Horrors of War

Tudjman is the president of the Republic of Croatia. He is also an exemplary Balkan political intellectual. In the Balkans, the intelligentsia have been largely responsible for a version of nationalism that combines political with cultural-linguistic factors, which they sought to implement--by whatever means necessary. This book (foreign editions of which have existed since 1989) purports to analyze the history and politics of ethnic violence in European history from Rome to the present. That material is mostly boiler plate and window dressing. The book's real focus is on what Tudjman describes as the scapegoating, by the former Yugoslav government, of Croatia as an artificial nationality irreversibly tainted by its collaboration with Nazi Germany and the accompanying massacres of Jews and Serbs. Tudjman insists that Croatian anti-fascism was as intense as any in Europe--a debatable point. He marshals data to show that while the crimes of the wartime Ustasha government cannot be denied, they must be contextualized. But in fact few Balkan hands were clean between 1941 and 1945. Tudjman's conclusion that insistence on remembering past grievances can only sustain a cycle of revenge has merit. His argument, however, would be more convincing had Croatia not sought to balance its perceived accounts with Serbs and Muslims with such unrestrained enthusiasm--and had Tudjman not led the pack. Morally and intellectually, this book ranks somewhere between O.J. Simpson's I Want to Tell You and Sammy Gravano's Underboss, and seems to draw inspiration from Lewis Carroll's Wonderland queen, who asserted that when she used a fact it meant only what she wanted it to mean. (July)