Outside of Serbian Life......

Milos asked me to write the next post.....not sure what he was thinking there. The topic is inside Serbian life; I am not Serbian, I do not live in Serbia, I have never even visited Serbia.

But, maybe that isn't such a bad thing for this post. That gives me the chance to tell you not so much about westerners' opinions but maybe about how westerners arrived at them through ignorance, about not just Serbs, but the Balkan peninsula, as a whole. As we should all know it is ignorance that breeds fear and hate, or at the very least apathy, and apathy can be more deadly than than the first two. It is my opinion that ignorant apathy was all that was needed for several wrongs to be inflicted on the people of Yugoslavia.

When I was in college I was a history major and while my concentration was not European or the modern era, I did take enough courses to have had a concentration in Modern European History. Yet, with that much education I will now, freely admit that I knew NOTHING about the Balkans. Why now? Cause I had to learn to know that I had been ignorant.

Okay, so maybe I wasn't totally ignorant, but the things I did know either were not truly important or they were random facts that I had picked up somewhere along the way. Yes, I knew about Vlad the Impaler and I knew the Ottoman Empire had invaded and occupied, and I learned a few dates and facts. But I truly knew nothing about the Serbs before the Ottoman invasion and knew nothing about the occupation.

Now, I am not going to say that ALL Americans were as ignorant as I was and still am; but considering that unlike most American students, I focused on history and still did not know The Balkans, I feel confident stating that the majority of the American populous was even less informed than I was. At most what the normal, everyday American knew was that Yugoslavia, had been the enemy during the Cold War. That made it very easy for Americans to assume the worst in the people of the land called Yugoslavia.

Typical everyday Americans are very self-absorbed, materialistic people, whom tend to act like the world ends at the end of their nose. For those flaws, Americans still tend to like to think they are helpful, defenders of the underdog. They see their country as the defender of all that is good and right and free in the world. Unfortunately, most Americans are so busy keeping up with the Jones, that they do not really take the time to know what is going on in the world and to understand all sides of conflicts, as much as we dislike our politicians we seem to still trust them when they tell us that these people or this group is bad and we support their decisions about how to handle said conflicts.

This poorly placed trust is what happened in the Balkans in the 90's. Our media only showed the “crimes” committed by the Yugoslavia Army. There was no logic, no reasonable questions, no verification, no investigating by our media that resulted in any story other than the ones that reflected negatively on the Yugoslavia Army or the Serbian people. I blame that on the fact that news has become business and in doing so has lost any and all integrity that it once might have had. And we all know that big business and politics are diabolical bed buddies.

Yet, even our leaders were ill informed about the truth of the Balkans. For Tony Blair stated in April of 1999, “Kosovo is on the doorstep of Europe.” I am not sure how many people consider the doorstep of their home to be in the middle of their living room. But it is this very ignorance and misunderstanding by most Westerners about the Balkans that allowed such misdeeds to occur.