Evil is easy to understand empirically. The vast literature on, for example, the Holocaust makes evil accessible and exoteric; memoirs, documentaries, literature, art, and cinema clearly bear witness to what evil is. Evil, however, is difficult to comprehend conceptually. Theoretically evil is abstruse and esoteric.

Plato’s Socrates avoids discussing evil, and it is important to understand why. No one knowingly does wrong, Socrates asserts. When someone knows that an act is wrong (truly knows that it is wrong), he or she does not willingly commit the act. Doing wrong, according to Socrates, is a matter of ignorance—a matter of...

“Ethnic cleansing” is a widely misused euphemism for the arrests, expulsions, rapes, and murders of Bosnian citizens. The use of this phrase obstructs an adequate understanding of the activity that the term labels. The term is euphemistic because the word “cleansing” implies an activity that is ordinary, harmless, and even beneficial. There, however, was nothing ordinary, harmless, or beneficial about the arrests, expulsions, rapes, and murders of hundreds of thousands of Bosnian citizens.

In 1992, before the war, there were 4.5 million inhabitants of Bosnia. During the war, close to one-quarter of a million were killed, one-quarter of a million...

What is the evil in war crimes? The word “evil” is a signifier, and its meaning needs to be recovered; otherwise, the word loses its significance despite the preponderance of its use. During the war against Bosnia, the nationalist Serb Army and the Yugoslav People’s Army deliberately targeted civilian funerals. Massacres sometimes occurred during services, thus preventing family members from burying their loved ones. Communities were forced to abandon their deceased in fields or on streets. The war criminals then grotesquely discarded the bodies into remote pits or inaccessible mines. Sometimes they planted grenades into these pits to discourage the...

While it is easy to identify the political motive behind ethnic cleansing, it is more difficult to understand the social motive. The costs were too high not only for the victims, but also for the victimizers. The perpetrators destroyed not only the homes, the communities, and the lives of people who had been neighbors, but also the social fabric and cultural conventions upon which they, too, had depended. In the video documentaryKilling Memory: Bosnia’s Cultural Heritage and Its Destruction, produced by the Community of Bosnia Foundation, Andras Reidlmayer says that ethnic cleansing was an assault not just against people...

The rapes that occurred in Bosnia during the war were assaults on individuals’ bodies and selves. The purpose was not just to harm a woman or young girl’s body, although this was one purpose. The purpose was also to destroy a person’s sense of self as a free and self-conscious person. The damage that rape does to the self, while sometimes invisible, takes longer to heal than the damage done to the body, although the harm to the body and the harm to the self are both acts of injustice.

In Bosnia, rape had an even more wretched significance. The...

What is the relation between an intellectual’s work and an intellectual’s life? Is it fair to measure one against the other? Does the knowledge of how an intellectual debased his or her life contribute to a critical understanding of an intellectual’s work? Shall we keep the two separate? Shall we fail to consider the two together?

Mihailo Marković is a world-renowned Yugoslav philosopher recognized for his writing on humanism, social democracy, and human rights. He was a leading member of the editorial board ofPraxisand director of the famous Korčula Summer School. His biography as a military officer in...

One instrument that promoted evil in Bosnia was the war criminals’ mendacious use of language in the media. Documentaries, news reports, and world newspapers featured the verbal utterances of Slobodan Milošević, Ratko Mladić, Željko Ražnjatović (Arkan), and Radovan Karadžić. When speaking with a reporter, Milošević, Mladić, Arkan, and Karadžić were aware of their audience; they anticipated how their audience would perceive them. This awareness influenced what those engaged in evil said and how they said it. The world would think that through these utterances it understood the ineffable events in Bosnia.

Every person engaged in action speaks, and this speaking...

When addressing the significance of postmodernism, it is helpful to keep in mind that the founders of postmodernism—Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Jacques Derrida—are all admirers of the ancient Sophists. Foucault, for instance, identifies positively with Callicles in theGorgiasand Thrasymachus in theRepublic. He resents the “reassuring dialectic” that Socrates employs to refute his ancient friends, and it is as if Foucault believes that, if he were to encounter Socrates today, he (unlike his ancient friends) would remain firm in his antipathy toward Platonic philosophy and defense of sophistry. Postmodernism is the serious revival and unabashed...

People in Bosnia were victimized by aggression from Serbia and Croatia and by criminal elements within their own country; they were also victimized by the world’s nonunderstanding of this evil. Even though media accounts attempted to explain the motivation behind the destruction of so many lives, families, and communities, they often fell short.

There is, however, preexisting literature that explains the evil that the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina suffered. One such essay is titled “On Nationalism” by Danilo Kiš. The essay has been reprinted in two anthologies,Why Bosnia?(Ali and Lifschultz 1993) andScar on the Stone(Agee 1998). It...

There are many books written on Bosnia and the Balkans from historical, political, journalistic, philosophical, and sociological points of view. One such book is Maria Todorova’sImagining the Balkans. It is worthwhile looking closely at Todorova’s concluding sentence. While an author’s last words are often the most enigmatic, they can also be the most revealing:

If Europe has produced not only racism but also antiracism, not only misogyny but also feminism, not only anti-Semitism, but also its repudiation, then what can be termed Balkanism has not yet been coupled with its complementing and ennobling antiparticle. (1997, 189)

There are problems...

Evil is difficult to comprehend theoretically. Socrates avoided this task, and it is important to understand why. When someone knows that an act is wrong (truly knows that it is wrong), someone will not willingly commit the act. Doing wrong, according to Socrates, is a matter of ignorance and nothing else.

Socrates’ refusal to theorize evil exasperated his interlocutors. In Plato’sGorgias, Polus asked why Socrates argued as if he were unaware of evil: “But can they not kill whoever they please, like dictators, and inflict confiscation and banishment on anyone they choose?” Socrates replied that, while tyrants do these...

During the war in Bosnia, home after home was burned. Gunners methodically shelled from the hills house after house along streets in villages, towns, and cities. Traveling through the countryside of Bosnia after the war, one still sees how immense this devastation is. Burnedout frames of homes dot the hills. Empty shells of houses are found in every locale.

Why was the violence brought to bear in this particular way against the people of Bosnia? Consider the significance of the home as recounted by the cultural anthropologist, Tone Bringa:

It often took ten to twenty years to finish a modern...