Social Media on the Drina

"A. Kilophot, Wien"Life time: n/a, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

 "Most of us in this class would say that this is very extreme and would never happen here. [A raging ethnic conflict with terrorism] I would like you to think again.  Many of my friends are starting to hate on people because of race (white or black alike) and question whites about their privilege.  Is this not the same type of question that correlates to whites with ancestors who were slave owners or blacks that were under slavery?  I think that there is a lot of people who look too far to the past to judge an individual who is sitting next to them on the bus. "

I will point out that this is taken out of context. It was from a discussion in my Politics of the Middle East class about how people can come to hate each other. I was pointing out that social media isn't the problem per say as it is the means that allows people to say something. And this is not a new phenomenon. This process of ethnic conflict can happen over race, gender, religion, and other things like that, even in places that share the same skin color, same language, and same climate, such as the Western Balkans. Religion, or at least an atheist nationalist version generated from the original religious identity caused the wars of the Balkans. Here is my answer.

I found the first answer to your question in the book Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andrich, a Yugoslav diplomat of Bosnian Croat extraction, and Nobel Prize-winning author. He was writing about hundreds of years of Bosnian history, and he explains in the passage below how the rise of newspapers, the new gramophone, and literacy in the late 19th and early 20th century unraveled the centuries-old Bosnian experiment in tranquility. Look how the knowledge of the wars in Tripoli prosecuted by the Italians against the Turks turns the young Turks in the village against Pietro, even though he never even knew that Tripoli existed until the newspapers and gramophone let him know that it did.

Are we in a different situation today with the activation of ethnic identities by social media and civil unrest? The only things that have changed are the technologies and the geopolitical structures. The rest is the tribal nature of humankind. After a war, we like to tell the stories of the other guy's war crimes to justify or cover up our war crimes that we have committed ourselves because we have to exculpate our ingroup for survival, even if those crimes go against the very fundamentals of our beliefs. This is a documented fact in every conflict that has ever happened or at least has been scientifically studied over the last 50 years. In Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, we do this again and again. It is a fundamental response in human nature.