Mongol influence, he thinks, is so scattered that it is very difficult
to see.
Unhappily, however, in the last thirty or forty years an enormous
amount of hatred has been piled up between Serb and Bulgar; things
have happened which we as outsiders can more easily forget than those
and the orphans of those who have suffered. Atrocities have taken
place; international commissions have recorded some of them and
non-Balkan writers have produced a library of lurid and, almost
always, strictly one-sided books about them. I suggest that these
gentlemen would have been better employed in translating the passages
wherein Homer depicts precisely the same atrocities. Whatever may seem
good to Balkan controversialists, let us of the West rather try, for
their sake and for ours, to bring these two people together. We have
good foundations on which to build; every Bulgar will tell you that he
is full of admiration of the Serbian army, and the Serbs will speak in
a similar strain of the Bulgars. Also the Serbs will tell you that, no
matter what else they may be able to do, they are, as compared with
the Bulgars, quite incompetent in the diffusion of propaganda; while
the Bulgars will explain to you that in propaganda the Serbs are
immensely their superiors. (Balkan propaganda does not confine itself
to using, with violence, the sword and the pen. In its higher flights
it will, in a disputed district, bury ancient-looking stones with
suitable inscriptions. It will go beyond the simple changes in the
termination of the surnames of those who come under its dominion; the
name upon a tombstone will be made to end, according to circumstances,
in "off" or "vitch," sometimes in the Roumanian "esco" or the Greek
"opoulos." If this is known to the departed, one would like to learn
how it affects them. A great deal of energy has been brought to bear
in the production of official books which place on record the
repugnant details of all the crimes that have ever been imagined by
men or ghouls, which crimes, so say the books of nation A, have been
committed by the incredible monsters of nation B. At times, from
motives of economy, the same photographs have been used by both
nations--an idea which in 1920 was adopted in Hungary, where an artist
conceived a poster showing a child with uplifted finger saying to its
mother in solemn warning: "Mother, remember me; vote for a Social
Democrat." This poster was forbidden by the censor, and, a few days
afterwards, appeared on all street corners as that of the Christian
Socialist party. People of the Balkans found that Western Europeans
were impressed by figures, so that they issued lists of schools whose
pupils were more numerous than the total population of the villages in
which they were situated. Frequently a village would be stated, on the
sworn testimony of its most respected inmates, to be exclusively
filled with persons say of nation A. Not for a moment would it be
admitted that the population might perhaps be mixed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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