This Time We Knew

by Cushman, Thomas; Mestrovic, Stjepan G.

• ISBN13: 9780814715345
• ISBN10: 0814715346
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1996-10-01
• Publisher: New York Univ Pr

Summary

We didn't know. For half a century, Western politicians and intellectuals have so explained away their inaction in the face of genocide in World War II. In stark contrast, Western observers today face a daily barrage of information and images, from CNN, the Internet, and newspapers about the parties and individuals responsible for the current Balkan War and crimes against humanity. The stories, often accompanied by video or pictures of rape, torture, mass graves, and ethnic cleansing, available almost instantaneously, do not allow even the most uninterested viewer to ignore the grim reality of genocide. And yet, while information abounds, so do rationalizations for non-intervention in Balkan affairs - the threshold of real genocide has yet to be reached in Bosnia; all sides are equally guilty; Islamic fundamentalism in Bosnia is a threat to the West; it will only end when they all tire of killing each other - to name but a few.InThis Time We Knew, Thomas Cushman and Stjepan G. Mestrovic have put together a collection of critical, reflective, essays that offer detailed sociological, political, and historical analyses of western responses to the war. This volume punctures once and for all common excuses for Western inaction.This Time We Knewfurther reveals the reasons why these rationalizations have persisted and led to the West's failure to intercede, in the face of incontrovertible evidence, in the most egregious crimes against humanity to occur in Europe since World War II. Contributors to the volume include Kai Erickson, Jean Baudrillard, Mark Almond, David Riesman, Daniel Kofman, Brendan Simms, Daniele Conversi, Brad Kagan Blitz, James J. Sadkovich, and Sheri Fink.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1	(38)
Thomas Cushman
Stjepan G. Mestrovic
The Complicity of Serbian Intellectuals in Genocide in the 1990s	39	(26)
Philip J. Cohen
Bosnia: The Lessons of History?	65	(14)
Brendan Simms
No Pity for Sarajevo; The West's Serbianization; When the West Stands In for the Dead	79	(11)
Jean Baudrillard
Israel and the War in Bosnia	90	(38)
Daniel Kofman
The Politics of Indifference at the United Nations and Genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia	128	(35)
Michael N. Barnett
The West Side Story of the Collapse of Yugoslavia and the Wars in Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina	163	(24)
Slaven Letica
Serbia's War Lobby: Diaspora Groups and Western Elites	187	(57)
Brad K. Blitz
Moral Relativism and Equidistance in British Attitudes to the War in the Former Yugoslavia	244	(38)
Daniele Conversi
The Former Yugoslavia, the End of the Nuremberg Era, and the New Barbarism	282	(22)
James J. Sadkovich
War and Ethnic Identity in Eastern Europe: Does the Post-Yugoslav Crisis Portend Wider Chaos?	304	(9)
Liah Greenfeld
The Anti-Genocide Movement on American College Campuses: A Growing Response to the Balkan War	313	(37)
Sheri Fink
Western Responses to the Current Balkan War	350	(9)
David Riesman
Appendix 1 A Definition of Genocide	359	(1)
Appendix 2 Text of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide	360	(3)
Appendix 3 Indictments by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia	363	(40)
Contributors	403	(2)
Index	405