Category Archives: Hate

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.

 

Vukovar: The Valley of Bones 

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Decline of the west, Hate, History, Mass killings, Modern History, violence, Waterfalls

 

I had been eagerly waiting to see the Croatian city of Vukovar since I signed up for this trip cruising up the Danube. I am sure I was the only one of our 147 passengers who thought that. Others wanted to see Bran Castle, because it was Dracula’s castle. So at least they thought.

The first thing we saw in this town was a museum. Vukovar has several museums, including the Vukovar Municipal Museum, housed in the Baroque Eltz Palace, which covers the city’s long history. This museum is dedicated to preserving the history of this region, even if that history is not always pleasant.

Vukovar Municipal Museum

We had been warned by our cruise director that the history of Vukovar was rough.

On our short stroll through Vukovar, a crucial city in the wars of Yugoslavia, our local guide, Marda, almost apologized for bringing to our attention the history of the massacre that happened here. At the time it occurred in 1991, it was the worst massacre in Europe since the Second World War. I thought that history was important, and I was glad she explained, to us, even though very briefly, what had happened. I wanted to understand it, partly because I realized it could happen back home in North America.

Tito the leader of Coca Cola communism, had a dream of brotherhood and unity.  It was brutally shattered after his death as various ethnic groups attacked each other with stunning ferocity. Brotherhood could not hold back the hatred.

Journalists have used the expression “The Valley of Bones” to refer to areas that are strewn with human remains.  They don’t necessarily refer to a specific area. They really mean an area that is desolate or war-torn after a long battle. I am sure some use it to describe the land that was once Yugoslavia.

In 1989, Frank Viviano, a journalist for the New York times referred to a place in Yugoslavia, Croatia to be specific, this way: “…as if all Yugoslavia had once been paved in concrete and were now breaking up. The biblical valley of dry bones, you might imagine, lay somewhere between Knin and Obrovac.” These are 2 towns in Croatia that were important medieval capitals and became important during the Croatian War of Independence.

The New York Times writer was talking about one of the most beautiful places in the world, called Plitvice Lakes where 16 lakes are connected by turquoise blue waterfalls . He said was second only to the Grand Canyon. I am not sure if the Grand Canyon is more beautiful. That place is called Plitvice Lakes and I saw it in 2008. [I must post about that trip.] In any event the expression refers to land that has far too many human bones.  Like the land that used to be called Yugoslavia. The beauty really can’t hide the bones. Or the hate.

 

The wars of Yugoslavia showed the power of hate.  These powers include powers opposed to fellow feeling.  Forces that seek to divide rather than to join, seemed much more powerful than the forces that kept people together, or at least in line.

 

There was a room with a body bag filled hundreds of bones.  At least 21 people.  And there were many body bags. There are many sites with bones.  Many are found in mass graves that were discovered after the war when bones were found in the earth.  When I was in Vukovar I was told by a young Croatian guide Marda, who held no animosity towards Serbians, that a mass grave of about 900 bodies had been found the day after the war with Serbian ended with the defeat of Croatia. And there are many mass graves around the country.  Many of the bodies are badly damaged. Often the skulls were so smashed you could hardly recognize them as humans. Some contained bones of women and children. Those are all valleys of bones.

 

Political extremism is born from a feeling other than fellow feeling. Its parent is that feeling that finds the other repugnant solely for being other. The feeling that we are superior to them. That the others are not even human.

 

Many people were let down when the UN who declared safe zones in the former Yugoslavia failed to make those zones safe.  People under siege gathered to be protected by the UN troops and  laid down their weapons, but  when the Serbs arrived they proceeded to slaughter those people. Or rape them.

 

We must remember that when we leave our affairs to the hard men in our group—there are always men—we will pay a hard price. As someone said, “as long as there are hard men there will be wars.” I wish I knew who to give her credit for those wise words. Einstein was more cynical than that. He said, “As long as there are men, there will be wars.”

 

We must all remember that there will always be men (again usually men, but sometimes women) who will urge us to join groups where we are obligated, to despise the other side. That is a dangerous path which never leads to glory no matter how much some try to persuade us.

That is the attitude that leads to a valley of bones.

 

Ethnic Cleansing in a Fractured Country

Croatia, Hate, Modern History

 

 

 

Meanwhile, of course, the various small armies in Yugoslavia were fighting each other with distilled ferocity. It mattered not that they had been until recently countrymen and women. Now they were at each others’ throats.

 

Between 1991 and 1999 during these wars of Yugoslavia, hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, and Albanians were killed, raped, or tortured by others who had until recently been their fellow citizens.  Basically, by their neighbours. Imagine if that happened in your home town. As if that was not bad enough, millions were forced out of their homes into unwelcome and appalling exile by the brutal efforts of ethnic cleansing.

 

As bad as ethnic cleansing was, we will never understand it unless we acknowledge that there is some deep perverted logic to it.  As Michael Ignatieff said,

 

“By 1990, this part of Yugoslavia was a Hobbesian world.  No one in these villages could be sure who would protect them.  If they were Serbs and someone attacked them and they went to the Croatian police, would the Croats protect them?  If they were Croats, in a Serbian village, could they be protected against nighttime attack from a Serbian paramilitary team, usually led by a former policeman?  This is how ethnic cleansing began to acquire its logic.  If you can’t trust your neighbors, drive them out.  If you can’t live among them, live only among your own.  This alone appeared to offer people security.  This alone gave them respite from the fear that leaped like a brushfire from house to house.”

 

For the two million people who fled their homes as pitiful refugees such flight was their only believable protection. Consider if that happened in the United States, or Canada. And don’t think that is impossible.

 

There are two common theories about why the fragmentation of Yugoslavia turned so bloody.  Both of them have some truth to them, but neither, in my view is a complete picture of reality.

 

One widely held theory blames the troubles on the assertion that the Balkans are a hopeless mish mash of warring tribes feeding on ancient never forgotten hatreds.  According to this view, Yugoslavia, was always doomed. As Milovan Djilas said in the book Wartime, “It seems as if these feuding peasants could hardly wait for the invasion of their country so they could hunt down and kill one another.”  One often repeated bon mot said that Yugoslavia consisted of 6 republics, 5 nations, 4 languages, 3 religions, and 2 alphabets. Only the charismatic and dictatorial leadership of Tito had held it together and after his demise there was not a shred of hope for the country of Yugoslavia. Like families that explode after the death of a strong-willed parent, so too with Yugoslavia. According to this view, after 1989 the lid on the cauldron of stewing hatreds was lifted and the toxic brew escaped.

Sadly, the international community was not able to do much to help the victims of the aggressors. It imposed an arms embargo that was a pathetic shadow of what it ought to be. As Tony Judt said,

 

“As in the comparable case of the Spanish Civil War, an ostensibly neutral international stance in practice favored the aggressor in a civil conflict: the international arms embargo imposed on the former Yugoslavia did nothing to restrain the Serbs, who could call on the substantial arms industry of  the old Yugoslavia federation, but it severely hampered the Bosnian Muslims in their struggle and goes a long way to account for their substantial military losses between 1992 and 1995.”

 

The “Safe areas” imposed by the UN turned out to be areas that were safe for the Serbs to slaughter Bosnians with impunity. They created a world safe for slaughter. Added to that, as Judt said, “The international presence, far from constraining the Serbs, now offered them additional cover.” And finally and perhaps most egregiously, as Judt pointed out,

 

“Bolstered by this evidence of Western pusillanimity, on July 11th Bosnian Serb forces under Mladic brazenly marched into one of the so-called UN ‘Safe Areas’, the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica, by then overflowing with terrified Muslim refugees. Srebrenica, was officially ‘protected’ not just by UN Mandate but by a 400-strong peacekeeping  contingent of armed Dutch soldiers. But when Mladic’s men arrived the Dutch battalion laid down its arms and offered no resistance whatsoever as Serbian troops combed the Muslim community, systematically separating men and boys from the rest. The next day, after Mladic had given his ‘word of honor as an officer’ that the men would not be harmed, his soldiers marched the Muslim males, including boys as young as thirteen, out into the fields around Srebrenica. In the course of the next four days nearly all of them—7,400 were killed. The Dutch soldiers returned home safely to Holland.

Srebrenica was the worst mass murder in Europe since World War II: a war crime on the scale of Oradour, Lidic or Katyn, carried out in full view of international observers.”

 

It was a sorry day for the international order ushered in after the slaughters in Europe during the Second World War as a result of which European countries fatuously promised “never again.” That is another promised that did not have legs. We seem to be living again in an era where the international order is collapsing. I hope the result won’t be the same.

 

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.

A Silly thing in the Balkans

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Hate

 

 

In the late 19th century, Otto von Bismarck, the great German statesman and first Chancellor of Germany predicted “If there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans.” And that is exactly what happened in 1914. And it was silly. But deadly serious.

 

All hell broke loose in Europe in 1914 when the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia.  For some unfathomable reason this precipitated an incredible melee that goes by the name of World War I or, even less aptly, The Great War. This initiated the Austro-Hungarian empire of the Habsburgs to dissolve, as for some mad and entirely irrational reasons, most of the countries of Europe and even Canada and the United States were drawn into this absurd conflict between disintegrating European empires. If any war showed how thin the veneer of European civilization was, this was it. One of the enduring legacies of Europe, like it or not, is frequent absurd wars.

 

 

World War I never really ended until the state of Yugoslavia, such as it was, got drawn into another European conflict, World War II in 1939. At first the country supported the Nazis, but later it was invaded by them.  Once again Hitler was not afraid to turn on his former allies, sort of like the current leader of the United States, who does so but of course, less violently.   The resistance to the Nazis was led by a communist, Marshall Tito who later became world famous when he became the leader of the Communist Party and the country.  During this time as well, there were bloody conflicts between various factions in the country, breeding hatreds which have not completely dimmed nor have they been forgotten to this day.

 

Hatred has a long life in the Balkans. Empathy, sadly, seems to have a much shorter shelf life.

Addicted to Anger

Extremism, Hate, Right-wing Extremism

 

Jen Senko said her father “seemed to be addicted to these strong emotions. It seemed as if he just couldn’t wait to shut himself off and  listen to Rush Limbaugh for 3 hours and get all pissed off.”  Anger was his drug, as it is to so much of the American right. It is an irrational but intoxicating anger off of which they get high. And the adherents, like Senko’s father, Frank Senko, were truly addicted to the anger. Addicted to fury.  Sometime are not happy unless they are angry.

As John Montgomery a professor of Psychology at SUNY said,

“If you watch something that makes you very angry, you can get addicted to that because as you get angry that drives stress response, and endorphin is the main pleasure chemical in the brain. The tricky thing is its mostly unconscious. People get tricked like in the case of your (Jen Senko’s) father.”

 

So Senko was onto something here. The addiction is real. Senko understood that the media has a profound effect on us, particularly of course, those who watch it a lot because they are addicted to it. Like her father, Frank.

 

Senko was interested in studying whether or not there are specific techniques right-wing media uses to get people to change their belief systems as her father had done. How did they do it?

 

In his case he was turned “against the very core” of who he was. He was turned so much that he voted against his own interest. This is a phenomenon that others have notice noticed. Like the Appalachian White American I read about  who was in the hospital and so sick he was going to die because he could not afford the treatment just because he didn’t want African Americans to get the benefits! He didn’t want free medical care if it meant African Americans would get it too. He was willing to die instead.