Nationalism: The Drink of Political Losers

When Donald Trump announced that he would run for President, many laughed.

When the campaign was ongoing, I kept telling my American friends that he would win.

They laughed. Some thought I was crazy to compare Trump to Balkan warlords who have been tearing my country apart for decades. With time, I found the words to explain my thinking and the parallels drawn, but George Packer did it better than anyone I ever heard or read speaking about this topic.

If you read one article on Bosnia today, this month, or this year - make it be this one.

Twenty years after Dayton, five years after Holbrooke died when his aorta tore open during a meeting in Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s office, a woman in Sarajevo named Aida began to experience insomnia. Though she had lived through the entire siege, she never counted herself among the hundreds of thousands of Bosnians with post-traumatic stress disorder, but now, two decades after the war, she lay awake night after night, unable to take her eyes off the American presidential campaign on TV. Something about the people at Donald Trump’s rallies was deeply familiar to Aida—their clothes, their faces, their teeth, the men’s mustaches, the women’s hair and makeup, the illogic of their grievances, their rage, their need for an enemy. She knew these people, and as she watched them her heartbeat raced, her breathing turned rapid and shallow. She began having flashbacks, not to the war but to the years just before it, when things once unacceptable even to think suddenly became commonplace to say, until every boundary of decency was erased. Moments in the American campaign brought up uncanny counterparts from those years in the Balkans.