ABSTRACT
The insights in Jean Baudrillard’s essay, “Hunting Nazis and Losing Reality” (1989) ought to be extended to the present discussion, and particularly to the postcommunist developments in the Balkans. The former Yugoslavia became the postmodern screen for projecting all sorts of fictitious evils from history, from the extermination of Native Americans to Vietnam, but especially Nazism. Croatia’s bid for independence was branded by many as a manifestation of its allegedly genocidal national character manifested during World War II (Kaplan 1991b, 1993). Serbia’s aggression against its neighbors was also frequently likened to Nazism. Four of the five nations that came up with the failed Washington Peace Plan on 23 May 1993, which was designed to end the fighting in former Yugoslavia, were the anti-Nazi allies from World War II: Britain, France, Russia, the USA, and Spain. From a more cynical perspective, most of these nations also capitulated to Hitler in the years prior to World War II, and arguably capitulated to Slobodan Miloševic of Serbia in the 1990s. History was repeating itself with a vengeance. Despite these and other revivals of ghosts from the past, and despite the often heard refrain, “Never Again,” genocide in the Balkans continued unabated-with the full and conscious knowledge of the postmodern world’s television-viewing public. The hunt for Nazis in the Balkans was fictitious in the sense that it never connected with the moral outrage necessary to put a stop to the real genocide that was occurring in former Yugoslavia.
