Thread by @maassp

Dear @NobelPrize,
Your 2019 Literature Prize went to an apologist for the Serb genocide in Bosnia. I covered the Bosnia war, I've read Peter Handke's "A Journey to the Rivers" -- which denies the genocide -- and I wrote this article.
Sincerely, Peter Maass
theintercept.com/2019/10/10/con…

@NobelPrize Did the jury of the @NobelPrize read Handke's 1997 book, which is subtitled "Justice for Serbia"? The book is on his Nobel biography, so it was part of his awarded work. Which leads to the next question -- how could they not understand the nature of what they were reading?

@NobelPrize The book is short (83 pages in its English edition) but you don't have to read far to get to the denialism at its heart. On page 2, Handke writes, "I wanted to go to Serbia, into the country of the so-called aggressors." Right there, stop -- "so-called aggressors."

@NobelPrize There's really no question, except among ultra-nationalists and their admirers, that Serbia under Slobodan Milosevic started the war. Right out of the gate, Handke wants us to believe that Serbs weren't responsible for the conflict. This is a starting point of denialism.

@NobelPrize What of the pictures of refugees fleeing Serb attacks? On page 20, Handke writes, "They compliantly and visibly adopted the requested martyr faces and postures for the lenses and microphones of the international photographers and reporters, as instructed, directed, signaled."

@NobelPrize I was among the international reporters who Handke suggests were manipulating things. (I covered the war for the Washington Post.) Hard to know where to begin. There were what, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of refugee photos? They were manipulated ?

@NobelPrize One of the key strategies of denialism -- of whatever stripe -- is that you don't have evidence of your own to back up what you're saying, so you deflect and try to undermine the people who bring evidence to the table that shows you are falsifying; these are the journalists.

@NobelPrize Handke describes the journalists who chronicled the events in Bosnia as a "horde of foreign reporters every evening at a hotel bar." This is an old trope -- lazy journalists making up stories over whiskeys. In the Bosnia war, 19 journalists were killed. cpj.org/data/killed/eu…

@NobelPrize Another strategy of denialism is to not always deny it straight up, but just question it, even after the question has been settled. On page 24, Handke asks this: "Has it been proved that the two attacks on Markale, the market of Sarajevo, were really Bosnian Serb atrocities..."

@NobelPrize Handke refers to Serb mortar attacks that killed more than 100 civilians in 1994 and 1995. Serb conspiracy theories accuse Sarajevo of bombing itself to generate international sympathy, or using blood-smeared dummies for staged photos (crisis actors before that phrase was used).

@NobelPrize There are no real questions about any of this. In addition to the ample news reports on these massacres, war crimes trials have settled it -- Serbs were convicted for these crimes and many others.

@NobelPrize I should pause here to recall that the @NobelPrize for Literature was awarded to this book's author. It's necessary to ask whether the members of the Swedish Academy who chose Handke actually read this book? If they didn't, why not? If they did, why didn't they interrogate it?

@NobelPrize I'm fine with Peter Handke believing what he wants to believe -- it's a discredited position, he can do as he wishes. But for the Nobel jurors to reward him, at a moment in history when our political systems are clogged with conspiracy theories that inspire far-right violence?

@NobelPrize We're not yet done with his book, by the way. It gets even worse.

@NobelPrize Another strategy of denialism -- the "all sides did it" approach, in which the immense crimes of one side are somehow balanced by the far fewer crimes of the other. Case in point: page 56 of Handke's book, in which he acknowledges that "thousands were murdered" at Srebrenica."

@NobelPrize Then the pivot:

"In smaller ways, much smaller, that was how the whole Bosnian war had gone: one night a Muslim village was destroyed, the following night a Serbian one."

@NobelPrize Except that's not how the war went, one for one. But if you want to deny a genocide, that's how you must pretend it went.

@NobelPrize Denialism is often carried out by asking questions long after they have been answered. You don't attack the edifice of truth head on, you try to go around it. You don't say Srebrenica didn't happen. You ask, But really, how could it have happened?

@NobelPrize From page 73 of Handke's book: "I want to ask how such a massacre is to be explained, carried out, it seems, under the eyes of the world, after more than three years of war during which, people say, all parties, even the dogs of this war, had become tired of killing...

@NobelPrize "...and further, it is supposed to have been an organized, systemic, long-planned execution."

@NobelPrize How could anyone from the Swedish Academy read these lines and not realize what's going on with them? I don't know what's worse -- that the Nobel jurors may not have read Handke's most controversial work, or failed to recognize what was controversial about it.

@NobelPrize Handke continues: "Why such a thousandfold slaughtering? What was the motivation? For what purpose? And why, instead of an investigation into the causes ('psychopaths' doesn't suffice), again nothing but the sale of the naked, lascivious, market-driven facts and supposed facts."

@NobelPrize Let's unpack this phrase -- "the sale of the naked, lascivious, market-driven facts and supposed facts."

@NobelPrize What does Handke mean by the "supposed facts" of Srebrenica? Did any member of the Swedish Academy ask themselves, when or if they read that passage, what their Nobel Prize laureate was positing as "supposed" about the execution of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys?

@NobelPrize More broadly, what does he mean by "the sale of the naked, lascivious, market-driven facts and supposed facts?" I suppose he means that articles about Serb atrocities sold newspapers. Well, I wrote those stories -- they were published despite the disinterest of most readers.

@NobelPrize The denialist strategy here is undisguised -- you can't assail the facts, so you assail the messengers. Handke describes the reporters of Bosnia as false chroniclers. What he writes about them on pages 74 and 75 is essential:

@NobelPrize "...packs of long-distance dispatchers who confuse their profession as writers with that of a judge or even with the role of a demagogue and .... are, from their foreign thrones, in their way just as terrible dogs of war as those on the battleground."

@NobelPrize I want to emphasize that Handke is fully within his rights to hold these views. He should be able to express his virulent disagreement with facts that are well-established. That's freedom of speech. My problem is with the Swedish Academy giving him a Nobel Prize for Literature.

@NobelPrize Literature is not always political, of course, but it can be. What's strange and upsetting about the Swedish Academy is that they pretty much denied/ignored the political aspect of Handke's work. Their lengthy biography of him had just this one passage obliquely mentioning it:

"Although he has, at times, caused controversy he cannot be considered an engaged writer in the sense of Sartre, and he gives us no political programs." nobelprize.org/prizes/literat…

It's almost nonsensical -- "he gives us no political programs." Just what does that mean? Handke has been widely accused of denying or downplaying a genocide, but that's not of relevance to the @NobelPrize jurors because, apparently, it's not a political program?

@NobelPrize Writers often write stupid and harmless things that should not disqualify them for awards. But rising to the defense of people who committed genocide is not harmless. By failing to read or understand Handke's work, the @NobelPrize has engaged in its own form of denialism.

@NobelPrize Ending the way I started -- with an article I wrote that I hope someone involved with the @NobelPrize might take notice of. theintercept.com/2019/10/10/con…