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Comment by otto2 | Hacker News Reader

I don't know where are you from, but imagine your country being under devastating economic sanctions, then bombarded by enormously more powerful armies, then annexing a part of the country, all of that against international law. Make that process displace hundreds of thousands of people. Now when you imagine that, be honest with yourself and see if you would keep conversations at weather and sport.

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You coveniently ignore the events leading to and the reasons for sanctions and bombardment:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_bombing_of_Yugoslavia

This was actually the second time NATO has bombarded serbian forces, the first time was in Bosnia, which eventually led to Dayton peace agreement later that year:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Deliberate_Force

Sounds like talk in the kafanas

Have you been to Vietnam? There is no comparison between what was done to them and Serbia, yet Vietnam has moved on. Victimhood is strong in the Balkans, it's a way of life. I know because I was born there.

Vietnam won decisively and Serbia lost decisively; measured in destruction it was incomparably worse for Vietnam, but they have no outstanding border conflicts while experiencing peaceful economic development and national sovereignty since the last war in 1979. When your story has a happy ending (and your government needs the US to counterbalance China) it's a lot easier to move on.

This is essentially the reverse of former Yugoslavia where things were fairly placid from 1945-1980 then fell apart.

There's a tendency to equate the grievances of a generation with immutable national character because it makes analysis easy and change impossible. But this gets used for purposes of denigration of peoples or excuses for policy failures, if not by race and culture, then by economic class and individual good fortune.

I'm guessing you were born to educated professionals who immigrated or helped you do so, rather than say, grew up in a refugee camp with a non-citizen passport.

It sounds like you are from the West. Thank you for explaining the psychology of my people so clearly to me. I think I understand it better now but it looks like I can use some book reading. Any recommendations?

[flagged]

> Sorry your genetic ancestral memory of the Balkans doesn’t stack up to...

Ah, we have a serial West-splainer. I emigrated when I was 24 and I speak for pretty much everybody I've known in those years. I've studied and wrote essays on the literature and the history of the region daily through high school and college. I speak the language and the customs.

You on the other hand seem completely oblivious to the cultural significance of Kafana, or its different incarnations throughout the region, to recognize that arguing about politics, whining about history, the Great Powers, life, and the Universe, has and still is pretty much the purpose of their existence.

> PS. Was I right about the educated professionals part, or were you a displaced person whose village was razed?

I'm having a hard time comprehending the relevance. Did the displaced people in Yugoslavia 30 years ago define the pathos of the region, which BTW is more than just former Yugoslavia, in the last 600+ years?

You sound like you’re from Belgrade and have never been to Kosova or Bosnia or even to the countryside. Would you prefer to say “western Balkans” or do you presume to also speak for Greeks, Romanians, Bulgarians, etc.

I would engage with your sources rather than once again retreat into claims of irreducible essence of identity that can never be understood by outsiders. If the Balkans has a curse, it’s that dishonest rhetoric being peddled by corrupt westernizers and corrupt nationalists.

If the GP had gone to Kosovo or (as the common English shorthand for “Bosnia and Herzegovina”) Bosnia, do you think that would change anything? In my experience, northern Kosovo and Republika Srpska are the very hotbeds of banging on about Serb identity and national character in the region, more than Beograd.

Vojvodina is a good escape from all that. Obviously the ethnic Hungarian population there doesn’t care about “Kosovo is Serbia” stuff, but even a lot of the Serb population feel those disputes are far away.

>In my experience, northern Kosovo and Republika Srpska are the very hotbeds of banging on about Serb identity and national character in the region, more than Beograd.

Most definitely! Not coincidentally, they also are dirt poor, ruled by the biggest crooks, and generally have limited opportunities for educational or economic mobility. The alliance that drove Serbia to war was between the resentful and opportunistic minority in the capital and the resentful and ignorant in the periphery.

Vojvodina is a great example of what the real tragedy is for Serbia. The Serbs were not united and their legitimate concerns about the future of Serb minorities was abducted by brutal people who cared about their own power only, effectively dooming not only those Serbs over the republic borders but also tainting the entire nation with their crimes.

Some of the most politically sophisticated people now are the men who started as country bumpkins taken in by Milosevic, served in the JNA or ancillary serb forces, and saw that it was all bullshit. Incompetence, drunkenness, and horrifying crimes against civilians for purposes of simple theft. They saw that the best of Serbia was against what they were doing and they were serving amoral people of low character, limited intelligence, who would shoot not only the enemy but anyone who got in the way of their ransacking. Yet now that they're in this dead end and the bridges have all been burned, how to go forward?

When I go elsewhere, I like to transmit these stories to people who (understandably) would not feel comfortable going to where those stories are told. At times there is a spark of recognition and solidarity in the shared problems, a willingness to reconcile if it comes first with full accounting and sincere apology that will never come from the political class.

And on the way back to serbian areas, I pass on the stories of not just random destruction but personal betrayal. How when the serbian paramilitaries came into a majority albanian village, they had kill lists provided for them by a local with names and addresses: the mayor, doctors, journalists, and anyone whose prominence had bred resentment. How after that, it makes simple tolerance of the western liberal type impossible, even basic trust impossible for a generation.

It certainly makes it hard for them to even pretend to care about Serbian families who experienced similar or historical Serbian architecture, because while everyone committed ethnic crimes, they did not all do so first or on the same scale.

And yet, all the refugee children of any ethnicity or religion who have become adults have much in common with each other: the feeling of being driven out of their home, hated for who they are, betrayed by neighbors they had grown up with, beset by economic uncertainty, and being continuously used in the most cynical way by politicians who make no real effort to provision their country for the future.

It should go without saying that neither "The West" in the form of the EU/Nato/KFor nor Russia have any interest in acting as honest brokers for untangling the complexity. If the conflict is reignited in earnest by local intragisence, everyone involved will likely become a tool of foreign powers who see the people there as little more than disposable proxies in a larger conflict.

I benefit from not just being an outsider but from being sincere in my sympathy for everyone. There is nothing more disrespectful than to tell someone in pain that their pain is not real, or that they deserved it because of what their government did, or that it's so proportionally insignificant compared to someone else's that they shouldn't even express it.

Telling people to shut up and get over it is (as is common among emigres and westerners) is so incredibly destructive. Refusing to listen is greatest gift to those who want to radicalize and dehumanize, it gives them an endless source of legitimacy as "the only one that cares" no matter what lies they tell.

I thought what drove Serbs to war was the Bosniak's desire to create a Muslim state and treat everybody else (Serbs, Croats) as second class citizens; and the Kosovar Albanians desire to create Albanian ethnostate and treat everybody else as second class citizens, which they did.

You are placing blame on Serbian militias' greed and power hunger, which sounds as an underwhelming explanation to me.

The modern wave of Albanian-Serb hostility goes back to the early 1980s, a time when the breakup of Yugoslavia was not yet on the horizon and so there was no fear of an oppressive Albanian ethnostate. Rather, the Serb rhetoric was driven by a claim that Albanians were squatters on historic Serb land.

An independent Kosovo would have become a state chiefly for the Albanian ethnicity simply due to demographics, but it need not have become completely hostile to Serbs and Bosniaks, if the Serbs had acted more wisely. The Republic of Albania itself contains a number of Greek, South Slavic-speaking, and Aromanian villages. And had the Serbs acted more wisely, Kosovo undoubtedly would have been partitioned at Mitrovica.

The latest claim sounds disingenous. I'm too painfully aware that no partitions of USSR were redone with regards of actual ethnic occupancy (especially when talking about Russians, that's Serbs in case of Yugoslavia).

So all the new states are extremely imperialistic and will not give up on any of "their" lands even if they did not have ethnic dominance there. So no, Kosovar Albanians will still demand Mitrovica.

However, it is actually outrageous that Serbs were made to give out their actual UN recognized lands, and they had full motivation to try and keep those, like Azeri did. And in fact it's not off the table yet. Let's suppose something bad happens to NATO, Serbs can try to Karabakh-2023 Kosovo.

> Vietnam won decisively

Northern, communist Vietnam won. It wasn't a war between a Vietnam and USA, but rather between a communist and pro-western regimes.

At no point did it exist as an independent entity with popular support, it was first created by the French and propped up by the US. It’s about as credible as saying the Soviet war in Afghanistan was between two competing regimes or that the liberation of France in WW2 was a conflict between pro-German and pro-American regimes.

Formally true, but not a meaningful distinction given the massive disparity in capabilities and supporters.

You are very articulate but you don't have a clue of what you are talking about, no matter how many books you have read. The southern vietnamese have a very distinct identity, and they haven't moved on at all, if they had a chance they would declare independence from the north in a split second.

Source: I have lived in Saigon for a decade, which beats hands down the many books I had read about the subject before that

I could say the same as an American southerner! The existence of distinct regional identity preexists the state and continues after reunification. The North dominates in their politics just as in ours and there’s resentment about it in both countries, but it does not follow that there is no national identity or that a regional dictatorship created and funded foreign powers which could not survive without their indefinite aid is true expression of regional identity.

First of all, apologies, the way I started my reply was too brusque.

Yes, at the end of the day it's all about who has the power. I just wanted to point out that present Vietnam is far from united and that you can't imagine how much resentment there is in Saigon towards the communist government in the north.

Saigon had a "good" war, barely saw any fighting, but the post-war was horrible, scarring southerners to this day, many people repeatedly tried to flee on dingies out of desperation from human (northern) caused starvation and scarcity, this in a land that had never experienced hunger (the Mekong Delta is extremely fertile and milked by the north). They haven't forgotten.

The world is full of hopeful irredentists, and whether they will ever succeed or not is not a matter of right, but might (maybe in the shape of a foreign power). It is just that in southern Vietnam most people are irredentists, which I suspect is not the case in the US south, isn't that right?

No apology needed, and I can believe it! I happen to have some personal contacts in Hue who are in middle but in the divide between northern and southern communists they were treated as part of the south. I know there's some real bitterness even among just the communists, in part because the Hanoi-driven war strategy led to the formations in the south taking incredibly heavy casualties which then further cemented their political subordination in the postwar era.

From what little I know, both the center of the country and the south, party and non-party alike, generally feel that the northern elite is clannish and doesn't allocate jobs and investment fairly, which is kind of a big deal for a country with such a large state sector.

In the American case most of the state of Mississippi did not celebrate the 4th of July until 1945 because they considered themselves to be occupied confederate territory for 81 years: https://www.visitvicksburg.com/blog/celebrating-independence...

I can well understand some feeling persisting a mere 65 years later.

That said, for American southern irredentists of past, present and future, they're stuck with the confederacy alone, which is inextricably connected to slavery even for people like Robert E. Lee who was personally but not politically opposed to slavery. That's simply a much harder thing to identify with morally and practically, especially when 30-40% of the population of the south are descended from freed slaves.

The Republic of Vietnam flag stands for the hundreds of thousands of ARVN soldiers and administration and their families, but it also stands for things like a catholic dictatorship attacking temples in a 90% buddhist country, rigged elections, coups, and being the junior partner of a foreign power that carried out a brutal and dehumanizing counter-insurgency.

Unlike the American south, the southern Vietnamese have a much older identity and much richer history to draw upon. So, I wonder if in time a prior symbol/flag/something from their distinct history will become more resonant for them in the future, which conveys the identity without the baggage.

For much of history (i.e. millennia) the north and the south of Vietnam have experienced different degrees of voluntary and involuntary separation. For hundreds and hundreds of years they existed as different countries and even tried to conquer each other. The vast majority of south Vietnamese people today have more sympathy for the US than for Hanoi.

Source: half my family is Vietnamese and I lived there for 3 years.

Vietnam didn't move on! That's the one thing they most certainly did not do. For decades the Viet refused to move on until they won. After they won, they then fought a war with China and another proxy war with America.

The Viet do not move on. They stick to their guns. Or feces covered bamboo sticks, or any weaponizable itsm they have on hand.

Nor did the Afghanis. They just kept at it until they won.

In fact, giving up and moving on is what just about only the peace loving Serbs did.

> your country being under devastating economic sanctions, then bombarded by enormously more powerful armies, then annexing a part of the country

All of that just out of a sudden, without anything else occurring to trigger these events, right? No genocides, no invasions, no massive civilian casualties? No war criminals walking around free doing DJ gigs 30 years later?

No, none of that is forgotten either. It's hell as far back as anyone alive can remember, from the 90s to the 40s to WWI and the Balkan wars, and all of the fighting with the Ottoman empire throughout the 19th century.

But you knew all of that.

Are you suggesting that because other genocides have happened, the Serbian ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats is just business as usual?

Perhaps NATO should have just left them to it. Sure, tens of thousands of civilians were killed, but I suppose that pales in comparison to the millions killed in WW2.

> the Serbian ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats

We've just seen a massive, 150k people ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh and nobody in the whole world went so far as lifting a finger to stop it. Except Russia, which did lift one of its fingers but that was it.

It happened this autumn.

But yeah, let's pretend that NATO is in business of preventing ethnic cleansings around the world, as opposed to ruining countries it doesn't like for profit. And BTW, what happened to Krajina Srpska?

Sorry, how many died? Where are you getting your figures?

The implied defence of russia is particularly inappropriate, given the russians have raped, tortured, and massacred tens of thousands of Ukrainians just in the past couple of years. If you're taking ethnic cleansing to simply mean displaced, then russia is guilty of ethnic cleansing to the tune of millions of civilians.

See also Yemen, the willfull murder of 5% of Iraqs population, etc....

Not many has died, but they have all left and have no hope to ever return to their homes. Contrast that to Balkans where a lot of people already returned to their homes, and way more could return if the hatred could be held in check, to which "humanitarian bombardments" history is a huge deterrent.

I'm not talking about defence of Russia, or Serbia, because they needn't one. The USA/NATO need to defend their involvement in civil wars to help one of the sides which make these civil wars worse every single time, as well as making at least one side even more bitter and preventing normalization of affairs for longer.

I, for one, do not want to ever hear any more moral judgements from you. You have no moral basis to have them.

Right now, the US is backing up an ethnic cleansing agent that is IDF, while placing high hopes on ethnic cleansing as a way to resolve the conflict.

I would be very glad to remove my comments if you remove the whole branch of your accusations, which are wildly out of place.

> they have all left and have no hope to ever return to their homes. Contrast that to Balkans where a lot of people already returned to their homes

It's difficult to return to your home when you're dead.

It is difficult to all sides of the conflict to return to their homes while being dead.

This is why fuel should not be put in the fire of ethnic civil wars. By encouraging your party of preference to score a win you encourage the other party to stiffen their resistance, leading to massive casualties and no resolution. Because the only actual resolution would involve sides talking and making concessions, and you didn't want your preferred party to do that, because you decided they are right all around and so should just get what they want, in full.

What happened in Bosnia with Dayton agreements could still happen, just earlier and with way fewer deaths.

There is no "all sides" to this.

By your own admission, "not many has died" [sic] in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. This contrasts with the tens of thousands of Bosniaks who literally died because they were massacred by Serbs.

That's a civil war. People die on all sides and lose their homes. In Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian population was so sure of its upcoming fate that it packed its bags and left as one, in about two weeks period.

Bosniaks just considered it's better to risk death but keep their homes. Serbs who lived there also did the same choice. The peace talks should have started immediately.

I have exactly zero faith in any accusations coming in from US/NATO because that's Jack the Ripper handing out traffic tickets scenario. So let's pretend I didn't hear about "blah blah massacred blah blah", and you didn't post that. That, and you are trying to pass a list of news report at eleven as a list of document war crimes in the other thread.

> given the russians have raped, tortured, and massacred tens of thousands of Ukrainians just in the past couple of years

Sorry, how many died? Where are you getting your figures? (C)

P.S. How does that rape trope in western propaganda manages not to get old? It's basically copypasta.

There are many sources, although I don't believe you're arguing in good faith and you're simply here to troll.

https://www.ohchr.org/en/news/2023/09/ukraine-civilian-casua...

> How does that rape trope in western propaganda manages not to get old? It's basically copypasta.

There are many, many documented cases of russian soldiers raping women and children in Ukraine.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFSmddcgiDo

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OusviV2Qd4o

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGeGJF0e1gs

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmWMBtjBf24

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cJ_YmhL62Y

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l7oAxACmlY

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cq1ZSp_hnCs

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMsz-WNNVQw

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRD2xGW2Hb4

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRLytM-1-Q4

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w28fh62dXT0

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhriOrErRPE

> you're simply here to troll

An awfully convenient attitude to having your claims challenged.

> https://www.ohchr.org/en/news/2023/09/ukraine-civilian-casua...

You are claiming tens of thousands killed, tortured and raped by Russians, but this data actually contradicts your claim: while there are lots of injured, the death toll is about 9k, half of them killed in Donetsk and Luhansk, which makes it more likely that they were killed by Ukrainian Armed Forces.

And that's ignoring all the casualties in Donetsk and Luhansk before the escalation.

Civilians getting in the crossfire is always a tragedy that each side tries to exploit to their own benefit, acting like they've totally transcended the problem of collateral damage and those other guys are doing it on purpose.

> There are many, many documented cases of russian soldiers raping women and children in Ukraine.

a) The X soldiers raping women (and children!) is a basic dehumanization technique. Serbs did it, Iraqis did it, Russians are doing it, Chinese are doing doing it, Palestine does it. Apparently literally everyone at odds with "western" political block seems to be doing it, which begs for some questions. The matter of sexual violence gets an easy emotional response and and demands very little burden of proof. And then we also have characters like Lyudmila Denisova, who are happy to craft stories like that.

b) You aren't seriously claiming that things you've linked could be held to a standard of "documented"? Hell, one of them is an "intercepted call" (somewhat popular medium to portray those evil orcs, and my god, does that LTE encryption sucks) with a woman literally saying: "so, hubby, how's fucking all those Ukrainian women going on :)))))))" - that totally sounds natural AF.

Not to turn this into a blindly dichotomic argument, war obviously sucks and obviously there are people who are killed, tortured and raped, and each one is one too many. But spinning propaganda and dumbing everything down to a perfect dichotomy of all good vs all evil is only going to make things worse for everyone, especially for ordinary normal people who just want to live in peace.

Just as you do, Russian media also have a shit load of "documented" cases of some evil shit and narratives of grannies having their legs torn off by HIMRAS missiles.

And in both cases, instead of a wakeup call, it's used as an excuse for MOAR weapons, MOAR warfare, MOAR destruction and death.

"How many died" and "Where are you getting your figures" are disturbing questions when speaking about ethnic cleansing. These people have had their homes and lives taken away from them.

Like the Ukrainians. Like the Ugandans. Like the Armenians of the early 20th century. Like the Jews. Like the Cambodians. Like the Bosnians. Like the Croats. Like the Serbs.

All of this is history, all of this damages a people and their culture. Let's not put a yardstick next to it to prove how bad things are. Let's remember why these things happened so we don't do them again.

Fair enough, but in that case, why are you replying to me? Shouldn’t you instead be replying to the guy who used whataboutism and compared the deaths of tens of thousands of Bosniaks to the displacement of 150k Armenians?

My comment on the comparison was in response to their comparison.

I don't think you're arguing in good faith, but for anyone else that takes this kind of commentary serious:

Take a look at a map. Even if there was political will, "The West" has extremely limited options for military intervention in a landlocked country surrounded by non-aligned states. It's not like the US is going to fly sorties through Iran or Russia. Armenia is in a tough spot.

No, and don't put words in my mouth. There's nothing business as usual about genocide. Neither are the people of the Balkans so flippant, none of this is forgotten. There's an awful lot of talk about "moving on" here, though, which is radically unsympathetic to the people who live across the Balkans who, for the last century, have had their lives and livelihood threatened seemingly every 30 years or so, one way or another.

Not really. Yugoslavia, especially after the end of 50s was pretty decent by standards of socialist countries.

> All of that just out of a sudden, without anything else occurring to trigger these events, right? No genocides, no invasions, no massive civilian casualties?

Do you also support Russia's invasion in Ukraine?

Because you are clearly rationalizing involving a larger military power whose brutality ends up hurting orders of magnitudes more innocent people than the actual bad actors. Thus, bringing ever more people into the cycle of hatered.

Do you really imagine that some random person whose house was bombed and family was killed saying "yeah, that is totally just, thank you, good guys!"

Obviously, they won't.

> Do you also support Russia's invasion in Ukraine?

No, because any Russian claims about civilians attacked in Ukraine are lies. If we lived in an alternative reality where those claims were true, I would support it — but in a much limited capacity. Like an aerial campaign.

> whose brutality ends up hurting orders of magnitudes more innocent people than the actual bad actors

That's patently false. US military involvement in Serbia was limited and hurt much less innocents that would be slaughtered otherwise.

> Do you really imagine that some random person whose house was bombed and family was killed saying "yeah, that is totally just, thank you, good guys!"

That's a tragedy. Why was his family living in a military installation? Whoever settled them there, or set up a military installation under his house is to blame — that's what he should be angry against.

It's like criticising Israel for bombing Hamas installations in civilian areas — that's not the actor who's responsible for breaking the rules or war and resulting casualties.

Welcome to understanding small countries.

We're not all stuck in our pasts.

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