Balkanism falsely frames Balkan violence as fated by history or blood
Evidence
A particular abuse of history, “Balkanism,” has been used to justify the genocide in Bosnia by suggesting that people in the Balkans are fated, by history or genetics, to kill one another. It is true that, like the rest of Europe, Bosnia was caught up in the violence of World War I, World War II, and earlier conflicts. But just as Germans, Dutch, French, and British today live together peacefully, only a few years ago Bosnians had every reason to believe the peace they had enjoyed for fifty years would continue. — Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 48
Categorization
- DEFINE: Introduces ‘Balkanism’ as a named rhetorical abuse parallel to orientalism that excuses genocide as fate.
Related
- Religious violence in the post-cold war era is a global, not Balkan, force (similarity 0.81)
- US isolationists invoked fabricated ancient-history claims to justify abandoning Bosnia. (similarity 0.80)
- Serbs exaggerated the Kosovo threat as genocide despite real Albanian violence (similarity 0.80)
- The ‘ancient animosities’ narrative obscures that Bosnians had five centuries of interreligious coexistence. (similarity 0.80)
- Bosnian Muslims suffered uniquely methodical persecution from both nationalist sides (similarity 0.80)
- The Bosnia genocide was religious in four distinct, compounding senses (similarity 0.79)
- A retrieved Serbian tradition could recast Kosovo’s traitor as the genocidaires themselves (similarity 0.79)
- Bosnian ethnic identities formed through shifting, multidirectional conversions (similarity 0.79)
- Resisting genocide requires first confronting one’s own traditions’ crimes (similarity 0.78)
- Milosevic and Tudjman courted Europe by framing genocide as European defense (similarity 0.78)
- The anti-Muslim genocide reused the Christ-killer myth once aimed at Jews (similarity 0.78)
- Genocide accusations were weaponized as signals to launch genocidal attacks (similarity 0.78)