Killings began with cultural elites to erase communal memory
Evidence
When a town fell to the Serb army, the first inhabitants to be targeted were intellectual and cultural leaders: religious authorities, teachers, lawyers, doctors, business people, artists, poets, and musicians. The object of such “elite-cide” was to destroy the cultural memory of the Bosnian Muslims and Bosnians who would live with them. Gradually, acts of cruelty and massacre took on an interior momentum and logic of their own. In many cases, the Serb population was alerted to leave a village before the killing began. — Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 97
Categorization
- SEED: ‘Elite-cide’ as a first-strike genocidal technique could anchor an essay on how states erase a people by decapitating its memory-keepers first.
- XREF: connects to: Rebuilding culture after mass murder is itself barbaric negation. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 69; The Rosenberg executions alarmed European intellectuals as a foretaste of fascism — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 770; Killing community leaders preceded mass extermination across Ottoman lands — Gregory H. Stanton, Ten Stages of Genocide, 19