Since the period of the Enlightenment, well-intentioned educators have supported the belief that peoples would only have to get to know each other better in order to feel sympathy or at least respect for each other, while the hatred that they occasionally allow someone to incite in them originates from ignorance, that is, from something that is not at all it doesn't exist, out of nothing.
It is an opinion worthy of respect, even noble, and those who represent it must be the most valuable and noble people. But didn't Bosnian Serbs, Croats and Muslims know each other?
They lived in the same villages and towns for centuries, built them together, constantly exchanged with each other, not only goods, but also understandings, life attitudes, insights; in addition, countless families were created regardless of ethnic and religious barriers, which in fact ceased to be, and brought children into the world who, even according to the criteria of blood cell counters, carry in themselves not only the heritage of one community, but several. , even of all nationalities of the region!
The Germanic Odilo, preparing for the genocide of the Slavs, tries to exterminate his Slavic ancestor, Globocnik, at the same time.
And do Irish Catholics really know nothing about Irish Protestants? Are Albanians, who call the country they live in Kosova, and Serbs, who call it Kosovo, really strangers to each other? Did the Romanians and Hungarians of Transylvania, before attacking each other with sticks, really hold their neighbor as a foreign bloodsucker who occupied their country due to an international conspiracy? Is their hatred born of ignorance?
It is not at all directed against the unknown - a foreigner who would be particularly different from them in morals and customs, in religious rituals and daily habits. No, that hatred is not directed against someone far away, but towards someone close to you, towards a neighbor, towards someone you know well.
It could even be said that it is directed against the one who is so close that he could be like one of us, if it was even a little bit missing to become so; a small biographical coincidence, a small but consequential decision from family history was enough for someone to find himself on the other side.
An Austrian war criminal, one of the organizers of the genocide in Poland and, as SS-Fuhrer in the vicinity of Trieste, responsible for the death of numerous Jews and Slovenes, his name was Odilo Globocnik.
Even the newspapers of the naist regime were not sure about his muteness and the spelling of his name, so they alternately called him Globocnik, Globotschnigg, Globotznic. As his name already shows, this Carinthian, known for his brutality and ethnic struggle, comes from a German family that also has Slavic, Slovenian roots.
Identity is both a defensive and an offensive category
He, who wanted to make the small region from which he came, as well as the whole of Europe, the domain of the Germanic master, had ancestors not only from the ethnic group whose supremacy he wanted to consolidate with all available barbaric means, but also from the other one, in whose persecution and extermination he participated in since his youth.
Karl Kraus even scoffed at the fact that the worst Slav-eaters among the German nationalists in Lower Styria are called Kokoschinegg, Stepischnegg, Jessenko, Ambrositsch, Polanetz, while, on the other hand, the national Czech gymnastics associations can boast of heroes who respond to the names Weiss, Majer, Feldmann, Mühlbauer.
The hatred that - especially in nationally mixed, ethnically inseparably intertwined regions and in ethnically homogeneous regions that cannot become ethnically cleansed - against some other national group, religion, ethnic group, is periodically incited by skillful arsonists, such hatred is at the same time self-hatred that vents on others.
The Germanic Odilo, preparing for the genocide of the Slavs, tries at the same time to exterminate his Slavic ancestor, Globocnik, to remove the deficiency in such a way that not only Germanic blood flows in him, but it, however diluted, is still contaminated by the Slavic element.
To someone who looks at things from the outside, the anger with which one ethnic group tries to separate itself from another may seem incomprehensible, even ridiculous, because they resemble each other in almost everything.
Identity is the weapon of small nations who, in their often justified fear of disappearing in a great sea of nations, cultivate the cult of differentiation and fall into the hysteria of differences.
What is it that distinguishes a Serb from a Bosniak when no one, just a few hours' drive north-west, will distinguish them, neither by language, nor by appearance, but will call them both by the derogatory name "Tschuschen"? The word that propagandists use to separate, sociologists of demarcation in Europe celebrate this cult of difference, is - identity.
Identity is both a defensive and an offensive category. Defensive because the one who refers to it always understands it as something existing that needs to be defended, something untouchable that must be protected from the touch of evil powers, anonymous cartels.
As if it was something that once came down from heaven and entered people, something that determines their most essential essence, identity is kept sacred, and if someone questions it or tries to change it, it is considered sacrilege.
That identity can never actually be a possession, but in the last case only a project, that it cannot be a clay jar in which the being of an individual or his community is secretly hidden, but only a fund of possibilities that a person or a group has to connect traditions and breakthroughs in new, to keep something and try something new - all that disappeared in the static concept of identity.
Therefore, no matter how much some people conceptualize identity defensively and others live it that way, it still turns outward offensively: just as it shows itself inward as a power of survival that guarantees stability, so it is directed outward as a force that reveals something supposedly foreign everywhere and marks it as a threat.
The assignment of identity to the outside is a limitation, because the world is no man's land for him to drive stakes into; only if it excludes, distances, closes, identity can inwardly mediate the security needed by those who, insecure, scared, disturbed by the flow of life, uncertainties of existence, changes of time, long for identity as a promise of stability.
In short, there is no such expansion, and no separation that cannot be justified by identity itself and its natural vulnerability
There are no such prohibitions in culture, there is no such national call, there is no such nationalistic folly that could not be perfectly justified by identity, because the essence of identity is that it is always threatened, that it must always be defended and that there are always countless and powerful enemies from which one must protect.
Identity can be used almost arbitrarily to protect a country from immigration, from the import of books, from the wave of libertarian ideas, because, at the end of the day, the country is in a defensive war for the threatened cultural or national identity of its people; on the other hand, the other country stands up aggressively against its neighbors because it can only protect its endangered identity, threatened by enemy conspiracies all around, through a preventive war.
In short, there is no such expansion, and no separation that cannot be justified by identity itself and its natural vulnerability. Identity is the weapon of small nations who, in their often justified fear of disappearing in a great sea of nations, cultivate a cult of differentiation and fall into the hysteria of differences - and it is also the weapon of great nations who once followed the path of Great Germany or Great Russia to bring their neighbors back home as lost brothers, as unconscious compatriots.
It is also popular with the violent rulers of poor countries who want to ensure peace for their population even when they cannot provide them with well-being - and it is equally popular with powerful people in rich countries, when there is a need to respect control at - borders. Identity, therefore, has its seasons, and the more fictitious it is, the greater its value.
(From the book European Alphabet, Durieux, Zagreb, translated by Marijan Bobinac)
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