War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges

[abaris]

Really what I'm wondering is what it has to do with the Balkans being a post communist society.  As I said, the author makes a substantial thread of the conflict in his book, and never mentions the classless society.  I guess this has something to do with the fact that the classless society was effectively a failure.  I wondered while I was reading it if the racial and religious conflict was somehow connected to an attempt to re-establish some kind of structure to the society in that part of the world, in the wake of said failure of communism.

Obviously neither you nor the author do realize what lay at the root of the Balkan conflicts in the 90ies. It wasn't a class war, it was an ethnic conflict, dating back as far as the Middle Ages. Former Yugoslavia included dozens of ethnicities bearing very old grudges against each other. It was a result of the Treaty of Saint Germain, which - as opposed to Wilson's 14 points - surrendered it all to the Serbian kings.

It's a very complicated matter and class or being a post communist region, doesn't figure into it. Even more so, since Tito steered a very independent course within the communist world. In 1961, he even founded the non-aligned states, which was a clear sign that he didn't consider Yugoslavia to be part of the communist block.