Podcast: Bosnia, False Histories and Fact-Free Politics w/ Edin Hajdarpašić

This is a conversation with Edin Hajdarpašić, associate professor of history at Loyola University Chicago on Bosnia, False Histories and Politics.

He wrote an essay called “What Use Is Fact-Checking Against Fact-Free Politics?” which was the basis for our conversation.

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Edin’s Recommended Books:

Silencing the Past by Michel-Rolph Trouillot

Bosnian Studies: Perspectives from an Emerging Field by Dzeneta Karabegovic and Adna Karamehic-Oates

Beekeeping in the End Times by Larisa Jasarevic

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Transcript via Antidote Zine:

The amount of lying, and indeed the fact of having to invent an alternative world in which Srebrenica or the Holocaust or the Armenian genocide didn’t happen, this total fantasy unhinged from facts, itself shows that facts have a strange resilience that allows them to be reasserted and reestablished. It is a battlefield, if you care about these issues—it is a field of struggle.

Edin Hajdarpašić: My name is Edin Hajdarpašić. I’m a historian; I currently work at Loyola University in Chicago. I studied history of the modern Balkans—nineteenth and twentieth centuries—and have an interest in historical methodology, and broader questions about philosophy of history. One of the things I’ve recently written is an article about the limitations of historians confronting politicians who spread deliberate lies about history. It raises broader question about how we deal with projects that deliberately step outside of evidence-based ideas.

Elia J. Ayoub: The essay is called “What Use Is Fact-checking Against Fact-Free Politics?” and it was published on Public Seminar. Walk us through some of the main ideas; ground us in the conversation.

EH: There’s a short-term context that led me to write this piece, and then there’s some longer-term things I can mention that I was thinking about in the background. As for the short-term, a substantial part of the article is about the current political situation in postwar Bosnia, in the last ten-fifteen years, or maybe since the war ended in 1995.

There have been various threats of secession in Bosnia for several years, off and on. But in November 2021 it came to a pretty stark crisis. In 2021, earlier that year, the top official who was in charge of implementing the Dayton peace accords in Bosnia imposed a new law banning genocide denial in the country. It’s a blanket ban. But it was widely understood that the law would hit Milorad Dodik of the Republika Srpska entity (which I can talk about in a bit—it’s a separate entity that has its own history rooted in the 1990s war).

In an apparent escalation, Dodik—a Serbian nationalist who had been making various threats about secession already—took a couple of concrete steps last year to form separate state institutions and announced that in the next six months he would seek the formation of a separate military; he passed some laws making sure that could happen. Obviously this set off the alarms not only in Bosnia, but Western politicians got involved because the threat to create a new army would potentially provoke more conflict.

Ordinarily, in Washington DC or Brussels or the UN today, nobody really cares about Bosnia. At best it’s an afterthought. But in the fall of 2021, suddenly there were these debates in the UN or in Brussels or in DC about what’s next for Bosnia. “Bosnia on the Brink”—articles with that headline have been printed hundreds of times. That’s when a couple news outlets reached out to me as a historian of the modern Balkans to give an explainer about the crisis. One of the requests specifically asked for a deeper history that explains this conflict.

That’s the short-term occasion for this essay. But it’s not just about last year. Mostly what I try to do is ask broader questions—in this case about the nature of denial, and about the role of history in society. It’s especially important to ask those bigger questions, for us who come from the periphery, from places like Syria or Bosnia or Sudan or Taiwan, and to insist on our stories as world stories: just as relevant as anywhere else in the world.

In European and American media and academia, these kinds of places on the periphery tend to pop up only in times of crisis, when their histories are being spotlighted as different from Western ones. They depart from the assumed norm and appear different somehow—not on the same plane as Western or “global” ones. Syrian intellectuals like Yassin Al Haj Saleh have talked about how American and Western European leftists are happy to lecture about Syria but not engage with Syrians as equals that can say something useful about the world.

I try to raise issues that are rooted in Bosnia but also ask bigger questions about history and politics that can be relevant to America or Ukraine or Turkey. I was happy to see that the essay was translated into Turkish. As a historian I became concerned that historians were being expected, in a time of crisis, to either provide a deeper history of crises that sometimes have shallower roots, or to fact-check what some statesman said about history. That’s what I wanted to think through and push back against in this essay, and ask what the power relations are in this.

EA: You mention “On the Brink”—there are also many “Lebanon on the Brink” headlines. It’s become a joke among folks I know: If this is “on the brink,” how does it get worse than this? We’ve been “on the brink” for years and years now.

An easy response to your essay might be, What’s wrong with fact-checking fact-free politics? Isn’t that how we challenge fact-free politics? By providing facts? There’s still this idea in a lot of circles—I hover around the climate activist world and in recent years there’s been more understanding that it’s not enough to tell people global warming is real and This is why it’s happening and This is what we must do. There are other things that need to be taken into consideration. Because for the most part people know the general gist of things. It’s not a matter of They need to be presented with information to therefore be empowered.

That’s part of it, but can you make the case that it’s not enough? You mentioned it already, but let’s get into it a bit more. How does this get used in dishonest ways?

EH: The last thing you said is one of the things I’m thinking about. The essay is not trying to present a solution—it is more about trying to pinpoint a problem. The problem that I see is that when there are politicians that are in charge of making policies saying We’re just not sure about the science; there are different indications that maybe it’s not as bad as scientists are saying; and maybe things are actually getting better in some ways! I think instead of trying to start with that statement and fact-check it, we have to step back and consider the context: we have scientists and historians, whose role is often seen as apolitical or impartial, confronting a person who is explicitly political and has the power to shape laws or pass decrees and do something about this. The very fact that they are not identifying certain facts as “real” or based in evidence is the starting point for our conversation.

When we see politicians saying that climate change is not happening, that is a statement that is false, and we have to label that person as having stepped outside the bounds of evidence-based discourse. We can’t start from the starting point they make, because it doesn’t take into account the power dynamics that we confront either as scientists or as historians. In my case as a historian, I’m not dealing with climate change denial, but genocide denial in Bosnia.

EA: Let me take the climate change example a bit further. This is pretty well understood now, but it’s easy to forget where we stood not that long ago, when there were still people going on TV in American and European media to “debate” climate change: one scientist versus some random person. The argument is: If only we can debunk what they’re saying, maybe we can convince them, and if not them, maybe the people who are listening to them. What that obfuscates is the specific role of the fossil fuel industry in promoting certain discourses. Now we know, because it’s been very well documented. But it was never about whether they personally knew or not. They knew, and they wanted to actively fight back against any efforts to phase them out.

In Bosnia—I will reference what I know most, which is Lebanon, and to a slightly lesser extent Syria. There are situations where I’m asked to explain what’s happening in Lebanon. I’m okay with doing that, that’s part of what I do. But some of the questions make it sound as if what is happening in Lebanon is only happening there, or could only happen there. The funny thing is that I mostly work in English, so I’m familiar enough with the US and UK contexts to comment, and often Americans or Brits don’t see how weird their countries look to many other people.

The main difference is that for the most part they get to tell their own stories, because they have the resources for it, and they get to ignore what other people think of them. At the end of the day, what the average European thinks of the average American doesn’t matter that much, in American politics. But what the average American thinks about Lebanon, if they ever do, can actually impact Lebanon for one reason or another. This is among the many power differences that I can see. It’s not that fact-checking in and of itself doesn’t matter; there are different issues there as well.

Another one I would quickly add is the pace of things. There’s something called the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle—we know how this works: fake news and bullshit spread much faster than you have time to sit down and fact-check, and make sure your fact-check is well-sourced, because they don’t have the same limitations. It becomes an infrastructural problem, with social media and all that.

EH: We could unpack that into a couple of different questions. We can return to this asymmetry between the periphery and places that are seen as exceptional; it also has to do with what I mentioned about Yassin Al Haj Saleh earlier. But first, since you mentioned climate change: it’s not a new connection to make, between Holocaust denial and climate change denial. I remember years ago, George Monbiot wrote an essay making the argument that we had to label climate change deniers what they are, which is deniers, and not “skeptics,” which is their preferred word, or “critical thinkers,” or any of these euphemisms contrarians use as camouflage.

But what I keep thinking, about denial more generally—this comes through often in Holocaust denial, and this is where climate change denial is different. If we think about Holocaust denial the way people like Deborah Lipstadt have talked about it, it’s a movement. It’s not a lone-wolf kind of thing; there’s clearly a coordinated effort; it’s acting out of a position of feeling threatened—it’s in some sense defensive against the establishment of facts. And the true aims of denial are often camouflaged.

The tactics we are familiar with. It’s to sow confusion: It’s a very complex issue; it’s murky; there are a lot of gray areas. There’s a lot of disagreement, and it appears all sides have a kernel of truth to them, so you can’t really say what’s wrong or right, or maybe everybody is a little bit right and a little bit wrong. We know the tactics, but the objectives are often camouflaged. This is what you mentioned about the fossil fuel industry. When politicians lie about climate change, they don’t say that it’s a message sponsored by the fossil fuel industry. That’s what I mean by camouflage.

It’s the same with other forms of denial. Where climate change is different—one of the running threads of this conversation is power relations. In the case of Holocaust denial, or genocide denial in Bosnia, there is a power imbalance in which denialists are acting out of the feeling that their ideology is threatened. Climate change deniers also feel that their ideology is threatened, but the power imbalance is different. They are often the ones who are in charge of states, in charge of corporations, in charge of massive efforts to preserve the current way that we are living and exploiting natural resources.

It’s not quite the same. I see a lot of similarities between genocide denial and climate change denial, but in the realm of power relations there is a slightly different dynamic.

EA: Let’s say something happens like last year, and you get a media inquiry: Hey, as a historian, can you explain what’s going on? Let’s say you respond to that email and tell them, XYZ is going on. What usually happens after that? Do they take a quote that fits within the piece anyway? Or do they change the piece if the answer you gave them didn’t fit? It doesn’t have to be a specific example, but walk us through what happens in that process of translation between a historian and a media outlet whose audience are not historians.

EH: It’s a big problem in public history. As a historian of the Balkans, I’ve had different experiences—some very positive, I have to say—working with media outlets or journalists. It’s not like I have a grudge. In fact I have a lot of respect for investigative journalists, and historians have a lot to learn from them and vice versa. But some of the common assumptions I run into as a historian of the Balkans are about the history of this region.

One that’s pretty straightforward, and might be familiar to your listeners or anyone who knows a bit about the Balkans in a more critical academic setting, is a variation on the Orientalist stereotype of the unchanging East. In the Balkan case, there’s the assumption that the Balkans have always been a place of division and conflict—the word “Balkanization” expresses that. In line with that view, any conflict in Bosnia is assumed to have deep roots. To go back to the “on the brink” trope—you don’t even have to say on the brink of what. Because everyone knows it’s the brink of war. It’s never on the brink of greatness, or anything positive.

Another example gets into some parallels or overlaps: this notion of a long and continuous history partly matches what nationalists want to do with history. In Bosnia (and this is widespread), nationalists insist on the notion that their group, and therefore their state, are the product of a long and deep history. It starts off somewhere in antiquity—even if your state was founded two years ago, it’s the product of a thousand years or more!

In the essay, I wanted to specifically focus on that nationalist idea and its implications for the public life of history, especially how certain histories are erased and silenced, and how others are blown up to enormous proportions. We see that in Republika Srpska. It’s a case that doesn’t represent all of Bosnia—it’s less than one half of Bosnia, territorially—but it’s what I wanted to zoom in on.

EA: I was recently looking at a map and I was surprised it was that big. In my mind I always pictured a tiny enclave, like for whatever reason the Dayton Accords wanted to appease some nationalists—but it’s actually quite a sizable proportion of Bosnia.

For me, the Lebanon parallel there (and all conflicts are different) is sectarianism as a buzzword. Sectarianism or political confessionalism is the way the Lebanese government operates—or at least one of the ways it operates. But arguably it’s not the main way. The main way is so common around the world that it doesn’t deserve a mention: through a capitalist framework; through a patriarchal framework. It’s such a common thing around the world that it doesn’t deserve special attention, so what we end up focusing on is the thing that gives it a different flavor.

What often gets erased is that these sectarian parties, that in theory are opposed to one another, regularly make deals with one another, form coalitions with one another, and the coalitions change—it’s not sufficient to say, Well, they did this because they are Shi’a or They did this because they are Sunnis or They did this because they are Maronites. It’s shallower than that. Their interests align in a certain way and they change every now and then. But that’s a different story than just saying “ancient hatreds.”

EH: I see parallels in Bosnia with that. It is said about Bosnia that the end of the war with the Dayton peace accords “froze” the situation, and that this peace is like a “frozen conflict.” It’s not necessarily untrue. There are elements of that that are definitely true even today; especially in 1995 it was true. But we are talking right now in 2022. It’s a lot different. Calling Bosnia a “frozen conflict” and assuming that it’s the same as it was in the 1990s is wrong—not only in terms of the politicians but more in terms of what you are talking about.

This postwar period generated its own new patterns that didn’t exist before the war in socialist Yugoslavia, and didn’t exist during the war, that you can’t assume to be an expression of a Serb or Croat or Bosniak outlook or mentality but that are a product of this very specific setup that in Bosnia took shape in the Dayton peace accords. It established certain incentives for sectarian or separate nationalist structures.

EA: I did an episode with Aida Hozić on this very topic, because we found a lot of parallels between Bosnia and Lebanon. It’s interesting to me that we’re still at the point where I often have to explain that although Lebanon is complicated—in most countries there are complexities to the situation, but these complexities are not necessarily that different. The details are different, but the overall patterns can be familiar, if not similar.

At the same time this doesn’t mean that we can flatten everything and say the problems in the US are the same as problems in Lebanon—then we end up cheapening the conversation.

EH: Places like Bosnia or Lebanon, as I said earlier, only come up when there is a crisis. That’s when the attention of the media, or academia, or politics—that’s when whatever rightwing or leftwing publications have to say something about it and they fit it in. Bosnia is a good place to think about that trap of exceptionalism—the idea that things that happen in the periphery are somehow either derivatives of or aberrations from the Western norm.

That is one of the things I try to think about in this piece. It requires setting some context for the 1990s. In 1992, the war in Bosnia broke out. It was in the same year that Francis Fukuyama published his book The End of History (the essay was in 1989, the book came out in 1992), which became the pervasive 1990s view: that history had always been progressing toward greater freedom, universal human rights. The Berlin wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed without a massive war. Of course there were conflicts, but it didn’t engulf the world. The EU was expanding, unifying. Looking back it’s a pretty vulgar Hegelian narrative, complete with a political teleology that culminates with Western values as enshrined in the EU and the US having these things and the rest of the world trying to compete with or emulate them.

But that was very popular in the 1990s, and it remained more or less intact in different ways up until the rise of Trump and Brexit, which served as a very rude awakening that this was not the end of history as we were told. But I grew up in the 1990s. For me, growing up with the war in Bosnia parallel to this narrative, it made me question the positions from which you narrate certain things. It made me wonder about vantage points in history, and wonder about perspectives—including my own perspective on history. It was a very formative thing. It made me ask who determines what is and isn’t the “main” subject of historical narrative. Who determines what counts as zeitgeist, and what is supposedly a less significant event or process in world history? What kind of theories or histories could we articulate from places that are relegated to the periphery?

To be honest, if you’re asking those sorts of questions, that already puts you at odds with large parts of Western academia and how they perceive places like Bosnia or Lebanon. If you’re in periphery, the flow of knowledge and expertise is implicit, but it’s also pretty clear: knowledge and theory are supposed to flow from the West, and locals will absorb it, and be improved or enlightened by it. I’m caricaturing only a little bit. I’ve seen it in Bosnia, especially in the first postwar decade and maybe less so today. But I can’t tell you how many EU-sponsored seminars on reconciliation I’ve seen. My god, Elia, it’s like, here’s the deputy mayor of Muenster with a lecture! Why can’t you Bosnians be friends? Why can’t you be more like France and Germany at the end of World War Two?

My favorite (everybody says this; Hillary Clinton said this about Bosnia when she was secretary of state) is: Don’t argue about history, leave history to the historians. It’s like, We have it all figured out, and you locals take notes and learn. It’s only with the rise of Trump, and Brexit, and especially with Russia’s now second war in Ukraine, that this self-confidence has been shaken and people are saying, Hey, maybe our conversations don’t need to be in this tutoring mode! God forbid we have something to learn from each other.

EA: I’ve been giving this example more and more because it says a lot: if we want to argue about an event that was objectively impactful in the world in the last decade or so, I would argue that the Syrian revolution is one of the major ones. I can easily make the argument for it. I can mention the refugee crisis which obviously galvanized far-right reactionaries in Europe. I can think of the deal between Turkey and the EU. Turkey’s relationship with the EU could have gone elsewhere. I can think of the role of Iran, I can think of what’s happening in Lebanon. I can think, later on, of the role of Russia, which in many ways precipitated what Russia would end up doing in Ukraine—which in itself becomes this more or less recognized “world event.”

Which it is! My argument isn’t that this isn’t a world event, it’s that this other thing is also. Maybe we should question what “world event” even means. One can hope that in fifty years Syria ends up having the recognition it deserves—that’s not my concern though. Because while objectively you can give fifty bullet points as to why the Syrian revolution has been extremely impactful on the world, at the same time it is simply not treated as such. What ends up happening is these things end up taking Europe “by surprise.” We know that the EU’s politics when it comes to most of the Middle East—I’m exaggerating slightly but this is quite consistent—is just about how to reduce refugee flow (because the assumption is that everyone will immediately want to go north, of course). So what ends up happening is that the priority is no longer even pretending or paying lip service to democracy or human rights, but actually just “statecraft.”

We’re seeing this now with Syria a lot. The priority isn’t anything to do with the human rights of Syrians, but everything to do with “stability.” And stability in Syria quite literally means gulags. Stability in Syria means death on an industrial scale. Bombings, torture, enforced disappearances. But that doesn’t matter as much on a global scale as long as it doesn’t cross the borders of Syria—or if it does, that it doesn’t go too far, it doesn’t get too close to the West, or specifically Europe in this case.

This is the argument I often make—and even when I’m making it, certain people will believe me and agree; other people might pause for a few seconds or a few minutes and agree in theory; but at the end of the day it doesn’t impact how we in Europe and the US end up talking about ourselves—despite the links between the Syrian revolution and Brexit, or the links between the Syrian revolution and the rise of the far right. The brown people came over and the racists started getting scared, therefore we need to push away the brown people in order for the racists to be less scared—that’s about as good as it gets for the discourse these days.

EH: I totally agree. Thinking about that, one thing that really came through—and it took me a long time to realize this, in graduate school reading more anthropologists than historians—has to do with narrative, how we tell stories about the histories of the world. This entails not just narrative strategies but also your own position, your own vantage point from which you tell histories. There isn’t one “correct” narrative or one “correct” position. What I find disturbing is the idea that we all are supposed to assume that this Eurocentric worldview, that is already pre-formed for you, once you absorb it, are educated into it, and deeply accept it, is supposed to make sense. It doesn’t.

For me, growing up with the Bosnian war, even though it was a big event for Europe especially but for the US as well, the focus quickly moves on to something else, the next crisis, and the narrative is uninterrupted. The periphery is absorbed into this larger narrative of the increasing human rights around the globe—this vulgar Hegelian “end of history” kind of narrative that predominated in the 1990s and only recently has been crashed wide open.

There is now a search for some other narrative to tell, and it’s interesting to think through that in light of Syria, in light of forgotten places—Bosnia as well. My effort in trying to think about these places is really to see and question from what perspectives we tell history (it’s broader than that; it’s how we see the world, really), and question our own assumptions and see where they come from. They all have histories that are embedded. We don’t need to reject them or a priori think they are negative or positive. But we do have to think critically, and we do have to think for ourselves about them. That’s the way I approach it.

EA: We now know from many examples—I think most people are aware of the anti-trans discourses that are popping up in the US and elsewhere, and at speed. And I hope our memory isn’t so short that we can remember that not that long ago the same online ecosystems, essentially bubbles of the far-right, were using very similar discourses against the so-called “caravans” coming from Latin America, and about Muslims before that (and during and after—it’s an ongoing thing), and “minorities” in general. I’m hoping more people understand that there is a direct connection between dehumanizing a group of people and treating the arguments being made by those doing the dehumanizing as though they are worthy of understanding or respect.

We saw this a bit with Russia and Ukraine. The brutality of the invasion was so extreme that Putin apologists did not get the platform they probably would have otherwise—but they are not too far away. I’ll explain this jump. There is a tendency within politics and media to treat those with a very clear intent to do harm as deserving of equal attention and understanding alongside those who they are harming. There is something to be said there. There is this desire or this need to appease. Let’s not rock the boat too much! Let’s hope we can wish Putin away (this is half of the EU’s policy at this point). Let’s hope that if we go their way, we can calm down the transphobes. Maybe we don’t say transphobia is good, but we understand their position…

Time and time again we see what this does. It solidifies their position. It makes them more extreme.

EH: Absolutely. Each of those issues has an important historical—if you’re pointing to the logic of wishing things away: I wish that Putin didn’t invade Ukraine…or maybe he’s more reasonable than we give him credit for…we haven’t really thought about it from his perspective. And it is the same with transphobes and anti-trans discourses.

I think the underlying logic there—you’re right to call it a variant of appeasement. In the interwar period there was a huge surge of antisemitism, which was vehement, violent, and ubiquitous. But if you study the discourses of the time, one of the French politicians at the time said, We don’t need this kind of virulent Nazi antisemitism. What we need is a more moderate kind of antisemitism that is suited to French circumstances. The history of our nation is not the same as the Germans. It’s not just a slippery slope, but it’s the idea that you can compromise with an extreme position that is truly outside the bounds of what should be acceptable discourse. To deny someone’s existence or to wish harm on them or to organize violence against them—those are not positions that you can compromise with. Let’s just hurt them a little bit—how about that?

To me that’s the underlying logic of appeasement. And since we already have my essay on Bosnia in the background as an occasion for our freewheeling conversation: I see it in Bosnia. You termed it Wishing things away. I definitely see this in Bosnia, Elia. There is the Republika Srpska entity—I can talk about it more now. I know it feels like jumping around.

There is this political entity, a place that has a really recent history, called Republika Srpska. It was created in 1992, at the beginning of the war in Bosnia, by Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić. These are hardline Bosnian Serb nationalists who seized on Yugoslavia’s dissolution as their chance to establish an ethnically pure nation-state. They were backed by Slobodan Milošević and by the remnants of the Yugoslav national army, and they went on to pursue their aim of an ethnically pure statelet by targeting non-Serbs—Bosniaks, Bosnian Muslims, and Croats—in the areas that they controlled (which was substantial—at one point seventy percent of Bosnia was controlled by the Serbian army).

In the end, Republika Srpska survived, but the founders of Republika Srpska were convicted. What happened in 1995 is the Dayton Agreement comes along, Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić are indicted, they go into hiding, they’re arrested eventually, and convicted in The Hague—beyond reasonable doubt, and again on appeal—on charges of crimes against humanity and genocide. That’s not a history I made up. There are transcripts, thousands of pages assembled by the ICTY. That’s what happened with Republika Srpska. There is no other way to narrate its founding and existence other than creation through genocide and crimes against humanity.

Again, the war in Bosnia is bigger than this. I’m only talking about Republika Srpska. But these are the facts that we’re dealing with. Of course there were other things that went on in the 1990s. But if we’re talking about this place, its leaders were convicted but their creation, Republika Srpska, was to remain. And it’s given this status as an autonomous entity. It’s forty-nine percent of the territory within the independent state of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The other entity is called the Federation, composed of federated cantons.

So we have this entity led by Milorad Dodik, who is this blustery populist politician who portrays himself as the guardian of this wartime legacy. Although he emerged as a liberal alternative to Karadžić, Dodik became figured out that his best card is to push Republika Srpska further in this hardline nationalist direction—by denying that it was founded on genocide, denying that the founders of Republika Srpska committed genocide, and claiming that the entity will soon have its own army, treasury, and its own institutions.

He can only get away with that because he has the support, first of all, of Putin in Russia, but more importantly he gets support form Vučić, the autocrat in Serbia—and also from people like Viktor Orbán in Hungary, which means that Republika Srpska has people who make excuses for it and support it within the EU. Orbán is the most obvious one, but there are others.

Going back to what you said earlier, I see this a lot among Western academics who will come to Bosnia and be like, But why can’t you all reconcile? Why can’t Bosnia move beyond its wartime past? And it’s almost like wishing that the genocide didn’t happen and that Republika Srpska wasn’t founded on genocide. You know what? I wish it wasn’t either! But it was. We just have to confront this. And the wishful thinking: What if Dodik isn’t really a hardline nationalist? What if we treat him with kid gloves and give in to some of his demands? All sides have something wrong and something right with them, and we can compromise.

To me, this is outlandish, slippery logic. Here we’re dealing with a person who has decided—he came out earlier, in 2007, and said, We know the genocide in Srebrenica happened, and then turned around and said it didn’t. The only reason he did that is he realized it is his ticket to whipping up this particular fear and populist outrage that keeps him in power. He’s staked out a position that is detached from evidence, from facts—both in terms of the past as well as heading in a direction where this is going to be an entity that is really unhinged.

It’s not a pretty picture. And pretending that it’s otherwise—more moderate, or maybe things weren’t so bad in the nineties…What if you guys, all of you, just agreed not to talk about it? There is this extremist in the room, this president of this entity, himself screaming otherwise; I think that’s not the most appropriate response.

EA: I mentioned Syria before. If someone wanted to see that this could lead to bigger things and it’s going to effect the only places that “matter” to world politics, which is Europe and the US, they could have already reached a conclusion in 2011 if not 2012. But it didn’t matter discursively. Observing Bosnians online and doing my own research, I see something similar happening. The EU has a tendency to not deal with reality until the reality is too big to handle. And when this happens, as with Russia and Ukraine, they still find ways—many of them—to push it away and wish it away.

You mention Dodik regarding himself as a “guardian” of Serbian ultra-nationalism. This concept of the guardian is interesting for all the wrong reasons. Orbán is the “guardian” of Christian Europe, right? What concerns me is not that this is how someone who is far-right talks, but that it isn’t all that different from what someone like Ursula von der Leyen has talked about. In early 2020 she excused Greece pushing back migrants and refugees into Turkey because Turkey “opened the gates.” She described Greece as the “shield” of Europe. The idea is you’re always protecting a fortress. It’s a metaphor of a fortress; you’re always protecting it from invaders. This is something that is extremely common in commercial entertainment media—movies and series and anime. Attack of the Titans is an obvious one. Or World War Z with the zombies coming in. In this metaphor, this foreigner, this other, is always otherized, this is a process.

In terms of more recent events, I think we’ve gotten to the point where things that in the past would be difficult to ignore are now being ignored. They have been whitewashed, and they have become normalized. What worries me is that this is never the final step; its heading in a certain direction and it feels like not that many people are aware. We aren’t the ones driving the bus—but we are on the bus! We’re recording this on July 18; at the end of June there was a massacre in Melilla, the Spanish enclave in northern Morocco. Thirty-seven people were killed by border guards, and it’s a blip in the news. This is barely something that counts as newsworthy.

This normalization has been coming for a long time now. And it plays into what we’re talking about now. Because even if they wouldn’t say it out loud, there is a lot of Islamophobia that is normalized and taken for granted when Bosnia is in the news or being talked about. This is part of the underlying narrative: Ultimately, “we” have more in common with Dodik or Vučić or Putin than we do with the average Bosnian Muslim, or with the average Turk or Syrian. When we get to that point, this is where the dark underbelly of European politics starts coming back again.

EH: Going back to this idea of “guarding” or defending Europe: it is explicitly Christian Europe; people like Dodik talk about that explicitly. Or Orbán, for that matter. And the other linkage you made there is really important. It’s not just leaders of Serbia and Russia that support Dodik and similar hardline nationalists in Croatia, Bosnian Croats—one of the reasons they don’t get immediately discredited or condemned in Europe is because on some level the European project is happy to say, You stepped out of bounds when you denied the genocide, but the pushbacks that are happening on the Croatian border we can turn a blind eye to.

In all the other ways that Dodik or Croat nationalists express not just Islamophobia but extremist anti-refugee discourse, there’s a space in which the European discourse and silence act as permission to take that anti-refugee rhetoric further and enact violence. Just yesterday one of the Serbian prime ministers literally said, Serbia is not a parking lot for Asian scum—really crazy. This is a minister in the Serbian government who paraded before cameras in front of refugees on the ground with their hands on their heads.

Since you brought up Melilla and all of this context around the Mediterranean—and of course the Balkan migrant route is inseparable from that as well—these are pretty brutal regimes to keep Black and Brown people out of Fortress Europe. We can talk more about Islamophobia, but it’s really racialized in this current moment. The language is broader. And once you establish this idea of “defending Europe,” it’s a very powerful one. It’s also a very old one, even though it doesn’t mean the same things today as it did fifty years ago or three hundred years ago.

But the fact that it’s a cliché means that it’s a notion you can graft on to new ideas. You can take these earlier ideas of protecting Europe and graft them and evolve them and make them into something new. I recently reread the speech that Slobodan Milošević gave in 1989 for the six hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, which took place in 1389. The Ottoman and the Serbian armies fought in what was essentially a stalemate—long story short, it became a defining moment that is later seen as the subjugation of the Serbian kingdom, the beginning of the end for all Balkan peoples, implicitly. So in 1989 Milošević comes to Kosovo and a million people gather; Communism is crumbling; he’s clearly on the cusp of something new; and he makes this interesting speech. At the end of it, he explicitly invokes defending Europe. In 1989. He says something like, Serbia didn’t just defend itself against the Ottomans, Serbia was defending Europe and its religion and its culture. In the past there were battles, so there may be battles for us in the future.

This idea of defending Europe was really popular among people like Milošević and Karadžić and the whole Republika Srpska leadership. In Croatia too, it’s huge. They often cited the idea of defending Europe in the 1990s, and it had a lot of resonance. It’s something I think is under-studied: how many far-right figures at the time realized the affinity? That what they were saying in places like France or England was being enacted in a much more brutal way by Karadžić and Milošević? And they can condemn them for doing that—These people are too extreme, they’re violent, they’re really Balkan, they’re not really European…but let’s not condemn them entirely because they’re still a part of out Christian European world.

This is not hyperbole. Karadžić, when he was charged with genocide in 1995, went into hiding and remained there for over a decade. In that period, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in the late 1990s, sought him out and met with him, while he was being sought by Interpol. That only came out long afterwards. Why is Le Pen having this meeting with a wanted criminal? What do they have in common? They can’t say it—this is what I mean by camouflage—but what they have in common is the idea of defending Europe against Muslims. Even during the war, one French diplomat said, We worry more about Muslims than about the Serbs. That’s the idea they have in common, and enacted.

And Jean Baudrillard, the author of Simulacra and Simulation, wrote a great essay in the 1990s about that affinity, how Milošević’s Serbia is doing the dirty work of defending Europe, and they might get a slap on their hand but there is an underlying affinity that Europe shares with extremist nationalists. I think a critical history of this idea from the 1990s to the present still remains to be written.

EA: There’s a book with the title People Love Dead Jews. In Europe, I would argue, they are fine with commemorating the Srebrenica genocide; they’re okay with saying this massacre of Muslims that happened twenty years ago is a bad thing. But they’re only fine with it because these Muslims were already murdered. These eight thousand Muslims who were murdered in Srebrenica in July 1995 are dead already. They are no longer a “question” for us in Europe. Their bodies are underground. They can’t be described.

I looked up that Serbian minister you referenced. And yes, he’s literally standing in front of migrants and refugees at the Serbian-Hungarian border—technically the EU border. And he said what he said. He could be wearing a Frontex uniform, and he could be wearing a swastika. I don’t mean to be provocative—I mean quite literally, it would look the same. The aesthetics are almost exactly the same.

People Love Dead Jews—it’s the sense in Europe (and also in the US) that there isn’t a huge problem with discussing the Holocaust, as long as you keep it in the past tense, as long as you talk about it as something that happened in the past and could never happen ever again in Europe—We’ve learned our lesson in Europe! We’ve said “Never Again” a thousand times! And as long as we repeat it like a mantra it becomes true, it’s never going to happen again. Of course I would never compare anything to the Holocaust because it’s on a scale that is virtually unheard of. But there are elements of EU border policy that are fascistic. Effectively this minister just took a selfie in front of these people who are all squatting on the ground with their heads between their knees. This isn’t coming from a context where “Never Again” is taken seriously.

You quote Hannah Arendt in the essay: “Facing forces that are rewriting the past, historians should rethink their assumptions and pose new questions about the relationship between power and their discipline.” As a way of wrapping up this conversation, can you discuss how the work of Hannah Arendt and people like her can help us understand things that the media and politicians and others don’t quite understand when it comes to this relationship?

EH: I found it really useful to think with her for this essay, up to a point. She’s always a brilliant thinker, and her essay that was relevant to this is “Lying in Politics.” It’s a seminal essay. I had read it in grad school, and when Trump came along it enjoyed a brief resurgence where people were constantly citing it. She’s incredibly insightful about how authoritarian and totalitarian regimes have the ability to detach themselves from truth, that lying in politics becomes this platform upon which their entire world is constructed.

In this post-truth era, Hannah Arendt is given a pessemistic gloss: how hard it is to fight against totalitarian regimes and lying politicians. But what I found interesting when I read that essay and a couple other things for this piece is how she says facts are a lot more resilient. This is really underappreciated: how the amount of lying, and indeed the fact of having to invent an alternative world in which Srebrenica or the Holocaust or the Armenian genocide didn’t happen, this total fantasy unhinged from facts, itself shows that facts have a strange resilience that allows them to be reasserted and reestablished. It is a battlefield, if you do care about these issues—it is a field of struggle.

This notion of struggle was to me a really important part of what she was saying. We are engaged in a struggle, and these issues are not settled. One mistake people make a lot about discourses of denial is assuming that because facts about the Holocaust, or the Armenian genocide, have been so painstakingly established that we don’t have to worry about denial, or that it’s a settled issue. That gets it wrong. We have to think about how pervasive attempts to relativize and falsify history are, and how we are engaged in a struggle in which we have to be alert to these strategies of relativization in which well-meaning intentions of compromise with nihilist positions actually allow them more of a platform, and dilute our struggle to establish more dignity and justice in this profoundly flawed world.

Arendt makes a comparison, implicitly, between historians and politicians, in the sense that she distrusts them, or has an air of suspicion about them, because they deal with human affairs and because they are tempted to legitimize their projects. Historians are constantly being enlisted to legitimize political projects—in Republika Srpska, or in the United States for that matter. But she has this air of suspicion about historians, and she almost sees them as a last resort of people who—let’s say you falsify history; you rewrite the history of the Holodomor so it didn’t happen, or however many deaths were accidental in Ukraine, and Stalin had nothing to do with it. She wants historians at that point to step in with facts. But she doesn’t see them as having anything else to say beyond that.

This gets into the polemical, political world, and that’s where this distrust comes in. It might be something that Arendt didn’t really want to rethink, because it would call in question so many of her other assumptions. History does not function as an impartial field, ever. We have to start with a different set of questions about not just narrative but about power, and the power to tell stories and the power to omit certain things, to erase history. This is something that I learned not from Hannah Arendt but from an anthropologist, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, who wrote a book called Silencing the Past in which he really grappled with these issues.

A lot of it is epistemological: how do we know what we know? But Trouillot gets to the bedrock of the issue, which isn’t just epistemological. It’s fundamentally a problem of power, and of power relations that are at work at every step in the productions of historical knowledge—from the production of sources to the narration of what we are told is history. Being aware of that makes you think of history much more as a field of struggle than as a settled reservoir of facts.

EA: Edin, thank you so much for your time. This was a fantastic conversation.

EH: Thank you, Elia.