundred soldiers and civilians were immediately massacred by the victorious Serbians. There was no reason for the slaughter. They were fellow citizens. The Croatians also discovered a mass grave with more than 900 bodies. More than 3,000 people were killed, and 20,000 civilians had been expelled. This was deep ethnic cleansing of non-Serbians. Of course, many Serbs who lived there were also killed by their fellow Serbs from Serbia. Massacres are rarely neat and tidy.

 

Another interesting phenomenon, considering the extreme bloodiness of the war, was that even though the two sides were often referred to as “Croatian” and “Serbian” or “Yugoslav”, Serbians and Croatians as well as many other of Yugoslavia’s national groups fought on both sides. There was never a pure ethnic division.  What were they fighting for?

After the war, several Serbian leaders were charged with war crimes, including their leader Slobodan Milošević who unfortunately died in prison before the trial concluded. Others survived long enough to be tried and convicted.

Even though Serbia “won” the battle the war exhausted them so completely, that after the war they were unable to continue the war with other belligerents. Not only that but Vukovar only remained in their hands until 1998 when it was peacefully reintegrated into Croatia. Clearly, all those deaths and injuries accomplished nothing!

Many mines were left behind after the fighting died down.  A minefield left as a defence against Serbians.   A million or more mines left in Balkans.  A reminder of war. A deadly reminder that would haunt the area for decades.

Since the end of the war the town has been rebuilt with few scars of war, but the psychic scars remain. The communities to some extent remain deeply divided. The town has also never regained its former prosperity. Destroying a town to save it, is rarely a good policy.

 

As we walked through Vukovar I was surprised to see how much of the city had been completely restored. The buildings were freshly plastered and painted. Most of the bullet holes were covered up. Some buildings however, laid out their wounds for us to see. I wondered why.

Was it stubborn pride to show us how they had suffered? I don’t know but I think it is important for us to see it and recognize it. And try to avoid a repetition of it.

Vukovar: When a Demon becomes God

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Decline of the west, Extremism, Hate, History, Modern History, Political Violence

 

 

The Flower House

Almost all the buildings in the city of Vukovar in Croatia  were completely destroyed. A few were left riddled with bullet holes.

 

I had read about Vukovar years ago in the two books by Michael Ignatieff and Tony Judt that I have referred to in these posts.  I have often thought about that war between brother states. I wanted to see the city. I thought it was important to understand it. It could happen here in Canada or in the United States.

 

Croatia had not been independent in 1,000 years until it declared its independence from Yugoslavia in1991 and then got tangled up in war with Serbia, also a former Republic of Yugoslavia as was Croatia, really a brother state.

 

An early skirmish in the 5 wars of the former Yugoslavia in what became briefly, Serbia, was the fight for Vukovar that was part of Croatia. Serbia, at great cost, temporarily “won” the war and gained control of Croatia, but that did not last long. It is now again part of Croatia. Why all the killing then? What were all those deaths for? Who knows? Maybe God. Not I.

 

Vukovar was once the Hapsburg episcopal seat. It was located directly on the Danube River and we were fortunate to visit it on this trip through the Balkans. As Michael Ignatieff said in his book Blood and Belonging,

 

“In 1991 it became the Croatian Stalingrad. Throughout the autumn, the Croatian national guard defended it to the last street against the heaviest artillery bombardment seen in Europe since 1945.”

 

They fought valiantly but eventually succumbed to the barrage until November 1991 the Yugoslav National Army (‘JNA’) which was dominated by Serbs, together with Serbian paramilitaries “liberated” the town. The “liberation” was much like the liberation of Fallujah in Iraq by coalition forces led by Americans where crumbled and flattened buildings stood behind the fighters as they drove around the city. Liberation, like beauty, is definitely in the eyes of the beholder. When the City of Vukovar was “liberated” by the Serbs there was, as Ignatieff said, “nothing left to liberate but a devastated ruin.”

 

 

C.S. Lewis, who was a wise man, said this about love of country: “We all know now that this love [nationalism] becomes a demon when it becomes a god.” He was referring to Nazism, but really it has much broader application. It can apply to any form of extreme nationalism, no matter where it is found. It can apply to Serbia, or Croatia, or Nazi Germany, or the United States, or Canada. No one is immune.

 

Lewis made another important point about love of country. And this attitude is becoming more and more common in places like the United States and Canada. This is the attitude that our ancestors were uniquely great. Many of us want to take photoshop to history to eliminate the flaws. Lewis realized that “the actual history of every country is full of shabby and even shameful doings.” No country is purely good. We must never forget that. If we do forget it, we don’t really love our country; we love a mirage. We love fake news. As well, if we forget this obvious fact, we begin to nurture a debilitating sense of superiority that can shred our own decency. We can become what we hate. Lewis also said, with such an attitude, “If our country’s cause is the cause of God, wars must be wars of annihilation. This is what happens when a false transcendence is given to things which are very much of this world.” In particular, we must guard against using this false sense of superiority as an unjustified basis for cruelty or exclusion.

As Bob Dylan, another very wise once said: “You don’t count the dead with god on your side.” That is what we must guard against.

 

In one house, [shown above] which locals referred to as “the flower house,” the holes from bullets and artillery were resplendent. Apparently, the owner had tried to rebuild it but despite repeated efforts to get a building permit and constantly being rebuffed by the local council, he decided to let it be.  All he did was place a large number of flower pots around it, hanging from every window. I guess he was trying to say, ‘Take your permits and shove them.’

Nothing can grow in the Valley of Bones other than hate. And maybe a few potted flowers.

 

Murderous Extremes

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Extremism, Liberalism, Pluralism

 

As far back as 1791 the Marquis de Salaberry had described people in the Balkans s as “the unpolished extremities of Europe”.  There is some truth to this.  The countries, it seems to me, were all ruled by extremists.  And when you turn your country over to extremists no one should be surprised when lethal mayhem follows. And many believed it was inevitable that they would bubble over much as they had done in centuries past.  It seemed that this is exactly what happened. Murderous animosities fueled by memories of injustice and vengeance took over a whole nation. In 1992 the American Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger said, “Until the Bosnians, Serbs, and Croats decide to stop killing each other, there is nothing the outside world can do about it.” This is the same thing that happened in Gaza and Israel. The extremists led each to war and the ensuing slaughter was as vicious as you would expect.

 

According to the second view the Balkans tragedy was rather the fault of outsiders.  After all, as outlined over the past 2 centuries the Balkans had been fought over, conquered, divided, and exploited by others.  These exploiting countries included Turkey, Italy, France, England, Austria, Germany, and Russia.  They were to blame for creating the bad blood between the peoples.  The problem was not ethnic hostility, but rather imperial manipulation for the benefit of the colonizers at the dire expense of the colonized. The irresponsible interference of foreign countries magnified the local hostilities. According to this view, things like the overly hasty recognition of the independence of Slovenia and Croatia by some European countries such as Germany, led in 1991 to a decade of disaster. This view has the attractive feature of aligning with centuries of dominance and interference by outside countries.

 

While the causes may be muddy, it is clear that a decade of catastrophe followed.  It is important however not to let the local Yugoslavs off the hook. They were far from blameless. As Tony Judt said in his magisterial history of modern Europe, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945,

 

“To be sure there was a lot of history buried in the mountains of the former Yugoslavia, and many bad memories too.  And outsiders did indeed contribute crucially to the country’s tragedy, though mostly through irresponsible acquiescence in local crimes.  But the break-up of Yugoslavia—resembling in this respect the dismantling of other former Communist states—was the work of men, not fate.  And the overwhelming responsibility for Yugoslavia’s tragedy lay not in Bonn or any other foreign capital, but the with the politicians in Belgrade.[Serbia]”

 

The key is to control the extremists. Don’t give in to them.  Once more that is what countries like Canada and the US must do. That is what Israel failed to do. Don’t give in to the loudest voices. Give in, if you must, to the dull boring middle, if you want to improve your chances. That’s really what pluralism and liberalism are all about.

 

Warlords for Dangerous Times

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Extremism, Fear, Modern History, Pluralism, Polarization, Political Violence, Vigilantism

 

Tony Judt  described what happened in Yugoslavia when the country split up into many tiny pieces after the wars of the 1990s ruled by small men: “These were little more than organized bands of thugs and criminals.” Michael Ignatieff in his wonderful book, Blood and Belonging, said this about what happened when the warlords took over:

 

“Elegant episcopal palaces and monasteries, delicately arcaded squares left behind by the Austro-Hungarians, lie in ruins. Time has slid back five centuries. One of the richest and most civilized parts of Europe has returned to the barbarism of the late Middle Ages. Such law and order as there is, is administered by warlords.”

 

Countries such as Canada and the US, both federations like Yugoslavia, in which people had lived together for many decades, should pay attention. All this could happen here.

 

They were harrowing times. One might have asked what was Ignatieff was  doing there in such dangerous circumstances? He explored it driving through the country and everywhere he saw young men with rifles demanding obeisance or money or both. If you saw the recent film Civil War about what might happen in the US you will know what it looks like, namely,

 

“The ones I began meeting at the checkpoints on the roads leading off from the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity [that joined Zagreb and Belgrade] during Tito’s Yugoslavia and they were short, stubby men who in a former life had been small-time hoods, small-town cops [amazing how similar they can be] or both.  Spend a day with them, touring their world and you’d hardly know that most of them are serial killers.

 

Warlords not only dominate the war zones; they have worked their way to the heart of power in the authoritarian single-party states of Croatia and Serbia alike.

 

War criminals are celebrities in the Balkans. They have seats in the Serbian Parliament… Arkan [-one of these warlord] controls an eight-hundred strong paramilitary unit called the Tigers, who raped and tortured their way through eastern Slavonia in the Croatian war of 1991.  This odious thug, on the run from an Interpol warrant for an attempted murder in Sweden, is a parliamentary deputy and operates a number of immensely profitable sanctions-busting businesses…Ever the post-modern Prince of Darkness.”

 

 

The peculiar thing though was that these warlords, and their followers all claimed to be working for their “country”. That of course, meant the “country” that had broken away from Yugoslavia. These were the reduced nations to which they now claimed to owe allegiance.  As a result, they considered themselves, nationalists. Ignatieff agreed that the force that was driving them was nationalism, but was it? Is that an accurate description? As he said,

 

“The warlords are nationalists, but their convictions are uninteresting.  They are technicians of violence, rather than ideologues.  Earlier than everybody else they had understood that ethnic nationalism had delivered the ordinary people of the Balkans straight back to the pre-political state of nature, where Hobbes predicted, life is nasty, brutish, and short. In the state of nature, the man with a Zastava machine pistol and a Cherokee Chief is king.  For he can provide the two commodities everybody here craves security and vengeance.

 

Once the Yugoslav Communist state began to spin apart into its constituent national particles, the key question soon became:  Will the local Croat policeman protect me if I am a Serb?  Will I keep my job in the soap factory if my new boss is Serb or a Muslim?  The answer to these questions was no, because no state remained to enforce the old inter-ethnic bargain.  As a result, every individual rushed, pell-mell, to the next available source of protection:  the warlord.

 

For the warlord not only offers protection.  He offers a solution.  He tells his people:  If we cannot trust our neighbours, we must rid ourselves of them.  If we cannot live together in a single state, we must create clean states of our own. The logic of ethnic cleansing is not just motivated by national hatred.  Cleansing is warlord’s coldly rational solution to the war of all against all.  Rid yourself of your neighbors, the warlord says, and you no longer have to fear them. Live among your own, and you can live in peace.  With me and my boys to protect you.”

 

It was really a protection racket. Pay up or we will kill you. Pretty blunt demands.  No room for nuance. Pay or die. It was often that simple. And if you belonged to the wrong group, you had no choice. You just died.

 

Of course, this is entirely the wrong approach. In modern societies people are mobile and quickly mover around the world. In each place, people must learn to live together with other people who are different from who you are—we call this pluralism. That is who we much learn to live. Belonging without the blood. Either that or say hello to the warlords.

Peculiar Nationalism: A New World Disorder

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Extremism, Modern History

 

I have already mentioned that the entities that broke out of the disintegrating Yugoslavia were not nations. They were something less than that. Yet, the people in those states were infused with nationalism for their little states.

 

Many outsiders assume that all Balkan peoples are inevitably nationalistic, but that is not true.  Many of them lamented the loss of the old Yugoslavia with its federal state where all ethnic differences were suppressed in favor of the unity of brotherhood. Many of them liked Coca Cola Communism.

 

Too many people around the world thought that the collapse of Communist states would bring a “new world order.”  Remember that quaint expression of George H.W. Bush?  What a foolish expectation!  What we got was a new world disorder. Most of us, around the world,  believed that the fall of communism would lead inevitably to a new order of nation states, hopefully free and democratic, when they were released from what Ignatieff called the “senile grip of Soviets.” Naively people assumed that self-determination meant peace and freedom.  Instead, in Yugoslavia at least, it meant savagery and nation destroying.  As Michael Ignatieff said,

 

“We assumed that national self-determination had to mean freedom and that nationalism meant nation building.  As usual, we were wrong.  We hoped for order.  We got pandemonium. In the name of nationalism, dozens of viable nation-states have been shattered beyond repair.  In the name of state building, we have returned large portions of Europe to the pre-political chaos prior to the emergence of the modern state.

 

Large portions of the former Yugoslavia are now ruled by figures that have not been seen in Europe since late medieval times; the warlords.  They appear wherever nation states disintegrate: in Lebanon, Somalia, northern India, Armenia, Georgia, Ossetia Cambodia, and the former Yugoslavia. With their car phones, faxes, and exquisite personal weaponry, they look postmodern, but the reality is pure medieval…”

 

Of course, since Michael Ignatieff wrote that in 1994 the same thing has happened in many other places around the world and is threatening again to happen in many more. Even countries we long thought of as solemn and steady have shown uncomfortable wobbliness.

We seem headed for dangerous times. No that’s wrong; we are in dangerous times.

Brothers at Each Other’s Throats

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Democracy, Extremism, Fear, Hate, Modern History, Pluralism, Polarization, Populism

 

The problem in the north of Yugoslavia was not so much resurfacing of ancient hatreds, or religious or linguistic differences, as it was economic nationalism. The northerners were producing most of the wealth of the country and felt that much of this wealth was being siphoned off by their poorer southern cousins. They were starting to believe in the north that they would all be better off as independent countries. Sounds a lot like Alberta doesn’t it? Resentment is often fuel of strife.

 

The Communist leader, Tito, had managed to suppress such serious criticisms during his life time, but as soon as he was gone such critiques flourished.

The economy of Yugoslavia had seriously unraveled during the 1980s.  The country moved into hyperinflation.  By 1989 the inflation rate was 1,240 % and rising.  These were conditions in which tensions were incubated into vigorously nasty animosities. As Tony Judt another brilliant historian said, in his book about Europe after the Second World War, “the growing distaste for feckless southerners was ethnically indiscriminate and based not on nationality but on economics.”

 

The ruling centres of former communist enclaves in Belgrade, Serbia, were also spectacularly corrupt. When these led to financial ruin, the people were ready to revolt.  These feelings were intensified by fears that a small group of former Communist apparatchiks coalescing around the brute Slobodan Milošević were planning to make a bid for power in the political vacuum that followed Tito’s death.  That is exactly what happened. He gained power by arousing and manipulating Serb national emotions.  Like Trump decades later, he was a master of that. Many Communist leaders had tried similar tactics in other countries.  As Judt said, “In the era of Gorbachev, with the ideological legitimacy of Communism and its ruling party waning fast, patriotism offered an alternative way of securing a hold on power.” Or as Samuel Johnson said, “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”

 

In Yugoslavia however, Milošević and his cronies encouraged nationalist meetings at which the insignia of wartime Chetniks were on public display and this aroused deep disquiet among those groups that had been abused by the Chetniks during the war. The Chetniks were the Serbs who had fought on the side of Hitler during the war, using that opportunity to commit mayhem and destruction. Riding a wave of Serbian nationalism, Milošević was confirmed in power as the President of the Serbian republic in 1989.

Milošević wanted to forge a more unitary Serbian state. No more wimpy federalism. Like so many autocrats before and after him, he used nationalism as an instrument to cement his power. After all, he told his fellow Serbs, we are just taking what is rightly ours.  He could have said, I just want to make Serbia great again.

Naturally the other 4 republics were not so keen on Serbian domination. In Slovenia and Croatia, they saw only one way out from such domination, secession. Unlike other Communist countries where the former powerful Communists had no internal ethnic divisions on which to prey when their political power waned, in Serbia those divisions were exploited for the personal gain of the former Communist power brokers. As Judt said, “The country offered fertile opportunities for demagogues like Milošević, or Franjo Tudjman, his Croat counterpart.”  The problem as Judt saw it was that, “in Yugoslavia, the break-up of the federation into its constituent republics would in every case except Slovenia leave a significant minority or group of minorities stranded in someone else’s country.”  Then when one republic declared itself independent its neighbours quickly fell like dominoes.

 

Milošević was the first Yugoslav politician to break Tito’s ban on the mobilization of ethnic consciousness.’  He liked to portray himself as the defender of Yugoslavia against the secessionist longings of Croatia and Slovenia, and, ominously, as the avenger of old wrongs done to Serbs. He wanted to build a greater Serbia on the ruins of old Yugoslavia, but with Serb domination. Milošević was quite capable of inciting Serb minorities in Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, and Kosovo to rise up and demand Serb protection.  In fact, that was his favoured technique.  The Serbs in these other republics to a large extent merely served as Milošević’s pretext for his expansionary designs.

 

Although most Serbs at the time displayed little nationalistic paranoia, and even less interest in distant Serbs, Milošević transformed their vague memories into rabid fears and paranoia that Serbs spread around the old Yugoslavia were about to be annihilated by the majority in their republics. Milošević, in other words, used these fears to further his demagogic purposes. He used the oldest trick in the playbook of wanna be autocrats–manufactured fear. Trump does it all the time.

 

Milošević did not invent the fears.  They grew up naturally when Yugoslavia disintegrated, as every national group feared they were endangered as a minority in some republic. So, for example, the Serbs, as the largest minority group in Croatia, they felt particularly vulnerable. He did not make up the fears, but he sure knew how to exploit them.

 

In the Slovene election in April of 1990 a government was elected that was still pro-Yugoslavia, but also highly critical of the Serbian government in Belgrade. In the following month of May a new nationalist party under its leader Tudjman came to power in Croatia. In December of that year Milošević seized, without authorization, 50% of the entire drawing rights of the Yugoslav federation in order to pay back pay and bonuses for federal employees. Again economics, as always, was a crucial factor in developments that often wore an ethnic or religious disguise. In January of 1991 the Slovenia government declared independence.   Within a month the Croats did the same thing. Soon the Parliament of Macedonia did the same thing.

 

The hasty recognition of the independent states by Europe, especially, Germany, perhaps were not helpful. When an independent Croatia was formed, political leaders in the Serbian capital of Belgrade began to play on the fears of Serbians with outrageous propaganda on radio and television.  This helped to invoke in the Serbs memories of massacres in World War II and prompted those Serbs to rise up in revolt against their ‘Ustache’ neighbours. The Ustache had been seen as traitors in the Second World War who supported the Nazis and did their best to exterminate the Serbs, so now the Serb minorities feared, a repeat, not entirely without  justification.

The Serb minorities in these states were deeply worried.  Clashes with authorities followed. They called upon Belgrade to help them against their ‘Ustache’ oppressors.

When Serbs were dismissed from their positions in the police force, judiciary, and military, many thought the Croats might be setting the table for another massacre. They believed they might be seeing the return of a an ethnic state with a genocidal past. Croats denied that this was the case, but there were some reasons for this angst. When Serb police were fired, Serbs armed themselves as militia. When the Croats were unable to maintain order, the Yugoslav national army, under the direction of Serbs from Belgrade stepped in at first to restore order, and later to obliterate Croatian independence. As Michael Ignatieff said, , “War was the result of an interacting spiral of Serbian expansionism, Croat independence, and Serbian ethnic paranoia in Croatia.”

 

Even though the Americans claimed to support a democratic and unified Yugoslavia, as Judt said, by then “a ‘democratic and unified Yugoslavia was an oxymoron.’” There really was no room for democracy.  Slovenia and Croatia took active measures to implement their independence by actually unilaterally seceding from the federation.  They enjoyed the tacit support of a number of European leaders.  The Serbs responded by moving the national Yugoslav army to the borders.

Although the Serbs and their army, the Yugoslav National Army bear the primary responsibility for what happened, since they hurled 150,000 shells into Croatia from the surrounding hills, but Croats were not without blame. They dynamited parts of the great city as they left so there would be nothing left for their Serb brothers. These are the type of things you can expect when all sides seem to be represented by their loudest and most extreme voices.

Unfortunately, all around us today this seems to be happening.  We had best be alert.

 

Blood and Belonging

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Extremism, Hate, Modern History, Pluralism

 

This is now a quiet business street. Not long ago, it was hell on earth. It has been completely rebuilt.

The Balkans is one of the most interesting areas on the globe.  Michael Ignatieff wrote a series of excellent books that focuses a lot of attention the region, and were supplemented by some documentary films. Michael Ignatieff was a much better writer and thinker than he was a political leader. As he said in one of the series of books I mentioned, Blood and Belonging,

 

“…huge sections of the world’s population have won the ‘right-of-self-determination’ on the cruelest possible terms:  they have been simply left to fend for themselves.  Not surprisingly their nation states are collapsing… In critical zones of the world, once heavily policed by empire—notably the Balkans—populations find themselves without an imperial arbiter to appeal to.  Small wonder then, that, unrestrained by stronger hands, they have set upon each other for that final settling of scores so long deferred by the presence of empire.”

 

It is not good enough to blame the melee on the assertion that this area of the world was filled with sub-rational intractable fanatics.  Though it was more than its fair share of those. We have to think more deeply than that.  We have to ask why people who had lived together for decades were transformed from neighbours into enemies?  That was the crucial question that has to be answered.

 

It was that great British philosopher Thomas Hobbes who wrote about the war of all against all that occurs in the state of nature (when there is no state) and requires the creation of a state to protect all and to provide a platform for morality when all give up the means of violence in favor of the sovereign. As Ignatieff said,

 

“Thomas Hobbes would have understood Yugoslavia.  What Hobbes would say, having lived through religious civil war himself, is that when people are sufficiently afraid, they will do anything. There is one type of fear more devastating in its impact than any other: the systemic fear that arises when a state begins to collapse.  Ethnic hatred is the result of terror that arises when legitimate authority disintegrates.“

 

This was the basis of the film Civil War shown a couple of years ago, speculating what might happen in the United States if their state broke down. Not at all an impossibility. It was brutal.

 

Tito, the communist leader of Yugoslavia, with his brand of Coca Cola Communism,  had realized that the unification of each of the 6 major Slav peoples required a strong federal state to keep it together.  Like Canada.  Who knows what would happen in Canada if the state collapsed as it did in Yugoslavia? If later any group wanted to secede it would have to deal with the minorities within in its own territory. After all, people don’t live in neatly separated enclaves.  In the case of Yugoslavia, in too many cases, this led to the forcible expulsion of whole populations.  They called it ethnic cleansing, an expression now known around the world, thanks to Yugoslavia. Remember that as much as 25% of both Croat and Serb populations have always lived outside the borders of their own republics.

 

The big mistake that Tito and the Communists had made was to fail to provide for divorce or succession. They failed to provide for the eventual emergence of civic, rather than ethnic based multi-party competition.   His doctrine of socialist rhetoric had lauded, not without some moral attraction, the “brotherhood and unity of all Yugoslavs.” This was a lofty goal, but it provided no mechanism for that to be accomplished when the state disintegrated.  That idea swiftly melted in the face of the profound hatreds that were released between the combatants. As Ignatieff said,

 

By failing to allow a plural political culture to mature, Tito ensured that the fall of his regime turned into the collapse of the entire state structure. In the ruins, his heirs and successor turned to the most atavistic principles of political mobilization in order to survive.

 

If Yugoslavia no longer protected you, perhaps your fellow Croats, Serbs, or Slovenes might.  Fear, more than conviction, made unwilling nationalists of ordinary people. …

 

Ethnic difference per se was not responsible for the nationalistic politics that emerged in the Yugoslavia of the 1980s.  Consciousness of ethnic difference turned into nationalistic hatred only when the surviving Communist elites, beginning with Serbia, began manipulating nationalist emotions in order to cling to power.

 

That is precisely the issue; people have to learn to live in plural cultures.  If difference leads to hate, as it often does, bloodshed soon follows when the dogs of hell are let loosed. No one should insist on my way or the highway, but many do. Who doesn’t like variety? Who thinks they have a monopoly on the truth? Many conservatives in the US now want a country without those nasty liberals. Of course, many liberals would like to get rid of the conservatives too. How could that happen peacefully?

 

Well, the extremists think they have a lock on the truth. Sometimes they even come to believe their own lies. This can even happen in modern countries such as the United States. Or Canada.

 

We all need to learn to live in pluralistic societies. If we can’t look out for those hounds. That is why Yugoslavia is so important. Even in Canada.