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On April 15, Austrian Nobel laureate Peter Handke was supposed to seem on Austria’s nationwide broadcaster ORF to speak about his new writings. As an alternative, he proceeded to as soon as once more deny that the Srebrenica genocide occurred, calling it Brudermord – biblical fratricide and framing it as a non secular tragedy reasonably than a criminal offense in opposition to humanity.
ORF stood by its resolution to interview Handke when it confronted criticism. It claimed that it had completed nothing unsuitable for the reason that interviewer acknowledged the genocide in a query.
{That a} European broadcaster would select to platform genocide denial at the moment is hardly shocking.
Europe faces a disaster not solely of reminiscence however of harmful continuity. From the Holocaust to Srebrenica to Gaza, denial of state violence in opposition to marginalised teams seeks to erase previous atrocities, normalise current ones, and pave the way in which for future ones.
Fratricide as ‘the worst crime’
The Bosnian genocide was the primary genocide broadcast on tv. In 1995, distressing photographs from Srebrenica crammed dwelling rooms worldwide, exposing the failure of worldwide safety. Regardless of a prolonged strategy of prosecuting struggle crimes via the Worldwide Felony Tribunal for the previous Yugoslavia and court docket selections implicating the complicity of European peacekeepers within the massacres, denial of the Bosnian genocide continues to be effectively tolerated in Europe.
Whereas Handke is by far not the one outstanding public determine who engages in it, his rhetoric makes clear how this crime has come to be weaponised in minimising German and Austrian guilt for the Holocaust.
Handke portrays the Bosnian genocide as a tragic civil struggle between “brothers” – Brudermord. He romanticises struggle criminals as victims and embeds genocide denial in a fascist narrative of redemption via ethnic violence.
Based on him, fratricide is “a lot worse” than genocide – ie, those that kill their “brothers” have to be deemed worse criminals than the Nazis who killed “the opposite”. By framing atrocities this fashion, Handke successfully minimises the duty of Germans and Austrians for the Holocaust.
On this twisted narrative, the descendants of the Nazis can declare ethical superiority, insisting they didn’t commit the “worst crime of all”- Brudermord. The chilling implication is that Jews had been by no means actually “brothers” to Europeans like Handke.
Serb nationalists might even see Handke as an ally in genocide denial, however he doesn’t defend them – he makes use of them. Via them, white Europe cleans its fingers of its bloody crimes – from Auschwitz to Algeria, from Congo to Rwanda. Handke’s theological language is an alchemy of European conscience, shifting guilt onto the Muslims, the Jews, and the “Balkan savages”.
Transplanting anti-Semitism
Handke’s logic parallels and reinforces the broader marketing campaign to shift the blame for anti-Semitism – and even the Holocaust – onto Arabs and Muslims. In Germany, this development has been totally embraced by the state and varied public establishments, which – in opposition to all proof – have begun to assert that the immigrant Muslim neighborhood within the nation is chargeable for rising anti-Semitic sentiment.
In 2024, the German parliament, the Bundestag, handed a decision stating that “the alarming extent of anti-Semitism” is “pushed by immigration from North African and Center Japanese nations”.
German media continues to manufacture a “Muslim Nazi previous”, with one article claiming: “Unlike Germany, the Middle East has never come to terms with its Nazi past.” In the meantime, state-funded NGOs have branded the Palestinian keffiyeh a Nazi image and echoed the discredited Israeli declare that the grand mufti of Palestine “impressed” the Remaining Resolution.
Germany’s political institution is now developing a revisionist ethical alibi: one through which Nazis are reimagined as reluctant, remorseful perpetrators, whereas Palestinians and their Muslim and Arab allies are vilified as extra evil than the Nazis themselves.
For a few years, this was a fringe thought adopted by far-right events just like the Different for Germany (AfD). However now, the AfD’s core concepts, not simply on Germany’s Nazi previous, but additionally on immigration and Islam, have been extensively adopted by the political centre.
This shift displays a longstanding technique of displacing guilt. Historian Ernst Nolte, celebrated by the conservative Konrad Adenauer Basis with a serious award in 2000, argued the Holocaust was a response to Soviet “barbarism”, relativising Nazi crimes by equating Auschwitz with the Gulag.
Nolte argued that Hitler had “rational” causes for concentrating on the Jews and rejected the “collective guilt” attributed to Germany since 1945. Right this moment, AfD chief Alice Weidel echoes this stance, dismissing Germany’s remembrance tradition as a “guilt cult”.
The place Nolte blamed the Soviets, at present’s political institution blames Muslims. The objective is similar: to erase German duty from historical past.
From denial to enabling
Genocide denial just isn’t a passive act of forgetting however an lively, dangerous course of that perpetuates violence. Genocide scholar Gregory Stanton recognises denial because the final stage of genocide, one which can also be a crucial signal that the following one is coming.
For survivors and their descendants, denial deepens trauma by invalidating struggling, distorting fact, and stripping victims of dignity, reminiscence and justice. These wounds prolong past people, affecting whole communities throughout generations.
In the meantime, genocide denial shields perpetrators, delays reparations and blocks reconciliation, deepening social divisions. It additionally undermines worldwide legislation and human rights frameworks, signalling that even crimes in opposition to humanity might be ignored.
Genocide denial, thus, straight prepares the bottom for the following genocide to happen and be accepted. We see this clearly in how Europeans are reacting to the genocide in Gaza, denying that it’s occurring in any respect, regardless of repeated pronouncements by United Nations specialists and genocide students, and persevering with to offer Israel with weapons and diplomatic cowl.
The playbook developed in Bosnia is now utilized to Gaza. It follows a well-recognized sample: blame “either side”, painting victims as aggressors, and assign duty to some people – thus hiding systematic violence. This blueprint is probably most clearly echoed within the declare that it is just Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his two far-right ministers who’re chargeable for the “violence” occurring in Gaza, thus separating coverage from construction and evading deeper accountability.
Within the narrative denying the Bosnian genocide, duty can also be decreased to some “unhealthy apples” throughout the Serb state equipment – as if genocide had been a spontaneous aberration reasonably than a meticulously deliberate, state-executed crime requiring widespread coordination and intent.
Getting ready for a future genocide in Europe
Europe at present faces a profound disaster as far-right nationalism surges and a vanishing center class struggles amid rising social and financial precarity. In lots of Western nations, the center class is shrinking whereas what the correct calls “surplus inhabitants” – disproportionately composed of Muslims – is more and more marginalised and scapegoated.
In a time like this, recasting a previous genocide in opposition to an othered inhabitants as a misunderstanding contributes to creating the setting for the following genocide to come back. And there are already clear indications that segments of the political class are pushing for eradicating this “surplus inhabitants” underneath varied guises.
The Nazi euphemism “Umsiedlung nach Osten” (resettlement to the East) was a grotesque excuse to deport Jews to fuel chambers. Right this moment, European actors like Austrian far-right activist Martin Sellner brazenly advocate for “remigration”, a sinister echo of this lethal logic geared toward uprooting Muslim communities.
European political elites might not have embraced this time period but, however they’re busy placing into apply varied insurance policies which have the identical final objective – restrict or lower the Muslim presence in Europe. They’ve been constructing a authorized regime for exclusion via the 2024 EU Migration Pact, plans to offshore asylum seekers to Albania or different nations, and an enormous injection of money into Frontex, the EU’s border company accused of – amongst different issues – unlawful pushbacks.
These aren’t impartial measures however ideological instruments of racialised removing, cloaked in liberal rhetoric. And they’ll solely get extra violent with time.
This isn’t alarmism. It’s a sample. The erosion of rights at all times begins with these deemed to be “the opposite”.
If genocide denial just isn’t urgently addressed, if the Gaza genocide just isn’t recognised and rapid motion taken to cease it, Europe dangers coming full circle. With genocide denial increasing and the urge to surrender duty for the Holocaust rising, the bottom is being ready for these horrific atrocities to repeat.
The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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