i don't want to comment on this documentary directly...

yugoslavia was kind of a turning point for me. it was a little before the apec summits, which is when i caught the media balls out lying to me for the first time. but it was yugoslavia that was my first point of confusion, the first point where it clicked that shit wasn't really adding up...

i wasn't old enough to really have the focus to follow or interest in following what was really happening, and the state of the internet wasn't such that i would have really had the tools available, anyways. the internet as a reliable source of information? is she mad? well, that's kind of what i want to talk about.

the action-reaction premise struck me as reasonable. the serbs were carrying out genocide. they needed to be stopped. therefore, war was justified. and, i can't claim that my logic on the matter has wavered over the years, even if my position on the conflict has become a bit more nuanced. if milosevic was carrying out genocide then he should have been obliterated by a united nations force to enforce the message that the world does not and will not tolerate this. that remains as true today as it did then. what's a little less clear is how valid the premise is, or how much it holds up relative to various complexities. why were the russians pushing back? and why were chinese embassies getting bombed?

see, it's not that i've concluded that the narrative i got from western media was "wrong", exactly. it's that i've concluded that there's no way to know. it's the rabbit hole that people started warning us about in the first half of the twentieth century. and, what's happening moving forward is that a generation of kids are becoming cognizant that this orwellian prediction is not something that might exist in the distant future, but the reality we live in day-to-day. it's the only reality we've ever known.

faced with some ideas that didn't add up, and some contradictions coming from people in my class that were born in the region, i wanted to clear things up. i was really just curious. so, how does a young person attempt to determine what happened in yugoslavia?

in the past, one might look towards literature. but is this reasonable today? certainly, publishers have no real interest in whether they're publishing bullshit or not. in our existing economy, books are a product and not a source of information. the publisher is not going to care about the level of inaccuracy, so long as the book sells. so, you can't trust the written documents. there's no real functioning review process.

worse, is that the nature of the evidence is subject to any and all types of modification. pictures can be doctored. film can be manufactured. actors can be paid. the media is as valuable as the source, and no source is above question.

the internet provided me with an opinion that seemed to be outside the bounds of state censorship, but it seemed impossible to believe. like i was watching the xfiles. it wasn't helping with my realization that there's not a useful source.

if you realize this, how far back can you take it? if you take an agnostic position on yugoslavia - as i claim you must, unless you were there yourself - do you take an agnostic position on vietnam? auschwitz?

it's right down the rabbit hole...

what i eventually found useful in getting a better understanding of what was happening was not evidence coming at me from yugoslavia, but the history of the region combined with understood geopolitical aims of the major powers. if you present me with an image of a mass grave or a chemical weapons attack, that means nothing to me - i know this is easily manufactured, and i do not trust you enough not to manufacture it. however, if you provide me with this evidence in the context of the "chessboard" (if you will), then i can begin to draw conclusions by making deductions about rational agents.

i suspect i'm not the only person my age that fell through the rabbit hole in this time period, and i think it's something that warrants further exploration on it's own merits.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzvNZz-X-50