As Distorted by All

One of the greatest obstacles in life could be a situation when you decide to study a subject only to discover, later on, that you really aren’t so in love with it. Especially if this happens not due to the subject itself but due to the people that are representing it. It happened to me, unfortunately, you guessed right. I wanted to study English, but I applied to study my own language and world history. Included were - the history exploring the dawn of humanity and Stone Age until present day and sadly, the history of my area as well. The main reason why I used an adverb sadly in the previous sentence are the active, living historians in this region with my full respect to others, rare exceptions. Thanks to the ominous pseudo-scientific climate caused by the war in ex-Yugoslavia history as a science ceased to exist here. What occurred suddenly in the fresh years after the disaster were the new inventions of the past. Moved by the last war - history professors tried to invent whole new histories from scratch.

However, during a certain time, despite some awful history professors I was unfortunate enough to listen to at university, I have developed a strange sense and compassion for the subject. It’s a feeling actually. Whenever the word 'romanticism' is used in describing the methodology of a piece of historical research, that means it is the worst possible historical presentation. It means glorifying the role and the achievements of a particular nation or ethnic group, usually at the expense of others and at the cost of the real truth. I still romantically believe that it is possible to reveal the real truth, or at least up to 99% of it. 'Why not the whole 100%?', someone might ask? Because I recall a Polish saying that goes for something like this: Anyone who claims to be right 100% in any issue that may arise between people, that same person is regarded as a despicable fool. So, 1% looks like a completely acceptable bargain to me.

However, what does it mean when I say that I also prefer romanticism in history as well? It means one passage from the Chazlaw Milsoh's poem Child of Europe:

He who invokes history is always secure.
The dead will not rise to witness against him.

You can accuse them of any deeds you like.
Their reply will always be silence.

The poem is absolutely right here, but there is an exception. We could all say whatever we want about people of old times, and our opinions are allowed great loose and imperfection – be it for the excuse for scarcity of valid historic sources, or because we are blatant nationalist, or because we are blessed with some crumbs of the Gibbon’s magic in describing the events.

It means to deal with history as the larger majority of living historians are doing here, in the whole area of ex-Yugoslavia. Conclusion is that there are more and less acceptable ways to be romantic in the realm of historic science.

On the other hand, when we talk about the more recent history it is getting harder and harder to be so inventive. It is getting harder to hide. Proves for that are Guantanamo, Iraq and not so recent wars in Ex-Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

For example, let’s take a look at the French resistance movement opposing Nazis during the World War II. The French Resistance movement and its role in fighting Nazis have been blown up to the immeasurable proportions thanks to various methods of distorting the truth. Its real role and merits could be in comparison to the role of a bigger village in Bosnia or a little bigger city here at that time because during the World War II people of Bosnia and of all ex-Yugoslavia had sacrificed so much in order to stop five or more major German offensive attacks. Hundreds of thousands of lives were sacrificed on this ground in order to do that and to stop the German war machine almost with their bare hands. Therefore, a sad fact is that so rarely is now being discussed about those brave people and their enormous undertakings.

Well , I am very much aware of the fact that the previous paragraph does not sound right, and it is obviously written under the heavy influence of French comics Asterix and Gaston.

Also, history, as written by too many historians here, in recent years, Croatian historians, Serbian, Bosnian - on the subject of the last war and many others that proceeded on this area - is really not a real science, it’s a nationalistic fairytale story. The truer it’s better. The bad stories nobody reads anyway.

In today’s era of Internet and media it's increasingly harder to conceal the facts and unforgiving statistics. Unfortunately, as Sarah Franco from the wonderful Café Turco blog once said – the wars in ex-Yugoslavia in the nineties happened just during the transition period when the massive use of Internet and global availability of information just started to roll. If she was right about this that leaves some hope after all. The tragically grotesque, vicious means of the Serbian propaganda during pre-war and war time, an ocean of lies observed today with a glimpse of undeniable evidences and facts – they all look like messages from another dimension, comparable to the time of meanest propaganda falsifications done by Nazis in the World War II.

Nevertheless, still, even today, people are being condemned for revealing the truth. Let’s take a look at the case of Florence Hartman, the former main spokes-lady of Hague Tribunal. Charges are being pressed against this brave and truth-loving person for her only sin of not wanting to keep silent at the sight of the undeniable evidences proving unquestionable involvement of Serbia in all the spheres of Bosnian tragedy – reminding us of the hard-to-understand indifference of the world’s most powerful political and diplomatic elite of that time and their unresponsiveness to the acts of most outrageous breakings of customs of war and to genocide, in other words – their undeniable involvement in the biggest atrocities on European soil after the World War II. Thanks to the people like the brave French lady Florence Hartman, I still have some good romanticism to spare.