Mr. Malloy writes: "Dr. Sells uses his alleged Serbian heritage when it is convient for him, as when he wishes to deflect attention from the topic at hand."
The "topic at hand" was the charge that I was "anti-Serb" for opposing the policies and crimes (labeled genocide by the International Tribunal) of Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic and which have led to annihilation for Bosnian Muslims and misery for millions of Serbs in Bosnia, Krajina, and Serbia.
Unlike Mr. Malloy, my grandparents were recent immigrants; my Serb grandparents and older aunts came to this country to work in the steel mills shortly before WW1. I was the child of the youngest and most Americanized in the family and so I did not grow up speaking the language, and like many first generation immigrants, my family did not speak much about the old country.
As I mentioned in my earlier posts, my family is trying to help our Serb cousins from Krajina and Bosnia who have been killed, are missing, are refugees, or are struggling to survive.
Yes, Mr. Malloy, we are of Serbian American heritage. Unless you wish to define as Serbian Americans as only those who are "ethnically pure."
But of course, no one is ethnically pure; that is one of the ironies of the Karadzic genocide on behalf of ethnoreligious purity. As I wrote in the discussion of Andric, scholars such as John Fine have shown that there never were stable religious groups of Serbs, Croats, and Muslims that lasted intact through the centuries. Conversion was a multidirectional phenomenon, as was intermarriage. After all the non-Serbs are exterminated in the Republika Srpska, then no doubt the Karadzic group will start to turn on Serbs suspected of having a non-Serb ancestor in the later generations, then the earlier generations, then earlier still. . .
In the great Russian novel by Bulgakov, "The Master And Marguerita," an irony occurs at the end of the novel. Whatever a person believes is the afterlife, will be the afterlife. Thus, when a communist official arrives at the waiting room after his death, and they look up his beliefs in the book, he says, wait! wait! I didn't really believe those things (that there is no afterlife) just before he goes "poof" out of existence.
No doubt the militant Serbian religious nationalist in Bulgakov's scenario will find a God who speaks to him in the language of Adam and the deity, pure Serb, and will find a Jesus who is ethnically pure Serb.
Mr. Malloy's discussion of his Irish background brings up an interesting issue. In both Irish American communities and Serbian American communities, as well as other immigrant communities, there are those who are more nationalist than the nationalists at home. So there are groups of Irish Americans who support and fund the terrorized wing of the IRA. Similarly, there are Serbian Americans who support the most violent and exterminationist political groups in Bosnia and Serbia, and who brand as traitors, as not "real Serbs," as propagandists, as liars, as running dog lackeys of the Vatican-Nazi-Islamic conspiracy (to mention only the nice things) any Serbian American who does not support the exterminationist policies of those Serb leaders in the Republika Srpska who have been indicted for genocide.
But there are many Serbs who oppose the policies of Slobodan Milosevic, his hand-picked general and loyal order-taker, Ratko Mladic, and Radovan Karadzic, whom Milosevic supported openly for two years--perhaps more Serb dissidents in Serbia than in the Serbian American community.
These Serbs willing to conceive of Serb culture and heritage as based on creation rather than destruction, on affirmation of life rather than celebration of killing, on cultural and economic growth rather than plundering the homes of others, on interaction and cooperation with other religions and cultures, rather than on the demonization and dehumanization of other communities.
Michael Sells