<nettime> re: No Nazis

["Michael Benson" <michael.benson@pristop.si>]

Reading a couple responses to my mail, including Frank Hartmann's 
remarkably insightful, supportive note -- thanks Frank! -- I realized 
that, since people who can't really read too well generally also can't 
make it past a first sentence, if that far, what I wrote could always be 
misinterpreted by the dull-witted and easily baffled. Frank, if you'd 
managed to spell your way beyond my first sentence or two, with the help 
of a dictionary -- that's d-i-c-t-i-o-n-a-r-y -- you'd get to the 
following:

My strong view is that Serbia will never recover its balance and the 
possibility of returning to something like normality unless it hands 
over Mladic, Karadzic, Milosevic, and the other mass murderers (Seselj, 
for example).

(No number of mass murderers given. But it's in the nature of mass 
murder that it takes more than four.) And:

But Serbia will never really recover until it becomes candid with itself 
about the extent of its willing complicity in his madness. In that 
sense, it's a similar situation to the one facing Germany in 1945.

Personally, I'm not someone who believes that, if Hitler had never been 
born, Germany would still have found a way to kill six million Jews. But 
tracing the murderous impulse and ideological mechanisms necessary to 
transmit it to an entire nations back to his leadership doesn't excuse 
the tens of thousands who not only followed orders, but took the lead in 
finding multiple ways to kill that many human beings. (It also doesn't 
take away the question of collective responsibility for those who looked 
the other way -- but anyone who followed that thread last summer I guess 
already knows my views on that.) While the same goes for the behavior of 
the Serbian nation in the last decade, I didn't really feel like this 
was the time or place to dwell on that, given that major step forward 
has just been taken, it seems, in Belgrade.

To repeat: a celebration's in order.

Cheers,
MB

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