AI Summary & Key Takeaways
AI InsightIdentities, sharpened beyond the point of folklore, cuisine, customs, and religious affiliation, left behind tremendous pain and destruction.
📌 3 Key Takeaways
Abstract
In the recent past, the word ‘ethnic’ ceased to mean ‘gentiles’ and came to be substituted for ‘nation’ when convenient, as in the case of group affiliations in former Yugoslavia, or ‘religion’ in the case of Bosnian Muslims, or ‘race’ in the case of Spanish or Black Americans. It has become fashionable to use the word for any and every different group identity regardless of a common past, shared by the people concerned. Forces of disintegration were at work; be it instigated by academic revisionists in search of a novel discourse, journalists in search of sensationalism and convenient clichés, politicians in search of a new popularism or, worse yet, by terrorist groups in search of power cum adventurism. Fashionable parlance declared that the nation-state was passé and history had come to an end. Yet history caught up with fashionable trends with a vengeance. The Bosnian tragedy proved once and for all that Tito's emphasis on differences in building a Yugoslavia on so-called ethnic lines was disastrous. Identities, sharpened beyond the point of folklore, cuisine, customs, and religious affiliation, left behind tremendous pain and destruction.