| Steve Tesich, Oscar winning movie
director:
A letter
The Editor, The New York
Times
Hanna Arendt,
an expert on totalitarian regimes and totalitarian mindsets,
warned us a long time ago that a time could come when not only
would philosophical truths be considered irrelevant but
factual
truths as well. Names and dates. Who did what to whom and when.
When facts would cease to exist as facts and be replaced by
opinion.
We have arrived
at such a time. Events in the world are no longer judged by
hard evidence or impartiality to the true causes which gave rise
to them. Even the normal journalistic standards of trying, merely
trying, to get the whole story have been discarded as too
cumbersome, too demanding. What has replaced the tradition of
truth seeking, both philosophical and factual, is a kind of lazy
drama critic's response to the events on the world stage. In this
new way of doing things, events themselves have no intrinsic value
in determining who is right or who is wrong, who is guilty or who
is innocent. It's all much simpler than that. It's all a matter of
who in our opinion seems right. Who moves us.
The Croatians move people. It
doesn't matter at all that the
first victims of atrocities which triggered this tragic civil
war in the former Yugoslavia were, in fact, Serbians. There was no
outrage in America nor in The New York Times when the Croatians
were killing Serbians, burning their homes, raping their women. It
was a non-event when thousands of Serbians fled in horror from
their former homes in Croatia to Belgrade in search of survival.
Nor was it an event when those Serbians who could not flee to
safety were trapped within the resurrected Croatian Fascist state.
No. The event came into being only when the Serbians from Serbia
came to their rescue. But since nobody really cared about the
victims of Croatian atrocities, coming to the aid of those victims
was seen as aggression.
Once you ignore the facts you can
call an event anything you please.
Once you have decided that
Croatians are "freedom-loving people" (who isn't?) then you can
ignore the fact that this Free
Croatia is a Fascist state where the freedom of the press does
not exist, where full citizenship is only granted to Catholic
Croatians who can certify the purity of their ancestry. The racial
laws governing citizenship in Croatia are not much different from
the racial laws in Hitler's Germany. When the Serbian minority
fled in horror, and when the refugees from Croatia crowded the
streets of Belgrade was this not an example of "ethnic cleansing?"
Why is ethnic cleansing in deed not as repugnant as ethnic
cleansing in name! Is the fact of it not enough to warrant
revulsion? Do events have to be labelled before we can respond to
them? And when Mr. Tudjman, the president of Croatia, wrote in his
own version of his own Mein
Kampf that genocide should not be discounted as a political
option why did not the world react with disgust? Was it too late
by then since by then we had decided that Croatians were
"freedom-loving people"? Was it too hard to simply inquire:
Freedom for whom?
The warning that Cyrus Vance issued
against recognition of Croatia as an independent state is another
fact. He warned that if Croatia were recognized then the civil war
between Serbians and Croatians would not only spread to Bosnia but
become a far bloodier war of nightmarish consequences. Not only
was the fact of his warning ignored, but now the fact that he ever
issued such a warning is ignored. The fact that he has been proven
right in his prediction is something we hold against him. The man
has been pilloried and vilified for being right. In the age of
opinions the man of facts is seen as inconvenient at best or even
as potentially a sinister figure.
Why is the fact forgotten that the
countries of the European Community were against recognizing the
independence of Croatia for precisely the reasons Mr. Vance
mentioned? And why is it forgotten that the first diplomatic act
of unified Germany was to apply economic pressure and to turn the
screws on its European neighbors until they reversed themselves
and did as Germany bid them by recognizing Croatia? If there ever
was a repetition of the appeasement in Munich was it not
this?
And if it's not treacherous, isn't
it at least interesting as a fact that the first diplomatic act of
a Unified Germany was to force recognition of its former Fascist
ally and by doing so to seek dismemberment of one of the few
countries in Europe which stood up to Hitler in World War II? When
the causes of this terrible civil war are discussed, why is
Germany's name never mentioned? Does the appeasement go on and on?
Why is the meeting in Bonn in 1989 never mentioned, when
representatives from Slovenia and Croatia were invited to Germany
and offered economic and political favors in return for their
secession from Yugoslavia? Why is Bonn totally innocent and
Belgrade totally guilty when facts paint a much more complicated
picture.
What purpose does it serve to keep
on repeating that the Serbians have taken over 70% of the land in
Bosnia and never mention a prior fact that before there were any
hostilities in that region 64% of the land belonged to the
Serbians. Historically, in that part of the world, the Moslems
were merchants and the Serbians farmers and peasants. They owned
that land, not through usurpation of what was not theirs, but
rather by working the land for generation after generation. What
harm can it do to include these facts?
What keeps us
from wanting to know the truth? Has it become too hard for us to
keep it in focus? Is it much easier to simply divide the
world in our minds, as we once divided it in fact, into ths
simplistic notions of good guys and bad guys? Into worthy victims
and unworthy victims.
When factual
truths disappear as points of reference for our decisions and
judgements, when we lose our regard for truth, we lose the ties
which hold civilizations together. And when we dare suggest
that there are unworthy victims, we are contributing to violence
in an already overly violent world. It can come back to haunt us.
Those whose sufferings are not worthy of our attention have
nothing left but to strike out in blind rage and make victims of
us all.
In the Monday, February 22nd
edition of the New York Times, there was a story about Goran
Ivanisevic in the Sports section. The placement of the story
seemed to fit. Mr. Ivanisevic is a Croatian
tennis player, a young millionaire, who "keeps an expensive
home in Monte Carlo, with a Mercedes convertible in the
garage."
However, toward the end of the
story and highlighted in bold print (an editorial decision, I
assume) by the words 'Bang! Bang!', I read a description of Mr.
Ivanisevic learning to shoot a machine gun. Here it is in his own
words:
"They showed me
how to shoot, just for fun. They let me shoot a machine gun. It
was tough to control, but, oh, it was a nice feeling - all the
bullets coming out. I was thinking it would be nice to have some
Serbs in front of me."
The key word
here is "some". Some Serbs. Not any Serbs in particular, but
some. Young or old, sick or healthy, men or women, innocent or
guilty, it doesn't seem to matter to Mr. Ivanisevic. Have
we not heard this inhuman call to murder, now reduced to
recreational murder on a practice range, for too long? Do we
really want to give encouragement to those in our own country who
also think how nice it would be to kill "some" Jews, or "some"
blacks, or "some" gays, or "some" cops, or "some" whites, or just
"some" people period. When any of us are relegated to unworthy
victims it is alright to kill then we all become "some" in
somebody's eyes.
That such a sentiment expressed by
a tennis player could appear in the Sports section of The New York
Times is a chilling mind-numbing example of the failure of
standards in our time. Without the pursuit of
truth, there can be no standards and calls to murder are seen as a
sports story.
What Hanna Arendt never envisioned
is that you can have a totalitarian atmosphere without
totalitarian regimes where truth, philosophical and factual, is no
longer suppressed but simply doesn't matter
anymore.
Steve Tesich
February 24, 1993
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Last revised: March 25,
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