I reviewed "My War Criminal," by Jessica Stern, a book that recounts her 12 interviews with Radovan Karadzic. Stern's book is an abject failure, and I wanted to add a few words, because the moral quandaries raised by a book like this are enormous 1/x nytimes.com/2020/01/23/boo…
To write a book about a perpetrator of genocide requires extraordinary moral fortitude *and* extraordinary writing skills. I don't think Stern wrote this book out of malevolence, or because she's a Karadzic sympathizer. After Op-Ed published an excerpt, she apologized. But... 2/x
... she gained access to someone who was then standing trial for war crimes at an international tribunal (interviews began in 2014; Karadzic was convicted in 2016) — the kind of access unheard of since the psychiatrists evaluated the Nazis at Nuremberg. 3/x
Access like this can be a devil's bargain. Stern even admits as much: When she accidentally challenged him in an interview (and it wasn't really a challenge!) she was so worried that he would kick her out and make it harder for her to finish her book. 4/x
But what Karadzic has to tell her is the usual odious stuff he's been spewing for years, about "protecting" his people. Karadzic was found guilty for multiple crimes against humanity, including the massacre at Srebrenica, where Serbian forces murdered 8,000 men and boys. 5/x
Stern says Karadzic wasn't responding to a real threat, but she seems to buy what he says about *perceiving* a threat. Her interviewing method is "to surrender to his idea of himself." And when the self-pitying war criminal's "idea of himself" is that of a nationalist hero... 6/x
... she's in trouble. So she strains for profundity by embroidering her book with literary affectations, starting with the title. A list of people at the beginning of her book is labeled "Dramatis Personae." Her meditations are presented in melodramatic italics, etc. 7/x
But what's I found most disturbing about the book is how she entertains Karadzic's grotesque excuses for his campaign of extermination. His "fear of being eclipsed," she writes, was "based on a kernel of truth." 8/x
“Mixing of cultures to create new hybrids does entail loss. Grave loss.” That's not Karadzic speaking; it's Stern. She follows it up with some junk by a *white nationalist* saying that “‘white European culture’ could indeed be eclipsed due to immigration and cultural mixing.” 9/x
Karadzic is revered by violent white nationalists across the world; the Christchurch shooter in NZ and Utoya shooter in Norway both cite Karadzic as a model. Stern says it wasn't her intention to lend credence to their views (and she's alarmed Trump won in 2016), but ... 10/x
... it would have taken an exceptional feat of writing to have prevented a convicted war criminal like Karadzic from commandeering her narrative. Empathy is woefully insufficient when it comes to writing a book like this — and it can even lead the writer astray. 11/x
As I say in the review, Karadzic weaponized history and identity to stoke hatred and turn the people who listened to him into killers. Stern wants the truth to be more complicated and less banal than it is. I recommend reading the work of @SashaHemon and @JasminMuj instead. 12/12
