sins of the fathers in 2013-2014

I'm finally diving into a book I've been holding onto for a long time: The Fall of Yugoslavia, by Misha Glenny. I zipped through his epic, comprehensive The Balkans and picked this one up immediately because I needed to clarify my understanding about the third Balkan War, but procrastinated because I knew it would be heartrending. And it is. I'm barely a third of the way through.

The part that really got me today was the description of the geopolitics and geography (of course--Misha Glenny is the most beautiful, human, vivid, amazeballs historian ever). But it was about how there's this strip across Croatia and Serbia called Vojna Kraijina that has been the boundary between the Habsburgs and Ottomans, between Orthodoxy and Islam, between Rome and Constantinople, between Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy, between between EVERYTHING, and because it's been wartorn since the 1400s, even in the 90s, weapons handling is/was part of Serb elementary/middle school. Because Someone Is Probably Going To Try To Kill You.

*"The Krajishnici, as people from Krajina are called, say that the gun was born with this land and will never disappear."

"Economic traditions of Slovenia and Croatia to the west of this line have developed in closer harmony with Western ideas in the twentieth century, whereas to the east of the divide, the corrupt barter mentality of the Ottomans still dominates the rural economies of Serbia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Bosnia, Montenegro, and Albania."

"[Describing the epicenter of clusterfuckery, Knin, on the Croatian coast] is a vapid town which is gloomy when it rains and oppressive when the sun blazes. When it snows, it is the coldest and most isolated place in the Balkans. Despite its intrinsic emptiness, when the dark ghosts of Knin began to wail, almost all Croats and Serbs responded to this call for arms. The lure of Knin proved fatal for both nations."*

But the real kicker, to me, is that a more literal translation of Vojna Kraijina is Landscape/Edge of War. It's usually translated as Military Frontier, though.

It's going with me to the treadmill today, because I finally got out of bed and can't put it down.

...and then I get on Facebook and there's a passive aggressive comment train from people who are usually quite educated and respectable, even/especially about politics, about how awful was slavery in America and incarceration rates are all white people's faults, and I want to throw my table off the balcony doors. There wasn't even a genocide or four! And I guess this is where American exceptionalism comes crashing down, because clearly we're not exceptional enough to quit politicizing our visceral anger about things that happened to our ancestors.

Maybe we need an American equivalent of St. Vitus Day.