[Marxism] Diana Johnstone: The Watch Dogs Of War

["Gilles d'Aymery" <aymery@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Peter Handke And The Watch Dogs Of War

by Diana Johnstone

(Swans - June 19, 2006)  Last April 8, the director of the Comédie-
Française, Marcel Bozonnet, announced his decision to cancel a planned
Paris production of Peter Handke's play, Voyage au pays sonore ou l'art
de la question. The cancellation was in reaction to a short item in the
Nouvel Observateur, attacking the Austrian playwright for having been
present when Slobodan Milosevic was buried in Pozarevac, Serbia, three
weeks earlier. The item fancifully described Handke as "waving a Serbian
flag" and "approving the Srebrenica massacre and other crimes committed
in the name of purification."

In fact, Handke stood discreetly in an icy rain among the hundreds of
thousands of people who quietly paid tribute less, probably, to the
former President of Serbia and of Yugoslavia than to the prisoner who
died in The Hague before he could conclude his surprisingly effective and
convincing defense.

The Soviet press used to start many affirmations with the expression,
"everyone knows." Today, thanks to Western media, "everyone knows" all
about former Yugoslavia, even if they know nothing. In France, "everyone
knows" because they read about it in Le Monde, whose Belgrade
correspondent, Florence Hartmann, has gone on to be spokeswoman for the
prosecution at the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia in The
Hague. The same media that had already convicted Milosevic ignored most
of the trial except for complaints by the Prosecution that Milosevic was
impeding justice by being ill and insisting on defending himself. Even
his dying was treated in the media as a dirty trick. Only those who
watched the proceedings on Serbian television or on the web could know
that the main accusation against him, of masterminding a "joint criminal
enterprise" to create a "Greater Serbia," had collapsed by last August,
and that no evidence whatever linked him to the Srebrenica massacre.

The defendant's death saved the ICTY judges from having to render a
verdict. The media has enthusiastically done the job for them.

Handke explained that what moved him to go to Pozarevac was precisely the
stereotyped language of the media that "knew everything," endlessly
recycling words like "the butcher of Belgrade"... Handke's one-minute
statement simply suggested that if "the world," meaning the media, "knew
everything," he did not. He hoped for a more thoughtful, questioning
language. (1)

Far from "approving" the Srebrenica massacre, Handke has described it as
an "infernal vengeance, eternal shame for the Bosnian Serbs responsible."
(2) He has simply tried to put it in context, and that is considered
sacrilege. "Srebrenica" is not an event to be studied and put into
context but a sacred cult. It must simply be ritually deplored as
"genocide" and "the worst massacre since World War II." Anything else is
stigmatized as an "insult to the victims" and a form of "revisionism" or
"negationism."

Now, history involves a constant process of revision. But today what is
implied by "revisionism" is "Holocaust denial," which is a crime in a
dozen European countries. By analogy with the Holocaust, history of even
such recent events as the war in Bosnia is being replaced by "the duty of
memory" which means reverent repetition of the designated victims'
version of the past.

[Full: http://www.swans.com/library/art12/dianaj03.html ]

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