Spent a long time talking with a New Zealand war photographer here. He’d spent years covering the Balkan wars. We talked about Kosovo, Chomsky, Christiane Amanpour, Donald Trump, the American public. He is without hope, but I have to say I find intelligent, observant, well-researched, well-spoken people so much more interesting than cruise ship passengers that hope doesn’t seem so important.
The Old Town is full of tourists, restaurants, shops, opportunities to buy tickets. That’s the fortress on the mountain above us.
From the fortress, and the Homeland War Museum
A number of AKs in the cases at the Homeland War Museum. Mine had intentionally been of Yugoslav manufacture, and parts were most probably from the same assembly lines as these. I had the same feeling I’d had at museums in Lithuania and Greece. I know how that rifle feels in my hands, I know how it feels on my shoulder, I can competently dissassemble and clean it.
The narrative presented, and how it is received, fascinates me. I spent a while talking to the male half of an American couple my age. I pointed out the museum presented Dubrovnik, and Croatia, as suffering, heroic defenders, and the exhibits are really pretty one note, with no context, no background for the war at all. He said he could tell me the reason for the war: human nature. He presented this as a sort of deep existential truth, without making any claim to be an ethnologist or anthropologist of any sort. I listened politely, he listened to me politely, but we were talking past each other, with me talking about Alexander and Tito, and his being the grander scheme of humans as a species. I am continually impressed with how frequently trite banalities have currency as wisdom, but then I am a man deficient in heart energy.
The thing is, I remember this war. This wasn’t Hitler and Roosevelt, it was Bush and Clinton and Milošević. I was reading about this war instead of watching Twin Peaks in the same way I read about Syria today instead of watching Game of Thrones. I remember the American fascination with the brave (it goes without saying) F-117 pilot shot down over „enemy territory“, but lack of any understanding or interest in understanding what was going on, or why, exactly, the US was bombing the Balkans.
