Trump: A War Criminal in the Making
Šešelj is a natural Trump ally, belonging to the same global tribe of rabid nationalists and racists. And then there’s the fact that 1 million Serb-Americans are a valuable constituency, particularly in a state like Ohio, where a large number (about 400,000) resides. Presently, Trump might not know where Serbia is, but soon enough he might look it up.
In my irresponsible youth, I dismissed Šešelj’s murderous bluster as pathological, if entertaining, buffoonery. But his entertainment value reached zero as the war reached its full potential and spread to Bosnia, my homeland, where Šešelj’s followers would eagerly slit many a Muslim throat. At around the same time, Šešelj became a Serbian parliament member and a close ally of Slobodan Milošević, the Godfather of the Greater-Serbia project and one of the greatest war criminals of the very competitive twentieth century. Šešelj would get into fistfights in the parliament, and once beat up his debate opponent in the TV studio right after the broadcast was over. Even on trial in The Hague, he retained his Trump-grade bravado. In his four-hour opening statement, he declared his regret that the death penalty was not on the table “so that proudly, with dignity, my head upright like my friend Saddam Hussein, I could die and put a final seal on my ideology.” On another occasion, he suggested to the Tribunal to “suck his dick” and “eat the shit they shat out,” graciously offering to “fuck all of their mothers.” When the Tribunal granted him temporary medical release in 2014, the justices surely felt relief.
What Šešelj has done for me, and what Trump might do for us, is expose a self-protective proclivity to dismiss the unimaginable as impossible. Accepting the possibility that someone like Šešelj (or Trump) could advance so rapidly from bombast to mass murder requires questioning the fabric of reality before it unravels and shows itself to be fragile and disastrously dependent on an assumed ethical consensus. What I’ve learned is that people are addicted to the inertia of their common reality, to the desperate belief that everything shall continue as it is simply because it’s been going fine up to this point. Šešelj taught me what lies beyond this point. Trump and his troops are killers in making.