The inability to live with paradoxes

[tusaki]

I found this an interesting piece, I translated it, so please bear with me.

Originally posted by Olaf Tempelman Journalism is a job where you can speak about things, but also a trade where others can say things about the way you say it. To publicize is in that way a form of making yourself vulnerable. You try in public to describe what you see, or to explain how something works according to you. After which others can react and speak their mind about how successful in your attempt you were -- to which extend they found your analyses and observations to be correct. In principle such reactions keep you focused. They can point out certain aspects which you neglected. They can also help you to find weak spots in your argumentation. To publicize is a sort of learning process which takes place in public. However, there are certain things where the one publicizing about it seems almost to be wrong by default, no matter how much of the learning process he or she has already undergone. No matter how much nuance or gray is put in the publication, there is always a group which takes offense, even if the group differs per publication. This is the case with articles about conflict situations, where sympathies of readers are spread out, where a group of readers believes party A is ok and another group believes party A is the cause of all misery. In my profession I enjoy the privilege to not always having to write about said situations. This results in nice mail. For example, in the last 4 years I have had many nice letters from readers in response to cultural, historical or touristy stories about Romania or Bulgaria. I get these posts -the way I see it- to compensate for the not-so-nice Yugoslavia-mail. The interest in former Yugoslavia has been greatly reduced in the last years, one of the reasons is the lack of a link between Yugoslavia and 9/11 or the war on terror. My colleague who writes about the Israeli-Palestine conflict receives an amount of mail which is many times larger than mine. Nevertheless there is a fanatic group of readers who checks everything which is written about Yugoslavia with their own conviction. The group doesn't only consist of ex-Yugoslavians in the Netherlands, but also of Dutch people who have put their soul and everything they are with the fate of one of the ethnic groups in Yugoslavia. I have strived in my publications about former Yugoslavia to give all ethnic groups a chance to voice themselves and to bring to light the suffering of all parties. But if you write about Serb refugees, within no time you will get a letter declaring you a Milosevic collaborator. If you write about the troublesome Serb relation with the Yugoslavia tribunal, then you have just shown you are an enemy of the Serb people. After writing about the recent wave of violence in Kosovo there was another club which suspected me of having anti-Serb emotions. I am always surprised how people refuse to question things again. The inability to cope with the fact there was a group which was the aggressor could become the victim, and how a group which was a victim at first could become the aggressor in a later stadium. Besides the inability to live with paradoxes, ambivalences and shades of gray instead of clear good and evil, it probably has something to do with lessening of media attention over time. Serbs where chased en masse out of Croatia, parts of Bosnia and Kosovo in later stages of the war. The minds of the public were already made up and the war was given less time by the media. The Serb suffering was not neglected however. The consequence of the above is that there exists a group which believes in a media-conspiracy to keep silent about the Serb suffering, as well as a group which sees every attention to the Serbs as victims as a form of accepting and making 'ok' the terrible things done by them during the war. A colleague who wrote about Cuba told me he regards an equal share of allegations about working for the CIA or Castro as a sort of compass. A correspondent in Jerusalem is right when he is suspected of Sharon- as well as Hams-sympathies. He must strife to make the different stacks of letters to be of almost equal height. It remains a lousy consolation though.