I received a note from a reader yesterday about an article on the Financial Times website . Without presuming to speak about the actual contents of the article – read it and make up your own mind – the author caught my correspondent’s attention with these passages:
“It is not as if victimhood is never true. Jews are slandered and persecuted, though not very often in the US. Muslims have had a rough deal in history. But our politics too often degenerate into expressions of self-pity, which is particularly odious in the German case. The result is suspicion, hatred, and in the end vengefulness. One might call it the Kosovo Syndrome.
On St Vitus Day, 1389, much of the Serbian nobility perished in a battle with Turkish armies on the Field of Blackbirds in Kosovo. More than 600 years later, Bosnian Muslims were driven from their homes, murdered and raped in large numbers, and tortured in concentration camps. And all this because Serbs could not stop thinking of themselves as the greatest victims in history.”
Sounds like a slam-dunk ending – were it true.