Nick Thorpe reported for BBC on the response to the arrest of Mladic in Sarajevo last year.
There is a lightness in the air, a mood of celebration among Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) about the arrest. But Muki – short for Muamera – says she can no longer share it.
“First reaction was, right, good news,” she says.
“But then, as I turned on the TV and watched all the footage… the scenes from the war… it brought back all the bad memories, stuff that I normally have flashbacks and nightmares about, that I and everybody [else] tries to block out. So it is not a happy day for me.”
…
In an extended broadcast of the interview with Maki or another young woman (one I can’t find), the interviewee stated that she thought everyone in Sarajevo suffered from PTSD and they all do their best to just go on. She concluded with a statement that on balance the capture of Mladic was good but it wasn’t without a new cost to the victims of Serbian war crimes.
I flashed back to that interview after reading Steven D’s diary GOP Candidate: “Incest Is So Rare” at dKos and Damnit Janet’s comments. In particular:
I’m spinning back to the need for vengence and that’s not me. I can’t be that person.
I’m angry because no matter what it always boils down to the fucking fact that I was raped.
I’m more than that.
For some large population of Americans, it always “boils down the the fucking fact” that they were sexually assaulted and all will carry with them some degree of PTSD. It required extraordinary courage and a not insignificant number of tears for so many women and men to observe the legal proceedings against Jerry Sandusky. That was an experience much like what Maki said about the arrest of Mladic. Painful but on balance worth it.
What the GOP has been doing for the past year to sexual assault victims is nothing short of cruel and unusual: trigger sexual assault PTSD flashbacks. Torture. Perhaps one of their “think-tanks” contracted with
Mitchell-Jessen & Associates psychologists on expanding their torture techniques to a mass population. Grind it through a Luntz word-salad-spinner and out comes whole new categories of rape such as “legitimate rape,” “honest rape, and “emergency rape.” Terms that undermine decades of feminist efforts to destimatize victims of sexual assault. Terms designed to empower bullies and harm real victims. Confident that victims are too confused and/or pained by the attacks to repel them fully. Confident that the range of the emotional effects of sexual assault protects the aggressors from any united and concerted backlash from the victims and their supporters.
The fact that the GOP elites and moneybags aren’t distancing themselves from their mouth-breathing front men engaging in the ritual torture of sexual assault victims suggests that they’re seeing a long-term winner.
“First they came for ….”
The torture genie is out of the bottle.