Alić: On the Production of Guilt in the Collective Consciousness of Bosniaks

By: Academician Sead Alić

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The global map is being reshuffled. Major players are entering the game with carefully and long-prepared arguments of armament. They are convincing onlookers that they will be left with nothing if they do not join. The game is promising because, at least for now, it is planned to be played at tables that will be burned as unnecessary evidence once the border games are over. Times of decision are coming.

Who will be on the 'right side of history'? Of course, no one will, because no war has brought happiness or solutions. World War III has probably already begun. It was preceded by media skirmishes between global producers of ideologically colored information. News has long ceased to be news. True journalists are condemned to death in advance. The 'luckier' ones die from lack of timely medical care. The unluckier ones end up with a bullet in the head or a dismembered body.

The public no longer exists because what remains is merely a media surrogate of the public. Reason has lost the war against 'rational arguments.' Everyone cultivates their own 'rational' truth in the paradise garden of their own media. A terrible era is coming in which everyone is right. Leaders of the world's most powerful nations always ensure they have religious leaders by their side. Sanctity always comes in handy as justification. Killing is godless barbarism if you don't have God's representatives on Earth on your side. Killing as it was done in Bosnia. Loading the bodies of the innocent with excavators as was done in Srebrenica or Jasenovac. Throwing them into deep pits, burying, exhuming, and hiding corpses in mass graves (not to list countless painful places and cruel ways of killing others) – only a false believer, a deceived religious person, a person who uses God as justification for their godless, inhuman behavior can do that.

The world is polarizing into two blocs. Global powers are not talking. They are just checking how loyal you are to them. Powers prefer playing away games. If a country must be burned, let it be someone else's country. Ukraine is thus fighting for its right to independently side with one empire or the other. In the process, it will sacrifice its people. Economically, it will regress by decades.

To be a destroyed and burned country. Ukrainians, like Native Americans, will be able to proudly say that they disappeared so that a great American nation could develop. So that one military power could reach the borders of another...

Countries with multiple nationalities are ideal for war zones. There is a greater possibility that a democratically elected little dictator will invite some world dictator to burn down that part of the country where his own people do not live. So, if the others are not of the same faith, the space for new holy killings is open. By killing people, the land beneath the feet of the killed is freed. The freed land seeks a new owner. Who will trample upon it. Part by part, Ukraine is joining the new All-Russian Union of All-Renewing Russia. Part of Bosnia and Herzegovina from which non-Serbs were expelled, emigrated, or killed – dreams of unification with Serbia.

At least, that is what the paradise gardens of All Free Serbian Reporters say. And their political executors. Europeans civilized Native American aborigines by sending them to the Happy Hunting Grounds for re-education. Land without people belongs to those who killed the people on that land. Posavina therefore does not belong to the killed and displaced Muslims/Bosniaks and Croats.

It belongs to the owners of the votes of those who supported or carried out the extermination. Hitler adored calls for help. Three million Germans in the Sudetenland were the reason for the Munich Agreement, signed on September 29, 1938, by Germany, Great Britain, France, and Italy. It seemed that Hitler's appetites were satisfied...

The People's Republic of Donetsk and the People's Republic of Luhansk 'asked for help' from Putin in defense against Ukrainian armed forces. Help, of course, arrived. Russia expanded – by providing help to its brothers in language and faith. It is illusory to think that Putin's appetites could be satisfied there. Putin is now waiting for new calls for help to reunite Orthodoxy on the sacred soil of the former USSR. More precisely, to mask the passion of armed response to the West with a politicized part of Orthodoxy.

The situation generally resembles Europe in the 1930s. Hitler sought 'living space' for his 'humiliated' Germany and the unification of Germans. The excuse was the unjust division of colonies and the unjust peace after World War I. Putin is not far behind. He is troubled by Russians and Russian land that were 'gifted' to independent states after the collapse of the USSR. He invokes the promise of non-expansion to the East that the West made and did not keep. He invokes the imperialist practice of the USA to break up and colonize states, mainly in Africa and the Middle East, by 'introducing democracy.' The expansion of NATO to the East must stop somewhere...

The question historians will grapple with will be: Did Putin have other options available, or was the invasion of Ukraine the only possible response? Even if there were provocations, and even if (and they certainly did) American services provoked the conflict – the question is whether war was the only response. Russia has irreversibly blunted the edge of its criticism of the West.

Be that as it may, few people today think about the arguments and the correctness of starting a war. Alliances are being formed that could soon take on the character of war alliances.

For Bosnia and Herzegovina, the paradox is indicative: While the world is dividing into war camps, Bosnia and Herzegovina is still being presented with conditions it must meet to join the West. As if the danger of calls for help to 'brother Russians' from the nation that produced the most terrible executors of the reduction of Muslims to the smallest possible number during the aggression against Bosnia and Herzegovina is not seen. As if it is not seen that Bosnia and Herzegovina is a possible next testing ground where world dictators will defend their states on someone else's territory. Which will be burned...

The High Representative is aware that he is asking for the impossible. Feudal lords will not leave their fiefdoms as long as they have even one serf to defend them. If two out of three feudal lords do not see the future of Bosnia and Herzegovina in a common state, then the impossible mission is impossible to such an extent that insisting on an agreement bears the mark of consenting to the breakup.

The date is also being set for the official start of the completion of wartime territorial conquests of Bosnia and Herzegovina, i.e., when the legal framework for returning civic Muslims to tribal and religious communities (suitable for confinement in reservations) will begin to be created.

Key pressures on Bosnian Muslims have been and are being carried out through the production of guilt in the collective consciousness of Bosniaks: They are guilty because they opted for a non-European faith (as if the other two originated in Europe); they are guilty for not emigrating in time (although they were enthusiastically helped to do so); they are guilty for inventing a new nation (as if the other two were not also artificially introduced into the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina); they are guilty for resisting Serbian and Serb aggression, and, in the formulation of The Hague, the Joint Criminal Enterprise in the territory of the self-proclaimed and 'cleansed' Herceg-Bosna (as if Bosniaks formulated The Hague's conclusions); they are guilty because, even after all the torture, killings, and expulsions – there are still so many of them that they prevent democratic organization in Bosnia and Herzegovina (because democracy is presumably only possible in ethnically homogeneous states); they are guilty if they speak out and object to secessionist announcements and the rhetoric of legally realizing goals that could not be achieved through wartime horrors (because this is immediately declared a threat of confrontation with secessionists); they are guilty for even considering defense in case of the seizure/secession of those parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina where most of the mass graves of Muslims are located (because any consideration of the danger of new genocides is presumably simultaneously an invocation of such genocides).

With such produced guilt and pressures, it becomes clear to Bosniaks that fulfilling the preconditions for starting negotiations is merely a sentence to extermination in the form of legally camouflaged formulations in which this extermination is, of course, not mentioned. Europe, it seems, has no problem sacrificing a few million people for the economy to function, for those who have to have more, and for Bosnia and Herzegovina to cease to be a living example of a possible, better, multicultural, multinational, neighborly, and good-neighborly – Europe before Europe.

However, man proposes... and there are too many cards in play.