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.