Comments by MaGioZal

The main culprits of India’s persistent poverty and backwardness are the caste system and the discrimination against non-Hindu Indians.

“Irish origins (which are, after all, Scandinavian if you go back far enough)”

— Irish people is traditionally descendent from the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celts of Continental Europe, and though they were de jure British citizens they weren’t treated as people of the same status of the Germanic-Protestant ones neither in Britain (remember the disenfranchisement, the famines and the rebellions) nor in America (remember the Dead Rabbit riots) up until the first half of the 20th century… and beyond.

“Sure - and if Serbs who lived in Sarajevo could today vote…”

— If Bosnian Serbs (we could call them Bosnians from traditionally Orthodox family origins, also) who lived in Sarajevo could today vote… well, it would not change the political situation of Sarajevo so much as for asking to join Republika Srpska or Serbia, whatever. And we must remember that many Bosnian Serbs remained in Sarajevo… and were treated as traitors of the Greater Serbian cause (remember Jovan Divjac and many other civillian Bosnian Serbs that were victims of RS artillery in the sniper alleys…).

“How can the Bosnian Serbs start to consider themselves as Bosniaks when the whole country refers to them as Serbs (which they are not, they are Bosnian Serbs) and the whole country does not want them, it wants their land?”

— The people of Bosnia that never wanted and still does not want to be considered Bosnian nor integrated into Bosnian society are the minority Bosnian Serbs in general and the political leadership and war veterans in particular — both profited a lot from the 90’s…

— Besides, RS children are indoctrinated from the kindergarden to believe that they are not Bosnian, that Bosnia as a country does not exist, that they are proud heroic Serbs (like that pregnant-woman killer, Gavrilo Princip…) that never did anything wrong in the Balkans and that the “Ustashe” and the “Turci” are eternal enemies that can never be trusted and, when a new opportunity comes, be expelled from Bosnian lands in the name of the eternal dream of “uniting all the Serbs under one state” — the Greater Serbia ideology of the Chetnik commander Draza Mihailovic and Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic.

“Also, Tuđman's HDZ party was mostly comprised of ex-communists.
Alija was the only one without communist party affiliation or sympathy to communism, but he was for the Islamic state.”

— Independently of any kind of “Islamic Declaration” written years before the end of Yugoslavia, the fact is that Bosnia since independence in 1992 NEVER had any kind of sharia-like legal framework or something similar. Since independence, Bosnia has always been a secular republic, and practically all the people in the majority-Bosnian Muslim don’t live in ways similar to Aiatollah-ruled Iran or Taliban-ruled Afghanistan — women don’t need to use veils, men shave their faces and don’t have to use turbans, and so on. How many islamic suicide bombings happened in Bosnian territory from the moment of independence until today? NONE. How many parties in Bosnian parliament advocate strict sharia-law appliance, Salafi-style? NONE. Maybe on average there are no more pro-Western Muslim people in the Planet Earth than Bosnians, Kosovars and Albanians.

— We should say, based on many evidences, that the flag-carriers of the anti-Westernism (including aversion to Western Christianity), anti-Liberalism (including anti-gay rights) and anti-Americanism are the Serbian and Bosnian Serb political-economic elites who look to authoritarian Belarus and Russia as sources of inspiration. Somehow, we could say that somehow nationalist Greater-Serbists are closer ideologically to Hezbollah and Hamas than the Muslim peoples of the Balkans…

“Sure - it is a well known phenemona that some nations, out of blue, choose to pack their bags and leave their homes where they lived for ages...
...for no apparent reason at all...”

— http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Martic-order1995.jpg

A move Google could do to boost up Google+ could be fusing the old Orkut accounts (there are still lots of them with millions of Brazilian and Indian users) to the G+ network…

Anyway, when I hear about all the fuss and buzz around Facebook IPO I remember all the fuss and buzz… around AOLTimeWarner.

Even after forty years of Civil Rights struggles and advances, for the minds of many people in America a real “Natural-Born Citizen” equals “White with no drop of any other kind of non-White blood, from the Germanic/Anglo-Saxon races (English, Dutch, German or Scandinavian ancestry) and baptized as a Christian Protestant”.

The biggest proof of this is that John F. Kennedy, a Catholic from Irish origins, faced the same questioning about “could he be fit to be an American president?” as Obama is facing.

NO ONE in the political or military ledaership in Croatia or Bosnia was ever indicted nor convicted for GENOCIDE by the ICTY. NO ONE in the political or military ledaership in Croatia or Bosnia ever attacked or besieged Belgrade. NO ONE in the political or military ledaership in Croatia or Bosnia ever made a civillian massacre like Srebrenica.

That’s a quite different picture from the leaders in Belgrade and Pale/Banja Luka of the 90’s…

The original RS leadership (such a nice people like Karadzic, Maldic and many other who are now behind bars in The Hague) was not exactly elected, but more preciselly picked up under Belgrade’s orders during Slobodan Milosevic’s government.

Besides, if the original population that lived up until 1992 in the terrtories now occupied by RS could vote, they certainly would not give victory to the political crooks now there, mainly Milorad Dodik, who is reversing everything that was gained in terms of political profress in Bosnia since 2006…

By the government who constructed the Omarska Cooncentration Camp and committed the Srebrenica Massacre of around 8000 Bosnians.

…and Catholic, and Orthodox, and Jews, and Atheists, and everyone who did not believe in Greater Serbia or Greater Croatia carved out of Bosnian territory.

Remember http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badinter_Commission , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnia_and_Herzegovina_independence_referen... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jovan_Divjak

To put Alija Izetbegovic, Franjo Tudman and Slobodan Milosevic at the same level is utter unjustice.

Tudman was a populist with authoritarian-expansionist tendencies, but at least he was elected by the legitimate votes of the majority of the people who lived in all Croatia. Izetbegovic has real democratic credentials, was elected president by the majority of the people who lived in Bosnia, and never had intentions of annexing nearby lands to the country he governed. Even the late Pope John Paul II recognized the legitimacy of Izetbegovic personally visitim him in Sarajevo.

About Milosevic… he was an Communist apparatchik who rose trough the ranks of the Communist Party bureaucracy in the 70’s and 80’s to become the nationalist dictator who destroyed Yugoslav federalism, ordered political assassinations and massacres and was stopped only after NATO destroyed most of the old Yugoslav-Serbian military hardware and military infrascture around him.

But if this were true, how can explain the fact that multi-ethnic and multi-religious Montenegro and Macedonia exist as relatively normal, unified countries?

The picture tells everything: as long as Milorad Dodik remains the strongman of Republika Srpska and the stumbling bloc of Bosnian politics (it seems like NOTHING can be done in the country without his approval or consent, even ehen the majority of Bosnian citizens despise him), Bosnia will continue to be a political and economic basket case.

Dodik always had a clear “dream”: to detach the eastern part of Bosnia occuppied by RS and annex it to Serbia, creating a smaller version of the Greater Serbia idea defended by Draza Mihailovic and Slobodan Milosevic…

“At many Latin American public universities students pay nothing, staff are unsackable, and the curriculum is old-fashioned and politicised. Good teaching and research are not rewarded with extra funding or promotions; institutions do not lose money if their students drop out.”

But hey, these things above happen in almost all Brazilian state-run public universities — and MAINLY AT THE U.S.P.!

Red China succeeded in liquidating Manchuria as a territorial and cultural concept. Inner Mongolia, Tibet and Uyghuristan are on the way…

“The massacre of some 8,000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys 16 years ago was the worst war crime in Europe since the second world war.”

Meanwhile, Milorad Dodik’s government wants to pay for Kardzic and Mladic defense in The Hague…

And Bosnia was recognized as an independent nation-state by the international community and gained its seat at the UN years before the signing of the Dayton Agreement.

And we must remember that according to both the 1974 Yugoslav Constitution and the conclusions of the 1991 Badinter Commission, the right of separation from Yugoslavia was not granted to ethnic groups/language groups/religious groups, but to the specifics republics that constituted the federation. So, these two documents not assured independence to “Croats” but to Croatia; not to “Bosniaks” but to Bosnia; not to “Slovenes” but to Slovenia, and so on.

To say that “Bosnia is an artificial creation” is to ignore History that shows Bosnia with most of its current borders since the time what would become Serbia was the Ottoman Pashaluk of Belgrade.

In in this Bosnia existed Bosnian Muslims, Catholics and Orthodox (and Jews, and Roma, and people from parents of different religions…) living together and intermingled, most of the time without major problems. The current separation was caused by the 1992-1995 atrocities commited in vast majority by the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army and later Belgrade-equipped (Croats and Bosniaks hadn’t a lot of fighter jets or guided missiles…) militias and Bosnian Serb army.

And the Dayton Agreement was a mere freezing of the frontlines.

The “rights” of Serbia to take over Bosnia’s RS is the same “rights” Nazi Germany wanted to have over Czechoslovakia’s Sudeten Mountains.

1. The problem is not with the “Bosnian Croats” in general, but with the HDZ and HDZ-90, the parties that claim to represent them;

2. The problem of regional versus country-wide representation could be resolved putting all of Bosnia in a (real) federal republic with a bicameral parliament, as the same way that happens with Austria;

3. “Orthodox Slavs cannot share the same country with Muslims” — what about Kazkhstan and Montenegro?

4. The ideology that guides the Serb expansionists today (even the teenager ones) is the same that of the “Seven Points” of Draza Mihailovic of the 1940s and the 1990s plans of the Milosevic-Karadzic-Mladic trio. America and Europe should make clear that Serbia has no right to expand its borders beyond the Drina, as the same way that happened to Germany with the Oder-Neisse line.