Theos-Talk Archives (April 1999 Message tt00177)

Dear RAMADOSS
I see in your letter on KOSOVO a lot of feeling for what is happening in
there. 
YES I too feel that way. When people of different ethnic origin lives
together There is a sense of racial fear. Which is inherent in each of us
genetically historically and general brainwashing.
How is a child to forget the brutalities perpetrated by man to man, I was
only twelve when I used to see hundreds of JEWS locked up in cattle wagons
being taken to concentrations camps Many times I have asked myself Is this
the humanity I am born in?  
 No , RAMA , it is not just , Religion or Racial, or colour.
YOU see . it is also  very hard to think about ,religion when one is very
hungry. This is a factor  as masses of people become destabilised when food
become scarce. 
It is proper food distribution that is required as it is tons of food is
being dumped to keep prices up?
These inequalities will eventually bear the fruits of anarchy.(no law)
mmmmmm  sound familiar.
We must realise that there is a bond amongst us , because we  see this in
actuality, this   togetherness , brotherhood
But the realisation  that is "Self realisation " It could be a tall order
for the hardened individual that has been brainwashed by the media  into
the ways of brutality.       LUCIO
 







At 08:44 PM 4/22/99 -0500, you wrote:
>I have been reading the print media as well as watching the TV everyday
>trying to understand what is the root cause of the problem in Kosov.
>Finally I just saw the following write up by Margolis which clearly
>explains why religion is at the root of the current Kosov Crisis.
>
>Religions have caused such huge suffering over thousands of years, one
>wonders it is not time for some of us who can see the suffering cannot
>raise above the organized religions and work for the elimination of the
>suffering. At the present rate, these kinds of horrors are likely to
>continue for ever unless the average man/woman starts thinking clearly so
>that we also do not fall into the "religious" trap.
>
>Theosophy should help.
>
>mkr
>======================
>Religion’s at the root of Balkan evil By Eric Margolis
>
>Serbia’s savagery in Kosovo has finally exposed one of Europe’s
>darkest and dirtiest secrets: the long racial and religious war against
>the Muslims of the Balkans. 
>
>Hatred of Muslims is the 1990’s version of the anti-Semitism of the 1930’s
>that led to the extermination of Europe’s Jews.  Just as many Europeans
>were overtly or secretly happy during the Nazi era to be rid of the Jews,
>so today, some modern Europeans actively or tacitly support the latest
>campaign by Serbia’s Muslim- hating racist regime to impose a `final
>solution’ to the `problem’ of the Balkan Muslims. 
>
>After the Ottoman Empire in Eastern Europe collapsed in 1912, hundreds of
>thousands of Muslim Turks were slaughtered or driven out.  At the end of
>Turkish-Greek war 1920-1928, 400,000 Turks were expelled from the Balkans;
>simultaneously, one million Greeks were driven from Aegean Turkey.  From
>1912-1928, large numbers of Slav and Albanian Muslims were expelled from
>Bosnia, Kosovo, and Serbia.  Today, there are almost 2 million people of
>Bosnian descent and some 1 million of Albanian origin living in Turkey. 
>
>These vast expulsions still left some Turks, and millions of native Balkan
>Muslims, the descendants of Serbs, Albanians, Greeks, and Bulgarians who
>had voluntarily converted to Islam in the 15-16th Centuries to escape
>fierce religious persecution by the Catholic or Orthodox Churches, or to
>avoid a head tax on Christians levied by the Ottomans.
>
>Today, there are some 10 million Muslims in the Balkans: nearly 3 million
>nominal Muslims in Albania; 2.3 million in Kosovo and Sanjak; 2 million in
>Bosnia; 2 million in Bulgaria;  180,000 in Greece; and 600-700,000 Muslim
>Albanians in Macedonia.
>
>In the 1980’s, Bulgaria expelled 300,000 Muslim citizens and forced the
>remaining Muslims to Slavicize their names and adopt Orthodox
>Christianity.  A few years later, Serbia began attempts to exterminate or
>drive out Bosnia’s Muslims. 
>
>France and Britain, nervous over their own large Muslim minorities, and
>traditionally anti-Muslim because of their colonial past, thwarted US
>efforts to halt ethnic warfare against Bosnia’s Muslims. Greece, Bulgaria,
>and Macedonia gave the Serbs economic and diplomatic support. The west’s
>tacit approval, or ineffectual opposition, to this ethnic-religious
>warfare opened the way for Serbia’s `final solution’ in Kosovo.
>
>Today, there is wide support among Orthodox nations of Eastern Europe for
>Serbia’s merciless campaign to eradicate its Muslim and Catholic Albanian
>minority.  What we are seeing is not just a war over land, it is an
>eruption of the most vicious medieval hatred against non-Slavs and
>non-Orthodox people, encouraged and enflamed by demagogue Slobodan
>Milosevic and some extremist elements of the Orthodox clergy.  Slavs in
>Bulgaria, Macedonia and Russia, and, sadly, some Greeks, are cheering on
>this massive pogrom, just as Europe’s Catholic right applauded Germany’s
>`purification’ of Jews from their midst. 
>
>Serb propaganda paints Albanians and Muslims as `dirty, violent Turks,’
>who `breed like rabbits,’ `run drugs,’ and flood Slav lands with their
>alien offspring, the vanguard of a vast `Islamic horde about to invade
>Christian Europe.’ Orthodox priests preach revenge for events 500 years
>past, even urging a new crusade to `liberate Constantinople(modern
>Istanbul)  from the Turks’ Milosevic began the horrors of ethnic warfare,
>vowing, a decade ago, `we will send all the Muslims back to Mecca.’
>
>Ironically, Albania was always renowned for religious toleration. Muslims
>drank and celebrated Christmas and Easter; Catholics often observed
>Ramadan; Muslim, Orthodox, and Catholic Albanians mixed freely and without
>the slightest rancor.  Every member of Albania’s small Jewish community
>was hidden from the Nazis and Italian fascists. 
>
>Yet the easy-going, unreligious Albanians and other Balkan Muslims now are
>paying a terrible price for long past centuries of religious and racial
>hatred. They have become scapegoats for the frustrations, economic ruin,
>and low self-esteem of the failed, only semi-Europeanized nations of the
>darkest Balkans. 
>
>
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