Lessons from Sarajevo: A War Stories Primer

2. Thesis: The Crime of the Scene

[ 23 ] Thesis The Crime of the Scene 2 Were there time, it would be worthwhile to consider the style (if one can call it that) of these books, which resemble each other in many respects. In their composition as in their language, they proceed always by affirmative accumulation , never, or hardly ever, by argumentation [. . .] They hammer at an idea, supporting it with whatever might seem to fit, without any analysis, without any discussion of objections, without any references. There is neither knowledge to establish, nor thought to overcome. There is only an already acquired, already available truth to declare. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Nazi Myth” The thinking behind this chapter began, in some sense, in early March 1999, after the refugee crisis in Kosovo had begun and when the NATO bombing campaign was only days away. One evening after classes, I attended a teach-in on the crisis. At that event, attended by about a hundred students and professors, a sociologist, Peter I. Rose, was the first to speak. He began by showing us a collection of news photos which he had accumulated from a variety of conflicts over the past decades. Each photo portrayed a nearly identical image, a mother and her child, invariably in the midst of desolation of one kind or another. Rose explained, with no trace of irony, that within human rights organizations this image is commonly referred to as “The Madonna of the Refugees.” His point was not, as mine will be here, to describe and reflect on those constraints and presuppositions within our collective imagination which cause this image to be generated, time and time again. Then the case was more simple: in March 1999, history seemed to be repeating itself, and Professor Rose wanted us to think about this woman with her child, to imagine ourselves in her place, and to remember her face the next time events in the world brought it to our attention. And indeed, that time was now. As if my colleague had predicted it, the very next cover of Time magazine portrayed a Kosovar Albanian woman, wearing a head scarf and breast-feeding her child while carrying it through a crowd of other displaced Kosovars. Cover of Time, April 12, 1999, War in Kosovo. [ 25 ] THESIS: THE CRIME OF THE SCENE The caps-and-boldface question on this cover does seem bold: was Time lobbying for military intervention? By 1999, many published accounts of the earlier war in Bosnia had claimed that journalism was instrumental in bringing the conflict to an end. The notion of an activist press is familiar, of course, at least since the U.S. war in Vietnam: coverage has often been said to set the terms of public opinion, politicians in Western democracies are seen as responding to the sentiments of their various publics—the right pictures are worth, as it were, a thousand divisions. I won’t speculate here about whether such claims for the power of the press are true; many articles , and a few books as well, have already begun to investigate this issue.1 I do suspect, however, that any straightforward narrative of journalistic triumph is far too simple. Whatever the case, even before we examine the effects of war coverage, we would do well to analyze the coverage itself. The place to begin, as far as I’m concerned, is with a quotation from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality. In that influential essay, Rousseau imagined an onlooker who witnesses, and is unable to aid, a mother and child being attacked by a savage beast: the tragic image of an imprisoned man who sees, through his window , a wild beast tearing a child from its mother’s arms, breaking its frail limbs with murderous teeth, and clawing its quivering entrails. What horrible agitation seizes him as he watches the scene which does not concern him personally! What anguish he suffers from being powerless to help the fainting mother and the dying child! (68)2 For the French philosophe, the spectacle he depicted naturally, and necessarily , displays the expression of sympathy—a sentiment he believed so widespread that it isn’t even species-specific. From his comments, however , readers today may suspect that Rousseau found tragedy as much in the “anguish” and “agitation” it produces as in the fate it ascribes to the mother and...