Was that due to being a homogenous nation-state or due to other factors.
Like I said, masquerading.
Youtube maps of the future Balkans...
- Thread starter Kyriakos
- Start date
Was that due to being a homogenous nation-state or due to other factors.
Like I said, masquerading.
Silurian
Deity
- Joined
- Jan 5, 2010
- Messages
- 7,567
The NATO top brass would be pretty stupid to bomb their own weekend houses on the coast.
r16
not deity
- Joined
- Nov 10, 2008
- Messages
- 12,003
we keep hearing that in May 1945 , at least one German woman and her children were tied together with barbed wire and thrown into a river in Prague . Are there any rivers in Prague ?
sorry , ı missed the sarcasm initially .
rugbyLEAGUEfan
Deity
Much to Homer's chagrin
del62
Deity
Winner
Diverse in Unity
No. Aaaagain, the Ottoman occupation/colonization of the Balkans is the reason this region's development was ******** for centuries, separated from the European mainstream (-> renaissance, reformation, religious civil wars, enlightenment, nationalistic wars, liberalism). It gradually seeped into the Balkans as the Ottomans weakened due to their utter inability to embrace modernism in time, and so when the Ottoman Empire collapsed, it exploded into a series of war and strife. It eventually triggered WW1, then calmed down a little, exploded again during WW2, then calmed down a lot during the Communist era, and then finally exploded for the (as of yet) last time in the 1990s. Basically, the Balkans needed to catch up with centuries of history which it was denied by the Ottomans. Turkey did nothing to actually solve the existing conflicts there, it just wasn't aware of them, ignored them, used them to its own advantage, and sometimes created new ones. It was a suffocating empire which pretty much screwed up every region it touched, the Balkans most of all.
What we've seen there recently is a legacy of that.
If it surrounded Brussels with heavy artillery and started bombing it, killing the Walloons en masse, maybe it would. Even if only because NATO HQ is located there
Nah, no rivers
Much worse things happened during the expulsions, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of Germans were killed, it's hard to say exactly how many. Men, women, children, old people, POWs... The issue was taboo during the Communist era, and in the early 1990s people were shouted down if they tried to open a debate about it (because there was a fear that the newly unified Germany might turn revisionist and demand compensation). Only in the last ~10 years have this been discussed, and increasingly the public is being made aware of all the atrocities that were committed by Czechs (usually those who didn't lift a finger during the war) on Germans. Recently a film footage was found showing Germans being shot and then run over by trucks. Several mass graves have been uncovered.
There is still a long way to go for the average Czech to be able to face this part of our recent history, though. A lot of people are still too blinded by knee-jerk nationalism to admit the post-war expulsions were an act of mass-scale ethnic cleansing.
del62
Deity
The role of the Ustaše during WW2 probably stoked up ethnic tensions more than anything else
Interestingly from wiki
Interestingly from wiki
Leonel
Breakfast Connoisseur
Serbia Stronk!
Being denied centuries of sectarian butchering and dynastic warfare is a good thing.
The issue here is that you see history essentially as a linear, fated narrative.
If the only way to solve conflict is to brutally subsumed a population into a single culture by forced assimilation, expulsion or murder, then the conflict may better remain unsolved.
NedimNapoleon
Weird Little Human
Politics, the Croats know they couldn't have controlled Bosnia without the help and support of the local muslim population... and we did support them....because they were the lesser evil. The Ustae weren't nearly as bad as The Kings Army in the Fatherland aka The Chetniks.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
The Ustaše actively participated in the Holocaust. 
NedimNapoleon
Weird Little Human
Yes against the Serb population and Jewish population but not against Muslim or Catholic Bosnians.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
That's really not how "lesser evils" are supposed to work. 
NedimNapoleon
Weird Little Human
I meant lesser evil to the Bosnian Catholic and Muslim population, because the Serb paramilitary was also genocidal, then you have the 13th Waffen SS Handschar Division, that was Bosnian Muslim and that supposedly committed genocide against the Serbs. The Balkans are screwed up, you cant really explain it.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
I suppose that's why Tito ended up so popular. Whatever you thought of his politics, at least he wasn't trying to commit genocide.
Winner
Diverse in Unity
And you keep missing my point, by now entirely on purpose. If sectarian butchering and nationalist-driven warfare is bound to happen, then it better happen when the pinnacle of military technology is the arquebus, culverin, and a 6 metre pike and the population is 10 times smaller than today. With some luck, it will make people more averse to do the same later with AK-47s, machine guns, MLRS, jet fighters, and poison gas, to a much larger number of people.
I don't - I am just being realistic. If you choose to believe in some multicultural utopia where enlightened leaders lead people to forget about their ages-old hatreds and suspicions and live in mutual respect and peace forever, be my guest. It's just that something like that probably never occurred in recorded history, certainly not in a region as complicated as the Balkans.
Great. If you think that your contrarianism here substitutes for an argument, or perhaps even a suggestion of a counter-hypothesis, you're sorely mistaken. There are of course ways to solve conflicts in less brutal ways, but Turkey wasn't any more interested in doing that than the colonials powers were in Africa. Why? If the natives hate each other more than they hate you, all is fine and dandy.
kochman
Deity
- Joined
- Jun 8, 2009
- Messages
- 10,818
Why did you omit Romania!?What do you mean? Those videos offer potentially hours of cheap entertainment
Although i bet the comments get recycled once in a while. Mostly "Greece-Serbia-Russia-Bulgaria= Orthodox brothers!" or the analogous antithetical sentiment
Terxpahseyton
Nobody
- Joined
- Sep 9, 2006
- Messages
- 10,759
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Then what was that "natural flow of history" stuff about?
Similar threads
