Time to stop waiting for Godot

Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent.  Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.  Is he both willing and able? Whence then is evil?

     David Hume
     quoted by Joan Acocella
     Misery
     The New Yorker, December 16, 2013

"Death gives birth to the first question -- Why? -- and seems to kill all the answers."

"...once a life is contained, made final, as if flattened within the pages of a diary, it becomes a small, contracted thing. It is just a life, one of millions, as arbitrary as everyone else's, a named tenancy that will soon become a nameless one; a life that we know, with horror, will become thoroughly forgotten within a few generations."

Why?
James Woods
The New Yorker
December 9, 2013

Through a Glass, Darkly

Before 1999, the great powers had intervened three times in the Balkans.  The first was at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 when European diplomats agreed to replace Ottoman power by building a system of competing alliances on the Balkan peninsula.  The second began with the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to Serbia in the summer of 1914 and culminated in 1923 with the Treaty of Lausanne and the Great Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey.  The third started with Italy's unprovoked attack on Greece in March 1940 and ended with the consolidation of unrepresentative pro-Soviet regimes in Bulgaria, Romania and a pro-Western administration in Greece. 

These three interventions were so destructive that they guaranteed the Balkans' relative economic backwardness, compared to the rest of Europe. And the violence that these interventions encouraged, often inflicted by one Balkan people on another, ensured the continuation of profound civil and nationalistic strife.  In the West however, these events are rarely regarded as the result of external intervention.  On the contrary, the Balkan countries are seen as culprits who force the reluctant outside powers into their unfathomable conflicts.  This imagined Balkans -- a world where people are motivated not by rational considerations but by a mysterious congenital bloodthirstiness -- is always invoked when the great powers seek to deny their responsibility for the economic and political difficulties that the region has suffered as a consistence of external interference.  "The Balkans," Theodore Geshkoff wrote in 1940, "are usually reported in the outside world only in time of terror and trouble; the rest of the time they are scornfully ignored." It is during these long periods of neglect that the Balkan counties have badly needed the engagement of the great powers.  Yet the only country to demonstrate a sustained interest in the economic development of the Balkans was Nazi Germany during the 1930s. 

The Balkans

Misha Glenny