Wellsy wrote:The case of Muslims as an ethnic, not merely religious, group in Bosnia is exemplary here: during the entire history of Yugoslavia, Bosnia was the place of potential tension and dispute, the locale in which the struggle between Serbs and Croats for the dominant role was fought. The problem was that the largest group in Bosnia were neither the Orthodox Serbs nor the Catholic Croats, but Muslims whose ethnic origins were always disputed - are they Serbs or Croats.
Zizek is giving us only half the information, only the part that does not undermine his own Slovenian or Communist narrative.
First of all, the problem is that this is also identity politics, Zizek is merely setting up the Bosnian Muslims as proverbial victims("the majority that was ignored"). He does not qualify his argument, he assumes that the mere placing of the Muslim community in this context is enough for you to make up your mind. This is of course intentional, and beyond that his argument is untrue and that is where the devil lies, Zizek totally ignores that Bosnia as a whole is the creation of Yugoslav communist policies that established Bosnia and engineered those ethnic-conditions
pro-actively.
The Muslim community of Bosnia was neither the silent majority, nor the place where Serbs and Croats vied for supremacy under Yugoslavia. Instead, the Muslim minority of Bosnia was elevated by Yugoslavia to levels that no other country has ever in the history of the world we live in today, elevated a former minority, from a minority of a province to a majority of a nation, equal to other constituent Yugoslav nations and all
that from the top and not from an organic national movement. Bosnia was drawn and formed in a communist committee meeting in 1943. The Bosnian SFR was created out of a provincial rearrangement with the purpose of having more federal entities. This was done in order to create a tinderbox republic whose tenuous balance would ensure the integrity of Yugoslavia both on the micro level inside Bosnia but also on the macro level inside Yugoslavia.
When this experiment blew up in the face of its own communist creators, they, like Zizek assumed the position of the noble victims by elevating the 'Serbs' to the 'ultimate problem, answer and solution'. Blaming the Serbs is not just convenient to western people bombing Yugoslavia it is also the basin where the Yugoslavian communists wash their own hands in order to evade their responsibility for their experiments. It is convenient to a lot of people to just blame Serbia for everything that happened and ignore the realities that cultivated these divisions in the first place.
Whoever asks, just say "Serbs", that way the enormous identity experiments proactively undertaken by communist Yugoslavia and imposed from the top will not be afforded the appropriate attention.
Yugoslavia was not unique in this, Soviet Russia started this identity experimentation, redrawing maps several times according to whatever whim or policy the communist committees could cook up at the time.
The moral of the story is that identity grows out of something, not by dictat, and there is a difference between organic and artificial identity. Elevating artificial identities to the same status as real ones has always been an enormous slippery slope that communists simply dismiss as seeing all identities as social constructs. Marxism proliferated this idea and marxism is the main vehicle that this idea propagates itself.
The blurring of the line between the real and the artificial is the primary mover here. Social construct for sure but an organic social construct grown out of struggle, blood, war and reality is not the same as an artificial social construct cooked up in a communist meeting.
EN EL ED EM ON
...take your common sense with you, and leave your prejudices behind...