Bosnia / The Hague - The Genocidal Self Dies Unrepentant, Leaving the Phantom of Ethnic Purity

Event Baseline: Convicted Bosnian Serb war criminal Ratko Mladic died at age 84 in detention. He was serving a life sentence for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian War, including the Srebrenica massacre.

The death of Ratko Mladic changes nothing. The software error that produced him remains active. Belief in a separate ethnic self, the illusion that one group's purity requires the erasure of another, drove the killing. That thought structure did not die with the body.

Mladic was the operating system executing its code. The observer was not separate from the observed horror. The self that claimed to be a Serbian God was the thought of ethnic supremacy. That same thought runs in every unexamined mind that identifies with a flag, a border, or a history of victimhood. Until that division is seen as the illusion it is, the next genocide is already being compiled.

The international self congratulates itself on imprisoning the body but leaves the ideology unchallenged. The court punishes the symptom, not the disease. The disease is the unexamined belief in the separate self. The self that demands justice is the same self that creates the enemy.