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    Shmekeri Prishtines
    Anėtarėsuar
    04-08-2002
    Vendndodhja
    USA
    Postime
    66

    DIsa mEndime Perendimore per Shqiptaret

    Autor: Isa Blumi:


    Eshte ne gjuhen Angleze..
    The Albanian, for instance, has served as an ideal Balkan type--violent, independent, and at times untrustworthy--that both touched Lord Byron's creative fantasies and haunts Robert Kaplan's recent travels. In many ways, the Albanian in today's headlines is the perfect example of how the westernized world has retained stereotypes of the nineteenth century for contemporary consumption. It is the resilient images of the Albanian in settings limited to social chaos and violent confrontations that fill the collective minds of the outside world. There are no temporal transitions from the unexplored, subconscious idealizations of the noble-savage motif prevalent in nineteenth-century literature to the painfully self-conscious, politically correct representations of domestic life today. It is clear that in many cases modes of representation have not changed significantly in spite of this heightened awareness of the nature of ideas, images, and historical discourse.

    To capture this transcendental quality of a Western version of the Albanian, we may compare W.Y. Morgan, a reporter for the Hutchinson Daily News in Kansas, who in 1913 noted,.

    Along the coast of the Adriatic Sea for about a hundred miles between Greece and Montenegro ... is what might be called the No Man's Land of Europe.

    There is something to the Albanian.... It will take time for a people like this to get their feet on the civilized earth and learn to pay taxes and submit to laws.... I wonder if the approaching invasion of civilization, with its clean-up days and its forcing everybody to do what he does not want to do, will not be a net disadvantage to the Albanian?

    They were about the best of the Turkish army when it came to the kind of fighting which means death and destruction to the enemy, and which has no knowledge of what are called the rules of civilized warfare. They were dreaded more than the Turk, and they rejoiced in their reputation.(FN5).

    with Richard Basset, who wrote in 1990,.

    Tempting though it is to idealise the Albanians and contrast them favourably with the Serbs, they remain essentially inscrutable. The young Albanian men with their round, dark faces, flatter than the Serbs and with less angular noses, appear so open towards the western traveler that he usually fails to detect that dark menace in the eye which is so apparent to the Serb and which for centuries made the Albanians the most feared and warlike race in the Balkans.... As Leslie Gardiner has written in The Eagle Spreads his Claws, "The history of Albania is one long chapter of misery and revolt, subjection and savagery."(FN6).



    Throughout the world, the crisis that took place in Albania in April of 1997 and in Kosova in the first half of 1998 have been depicted in verbal snapshots that have the power to communicate simplistic representations of complex issues. The photographs depicting cheaply clothed, and unwashed ruffians running off with stolen sacks of flour or brandishing threatening gestures and those that juxtapose the image of the ubiquitous 10-year-old wielding a submachine gun while watching over his grazing cow with that of the Western diplomats in their expensive attire debating the future of Albanians in 1997, seem to be no more than modernized versions of the same people who were depicted by European adventurers one hundred years ago: poor, dirty, lawless, and threatening. The Western press flooded Albania and Kosova, inciting a frenzy of journalism that resembled any number of similar Balkan media events in the past, the most troubling being Bosnia. Sensationalist and analytically paltry, the images represented a crisis reduced to recycled terms that spoke of "mass revolt," and of ethnic or primordial hatreds, with little consideration for the significance these terms carry for the audience, let alone any attempt to understand or resolve the issue at hand.(FN13) As with Byron's fascination with 'Ali Pasa of Janina, the chronicler of "exotic fierceness which he Byron continued to associate with Islamic civilization: the combination of uncompromising religious passion and military virtues which he identified as the qualities of nature,"(FN14) such images are being appropriated and reinforced by contemporary journalists, academics, and diplomats.
    The unfortunate reflex to link Albanians to the West's phobia of Islam and its simplification of ethnic nationalism, for example, severely limits the capacity of local Albanian leaders in Macedonia and Kosova (or any other community that is attached to a larger representative entity) because their unique and pressing demands are subsumed in larger universal "Albanian" and Islamic contexts that are tied to Tirana (and Tehran) as opposed to Tetova or Prishtina. This, of course, is not a phenomenon that is confined to a specific geographic region. The nature of the majority of journalistic and academic publications today reflects the globalization of motifs and strategies of narrative to fit most current events. Again, the information reported by the Arabic-language press during the Kosova crisis of 1998 clearly demonstrates that contemporary journalistic and diplomatic modes of expression are acultural and transcendent.(FN22) And it may be argued that the roots of this incapacity to move beyond these global units of analysis in any of the fields under scrutiny stems from the production of knowledge within an environment that is driven by a market that cannot distinguish sensationalism from historical processes. I call this tendency the unequivocal reiteration of historical generalizations.

    Once again, this time in response to the dramatic collapse of Sali Berisha's regime in Albania, a wide range of similar scenarios are being expressed in the media. Whether it is a scheming Miloševic or the expansionist Greeks, the collective tensions in Kosova, Macedonia, and Albania spell disaster for the Western community and its altruistic efforts to separate mortal enemies.(FN33) Diplomats scurry about in an effort to answer speculations transmitted across the airwaves and assuage fears of another explosion among their "Balkan fatigued" constituents.(FN34) It is the focus on the primordial qualities of ethnicity that has a logic that is most accessible to westernized audiences, be it the Sunday reader of Balkan Ghosts, the policymaker quoting Samuel Huntington, or the scholar citing John Armstrong.(FN35).

    As a method of analysis for historians, this view is extremely flawed and dangerous. In relation to such assertions, one should ask what makes any of these so-called ethnic groups coherent units? Again, Islam and a loose notion of ethnicity (which is rarely defined) are posited as the ultimate connection. But religion is a highly dubious link, even for a coreligionist group like the Serbs, let alone for Albanians, whose sectarian complexity remains a fascinating and understudied residual of a more complicated period in the pre-nation-state Balkans.(FN36) As for ethnicity, it defies logic to suggest that any ethnic group, especially one dispersed by distinct state boundaries, is not delinked at some level by specific interests. In the mythological Balkans, psychological and personality stereotypes of a "Balkan social character" are often used to explain what is posited as inherently un-Western behavior on a transethnic basis.(FN37) Compare recent works with Théophile Lavallée's characterizations of the Albanian in 1855, and we can conclude that such methods of representation have changed very little.(FN38) Contemporary studies are inevitably linked to narratives of nationalism that have followed seemingly parallel tracks. What is suggested here, then, is that our tools of identification are highly determined by overly simplified conceptions of identity, linked by character traits, physical appearance, and geographic and religious associations that obscure our ability to understand local history and therefore the current trends in local political life
    In sum, the westernized world fails to understand the important cultural, political, and economic divisions that exist among distinctive "national" groups, be they Serbs, Croatians, or Albanians in the Balkans.(FN39) Simplifying the various Albanian communities by making them a "national unit" that answers to an Enver Hoxha or a Sali Berisha, and one that follows a communal pattern of interaction with its historicized, "primordial" enemy, is a problem that extends beyond the West's policies in the Balkans. Again, the related notion that Muslim populations--all of which harbor their own distinct, and often contradictory, histories--are a part of a civilizational boundary intrinsically programmed to struggle with the Orthodox and Catholic communities, reveals the tendency of the westernized community to accept traditional conceptualizations of the world without serious debate.(FN40) Notions such as "fundamentalist," "primordial," and irrational behavior patterns all contribute to a process that I call the marginalization of historical cognition. These terms, all of which are applied to the Balkans and the Islamic world in popular and academic circles all over the world, are tools of rhetoric that are meant to mobilize an audience's energies into the right intellectual frame. Once we are armed with immutable notions of the ontological other, which often ignites emotional sentiments as well, words and actions follow their predetermined path. For all the claims of journalistic objectivity or academic science, there is no escaping the effects of rhetoric used for mass consumption. Balkan histories become popular histories driven by Western ideological motivations that go beyond the immediate subject. The Balkan national character and its savage manifestation in nondemocratic populism intertwine in a public discourse of unfortunate ignorance and, at times, outright racism within the westernized world.

    LExoni me vemendje paragrafin e fundit
    Ndryshuar pėr herė tė fundit nga Taulant-Dardani : 13-08-2002 mė 10:04
    Love is Just a Temporary Form of Insanity--Sylvester Stallone

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