Of course, we are not talking about Dostoyevsky's novel. Although perhaps some real registers for this topic could be found among his sentences. The man simply knew something about evil. Or about – human nature. And it seems that there is no more perfect packaging for evil than human nature. But it is already anthropological jazz that usually ends in the syncopation of cheap metaphysics.
Ratko Mladić was arrested. Finally. The murderous general, the butcher from Srebrenica, the author of probably the biggest crime in Europe after the end of the Second World War, has come to where he belongs. A long time ago, of course, and all this intervening time is just another sketch of the Balkan villainy. Now they are going to arrest petty criminals in Serbia, and yet no one will fully dismantle all that military-political-clerical-media hydra that protected the mass murderer with its countless tentacles. Will someone say the right word (and is there such a word?) to the parents of those two murdered soldiers who saw something they shouldn't have. In what way will those who, as a national interest, set the protection of a criminal will be (re)tried? By the way - if Hitler had been hiding as much as Mladić, he would have been arrested only in 1961. That sounds unimaginable, doesn't it?
Of course, the usual national theater will follow - Amphilochius will go to The Hague again, to provide spiritual help to another beast. And nothing will be strange to anyone. The metropolitan will pull some kind of Christian platitude about a god who loves everyone, about the fact that even the greatest sinner has the right to a word of comfort... And maybe I would believe him if the metropolitan didn't want to nail people to the bridge because they have a national feeling that he doesn't like like. And that is a bit unusual, you have to admit, even for a metropolitan like this - that his Christian lights turn on, that he has understanding for mass murderers, but not for people who don't look at some as he does, from the aspect of any religion, basically and not so crucial things. There must be some deeper understanding and agreement between him and his criminals, whom he persistently treats spiritually. You know what - there is some secret connection...
Uh, now the fiddle will be pulled: what an epic composition with a title like "Imprisonment of General Mladić". It seems that the fiddle is destined to be on the side of everything worst imaginable. It has nothing to do with the music - it's about the "musicians". Then such and such a ten-seater song will be a megahit on both sides of the Drina, but the troubles will only begin in ten years, when the children will grow up and their parents will afford such a musical and poetic education. Then explain to them who Mladić was. And so on... All around, the Balkan circle with blood.
There should be no calculations with such things: do not allow yourself to be carried away by guesses or relativization of the type - others have also done all kinds of things, or about some personal tragedy of this or that criminal - no, that does not exist - Mladić, like any criminal, is only and only in his crime, he is nowhere outside. Watch again some of the gruesome footage from Srebrenica, listen again to that sentence - "Not a hair on anyone's head will be missing" (but heads will). Watch those scenes when thirteen-year-olds are separated from their mothers, because Mladić determined that this should be the limit of maturity. For death. "Not even a hair from the head will be missing". And so - eight thousand times... Imagine all those people: as beings, not as a number. Numbers are fiction – people are real. Or, as the great Zbigniew Herbert sang: "There are too many of them / zero digits at the end / transform them into abstraction / a topic for thinking: / modern arithmetic". Always be careful with that arithmetic – it sometimes cancels out empathy, and that can be dangerous.
Or listen to him as he speaks to his soldiers (bandits, actually) about the Bosnian weaklings as "Turks", thereby pushing them into the hell of folk poetry. To inspire them for evil. Yes, those "anesthetized" by ten-point fiction kill more easily. From that hell, as is known, no one has ever returned normal and clean.
I believe that whenever some criminal and mass murderer goes to prison, the world becomes at least a tiny bit better place. And it will always be like that.
A friend from Novi sent me an SMS yesterday: "And the winner of Survivor is - Goran Hadžić!"
Bonus video:
