The cut-throat gesture made by Ratko Mladic on the opening day of his trial at The Hague sent a frisson of excitement through the press corps. Never mind that it’s now reported that the gesture could have been a demand for a toilet break rather than a threat to the Bosnian Muslims sitting in the gallery (ie. Mladic was saying, “Let’s cut for a minute, I need a leak”). The media still lapped it up, cock-a-hoop that their favourite evil man had done a really evil thing on the first day of his trial for being evil. They had the image they wanted, the image that would further boost the shtick they’ve been performing for 20 years now: the one in which the Serbs play the role of modern-day Nazis who love killing and raping people, and the moral crusaders of the Western media play the role of unimaginably brave witnesses to this Nazi-style nastiness.
The trial of Mladic has nothing to do with “justice for Bosnia”. It is better understood as a cut-price Nuremberg for modern moral crusaders who, lacking a Hess or a Goering, will make do with a Mladic instead. Mladic is a substitute Nazi for self-styled reincarnations of Churchill, those middle-aged bores of the liberal international media who fancy that their brave reporting from Bosnia in the mid-1990s helped to expose that Nazism was alive and well and living in the DNA of every Serb man. No mention of Mladic is complete without the deployment of Holocaust-echoing terminology, whether we’re being reminded that he is responsible for “the worst crimes in Europe since the Nazi Holocaust”, or that he is the “architect of genocide”, or that he was hellbent on cleansing, exterminating, wiping out, and so on.
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar