It was the chilling climax of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the most vicious and genocidal battlefront in the Balkans conflict.
Srebrenica - July 1995, one of the most notorious modern acts of gendercide took place. While the internat'l community and U.N. peacekeepers looked on, Serbian forces separated civilian guys from girls and killed thousands en masse.
And the cat believed to be in command of the genocide is the freshly busted 'General' Ratko Mladić.
Not unlike 3rd Reich's Das Reich's"Just following orders!" meme defense (that funnily enough failed to defend anyone at Nürnburg), Ratko laid out to his Parliament exactly what Greater Serbia entailed
‘People are not little stones, or keys in someone's pocket, that can be moved from one place to another just like that... Therefore, we cannot precisely arrange for only Serbs to stay in one part of the country while removing others painlessly...That is genocide.’Ratko was right. Aside from the nearly 8k civilians killed at Srebrenica while the UN's gay Dutch contingent looked on in dispassionate impotence as the entire Hitlerian Dance Macabre exploded
The policies of aggression and ethnic cleansing as implemented by Serb forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1992 to 1995 with the direct support of Serbian regime of Slobodan Milošević and its followers ultimately led to the displacement of more than 2,000,000 people, an estimated 200,000 killed, tens of thousands raped or otherwise tortured and abused, and the innocent civilians of Sarajevo and other urban centres repeatedly subjected to shelling and sniper attacks; meet the terms defining the crime of genocide in Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, created in Paris on 9 December 1948, and entered into force on 12 January 1951.As the ungodly - yet delightfully daemoneoconic avuncular Christopher Hitchens teaches:
"On whatever basis the post-Tito Yugoslavia was to be reconstituted, there was one that was utterly impossible as well as unthinkable: a "Greater Serbia," whereby smaller republics and their populations were forcibly cut to fit the requirements of a dictatorial tailoring. It will one day seem incredible that the NATO powers did not see this right away and continued to treat Slobodan Milosevic as a "partner in peace," thus opening the road that led straight to Srebrenica and the murder of people ostensibly under our protection.
"At times like this, we are always reliably reminded of what John Quincy Adams said about the risk to the United States of going "abroad in search of monsters to destroy." The monstrous character of Mladic and his movement needed no exaggeration. To this day, a lot of people do not understand how much misery and chaos and suffering it purposely inflicted.
"The monstrous nature of his power and reach was paradoxically and enormously exaggerated—not by those who wanted to confront it, but by those who did not! This meant that the whole nightmare was needlessly prolonged and the expense of concluding it greatly increased.
OT:
ReplyDeleteCourtney, you've pointed out that Columbus went searching for a route East that was unthreatened by sea-going Muj. Do you know what source tells us about this? Was it in Columbus's plea to Ferdinand and Isabella for sponsorship? Court chronicles? Where can I find documentation, useful in discussion with doubters? I haven't found it. Thanks, if you can guide me. Cheers!
WH
Thanks WH. I reckon it's an exercise in critical thinking - here goes (:
ReplyDeleteWhat was the motivation for CC to split sail from Europa and head west?
Easy!
Find a short cut to India.
The real quiz is quite significant. Why?
After all, Europa was the centre of the world for the tech saavy Europeans - India's locale was well known since Alexander the Great's era and thanks to Prince Henry (the cat who put the 'gator' in navigator) sealanes and land routes could have sweetly hooked up to provide the fastest transport times circa 1500 anywhere on earth.
Check out a World map from 1500 AD and the answer is prett obvious.
Critical portions of any route to and from India were totally beseiged by totalitarian monarchies like the Ottomans, Safavid Persia and an unhealthy mix of sundry and "...various mohammedist states..."
Plus, a newly reconstituted Xian Spain had just fought an expensive, bloody reconquista against 7th century time traveling control freaks and all of Europa wanted to get as far away as possible from said jerks and creeps.
Amazing that the reason for the season of Columbus Day is traced back to probs that kicked off Great Satan's very 1st regime change and are facing the entire free world today.
Unfun, unfree and unhinged regimes built, cruelly maintained and by their very design expansionist feature intolerance, nonegalitarian and misery projection with all the trimmings like slavery, pitiful lit rates and of course - violence.
Detours allowing the avoidance of such 'tardist, backward civs were in high demand, thanks to Columbus - Europa turned her back on the faux, played league of failed states - and concentrated her efforts on the "New World"
Thanks for the answer.
ReplyDeleteThe logic of it makes sense to you and me here. But do historians have any actual evidence of that being the discussion behind his voyage?
I expect that avoiding muslim probs was implicitly in the air in Spain right then. And that shouldn't be too hard to find doc of. But of Columbus's voyage specifically - that'd make a strong argument. I gather you've not heard of any?
Trying to imagine the time, do you think the Reconquista inflamed other jihad - M'dans "feeling humiliated" + the Waqf principle. Maybe the world was too large for that then, with little communications, literacy, etc, everything just local.
Otherwise, the Reconquista might've been a bit like Little Satan, or having US troops in Saudi Arabia - inflaming new muj swell, making it increasingly hot to pirate infidel shipping, and spawning 16th C OBL sheiks.
WH