Senior Scholar Walter Reich Analyzes Evil in Op-Ed
As Radovan Karadzic awaits a tribunal, looking at a Serbian Holocaust war criminal provides psychological parallels.
Wilson Center Senior Scholar Walter Reich published an opinion piece Sunday in the Baltimore Sun, analyzing the psychology of Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader recently arrested on war crimes charges. Putting Karadzic's atrocities in perspective, he compares Karadzic to Dinko Sakic, a war criminal who ran Croatia's most horrible concentration camp during the Holocaust. Sakic never expressed regret for his crimes, even commenting that he wished he had killed more Serbs.
"Human beings, it seems, have a powerful, limitless and unshakable capacity to convince themselves of the justice of anything they do," Reich writes. "No matter how deeply those leaders and their followers believe in their own rectitude, others must never be taken in by such rationales."
