The Tower of Wiki

The fear that globalization would somehow eliminate regional, even national cultural idiosyncrasies and turn the entire planet's population into one single culturally indistinguishable mush has long ago been proven wrong. Modern telecommunication has made convening like-minded people and sharing ideas easier than ever, thereby enabling the preservation of distinct cultural practices. I nonetheless never cease to be amazed at the burgeoning number of articles available on wikipedia in an ever increasing number of languages, many of which are unofficial languages or minority dialects. Clearly, many people have way too much free time on their hands and take it upon themselves to write and edit the user submitted entries in their native language's wikipedia.

Of course, to a certain degree, the various wikipedias reflect the technological gap. Languages of wealthier, more internet-savvy nations with more leisure time boast proportionately far more, longer, and better edited articles than, say, the languages of sub-Saharan Africa. Spanish, despite its vast number of speakers, ranks only tenth in wikipedia strength, well behind Dutch, Polish or Swedish, largely due to the limited internet access and lack of leisure time of many of its speakers. But what is most astounding is the proliferation of very sizable wikipedias in regional dialects.

Those who think of Germany, and to a lesser extent Italy, primarily in light of their mid-century bouts of nationalist insanity, tend to forget that these two countries were only nationally unified less than 150 years ago. Indeed, Germany is so regionally diverse and decentralized that even seventy years after its initial unification, much of Hitler's mass rallies consisted of all sorts of ceremonies celebrating the various provinces' allegiance to the Reich. This diversity was never eradicated under the Nazis and its continued persistence is reflected in today's wikipedias.

Besides regular Hochdeutsch (second only to English in number of articles), four other varietals of the German language clock in with over 1,000 articles: Luxembourgish with over 10,000 (Lëtzebuergesch); Ripuarian (lower-Rhenish local dialect spoken in the Rhineland, eastern Belgium and southern Dutch Limburg); Low-German (Plattdüütsch - spoken in Lower Saxony and the Eastern Netherlands); and Allemanic (a group of dialects comprising Alsatian, Swiss-German, Swabian and also spoken in Northern Italy). The Pennsylvania "Dutch" (actually Germans) have staked out territory for their Germanic dialect (Deitsch) with 154 articles. Any uninitiated native speaker of standard high German, or of a different regional dialect, would need an extensive dose of good will and patience to get even the general gist of any of the articles in these almost unrecognizable permutations of the German language.

Italy, with its similarly recent national unification and great regional diversity, boasts an even greater linguistic wiki diversity than Germany. Separate wikipedias have sprung up for Neapolitan (over 12,000 articles); Sicilian (over 5,000 articles); Venetian (over 3,000 articles); Piedmontese (over 1,000 articles); Friulian (just over 1,000 articles); Lombard (over 700 articles); and Ligurian (over 600 articles). Sardinian still has a long way to go with just over 150 articles.

Even France -- the first country to use collective nationalism for political ends and historically the most centralized state in Europe -- celebrates its linguistic diversity on wikipedia. While standard French boasts the third largest wikipedia with well over 300,000 articles (after English and German), there are now individual wikipedias for Occitan (over 2,000 entries), Arpitan/Franco-Provencal (1,600 entries), and Norman (at just over 1,000 entries). The non-Francophone minorities of France also assert webspace for their cultures with over 12,000 entries for Basque, over 7,000 for Breton, and over 4,000 for Corsican.

It is therefore all the more puzzling how people who take the nationalism of Germany, France or Italy for granted, despite these countries' vast linguistic and cultural diversity, can in the same breath speak of the "inevitability" of the disintegration of other "multi-ethnic" states, such as the former Yugoslavia. Apart from Slovenian and Macedonian -- which are completely distinct and not mutually intelligible Slavic languages -- as well as the non-Slavic Albanian, most of the rest of former Yugoslavia spoke a language formerly known as Serbo-Croatian. The language spoken by Serbs, Croats, Montenegrins and Bosnians comprised under its umbrella a number of regional dialects including Štokavian, Kajkavian and Čakavian (the names derive from the pronunciation of the word for "what" - Što, Kaj and Ča, respectively), and defined Ekavian and Iyekavian, as well as the very rare Ikavian, as different pronunciations of the various dialects. These dialects are less ethnically based than they are regional species. Kajkavian is spoken in northwestern Croatia; Štokavian -- the dominant dialect -- is spoken in Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Hercegovina, and the greater part of Croatia; while Čakavian is spoken in Istria, the Adriatic coast and the Dalmatian Islands. The Ekavian pronunciation is more an Eastern phenomenon while Iyekavian is at home in the Western areas. There are small, non-contiguous pockets of speakers of Ikavian in parts of Croatia, Bosnia and northern Serbia.

All of these are mutually intelligible to speakers of any of the other forms of the language formerly known as Serbo-Croatian (unless one is really trying not to understand). Depending on your religious preference, you might write in either the Cyrillic or the Roman alphabet. Thus, more than the actual spoken dialect, Cyrillic writing is distinctly the domain of the Christian-Orthodox Serbs and Montenegrins, while Bosnians and Croats write with the Roman alphabet. All Serbo-Croatian writing is strictly phonetic, though without any hints to syllabic stress or length of vowels, which means that all dialects are spelled slightly differently, though the differences are sufficiently minor to allow uncomplicated mutual intelligibility. (Strangely, modern Croats have now started to spell foreign words and names in their original foreign spelling -- rather than transcribing them phonetically as was previously the practice (and a necessity in Cyrillic) -- while still attaching regular Serbo-Croatian case and tense suffixes, which makes for a curious shift in gears while reading. But that is another matter.)

True to the motto "a language is a dialect with its own army and navy" (I forget the author of this brilliant apercu), the disintegration of Yugoslavia resulted in the official disappearance of Serbo-Croatian and the split into three, supposedly distinct, languages: Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian. (The UN in its politically correct brilliance lumps them all together as "Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian" and at times assigns only one single translator.) Standard Serbian these days is Štokavian with Ekavian pronunciation, while standard Croatian now is mostly Štokavian with some Čakavian and Kajkavian influences and Iyekavian pronunciation. Bosnian is likewise Štokavian with Iyekavian pronunciation. One main difference lies in the general inclusiveness with which Bosnian and Serbian adopt words from any of the surrounding languages and dialects (including, e.g., Turkish during the occupation), while speakers of modern Croatian prefer to take a purist approach and go to great lengths to coin neologisms rather than import a non-native term. The Montenegrins speak Štokavian but, unlike most Serbs, with Iyekavian pronunciation. Despite their recent split from Serbia I am as of yet unaware of them having declared their own separate language. There are other minute differences among the three, now autonomous, languages, too arcane to discuss here.

Wikipedia reflects this ethnic split with separate wikis for the three languages: Serbian with over 34,000 articles, Croatian with over 19,000 and Bosnian with over 10,000 articles. As the various wikipedias are written and edited by regular internet users (with too much free time on their hands), they provide a decent measure of the public understanding of their recent history, however contorted. A brief review of wikipedia entries on Slobodan Milosevic on the different ex-Yugo wikis thus reveals just how political the linguistic split is. I chose to look at the entries for Milosevic not in the expectation of finding devotion on one side and hatred on the other -- he is pretty much universally despised, and deservedly so -- but rather because in describing his actions in office, each group has found ways to subtly cast themselves in a better light and deflect any responsibility for the various wars to others. In a sense this is therefore a way of taking measure of the level of collective self delusion, nationalist mythology and perceived victimization of self and the respective others.

Croatian wiki's Version of Balkan History

Croatian wiki cuts straight to the chase. Milosevic's youth and early political career are completely omitted, while the first sentence already classifies him as an "un-sentenced war criminal". The first chapter focuses on the bureaucratic and political specifics of how Milosevic turned the Yugoslav state apparatus into his own personal domain. The Croatian authors make the astute observation that it was Milosevic's nationalist movement that "catalyzed" the "crystallization" of Bosnian and Croatian national identity, as distinct from Yugoslav identity. In a sense, this is an interesting statement, as it is an implicit admission that there was de facto not a strong sense of ethnic difference, let alone separate national identity among the Yugoslav ethnic groups prior to the political conflicts that led to secession. Croatian wiki proceeds to point the finger at Milosevic for fomenting violence and unrest among Croatia's and Bosnia's "highly politicized" Serbs, keeping them perpetually at the edge of "fear" and "aggression". Croatian wiki states correctly that Serbian irredentist movements at times "paralyzed" southern Croatia, but fails to mention any actions of Croatian nationalists that could have in any way influenced this outcome (indeed, Milosevic's prodding notwithstanding, much of Croatia's Serbs were reacting to deliberate provocations from Zagreb).

The Croatian authors then pat themselves, or rather their nation, on the back while putting the Bosnians in their place when they write that Milosevic underestimated "Croatian and, with some delay, Bosnian determination" to prevent a greater Serbia. Was it so much their determination as it was the utter strategic and diplomatic ineptitude of the Serbian state and military apparatus, which lost every war and every negotiation it entered? Likewise, Croatian wiki makes the Croatian struggle seem more heroic than it was by speaking of supposedly "considerable diplomatic support" provided to Serbia by the former "WW I Entente powers", while completely omitting mention of the much stronger support Slovenia and Croatia received from Germany and Austria (which included the promise of recognition at a given date prior to the conclusion of the work of the EU's Badinter commission, thereby rendering the latter futile). Never mind also that it was less "diplomatic support" by France and Russia than it was utter failure to coordinate European policy and total lack of a clue as to what to do, which gave Milosevic's forces the breathing room to create a fait accompli on the ground.

The strangest parts of the Croatian wiki entry on Milosevic is when it describes Milosevic's ideology and legacy. The Croatian authors take it at face value that it was indeed Milosevic's goal to establish the dominance of Serbs on the territory of the former Yugoslavia and doesn't represent the (more likely) contrary view that he was simply a power hungry opportunist jumping onto the bandwagon du jour (provided courtesy of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences), which happened to be nationalism. Indeed there is little in his ideological background to suggest that he was ever a serious believer in a Greater Serbia. And a true believer, as Croatian wiki alleges him to be, would not have so willingly traded territory at Dayton, nor so carelessly abandoned the Krajina Serbs when they needed him most (but had already become more of a political liability to him). Croatian wiki's claim in this respect is strangely then equivocated by attributing the cause of the war not to Milosevic specifically, but to a general nationalist sentiment among the Serbian population and elite, which in the authors' belief would have led to war, even if someone else had been in charge. This collective bitch-slap against the entire Serbian population is delivered nonchalantly in the last sentences of the closing paragraph. In a sense, the authors want to have the cake and eat it, too: they would like to represent Milosevic as the evil dictator who singlehandedly attacked Bosnia and the valiant Croats, while also not letting the Serbian people off the hook. In this, they create an irresolvable contradiction. Finally, in countering one aspect of Serbian nationalism which claimed that the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia had a right to secede, Croatian wiki makes a curious argument that there is generally no right of secession of minorities in international political practice, but conveniently avoids explaining on what basis then the secession of the various Yugoslav republics (such as Croatia and Slovenia) was acceptable. The role of Franjo Tudjman in the wars and the haggling over territory in Dayton is not mentioned with even one word.

The Serbian Version

Serbian wiki has a schizophrenic melange of criticism and borderline reverence for the old leader. The Serbian entry is more than four times the size of the Croatian one (though, in all fairness, Serbian wiki as a whole is almost 75% larger than Croatian wiki and it would therefore not be surprising if the individual entries themselves were generally larger). But is it really necessary to mention in the first line that Milosevic is nominally still head of the Serbian Socialist party despite his death? Included on the Serbian page is extensive photo documentation from all stages of his life: from his youth, with his mentor Ivan Stambolic, from various key speeches in Kosovo, at the signing of the Dayton accords, responding to protests against him, being led off in handcuffs, in the courtroom at The Hague and finally a screenshot from CNN with the all caps headline "MILOSEVIC DIES", as well as a photo of his final letter where he claims that someone is trying to poison him. We read about his tragic family history, his legal studies and his marriage to his high school sweetheart.

One wonders which unrepenting communist wrote the following gem of a sentence in the context of Milosevic's rise through the Yugoslav bureaucracy: "The absence of a genuine workers' democracy in the workplaces [in Yugoslavia] paved the way for these technocrats [like Milosevic] to access positions of great power." It is presumably the same author who is responsible for the consistent use of the term "imperialist powers" instead of Western nations. That same paragraph, however, laudably continues in detail to describe precisely what Croatian wiki missed, namely just how Milosevic's generation of communists was not ideologically grounded and instead more careerist and opportunistically minded. We learn in detail of the singlemindedness with which Milosevic pursued his political career, in the end backstabbing his mentor Stambolic.

One valuable contribution of the Serbian wiki account is a somewhat in depth account of the economic pressures on the deeply indebted Yugoslavia in the 1980s that led to mass strikes as social services were cut and eventually to hyperinflation. It is in this atmosphere of economic pressure and social tension that both Milosevic's rise and the secession of the various republics was possible. But then, by indulging in great detail with speech quotations in describing Milosevic's unraveling of the crusty communist leadership, it risks sounding hagiographic. Is it appropriate for an encyclopedia to extensively quote the substantively empty demagogic speeches of a fallen dictator, particularly when such quotes are left unchallenged by critical corrections of the record? (Including such blatant lies like "I am fundamentally against war.") In the end, however, Serbian wiki provides more detailed, factual accounts of the usurpation of power by Milosevic, where Croatian wiki instead leaves us with only the broad brushstrokes of editorial interpretation.

In its credit, it should be said, that Serbian wiki gets the cause and effect description correct: it shows that it was Milosevic's infamous 1989 Kosovo speech that set off in earnest a drive for secession among the state bureaucracies of the individual republics. Strangely, though, despite making this correct assessment, the page proceeds to present Milosevic's actions thereafter as reactions to Croatian and Slovenian secessionism and as an attempt to prevent a civil war. Is this a case of different authors working against each other within the same text? Thankfully, all ambiguity is resolved for a moment when a little later we read quotes from the Serbian minority leaders within Croatia showing that they either blamed Milosevic directly for the war or otherwise saw themselves as merely executing his orders.

In describing his fall, Serbian wiki notes the entanglement of criminal elements within Serbian society, especially war profiteers, in the power system that upheld Milosevic. But when it comes to assessing the complicity of Serbian society with Milosevic's rise and rule in general, Serbian wiki fails. While noting correctly that reducing the guilt question to blaming "this simple bureaucrat" for everything is "oversimplified", we instead read about the role of "imperialism" in supporting a "series of local gangsters" in the alleged project of reducing the former Yugoslavia to a number of small, economically dependent, "obedient" units "open to exploitation". What exactly the plan was, who concocted it and how it was put into effect, on all this Serbian wiki is of course silent. We are to believe that the naive Serbian population was victim of an international conspiracy to economically control a territory where the Serbs previously had the majority. This is Serbian wiki's greatest failure and is generally reflective of the Serbian mindset that still persists today: instead of critically assessing how the Serbian population -- especialy the bourgeoisie, expats and initially the working class -- was complicit in generating a nationalist proto-fascist atmosphere that made secession of the individual republics and ultimate war all but inevitable, Serbs see themselves as having been duped by their gangster leadership and the West, which supposedly just wanted to cut the economically most valuable parts (Slovenia and Croatia) out of the Yugoslav pie. The only time we hear about the Serbian people is when they finally heroically rise up in the year 2000 to topple Milosevic. How convenient. Only regretfully does Serbian wiki note in one of its closing paragraphs that the weakened post-Titoist Yugoslavia "lacked the necessary amount of democracy" to effectively "dull the antidemocratic edge of nationalism", and even in this vague sentence, the focus is on nationalism in the whole of Yugoslavia, not nationalism in Serbia specifically. Indeed, that paragraph works istelf up into making Tito "directly responsible" for rearing the "most aggressive" nationalists, Milosevic and Tudjman, within his bureaucratic apparatus and thereby destroying the state he helped create "out of the ashes of WWII."

When we get to the trial at the Hague, Serbian wiki indulges in offering partial transcripts of the lunatic rantings against the tribunal by Milosevic. Why we need this instead of a lucid summary of his attitude towards the court is anyone's guess. Further indulgences abound in the description of Milosevic's death in his cell in Scheveningen. Instead of providing a dispassionate, levelheaded summary of the controversy over his death, various demonstrably false and conflicting assertions by self-interested allies and collaborators of Milosevic are presented unchallenged. Then follows a completely gratuitous listing of various official figures' condolences. Why an encyclopedia article has to cover his funeral beats me.

The Bosnian View -- or Whose View is it?

Bosnian wiki's Milosevic page is about the same size as the Croatian entry, but utilizes some of the pictures from the Serbian entry, including the sappy youthful Slobo, Stambolic and Milosevic hugging, and the official head of state photo in front of the Serbian flag. The text, on the other hand, is only partially original. Entire paragraphs seem to be lifted from the Croatian page, translated but cleansed of the self-congratulatory Croatian mythology. E.g., the wonderful sentence about Milosevic underestimating "Croatian, and with some delay, Bosnian determination" is rewritten simply as Milosevic having underestimated "Bosnian and Croatian determination" (note the order!). A small introduction is added which appears to be a drastically abbreviated personal background, taken partly from the Serbian page. To its great credit, Bosnian wiki omits the ludicrously one-sided paragraph in which the Croatian wiki authors simultaneously seek to pin collective guilt on the Serbian people and cast them as incorrigible congenital nationalists.

What about the Albanians?

If I could read Albanian, I would have compared their view as well. One does not need any Albanian language skills, however, to note that the only photo of Milosevic on the page is the famous photo of his 2000 election poster covered with excrement which was launched at it by the victorious protesters who toppled his regime. Curiously, no love is lost for the Albanians on any of the three ex-Serbo-Croatian wikis. The massively large Serbian entry barely even mentions them. Unsurprisingly, Serbian wiki, claims that Milosevic became a "charismatic leader" of the Serbs in reaction to "Albanian chauvinism and separatism". It does offer the criticism that Milosevic's actions were regarded as "nationalistic" at a time when communist "Brotherhood and Unity" was still the official dogma, but presents on an equal footing the assertion that Milosevic was in fact selflessly concerned with the "human rights" of the Serbian minority in Kosovo. Likewise, Serbian wiki presents the anti-Albanian mass demonstrations in the wake of Milosevic's elimination of Kosovo's special autonomous status as authentic popular movements with no mention of the top-down engineering that went into them. Croatian wiki goes so far as to consider it unclear whether the Kosovar Albanian secession movement was truly a reaction against Serbian repression or a greater nationalist irredentist movement for unification with Albania, resulting from "indoctrination" by Enver Hoxha. Bosnian wiki repeats these assertions verbatim.

Serbo-Croatian Lives On!

Some people evidently had enough of all these post-Titoist particularisms and decided that Serbo-Croatian is alive and deserves its own wiki. At just over 5,000 articles at present it is not yet in the same league as the linguistic separatist wikis, but it is catching up. In truly Balkan free-for-all style, the Serbo-Croatian wiki allows its contributors to choose for themselves whether they wish to write in the Cyrillic or the Roman alphabet (even the web address is multi-font). Thankfully, the search engine seems to bring up the desired information irrespective of the chosen alphabet. The Serbo-Croatian entry on Milosevic is minimalistically short at present, certainly owing to its small active author membership. The page is written in Roman script in Štokavian with Iyekavian pronunciation, but without certain Croatian idiosyncracies, suggesting a writer (or writers) from the territory of Bosnia or Montenegro. I cannot for the life of me detect any nationalist bent in the article itself, however, as it limits itself to the absolute minimum of incontrovertible information on Milosevic's background, rise, rule and eventual demise. As to Milosevic's guilt, it merely states that "many people in the world consider Milosevic directly responsible for [the deaths in the Balkan wars], as well as for numerous war crimes committed in that period."

Maybe the Croats, Bosnians and Serbs would have all been better off had they continued speaking Serbo-Croatian...



Disclaimer: This review is based on the wikipedia entries as of the date herof. Wikipedia entries are subject to constant editing by multiple authors and may have changed by the time you are reading this.

Elevated Perspectives

Manhattan, seen from the southern shore of Staten Island, approx. 6,000 feet.



Lake St.Clair (Michigan/Ontario border) from 34,000 feet.

The Finance Capitalist's Formula for World Peace

How to end all wars? Mortgage all disputed territories to Citibank, ABN Amro, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank or your major Western financial institution of choice and no one will dare touch it.

Israel's current military action against Lebanon is of course not the first of its kind. But in its present attacks on Lebanese infrastructure, Israel is being far more circumspect than in the past. On December 28th 1968, the Israeli Air Force destroyed eight aircraft of the Lebanese national airline Middle East Airlines (MEA) on the ground at Beirut Airport. As it turned out, one of the destroyed aircraft (a classic Vickers VC-10 like this one, brand new at the time) was not actually owned by MEA but on temporary lease from Ghana Airways. Israel ended up having to compensate Ghana considerably for the destroyed aircraft.

Deviously, when MEA a few years ago replaced its ageing fleet with the latest Airbus A320/321 and A330 aircraft, they did so under various financing and leasing schemes, leaving ownership with French and other entities and, in most cases, with the aircraft mortgaged to various Western (mostly French) banks. All of MEA's current aircraft are registered in France. Evidently, Israel remembered the 1968 Ghana incident when planning its current course of action. The Israelis clearly were in no mood to have to compensate a number of French banks for several hundred million dollars of destroyed equipment. No sir. This time around, they only bombed some runways and fuel tanks at first. Indeed, "In an unusual deal that the United States helped broker, a runway at the Beirut airport was repaired long enough to enable six planes -- one carrying former Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Nakati -- to take off. Israeli forces soon after bombed the runway again." (from CNN) All of MEA's fleet has safely evacuated to Cyprus and it is rumored that MEA will restart operations temporarily from Damascus.

Alas, humans in war zones tend not to be as lucky as MEA's aircraft. In our current global system, apparently, private property rights are prosecuted far more vigorously than human rights. So what is the finance capitalist's solution to intractable conflagrations?: Mortgage the disputed land to Western banks. Apparently, being sued for monetary damages by high paid corporate litigators in the Federal Courts of the Southern District of New York is a far greater deterrent than the possibility of being hauled before the International Criminal Court in the Hague. A mortgage on 100 acres of prime Darfur real estate, anyone...???

Welcome

Hi everybody!

In this space, you will soon have to put up with all my crazy ideas and random fascinations. Muhahahaha....

For starters, we will begin with a completely random image of a Goliath Heron lurking in the shrubbery.



See you soon.

MK