"Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War" by Peter Maass

I have a confession to make - I am guilty of ignorance.

While in 1992 I was taking my first trip to Europe, falling in love for the first time, getting my introduction to Pentecostalism and learning to live, people were being exterminated only several hundred miles away from me.
While I was going into my fourth year of high school education in Bulgaria, boys and girls my age were being raped and tortured and murdered and it took me 15 years to find that out. How is it that I knew nothing about that war? How is it I never paid attention to the news, never took interest in what was happing in Bosnia? How? How come I turned a blind eye to the grizzly events occurring in a land where people spoke Slavic language similar to my own, had features similar to mine, shared with history similar to the one of my county? How can I have been so blind to the genocide in Bosnia?

Then, in the winter of 1992 I came to the United States and looking back now I find I wasn’t the only one guilty. For three years (1992-1995) the United Nations, countries like Britain, France, Russia and of course, the USA, looked to resolved the conflict by ignoring the direct problem in the region. Peaceful solution is what everyone was talking about and looking for, and all the while men, women, and children died by torture, by fire, by knives to their throats. Over 200,000 people. 200,000 died in this conflict and having read Peter Maass’ book I feel disgusted with myself, with humanity in general.

I suspect there were hundreds of other conflicts that occurred and I missed. I know there were many more that history sheltered away from humanity and perhaps I’ll never learn about their victims, but having read this book and having learned of the dangerous games politicians and people with power played, I’m left with a nauseating feeling of shame. Shame for being a human and possessing the realization that evil is something people grow inside, something they cultivate and feed from. For all of our 100,000 years of civilization we have nothing to show except death, destruction and deceit. Is this what we should be proud of?

I recommend this book to everyone. It’s hard to find stories out there that are so open, so raw, so real in their context to make readers seriously wonder what society, civilization, morality and ethics really mean. Mr. Maass, thank you for being so honest.

-by Simon Cleveland