The 1989 Kosovo commemoration fused Christ-killer myth with anti-Muslim and anti-Albanian hatred

Evidence

Three vectors of mythic power came together in the 1989 passion play performance. The fourteenth-century ancestors of Slavic Muslims were characterized as Christ killers and then, through temporal collapse effected by the performance, identified with present-day Slavic Muslims in Bosnia. The hatred of Albanians in Kosovo province in 1989 was fused with the hatred of Slavic Muslims. And the atrocities of World War II were resurrected and attributed to Croats and Muslims as entire peoples. — Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 201

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The mechanism of ‘temporal collapse’ — flattening centuries so medieval ancestors of victims are blamed for contemporary acts — is a powerful analytical concept for how collective hatred gets structured.
• SEED: Essay angle: temporal collapse as a technology of genocide — collapsing historical distance to make living people stand in for their ancestors.

Related

• Collapsing distinct historical wounds into one mythic present fueled genocide (similarity 0.83)
• A retrieved Serbian tradition could recast Kosovo’s traitor as the genocidaires themselves (similarity 0.80)
• Kosovo mythology transforms religious identity into a racialist ideology (similarity 0.80)
• The Kosovo myth of ancient Serb-Muslim enmity is a recent nineteenth-century construction (similarity 0.80)
• Kosovo’s mythic centrality was imposed by nationalists, not present in the folk canon (similarity 0.80)
• The anti-Muslim genocide reused the Christ-killer myth once aimed at Jews (similarity 0.79)
• The ‘ancient animosities’ narrative obscures that Bosnians had five centuries of interreligious coexistence. (similarity 0.78)