“I would have said, speaking mostly from ignorance, that Croatia did well to get out from under the Muslims, the Communists, the Nazis...”
The Muslims didn’t run Croatia. In WW II they and Albanians marched in Himmler’s SS together with the Croats, who called the Bosnian Muslims “the flower of Croatia.” Muslim SS units guarded the rail lines carting Jews to Auschwitz.
“If things were really bad, we’d be hearing more about it.”
As you say - uninformed. “As for economic troubles, what country isn’t having economic trouble these days?” —
Dubrovnik is now totally gangster-ridden. Croatia became an economic basket case and mafia “state” as soon as Yugoslavia was broken up by CRO, SLO and MU secession, backed by Germany, the US and the Vatican. (16 years of my education was in RC schools.)
Out from under the Nazis?” That IS uninformed. Croatia IS a Nazi statelet today. There was no de-Nazification by Tito; he let the Yugo-Nazis swap their SS badges for the Red Star. Chameleon is the “national bird” of those tribes. In Croatia today the Hitler salute is in fashion. People get beaten up if their accent isn’t considered Croatian. Serbs returning to their property in Croat-seized Serb lands or to get birth certificates in the new Croatia are arrested on trumped up charges. Death threats and murder are the pay-off for Croatian reporters who publish about murder of Serb civilians.
http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=15898
What do we hear about the murder of Christians in Iraq (Assyrians, Chaldaean, Syriac, as they’re variously known). Precious little. Just Sunnis, Shia, Kurds. What have you heard about the Turkmen or Mandaeans being slaughtered in Iraq? You heard nothing about the impaling, burning, beheading of Serbs by Muslims in the villages around Srebrenica 1992-95, the kidnap and shipment of Serb kids from Sarajevo in the early 1990s to the sex bazaars of the Middle East. The media didn’t report the mujahedin show-and-tell with the salted heads of Serb women brought back as trophies to Saudi.
“If things were really bad, we’d be hearing more about it.”
Sorry, I don’t buy it. Some of the Balkan statelets and groups marched with Hitler. Some marched with Stalin. Some managed to march with both. Decent people caught in the middle were lucky to get out from under both these oppressive totalitarian systems, which are commonly said to be opposites, but were, in fact, much the same.