On the Cruelty of Pavelic and Karadzic

Lee, Byung Wook

Abstract

The horrible genocides in the Balkans directed by Ante Pavelic and Radovan Karadzic shall be recorded as the most cruel and inhumane events in human history. These events show the most extreme levels of human insanity, surpassed only by the Nazi holocaust and the Nanjing massacre by Japanese troops. These individuals were called the butchers of the Balkans, and deserve to be denounced. Pavelic served as the Ustache leader of the Independent State of Croatia, which had been a puppet state of Nazi Germany during the World War II. He directly ordered, organized, and conducted a campaign of terror against Serbia, and therefore many men, women, and even children were literally hacked to death. The death toll from 1941-45 was almost 700,000. Despite the horror, the Vatican never condemned the genocide and instead, forced conversions of these people to Catholicism, something which was perpetrated by the Ustache. Fiftyyears later, another instance of genocide occurred in Bosnia. Radovan Karadzic, as acting as the President of Srpska Republic, ordered the mass murder of many Muslims from1992-1995. It seems as though there is a vicious circle of criminal revenge between Croatian Catholicism and Serbian Orthodox Christians, or the extreme collusion of fanatic nationalists specific to the Balkans. But here I would like to stress the enormously destructive wishes and cruelty which is deep-seated in the human mind, and the serious psychopathology of a charismatic political leader. I think that all the people of the Balkans were not actually the persecutors but rather the victims. The prime perpetrators are always the insane political, religious leaders as they instigate and provoke their people's weak areas of their personalities. As this occurs, they stimulate mass regression. They do not appeal to reason, but to passion. People need to fight against this sort of deception. We need to be mindful that psychoanalytic information presents an offer to us. I believe that the proper self-insight and groupinsights will assist in preventing future genocide and mass murders. Human cruelty and as well as evil minds are ubiquitous, deep seeded in every mind.