In memoriam: Vukovar and Skabrnja

[Eosphoros]

Today we remember the fall and destruction of Vukovar and Škabrnja and the heinous acts of genocide and crimes against humanity commited thereafter. May these innocent victims who died for freedom never be forgot. Rest in peace.

[Mikey]

It is always my greatest hope that such tragedies not be forgotten, and not be allowed to happen again. My thoughts and prayers go out to your countrymen, and I pray that this is a theme in our history which we don't have to revisit.

[Sionnach Glic]

*A moments silence*
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[Tsukiyumi]

These types of atrocities are the bane of civilization. Unless people remember, future generations will blindly stumble down the same bleak paths we have in the past. Makes me want to visit the Wounded Knee memorial.

[Eosphoros]

Thanks for your sympathy.

I always try to remember the countless innocent victims who died all over the world. It is very ironic that my country, which has suffered a lot through history, unfortunately, took part in the greatest crime in modern history - the Holocaust, and I am very ashamed of that. The Ustaše (a fascist Nazi-Germany-backed puppet regime in Croatia) opened two concentration camps in Croatia - Jasenovac and Stara Gradiška. More than 60 000 Jews were killed in Jasenovac alone. I always remember them on Holocaust Day and think about how these crimes should have been stopped. Whenever I remember Vukovar I feel great pain in my heart, and then I associate that pain with the Jews killed in Croatia and feel ashamed. If I had the power to change just one part of our history, it would be the 1941-1945 Ustaše regime, and not the 1990-1995 Homeland War. We can rebuild our cities, towns and villages, we can get over the losses of our dear ones, but we'll always have those thousands of killed Jews on our conscience and the stigma of historic judgement.

[Tsukiyumi]

Your country (region) was a forced pawn in that war, like a number of others. In total, the Reich executed upwards of 11 million people, from Jewish people and ethnic Polish to Homosexuals and the disabled and mentally ill. A few million were Soviet POWs. That was assuredly the worst chapter of human history to date, and I hope that we all try our hardest to make sure it never happens again.

[Mikey]

As a descendant of Eastern European Jews who had family who suffered and died in the Holocaust, please believe that I have never heard in my religious community any slight or blame placed on the nations whose enforced, controlled governments took part without the will of their people. Of course there were camps outside the Reich; but when Babi Yar was operating, the USSR wasn't controlled by a puppet of the Third Reich.

Rather, in those cases, we try to remember the Righteous Gentiles; those courageous people who were not Jewish, Soviet, homosexual, or Catholic - and thus in no immediate danger of the Holocaust itself, though they may have been from the war and the Reich - yet still endangered themselves and their families in order to try to do the right thing. People like Otto Schindler, Raoul Wallenberg, Jozef Piwowarczyk, and countless others will continue to be honored in our community as heroes and sometimes martyrs, not in the name of just helping the Jews or other Holocaust victims, but in the name of choosing humanity over barbarism. I am embarassed to say that I don't know offhand the name of any particular such Croat, but I know for a fact that such underground, grassroots efforts were in place.

[Tsukiyumi]

Plenty of them, as well. The Maquis (French Resistance) may be the most well-known freedom fighters in Europe during the war, but there were many others, like the Norwegian commandos sabotaging Norsk Hydro's heavy water plant in their country, or Marshal Tito in Yugoslavia. Under the circumstances, I believe most of Europe did their best.

Even America didn't react after the beast of the Nazi regime reared it's head, because of our isolationist policies at the time. This is why America is always in everyone else's business: we appear to have taken it upon ourselves to make sure another "Hitler" doesn't gain any significant control anywhere in the world

[Eosphoros]

Well, the unfortunate thing about marshal Tito is that he wasn't just the leader of an antifascist movement, but also the leader of communist movement. He fought against the Ustaše (Croatian ultranationalist fascist extremists) and the German and Italian occupying armies. But he also sometimes collaborated with the Četniks (a Greater Serbian expansionist ultranationalist movement) and sometimes fought against them, and his partisans commited numerous crimes against the Croatian people, during and after the war. My maternal grandmother lost her maternal uncle (we have three words for uncle) and two of her brothers to the partisans, and of course there is the Bleiburg massacre. Here in the Balkans things are never normal.

[Tsukiyumi]

Yeah, it seems after the war he went in a completely opposite direction from fascism, and really lost the honor he demonstrated during the war. A dictatorship is a dictatorship.

I am sorry for your family's loss, and the suffering you have undergone is nearly impossible for most Americans to comprehend. I had a rather difficult time while growing up here, but I will not even pretend to understand what type of hardships you've endured.

[Mikey]

The fact that you took it upon yourself to express an apology for something which MAY be ascribed, incorrectly, to your preceding countrymen shows how you've been taught the graces of humanity.

[Captain Peabody]

My dad's family were Jews from Czechoslovakia, and I'm pretty sure none of them were involved in the Holocaust... but I can certainly sympathize with those who have gone through such things.

And you know what the really sad part is? Such events are still just as capable of happening today as they were in the past; all it takes is a single madman with a cause and enough power. Witness Saddam Hussein; he got away with genocide for years for the simple reason that no one cared a wit what he did to his own people. Or the genocide in Rwanda, which went on right under the collective nose of the entire west; or even Darfur today. This is one reason why I'm very wary of a lot of modern anti-war sentiment; because the costs of the kind of isolationism they're advocating would be way, way higher than they think. I'm not an Imperialist, or a big interventionist or anything, I'm just afraid that the current political climate is rapidly swinging too far the other direction, into pure isolationism. There has to be some kind middle ground between the two extremes...

[Deepcrush]

The US has paid a heavy price for those wars. Remember that where many of these countries are in need of help, many of them aren't willing to help themselves. Starting at the civil war up to WW2 my family alone has lost 5 men plus those who are wounded and will never live a normal life or bare children. My father has 3 sons, one dead from an accident, one who will never have children and myself. My family continues to serve but we are fewer in number now and few families are willing to take up our place as we die out.

[Mikey]

You should be proud of your family's service without a doubt, Deep, but a nation doesn't have to be constantly militarily involved in order to be non-isolationist. If you are not familiar with the "Ship of the Damned," suffice it to say that the US was one of many nations which denied harbor to a boatload of Jews fleeing the beginnings of the Holocaust. They were denied sanctuary on the grounds that providing such would draw the US into the war. Obviously, that is simply a poor excuse based on our insular policy, but an excuse that nonetheless was used to rationalize inhuman behavior.

[Deepcrush]

The problem is that if you are involved with other nations then there will be war. It just is. The only way to prevent war is to have every nation around in the UN and NATO stand together and work as one. A united command and a united military. There is no such thing as peace because at anytime somewhere in the world there is fighting going on. Most of the time peace is only found at the end of war. Its sad but you have to pick a side if you want peace. Either you fight or surrender. The US tried to stay out of things and failed. The last one hundred years of non stop war has shown that if the US backs out then the wars spread. As long as the US is fighting, most wars stay contained to their home nations and maybe a few of their neighbors. Africa is just a lost cause I feel. They are doing everything they can do to fight. They dont' want peace anymore.