КОСОВО ЈЕ СРБИЈА, the Balkans on YouTube Options

[Raijinili]

 In the south-eastern corner of Europe, there is a peninsula named after its most prominent mountain range: the Balkan. Across it live a diversity of peoples—many of South Slav stock, though also Vlachs, Albanians, Greeks, and many others. Orthodox Christianity thrives alongside Sunni Islam, and where ethnic cleansing has yet to homogenise a region, as you move from valley to valley, you will come upon many an enclave of ethnic minorities.

 Be it cuisine, architecture, religion, or culture, this peninsula today is a colourful mixture of many centuries of influences exerted upon its people by outside forces.
 The Balkan found itself a border province of the Eastern Roman Empire, which left its imprint in the Romanian and Vlach peoples, who to this day speak a Latinate language. Here, the great migration of Slavs found its final destination; today, South Slavs populate most of the Balkans, and have left their genetic imprint even in other ethnic groups. The Adriatic coast was long the realm of the Serene Republic of Venice and its trade empire, maintaining a rivalry with the small but wealthy Republic of Ragusa.
 After the fall of Constantinople, it was the Turks who conquered all of the peninsula; though their advance was stopped by the valiant Poles and Austrians at Vienna, the Ottoman Empire remained until the later 19th century a dominant power in the region, though the Austrian Empire—and later client states of Russia—encroached upon it, and, too, left a deep imprint on the peoples and regions under its rule.

 A constant in all this was that the Balkans was always periphery: conquered, dominated, and divided time and time again, each cycle accompanied with extraordinary violence. Indeed, this history of war, rape, mass murder, and ethnic cleansing has manifested itself in the soul of many Balkan people. From village to village, they hate each other's guts, and would relish in nothing as much as in cutting the throats of each and every of their neighbours, although they all look the same to the outside observer.

 Whenever they were not under the thumb of an greater realm, the peoples and nations of the Balkans were sure to wage incessant, senseless war upon one another. Be it far-fetched, ancient claims on a strip of land as worthless as any other in this poor and wretched corner of the world, a different religion another people chose to violate the principles of, or merely revenge for past atrocities—the people of the Balkans never fall short of an excuse to try to exterminate each other.

 Bosniaks and Serbs, Serbs and Albanians, Albanians and Greeks, Greeks and Macedonians… each nation hates to the core at the very least one of their neighbours—where fragile alliances don't force them to downplay their irrational hatred, they are more likely to hate everyone both outside and inside their ever-shifting borders. And at the most trivial of pretexts, these tensions erupt into violence unparalleled on the world outside of Central Africa.

 But it is not only when they depopulate villages, ruin cities, displace hundreds of thousands, massacre—one way or another—civilians, and barely find the time to dig mass graves deep enough to hide from the eyes of war crime tribunals the mountains of corpses their campaigns leave behind that these ignoble savages make their miserable lives even more miserable by showering each other with hatred.
No, the advent of the internet has laid out before them a new battlefield, even more pointless than the ones whose soil is already deeply soaked in blood: YouTube comments.


 This thread is devoted to chronicling these torrents of insults, left on each and every Balkan pop video from somewhere in or around ex-Yugoslavia, and formulated in English barely above the level of a second-grader learning it as their second language.