Throw your books in the bin

Slobodan Milosevic's death has stimulated quite a bit of media coverage, and the tone is pretty much what one would expect, along the same lines as most of what has been printed since 1991, with Milosevic and the Serbs the main aggressors in the terrible wars in former-Yugoslavia. No surprises there.
The New York Times reports, however, that we need no longer bother agonising over the origins of these tragic conflicts in Yugoslavia's demise - it has found the answer. Forget the legacy of the Second World War and its impact on how people percieved their nation and ethnic or religious group and its place within Yugoslavia after 1945. Forget the badly planned economy and the uneven development which reached crisis point after international loans dried up at the end of the 70's. Forget the almost wilfully unworkable system of governing Tito designed to follow his death. Forget demagogues who directed these tensions towards ethnic and religious-based hatred, and don't bother wondering how much their success reflected antagonism which people felt, but did not act on for the most part, until they came to power.
Forget it all, the questions are unnecessary and unenlightening; they merely confuse the issue (deliberately?) complicating what ought to be a simple narrative of determined villains and their helpless, passive victims.
Why? Because it was all one man: "In effect, Mr. Milosevic destroyed the delicate balance of the Yugoslavia he professed to defend." He's responsible; he manipulated everybody and brought down the structure of Yugoslavia, making sure violent and chaotic destruction, which he could use to consolidate his grip on neat-autocratic power, were the inevitable results.
No questions need be asked, no history explored, no social or economic tensions analysed. The journalists have figured it out while the academics have been crafting straw men to fish for the red herrings they mistakenly believe to need destroying.
"Mr. Milosevic's overriding myth of Serbian suffering" was the tool he used in his "single-minded pursuit of power," Roger Cohen, the international affairs polymath who authored this nonsense, reveals.
And surely, to dissent from this hurriedly-written, unthinking nonsense (yesterday Cohen was wondering whether South Africa's last decade of reconciliation provides a model fo Iraq's future - Times Select, sorry) is to sympathise with, or apologise for Milosevic and his terrible crimes. Those of us who care about understanding the world - in all its capacity for unimaginable evil, as well as its potential for astonishing good - must reject this manner of looking at the world absolutely each time we are asked to make such a false choice ("if you aren't with us, you're against us"), which we are, all too often, by a media determined to simplify everything, creating a simple narrative (dictated) that calls for no reflection on our history, or our society.
The question of why Yugoslavia collapsed in to such terrible violence and ethnic hatred is central to understanding the role the idea of the nation has played in the last two centuries of world history, and a decent answer could tell us an enormous amount about ourselves, our society, our prospects and the potential for a better future. We cannot let the New York Times (or other outlets who systematically do the same) persuade us that the question does not exist.