156. If Smart Women Ran Countries

"If rulers are smart what do you care whether they're men or women? Don't smarts give you all you want?"

They would if it weren't for hormones.  The male one, testosterone, can make a difference.  Not much, maybe, if a ruler is really smart, but in the choices that matter most, the ones that take a country into war, often there is very little difference between the choice that leads to ruin and the one that leads to safety.  I fear that squirt of testosterone that will push rulers the wrong way.

"Yes, and how about when you need that squirt?  Valley Forge.  Gettysburg.  Midway.  How about the Brits' need for it when they stood alone against Hitler?  Don't you wish they'd had more of it when Hitler first moved into the Rhineland?  How many civilized cities have longed for it when the barbarians were at the gates?  Testosterone may bring us disaster but more often it's the only thing between us and disaster."

That's where the smarts come in.  "What do we need here?" the smart ruler asks.  "What does the particular situation call for?"  He doesn't know until he sees how each choice might play out, long-term and short term. If the chance for success (which, this being war, he has to measure against ruin) is high enough, he says, "Release the testosterone!"  The other way round he says, "Bottle it."  Dumb rulers say one or the other without calculation.

"I see.  And you're talking about a calculation that will be testosterone-free?"

As much as it can be.  The choice that turns on the testosterone is best made by somebody free of it.  That's why I think you're safer with a woman running a country. 

"A woman can be free of testosterone and still act as if she has it, especially if voters want to see signs of it.  She can want to be an Iron Lady."

Oh yes, just as low-testosterone men do.  I know that you've got to watch out for people like that.   A ruler faking testosterone can be more dangerous — on television, at a conference — than one simply ruled by it.  The fake can't relax long enough to do the calculations.  But, aside from the occasional fake, and given the smarts, I trust women to do them.  And make better choices than men. 

"With very little in history to go on.  You'll understand if I find your trust rather quick, if not naive."

Maybe you don't understand how limited my trust is, and what a small difference it is based on.  Eliminate all but the critical case.  You're down to the casus belli, the thing that finally justifies going to war — the firing on Sumter, the blowing up of the Maine, the firing on a destroyer in the Tonkin Gulf, the possession of weapons of mass destruction.     Everything depends on the ruler's standard of evidence.  (You know "standard of evidence."  It's what made physicists wait so long before they'd say they'd really found the Higgs boson.  "Chance of error less than 1:3,500,000?  OK, we've got it.")

Do you have the picture?  If so, you're ready for my hormone experiment.  Put two rulers with equal smarts into position to make the final decision on war.  After all the calculations have been made and come out even give one a squirt of testosterone.  Watch his standard-of-evidence-dial.  Woops, there it goes.  Down to 1: 50.  Still going.  1:40. 1:30.  This fellow wants to go to war.

"But that fellow has diplomats, and he himself has to be a diplomat.  Diplomats control their testosterone.   They at least hide it.  And there you are, seeing it in them so clearly.  On a dial for heaven's sake."

All right, try listening.  Tune your ears.  Listen to those diplomats taking Britain into the Crimea: "I don't see," says the ambassador to Turkey (Stratford), "how we can with honor abstain longer from entering the Black Sea in force."  Honor, honor, manly honor.  The honor of the Royal Navy.  "It was unthinkable that it might be deployed and then not used effectively," says our historian, Trevor Royle, explaining the unused Navy's action after Russia had given in.  All testosterone.

Tune in on the diplomatic exchanges of that time and you're ready for the others leading up to World War I.  What was that at Ems?  The Prussian king insulted?  The French ambassador snubbed?  Grounds for war, sir.  France goes at Prussia and suffers losses it pines to repair until 1918, when it "gets satisfaction."  Sounds like an aristocrat speaking of a duel.  I hear testosterone speaking through the whole Great Power era.  High blood in a biker bar.

"That's certainly vivid but, excuse me, you must see how over-simple it is. Testosterone may generate a lot more than war.  How about the accomplishments that seem to accompany great conquests — Athenian, Roman, and, yes, British.  Darwin.  The voyage of the Beagle.  Bottle testosterone and you could lose Elizabethan drama, Shakespeare.  Maybe it's just the energy that at times whangs out in all directions — including the military."

All right, it's a gamble.  Substitute estrogen and we could lose Shakespeare.  But you know, I'm still inclined to bet on women — on the throne, in the White House.

"You have more data?  Better data?"

No, it's intuitive, and I'm not sure what I'm drawing on.  But when I think back to a ruler making those war-peace calculations — imagining the consequences of each choice— I feel that women have an advantage we haven't considered yet: they're better at imagining the suffering consequence.  I don't know why this should be, but men are slow at this.  They seem to have to be there — for the blood, the groans, the cries of "Mother, mother, help me!" — and women can see it ahead of time.

"I know what you're talking about.  It's well established that severely wounded men, dying men — doughboys hung up on barbed wire outside the trenches, Marines being hoisted out of landing craft, the toughest of the tough — call on their mothers.  But I don't see how women could see this ahead of time any better than men can."

I don't either.  But there's this about women.  They carry around inside themselves this three-inch pouch that babies come out of.  And that pouch, through the hormones that go with it, must make them think about the babies and their future — even before the future is on them.

"'Think about the future.'  That doesn't mean 'foresee.'"

I know.  This is not rational.  It's an intuition, with no possible base except in observation of women I have known: that somehow women can hear those cries of "Mother, mother, help me" before they are uttered.

154. What's Hot in the Streets and What's Cool in Philosophy: The Balkan Connection.

Friday, June 29, 2012

 

6

 

154. What's Hot in the Streets and What's Cool in Philosophy: The Balkan Connection.

Americans have to talk about cool because they can't talk about goodness.  "We're better than you."  That's ugly and dangerous.  "Better," coming from Americans in the Balkans, means "more rational, less credulous," and when a Serb or a Croat finds out that 31% of Americans believe in astrology and that 43% believe that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so" (Gallup, 2007) their tongues are stopped.  Looking at rumor-charged Balkan killers and saying, "Change, be more like us," is not an option."

Claims about what's cool in your country, though, are comparatively safe.  "Sure, there are a lot of Americans believing those things but they're not considered cool, not by educated Americans."

What do you mean, "not by educated Americans"?  More than 30% of Americans over 25 hold bachelor's degrees (2012 Census Bureau).  You must have plenty of educated people believing unbelievable things.

OK, by educated I have to mean, "having learned to be careful about belief," and not "having acquired a lot of knowledge."  The latter can certainly get you all kinds of degrees — professional ones, mainly — but in America (I'll risk it) it won't make you cool.  I mean not as long as traditional philosophy is thought of as cool.

And by "traditional" you mean?

Of the tradition that descends from Plato's Socrates, the careful step-by-step testing that lets limited human beings establish reliable beliefs, the testing that eventually gave us the scientific method — though from Plato's starting points he could never get to what we call science.

What percentage of people in any country are going to be careful enough to meet Socrates' standards?

The number doesn't matter.  As long as those standards are thought cool by people — heck, 2% — that the others think are cool a nation won't wander too far into dangerous belief, that is, careless belief about things that matter, things you go to war over. 

And that 2%, those are professors, I take it.

You take it wrong, though you can expect to find professors, trained academics, to be prominent among those who are careful about belief.  Anybody, schooled or unschooled, can be in the 2%.  Faulkner's barber, Hawkshaw, was in the 2% of careful people in that town of his that did the lynching.  "Get the facts, boys, get the facts."

"Facts, hell!" they said.  "You're a fine white man."

Then the leader, McLendon, the officer, the one who had commanded troops in France: "Are you going to let the black sons get away with it until one really does it?"  He's the one they look up to and they join his mob, leaving Hawkshaw standing.  No prof ever defended the academic tradition more firmly, or more futilely. 

And the lesson for Balkan people?  You're not equating them with Southern racists, are you?

No, but I'm pointing to a comparable need.  Hawkshaw needed some standing in Jefferson.  A coterie, some cool fellows in the drinking places, some fear of their wit from behind the pool cues, somebody to give skepticism a better name.  They don't have to be scholars, they don't have to speak good English.  All they have to have, if they know they have some backing, is a voice.  "McLendon, you're out of your fucking mind."  That might have been enough.

I see.  And if in the Balkans a voice, with some backing, had said, "General Strugar, you're out of your fucking mind," that might have been enough.

Might have, but words like that too easily lead to fights.  Better the teacher's words, the composition teacher going over McLendon's sentence: "Are you going to let the black sons get away with it until one really does it?"  Pronoun reference, Jack.  What do you have in mind each time you use "it"? 

These comp teachers are bears on reference.  Noun reference. "Does this word refer to something in the reader's world, not just your world? Something he or she can check on, and call true or false or something in between.  Assume checking.  Assume Socrates."

Slavov Zizek couldn't assume that if he taught composition. "The truth we are dealing with here is not an 'objective' truth, but the self-relating truth about one's own subjective position; as such it is an engaged truth, measured not by its factual accuracy but by the way it affects the subjective position of enunciation."  He has to assume concession.

How should those of us with a stake in the old academic tradition respond to Zizek?  We know that his position can't be reconciled with ours.  We doubt that the continental tradition that tolerates and even encourages his position can be reconciled with ours.  Indeed, if we listen to Martha Nussbaum, we'll doubt that reconciliation is possible.  She found the portrait of philosophy in Astra Taylor's documentary, concentrating on figures (like Zizek) outside the strict discipline of philosophy, a "betrayal" of our tradition (see

http://www.thepointmag.com/2010/reviews/inheriting-socrates ).

 So, you hear Zizek's voice: "Truth...measured not by its factual accuracy but by the way it affects the subjective position of enunciation."  Do you pass by indifferently?  So much noise?

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It will depend on where you are.  If you're in a student drinking place that's not noise.  It could be the future.  Raise a warning flag.  "Fire danger: high."  If the drinking place is in a Balkan capital, sound the alarm.  The woods are burning.

153. Balkans: Checking for Cool.

You don't want to know what the professors are saying in their books and lectures.  You don't want to know what the pundits are saying in their columns.  You want to know what the students are saying in their drinking places.

That's what will determine the future.  Politicians and wise men can talk up something all they want but if the next generation of college students doesn't think it's cool it's dead.  A zero in the historical force column. 

I had heard this said but was suspicious until I heard a man, a successful modern poet, tell of his literature classes at Vanderbilt in the twenties.  The Mighty Romantics and the Great Victorians were still all the rage then with the profs, but the students, even as the room resounded with Tennyson's mighty lines, were passing around mimeographed copies of "The Waste Land."

Can you feel that, the cool of it?  If you can't, picture one of those graduate seminars in Southern universities attended after the war by second-tier New York intellectuals squeezed south by the GI competition for Eastern schools.  CCNY types.  Deliver your opinion and they say, "You sure of that?"  Then they're there with the goods.  Out of Morris Cohen (Introduction to Logic and the Scientific Method), who taught at Columbia.  Those guys are cool.  Over beer afterward one of them, about to say the word "God," pauses and says, "if you'll pardon the expression."   Atheism becomes cool.  Marxism and Freudianism follow.

That's what I mean by cool and that's what it was in 1947 Louisiana.  It doesn't have to be subversive and it doesn't have to be outside the curriculum.  When Cleanth Brooks arrived at Yale with the New Criticism the students greeted him warmly ("Mistah Brooks, he come" headlined the student newspaper) and ate up his teaching.

What's the equivalent of that now in Ljubljana and Zagreb and Belgrade?  Sean O'Hagan says that Slavoj Zizek is now "the thinker of choice for Europe's young intellectual vanguard."  Is that true?  Could I confirm it by listening in on student talk?  I, a two-week tourist?  Not a chance.

But I know what I'd be looking for.  First, the student who says what students (or anybody, really) can say in a hundred different ways in a time of crisis: "Are you with us in the movement?"  Second, the student who says, "Are you sure of that?"  I'd look at the listening students.  If they think the first one is cool they (and their country) face one kind of future; if they think the second one is cool they face an entirely different kind.

It's not obvious which one is better.  Everything depends on where you are, when.  You're marching for civil rights in '63 (or for independence in '76) you want to know who's with you and who isn't.  You want them charged up.  You're sword-fighting in a phalanx you want your buddy on your left to be super-charged.  That's your unprotected side and your life depends on it.

Those who have been in those situations will tell you: you're not going to do a Ph.D. oral on what did the charging.  The British spin experts doctor a picture of Hitler to make him more hateful.  It fires us up and we fight harder to defeat his armies.  Anything that gets us home quicker is cool.

Academic cool can be ugly.  Picture the places where it's most easily maintained: in America with 3,000 miles of ocean on each side and 1500 missiles securely in their silos; in Scandinavia, with all that water around and a homogeneous population. It's easy to look at the Balkans and forget the mixed-up population and close, over-the-mountain borders — with wall-mounted rifles on the other side of them.

What kind of cool is the right kind is always going to be a close call there.  Times and situations change so.  Outsiders, even when they're willing to risk ugliness, can hardly ever speak positively.  "Let's just quit talking about cool.  We'll never be able to say anything helpful.  Forget the whole category."

At this point I hear one of my profs breaking in.  Sam Monk.  "You think there's no cool any more.  You want to know cool?  I'll show you cool.  My period.  Early 18th century.  England is looking back at a bad religious war.  The Western continent is looking back at worse ones.  The Holy Roman Empire, with its little states, has torn itself into Protestant-Catholic shreds.  Here's Jonathan Swift's Gulliver explaining it to the leader of the Houyhnhnms:

Difference in opinions hath cost many millions of lives: for instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine; whether whistling be a vice or a virtue; whether it be better to kiss a post, or throw it into the fire; what is the best color for a coat, whether black, red, white, or gray; and whether it should be long or short, dirty or clean; with many more.  Neither are any wars so furious and bloody, or of so long continuance, as those occasioned by difference of opinion, especially if it be in things indifferent.

That's cool.  Enlightenment cool."

Is it always and everywhere cool?  It doesn't have to be, not for anybody who feels sorry for the sweet people locked into those Balkan situations.  If it's occasionally helpful that's enough.

143. Balkan Tour (9)

9. Belgrade

First a guide, Djina Dostanic, making the Serbian case, or slipping it in, as she took us to the largest Orthodox Church in the world and then to Tito's tomb.  "It’s not true that only military targets were hit in the bombing.  A hospital was bombed, a moving train was hit."

"How do you feel about Americans?"  (Asked off to the side.)

"At the time of the bombing I was very angry.  But that's past now.  You are not guilty but you were badly informed, as we were" — presumably by Milosevic.

About the start of the war: "The Croats (I guess the Ustashe) used the Nazi symbol."  She said Serbs were deathly afraid of that.  "250,000 Serbs fled Croatia in one night, fearing for their lives.  I know.  I was teaching near the border.  I saw their children in school the next day."

"Is that the reason the Serbs invaded?"

"Yes.  The Yugoslav Army invaded."

"To protect them?"

"Yes.  The Yugoslav Army was made up of all Yugoslavs.  The Croatian Army was just Croatians." 

She said nothing about leaving the bombed buildings in Belgrade as memorials (Julia's story).  Her explanation was that no buyer could meet the conditions set by the government: that they be restored to their original condition.  They were left unrepaired because repair was too expensive.

Then to lunch at the Dorian Gray restaurant with, at our table, two recent graduates of the University of Belgrade, Sonia (major in "technical translation") and Tanja (liberal arts).  Both very open and friendly and (I think Mary Anne would agree) beautiful women. 

How about dislike of Americans for the bombing?

"That's the older generation.  I [Sonia] remember being very frightened as a child.  But that's past.  We think it's not people, it's politicians."  Sonia admitted that the Kosovo invasion had to be stopped but was unwilling to see bombing as the only way to stop it.  What was the alternative?  I couldn't bring myself to ask.  Their hearts were for peace and good will, and their minds were set against the "politicians" who had to find the means.

They had some questions for us.  "I understand that you can put people in jail indefinitely on suspicion of being a terrorist.  Nobody will know."

"Ah, I think they will.  Our press will find out."

"You think you can trust your press?"

We tried very hard to get across our reasons for trusting our press but I'm not sure we succeeded.  They had the ingrained suspicion of media and government that we have noticed in so many, including Shura, who have come from Communist countries.  Mary Anne explained, as best she could, the Freedom of Information Act.  They came to the table assuming that the obvious could never be true.  "That belief is what's behind most conspiracy theories," I said. They laughed in agreement.  "Oh, conspiracy theories.  You should live in Serbia!"

"Were your families involved in the war?" 

"My father hid from the draft," Sonia said, "but he couldn't get a job.  My mother worked as a nurse."  Like the young women we met in Pskov they were working hard toward careers they had little hope of ever entering.  Jobs are so scarce.  Sonia, with a specialty, has the better chance; Tanja's humanities can lead only to teaching, where the outlook is bleak.  "But," she said, "the learning is good in itself."  (I thought of Zoran's complaint about Serbia's attachment to the humanities: "We educate our people to be unemployable.")

It was great to meet such young people after seeing so much that made us despair.  We loved them, and will remember them every time we get down on the Balkans, or (as people in their eighties do) get down on the human race.

Tonight it was dinner in a dark-wood restaurant in the Bohemian quarter with Serbian plum brandy, phylo-dough pastries, and a six-man string band playing eclectic jump tunes, including a German one and "Oh Susanna" (for our benefit), though it was the native Serb stuff they riffed on.  They came to our table and played leaning over the ladies and we loved them.

Tomorrow it's back to Croatia, the heart of it, where, being among them, we'll probably love the Croatians too.

140. Balkan Tour (7)

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7. Sarajevo to Belgrade

Over more beautiful mountains into a rich plain full of agribusiness, Serbia, the prosperous, the powerful (compared to Bosnia), and the villain of everybody's piece so far.  Right to a lecture by a Serb, Zoran Janjetovic, who has written a book published in English as Between Hitler and Tito.

He puts the Montenegrins in their place right off.  "The Montenegrin identity, separate from the Serbian identity, was invented by the communist state.  They are really Serbs."  I see an ugly Serb rising but no, he gives a full and fairly balanced history of the Serbs and their region, with judicious credit given.  "The first two centuries of Ottoman rule were a big improvement over life under Serbian lords." 

Identity is a big thing.  (We can imagine.  Say that a foreign national is really Serb and you have an excuse for fighting for your intervention.)  And it makes for competition.  "Bulgarians claim Macedonians are really Bulgarians.  Serbs say they're Serbian."  Oi.

On the controversial issues he tilts toward Serbia.  On the assassination of the Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand that "some say started World War I" he says that "always there are officers who think you can do everything by saber."  Serb officers "found some teenagers and there you have Gavrilo Princip killing Franz Ferdinand."  But "the Serbian government had nothing to do with that."  (Misha Glenny, I believe, says otherwise.)  "Still," he adds, "you don't have to have a world war over a crown prince."

"Everybody who opposed the communists was done away with in the first days of their rule."  Tito, a master player, kept Yugoslavia independent and well supplied by "milking two cows (US and USSR) at the same time."

Tito dies in 1980, then we get to the hot period, the nineties.  Autonomous and semi-autonomous provinces had already developed a lot of ethnic and national pride.  "They were bombs ready to explode.  Politicians took advantage."  Boom.  Milosevic said he wanted to preserve Serbians from the many enemies who had victimized them.  "He used the state media to work up the people."  (When I later asked if there were any independent media he said, "Yes, two, a TV station and a radio station, but the people preferred the state media."  The people.  Not forced.  People loving the message.)

"It was easy for Milosevic to sell his message that the Serbs 'needed protection'" because "refugees from the Ustashe (Croat) were streaming in."  The media played up the refugee pictures.

The tension in the room increased as we approached our own time.  What's the situation now?  "Many people still believe that the Serbs are victims.  The fact that more Serbs are prosecuted for war crimes in international courts just demonstrates to them that everybody has it in for them.  They believe that the Serbs did not commit more and worse war crimes than the others."

After taking a question by Carol Cohen about education in Serbia he had to answer the question that I think all Americans would want to ask and I had a chance to:  "My most vivid memory, from television pictures, is of Serb soldiers sniping at women and children on the streets of Sarajevo.  I think many of us were wondering, What kind of upbringing did those soldiers have that would let them do that?"

"That's a good question," he said, "but it's one for psychologists."  Then he went on to say that the emphasis in the schools had been on "national brotherhood and unity."  That "may have been harmless among educated people in Belgrade but if you're from a village next to a village whose people have killed your people it's going to be different."

He tried to fill in the buildup of animosity.   People had nothing good to say about nearby people.  "They buy your cheap fruit and sell you expensive juice."  But he himself, I think, found the extension into savagery puzzling.

Joe Tudisco wanted to know about the situation in the schools now.  "What values are stressed?  Brotherhood and unity still?"  The answer wasn't clear.

And that's what we learned from the great Balkan Monster.

I did learn later that the prosperity I saw was an illusion.  Unemployment is at an official 27% (probably 40%) and many unemployed are going to Europe.

And here's something to add to Mohammed's answer yesterday about what keeps Bosnia afloat: "More than 60% of the GDP of Bosnia-Herzegovina is spent on administration."

139. Balkan Tour (6)

6. Sarajevo

Now in the morning we hear from Mohammed Dzihic, 32, from north Bosnia, with a Hungarian MA in European Studies.  Within 300 meters of the hotel he is speaking in, he tells us, are a mosque, a Roman Catholic Church, an Orthodox church, and a synagogue.  Sarajevo was very mixed, with much intermarriage.  There was friendship. 

He goes on with a Wikipedia-type report: Before 1992 Sarajevo was 30% RC and Orthodox, 60% Muslim.  Before WWII there were 43,000 Jews.  War sliced them up.  Eleven thousand killed, more than a thousand of them children, between 1991 and 1995.

Where's the money coming from to rebuild?  The IMF, says Mohammed, and it will have to be paid back. Where's the money coming from to hold life together?  Most families have somebody working abroad, sending money home.  His sister, working in Germany, supported his family of six through the whole war.

 And then the partiality starts seeping in.  The Bosnian Serbs killed children under five and women over 80.  He takes up more and more Serb myths, arguing.  "It's not true that Bosnian Muslims are Serbs who converted to Islam under the Turks just for advantage.  They already had a religion, Bogomil, in which they prayed five times a day and purified themselves with water beforehand.  Islam was natural.  It's not true that Muslims expelled others." and so on.  When he gets to describing the various Muslim sects he says things we want to question.  Are the Shiites really expelling Sunnis in Iraq. as he says?  (Checked Wiki back at the hotel, though, and saw that a lot of what he said is true; the Serbs are responsible for most of, and the ghastliest of,  the atrocities.)

In the afternoon we went on a bus tour led by a striking, passionately patriotic Muslim woman named Senirah.  For people old enough (many in our group) she is the spitting image of La Pasionaria, the female Che Guevara of the Spanish Civil War.  She showed us the bridge where the first two women were killed by Serb snipers.  She took us to maps showing where the Serbs lines ran, just above town.  In between she talked about the great job Sarajevo had done in hosting the 1984 Olympics.  She quoted the writers who called it "the best organized up to that time."  City pride.

Then she took us out past the airport to the Tunnel Museum, which is really only the house that served as terminus to the 800-meter tunnel (960-meter in Wikipedia) the Muslims dug to get ammunition and food into the city and the wounded out.  It's what let them hold on for four years.  What did she do?  She was a surgical nurse in the city and worked with the wounded.  Operations without anesthetic.

"They say we were 'miserable' in the city.  We women were not miserable.  We did not want to look miserable.  We put on our best clothes and earrings and make-up and were happy.  For our men who were fighting."  Forty-three of her relatives died in the fighting, she said.

In the basement, sitting on ammunition boxes, we saw a movie about the tunnel and the siege.  Then we went down into the tunnel and, bent low, walked about 25 meters.  (I, 5' 7", hit my head twice, hard, on beams; the men here average 6" and were carrying 75 lbs. on their backs.) As we were leaving, a group of girls from a madras (Muslim school) were coming in.

After that a walking tour of the Old Town, ending at the corner where the Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip shot dead the Austrian Archduke, Franz Ferdinand.  He's apparently still a hero here, since they preserved the markers of where his feet had been planted and, during the siege, moved them inside so Serb shells wouldn't damage them.

Had dinner in a good restaurant in the Turkish quarter (Bosnian cuisine), then joined the Saturday night promenade on the main pedestrian street.  Montpellier, even Barcelona, could hardly have been gayer, or more with it.  Streams of handsome young people, some in high fashion, flowed past us, all looking happy and full of life.

We bed down thinking mainly of the two Muslims who spoke.  What a preparation for tomorrow, when we go to the heart of Serbia and start hearing from the Great Enemy!

Note: For background on what I have been reporting you might check the following Wikipedia entries, all of which have passed their neutrality test: Siege of Dubrovnik, Siege of Mostar, Siege of Sarajevo, Bosnian War, Rape in the Bosnian War.  Wikipedia has apparently not been able to find anybody with a sufficiently neutral point of view to write the general article, Yugoslav Wars.

136. Balkan Tour (3)

3. Dubrovnik

Now the Croatian side.  Dubrovnik was "70% destroyed" in 1991 by Serbs and the nice Montenegrins we listened to yesterday.  Shelled the place from the surrounding mountains. Map in town square shows where shells hit.  Gouge in wall in museum has a circular wooden frame around it, with a caption: "Shell impact."  Keeps the desire for revenge alive.  In Montenegro our lecturer Jack Delf, an Australian whose day job was promotion of tourist sailing around here, couldn't have trips between Herceg Novi and Dubrovnik because, the Dubrovnicians told him, "the Montenegrins will smash our boats."  No deal, no sea traffic between the two cities.  "The Montenegrins believe the same about the Dubrovnicians, " he said.   "And nobody has ever smashed any boats."

"Park a car with Serbian license plates in Dubrovnik and the windows will be smashed," admits Igor, our Croatian lecturer. "No Serb accents are served in restaurants.  It's the same way in French-speaking Switzerland.  Order in Swiss-German and they won't serve you."  We're doing what the world does.  (Only we who have lived in French-speaking Switzerland know that it doesn't do that there.)  Among the T-shirts being sold outside the Dubrovnik cathedral was one saying, "Lord, protect me from evil people."

Time is short so I'll close with words from the Slovenian toast in our brochure:

God save our land and nation

And all Slovenes where they live,

Who own the same

Blood and name,

And who one glorious Mother claim.

Let thunder out of heaven

Strike down and smite our wanton foe!  (translation)