MY FAVORITE BOOKS
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BALKAN GHOSTS
ROBERT D. KAPLAN
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" Balkan is , or was , a gay peninsula filled with sprightly people
who ate peppered foods , drank strong liquors , wore flamboyant
clothes , loved and murdered easily and had a splendid talent for
starting wars . Karl Marx called them "ethnic trash".
C.L. SULZBERGER , A Long
Row of Candles
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The Balkans produced the century`s first terrorists . IMRO ( the
Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization ) was the Palestine
Liberation organization of the 1920`s and 1930`s , with Bulgarian
paymasters , dedicated to recovering the parts of Macedonia taken
by Greece and Yugoslavia after the Second Balkan War . Like the
present day Shiite`s of Beirut`s southern suburbs , the IMRO killers
, who swore allegiance over a gun and Orthodox Bible , came from
the rootless , peasant proleteriat of Skopje , Belgrade and Sofia
slums . Hostage taking and wholesale slaughter of innocent were
common .
Twentieth-century history came from the Balkans
. Here men have been isolated by poverty and ethnic rivalry , dooming
them to hate . Here politics has been reduced to a level of near
anarchy …..
The landscape of atrocities is easy to recognize
: Communism had been the Great Preserver .
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""DUST"
by Milcho Manchevski
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Angela :
The look of things
to come . Luke felt of another , older time . The new century
was runing him over , And he was but a miserable roadkill
So , he went looking
for another frontier .
Far from the Wild
West . The Wild East . Where he felt at home again .
And he took the train
East . Eventually ended up Way out there , in Ottoman Empire
, The Sick Man of Europe …as they called it then .
Where the centuries
don`t follow One another - they co-exist
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