I was going to dissect here an op-ed that appeared in today's New York Times, penned by one of the usual suspects.
I wanted to explain how half the stuff in the piece is outright made up, and the rest is twisted half-truths, combined with the author's self-serving projections. Such as when he called the Bosnian Serb Republic a "crucible of imagined victimhood" - on par with other big lies that have just kept coming for the past 22-plus years.
I felt an urge to try and correct idiotic assertions such as that "young people" emigrate so "they could be plain 'Bosnians,' not some ethnic subgroup", or that "young people" (again) who supposedly protested supposed Serb racism last month "wanted to to be Bosnians — not Bosniaks, or Serbs or Croats." Because no actual people, young or otherwise, said that. Ever. And because, whether one likes it or not, there is no such thing as a "Bosnian" identity, divorced from group identities defined by religious legacies of foreign conquest.
I also wanted to challenge the moronic attempt to blame a 2011 jihadist attack on the U.S. Embassy on the lack of centralized police command. It wouldn't be the first political abuse of that incident, after all.
Most of all, I wanted to vent my disgust at a shill who pretends to care about phantasmal "Bosnians" while in actuality shilling for one particular "subgroup" (hint: change one letter), as he has for the past two decades.
But then I realized something. People who complain about articles in the New York Times are under the mistaken impression that the New York Times still matters.
So I wrote this post instead.
I wanted to explain how half the stuff in the piece is outright made up, and the rest is twisted half-truths, combined with the author's self-serving projections. Such as when he called the Bosnian Serb Republic a "crucible of imagined victimhood" - on par with other big lies that have just kept coming for the past 22-plus years.
I felt an urge to try and correct idiotic assertions such as that "young people" emigrate so "they could be plain 'Bosnians,' not some ethnic subgroup", or that "young people" (again) who supposedly protested supposed Serb racism last month "wanted to to be Bosnians — not Bosniaks, or Serbs or Croats." Because no actual people, young or otherwise, said that. Ever. And because, whether one likes it or not, there is no such thing as a "Bosnian" identity, divorced from group identities defined by religious legacies of foreign conquest.
I also wanted to challenge the moronic attempt to blame a 2011 jihadist attack on the U.S. Embassy on the lack of centralized police command. It wouldn't be the first political abuse of that incident, after all.
Most of all, I wanted to vent my disgust at a shill who pretends to care about phantasmal "Bosnians" while in actuality shilling for one particular "subgroup" (hint: change one letter), as he has for the past two decades.
But then I realized something. People who complain about articles in the New York Times are under the mistaken impression that the New York Times still matters.
So I wrote this post instead.
2 comments:
You certainly made the right decision. I learnt a long time ago to choose one's battles and embrace the bullet point.
Just look at 'Reader Picks' and 'NYT Pick's. The former has a number of good comments, the latter's two top comments support Cohen.
Curious that no-one pointed out that if democracy is considered to be a 'a good thing', then it should be equally applicable to Bosnia as it is to the USA. Cohen likes democracy at home, but not for the 'fuzzie wuzzies' abroad. How colonial.
Indeed. Plus, there is little point in arguing with a shill in a "newspaper" so relevant, it had to be bailed out by a foreign telecom & tobacco monopolist.
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