As the “Monster Trip”, which started in February, 2025 continues, we’ve moved on to the Balkans. As a former history teacher, I know how vital this area has been in determining when the world goes to war. Otto von Bismarck once said something like “If there ever is a world war it will be because of some fool in the Balkans.”
Bismarck was, of course, quite prophetic as Gavrilo Princip, the Serbian nationalist, delivered on that prophecy by killing Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and thereby lighting a match to the tinderbox that exploded into the Great War.
Visiting Sarajevo sort of required me to walk to the spot where the assassination happened. It’s well-marked and a museum sits on the corner where it all went down. Princip’s footprints where he stood have been preserved in the sidewalk. Photos of the chaos fill the outside walls of the museum.
I didn’t go into the museum, because when I get jonesing for some history, my wife frowns on multiple museums in one day. I already knew where I wanted to go…check that…where I knew I HAD to go.
A few blocks away is the the Museum of Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide. It covers the atrocities committed after the fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent break-up of Yugoslavia. That artificial country, created by the geniuses at Versailles following World War I, was only held together because they had a strongman leader who forced the many ethnic and religious groups, who pretty much despised each other, to coexist.
With the death of that strongman in 1980 there was no one to keep things together once the Soviets were out of the game. All hell broke loose, and between 1992 and 1995, some of the most horrific moments in human history played out all across the Balkans. Apparently World Wars I and II didn’t put an end to the supply of damn fools down there.
I knew going into the museum would be especially difficult for my wife. She is easily the most compassionate woman I have ever known, and cannot understand how such atrocities are even possible. It was a risk dragging her in there, though her natural curiosity wasn’t going to let her stay behind.
The museum is a collection of stories and artifacts of the massacre of thousands, mostly Bosnian Muslims, by forces acting with the support and guidance of the “Christian” Serbs. The numbers are staggering. The term “ethnic cleansing” was coined during this crisis as I recall. The order to kill ALL Muslim men and to repeatedly and relentlessly rape Muslim women hoping to impregnate them so as to corrupt the blood of Bosnian Muslims came from the top of the Serbian command.
(At this point many of you are probably asking yourself: Wait. What? How did I not know about this? The answer of course lies in who the victims of the atrocities were. We just don’t do a very good job in the western world in teaching about the massacre of certain groups it seems.)
Mind you, the Serbians used this term NOT as some condemnation of the atrocities, but rather as a goal well-worth pursuing. They thought the world would be better with less Bosnian Muslims. Most of the leadership and many of those who carried it out were later arrested, tried, and convicted by the International Criminal Court in one of the greatest examples of international cooperation and jurisprudence in history..
(Had the term “ethnic cleansing” existed in the 1800’s, certain parties in the American government would surely have been proudly using it to describe the Native American genocide in this country. Instead, we opted for Manifest Destiny, which worked better I suppose because it put God on the side of the white man).
So this essay was just a little history lesson for you? Hell to the no!
I don’t travel anywhere without thinking about how the history I encounter relates to what is happening in the United States today. So many of us are as tied up in knots over the way the trump administration is undoing our Constitution in the same way my wife is honestly and sincerely unable to understand how humans can be so cruel to each other. (though the evidence of that cruelty has stained ALL of human history at one point or another.)
Now I am not suggesting that the trump master plan is to commit a Bosnian level genocide. I am, however, suggesting that the very same tools used by the Serbs to motivate their people to commit such atrocities are being used every day in the United States against “the other.”
It was very clear to me walking through the Museum of Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide that the answer to my wife’s quandry isn’t that hard to explain. Dehumanize “the other.” Convince people that “the other” is a threat. Mistreat “the other” and claim that they deserved such mistreatment. Ignore the law because it stands in the way of your mission. Dehumanize, dehumanize, dehumanize. And then suddenly the crowds cheer as babies are taken from their mothers’ arms while the mother is deported. The masses are whipped up into enthusiasm by unidentified masked men in black cars violating our laws to separate families and disrupt the contributions of immigrants. The crowds go wild when a person is exiled in violation of our Constitution because, my God, that sub-human has no rights! The hysteria crescendos when congressmen and mayors are beaten by the police for standing up for “the other.”
As we were leaving the museum, I was literally having trouble breathing. The things I saw and read had driven me into a very deep hole. I walked up to the man at the ticket counter to thank him and to say good-bye. I could hear my wife quietly fighting back sobs behind me. I tried to speak. Tears filled my eyes. My throat tightened. “How can you get past this?” I asked. He looked at me with the most woeful eyes you can imagine. “What’s to be done? We must move on.” Even if I had a response to that I would not have been able to deliver it without a full meltdown. So we quietly thanked him, wiped our eyes, and walked down the steps to the streets of Sarajevo.
Atrocities don’t happen on day one of a genocide…there are years of dehumanization that come first. It’s incremental and the escalation might not even be noticeable as you’re living through it. One day you’re making fun of an immigrant’s plight on social media…the next month you’re agreeing that immigrants are the root of all American problems…the next month you no longer divert your eyes watching children in cages…
If you think I’m exaggerating the lessons we could learn in this country about the creation and treatment of “the other”, I dare you to spend an hour reading stories from this period in Bosnian history. Here are some links. You can find many more.
https://sfi.usc.edu/collections/bosnia-herzegovina
https://srebrenica.org.uk/category/survivor-stories
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93kkqe8gy5o
I dare you to really dig into what happened there and how it progressed from dehumanizing “the other” into a full blown genocide.
I dare you read the stories and look at the pictures and then deny that it could happen here…I fucking dare you.
The Grumblings 
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