Cultural destruction was performed to make later denial plausible
Evidence
The armies of the Serb and Croat religious nationalists targeted Bosnian culture, monuments, cultural leaders, teachers, and students, so that someday advocates of religious apartheid in Bosnia could declare: “There is no Bosnian culture.” People looking at the parking lots where mosques and churches and art museums and music schools and libraries and manuscript collections once stood would say: “I guess Kissinger was right.” The argument then becomes plausible. As the mayor of the newly “cleansed” and ioo percent pure Serb Orthodox city of Zvornik said, after all of the city’s mosques had been dynamited, “There never were any mosques in Zvornik.” — Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 384
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: The insight that violence is retroactively justified by destroying the evidence of the victim’s existence — the denial is produced, not just spoken — is paradigm-level. The Zvornik mayor’s sentence is chilling and load-bearing.
- XREF: The manufactured-after-the-fact denial echoes how colonial ‘empty land’ narratives erased prior inhabitants — connects to the South Africa and Native American parallels in the next paragraphs. — connects to: Rebuilding culture after mass murder is itself barbaric negation. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 69; Perceived feasibility explains which historical harms are actually repaired — Nyla R. Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje (eds.), Collective Guilt: International…, 2129; Denial is a reliable predictor of further genocidal massacres — Gregory H. Stanton, Ten Stages of Genocide, 16
Related
- Nationalist destruction of culture ironically proves that culture existed (similarity 0.84)
- The destruction campaign attempted to erase an existing Bosnian culture (similarity 0.84)
- Rebuilding culture after mass murder is itself barbaric negation. (similarity 0.82)
- Physical destruction of mosques enabled wholesale rewriting of local history by nationalist mayors. (similarity 0.80)