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Authors: Chris Hedges
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outwards like concentric circles. These acts, unrecognized at the time, make it impossible to condemn, legally or morally, an entire people. They serve as reminders that we all have a will of our own, a will that is independent of the state or the nationalist cause. Most important, once the war is over, these people make it hard to brand an entire nation or an entire people as guilty.
âI do not understand,â wrote Primo Levi. âI cannot tolerate the fact that a man should be judged not for what he is but because of the group to which he happens to belong.â 3
But these acts also remind us that in wartime most people are unwilling to risk discomfort, censure, or violence to help neighbors. There is a frightening indifference and willful blindness, adesire to believe the nationalist myth because it brands those outside a nation or ethnic group with traits and vices that cannot be eradicated. Because they are the other, because they are not us, they are guilty. Such indifference, such acceptance of nationalist self-glorification, turns many into silent accomplices.
To those who swallow the nationalist myth, life is transformed. The collective glorification permits people to abandon their usual preoccupation with the petty concerns of daily life. They can abandon even self-preservation in the desire to see themselves as players in a momentous historical drama. This vision is accepted even at the expense of self-annihilation. Life in wartime becomes theater. All are actors. Leaders, against the backdrop of war, look heroic, noble. Pilots who bail out of planes shot down by the enemy and who make their way back home play cameo roles. The state, as we saw in the Persian Gulf War or Afghanistan, transforms war into a nightly television show. The generals, who are no more interested in candor than they were in Vietnam, have at least perfected the appearance of candor. And the press has usually been more than willing to play the dupe as long as the ratings are good.
The daily wartime episodes are central to the nationalist vision. The carefully choreographed performances come to define and make up the body politic. The lines between real entertainment and political entertainment blur and finally vanish. The world, as we see it in wartime, becomes high drama. It is romanticized. A moral purpose is infused into the trivial and the commonplace. And we, who yesterday felt maligned, alienated, and ignored, are part of a nation of self-appointed agents of the divine will. We await our chance to walk on stage.
During the first protest movement against MiloÅ¡eviÄ in the winter of 1998, a time when nationalism should have been discredited,I visited one of the faculties occupied by the students who sought MiloÅ¡eviÄâs removal. I arrived at the front door of the Philosophy Department at Belgrade University to be stopped by several curt young men with tags on their jackets identifying them as âsecurity.â
Students inside who attempted to speak to me were told by the security detail that only âthe committeeâ had the right to make statements. And when Jack Lang, former minister of culture in France, arrived at the building to express his support for the student protesters, he was escorted by young men in green fatigue jackets to a room where he was declared âan enemy of the Serbsâ and ordered to leave.
Lang had stumbled unwittingly on the virulent Serbian nationalism that colored the anti-government protests. The incident highlighted the problem that changing Serbian society did not lie in overturning the rule of one man, but in transforming a country that had come to see racist remarks as acceptable and had learned to express itself in the language of hate and nationalist crusades. The opposition to MiloÅ¡eviÄ came from those who felt he had sold out the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia. There was no repentance.
âStudents, professors, and many Serbs have simply switched their
âI do not understand,â wrote Primo Levi. âI cannot tolerate the fact that a man should be judged not for what he is but because of the group to which he happens to belong.â 3
But these acts also remind us that in wartime most people are unwilling to risk discomfort, censure, or violence to help neighbors. There is a frightening indifference and willful blindness, adesire to believe the nationalist myth because it brands those outside a nation or ethnic group with traits and vices that cannot be eradicated. Because they are the other, because they are not us, they are guilty. Such indifference, such acceptance of nationalist self-glorification, turns many into silent accomplices.
To those who swallow the nationalist myth, life is transformed. The collective glorification permits people to abandon their usual preoccupation with the petty concerns of daily life. They can abandon even self-preservation in the desire to see themselves as players in a momentous historical drama. This vision is accepted even at the expense of self-annihilation. Life in wartime becomes theater. All are actors. Leaders, against the backdrop of war, look heroic, noble. Pilots who bail out of planes shot down by the enemy and who make their way back home play cameo roles. The state, as we saw in the Persian Gulf War or Afghanistan, transforms war into a nightly television show. The generals, who are no more interested in candor than they were in Vietnam, have at least perfected the appearance of candor. And the press has usually been more than willing to play the dupe as long as the ratings are good.
The daily wartime episodes are central to the nationalist vision. The carefully choreographed performances come to define and make up the body politic. The lines between real entertainment and political entertainment blur and finally vanish. The world, as we see it in wartime, becomes high drama. It is romanticized. A moral purpose is infused into the trivial and the commonplace. And we, who yesterday felt maligned, alienated, and ignored, are part of a nation of self-appointed agents of the divine will. We await our chance to walk on stage.
During the first protest movement against MiloÅ¡eviÄ in the winter of 1998, a time when nationalism should have been discredited,I visited one of the faculties occupied by the students who sought MiloÅ¡eviÄâs removal. I arrived at the front door of the Philosophy Department at Belgrade University to be stopped by several curt young men with tags on their jackets identifying them as âsecurity.â
Students inside who attempted to speak to me were told by the security detail that only âthe committeeâ had the right to make statements. And when Jack Lang, former minister of culture in France, arrived at the building to express his support for the student protesters, he was escorted by young men in green fatigue jackets to a room where he was declared âan enemy of the Serbsâ and ordered to leave.
Lang had stumbled unwittingly on the virulent Serbian nationalism that colored the anti-government protests. The incident highlighted the problem that changing Serbian society did not lie in overturning the rule of one man, but in transforming a country that had come to see racist remarks as acceptable and had learned to express itself in the language of hate and nationalist crusades. The opposition to MiloÅ¡eviÄ came from those who felt he had sold out the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia. There was no repentance.
âStudents, professors, and many Serbs have simply switched their
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