Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

MODERNITY AND GENOCIDE
by international prosecutors to bear command responsibility. On July 24, 1995, Mladic
was indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for
genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. He was held to be personally responsible
for the attacks on UN-designated safe areas, culminating in the capture of Srebrenica
and the subsequent massacre of at least eight thousand of its Muslim male citizens in July
1995. Indeed, Mladic is held by many to have been the military architect of the Bosnian
genocide, and, as such, its greatest mass killer. Despite this, and in defiance of the ICTY
indictment against him, Mladic continued to live quite openly following the end of the
Bosnian War (December 1995). He even retained his post as VRS commander until
December 1996, and functioned fully in that capacity. Without any fear of arrest, he was
often seen on the streets of the many towns he visited in an official capacity, attended
football matches, dined openly in restaurants, and was observed in a number of overseas
locations. With the arrest of former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic (1941–2006)
in 2001, Mladic began to fear that his days of open impunity could be drawing to a close,
and he went into hiding. As of late 2007, he was still at large.
Modernity and Genocide. The onset of modernity has been a common theme in
scholars’ attempts to understand the reasons for genocide. Initially, this discussion focused
on the tragedy of the Holocaust (1933–1945). It was argued that some Europeans’ radical
rejection of the Jews emanated from a failure to adjust to a fast-changing world. A
great emphasis was also placed on the post–World War I crises that shook Germany, as it
was argued that Germans could not fathom how their powerful country had lost the war;
only conspiracy theories seemed a logical answer. Germany, it was felt, had been betrayed
and undermined by sinister new forces: atheistic socialists, Jews, republicans, and capitalists,
among others. Hence, the attitude was that these forces were responsible for all that
was wrong at the time: the economic disasters of 1923 and 1929; the destabilizing, though
aborted, communist revolutions in Berlin and Bavaria; the plight of small shopkeepers;
the crippling labor strikes; the chronic unemployment; and, above all, the insidious influence
of the arts and the subversive ideas of new scientific disciplines such as psychoanalysis.
All threatened the stable world that had once been: bourgeois comfort
(Gemütlichkeit), Christianity, thrift, industry, conservatism, respect for authority, and the
like. Out of the confusion came “answers”: the troublemakers were viewed as the Bolsheviks,
the liberals, the avant-garde artists, abstractionism in the arts, and sexual immorality.
Above all else, though, the fault was laid on the Jews and their “rootless
cosmopolitanism.” Some argued that the Jews embodied everything that threatened
traditional Germany. Jews—Franz Kafka (1883–1924), Arnold Schoenberg
(1874–1951), Albert Einstein (1879–1955), Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), and so on—
generated ideas that overthrew the old order. The Nazis asserted that if there was to be a
return to a healthy German society and state, then the Jews (and those who followed their
thinking) would have to be expunged, culturally and physically. The war against the Jews
was to be a war over the soul of the German (Aryan) race. Hence, in time, the “Final
Solution of the Jewish Question” (Die Endlösung des Judenfrage) emerged as the only way
to rid Germany of its domestic and international foes. Genocide was a logical conclusion
for this paranoid mindset. Whether this scenario, in whole or part, can be applied to other
incidents of genocide is questionable. Discussion over whether the onset of a genocide
scenario can be ascribed to an extreme reaction to sociopolitical change has yet to be
resolved. Aspects of such a reaction no doubt can be applied to the analysis of other
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