Like many in recent weeks, I’ve been reading the news a lot, perhaps too much, to the point that I’ve been thoroughly disturbed by the apocalyptic undertones of the Iran conflict. It’s a long standing fact that Iran is a hardline theocracy whose supreme leaders have for generations now been proclaiming “death to the Great Satan (the US) and its henchmen (i.e. Israel).” So foreign to me is the place and culture of Iran that while I marvel at it, I do so from afar.

It’s the prospect of American Christian theocracy that really has me disturbed. I think about friends and acquaintances from my times living and working in the US—Christians and non-Christians, Republicans and Democrats—and I wonder what they’re all thinking. I knew a couple of guys from a Christian summer camp I worked at when I was 18 who were fresh into the marines. Are they still there? Do they believe the war in Iran is going to unleash the fire of armageddon that will usher in Christ’s return? It beggars belief.

What shocks me most, and sits quite close to home as someone who grew up in the Christian tradition and still has a lot of love for aspects of it, is the brazen certainty with which these lunatics—from Hegseth to Netanyahu to Khamenei—hold to their beliefs.

It strikes me as dangerous for a society that requires some degree of empathy to function that anyone should hold firm beliefs about anything that can’t be proven.

Of course you could tie me up in a neat little knot with that assertion because it is itself a firm belief without irrefutable proof. But what I really mean to say—and here I hold true to my name—is that doubt is the treasure of existence.

Doubt creates room in the heart. Doubt makes space for us to encounter the unknown, the unforeseen, the limits of our minds. Doubt pierces our rigid beliefs, renders us pliable and free. One way we could define freedom is the ability to encounter the world as it truly is. One is locked in a cage if one cannot regard the other with respect or dignity because of one’s beliefs. One is stripped of agency if one fervently believes we are on a runaway train to the apocalypse.

Doubt has sown the seeds of every great leap in human history. It is doubt that enables the boy to say “look, the Emperor has no clothes”. It was doubt that brought about universal suffrage, that empowered slaves to revolt, brought down monarchs and ended apartheid. Doubting the system, doubting the conventional wisdom, doubting the beliefs that limit our ability to simply be with reality as it is: the green trees, the falling snow, the warm fire, the roaring sea, the twittering birds, the humming jungle, the piercing eyes of a cat, the smell of freshly cooked rice, the taste of butter, the hug of a mother, the quizzing of a child, the burble of a baby.

Life is really not that complicated: a place to sleep, water to drink, food to eat, companionship and a beautiful sunrise should be enough to satisfy. And I believe most ordinary people of America, Iran, Israel, wherever could be pretty happy with that, so why do we create so much suffering? It is our firmly held beliefs, in principalities and powers in realms no one can point to, in the supremacy of white skin, in the necessity of wealth, in the scarcity of resources, which send us out of paradise and into hell. Little do we know it is a hell of our own design and the kingdom of heaven was here all along, making a meek rustling noise like a breeze stirring leaves. But our fantasies of being the strong man fill our ears with the noise of battle and on we charge.

I speak not only of the need for doubt in matters of religion and politics, but in medicine and science, in education, economics, investing and agriculture: we are better off, always, if we surrender the lust of certainty and engage authentically in what David Whyte calls “the vital conversation”: the state of being where what’s going on inside the head is in honest dialogue with what’s outside it. It is no coincidence that religious fervour leads to violence: one is at war with the world the moment one decides what is inside the head is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

In these hyper masculine times, as the masculine in all of us—male, female, non-binary, whatever—fights fearfully against the rising feminine and its implications of softness, uncertainty and flow, we must see that clinging to certainty is fruitless, that our quest for control merely ushers forth the only certainty we all live with: our ending

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Reflections on this essay, 12 years after it was written

My first thoughts upon reading this essay today, the 19th of March, 2026, are about how much the world has changed since then. When I visited Europe on a study tour in June/July 2014, Russia had just invaded Crimea. It was a breach of international norms not so much in the sense that countries didn’t invade countries, but that countries in Europe, or on its periphery, didn’t invade countries in Europe. It was a theme of the study tour that the wars in the former Yugoslavia were regarded with that same sense of shock: that in the 1990s a European city (Sarajevo) that had hosted the winter olympic games could be under siege, hammered by howitzer shells and haunted by snipers was deeply unsettling. After World War II everyone had thought “never again”. And yet here it was: a war of ethnic cleansing in Europe.

The hubristic juxtaposition between the brutality of war and the “civilisation” of Europe implies a kind of “it couldn’t happen here” and was a deep-running thread throughout that study tour. We were in Sarajevo for the 100th anniversary of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a triggering act in the cascade of events that led to World War I and at least 15 million deaths… in Europe 😱.

Since the time I wrote this essay, we have seen Russia’s action in Crimea lead to incessant destabilisation in the eastern regions of Ukraine, and a full-scale ground invasion in 2022. Despite a prevailing “Russia failed” narrative in the Western media, the war in Ukraine is dragging on and on and appearing to serve Russian interests quite well.

Then there was October 7th, 2023 and the brutal retaliatory violence Israel has unleashed upon Gaza. With Israel demonstrating no intention of living alongside Palestinian peoples, its actions can only be characterised as ethnic cleansing.

And of course especially recently we have seen the US-Israeli war on Iran and all the fallout that entails.

War in the Middle East is something we Westerners are much more accustomed to digesting, and it doesn’t arouse the same degree of shock as an invasion of Ukraine, only a day or two’s drive from Germany, Sweden or France. But there has certainly been some degree of shock as Iranian drones struck a military base in Cypress, or shut down major hubs like Doha and Dubai.

But to angle towards the primary thrust of this essay: I have again found myself troubled by the questions it poses about the participation of ordinary people in heinous acts. Where the essay considers ordinary Yugoslavs, now I wonder about the soldiers in the IDF and US military. President Trump is very obviously petulant and erratic in his decision making. It is unclear what strategy the US is implementing in their assault on Iran, and I find myself wondering what the military personnel implementing his “strategy” are thinking to themselves. What did they think when they struck a school? Are we still living in an age of “collateral damage”, where managerial consultant-speak is used to excuse the horrors of war? Or are there some wondering “are we the baddies?”

I particularly like the articulation of justice in this essay as something that serves three ends: a chance for victims to be heard; for the ‘proceeds of crime’ to be calculated and, where possible, confiscated or remediated; and a chance for the perpetrators of crime to honestly face the consequences of their actions.

As we witness the war on Iran sliding up the escalation ladder, with a previously ruled-out ground invasion clearly being prepared for, I feel that I’m watching a US leadership that is in free-fall, beholden to rules of engagement that they are not in control of. President Trump, Defense Secretary Hegseth: these men are clearly not in control and are condemned to a cascade of reactionary steps lest they risk loss of face. To the extent they are unwilling to accept some blame or guilt, that is the extent to which they will pursue deeper involvement, entrenching themselves (perhaps literally entrenching their military) further and further.

If justice is not only for victims but also perpetrators, it’s a chance at a reset. Once someone recognises the impacts of their actions and accepts punishment, they are then in a position where they can atone for them, make amends by living differently, by orienting themselves towards a different moral code than whatever led them to cause such harm.

The deeper the war in Iran goes, or the invasion of Lebanon or devastation of Gaza, the more trauma we pile on and the more crimes we commit, the more we will desperately need justice, not only for the innocent who suffered, but for the guilty who participated and the societies that enabled them.

There are many deeper questions posed by this essay which I will have to return to another time, namely: what is the basis of a social code that could prevent such degenerate behaviour? And prevent such degenerate leaders from rising to power? I suspect that our society’s reliance on legal codes to define moral behaviour has had the perverse effect of excusing anything not explicitly sanctioned. So if we are to go outside legal frameworks and consider instead how we might re-develop a unifying sense of morality without explicitly telling each other what to do: how do we do that?

Big questions, and I’m not sure I’m up to them. But it’s imperative we try.

Introduction

In preparation for the RMIT University EU study tour to the Netherlands and Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) I watched documentaries that often included footage of young Bosnian-Serb militia members humiliating and terrorising their Muslim neighbours. In studying the wars and atrocities committed during the breakup of Yugoslavia I was hit by a question; could I, given the right circumstances, commit heinous crimes like mass murder and rape? This thought stuck with me throughout my experience, both in the Netherlands where I came face-to-face with Ratko Mladić and in Bosnia, where I witnessed the deep scars of ethnic cleansing first hand. In researching for this essay I have found that I am most certainly not alone in this thought, and that many have written of this confounding, at times shameful, empathy with brutal men—and they are, almost to the last, men. Not only the wars between 1991 and 1999 fought in the Balkans; the Rwandan genocide and the Holocaust top the long list of events that have sparked many to consider the process by which an ordinary person can become a monster. And if an ordinary person can become a monster in the right society, at the right time—or perhaps wrong society and wrong time—then we might be forced to concede that we too, could be capable of such crimes.

This piece is not conclusive, but rather formative. I’m following a thought through various areas of scholarship; ethnography, philosophy, sociology, and criminal justice studies, and trying to reconcile it with the notion of justice, the need for justice that I witnessed in Bosnia. Primarily, I am not concerned with whether ‘ordinary people’ participate in genocide, nor how they come to do so, although I will establish these, as they are foundational to my question. I’m particularly concerned with what the implications are if we do believe that ordinary people, in times such as those in the former Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1999, can transform into ruthless mass killers, capable of shooting, face to face, up to 150 innocent civilians in one day.

This is not to say that I felt no empathy with the victims in this terrible disaster. In fact, I felt much more strongly the pain and anguish that the war and genocide in Bosnia has wrought on the victims than any kind of empathy for the killers. I have come to appreciate that the foundation for any kind of just system in a secular liberal society stems from the appreciation that we might have been the victims. In Sarajevo I saw a photo dated to 1993 of a baby missing a leg. I was born in 1993 in Melbourne, Australia. That baby was born in the same year in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. That’s the difference.

Foundations

Genocide poses a major challenge to ethics, philosophy and morality. According to Michael Freeman, “genocide is, then, not just another topic for empirical or normative theory: it is a challenge to the adequacy of our understanding of ourselves and of the modern world we have made.” Freeman’s article examines this challenge in depth beginning with the nihilism of Nietzsche and Heidegger. As Heidegger remarked—in commenting on the work of Nietzsche—if God is dead “then nothing more remains to which man can cling and by which he can orient himself.” This is the essence of nihilism and its relation to genocide—indeed all crimes; that if there is no God there is no norm by which one man can condemn the actions of another. If our origin is one of meaninglessness, chance and happenstance, then the lives we lead are similarly meaningless; all ‘morality’ and ‘ethics’ are chance agglomerations of values that may not be replicated in any other human being and thereby cannot be applied to the actions of another. Nietzsche did not revel in this thought; he considered it a logical outworking of the death of the Abrahamic god at the hands of the enlightenment. And he considered nihilism a challenge to be overcome, for in the death of God he had found nihilism and in the death of nihilism he believed there would be the foundations for a truly just human society.

Whether there is a God or not, the world as it is today consists of a whole gamut of religions, worldviews and faiths. The only way to coexist as a society with a workable system of justice is to find the lowest common denominator, which precludes the use of any moral code that stems from the existence of God. Freeman turns to the intuitionism of Martin Gilbert to illustrate the grounds for a feasible humanist moral code. Quoted in Freeman’s article, Gilbert describes an horrific and real execution that occurred in Nazi Germany. A young Jewish boy at the Belzec concentration camp was beaten, stripped, hung upside-down for three hours and then killed by way of sand shoved down his throat with sticks. Freeman sums up: “the appropriate ethical response is beyond doubt… the only alternative is a radical scepticism or relativism which can only capitulate (and/or collaborate) in the face of the realities of genocide.” The root of our disgust at the hearing of such an act comes from our common humanity, and it is upon this principle we can—and to a great extent already have—build a just and fair society that condemns genocide with total conviction. As an international society that recognises the multitude of faiths in the world, we cannot found our system of justice on a code of morality that stems from a belief in this or that god; we find the common human thread, and that is our vulnerability to suffering, humiliation and death. We condemn acts of killing, rape and slaughter on that basis.

But what does it mean for the secular, liberal system of justice if we also have empathy for the killers? What happens if we look at the society they were brought up in, the level of education they were able to attain, all of the external factors that are out of any one person’s control, and conclude that individual agency was not the primary cause of someone’s participation in mass killing and genocide? This is a scary thought; this is why we feed our anger at perpetrators of mass crimes; we want to think of these criminals as ‘monsters’ rather than the product of an environment, least of all an environment that could be replicated. This is why Adam Kirsch said to “beware of pity”. And this is why Slavenka Drakulić said “the more you realize that war criminals might be ordinary people, the more fearful you become.” The fear that all share when they have this thought is; but what do we do if we can see ourselves in their shoes? How do we punish people if anyone in their situation would have done the same thing? Would anyone in their situation have done the same thing?

Do ordinary people commit genocide, and how?

The question of the involvement of ordinary people in the genocide in Bosnia is of course based on a tenuous concept: ‘the ordinary person’. What is meant by ‘ordinary person’? The whole thrust of this essay is focused on the implications of empathy with killers. This empathy stems from a belief, well founded or not, that had we—liberal, educated cosmopolitans—been brought up in their culture, with their education, we might have acted in very similar ways. That is to say that there was nothing present in the minds of all the perpetrators and participants in the Bosnian genocide that intrinsically predisposed them towards such crimes. It is difficult to split the two questions of ‘whether’ and ‘how’ ‘ordinary people’ can be agents in mass crimes and in many respects the question of ‘whether’ is answered only through an examination of how people, like us or otherwise, came to be involved. So to an extent it must be taken on faith so far that average people were involved in mass killings and we will now delve into how they came to be so.

Particularly in the wake of the Holocaust, and the sheer manpower required to carry out the Final Solution, much attention has been drawn to the process by which an entire society can dehumanise another group to the point of perpetrating genocide. Surely it cannot be possible, many have concluded, that all of those people were sociopaths and monsters. Therefore, how does it happen? Importantly, this essay will attempt to focus exclusively on the Bosnian context, for according to Samuel Tanner “the mass violence that occurred in the former Yugoslavia show different and sometimes more volatile patterns than the Holocaust, on which the core literature is mostly grounded.” Whereas the Nazi extermination of Jews operated as an efficient killing factory the likes of which the world had never seen, in the context of the Balkans there was a far greater degree of autonomy on the part of perpetrators and militia members and thus anarchy in the way men participated in mass atrocities.

Tanner interviewed four ethnic Serbs who committed many crimes including executions between 1991 and 1995 in Croatia and Bosnia. These men joined militias linked to the Serbian Renewal Movement, they were rural, petty criminals and did not trust the government in Belgrade to properly safeguard the Serb people. He identifies a series of cognitive scripts including a version of evolutionism that placed Serbs in a privileged position while dehumanising other ethnicities, a vision of themselves as Orthodox warriors defending the faith and a rural-urban divide steeped in resistance to political modernisation. This combination of cognitive scripts is not enough to tip one towards mass violence, but it motivated Tanner’s respondents to join the war as individuals interested in how they could help their brethren. Nor did a history of petty crime have much influence on mass violence. But Tanner argues the “templates for interaction passed on via trust networks, helped mobilize them for mass violence.” According to Tanner a driving force in the scale of atrocities was anarchy; the multitude of militias, paramilitary groups and the Yugoslav National Army were vying for control and power, and in this vacuum events tended to spiral.

The link between pre-war criminal activity and participation in genocide struck me as nonsensical when I visited Bosnia; how could involvement in shoplifting or armed bank robberies prepare someone for mass killing? Mark Winton and Ali Unlu come to similar conclusions to Tanner in that criminals were more likely to engage in violent behaviour if they had previously done so, lived on the margins of society and were reliant on criminal social networks. Perpetrators were even freed from prison on condition of joining militias, and many who tried to back out of the violence found themselves or their families threatened. In line with the violentization theory, the perpetrators examined by the authors reported that it became easier to kill as the massacres went on. The killings became a communal event, which reinforced the narratives of the Serbs’ involvement in collective self-defence. Many of these rural Serbs were led to believe that they were in danger of being victims of genocide; they were coerced through ‘conditional prison breaks’; they were taught to think of themselves as holy warriors, defending their faith and people; and they were plunged into a space where no authority existed but the use and demonstration of brute force.

Tellingly, it is primarily not these ‘foot-soldiers’ who have faced justice in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and many of them live in the Bosnian state they created through ethnic cleansing, the Republika Srpska (RS). Perhaps this reflects the implicit assumption that the killers involved in the genocide were puppets of men far more powerful, and that these powerful men were the ones really committing the crimes; Ratko Mladić, Radovan Karadžić, Slobodan Milošević, Željko Ražnatović “Arkan”, Duško Tadić; it only takes a quick perusal of those indicted to the ICTY, past and present, to realise most of them were in positions of leadership and power. In my preliminary research leading up to the trip to Bosnia I was struck by the open greed on display by the leaders; they stirred up nationalism, ethnic hatred and eventually genocide because it provided a channel for the manipulation of thousands of people, in the end it was the source of their power.

On Justice

If the rank and file of the Croatian Defence Council (HVO), the Yugoslav National Army (JNA), or the army of Republika Srpska (VRS) were merely puppets of the men who were truly evil and criminal, either brainwashed or coerced into what they did, does that make them innocent? Does remorse make a difference? In Slavenka Drakulić’s account of ‘One day in the life of Dražen Erdemović’ we are exposed to the possibility that at least one participant in the genocide at Srebrenica didn’t want to do it, but was coerced for fear of his own life.

These questions are dangerous, offensive and extremely difficult to answer, but they are valid. Genocide is far more than murder; it is group murder, societal murder, and a crisis of civilisation. But in this group action, as opposed to premeditated violence planned by one or a few, it is all too likely that many who would not otherwise condone or participate in such brutality get caught up in the hysteria. In the anarchy, in the ‘authorizing space,’ many found themselves cogs in a death machine before they knew what was going on. And we must recognise that, despite all our best intentions, if we are true to ourselves, we cannot be sure we would have stood out of the crowd to condemn what was happening. These questions drive us into what justice really means, what the point of it is, and ultimately towards how we find justice in the stalemate that is the Dayton Accord.

I appeal to what Crank and Bowman term the hermeneutic model of social science in my construction of justice; “all the words in the social science of criminal justice have meanings that are only sensible locally and practically, and they exist by appeal to what the senses show… there is no independent, objective source that one can turn to that will provide an impartial, neutral interpretation of the world.” I acknowledged above the possibility the questions I am asking could be offensive, and so I hasten to add this recognition: I believe conceptions of ‘justice’ are only valid within one context of application and cannot be transferred willy-nilly as though it is an empirically verifiable concept. The implication of this recognition is that I, a 20 year-old Melbournian who spent the best part of three weeks in Bosnia, cannot answer for the ‘meaning of justice in Bosnia.’ The best I can do is offer my thoughts, based on the research I have undertaken and the sensory experiences I have had in recognition of my tenuous standing to speak on this issue for the consideration of any who read this.

The deep theoretical conclusions that underpin the question of what justice means in this setting can be broken into two primary questions; firstly, what is justice, as in what are its aims, and secondly, what goals are paramount in the carrying out of justice as a process. Justice, conceptualised through my experiences, is the action of reinstating equality, where crimes represent an abuse of power. Equality is a state, and justice is an action.

On the point of punishment, the circumstances of genocide muddy the waters. Carmichael writes that “ethnic cleansing and the crisis of war appears to invert, not exaggerate normal behaviour, to turn normal men into murderers and rapists, leaving both victim and victimizer damaged.” Genocide requires a particular set of circumstances and a break down of civil order to occur, so is the point of punishment for crimes against humanity deterrence? I don’t think so. The crimes we are talking about are so monstrous that participation in genocide ought to be deterrence enough. We are talking about a societal breakdown of great magnitude, and the possibility of trial for war crimes in The Hague hardly featured in the responses of militiamen engaged in atrocities in the Balkans. “One of the soldiers described his situation as a different world.” As Tanner notes, awareness by grassroots perpetrators of international norms regarding mass crimes was present, although for many reasons they had rationalised their actions through a belief in the danger of their own people and a conviction that Croats and Bosniaks were committing war crimes against Serbs and each other.

Confirming the impression that many of those indicted by the ICTY were high-level managers and leaders, Tanner writes, “Many of the local executioners do not identify with indicted high-ranking army or government officials.” And so, despite closely following events in The Hague, many low-level participants feel the ICTY to be far off and irrelevant to their situation. Tanner concludes, “The application of international justice is limited.” The results of Tanner’s research is that domestic legal proceedings, such as the Serbian War Crimes Chamber, have far greater impact at the local level. This is unsurprising, as much of the international justice system, set up in part because Western powers felt they could not simply stand by and do nothing, is often portrayed as an imposition on those peoples who have been affected by genocide.

Although eminently more practical than the discussion at the heart of this essay, Tanner’s line of inquiry offers several important conclusions. Particularly, by stressing the need for justice in a domestic setting, Tanner touches upon the work of Hannah Arendt and the risk—especially prevalent in international justice—that when an entire society is held responsible for a crime, paradoxically none are. The essence of collective responsibility is that an entire society is culpable for mass crimes, both in the culture and structure that allowed individuals to perpetrate such crimes and for failing to intervene, revolt or do whatever it takes to avert disaster. This is not true in every case, but in the Balkans it is possible to target a number of individuals as responsible for creating those structures and cultures that provided fertile ground for innocent blood to be spilt on such a scale. Especially culpable are those individuals who exploited such structures and cultures for personal gain.

The grassroots actors this essay has sought to focus on, those ‘ordinary’ mass killers, may have been influenced by many factors out of their control, but it stands that they are guilty of some heinous acts. Empathy does not imply a belief in innocence. There are three primary reasons for the pursuit of justice, firstly, that justice must be done for the sakes of the victims of the conflict; secondly, prosecution and sanctions can assess and take into account gains made through ethnic cleansing; thirdly, just punishment can allow an outlet for men bearing the weight of their crimes.

On the first reason, I appeal to my definition of justice outlined above. In the anarchy and power vacuum created by the breakup of Yugoslavia, certain men were handed power—officials turning a blind eye, supplying weapons, legitimising criminal groups—over others, and they abused this force. The carriage of justice involves bringing the power of the state—still arguably the most powerful entity in human society—to side with those who have suffered an abuse of power. Wounds are not healed simply by a court case, and for most those wounds will remain searing and raw, but the opportunity to bear witness against one’s tormentors goes some way towards rectifying injustice.

Conviction and indictment can account for gains made in the war by way of ethnic cleansing. I have come to this conclusion through witnessing first hand the unashamed pride in the Republika Srpska of Serb identity and of the ‘war of liberation.’ Many Serbs live in houses taken from Bosniaks and have made significant material gains from the war. Through the criminal trial process these gains can be recognised, and two results emerge. First, gains by criminal activity in a time of genocide can be seized, or at least valued, and can be labelled as proceeds of ethnic cleansing. Secondly, gains bear upon the culpability and guilt of a defendant, increasing the likelihood of a fair judgement.

The third reason is perhaps the furthest outworking of my empathy with those who committed mass atrocities. Trial and punishment, even if a defendant maintains their innocence or believe their actions justified, give a chance for the extreme toll of brutalisation to be made a little lighter. Carmichael outlines the damage done to victimisers as almost as great as that to victims. She writes, “Perpetrators of violent crimes are left with a permanent self-disgust, which is reinforced by repeated patterns of violent sexual behaviour.” This is supported by the work of Winton and Unlu on the violentization process, to a lesser extent by Tanner, who interviewed four criminals who had made significant advances in society following the war, and in the interviews with Serb perpetrators by Montgomery and Smith. They all refer to the psychological harm done by participation in genocide, of the spiralling brutalisation process, and lend some support to the much-maligned work of Slavenka Drakulić.

Conclusion

This essay has outlined a dilemma: what does it mean to empathise with the situation of mass killers in a system of justice founded on another form of empathy—essentially that with victims? I have explored the roots of the secular liberal system of justice we have today, in its reaction to nihilism and the philosophical challenge that the holocaust presented. I have established that ‘ordinary people’ did indeed participate in mass atrocities in the Balkans conflict. And I have provided some insight into how this occurs and the process by which ordinary people can undergo the inversion of human behaviour in such a civilizational collapse as happened in the former Yugoslavia.

The recognition of societal and structural factors in the development of genocide perpetrators should not be ignored simply because it complicates the carriage of justice. Collective responsibility exists, and recognition of it runs the risk, as Arendt outlined, of so dissolving culpability for crimes that everyone gets off scot-free. But, at least in the war crimes of the former Yugoslavia, the society and culture that enabled said crimes was created and driven by a number of powerful individuals who sought to use nationalism as a tool towards personal gain and ever greater amassment of power. Leaders like Milošević, Karadžić and Mladić stand at the top of a tree with many branches. Each branch must be treated with special distinctions and understanding.

Despite outlining the challenge posed to justice by empathy with the grass-roots executioners, this essay has not fought for the opposite; no one who participated in genocide or mass atrocities is innocent simply as a puppet without agency. The rank and file of ethnic cleansing must be brought to justice, not only for the victims of this sickening episode of history, but in recognition of the material gains made by ethnic cleansing and as an outlet for the weight these crimes hold over those who committed them. Empathy is a form of wisdom, it is an in-another’s-shoes feeling, and wisdom is the recognition of complexity. As a global community, as witnesses to the stories of those who have lived through horrific times, we must be wise, true to all our impressions, and value above all the good of all people.

References:

Arendt, Hannah. Responsibility and Judgement. New York: Schocken Books, 2003.

Bassouni, Chérif. “Final Report of the United Nations Commission of Experts Established Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 780.” United Nations, 1992.

Bauman, Zygmut. Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989.

Carmichael, Cathie. Ethnic Cleansing in the Balkans: Nationalism and the Destruction of Tradition. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Crank, John P., and Blythe A. Bowman. “What Is Good Criminal Justice Theory?”. Journal of Criminal Justice 36 (2008): 9.

Crank, John P., and Blythe B. Proulx. “Toward an Interpretive Criminal Justice.” Critical Criminology 18 (2010): 20.

Drakulić, Slavenka. They Would Never Hurt a Fly: War Criminals on Trial in the Hague. London: Abacus, 2004.

Freeman, Michael. “Speaking About the Unspeakable: Genocide and Philosophy.” Journal of Applied Philosophy 8, no. 1 (1991): 3-18.

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Heidegger, Martin. “The Word of Nietzsche: God Is Dead.” The question concerning technology and other essays (1977): 53-112.

Institute, Open Media Research. “Suicide in the Republika Srpska.” http://www.hri.org/news/balkans/pbp/1996/96-06-04.pbp.html - 24.

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Kirsch, Adam. “Beware of Pity.” The New Yorker, January 12 2009, 62.

Kraska, Peter B, and John J Brent. Theorizing Criminal Justice: Eight Essential Orientations. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2004.

Montgomery, Michael, and Stephen Smith. “Excerpts from Interviews with Militia Members.” American Public Media, http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/kosovo/more1.htm

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Genealogy of Morals: Peoples and Countries. Translated by Horace B. Samuel. The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche. edited by Oscar Levy 16 vols. Vol. 13, London: T. N. Foulis, 1913.

Tanner, Samuel. “The Mass Crimes in the Former Yugoslavia: Participation, Punishment and Prevention?” [In English]. International Review of the Red Cross 90, no. 870 (Jun 2008)(2011-12-16 2008): 273-326.

Weitz, Eric D. A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation. Princeton University Press, 2009.

Winton, Mark A., and Ali Unlu. “Micro–Macro Dimensions of the Bosnian Genocides: The Circumplex Model and Violentization Theory.” Aggression and Violent Behavior 13, no. 1 (1// 2008): 45-59.

I’m not entirely sure why I share what I write. Perhaps it’s more that I’m not sure of myself and what I have to offer, and thus by extension I question whether it’s worth sharing what I write. I’m no “subject matter expert” and I have led no extraordinary life. I can make no claims to exceptionalism, nor can I claim to be an exceptionally good writer.

I can say for sure that I can’t help writing. Since I was a young child I have always taken refuge in writing my thoughts, as though seeing my internal maelstrom parsed out into strings of legible symbols made it less of a maelstrom. I find myself intrigued or bothered by events in the world and though I cannot claim expertise in Israel-Gaza relations or Australia’s colonial legacy, I do often feel that I’m grasping at some kind of insight that wants to be expressed.

And I suppose I share what I write in the same way that we all (mostly) participate in conversations: because we’re all making sense of things and there is value in coming together to discuss life, the universe and everything.

I’m moving from a blog to Substack because I’ve come to appreciate the Substack platform as a better place for writers to participate in and facilitate important conversations. I like the format, the ease with which I can get email newsletters from writers I follow, and the simple formatting which puts every writer on a level playing field as far as web design goes (my blog is feeling very shabby and I don’t wish to put the time in to update it).

I wrote a short blog piece titled “Why I Write” back in 2022, where I tussled with the duality of writing for its own sake, and yet also writing to share or participate in a conversation. I’m still tussling with that, although I’m more sure these days that what I have to say resonates with people and brings them some degree of comfort, enlightenment, entertainment or all three.

I’ll be drawing on my blog posts to populate this Substack, so that this becomes a repository not only of fresher writings but also of older ones too. And I’ll endeavour to write new reflections on top of whatever old stuff I post. To that end, here’s my original post entitled “Why I Write” published on November 24, 2022:

I’m trying to tease out a paradox in my writing headspace. When I sit down to write, I take some time to set out my intentions and frame up my overall approach. This practice is best narrowed down into two affirmations: one; I remember this life is bigger than me and that I write to participate in this wonderful, miraculous unfolding of creation, and two; I’m not writing for anybody but me. I suppose these two motivations can go hand in hand: as I’m writing, I like to make sure I’m doing it for my own reasons. I like to approach writing as play. I imagine myself as a kitten, batting at toy mice that dangle in front of me, held aloft by unknowable forces. Writing with a point to prove isn’t impossible, but I find it less joyful and I often get tangled in the weeds. Writing for play is a marvel. However, I also find it important to have an intention and purpose to why I’m writing, and I guess that’s where the ‘bigger than me’ thing comes in: it’s not about getting lots of likes or attention, but it is about participating in a flow of knowledge, ideas, culture and, most importantly, emotion. The act of posting to my blog is something that has become second nature to me now. But it wasn’t long ago that I faced a lot of resistance to the concept. Now I’ve felt the urge to post on Instagram after a three-year hiatus, and that’s come with its own baggage as well. Fame and being known are two very different things, but we easily combine the two, and I routinely find myself caught up in fantasies of renown and power. It’s not as though I’m purely and innocently sharing what I write online: there is absolutely an element of self-promotion and an attention seeking agenda at work. But I choose to simply acknowledge that and realise I will never be free of that desire. The best solution, for me, is to engage nevertheless and simply choose to be as aware as I can of these subtle undercurrents that threaten to pull me off course. My true aim is to participate in life through my own authentic self-expression, and when I focus on that, the writing flows effortlessly. It often happens that the writing I do in that state is well received and I’m validated for it, but I know that the validation cannot be the motivation or else the creation loses its spark. I suppose the synthesis of these apparently opposed points is this: while I write for nobody but myself, I also recognise that I am a member of a whole, of a singular existence we call the universe. It’s an orientation that keeps me both powerfully attuned to myself but also powerfully engaged in a spirit of service and contribution.