The Truth About Violence

I read an article on a Serb sniper who has killed over 300 people in Sarajevo since the start of the war. He says he doesn't know what he'll do when the war is over, and that his wife and child have left him, and that all he knows is to kill, and that there is no place for him here on this planet anymore. He didn't hate the people he killed. Before the war he was an athlete and liked women.

There is no doubt that Serb nationalists, Serb authorities, the Serb army, and Serbian society are most responsible for the war and the crimes, and there is no doubt that innocent Muslim victims are among the most numerous. I have heard Serbs say that the accusations are exaggerated. The laws of morality are such that if the accusations are exaggerated, then the unjust ones will be disregarded and any accusation will serve as an excuse and consolation to the guilty; if, on the other hand they are insufficient, there is no excuse for the additional injustice done to the victim. There is no need to fear injustice towards the guilty, it can be rectified. There is no excuse for the injustice towards the victims.

I don't know when exactly during the war I became aware that political explanations were ridiculously inadequate for the degree of violence. I counted the causes: mentality, the Communist heritage, the secret police, a pampered army, Serb nationalism, a corrupt intelligentsia, a perfidious bureaucracy, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, television, folklore, the moral and intellectual crises, the Greater Serbia project, a set of incredible circumstances,and when all this is added together and the explosive power of such a mechanism built into the head of a weak person, it is still difficult to understand or find an explanation for the coldblooded slitting of throats, the shoeing of people, the dismembering of children and girls! Or rather, I see that all these explanations are childish and that we are grabbing at them in order that we might remain within framework of language and reason. This is not reason but a superstitious divining in order to avoid facing the fact that crime and sadistic behavior are our only reality, the most authentic expression of our being, and perhaps, as a psychopath and mass killer admitted, ``our only happiness.''

I remember that until the very start of the war, when I visited various parts of Yugoslavia, I was surprised by the ever-present fear which at times was close to being an obsession: may there be no war, may there be no killing! The people were kinder and more hospitable to travellers, as if they were afraid of what they felt within themselves. This led me to believe that there would be no war; I should have realized that this irrational foreboding was a warning that the war, when it came, would be terrible.

Those lies spread by nationalists on returning Serbia's dignity, their secret intentions and underhand ambitions, and their state plans none of them help in understanding this war. Therefore, the cause of the war does not lie in them. This quantity of violence is locked up in itself, no thoughts penetrate it or escape it, it is its own cause and goal.

Perhaps things were different sometime and somewhere, but in our times we are just witnesses that the national feeling is a disease and not a human identity. To be a Serb today is not a nationality but a symptom.

So much of what we call high politics, various parties and parliaments, demands made by various authorities, threats, promises and negotiations are just things that Serbian and Western politicians continue to practice. On the one hand gangsters and killers on the other cowards and bon vivants. Public opinion in the West sees to what extent they are removed from reality, while the politicians themselves seem to be surprised by the smallness of their shortcomings and the enormity of the crime. It is more difficult to determine what public opinion in Serbia feels, but it is possible that a similar feeling lies in the background of the pathological blockades in which the Serbs are locked.

What is there about the citizens of Sarajevo, Mostar, Foca, Tuzla, Gorazde, etc. which made them an irresistible target for guns? And an even more difficult moment, what is it in the consciousness of their killers that made them hate the skin, hands, legs, internal organs, breath, looks, movements, moans, pleas and silent trembling of their fellow human beings? And what is it that makes entire nations approve the butchering of innocent people, and prevents them from seeing and knowing, and stops them from protesting? Is it possible that man is a sadistic animal in whom absolute egoism reigns supreme above all other feelings? Or are we blundering headlong towards punishment in search of our lost humanity? But if man dreams of grace and redemption, then he is just an even more disgusting fool and more corrupt than his deeds.

Marx, like many other modern thinkers, glorified violence, or at least believed that it is only through violence that man and mankind can find themselves. Herein lies the powerful engine of Communism and nationalism. This, however, is an important message carried by modern art: only destruction is authentic, the truth lies in disfigured forms and the explosive strength of energy is the real thing. Perhaps this truth about the spirit, when life becomes a caricature, is expressed as a slaughterhouse? Perhaps the search for strong emotions which are experienced as a banality by a tired civilization, inevitably end in the merry dismembering of those close to one?

I hear that many people have become religious during this war, both among the victims and the killers. I don't understand that. If I had been religious, I would have become an atheist.

Everything is possible, and it is possible that the greatest criminals are subject to some universal laws. But it is necessary to rebel against the Universe, and not just against one's people, or refrain, or feel sorrow, or repent.

But first of all, it is necessary to face the truth within one's self, and this truth will not come via television, but is waiting for each of us in Sarajevo. It is so great that we need not have the slightest illusion that we can run away from it.