(Disclaimer: I’m in a heavy-OT zone today, and do not have the time to write this up with the care that it deserves, but the issue needs to be raised, because the “common wisdom” is beginning to accrete in a dangerous direction.)

Bosnia has brought up Serbia on war crimes. Yes, the entire nation. This has never been done before, and there’s a good reason for that: the Allies didn’t hang the entire population of Germany for war crimes after World War II, the entire Serbian nation didn’t somehow wake up one morning and think “let’s go murder all the Bosnian Muslims.”

Now, for those of you who are rightly beginning to protest, don’t get me wrong. I know folks who were in Sarajevo. I can remember to this day handling the piece of shrapnel that the Bosnian I was introduced to kept to commemorate the piece of metal, one half of which cut his hair and sat in his pocket, the other half of which tore his best friend’s head off. At no point do I wish to even pretend that what Milosevic engineered does not fully justify putting him and his at the end of a short rope, just as was done to the men who ran the Nazi concentration camps. But just as it would be ridiculous to hold every Croat guilty for the expulsion of Serbs from the Krajina, mass judgment in this case is an abrogation of, rather than a support for, final justice.

The trial is giving rise to self-righteous screeds like this, which sacrifice history on an altar of sanctimony. History is more complicated than an editorial-page sound-bite, and the Serbs also suffered terribly at the hands of Milosevic as he rallied the Chetniks’ long memories of earlier horror as a distraction from what he was doing to the populace at large. The Bosnian government’s attempt to create collective guilt papers over certain inconvenient facts, like Milosevic’s little habit of putting Chetnik units directly behind the lines in order to keep Serbian line units from simply deserting en masse out of a war with which they wanted nothing to do in the first place.

I don’t know where Ratko Mladic’ is. Neither does the average Serb, and the Serbian government appears to take its responsibility regarding the fugitive seriously. That some Chetniks are in denial over the whole process, or even actively aiding and abetting this monster even today, does not justify making a mockery of history by putting forth collective judgment. Collectivism makes a mockery of justice. If everybody owns the land, nobody owns it. The same thing applies to atrocities. The individuals who took part in the mass killings and rape rooms need to be brought to full, merciless justice. Otherwise, individual accountability suffers, and it becomes easy enough to once again subordinate one’s guilty conscience under the murderous goals of an evil regime.

The 20th Century should have unequivocally taught us this lesson.