The ‘ancient animosities’ narrative obscures that Bosnians had five centuries of interreligious coexistence.

Evidence

Western political leaders have spoken of “ancient animosities,” portraying Bosnians as a group of Balkan tribal killers who have hated one another for centuries and who are incapable of living in peace. In the fires of the National Library, the irony of that portrayal becomes apparent. What the Serb and Croat armies were destroying, there and elsewhere, was the graphic and palpable evidence of over five hundred years of interreligious life in Bosnia. — Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 61

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the thesis in ‘Troubling Transparency’ and other works that official framing narratives (here ‘ancient animosities’) actively explain away or justify policy outcomes; also echoes the moral-panic literature’s finding that the moral dimension of social reaction shapes what gets punished.
• SEED: An essay angle: ‘the self-erasing archive’ — how the very physical records that would falsify an ethnonationalist founding myth get targeted first, so that ‘ancient animosities’ becomes self-fulfilling after the evidence is burned.

Related

• Balkanism falsely frames Balkan violence as fated by history or blood (similarity 0.80)
• Bosnian ethnic identities formed through shifting, multidirectional conversions (similarity 0.79)
• The 1989 Kosovo commemoration fused Christ-killer myth with anti-Muslim and anti-Albanian hatred (similarity 0.78)