Thursday, May 25, 2006

 
[Whoopee -though my drivel didn't make it to the NRO Corner, the Rebecca West quote at the end did.]

I'm not alone, of course, in having long thought that there hasn't been a heckuva lotta' difference twixt the various Balkan tribes. - And in tending to look at faraway messes and think, "Aw heckwithit, just let them fight it out, or at most, help them arrive at some sort of partitioning that might not be as ghastly as forcing them to live together."
Perhaps there is some general principle - the world was more willing to accept Croatian, Bosnian, Slovenian, etc. succession than it was to even look at the claims of ethnic Serbs living outside rather artificial boundaries to in turn, secede from new statelets -in which they were a minority in order to link up with the Serb republic. And the many of the Micks, of course, as well as much of the world, had little sympathy for the Rottenprots of Northern Ireland who wished to stay separated from the Irish republic.
I didn't get very far several years ago into a library copy of Rebecca West's biggie, "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon", but Professor Google kindly retrieved one of the more memorable and oft-quoted passages:

"English persons, therefore, of humanitarian and reformist disposition constantly went out to the Balkan Peninsula to see who was in fact ill-treating whom, and, being by the very nature of their perfectionist faith unable to accept the horrid hypothesis that everybody was ill-treating everybody else, all came back with a pet Balkan people established in their hearts as suffering and innocent, eternally the massacree and never the massacrer.

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, 1943"