Professor Maher is the king of the anecdote. He’s always able to back up his facts with a story, whether it’s his own personal experience or the experiences of others whom he considers credible sources. The anecdotes make the facts come alive, and he has no reason to lie or to make things up. He’s not a “paid propagandist”. His motives are to discover and share the truth. It’s called integrity.
It’s almost impossible to imagine that Croats and Serbs ever lived together “peacefully” and that they shared common experiences. As to your point about “bias”, I feel that once the essence of an “opinion” is shown to be “fact”, it’s no longer “biased”. There are, believe it or not, Serbs and Croats who are able to look at the history of their people honestly and to provide a truthful description of their history. There are Croats who have testified to the crimes their own bretheren have committed who actually lived to tell about it. And with Serbs, you have to always keep in mind where they are coming from “politically” and “ideologically” when they are giving you their analysis of things. For example, a pro-Tito Serb will often paint a whole different picture than a chetnik Serb will.
Serbs, for a long time, believed that the “truth” would prevail as events unfolded in the Balkans at the beginning of the 1990s. One day it will.
Good point. No one people in the World such as Croats have just one opinion, Tito’s partizans and Ustasha have the samepicures of the Serbs, they (Serbs) must be destroyed,Croats don’t care, Communist Tudjman or Fascist Pavelic, killing Serbs is duty for all Croats.
I used to think there would be a more objective analysis of the whole 1990s mess in the Balkans about 20 years after it ended. Now, I think it will take much longer.
Why? The further entrenchment of the idea that questioning the current biased, inaccurate and overblown view is tantamount to being a Holocaust denier. Based on these (usually unstated) absurd equations: Serbs=Nazis and Srebrenica=Auschwitz.
It was a bloody three-way civil war, but for some reason we must recast it as a mini-WWII. Serbs play the part of the Nazis, Croats play the part of the Brits and "Free French," and the Muslims play the part of the Jews.
I used to think of it being recast as a cowboy movie by the media: Croats in white hats, Serbs in black hats, Muslims as school marms tied to the railroad track. But when you think of the language and imagery used by the media, it's really portrayed more as a mini-WWII.