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<nettime> NYT: Looking for the Line Between Patriotism and Guilt |
http://search.nytimes.com/search/daily/bin/fastweb?getdoc+site+site+61671+7+wAAA+goldhagen April 11, 1999 Looking for the Line Between Patriotism and Guilt By MICHAEL T. KAUFMAN In view of the accumulating evidence of a genocidal campaign unleashed against Kosovo's Albanians by Serbian forces directed by President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia, the conduct of ordinary Serbs is starting to attract the kinds of questions raised in Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's book, "Hitler's Willing Executioners, Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust." The controversial book examined how some longstanding "eliminationist" myths within German culture predisposed what might be thought of as normal citizens to accept, support and in many instances actively carry out Nazi policies of Jewish extermination. Those policies remain a benchmark of evil in this century, and there are, of course, great differences of scale distinguishing what happened in Germany from what is happening in Serbia. Nonetheless, focusing on actions of common men and women in both places and the willingness of many to follow murderous leads, does not, at the moment, seem inappropriate. Goldhagen himself thinks that questioning the behavior of the Serbian nation is essential. "Right now is the time when we must ask the question of how ordinary people have acted while it can still influence events. Those who support what has been happening in Kosovo should be made aware that they will be held complicit in what will most likely be the last enormous crime of the century," said Goldhagen, a professor of government at Harvard who is working on a study of genocide in the last 100 years. Former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, who is also a former U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia, raised a similar point last week in an op-ed article in The New York Times: "Although Milosevic is the prime mover behind the murder and agony that have filled our television screens for the better part of a decade, he has not acted alone. He may plan the strategy, but the Serbian people are the willing instruments of his terror. There are, of course, many decent Serbs who decry the violence, just as there were decent Germans under Hitler, but that does not excuse the Serb nation for its part in making a killing field of so much of the former Yugoslavia." Usually, and probably rightly, issues of collective responsibility remain taboo in polite society. Within the pluralistic tradition, there is a reluctance to assign guilt to all, or most, or even many citizens of an offending state, and instead focus blame on culpable leaders. But as Goldhagen has persuasively argued, there was a correlation between Hitler's policies of extermination and the willingness of a sizable German population to support such ideas. In an escalating manner the actions of the Nazi leader and the approval of those he led mutually reinforced and encouraged each other. And while, as Eagleburger noted, there are Serbs who have deplored the violence, a similar reverberating process has been under way in Serbia since 1987, when Milosevic broke Titoism's major precept of never discussing ethnic tensions in public. Instead, he openly played to Serb nationalist sentiments, affirming widespread Serb feelings of victimization and martyrdom stretching back centuries. The sense of the collusive relationship between Milosevic and the populace that both empowers and follows him has been evident in the tone of such Serbian public expression as has reached beyond Yugoslav territory. Some has been in the form of e-mail messages to media organizations, universities, and addresses pulled out of the air, like messages placed in bottles and thrown into the ocean. There have also been the images of people at rock-concert rallies in Belgrade and other cities, dancing in defiance of NATO and in support of the man they call Slobo. According to sources in Belgrade, the first of these rallies, which included some placards critical of the leader, was spontaneous, but later ones were organized and criticism disappeared. What is so striking about these expressions is how stridently they clash with images of other people that the world has been watching, images of people burned out of their homes, standing in lines that have stretched for 15 miles trying to enter countries that have no room for them or do not want them. Or images of people from many different villages telling the same stories -- of their friends and relatives shot and killed, of men being taken away to places unknown. All of this is happening to Albanians at the hands of Serbs less than 200 miles from Belgrade, but given the responses of Serbs it might as well be taking place on the moon. Even in 1913, during a similar uprooting of Kosovars, there were louder voices of dissent in Serbia. Obviously, neither Serbs nor any other people can be expected to look much beyond their own fear and suffering when their cities are being struck by rockets and bombs. It is unrealistic to assume that any Serb might denounce the Serb assault on Albanians or that any such cry inside the country would be loud enough to be heard above the cheering and rallying around the chants of wartime chauvinism. Those few media organs in Serbia that have bravely struggled for years to maintain independence in the face of government control have been squelched. The radio station B-92 was shut down by police last week but even before that it reported that it was not able to report on what was happening in Kosovo. The journal Vreme has suddenly suspended its previous criticism of the government. The images of the Albanian refugees that have been telecast all over the world have not been carried by Serbian television and have been seen only by those Serbians who have dish antennas and cable service. Is it possible that people just don't know what is happening to the Albanians and that therefore they bear little or no responsibility for the support they show? Here too, Goldhagen saw similarities with the Nazi period. "How many Germans knew that there was a formal program of Jewish extermination? My guess is not many, but almost all knew that their civilization was killing Jews by the tens of thousands." He noted that it would require a sizable force to burn villages and set hundreds of thousands of residents to flight and that the people carrying out such tasks all have relatives and friends who would bring the accounts to general attention. The e-mail from Serbia is characterized by an overwhelming sense of defensiveness and unredeemed victimization. As the correspondents denounce NATO and the United States, there is no sense that the rockets are a response to Serb conduct. The Albanians, if they are mentioned at all, are referred to as Muslims who wish to establish a base for guerrilla terror, or narcotics traffickers, or former allies and beneficiaries of the Ottoman Turks. As for Serbs, they are persistently portrayed as defenders of Christianity in Europe, heroic fighters in two world wars whose contributions to civilization have gone unrewarded. Even writers who identify themselves as Milosevic's opponents show more scorn than sympathy for the Kosovar Albanians, blaming them for keeping him in power by boycotting elections rather than voting with the opposition. Many of the letters mention the sacredness of Kosovo to Serbs and cite the battle there in 1389 at which they were defeated by the Turks. There are far fewer references to the more contemporary history of Serb conflicts with Croats and Bosnians over the last eight years. For instance no one mentions the destruction of Vukovar by Serbs in 1991 or the massacre of Bosnian men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995, an atrocity for which the military and political leaders of the Bosnian Serbs have been indicted. Such things appear to be missing from the current context although there are occasional accurate references to the Croats having waged campaigns of ethnic cleansing that chased Serbs into flight. But where does patriotism end and complicity in war crimes begin? Surely there is a difference between people who are chanting "Slobo, Slobo" and those who are burning homes, separating wives and husbands, and shooting civilians. Aryeh Neier, the president of the Open Society Institute and the author of "War Crimes, Brutality, Genocide, Terror and the Struggle for Justice," argues that in recent wars like those in Rwanda and Bosnia, there was a greater degree of criminal responsibility on the part of ordinary citizens than was the case in Nazi Germany. With the Nazis, he pointed out, the killing was highly bureaucratized, and the victims were generally unknown to those who killed them. In Rwanda and Bosnia, he said, many of the perpetrators knew the victims, often having lived with them, gone to school with them and in some cases married into their families. In both places, Neier said, because of the way people were killed, there were almost as many killers as victims. As for Kosovo, he said there was insufficient information to determine what was happening or how to apportion responsibility. In Tirana, the Albanian capital, there lives an Albanian writer named Fatos Lubunja, who under the regime of the late dictator Enver Hoxa spent 17 years in prison. Now he edits an intellectual journal and monitors human rights abuses. In a message to a friend he traced many instances of Serb attacks on Albanians, dating from expulsion in 1878 when Milan Obrenovic, a Serbian king, rallied his countrymen with the words, "The more Albanians you kick out of our land the greater patriots you will be." Lubunja cited ethnic cleansing campaigns of 1913 and 1920, and then he addressed the questions that Goldhagen raised in his book. He was, he said, suspicious of judgments based on assumptions that people inevitably repeat the conduct of their ancestors. "But if we can speak of collective guilt, I think we have to consider a long historical process of manipulation; all those politicians, historians, writers, teachers, who have created and nourished some dangerous myths, have manipulated history and, in the end, created those closed-minded horrible human beings who are ready to kill the others." Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@desk.nl and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@desk.nl