The quest for a Whites only homeland carved out
of the United States seems to be the “Holy Grail” of white nationalists.
Killing their way to that Whites only nation is
being tried out in the United States.
"Nearly
two decades after the war ended, Bosnia is still struggling to emerge from
the vortex of hatred that destroyed the country during the 1990s. Yet what may
be even more alarming is that outside of Bosnia, the memory of the genocide
committed against its Muslims has become a source of inspiration for the global
far right. The shooter who killed 51 people at two mosques in New Zealand this
March wrote the names of Serbian nationalist leaders on the rifle he used to
carry out the massacres. During his livestream of the attacks, he played a
jaunty song performed by Bosnian Serb soldiers during the war, nicknamed “Remove
Kebab,” that has become popular among the online “alt-right.” The Norwegian
extremist Anders Breivik, who murdered 77 people during a 2011 shooting
rampage, reportedly also showed a “strange obsession” with the genocide in Bosnia, heaping praise
on wartime Serb leaders in a manifesto he wrote before his journalists attacks.
A domestic terrorist in Pennsylvania who killed a state trooper in 2014 was
similarly infatuated with the wartime Bosnian Serb military, posing images of himself on social media in
a uniform from the notorious Drina Wolves unit. On websites like 4chan
that are helping to breed a new culture of racial hatred and glorification of
violence, it’s not hard to find the Bosnian genocide favorably discussed. These
new online connections are also helping to foster real-world links between the Western far right and its Balkan
counterparts.
In the years before the war broke out, ultranationalist
politicians obsessively raised public fears about the demographic balance of
Yugoslavia. As historian Michael Sells wrote in his history of the war,
“Birthrates became so heated an issue that Serb nationalists charged Muslims
with a premeditated plot to use their higher birthrates to overwhelm and
ultimately destroy the Christian Serbs.” That same fever dream of birth rates
and racism is now taking hold in the minds of many people outside Serbia and
Bosnia, including in the United States. The young man who murdered 22 people in
a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, left a manifesto online despairing over the
demographic growth of Hispanics in his state. His goal for the massacre was to
kill as many of them as possible. It doesn’t take much to connect the rhetoric
about a Hispanic “invasion” to violence as a response to the supposed threat.
The war and genocide in Bosnia proved that it is, in fact,
possible to incite and kill your way to an ethno-state.
The Balkans are often condescendingly stereotyped as a
backward region stuck in the grip of old prejudices. In reality, Serbs, Croats,
and Muslims had lived together as compatriots in the former Yugoslavia for a
long time before violent demagogues came to power; it took years of effort
during the late 1980s and early 1990s for ultranationalist leaders to drum up
the level of fear and hatred necessary for war to start. Before it fell apart,
the former Yugoslavia was a relatively modern place, with a highly educated
elite in its cities and a solid professional class. In some ways, politically,
the region might be ahead of us. It was decades ago that the former Yugoslavia
began to experience the top-down encouragement of racism that the United States
is now undergoing. We are only witnessing the early stages of a process that
the former Yugoslavia has already been through in its entirety. The war and
genocide in Bosnia proved that it is, in fact, possible to incite and kill your
way to an ethno-state. The eastern half of the country, where towns like
Višegrad are located, was cleansed of almost all of its non-Serb populations
and transformed into an entity known to this day as Republika Srpska.
As the United States and Western Europe now grapple with
political movements demanding ethnic purity and demographic change — through
individual acts of terrorism, as well as government policy — it feels more
urgent to take a look at the inspiration for these demands and the
consequences. To put it another way, with Bosnia as an example, what does it
actually look like when you get your ethno-state?
More At:
By
TERRIE MORGAN-BESECKER AND DAVID SINGLETON
Of
The Scranton Times-Tribune
Oct
12, 2014 | 6:37 PM
Just
who is Eric Frein? We know he is accused of fatally shooting a Pennsylvania
state trooper and wounding another in an ambush outside the Blooming Grove
barracks on Sept. 12. But did anyone really know Frein?
Eric
Matthew Frein's infatuation with the Serbian military is evident in the uniforms
he wears in photographs splashed across the Internet.
If
the clothes make the man, they may also reveal a more sinister side of the
accused cop killer's psyche.
Several
photos show Frein wearing a patch of the Drina Wolves, a notorious unit within
the Serbian Army that took part in the 1995 massacre of more than 7,500 men and
boys in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica
More
At:
