Most confusing Civil War

Most confusing Civil War

  • Russian Civil War

    Votes: 34 23.8%
  • Spanish Civil War

    Votes: 9 6.3%
  • Chinese Civil War

    Votes: 40 28.0%
  • Lebanese Civil War

    Votes: 31 21.7%
  • Angolan Civil War

    Votes: 3 2.1%
  • Sri Lankan Civil War

    Votes: 1 0.7%
  • Somali Conflicts

    Votes: 20 14.0%
  • Other (which one?)

    Votes: 5 3.5%

  • Total voters
    143
Depends. The main point was that the various ethnic groups didn't want to live with each other. What started off as an understandable motive became more and more an incoherent mess due to the complex ethnic structure combined with the amounts of backstabbing and switching alleigences due to the fact that the political leadership wasn't as nationalistic as popular media portrays them to be, but rather a bunch of sociopathic hyenas fighting over the carcass of Yugoslavia. It's a long story. To give you a glimpse there were technically four Serb factions whose cooperation could only be described as half-assed at best.
Serbia, the Bosnian Serbs, the Croatian Serbs and the Montenegrins?
 
I'd say that the Wars in former Yugoslavia are very difficult to keep track of, even for the natives.

Agreed - both the World War 2 and the 1990s were a complete free-for-all. The amount of differing agendas from within the same ethnic groups, shifting alliances (including situations where on one front two different sides might be co-operating, and fighting each other on another front) and just general messiness is astounding.
 

Angel Heart

Banned
Serbia, the Bosnian Serbs, the Croatian Serbs and the Montenegrins?

It was more like the Croatian Serbs, the Bosnian Serbs, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia + Montenegro) and the war profiteers and other irregular pirate militas like the ones of Arkan and Captain Dragan.
Also keep in mind that after Jović's mandate ended the JNA was also a faction on her own.

Agreed - both the World War 2 and the 1990s were a complete free-for-all. The amount of differing agendas from within the same ethnic groups, shifting alliances (including situations where on one front two different sides might be co-operating, and fighting each other on another front) and just general messiness is astounding.

World War II was even worse. Especially with all the Chetnik and Partizan factions and their cooperation with the Ustashe, the Italians and the Germans.
 
Actually WWII in general might qualify for this. I mean WWII starts with Japan going to war with two Chinese factions, both of which spend as much as or more time fighting each other as they do fighting the Imperial Japanese Army. It goes to Europe where the Soviets and Nazis are allies in the first two years of the war, Poland is a military dictatorship subject to Nazi aggression. France, Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece, all of them have convoluted military histories, what with the Vichy/Free French/French Communist Party triumvirate in France, the Warsaw and Lublin Governments in Poland, the Ustaste-Chetnik-Titoist bunch in Yugoslavia, the Greek monarchists, republicans, and Communists, the Italian Salo Republic and the pro-Allied government, mixed in with the usual German "Kill All, Burn All, Loot All" approach to occupation.....

And this is without factoring in all the convolutions of Asian nationalism in WWII. Or for that matter the can of worms about whether the USSR (as I believe was indisputably the case) got away with nakedly absorbing three independent countries, whose nationalists during WWII were more anti-Semitic than the SS butchers themselves were, the RONA and its revealing the extent to which the Nazis were after all fanatical true believers, the whole convolutions of the Warsaw Rising, and the post-war Soviet Civil War that was written out of the history books.
 
Actually now that I think about it, the Thirty Years' War and the Wars of Religion era in general qualifies as pre-1900 examples of this OP. Not to mention WWI and the US Civil War, the more people bring into it the aspects of it that the older generations neglected (seriously, the real war was a confusing mess. No wonder Walt Whitman said what he did about it). I would also add in every single Mexican Civil War since the Mexican Independence War, while I'm at it. Mexican civil wars are about as convoluted as wars get.
 
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