Michael Totten describes what it’s like to drive from Bosnia’s Serb-controlled Republica Srpska to the Croatian coast on the Adriatic. Not only does the landscape change, but so does the atmosphere. And they don’t sync.
The destruction wrought from ethnic-cleansing, including mass graveyards as well as blown-up houses and villages scourged by artillery fire, stretched from one end of Bosnia to the other. It was horrible. …
Bosnia is a troubled country with a dark recent past, but it’s also extraordinarily beautiful. For some reason that I can’t quite explain, it’s hard to imagine such a terrible war erupting amid such breathtaking scenery. Sean nearly ran the car off the road when we drove through a canyon between Sarajevo and Mostar. “Oh my God,” he said, “look at this place!”
The Balkans are, without being it physically apparent, an ancient battleground. Occasionally, some incongrous artifact gives the game away. At the beautiful town of Kotor in Montenegro, for example, Michael Totten came across what appeared to be “a well-lit Great Wall of China [that] shot straight up the side of a mountain”. It was an ancient defensive wall constructed to defend the town from the hills, which overlook it almost everywhere. Kotor had been fortified and fought over since Greek times. Yet beauty and life had always coexisted cheek by jowl with war. A Washington Post article from 2006 captured the dissonant juxtaposition between the human and the natural landscape. “It seems hard to believe now, but until Yugoslavia started to crumble in the early 1990s, Montenegro was a holiday hot spot for models, monarchs and movie stars. Claudia Schiffer, Queen Elizabeth II, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor all partied (or at least vacationed) here.”
Susan Woodward of the Brookings Institution argued that the failure to impose order upon a collapsing Communist order provided the opportunity for ancient hatreds, never far under the beautiful landscape, to break out again. Perhaps just as some persons in those old French novels are perpetually between lovers, some communities are always between empires: highlighted by them, but never quite defined; remaining themselves in all their light and darkness.
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11 Comments
1. Brock:Richard, do you have any control over the scheme for this page? Font, color, that sort of thing? I don’t the current settings to be very readable.
Jun 23, 2008 - 7:22 am 2. Triton'sPolarTiger:Richard – this is, I think, a good move. Lots to like at PJM; you’ll fit right in here.
Can’t help but notice that it’s much simpler to post a comment as compared to your previous digs, although I do miss the opportunity to preview a comment before making it.
Hopefully the regulars will find their way over soon.
All the best,
Triton
Jun 23, 2008 - 7:50 am 3. Biff:I’m with Brock. I find the low contrast between the text and the blue-gray background to be quite hard on the eyes, and the densely-packed sans-serif typeface doesn’t help, either.
I’m thinking that for pajamas media sites I might be better off using a text-based feed reader rather than using a web browser.
Otherwise, congrats & good luck! Belmont Club remains on my “must read daily” list!
Jun 23, 2008 - 10:48 am 4. Cletus:I’m used to PJM so the layout doesn’t bother me.
Good articles though. I like reading something that doesn’t lower my IQ; that rarely happens on the internet. Kudos
Jun 23, 2008 - 12:03 pm 5. Ammo Guy:I remember flying from Tuzla to Slavonski Brod in a Kiowa in 1997. We were in no particular hurry so the pilot (the usual grizzled CW4) wanted to show me around. We skimmed over the lovely countryside and, from time to time, would happen upon some once picturesque village atop a hill – the juxtaposition of breathtaking scenery with bombed-out abandoned homes was disturbing and depressing. I wish all the Slavs in that part of the world the best, but I am not hopeful…even ten years down the road.
Otherwise, love your site Wretchard…both old and new. And, whenever I get a bit cocky about my writing skills (being a career bureaucrat and all), I merely come to your Club, gaze upon your efforts and go humbly back to pushing paper around the Pentagon. You are an absolutely amazing scribe whose turn of the phrase and obscure (yet spot on) references can take my breath away. Keep up the good work and you’ll always have an audience in this corner. Excelsior.
Jun 23, 2008 - 12:39 pm 6. Sparks:The black on blue text is easy on my eyes. Make the comment window the same.
Jun 23, 2008 - 12:54 pm 7. Lilith:Thanks.
Susan Woodward of the Brookings Institution argued that the failure to impose order upon a collapsing Communist order provided the opportunity for ancient hatreds, never far under the beautiful landscape, to break out again.
When people live under totalitarian “order” the last thing they want is more order, even of a liberal democratic stripe (and I mean both those terms in the small L small D sense). So you had your lost decade of the 1990s in Russia under Yeltsen. Then, having lived under absolute anarchy, people want order again. So now you got Putin.
Jun 23, 2008 - 2:32 pm 8. Brock:Now that’s customer service!
Jun 23, 2008 - 6:51 pm 9. JJJoseph:The nature of the disputes that arose when communism collapsed in Yugoslavia and Russia result from the renewed clash between Islam and Christianity. Communism suppressed this conflict with an iron fist. In countries with little Islam, communism collapses fairly peacefully, but Russia and the Balkans are still flailing in the reinvigorated battle with Islam. By insisting on equal rights for muslim, the west is having fun stirring the pot, so to speak. If this was America’s tactic for keeping Russia confused and perpetually on its back foot, it’s been working pretty well so far.
Jun 23, 2008 - 9:48 pm 10. RWE:Things disintegrated in the Balkans not because of the collapse of Communism there but because of the imposition of it. Communism ultimately must destroy all normal social institutions because they are incompatible with it. Part of this is the pointing at the West and saying “Bad! Bad!” Okay, so if the West is bad then all parts of it must be bad and that includes that Western idea of not stealing your next door neighbor’s chickens.
Then, the collapse of Communism led to no standards at all. If everything you have been told is now wrong then that includes the old Yugoslavian idea of not shooting your next door neighbor and taking his chickens.
Jun 24, 2008 - 5:00 am 11. Fat Man:Country: Republica Srpska
Motto: Can I buy a vowel.
Jun 24, 2008 - 9:09 amSorry, comments for this entry are closed at this time.