July 12 2023 Anniversary of the Srebrenica Massacre

On this the anniversary of one of history’s most terrible examples of man’s inhumanity to man, state terror and racial violence, genocide and ethnic cleansing, and of the massive scale of hate crime when enacted by a government as an authorized policy of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil so very like those recently employed by America against our own Black and other nonwhite citizens and in concentration camps for Latin migrants at our border, let us consider the nature of the path we are on and where it might lead.

There is nothing more dangerous than a man who believes God is on his side, for this belief justifies all evils. He who has granted himself absolution from any crimes committed in the pursuit of a sanctified goal, like the Pope once granted beforehand to all Crusaders for any sins committed during conversion by the sword, has opened the door to a bottomless well of depravity, perversion, brutality, and atavisms of barbarian darkness.

The Srebrenica Massacre stands out from the background of war crimes and atrocities in a chiaroscuro of wickedness and of terrors; the three legged race to the dehumanization of peoples and the degradation of values between the Bosnian Orthodox Serbs, their victims the Muslims of Bosnia who were abandoned in place by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the Catholic Croatians likewise set adrift by the defeat of the Austrian Empire in the wake of World War One having recurred like Nietzsche’s Eternal Return to echo the collapse of civilization in a whirlpool of destruction. The Siege of Sarajevo alone lasted three times longer than the Battle of Stalingrad, to which it compares unfavorably in other respects as well.

Of Sarajevo I shall speak here not of the monstrous acts of those who would be conquerors, nor of the courageous resistance of their intended victims who held true to their faith and to each other in the face of death and torture, nor even of the valor and compassion of the volunteers of the International Brigade who placed themselves between hammer and anvil, but of a small horror which has come to symbolize for me the unimaginable horrors of war; the Jar of Eyes.

On the desk of a commander of death squads sat a jar full of eyes, and beside it an ice cream scoop which he would toy with, stroking its stainless smoothness with an absentminded and sensual languor while interrogating prisoners.

How do I know this, and what were we to each other, this monster and I? Herein I recall and speak as a witness of history a Defining Moment in which we played a game of chess with the life of a prisoner of his as the prize.

Within the jar the eyes would float randomly, hypnotic, reflective, capturing ones will to resist with a Medusa-like gaze of objectification and dehumanization appropriated from their tormentors, a talisman of transference of power. A jar of silent screams, erased lives, and the lost witness of history; how can we accuse our destroyers when we have no mouths?

Here among the dragons, where the rule of law cannot reach and our maps of meaning and value have given way to tantalizing empty spaces which beckon with the siren call of the Forbidden, where the only currency is fear and the only relationships those of power and dominion, we challenge and define by their absence and contrary the limits of what is human.

For we are all trapped in the Jar of Eyes, and if we are to reawaken and assume our true forms we must find a means of escape.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/from-the-archive-blog/2020/jul/01/the-srebrenica-massacre-archive-july-1995

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/26/ratko-mladic-arrested-srebrenica-massacre

Srebrenica, a reading list

Endgame: The Betrayal And Fall Of Srebrenica, Europe’s Worst Massacre Since World War II, David Rohde

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/88341.Endgame?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=mn8T7hJqta&rank=1

The Last Refuge: A True Story of War, Survival and Life Under Siege in Srebrenica, Hasan Nuhanović

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39305626-the-last-refuge?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=mn8T7hJqta&rank=2

Blood and Vengeance: One Family’s Story of the War in Bosnia, Chuck Sudetic

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/132782.Blood_and_Vengeance

Sarajevo, a reading list

Hearts Grown Brutal: Sagas of Sarajevo, by Roger Cohen