[Nettime-bold] re: No Nazis

Reading a couple responses to my mail, including Frank Hartmann's remarkably insightful, supportive note -- thanks Frank! -- I realized that, since people who can't really read too well generally also can't make it past a first sentence, if that far, what I wrote could always be misinterpreted by the dull-witted and easily baffled. Frank, if you'd managed to spell your way beyond my first sentence or two, with the help of a dictionary -- that's d-i-c-t-i-o-n-a-r-y -- you'd get to the following:

My strong view is that Serbia will never recover its balance and the possibility of returning to something like normality unless it hands over Mladic, Karadzic, Milosevic, and the other mass murderers (Seselj, for example).

(No number of mass murderers given. But it's in the nature of mass murder that it takes more than four.) And:

But Serbia will never really recover until it becomes candid with itself about the extent of its willing complicity in his madness. In that sense, it's a similar situation to the one facing Germany in 1945.

Personally, I'm not someone who believes that, if Hitler had never been born, Germany would still have found a way to kill six million Jews. But tracing the murderous impulse and ideological mechanisms necessary to transmit it to an entire nations back to his leadership doesn't excuse the tens of thousands who not only followed orders, but took the lead in finding multiple ways to kill that many human beings. (It also doesn't take away the question of collective responsibility for those who looked the other way -- but anyone who followed that thread last summer I guess already knows my views on that.) While the same goes for the behavior of the Serbian nation in the last decade, I didn't really feel like this was the time or place to dwell on that, given that major step forward has just been taken, it seems, in Belgrade.

To repeat: a celebration's in order.

Cheers,