otto katz wrote:...
Sve je to u Bergholzovoj knjizi briljantno ispripovijedano, ali knjiga, zapravo, govori o nečemu drugom. Zašto se zločin dogodio? Najprije onaj prvi, ustaški, oličen u osobi Miroslava Matijevića, a zatim onaj drugi, ustanički, oličen u Petru Đilasu, Mani Rokviću, koji će završiti kao četnici, ali bome i nekima, poput generala i narodnog heroja Nikole Karanovića, koji će završiti kao partizani i veleugledni građani socijalističke Jugoslavije. Bergholz ne pristaje niti na jedan od općeprihvaćenih prečaca u zaključivanju o uzrocima zločina: za njega niti je objašnjenje da ustaše ubijaju naprosto zato da su ustaše, niti da se međusobno razbuđeni nacionalizmi ispomažu i nadopunjuju, niti da se sve to događalo po nuždi povijesnog trenutka i po logici konfrontacije fašizma s Drugim.
Pri svakom iskušenju prečaca u zaključivanju, Bergholz postavlja vječno isto pitanje: dobro, ali zašto se ista stvar nije dogodila i na drugim mjestima koja su bila u istom ili u sličnoj situaciji kao Kulen Vakuf i okolina? A moglo bi se pitati i ovako: zašto se isti zločin u to vrijeme nije dogodio tamo gdje su prethodni međunacionalni odnosi bili puno gori nego u ovome kraju?
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I još nešto je u Bergholzovoj postavci veoma važno: zločin u Kulen Vakufu, kao ni sve ono što je tom zločinu prethodilo, ali ni ponešto od onog što je nakon kulenvakufskog zločina uslijedilo, nemaju veze s ljudima koji su došli sa strane. Ovdje su se, u najvećem broju slučajeva, ubojice i žrtve osobno poznavali. Ono na što autora ova činjenica navodi jest upravo ono što je i u naslovu knjige - generativa moć nasilja. Iz naše perspektive, međutim, lokalni, komšijski karakter zločin o kojemu je riječ samo dodatno globalizira i uozbiljuje pitanja naše kolektivne odgovornosti. No, to je nešto što Bergholz samo dijelom dotiče, ali nigdje eksplicitno ne tematizira.
Čitao sam knjigu pre par meseci (ne celu, delove koje sam smatrao zanimljivim). Nekako je MJ omašio da prenese glavnu sponu između državnog i lokalnog nivoa i više faktora (nacionalizam, oportunizam, pljačku itd) a što je Bergholc elaborirao u knjizi. Na kraju, nisu došli sa strane neki drugi ljudi, došla je politička promena i novi okvir.
Npr str. 90-95:
In the Kulen Vakuf region, among the first activities that local Ustašas engaged in was neither facilitating religious conversion nor resettlement of the perceived Serb population; rather, it was stealing from their neighbors. This did not rid the region of the non-Croat population; rather, like the poorly executed resettlements, it created rising levels of fear and insecurity. [...] As Gutić had already begun in April, the Ustaša leader in the Kulen Vakuf region, Matijević, began to make use of his new position in May, and increasingly during June, to steal money and property from those whom he considered as the region’s most prominent Orthodox. He sent orders to such individuals in the local villages to appear in the town of Kulen Vakuf with a specific sum of money. He usually arrested those who arrived, took their money, and then held them prisoner for a period of time.111 Matijević was not simply acting on his own volition. He was following in the footsteps of the regional leaders Gutić and Kvaternik. The latter was explicit about the need for Serbian property to “fall into the [Croat] people’s hands.” This was a primary means through which to mobilize local Catholics and Muslims to assist in the elite-led project of reshaping of the NDH’s ethnic composition. [...] Of significance here is the notion that one had the right to steal “because I’m an Ustaša.” This suggests that the new position that the NDH government gave to these men, which carried with it an expectation that they would have a wide latitude of authority in their local communities, played a key role in restructuring their future behavior. [...] In an important sense, then, the initial mobilization of local men into the Ustašas was a situational convergence of divergent agendas that suited both national and regional leaders—and local residents—but in general, for different reasons. For the former, men were needed, and incentives were needed to mobilize them, to carry out the removal of non-Croats from the NDH, and to deal with supposed security threats. For the latter, to be suddenly armed and to be able to behave however they wished toward their neighbors was an unprecedented and, for most, irresistible opportunity to rapidly enrich themselves. [...]
We now have the pieces in place to explain the main dynamics of the sweeping changes that took place in the Kulen Vakuf region during the first two months after the establishment of the NDH. The interactions among the macro, meso, and micro levels upended the world of the local community that existed prior to early April€1941, which then recrystallized in response to a radically different political field. The elite of the NDH redefined the population as composed of ethnic categories of inclusion and exclusion. These tended to be based more on subjective factors such as past and present behavior, rather than a perception of unchangeable essence, such as race. This meant that while the central axis for future conflict would be ethnic, in practice ethnicity was to be understood in local, subjective ways. The state’s elite did not simply unleash deeply rooted, widespread, and pre-existing hatreds along such lines, although for a minority of people prewar political and inter-personal conflicts mattered in explaining their participation in the Ustaša units; rather, they created a set of exclusive, antagonistic categories, and then offered local actors concrete incentives to use them in order to undertake ethnic persecution, which the central authorities hoped would assist in their creation of a new nation-state. Mobilization of local actors did indeed occur in a top-down fashion, yet bottom-up forces were significant in the transformations taking place. Only for a small number did their prewar political disposition matter in any serious way. For the rest, the unexpected opportunity for personal enrichment was paramount.
Str. 308-310:
The sources reveal a world in which the language of antagonistic ethnicity did come to exist as an available vocabulary. It was a mental template and language that people could employ to make sense of events, relationships, problems, and conflicts. Yet it co-existed with other available vocabularies, which functioned on non-ethnic and intra-ethnic axes. Contrary to the views of many scholars, who tend to assume that a sense of elite-level, ethnic cleavages extended out to the localities, our evidence suggests that the language of antagonistic ethnicity was present—but not dominant—in the local community during the years immediately prior to 1941.
[...]
When we examine the local dynamics of change during the first critical months of the NDH’s existence, we note that “ethnic conflict” did not, in fact, “explode” among neighbors who were already supposedly constituted into clearly defined, mutually antagonistic “groups.” Rather, it had to be consciously made through sizable effort at the macro, meso, and micro levels of social and political life. The role of nationalist ideology (i.e., an ethnicized view of humanity and a commitment to remaking the human landscape by including and excluding people according to their perceived ethnicity) in fueling change was crucial among actors at the macro and meso levels. But it was far less important among those at the micro level. There, we discovered that concrete, everyday incentives—especially material gain and the opportunity to resolve long-standing inter-personal conflicts—were far more important in motivating some people to engage in local persecution on an ethnic axis. There were clear, tangible incentives at the local level for those who fit into the new government’s ethnicized categories of inclusion to gain economically from their participation, and in so doing to resolve long-festering conflicts in their communities.
There is nothing mysterious here about what drove local mobilization; in fact, the rationality at work is what stands out. There were unprecedented benefits to be obtained by joining the persecution of those now marked for exclusion according to redefined ethnic categories, and their newly politicized salience. Some local residents quickly perceived these opportunities, and took advantage of them. This dynamic driving local mobilization into micro-level persecution on an ethnic axis, as we have noted, has broad parallels to a host of other contexts throughout the world, including communities in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. Our story thus demonstrates that high levels of persecution and violence can proceed even if a sizable disjuncture exists among actors’ motivations at the macro, meso, and micro levels. Widespread ideological indoctrination with the ideas of the nationalist elite is not, in fact, a necessary precondition at all levels of society. Nor is the existence of widespread, deeply rooted “ethnic” cleavages at the local level. Rather, a convergence of differing agendas and mutually beneficial incentives can be sufficient to compel a certain number of people toward persecuting and committing violence against their neighbors.
“Ethnic conflict” thus quickly became a dominant axis for local conflict during the spring and summer of 1941 because the new NDH authorities offered clear incentives—which were especially attractive to local residents previously at the margins of economic, social, and political life—to act out pre-existing social conflicts, and to initiate new ones, through an ethnic key. Why is this finding important? Our local story suggests more broadly that conflicts actually crystalize as “ethnic” in response to highly situational incentives. We should not confuse, conflate, or mistake these powerful incentivesof a contingent political situation with supposed mutually antagonistic “ethnic” affinities that some might assume to be long-standing, widespread, and deeply rooted. Here, at the local level, the evidence suggests that pre-conflict political dispositions along an ethnic axis were far less important in driving behavior than one might assume. “Ethnic conflicts,” therefore, have to be made at the micro level through vigorous work in the present; they do simply reflect macro level cleavages, or emerge logically and naturally from pre-existing cultural differences, or even antagonisms along such lines. They are, in short, highly contingent, even in societies in which many people are perceived to be nominally of different ethnicities.
Just how contingent comes vividly clear once we are confronted with the local level evidence that those who respond to the incentives to engage in inter-ethnic persecution often simultaneously engage in intra-ethnic plunder and violence. Our evidence suggests that this dynamic existed among nearly all the main protagonists of our story, regardless of an actor’s nominal ethnicity. As such, it further supports a notion of “ethnic conflict” as fluid and tenuous, rather than fixed and enduring. It thus follows that any investigation of a conflict in a region depicted as “multi-ethnic” should not proceed with the assumption that ethnicity must be a key social fault line, even if evidence suggests that persecution and violence have occurred, or is occurring, on an ethnic axis. Rather, how a conflict comes to be “ethnicized” has to be carefully explained—not assumed, even when the actors appears to be nominally “ethnic.” By conducting our analysis at the local level, we can illuminate the specific process, and discern the logic, of how an environment potentially conducive to “ethnic conflict” actually crystallizes on the ground.
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by Guest Mon Apr 08, 2019 9:14 am
Кад и на јавном форуму повремено губе моћ расуђивања шта је добро, а шта зло. Није то идеологија, то је потреба за убијањем и малтретирањем заснована на локалном моралу. Између осталог зато подржавам Вучићев просвећени популизам, јер како ти да направиш плурализам у друштву у коме су увреде, претње и насиља ко "Добар дан"... А кад је тако у велеграду Београду замисли тек како се лако потежу секирице у херцеговачко-црногорским кршевим и босанским забитима. 
