what difference does it make anyway?
here’s something we read last night:<blockquote>The war in the Balkans is the product of that ‘us’, of that huge, 20 million-bodied mass swinging back and forth in waves, then following their leaders into mass hysteria. Individuals who were against the war, who saw it coming, where could they turn? To what organization or institution? There was no organised political alternative. The individual citizen had no chance to voice his protest or his opinion, not even his fear. He could only leave the country–and so people did…As a consequence of this ‘us’, no civic society developed. The little there was, in the form of small, isolated and marginalised groups, was soon swallowed up by the national homogenisation that did not permit any differences, any individualism. As under communism, individualism was punished–individuals speaking out against war, or against nationalism, were singled out as ‘traitors’.</blockquote>Slavenka Drakulic in Cafe Europa, 1996