User talk:Leiwandesk

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G'day Leiwandesk, I have reverted your reversion on Anti-Serb sentiment. The edit was properly sourced, the source is an New Zealand academic. Referring to his work as POV is completely inappropriate. The idea that Serbophobia is a myth is as important as the idea itself, and it should be in the lead. This article is full of synthesis and needs a strong dose of neutrality and balance. Regards, Peacemaker67 (send... over) 00:31, 21 April 2013 (UTC)

'ello Peacemaker67, first of all thanks for keeping me updated about your re-edit of the anti-serb sentiment arcticle (it's on my watchlist anyways), but my intention of undoing it wasn't to criticize MacDonald for making inappropriate POVs - blame WP for not giving enough room for an appropriate and precise statement in the commenting edit line -, but because the citation itself or better using it in the defining first sentence. So why? Just because "views" on that irrational, chauvinistic, fascist or even racist concept (I wouldn't like to call it "idea", because no serbophobian would use this term oneself when showing his hostile sentiment towards all Serbian) cannot define this term at all. Furthermore, as I've dealt with his particular work so far, this book is not about Anti-serb or Anti-Croat or Anti-whatever sentiments at all, but about holocaust semantics described as "victim centred propaganda and the war in Yugoslavia" used during the Yugoslavian break-up and the following wars showing the instrumentalization of the holocaust. Why I came to this conclusion? Well, MacDonald does not refer to the deeper historical background which has to begin at least in the 18th century with the settlement of Serbs in the Krajina region introduced and forced by Austrian imperial interests in order to save the border there. In the whole book he also did not mention for example famous French writer Victor Hugo's writing "Pour la Serbie" from 1876(!) in which a high-respected non-slav author expresses his shame about Europe watching the "martyrdom of this small people" by, asking the reader when will it end. Furthermore, are all the "Serbien muss sterbien!"-propaganda even mentioned in the article just myths? Are all those hundreds of thousands - at least at Jasenovac - dead Serbs killed by the Ustasha militia, the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS or the Bosniak and Albanian SS-divisions Handschar and Skenderbeg just a myth either? (No question, you have to mention all the victims of other nations killed by Serbs as well.) Unless you are revisionist, you cannot accept that view! But exactly this opinion shows through the words, if MacDonald's statement is cited in this - indeed - inappropriate way - when used for the lead(!) of this article. Myths or Serbian views cannot be used for something which is all Anti-Serbian, nothing more, nothing less - and definitely anything but a "myth". For instance, ongoing acts (not myths!) of serbophobia against the Serbian-Orthodox church and its cultural heritage continuing to the present day in Kosovo are not mentioned any longer, too. The wiki article should be about the phenomena of Serbophobia well-known for at least more than a century, not only its Serbian instrumentalization during the last decades of the 20th century. Last not least, I wonder why MacDonald is showing in the acknowledgment his highest regards just towards "the staff at the Hrvatska Matica", one of the biggest centres of Croatian nationalism in the years when he travelled the Balkans in the 1990s - and did write his book. All this could be neglect if MacDonald's work were about the subject he examined, holocaust semantics during the Balkan wars at the the end of the 20th century, but it will be more problematic if it is read as a study on Serbophobia declaring this phenomena either to a myth or just a Serbian view, because it would be just the same as speaking of the holocaust in falling apart Yugoslavia, a political instrumentalization - and nothing more than another kind of real Anti-Serb sentiment as you can find it sadly enough too often as a common sense in academic literature, mainly by U.S., Germany or Commonwealth states based authors (to avoid a term such as "Western states"), by accident the same countries who are responsible for war crimes committed during the NATO aggression in 1999. But I guess all those "collateral damages" have been just another myth of Anti-Serb sentiment - and did never happen. Regards, --Leiwandesk (talk) 02:19, 21 April 2013 (UTC)

I disagree. Intolerance, human rights abuses, crimes against humanity and war crimes have been rife in the Balkans for many generations. All sides are to blame to some extent. Non-Serbs that have resented Serbian hegemony, colonisation, oppression, dispossession etc have fought against what has been done to them. It is not specific to Serbs, they just happen to have been the ones doing those things to them. No-one's writing an article about Hutuphobia in Rwanda. What happens in societies is one grouping gains control and attempts to hold onto and consolidate its power, at the expense of "the other" whoever they may be. Look at what Tucović says about Serbian colonialism in Kosovo. In Rwanda it was the Hutu majority trying to re-gain control from the Tutsi minority that had been empowered by the Belgians during colonial times. The Ottomans carried out devşirme pretty uniformly throughout their empire, it wasn't aimed at Serbs just because they were Serbs, their policies applied to everyone that fit a particular description (mostly Christians). At one point this was used in this article as an expression of anti-Serb sentiment. It's just a load of old cobblers and a WP:COATRACK for "poor us, look what those bad "others" do to us all the time, we never do anything wrong, and if we do it's only because they did it to us first". The response of the Austrians to the assassination of their monarch by a Bosnian Serb supported by elements of the Serbian military was not-surprisingly, fairly strong. But the assassination was an expression of Serbs wanting to be out from under the yoke of the Austrians. All this is, is a cycle or progression of domination by one group who will do almost anything to retain and expand their empire. Everyone reaps the whirlwind eventually. Everyone. Not just Serbs. All over the world there are groups that have been hard-done by (in their opinion). I personally think the article should just be deleted as a POVFORK of History of Serbia, but if it is staying on WP the term needs to be defined, by scholarly sources, and MacDonald is one of the ones that has tried to address it. I haven't bothered to add in Ramet and others that have written on this topic, but you appear to think only a Serb could write cogently about this topic. I, on the other hand, feel that few Serbs could (due to the indoctrination of this victim-mentality in people from primary school onwards), Tucović being an obvious exception. So, we are clearly not on the same page. Peacemaker67 (send... over) 03:39, 21 April 2013 (UTC)

Existence of crimes against Serbs doesn't prove the existence of Serbophobia. Serbophobia is not the same as anti-Serb sentiment. No one is denying anti-Serb sentiment, nor the genocide of the Serbs in WWII. But Serbophobia is (defined as) something else (a good definition is in the cited book). If we continue to have one article instead of two there must be an opposing view. Yes, in the lead of the article. Zhmr (talk) 19:53, 27 April 2013 (UTC)