150. Balkan Tour (13)

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Ljubljana

Optimism!  Here at the end.  Gregor Novak, Slovenian atheist, with four years in New York City where he learned to appreciate diversity ("my friends were all either Jews or Koreans"), believes that "there will be no war."  The Serbs "will not again go military, not in the short term, nor will the Croats.  They've learned what that costs."  He does not talk about, or apparently worry about, "animosity."  Make reasonable economic improvement (boy, does a lot depend on that) and they'll come around, maybe long-term.  The exception is Macedonia.  Things could get out of control with the Albanians.

What I hear is that Clinton's bombing succeeded.  The way to get people to stop doing what they're doing, after persuasion has failed, is to make them suffer.  That's the way of all war.  Here the Serbs suffered and stopped their military action.  They are deterred from further military action.  War brings peace, aggression benefits humanity.

"Yes," said the people of Novi Sad, "but we weren't the ones who needed to be stopped and deterred.  We didn't kill and cleanse.  We voted against Milosevic.  And we got plastered, losing three vital bridges."

The answer to that, implicit in Novak's lecture (one of several that rebuke me for seeing so much partisanship here), is that this is what you get when you form a nation-tribe.  You pay for the tribe's sins.  "And," the American might add, "not equitably.  Suffering-infliction cannot be balanced and fair."

"How about collateral damage?  Three thousand civilians died in Belgrade."

Bombing cannot be perfect.  We (the Americans taking over now) accept collateral damage when we accept our goal, to inflict suffering on the big causer of suffering.  Collateral damage is an accurate, justifiable term for what a humanitarian aggressor has to figure.  It's straight cost-benefit.  Will the suffering of tribal bystanders, as in Belgrade, be less than the total suffering you're trying to stop, as in Kosovo?  If the answer is yes you bomb and live with the results."

"Yes, but suppose it's just the tribe's leader who is making the decisions."

Who made him, or let him be, leader?  It's the nation-tribe again.  But the humanitarian aggressor thinks further.  He thinks about making the tribe suffer so that the leader will, in his political way, suffer, and stop the tribe from doing what it's doing.  Before criticizing Clinton you should ask,  "What would I have done (or have him do), not by deep, retrospective knowledge, the kind academics have, but by surface, immediate knowledge, what's knowable at the time with the resources available?" 

"I mean," says Clinton, anticipating Obama's answer to his counter-recession measures, "do you know a good alternative to what I did?  How would YOU have stopped the Serbs?"  (There's the answer to Sonia — though you'd never give it so bluntly — or to the analytical prof.)

What, Mr. Novak, is the feeling here now about Americans?  "I think people believe that they stopped the war and that that was OK, but now what they do is not OK.  Their behavior is outdated."  (What behavior?  He, or they, didn't say.)

Novak shows us how to take Sonia's word "meddling."  The Yugoslav people want to be (or to have been) saved from killing and cleansing but they also want to be free to call the act that saved them "meddling." 

We end with a kind of swing I haven't mentioned, the one that takes us from the sickening facts showing us what uneducated, credulous farm boys are capable of as snipers to a restaurant (or, usually, a bus) filled with the sweet music of the folk, the jolly farm folk, in their moments of togetherness.  On the bus we've had Croatian folk music ("clappa," lovely), Bosnian folk music, Serbian folk music, and now Slovenian folk music.

This last, with six good strummers and great local food, was maybe the best of our restaurant jolliness and love but, adding in all the tour-ending ceremonies, we got a little impatient with it.  We knew we had to get up at 3:30 (bags out at 4:00!) and we faced 24 hours of plane travel home.

148. Balkan Tour (12)

Zagreb to Ljubljana

Neat farmhouses, productive farms, some heavy industry (a Renault plant), stable EU (Euro zone) member, 5% unemployment, a relatively homogeneous population, Slovenia is a horse of a different color.

Maybe their distance from Serbia accounts for the Slovenians' quick establishment of independence but you've got to give some credit to their smarts.  They saw an invasion by the Yugoslavia National Army (of which they were a part) coming and prepared plans to transfer all the Slovenes in the YNA to an old, neglected National Guard, locally commanded. On the day of the invasion, surprise, they transferred everybody and had a ready-made army with command structure (which they had filled out and modernized) in place. They fought efficiently and won in ten days.

So, relatively tame politics and from us, by now connoisseurs (if not voyeurs) of violence, more or less a yawn.  Can't help it.  It's late in the tour, we've seen so much, we're a little tired.  OK, let's see the buildings and hear the culture spiel.

We expected a routine bus and walking tour, and it was, except for the fine Austrian-era buildings and then wham, the great interior of this cathedral, St. Nicholas, with a mass going on, celebrating Ljubljana’s patron saint.  A knockout.

But with the heat and the walking Mary Anne and I, dying for a beer, decided to get permission from Julia to drop out.  Our request, though, opened the tap for half the group, and so back to the hotel en masse, not stopping because we, their leaders, wanted our beer time for ourselves.  We had it nicely, in the hotel bar, after a nap and shower.

Slovenia is the place where you catch your breath and start having imaginary conversations with people you met earlier.  "You.  Your Serbs. They believed those stories about thousands of Croatian soldiers in Dubrovnik getting ready to attack you.   Didn't anybody ask, 'Is it true?'  Why didn't they check Wikipedia?"

There wasn't any such thing then.

"But there's always something like it, some upholder of academic standards of inquiry.  They could check with their profs.  Or their profs' students, or former students, their good students."

But even our profs were deceived.  A lot of them went along.  The potential enemy — the one that produced the Ustashe, you know — was so close.  Listen to those profs now and you have to feel sorry for them.  "I was confused after hearing about 30,000 Ustashas on the move! TV Belgrade and Montenegrin TV provided the news and I, like a child, was frightened... Imagine how others felt when even I, a university professor, fell for it."  (Prof. Novak Kilibarda, quoted in Wikipedia, "Siege of Dubrovnik" — I looked it up.)  So he was all for the attack on Croatia.  That happens to smart profs, you know.  In the excitement of nationalism.  Think of all those brainy German professors who went along with Hitler and Goebbels.

Smart profs, the smartest of all, falling for Hitler. And here it is again, the same kind of thing.   We've had some of it in the U.S.  It's a puzzle.  "What prevents smart profs from going jingo?"

If the question had been asked I would not have been ready with an answer.  Prevent a prof from holding a view?  Who in America can do that?  Only, only (it took me a while) other profs.  By putting the credulous prof down.  'Definitely not cool.'  Politicians, statesmen, preachers, journalists, they don't have a chance of putting a prof down.  Profs are too arrogant.  Only other profs can do it.  In the faculty lounge.  "Frosting their ass," as the WWII veterans used to say.  You want to know, Serbian friend, the secret of a culture?  Look to see whose ass is getting frosted.

What are we going to do tomorrow?  Play bridge all morning with our New York lawyer and his partner.  It's scheduled free time.   And we've done our last washing.