The results of this pseudospeciation — the denigration of an enemy, or scapegoat, as something less than human, a lower species of animal — which cannot be turned on and off at will, linger with a society interminably, poisoning it and limiting its ability to assume responsibility for its fate, or to create an harmonious nation.

Nowhere has this phenomenon of pseudospeciation and blame been more vitriolic and corrosive than in the attacks by Tsarist and then Stalinist Russia, and by Germany, and German allies during the 20th Century (in particular), and by some Muslim societies in the 20th and 21st centuries against the Jews; and by Germany, Croatia, and others against the Serbs in the 20th Century. What is significant is that the nation which uses hate and pseudospeciation as a principal pillar ofits state policy inevitably suffers as a result.

The fact that the German-led Axis lost World War II was in no small measure due to its anti-Semitic vitriol, which diverted vast amounts of its focus, funds, and forces away from fighting the war. The delay in getting German forces onto the Russian Front can be laid directly at the German-Croation program of extermination aimed at the Jews, Serbs, and Romapopulations of the Balkans, for example.

And while the German defeat enabled a de-nazification of Germany after World War II, the collapse of the nazi puppetstate of Croatia into a post-World War II communist state did not allow for de-nazification and for post-war Yugoslavia (and particularly its Croatian republic) to take responsibility for its racebased extermination policies. Thus Croatia of the 21st Century still cannot reconcile itself to the acts of the wartime Ustaše, or even the revived Ustaše of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.

In 1997, however, a remarkable event took place at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, New York: a conference on Jasenovac and the Holocaust in Yugoslavia. The conference used the name of Jasenovac — the main Ustaše concentration camp in the Balkans — to represent literally all of the thousand-plus extermination sites in Yugoslavia. What was remarkable about the conference was its objectivity in bringing together divergent views, testimony from survivors, and great scholarship. But mostly, because it occurred in 1997, when vilification of the victims — the Serbs — had been revived, largely by the Croatians who nurtured the Ustaše legacy, as well as by the US Clinton Administration, which supported that legacy, by default, in order to achieve domestic political gains in the US.

I had ample opportunity on several occasions to walk the melancholy groundsand forests of the main Ustaše-nazi death camp at Jasenovac, in what is now the Republica Srpska part of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and wrote of it subsequently.

To see the publication, in 2006, of thebook Jasenovac and the Holocaust in Yugoslavia, based on the 1997 conference papers and transcripts, was profoundly satisfying. Just to read the extensive introduction by Prof. Barry M. Lituchy is profoundly moving and important. Lituchy was responsible for raising the idea of a conference on Jasenovac, and acted as a key organizer of the event in1997. And he used great scholarship and balance in bringing together all of the papers of the event, even to show the diversity of opinions, particularly as they relate to the numbers of dead at the Balkan death camps run by the nazi forces (the Wehrmacht and SS) and their more zealous puppets, the Croatian Ustaše, which was modeled on the SS.

Despite the controversy over actual numbers of Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies killed in the Balkans during World War II, it seems clear that a figure of more than 600,000 (and possibly considerably more) died in the 240 square kilometers or so of territory which comprised the Jasenovac complex of camps. But there were more than 1,000 killing camps or sites across Bosnia-Herzegovina alone. And, significantly, it was in Belgrade where the Germans experimented with the whole process of killing prisoners with poisonous gas; it was here that the nazi concentration camps and the exterminations of Jews known as the “Final Solution” began.

All of this is with us today, and caused the violent break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. As Barry Lituchy noted in his Introduction: “Jasenovac is in the blood and marrow of the peoples of the Balkans; it defines who they are and who their children will become for following generations. In the name of ‘Bratstvo I Jedinstvo’ (Brotherhood and Unity), Tito’s Yugoslavia failed to come to grips with the legacy of Jasenovac and the Holocaust. It failed to denazify the country.”

The French Parliament in October 2006 passed a law to make it an offence to deny the existence of Turkish genocide against the Armenians. It should equally be a criminal offence for anyone to disregard this important book. Jasenovac and the Holocaust in Yugoslavia has the heartbreaking quality of a modestly-declaimed tragedy reflecting so many diverse voices and witnesses. It is eminently readable, for all its scholarly and strategic value.

Actions such as the denial of the holocaust at Jasenovac, and the use of racist strategies generally — against Jews, Muslims, Serbs, whomever — contain the foundation of the destruction and failure of those who practice them.

Source: Gregory Copley
published in Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy.