Thursday 17 May 2012

New Hitlers, Imaginary and Real

From the Left, Brendan O'Neill writes:

The cut-throat gesture made by Ratko Mladic on the opening day of his trial at The Hague sent a frisson of excitement through the press corps. Never mind that it’s now reported that the gesture could have been a demand for a toilet break rather than a threat to the Bosnian Muslims sitting in the gallery (ie. Mladic was saying, “Let’s cut for a minute, I need a leak”). The media still lapped it up, cock-a-hoop that their favourite evil man had done a really evil thing on the first day of his trial for being evil. They had the image they wanted, the image that would further boost the shtick they’ve been performing for 20 years now: the one in which the Serbs play the role of modern-day Nazis who love killing and raping people, and the moral crusaders of the Western media play the role of unimaginably brave witnesses to this Nazi-style nastiness.

The trial of Mladic has nothing to do with “justice for Bosnia”. It is better understood as a cut-price Nuremberg for modern moral crusaders who, lacking a Hess or a Goering, will make do with a Mladic instead. Mladic is a substitute Nazi for self-styled reincarnations of Churchill, those middle-aged bores of the liberal international media who fancy that their brave reporting from Bosnia in the mid-1990s helped to expose that Nazism was alive and well and living in the DNA of every Serb man. No mention of Mladic is complete without the deployment of Holocaust-echoing terminology, whether we’re being reminded that he is responsible for “the worst crimes in Europe since the Nazi Holocaust”, or that he is the “architect of genocide”, or that he was hellbent on cleansing, exterminating, wiping out, and so on.

There is of course no question that Mladic is a vicious piece of work who was responsible for a great deal of barbarism in the Bosnian War – as were the Bosnian Croats and the Bosnian Muslims (who, among other things, welcomed former Mujahideen and future al-Qaeda members from Afghanistan to fight with them against the Serbs, some of whom had their heads chopped off by those lovely jihadists). But the use of Nazi analogies in every discussion of the Serbs has more to do with the emotional needs of Western observers than it does with what really happened in Bosnia in the 1990s. It is their desperate need for an historic-sounding mission, for a political thrill in their otherwise cushioned, uneventful lives, which has led to the tragic, messy, profoundly complex war in Bosnia being reimagined as a simple re-enactment of Nazi wickedness. This, you see, allowed Western liberal writers and activists who had the misfortune to be in the ascendancy in an extraordinarily bland political era – the 1990s – to fantasise that a new Holocaust was unfolding in Europe and that it fell to them to tell the world about it and to STOP IT.

From Bosnia in the mid-1990s (when the New Statesman referred to the Serbs as “Satanic”) to Kosovo in the late 1990s (when the Sun ran a headline saying “Nazis 1999: Serb cruelty has chilling echoes of the Holocaust”), the Serbs have continually been compared to the Nazis. This whoring of the Holocaust by Western commentators is designed not only to condemn the Serbs (depicting them as “stark, raving, mad, vicious, mean bastards”, in the words of Misha Glenny), but more importantly to flatter the egos of Western observers. Guardian writer Ed Vulliamy rather gave the game away when, in one of his many pieces on the Bosnian War, he wrote that where his father “had the honour of fighting fascism”, he had the “strange privilege” of watching people fight against “a pale but unmistakeable imitation of the Third Reich” – that is, the Bosnian Serbs. Across the Western media in the 1990s, journalists were trying to live up to daddy’s expectations, to the higher achievements of that more inspiring wartime generation, by declaring a war of words against “New Nazis”.

We can now expect the trial of Mladic to be treated as a kind of denouement to this self-flattering branding of the Serbs as Nazis. Every gesture and comment made by Mladic will be held up as evidence that he is more than your average wicked warlord, of which there are actually many around the world – he is a new Hitler, a maker of Holocausts. It took Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the actual Holocaust, to challenge this teenage exploitation of the history of the Holocaust by mission-seeking journalists. In the late 1990s, he said: “The Holocaust was conceived to annihilate the last Jew on the planet. Does anyone believe that [the Serbs] seriously planned to exterminate all the Bosnians, all the Albanians, all the Muslims in the world?” Let’s hope those words have at least some impact as Western hacks rush to The Hague in the coming months in the hope of glimpsing “the new Hitler”.

And from the Right, see the video to which Daniel Hannan links. The Nazis in Kosovo are real, and they are in charge, because we have sided with them by force of arms. We did the same in Bosnia, where, as in Kosovo, the Nazis were and are also Islamists, just as they were in those places in the 1940s.

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