Every once in a while, an Afrocentric will try his seventeen paragraphs of truth on me and walk away pissed that I'm not impressed. It's not that I don't understand or that I fundamentally reject where they're coming from so much as it is that there's no consequences one way or another. What do I mean by no consequences? I mean nobody's burning down any buildings. Nobody is taking a mob from house to house looking for the right kind of scapegoat to hang in a tree and set on fire. What we get is people upset, insulted and offended. We get loudmouths full of self-righteous indignation. It's almost kind of sad. You may or may not recall that a month or so ago (and I still get everything on the Kwaku Network) somebody posted a picture of a Barnes & Noble shop window with a picture of the President surrounded by books about monkeys. It was either a hoax, or not. But I remarked that the person who took the picture and emailed it to 'us', did not have the temerity to smash the window with a brick. So how offensive is it really?
Oh. Did you get my little joke? Haha.
Now I'm going to quote something from page 166 of the book I'm reading on WW2.
In reality, Yugoslavia was an uneasy amalgam not just of Croats, Serves, and Slovenes, but also of Albanians, Bosnian Muslims, Montenegrins, Macedonians, and Turks - not to mention Czechs, Germans, Gypsies, Hungarians, Italians, Jews, Romanians, Russians, Slovaks and Ukranians.
..and then across the page
In Czechoslovakia the Germans were effectively excluded from the 1919 elections in clashes with Czecch gendarmes and troops - the so-called massacre of Kaaden of march 14, 1919 - fifty-two Germans were killed and eighty-four wounded.
Now I'm just discovering skirmishes I didn't know about Germany and Poland in the years between WW1 and WW2, but I'm struck by the number of ethnic groups in Eastern Europe that were basically behaving like tribes and not Westphalian nations. My overall impression of the period between 1900 and 1920 thus far is a broad area in Europe where the idea of a nation is not firmly established. You have royal families, socialist and communist revolutionaries, and ethnic blowhards all in the mix of instability. And so for any number of reasons, no less than the madness sustainable by an organization of 50 fanatics, all sorts of small and large pogroms came to be in Europe.
We don't often think of Montenegrins or Macedonians here in the states, and it's almost impossible to imagine, given our history curriculum, that Germans might have ever been persecuted by Poles. But those are the facts, and some many thousands died due to tribal warfare in 20th century Europe outside of the two great wars.
The opportunism to defeat modernity always presents itself.
