Filip Maljkovic wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Since when does some silly war solve anything?
Maybe if people like you didn't call it silly, people would start to
appreciate the Balkans. Expressions like "silly war" may be offensive
to some people (not to me, because I'm politically neutral), and some
people may be outraged. Do you have any idea how many lives were lost
and how many were jeopardized? Do you know how it is to live through a
war? That war had A LOT of influence and you can't just step over it.
The influence of the wars (treating it as more than one, and not just
talking about the one over Kosovo) is bound to have an effect on
people's lives, but certainly the fact that so many were killed for no
good reason is a big part of the silliness.
My experience
with the Yugoslav diaspora in Canada, many of whom
immigrated before Yugoslavia broke up, is that they still see
Serbo-Croatian as one language.
Exactly. They weren't here when the stuff happened. These
refugees/people who moved away differ and, while some claim that they
"still see Serbo-Croatian as one language", how many of them actually
"speak" it? The views are different, but statistics support something
pretty obvious.
Most of them continue to speak their language. That's normal in most
immigrant communities. Language is not usually lost until the
generation of their grandchildren. The process takes maybe 50 years.
If a project
is to cease operation it must be *allowed* to die a
natural death. As long as people keep insisting that SH be closed
there will be resistance, and that will keep it alive. Once we are
sure that it has stopped breathing, it will be safe to turn off the
life support systems.
Does policy like that actually exist? I am, frankly, not aware of that.
I didn't say anything about policy. I was just commenting on human nature.
The problem
with that is that some of those solutions are not very nice.
Like a proverb from these areas says: /Klin se klinom izbija/! (I
can't really find a substitute in English ATM)
My sh-en dictionary (from-1982 :-) ) had this expression.as "one nail
drives out another". Literal translations never convey the full meaning
for this sort of thing.