Genocide in Bosnia shared structural features with dismissed U.S. militia threats

Evidence

Imagine that such extremists had control over major U.S. media, which for three years broadcast alleged atrocities of nonChristians and non-Aryans against the Aryan Christians. Imagine that such extremists had a high-level supporter in the U.S. military who supplied them not only with assault rifles but with tanks and heavy artillery. Many Americans dismiss the threat of such groups and the possibility of such an ethnoreligious war. In the former Yugoslavia, the extremists were dismissed in the same way. Few imagined that in just a few years neighbors and friends would be shelling them with mortars or tormenting them in killing camps. — Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 208

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s work on fascist movements’ grooming of violence and the normalization-to-atrocity pipeline in contemporary authoritarian studies.
• SEED: An angle for an essay connecting U.S. militia movements’ dismissal to the dynamics that preceded Yugoslavia’s genocide — how mainstream society rationalizes away proto-genocidal movements as fringe.

Related

• The Bosnia genocide was religious in four distinct, compounding senses (similarity 0.80)
• Genocide accusations were weaponized as signals to launch genocidal attacks (similarity 0.79)