The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

the good of courage 209offered no resistance to probes, took up static positions easily evaded by theSerbs, who it appears from their evasions were afraid to bring down thewrath of the United Nations by killing Dutchmen on a UN mission. Thenthe Dutch accepted the Serbian proposal to “screen” for “war criminals” theBosnian men and adolescent boys still in Srebrenica, whether armed soldiersor merely refugees. Most of the Bosnian men with weapons and withhostile intent had in fact already escaped the enclave. 27 The remaining,defenseless Bosnian males were handed over to the Serbs, and were allpromptly shot, though only some of the Dutch soldiers, as I mentioned,were aware of this activity, about which many later received psychologicalcounseling. 28The Institute for War Documentation, which had been set up long beforeto give a balanced accounting of Dutch heroism and cowardice, resistanceand collaboration in the Second World War, believes that the Dutch generalwas “forced” to accept the Serbian deal. Hand over the men and boys, theSerbs are said to have offered in effect, and we will leave the women and(small) children alone. The frame for the story recounted by the historiansof the institute is a bourgeois prudence, a utilitarian calculation of cost andbenefit, some thousands of men and boys—whose fate was not suspected, thereport implies—in exchange for many more thousands of women and smallchildren.The trouble is that the context was not one of enforceable quasi contractsin the flower market of Alsmeer or the offices of Royal Dutch Shell. It was acontext of peasant/aristocratic warfare, not bourgeois business. The Dutchforce left the battlefield without fighting, having got a “promise” that thewomen and children would not be disturbed, a promise by someone who hadrepeatedly broken his promises. On this occasion the Serbs did not actuallykill the women and small children. But the outcome does not justify theclaimed assumption at the time that the deal would hold. The Serbs hadshown what they were capable of. The “deal” looks a lot like an excuse for savingthe skins of the Dutch in exchange for putting those of the seven thousandmen and many thousands of women and children in mortal danger.Why indeed did the Dutch force not fight and die, as was its aristocraticduty? Why does an army—a part of bourgeois society sworn to puttingitself aristocratically in harm’s way, like firefighters running up burningtwin towers or police exchanging gunfire with criminals—not exhibitCourage? The report from the institute offers the practical, Prudent reason: