Grim reminder

The death of Slobodan Milosevic takes me back to graduate school. That is where, for three years, I worked toward being a political scientist with a particular interest in the comparative analysis of genocides. Milosevic was at the heart of much what of what I was studying back in the late '90s. The horror of Bosnia was fresh then, and the Kosovo crisis was getting worse and worse.

Genocide scholars are kind of a weird bunch, as you might imagine. The ones I met wore a lot of black. What motivates them? What motivated me? I've thought a lot about that, and the best answer I've come up with, and not to sound flip about this, is that genocide is, you know, a problem. And what we do with problems is to try to understand them. This is what academic research is all about. Quantum physics, linguistics, statistics -- each has it own set of problems, and people fascinated by the problems go to graduate school to study them.

Most academic disciplines, however, don't involve villagers being hacked to death with machetes. But stuff like that is indeed what this budding academic thought about a lot. It wasn't necessarily the very process of killing that fascinated me, although I participated in more than one seminar that examined state-sponsored mass murder in very gory detail. What interested me more was ideology, and how political tools like nationalism and the mass media helped bring about the cataclysms that everyone pretty much agrees were -- are -- genocides. And there have been just a handful of them.

Horrible stuff. My books from graduate school are on a shelf near my desk, so I look at those titles every day: The Tragedy of Cambodian History, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hitler's Willing Executioners. But although the topic still interests me, it certainly no longer feels like my calling. The death of Milosevic is personally significant, as was the death of Pol Pot in 1998; and the ongoing massacre in Darfur makes me want to scream. (The Bush administration called Darfur a genocide, and my understanding is that by treaty, America was then obligated to stop the bloodshed. Oh well.) But I don't think about mass slaughter all the time, not anymore.

Call it a phase. I struggled with some demons in my late 20s, and I think my interest in genocide was one way I allowed myself to get distracted from my problems. For example, and this may sound crazy: I was a closeted gay man through most of my 20s, and rather than face my own fear and shame, I delved deeply into contemplating the worst things humankind has done to itself.

I also was motivated by a sort of reform-minded concern. I imagined that if academics thought hard enough, they could help devise policies to stop the killing. This may indeed be true; easing global poverty, for example, would likely forestall some violence, and political economists would be happy to talk to you about how to go about doing this. But there was something pathological about my thinking in this vein, too. Save the world? When I can't even live honestly?

Now all the violence just scares me. If I found myself on the ground in Darfur, facing a janjaweed division, what, really, would I say? That identity is contingent? That Arab Sudan is an imagined community? I would be chopped to bits.

I'm disappointed Milosevic died when he did. Humanity would have benefited to see someone like him in the dock. I'm not sure whether in future we'll mention Milosevic in the same breath as Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. Perhaps not. But we don't get many chances like the one we lost when Slobo kicked off.