Posted on 05/07/2008 10:22:37 AM PDT by Bokababe
There`s a list of mediavel and contemporary documents of researches in ethnology, archaeology, history, linguistics, genealogy, genetics...of mostley what we call today “western Balkans”. Some of those I studied before like mediavel famous DAI - “De Administrando Imperio”
by Emperor of Byzant Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus
(chronicle of the events from 7th to 10th cen.) or some of Karoling`s Annals, and some quotes from contemporary sientists are very interesting also:
Albanians in Kosova:
Western historians prove that the ancestors of today’s Albanian population achieved majority status by ETHNICALLY CLEANSING the Serb population in the 16th and 17th centuries...
http://www.geocities.com/aia_skenderbeg/turkish_era.html
and especially this quote:
“For instance, the ethnogenesis of the Albanians was an open question among Albanian scholars in the 1950s, but when Enver Hoxha declared that their origin was Illyrian (without denying their Pelasgian roots), no one dared participate in any further discussion of the question. During the Communist era, literary and artistic activity as well as academic studies (especially historic and linguistic studies) all adhered to this pattern. By this means a virtual world was created in which Albanians lived within the propaganda framework of the part and of the literary, artistic and academic works, which pervaded schools, libraries, cinemas, theaters and exhibitions.
...
…the old myths of national romanticism like that of Skenderbeg and ‘the religion of the Albanians is Albanianism’ remain the dominant mythologies in Albanian cultural and political life today.
Fatos Lubonja
Between the Glory of a Virtual World & the Misery of a Real World”
also :
John Wilkes
The Peoples of Europe: The Illyrians
1992 Blackwell Publishers
Researches like those should resolve issues in questions of myth and reality, bringing evidences in history, archaeology, anthropology and other fields in humanistic sciencies and to try to clear already big mess in Balkans and not to be used in everyday cheap political fightings. Just a tip for those funny people who “do not lack knowledge of the Balkans or its history”.
I will need to read more about those studies. My initial reaction is scepticism because the numbers are so much lower than all of the other estimates. However, I will admit that (from the little bit of reading I was able to do in the last hour or so) it does appear that three of the more detailed statistical studies all came to similar results. That said, I put a lot of faith in the Simon Wisenthal Center and find it hard to believe that the estimates of the dead could have been so far off for so long. There also were some legitimate sounding criticisms of these studies methedologies - in that they may have used too low of a birthrate for rural Serbs. Anyway, thanks for the information - I actually handn’t been aware that there was such a dispute over the numbers untill you started posting to me today.
It was the ridiculous inflation of the dead numbers of Serbs that led Tudjman, a man in charge of the military museum, to turn away from the regime in the first place.
dschapin,
Yugoslav death numbers, IIRC, were originally inflated by Tito to collect more reparations $ from Germany. They didn’t accept them and a new lower number was submitted including ALL death.
But if one person says “2 million” it stays that way if it’s repeated time and time again until a researcher actually looks into it.
Interesting point about “Action-Directe”
As far as I know “Action-Directe” was one of the few Euro-terrorist outfits that never attacked Americans. On the other hand, while Greek Nov. 17, like all the Euro-terrorists of the era, mostly attacked their own countrymen, Nov 17 was almost unique in the intensity of its focus on American targets.
More interesting vis the Greeks is that while all the Euro-terrorists were financed/directed by Warsaw Pact intelligence agencies, and promptly died off when their backers disappeared, the Greek terrorists persisted independently. This, it is speculated, though there is circumstantial evidence for it, is because they had the allegiance and protection of elements of the Greek government.
There seems to be an offshoot that is still active. Almost twenty years after the end of the Cold War anti-American Communist Greeks were shooting rockets at the US embassy last year.
Very interesting material re Skanderbeg, but it is very much beside the point.
Your argument is similar to denying that Richard Lionheart was King of England by (truthfully) claiming his ancestry and culture were predominantly French.
But he was in fact King of England, and led the English kingdom and its armies.
And Skanderbeg was an Albanian chieftain (or a chief of Albanians, as you like) and led Albanian tribes in resisting the Turks and Moslems. The point here is that Albanians also resisted the Turks, and they were, like the Serbs, also defeated. There is no reasonable argument that can be made about the uniqueness of Serbian resistance, or the purity of the issues because even the Serbs submitted, in craven terms on occasion, as in when they assisted their enemies in defeating an army of Christian liberation. Complex situation and motivations ? Definitely.
This is also an illustration of the misuse of history, which is commonplace on the left, not the right, and that is because they have no respect for it. The proper appreciation of history does not lie in pushing isolated facts, but in developing perspective. Please do not fall into this trap.
The usual leftist perversion of history works like this, by analogy - Say a naturalist undertakes to write a book describing a certain forest, which book is to serve as a general guide. Now, this particular naturalist is obsessed with bear droppings, and considers them the most important - no - the only relevant facts, even independent of the bears themselves. So, using all his skill and great effort, he writes a book recording in detail all the bear droppings he can find in the forest, and calls his book “A Description of the Forest”.
If you want an example of this, I recommend the despicable Howard Zinn’s atrocious “A Peoples History of the United States”. Do not be like Howard Zinn.
“Actually, from 1974 on to Milosevic’s rise to power, Kosovo province had a good amount of political autonomy. Why else was it called a “Autonomous Province”? And the provincial administration was, I believe, mostly Albanian.”
Indeed, and then Miloslevic took their autonomy away, prompting a nationalist movement. Who started this problem ? Do the Albanians there not have an excellent case for independence ?
“Albanians in Kosova:
Western historians prove that the ancestors of today’s Albanian population achieved majority status by ETHNICALLY CLEANSING the Serb population in the 16th and 17th centuries...”
Indeed, therefore the Albanians have been the majority in Kosovo for 400 years or so. From where any reasonable person would stand, such a situation should be an accepted fact, not a cause for present outrage.
It is not beside the point! The mediavel territory of (modern) Albania was also populated by Slavs and Greeks. The Albanians didn`t chose to resist as much as they could, by accepting islam in great numbers - similar as Christians both Serbs and Croat in mediavel Bosnia, creating what we know today as Bosniak muslims. One of the main reason that both territory of Albania (not state but territory with very mixed population of natives, Slavs and Greeks with those who came during turkish ocupation of Balkans) and Bosnia (kingdom) didn`t have as developed religion in form, structure and presence in every level of society that could form strong traditional, national and cultural identity of their people, that later could provide constant resistence under the great pressure of foreign aggression - Turks. In Bosnia there was what some historians today describe as heretic churche - for that statement I do not have enough proof, but it was certainly unique church under the influence both from Byzant and Rome on substratum of old slavic customs and beliefs. The Orthodox church (in mediavel times also state ideology) in Greece and Serbia was base for preserving cultural and national consciousness of their people and giving hope for later renovation of state. Serbian church was of greatest support for people during turkish ocupation, what Turks were aware of and there for happened brutal atempt to stop future resistance - in 1594. turkish Sinan-pasha (Albanian) burned holy relies of Saint Sava (first archbishop of serbian orthodox church and later person of greatest influence in serbian cultural tradition) in Belgrade.
“...
The region of Kosovo and Metohija has been settled since the early Middle Ages by a homogeneous Serb population. The first Serbian states of the 10th and 11th centuries leaned toward Kosovo. Under Byzantine rule, right up to its final incorporation into the Serbian Nemanjic state in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, Kosovo was, ethnically speaking, a Serbian land when political integration began. This is borne out by historical documents (the charters of Serbian rulers), particularly by a study of the anthronyms (first names) they contain, and the original toponyms (place names) - for in Kosovo and Metohija these are all mainly of Slav origin. Nomadic groups of Albanian shepherds, mostly of the Roman Catholic faith, made up a negligible 2 percent of the overall population and were concentrated in the mountainous west, around what is today the Yugoslav-Albanian border. There were also a few Albanian craftsmen, miners, and merchants in the towns.
It was the ethnic homogeneity of this densely populated medieval territory that led to its rapidly becoming the state, political, economic, and cultural center of the Serbian nation. The Serbian Orthodox Church, the national religious organization since the birth of the state in 1219, played its part in maintaining Kosovo as a Serbian territory. The leading monasteries founded by the Nemanjic dynasty (Gracanica, The Virgin of Ljeviska, Banjska, Decani, and The Archangels) with their icon paintings showing the sovereignty of the state and continuity of Serbian rule, relics of canonized rulers, and its Great Church (the Pec Patriarchate) - whose relics of canonized leaders of the national Church, together with many other monasteries and a dense network of small parish churches all over Kosovo and neighboring regions, represent the basis on which the Serbs formed and consolidated their national consciousness and built up a national and cultural identity. These monuments, then, concentrated and deployed over one territory, are national boundary-stones. The only intact survivors of the Turkish-Albanian Muslim devastation of these parts, they are still active centers of Serbian spiritual and national consciousness. Serbia’s architectural and art monuments in Kosovo rank among the finest achievements of medieval Europe, while the literary creations from this region represent the very foundations of the Serbian written word, which helped form a national consciousness during this period. It was rightly said (in the Serbian Memorandum to the ambassadors of the European Powers in London in 1913) that this territory is a kind of “Holy Land” for the Serbian people’for it was here in the Middle Ages that they attained a high degree of civilization and it is on the achievements of this period that their European identity rests.
The situation in Kosovo did not essentially change even in the course of the Turkish invasions in the last 2 decades of the 14th century - that is to say, ethnic relations were unaltered and the region retained its Serbian character. Unlike Albania, where Djordje Kastriot Skanderbeg, relying on the Albanian people, tried to unite the Albanian feudal landowners to resist the Turks in the mid-15th century, Kosovo remained Serbian, sharing the political fate of the other Serbian regions in the despotic domains of the Lazarevic and Brankovic families. The areas in which there existed a Serbo-Albanian ethnic symbiosis at that time lay far to the west of Kosovo, in lower Zeta, the Skadar Plain, and the northern Albanian mountains. Anthroponymic study of original Turkish defteri (censuses) in the 15th century shows that the line of the present-day state border between Yugoslavia and Albania, in its northern sector, chiefly coincides with today’s ethnic boundary between the Serbs and Albanians.
...
The Turkish invasions set in motion great ethnic masses in the Balkans and caused upheavals with lasting, frequently tragic results. Yet, where Kosovo is involved, the first Serbian migrations in the 15th century did not affect this region to any great degree, nor did they bring the Albanian shepherds down from the Prokletije Mountains. In the 16th century official Turkish records put Christians in a continuing absolute majority over Muslims (Turks and converted Albanians). Together with the other Christian peoples, who still survived as small groups of town-dwellers and shepherds (Orthodox Greeks and Vlachs and Roman Catholic Arbanasi/Albanians), the Serbs made up 97 percent of the total population.
Consequently, the territory of Old Serbia (the historical name for the region of Kosovo, Metohija, and neighboring areas) existed as a Serbian land in the 15th and 16th centuries. The restored Pec Patriarchate (1557) not only played an enormous part in linking up the Serbs scattered over the Balkans and even the Pannonian Plain, it was also instrumental in organizing Serbian resistance and the struggle against the Turks, especially in Kosovo. By the end of the 17th century this region had reopened its former religious centers, and Serbian power to resist grew apace. The Serbs were in a desperate position under the Turks. The effect of Turkish government and forced conversions to Islam, as Ivo Andric wrote in his doctoral thesis, was “absolutely negative.” All historical sources support him. Ottoman rule reposed on the law of discrimination and the absolute authority of Islam, with legal permission to commit acts of individual or mass violence up to total annihilation of people or whole areas.
...”
The Kosovo Question -
Past and Present
http://www.srpska-mreza.com/bookstore/kosovo/kosovo12.htm
“...
The fall of Serbian countries under the Turkish captivity brought to the Serbian people and their church the hardest days in the history. The conqueror wanted to destroy, with the hard blow, the national consciousness of their own strength and to present himself as the limitless master over the nonMuslim subjects (the subjugated people). The time of great plunder, the leading away of many slaves, the destruction of the churches and monasteries, arose. Such state provoked constant motion of the population, the migrations. And just on account of being acquainted with that and of knowing of the hard living of the Serbian people under the Turks, fearing for their own state and people, Hungarian kings and Austrian tsars were luring Serbs to go to their state and to, towards the Turkish border, form the military border as the alive wall towards the Turks. The settled Serbs were there the first protective zone of the Western Christian world from the Turks and Islam. When it is spoken of the bulwark of the Western Christianity (*antemurale christianitatis), then by that honorable name this suffering people should be meant in the first place, who used to leave their fire-sides in Serbia and Bosnia to avoid the evil of the Turks and they fought against them from the Christian region. The Church followed her children with maternal care and guarded them in the new settlements in the same way as at the old fire-sides which they had to leave to avoid the Turkish oppression and to be able to fight against it.
...”
A short History of Serbian Orthodox Church
http://www.svetisavaflemington.org/english.htm
“Indeed, therefore the Albanians have been the majority in Kosovo for 400 years or so.”
Ultimate idiocy! In that way you can also say that Croatians were majority in N-W part of Bosnia in region around Kozara mountain during WW2 (key word JASENOVAC). No! Both croatian fascists and Albanians used the situation of war and siding with nazists tried to make Serbienfrei territories that they got from Hitler.
“The proper appreciation of history does not lie in pushing isolated facts, but in developing perspective. Please do not fall into this trap!” Are you talking to yourself often?
Er, you made an argument in your earlier posts that the predominance of Albanians in Kosovo is recent and illegitimate.
You further stated that they became dominant (through ethnic cleansing) 400 years ago.
We may have a difference of opinion on what can be defined as “recent”; 400 years seems to be more than enough time to confer legitimacy in any reasonable sense. If you open up that can of worms, then you also permit all sorts of other historical grievances, such as for instance Muslim/Moroccan claims to parts of Spain, Chinese claims to Korea, Korean claims to parts of China, etc. ad infinitum. There has to be a statute of limitations on this sort of thing.
Historical scholarship is useful and interesting, but it is misused if it is just a way of creating a sort of legal brief.
I do in fact talk to myself a great deal, as the conversation is of such high quality of course.
What is the “ultimate idiocy” ? Holding nationalistic grudges for hundreds of years ? Making the children pay for the sins of their fathers, grandfathers, and distant ancestors ? Holding on to hopeless claims that are of no value and will benefit nobody ?
Forgive, and seek progress and prosperity in new endeavors, not in nostalgia and backwards obsessions. That is the wiser course for anybody.
As far as I can tell, Albanian domination of Kosovo pre-dated WWII. Whatever the misbehavior of the Albanians of that age, this does not seem a reasonable justification to deny them independence 60 years later. Even the Germans and Japanese were forgiven.
Most European nations that did “collaborate” with the Nazis at one point or another. The only question is the degree.
If the majority in that region (Kosovo) was Albanian for centuries, why don’t they have the right, according to principles of self-determination, to demand separation and independence ?
so we will turn over a substantial portion of the US to illegals from the south? that is the equivalent to your suggestion in Serbia...apples and apples...defend your position...
Oh, is that why they ethnically cleansed all the Jews from the province? Albanians are a bunch of mediaeval heathens, and they'll be falling over themselves kissing your arse -- but you'd better grow a pair of eyes on your back.
Comment - Kosovo looks like an American success and there is no Caliphate there.
Sure, if by America you mean the worst ghetto in Flint, MI. Kosovo's unemployment is at around 70% and not even the basic services exist (garbage collection, for example). The prices have gone up 50% over the last 2 months (i.e. since the illegal, unilateral separation from Serbia).
Good question -
Answers and related points -
- I am against illegal immigration. Of course we should do something about that.
- Even if there were a full stop to illegal immigration we would still have nearly all the situation you worry about, due to established demographic trends in the US SouthWest.
- The difference between the US and Serbia/Kosovo is the nature of American citizenship and identity, and to a great degree also the nature of Mexican identity. Europe is full of tribal nations, the Serbs and Albanians are definitely in that category. American identity is not this tribal thing. Unless things are carried on very badly these people of Mexican origin will feel more American than Mexican, like the older population is American and not whatever European tribe they came from.
Mexico is also a mixed place, which does not in fact have a strong national identity. The whole “la raza” business, which was part of Mexican nationalist propaganda in Mexico proper decades before it was ever parroted by idiots in the US, was a rather pathetic attempt to drum up Mexican nationalist feeling in Mexico. It didn’t work.
- On a more practical level, Kosovo-Albanians do not see that Serbia has much to offer them in terms of economic opportunity or scope for advancement. They can credibly think they can do better for themselves.
Mexicans in America ? Precisely the opposite. The entire point of being here and not there has nothing to do with the land in itself and everything to do with being part of US society. Thats where the jobs are, thats where the livelihood is. Reuniting with Mexico is stupid, Mexico is the pit they escaped, the last thing they want is to return to the pit.
There are idiots (there are always idiots) who claim otherwise. But this is not exactly a widespread idea. The Mexican-American consensus is that it is an idiotic idea.
- Unlike the Serbians, America has the ability to assimilate these people, because it is a society designed for assimilation. Albanians can’t become Serbs, not least because the Serbs won’t let them. But America can and has let Mexicans become Americans. We need to get rid of any barrier in the way of that. Among them is any remaining bit of tribalism that keeps Mexicans from fully assimilating, and any bit of “multicultural” nonsense from the other end.
“Sure, if by America you mean the worst ghetto in Flint, MI. “
The worst ghetto in Flint, MI is better off materially than 90% of the rest of the world, as we both know. Being from the third world myself it takes some pretty shocking conditions to put me off, I don’t know about you.
It seems to me that neither of us is in a good position to comment on the Kosovo economy. Why don’t we wait for a while and see what transpires ?
Regards
Serbia was and still remains the most diversly populated region of the former Yugoslavia...your statements regarding the ‘tribal’ Serbs are not based in fact, but in your own quite obvious anti-Serb bias.
Typical nonsense that we've come to expect in support of the Jihadists and which does nothing to explain nor justify the terror campaign against the legal Serb, Roma, and Jewish residents waged by the illegal Albanian immigrants since the 1980's.
The Albanians began treating each of these groups as second-class citizens in their own country, even refusing to teach college-level courses in Serbo-Croatian, the official language of Yugoslavia at the time.
All of this is being replayed today in Aztlan and Americans are being stupid beyond belief if they support the policies in Kosovo that will one day be used against the United States.
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