Love Thy Neighbor A Story of War by Peter Maass

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28 November 2007

Love Thy Neighbor : A Story of War by Peter Maass (A Critique

This book is interesting from a number of perspectives . One is the story of Peter Maass himself- a widely respected reporter for the Washington Post and a native Californian Jew . The book draws on the author 's experiences gained during his time as a journalist in Bosnia in 1992 to 1993 - merely a year , yet he saw a great deal . He was there when some of the

worst atrocities of the conflict were just reaching the Western media , and also at a time when the policies of the Western powers towards Bosnia were at their most duplicitous , and a US Presidential election and the Olympic Games in Barcelona dominated the global media . Little did he know how profoundly this assignment was going to change his self-perception as well as his view of the world . In Bosnia he came to confront a reality for which even the riots of Los Angeles had not prepared him : he discovered his own Jewish identity and what it means to belong to a despised ethnic minority in a land composed entirely of ethnic minorities who routinely despise one another

Although Maass shows little or no traditional theological sensibility he does explore the moral dimensions of inter-human relationships . He is fortunately not satisfied with merely naming the obvious source of the Balkan bloodletting- Serbian nationalism gone berserk as a result of threatening encounters with other nationalisms . He looks instead at evil from a universal perspective . Regarding the Nazis of World War II and the Serbs of these Balkan wars as the epitome of something diabolical in human nature , Maass contemplates the unleashing of this wild beast

He discovers that , while part of us is reasonable , practical , happiness and pleasure-seeking , our other half prefers darkness , pain , despair and devastation . The principle of evil , Maass realizes , takes ascendancy not only among Germans in the form of Nazism or Serbs in the form of national chauvinism but that all people are liable to descend into darkness , hating rather than loving their neighbor . He comprehends the enormity of human depravity and avoids the shallow analysis of those who see only socio-economic causation for cataclysms like that of the Balkans

What intrigues Maass is why Europe and the U .S . did not intervene to stop the evil after journalists , including himself , had demonstrated what was going on in Bosnia . Maass spares of the players the moral collapse of the ideology of law and accountability starts with low-level employees of the State Department , rises to middle-level figures such as Lord David Owen , and reaches the American president , Bill Clinton . He considers them all to have been appeasers and sees no extenuating circumstances for their concessions to and collaboration with evil

With this , he has produced an excellent account of the tragedy and absurdity ' of the Bosnian war . We move from the disarming sincerity of the mendacious Bosnian Serb...