“Srebrenica” and the Power of Reason

By Srdja Trifkovic
“Truth and reason are eternal,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to Rev. Samuel Knox in 1810. “They have prevailed. And they will eternally prevail . . . ” Jefferson was wrong. His belief that “Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left to combat it” was naive. As Patrick J. Buchanan proves in a passing reference in his otherwise sound latest column, even men of generally sound understanding and good intentions end up the victims of the disinformation campaigns that pass for media reporting. “In none of the Libyan towns affected by fighting in recent weeks,” Buchanan writes, “has anything like the massacre in the Ivory Coast taken place, let alone Srebrenica.” It is noteworthy that “Srebrenica” is used here not as a geographic location that needs to be preceded by a noun (“the massacre in…”) but as a stand-alone term that denotes horror, on par with “Auschwitz,” or “Katyn,” or “Hiroshima.” “Srebrenica” used in this sense has established itself as a myth based on a lie. As the introduction to an enlightening recent article points out, we need to transcend the routine banalities of the Srebrenica debate which turns mostly on numbers; but the very term “debate” is rejected by those who should be on one of the two sides in that debate: They deny as a matter of principle that there is anything to debate. So many thousand prisoners were executed and a distinguished international judicial forum of unquestioned authority has found it to constitute genocide. (These are the “routine banalities” that define the parameters of Srebrenica as an issue at least, if not as a debate.) According to our hypothetical debating partners there is nothing to debate because everything is settled and clear. Reasonable people with no ethno-religious axe to grind in the Balkan quagmire have long fought such “routine banalities,” including the claim that as many as 8,000 Muslims were killed in cold blood and the systematic misuse of the term “genocide.”
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