2006-07-11

Ground control to Major Tom

I've been following the proceedings this morning outside Srebrenica, where over 500 bodies will be buried today, on the annniversary of the fall of the town to Serb forces in 1995. I couldn't help but think of this wonderful example of irresponsible gibberish, written by a pomo obfuscator named Tomislav ("Major Tom") Z. Longinovic in a thoroughly forgettable volume ("Balkan as Metaphor"):
The war crimes were committed by the nomadic clones of post-communist territoriality, regardless of ethnic and religious origin; "the serbs" [sic] were both the fiercest perpetrators and the most numerous victims of these anti-Yugoslav forces.

I'm too dumb to understand the whole piece but what I do understand I sure don't like.

9 comments:

cãorafeiro said...

It is very disturbing to observe that the belief that the serbs were the major victims is so widespread.

in fact, I have found that belief even among people of serbian nationality who do acknowledge that genocide has been commited in the name of the serbian people.

T K Vogel said...

I should probably clarify, in best Chomskyan fashion, what I meant when I said I was "observing" the proceedings in Potocari. I was talking about watching it on TV. I'm a few hundred miles to the north-west.

cãorafeiro said...

TK: yesterday I wrote a small text in my weblog about srebrenica.

a blogger then wrote a comment asking me why I did not write about croatian atrocities in Krajina.
then I visited his own blog. curiously, its name is roses of luxembourg...

Anonymous said...

Erik a gde je ovde link za Jelin "Museum of Photo"? :)

pozdrav mirko

Anonymous said...

pardon

http://maniacmuseum.blog.hr/

mirko

Eric Gordy said...

Maybe I could put in a word in defence of my friend Toma Longinovic. As I understand it, in the passage he was trying to draw attention to the ideological commonality of war criminals regardless of nationality, which is a position I do not have much of a problem with. As to how numerous the victims were, this may depend on how specifically one wants to define the word "victim" -- if the passage refers to victims of large scale murder, then it is incorrect, but perhaps it is not so wrong if it refers to victims of forced resettlement. In any case, I do not really share the position that it is wrong or tasteless in principle to mention Serbian victims. But of course, context is crucially important in this regard.

Last year I posted a little note on the release of Toma Longinovic's book on vampires and ethnic politics:

http://eastethnia.blogspot.com/2005/06/triangulating-square-around-circle.html

We are now back from our brief sojourn in Ljubljana and Istra, posts to come!

T K Vogel said...

I guess what I found most disturbing in the piece is that there's no sense that real people committed real crimes against other real people, and that the first set did so in the name of *their* people against members of what they saw as an enemy people. Just a few nods in that direction would have been enough for some, perhaps most, of the rest of the piece to be palatable, but the fact that I looked in vain for any acknowledgment that these things were for real and not just a product of the conceptual machinations of the West made me wonder.

Eric Gordy said...

Well, I understand that. It may be a bit of the literary theory bent there.

The PC said...

I have not read the piece, but the passage you quoted is too pretentios and poorly written to ever inspire me to look for the entire text.