On Wed, 9 Oct 2002, Chris Doss wrote:
> > that "Milosevic is no war criminal" nor "a dictator," and that there
> > was never any coordinated campaign of genocide or ethnic cleansing by
> > Serbs, no massacres at either Racek or Srebrenica, and never any such
> > thing as Serbian "rape camps."
>
> I thought the rape camp story was long ago shown up as bogus?
That was certainly my impression last time I researched it. And ditto with Racek. AFAICT (and I'm open to any new evidence), they were both propaganda stories, where a core of truth was exaggerated into something that didn't happen, which was then used as a rallying point, and has been used as such ever since.
It's funny how, no matter how bad people are, we always make up things they didn't do. Even the Nazis. It's hard to imagine anything awful they didn't do. But still foremost in the popular list of their atrocities is the idea that they made Jews into soap. Which they didn't. The weird thing is that these propaganda stories seem to stick in the mind even more than the terrible facts.
But then again, perhaps it makes perfect sense, because the made-up things are always so symbolically perfect and provide so much better an emotional summary. How better to symbolize the rape of a country (and perhaps the chivalry of its champions) than a rape camp? And how better to symbolize the liquidation of a people -- an industrialized liquidation (and seeming at the time to leave no traces, to leave the world with a clean conscience) -- than a soap factory?
But to the extent we want to have intellectual rather than symbolic arguments, it would be best to weed this stuff out.
Michael