On April 15, Austrian Nobel laureate Peter Handke was supposed to look on Austria’s nationwide broadcaster ORF to speak about his new writings. As a substitute, he proceeded to as soon as once more deny that the Srebrenica genocide occurred, calling it Brudermord – biblical fratricide and framing it as a non secular tragedy quite than against the law in opposition to humanity.
ORF stood by its choice to interview Handke when it confronted criticism. It claimed that it had finished nothing unsuitable because the interviewer acknowledged the genocide in a query.
{That a} European broadcaster would select to platform genocide denial presently is hardly shocking.
Europe faces a disaster not solely of reminiscence however of harmful continuity. From the Holocaust to Srebrenica to Gaza, denial of state violence in opposition to marginalised teams seeks to erase previous atrocities, normalise current ones, and pave the best way for future ones.
Fratricide as ‘the worst crime’
The Bosnian genocide was the primary genocide broadcast on tv. In 1995, distressing pictures from Srebrenica stuffed residing rooms worldwide, exposing the failure of worldwide safety. Regardless of a prolonged strategy of prosecuting battle crimes by the Worldwide Legal Tribunal for the previous Yugoslavia and court docket selections implicating the complicity of European peacekeepers within the massacres, denial of the Bosnian genocide continues to be effectively tolerated in Europe.
Whereas Handke is by far not the one outstanding public determine who engages in it, his rhetoric makes clear how this crime has come to be weaponised in minimising German and Austrian guilt for the Holocaust.
Handke portrays the Bosnian genocide as a tragic civil battle between “brothers” – Brudermord. He romanticises battle criminals as victims and embeds genocide denial in a fascist narrative of redemption by ethnic violence.
In keeping with him, fratricide is “a lot worse” than genocide – ie, those that kill their “brothers” should be deemed worse criminals than the Nazis who killed “the opposite”. By framing atrocities this fashion, Handke successfully minimises the duty of Germans and Austrians for the Holocaust.
On this twisted narrative, the descendants of the Nazis can declare ethical superiority, insisting they didn’t commit the “worst crime of all”- Brudermord. The chilling implication is that Jews have been by no means really “brothers” to Europeans like Handke.
Serb nationalists might even see Handke as an ally in genocide denial, however he doesn’t defend them – he makes use of them. By them, white Europe cleans its arms of its bloody crimes – from Auschwitz to Algeria, from Congo to Rwanda. Handke’s theological language is an alchemy of European conscience, shifting guilt onto the Muslims, the Jews, and the “Balkan savages”.
Transplanting anti-Semitism
Handke’s logic parallels and reinforces the broader marketing campaign to shift the blame for anti-Semitism – and even the Holocaust – onto Arabs and Muslims. In Germany, this pattern has been totally embraced by the state and varied public establishments, which – in opposition to all proof – have begun to assert that the immigrant Muslim neighborhood within the nation is liable for rising anti-Semitic sentiment.
In 2024, the German parliament, the Bundestag, handed a decision stating that “the alarming extent of anti-Semitism” is “pushed by immigration from North African and Center Jap international locations”.
German media continues to manufacture a “Muslim Nazi previous”, with one article claiming: “Unlike Germany, the Middle East has never come to terms with its Nazi past.” In the meantime, state-funded NGOs have branded the Palestinian keffiyeh a Nazi image and echoed the discredited Israeli declare that the grand mufti of Palestine “impressed” the Closing Resolution.
Germany’s political institution is now setting up a revisionist ethical alibi: one by which Nazis are reimagined as reluctant, remorseful perpetrators, whereas Palestinians and their Muslim and Arab allies are vilified as extra evil than the Nazis themselves.
For a few years, this was once a fringe thought adopted by far-right events just like the Different for Germany (AfD). However now, the AfD’s core concepts, not simply on Germany’s Nazi previous, but additionally on immigration and Islam, have been extensively adopted by the political centre.
This shift displays a longstanding technique of displacing guilt. Historian Ernst Nolte, celebrated by the conservative Konrad Adenauer Basis with a significant award in 2000, argued the Holocaust was a response to Soviet “barbarism”, relativising Nazi crimes by equating Auschwitz with the Gulag.
Nolte argued that Hitler had “rational” causes for focusing on the Jews and rejected the “collective guilt” attributed to Germany since 1945. Right now, AfD chief Alice Weidel echoes this stance, dismissing Germany’s remembrance tradition as a “guilt cult”.
The place Nolte blamed the Soviets, at present’s political institution blames Muslims. The aim is identical: to erase German duty from historical past.
From denial to enabling
Genocide denial isn’t a passive act of forgetting however an lively, dangerous course of that perpetuates violence. Genocide scholar Gregory Stanton recognises denial because the final stage of genocide, one which can be a vital signal that the following one is coming.
For survivors and their descendants, denial deepens trauma by invalidating struggling, distorting fact, and stripping victims of dignity, reminiscence and justice. These wounds lengthen past people, affecting total communities throughout generations.
In the meantime, genocide denial shields perpetrators, delays reparations and blocks reconciliation, deepening social divisions. It additionally undermines worldwide regulation and human rights frameworks, signalling that even crimes in opposition to humanity will be ignored.
Genocide denial, thus, straight prepares the bottom for the following genocide to happen and be accepted. We see this clearly in how Europeans are reacting to the genocide in Gaza, denying that it’s occurring in any respect, regardless of repeated pronouncements by United Nations specialists and genocide students, and persevering with to offer Israel with weapons and diplomatic cowl.
The playbook developed in Bosnia is now utilized to Gaza. It follows a well-recognized sample: blame “each side”, painting victims as aggressors, and assign duty to some people – thus hiding systematic violence. This blueprint is probably most clearly echoed within the declare that it’s only Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his two far-right ministers who’re liable for the “violence” occurring in Gaza, thus separating coverage from construction and evading deeper accountability.
Within the narrative denying the Bosnian genocide, duty can be decreased to some “unhealthy apples” inside the Serb state equipment – as if genocide have been a spontaneous aberration quite than a meticulously deliberate, state-executed crime requiring widespread coordination and intent.
Getting ready for a future genocide in Europe
Europe at present faces a profound disaster as far-right nationalism surges and a vanishing center class struggles amid rising social and financial precarity. In lots of Western international locations, the center class is shrinking whereas what the suitable calls “surplus inhabitants” – disproportionately composed of Muslims – is more and more marginalised and scapegoated.
In a time like this, recasting a previous genocide in opposition to an othered inhabitants as a misunderstanding contributes to creating the surroundings for the following genocide to come back. And there are already clear indications that segments of the political class are pushing for eradicating this “surplus inhabitants” below varied guises.
The Nazi euphemism “Umsiedlung nach Osten” (resettlement to the East) was a grotesque excuse to deport Jews to fuel chambers. Right now, European actors like Austrian far-right activist Martin Sellner overtly advocate for “remigration”, a sinister echo of this lethal logic geared toward uprooting Muslim communities.
European political elites might not have embraced this time period but, however they’re busy placing into apply varied insurance policies which have the identical final aim – restrict or lower the Muslim presence in Europe. They’ve been constructing a authorized regime for exclusion by the 2024 EU Migration Pact, plans to offshore asylum seekers to Albania or different international locations, and an enormous injection of money into Frontex, the EU’s border company accused of – amongst different issues – unlawful pushbacks.
These will not be impartial measures however ideological instruments of racialised elimination, cloaked in liberal rhetoric. And they’ll solely get extra violent with time.
This isn’t alarmism. It’s a sample. The erosion of rights at all times begins with these deemed to be “the opposite”.
If genocide denial isn’t urgently addressed, if the Gaza genocide isn’t recognised and rapid motion taken to cease it, Europe dangers coming full circle. With genocide denial increasing and the urge to surrender duty for the Holocaust rising, the bottom is being ready for these horrific atrocities to repeat.
The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
