We Lucked Out Hard Core.
So, when the conflict in Bosnian happened, I was, what, like 6? So, yeah, I don't remember it so much. Now, I am paying for my ignorance because I am being forced to study to situation in Yugoslavia since essentially pre-Ottoman rule. It's horrible, and I'm not even to the 1990s yet! I'm curious, though, to what degree the media revealed to the public the events in that region during the second world war. To simplify the story, let me give you the low down:
The Croats have always been tight with Italy and so they ended up working with the Axis. The Serbs ended up working with the Allies. That, however, is really inconsequential. Neither group really cared that much about the war outside of that region. They were hell bent on killing each other. The Axis set into power a group called the Ustasas in Croatia. The Ustasas are like, "Hey, let's kill a third of the Serbs, export another third, and force the final third to convert to Catholicism." So, they'd just march into Serbian villages and kill all of them. The Serbs had their own little ethnic cleansing group, the Cetniks. The number of people die are in the hundreds of thousands if not millions. But what's important is not the number of people who died, but the way in which they were killed. The concentration camps in the Balkans make the German's look civilized. The slavs did not have the money to waste bullets or build gas chambers, so they had to be more creative with their forms of genocide. Both of these groups were sadistic in their brutality, rape, murder, and torture of children, men, women, and the elderly. One historian describes the massacres as "pornographic" to describe "the pathological nature of the hatred" (Perica 2002 23).
Seriously.
Every time I read about the conditions of World Wars in every other region of the world except for the Americas, I cannot help thinking how blessed we were to be the winners of the situation. The losers lost more than economic power and international political clout. These poor people, from the Germans to the Serbs to the Turks to the Iraqis and so on, have seen violence that we, as Americans, can only imagine.
The Croats have always been tight with Italy and so they ended up working with the Axis. The Serbs ended up working with the Allies. That, however, is really inconsequential. Neither group really cared that much about the war outside of that region. They were hell bent on killing each other. The Axis set into power a group called the Ustasas in Croatia. The Ustasas are like, "Hey, let's kill a third of the Serbs, export another third, and force the final third to convert to Catholicism." So, they'd just march into Serbian villages and kill all of them. The Serbs had their own little ethnic cleansing group, the Cetniks. The number of people die are in the hundreds of thousands if not millions. But what's important is not the number of people who died, but the way in which they were killed. The concentration camps in the Balkans make the German's look civilized. The slavs did not have the money to waste bullets or build gas chambers, so they had to be more creative with their forms of genocide. Both of these groups were sadistic in their brutality, rape, murder, and torture of children, men, women, and the elderly. One historian describes the massacres as "pornographic" to describe "the pathological nature of the hatred" (Perica 2002 23).
Seriously.
Every time I read about the conditions of World Wars in every other region of the world except for the Americas, I cannot help thinking how blessed we were to be the winners of the situation. The losers lost more than economic power and international political clout. These poor people, from the Germans to the Serbs to the Turks to the Iraqis and so on, have seen violence that we, as Americans, can only imagine.
posted by Jesi E. at 2/21/2006 01:30:00 PM
1 Comments:
The North American continent since inhabited by westerners has avoided the scale of genocide and instability that the rest of the world has experienced. We owe this not to unalterable and given circumstances or to good fortune; we owe to the philosophy of natural rights, and the men that created a government based on such. IT required the oppressed rising up against oppressors. It required human beings to act using the tools of logic and reason that all men are born with.
You know this too well I should think, for your writing to sound sympathetic for and undetached from the great evils that men have done, and continue to do across the globe. The evils I speak of not being the genocides, cullings, exterminations, and mass mutilations...all of which are evil. I am speaking of the apathy, passivity, ignorance, and blindness which men have accepted in the shadow of these horrors.
Those who live within totalitarian regimes in which such physical horrors can occur are only victims in the sense that the circumstances they were born into were the product of others, and not of their own choice. For these regimes to exist however, acting man must continue to allow them to exist or come into existance. These regimes can only exist through the compliance and participation of the population. By not resisting, by funding and laboring for the oppressive regime, most are guilty. Perhaps not as directly responsible, but certainly accomplices.
The "poor" people are those who fight and resist and yet fail to force change inspite of their weak countrymen and the freer people's of earth who have forgotten them.
(see "Eugenics" in America, Germany, and Yugoslavia.)
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