Feb

9

Robert Kaplan can write. But in Balkan Ghosts, he did not get close to understanding how deep the anger was or is against the Croats (including Tito) and the Muslims among the Serbs who survived WW II.

Srebrenica, for example, is the part of Bosnia where the local Muslims were particularly vicious to the Serb minority during the German and Italian occupation. The Bosnian Serbs saw the organized murder there as justified revenge. I don't accept that explanation or justification, but I know many otherwise reasonable people who do.

In treating the Balkan (and in particular the Serb and gypsy) memories as "ghostly," rather than fresh and raw, Kaplan failed to see how deep-seated the anger really was. He saw Milosevic as somehow provoking it when like most politicians he was merely chasing after the parade to get in front of it. It is as if Kaplan had written a book about the awfulness of Menachem Begin and bombing of the King David Hotel without mentioning the Holocaust.

One of the many reasons I adored my grandfather is that he believed people could go beyond the ideologies of history. He married a Polish Catholic, and his three children married a Ukrainian Eastern Rite Catholic, a Croat born-again Protestant, and an Alabama Methodist. He told me I should learn history but I should be wary of its lessons. That was, he said, one of the true beauties of America; people here were less interested in the past than they were in present, as a path to the future.


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