Those to Whom Evil is Done/Do Evil in Return
Lance Morrow
...I had wondered for months how in the face of the world's almost unanimous condemnation and disgust, the Serbs could keep up a war conducted by rape, murder and starvation of whole cities. "Ethnic cleansing" has generated the worst public relations problem since Pol Pot went into politics: How do the Serbs keep on? How do they explain themselves to themselves?
The Serbs have found an amazing solution: they feel sorry for themselves. They marinate in self-pity. In their own minds they have solved their formidable moral problem by declaring themselves the injured party. An artful, if disgraceful display of jujitsu; this is a tactic one encounters in wife beaters and child abusers, who ingeniously manage to convince themselves, if not the authorities, that they were driven to it by the terrible behaviour of their victims...
...Mobs have an evil dynamic. An ethnic tribe, at its worst, is a supermob. A sense of narcissistic self pity that is merely contemptible in an individual is transformed to heroism in the tribal context: a fierce, virtuous assertion of the group. That is why ethnic grievance -- a rising force in so much of the world -- is so dangerous. When the subjective goes tribal, the self indulgence of one man or woman comes frighteningly alive, collective, suddenly legitimized, glorious even. What would be individual shame now blossoms into shamelessness. The weak and vicious transfer their worst defects to the larger cause (Greater Serbia, perhaps). Thus does self pity become selfless and, by this magic, righteous. And thus a brute killer portrays himself as a victim, who is therefore infinitely justified. Ethnic cleansing is merely injured virtue catching up. Nothing is more empowering, as they say, than being a victim. It is the Rolls-Royce of self-justifications, a plenary indulgence. W.H. Auden described it as if it were one of Newton's laws: "Those to whom evil is done/ do evil in return."...
Excerpted from Lance Morrow's Essay, A Moral Mystery: Serbian Self Pity. TIME April 12, 1993.