Sarajevo / Crimea as testing of limits
example · history ·
retold in 4 talks
Like the Sarajevo assassination that triggered WWI when everyone believed war impossible, Crimea is today's test: Putin hears a call from Crimea, swallows it, then may hear calls from Baltic states or Poland, the paranoiac logic of probing the opponent's limits.
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026
As told 4
“Putin hears calls for help. He heard it first for Crimea, now who knows maybe he will hear some future calls from Baltic republics, maybe even from Poland.”
“Sarajevo capital of Bosnia. They knew the war is coming... the moment it happened it was as you said it was instantly renormalized”
“the Western sympathy with suffering Sarajevo was pure absolute hypocrisy”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
contents · one story, 3 jobsuses
renormalization
×2
catastrophist optimism
×1
immanent impossibilities
×1
Its cast and sources
populated by
Richard Sennett2Julien Gracq1Alessandro Russo1Gong Li1Garry Kasparov1Paul Fussell1Bülent Somay1Samir Amin1
alongside works
Every retelling 4
Like the Sarajevo assassination that triggered WWI when everyone believed war impossible, Crimea is today's test: Putin hears a call from Crimea, swallows it, then may hear calls from Baltic states or Poland, the paranoiac logic of probing the opponent's limits., illustrating pre-WWI parallel,geopolitical danger,enlightened catastrophism
Žižek recalls the siege of Sarajevo, noting that people initially thought it couldn't happen in late 20th-century Europe, but once it did, it was 'instantly renormalized,' paralleling the normalization of ecological crisis., illustrating ecology-climate,renormalization
Žižek cites Karadžić's own memoir to show that the siege could have been broken by a single Western battalion at the airport; Western powers chose not to act while performing outrage at Sarajevo's suffering, exposing humanitarian fascination with suffering as cover for complicity., illustrating humanitarian spectacle and Western hypocrisy,fascination with suffering as political paralysis
The siege of Sarajevo, considered unimaginable two weeks before it began, became normalized within days; residents assumed a short interruption and sent their children away for a week or two, not imagining the siege would last three years., illustrating renormalization,impossibility becoming real