Balkanized America

I was thrilled to learn this week that the Holocaust Museum Houston is adding my photo of Mevludin Orić to their collection, as part of their effort to educate the public about the Holocaust. (The photo appeared in my New Yorker article "The Legacy of Srebrenica, Twenty Years Later.") Orić's story is extreme—he dodged a bullet in front of a Serbian firing squad and played dead while thousands of Muslim men and teenage boys were gunned down around him—but the lessons from Bosnia's war are timeless.

Nationalism is dangerous. People who inflame it, or condone those who do, are playing with fire. Today in the U.S., one of our two political parties is led by nationalist types who spread hatred and lies, while attacking the institutions of democracy. They are ripping apart our collective ability to agree on truth, without which we cannot hope to address challenges like climate change. It’s no hyperbole to say the fate of the planet may hinge on our ability to confront this madness.

I wish more Americans could meet Bosnians like Orić, whose society was ripped apart by nationalism, and whose relatives were raped or tortured or killed by men who’d been led to see them as the Other. I’m thinking especially of journalists and TV pundits who think of themselves as “centrists,” as above the fray of partisan politics. I imagine them lecturing Bosnians about how much they lament the region’s “divisiveness,” how “both sides” were to blame for the violence. How Serbia’s Slobodan Milošević might have been reckless, but was responding to the legitimate fears of average Serbs. I would like to witness the moment when the stare they received in response sent a chill down their spine.