Jonathan Tremblay: U.S. General Blames Srebrenica Massacre on Open Gay Policy
Retired US general and former NATO commander John Sheehan has claimed that his UN forces failed to prevent the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia-Herzegovina due to the heavy contingent of Dutch effectives among his troops, a force that allows soldiers to be openly homosexual. Former general Sheehan’s logic follows that western armies began a “socialization” process following the fall of the Soviet Union, allowing badly trained and/or inept soldiers (such as homosexuals) to join military forces. The end result is said to be a weakened and ineffective military. Sheehan had no comment about female soldiers that were, in 1995, still not allowed in US army overseas operations.
In 1995, Bosnia-Herzegovina was at the forefront of the secession wars pitching the former province-nations of Yugoslavia against one another in a bid for cultural sovereignty. Slovenia broke off with relative ease and Croatia violently and instantly repressed cultural minorities but Bosnia’s was a different setting. Separated almost equally amongst Serbs, Muslims (a recognized nationality in this case) and Croatians, it was a melting pot that led to many clashes, urban encounters, full-out warfare and gruesome massacres such as those in Mostar and Srebrenica. It was in the latter that UN troops aimed to protect the Muslim population that had sought refuge there by mid-1995. The principally Dutch UN contingent became powerless as Bosnian-Serb forces overran them and proceeded to kill up to 8,000 Muslim civilians (children included). 30,000 Muslim citizens later fell to Bosnian-Serb troops in the following weeks as UN peacekeepers did not have the mandate to counterattack and could only leave the war zone. In the decade-and-a-half since those tragic events, many contributing factors have been analyzed and proposed in the hope of avoiding some unfortunate historical repetition. Among the accepted causes are racial tension, lack of UN manpower and figurative firepower; an international tribunal has even determined that the action is to be designated “genocide”. Notice that no organization has proposed the potential sexual orientation of peacekeeping forces as a major or indeed minor factor in the events of Srebrenica. US and Dutch officials alike have vehemently denied Sheehan’s allegations and condemn them wholly.
That being said, this is not the first (or last presumably) time that a more despicable part of history is linked or indeed even blamed on homosexuality. I propose that sensationalism would be the only motive for this type of historical revisionism. Just imagine what the media would do with theories linking homosexuality and the Holocaust…
Homosexuality may have led to the holocaust
German historian Lothar Machtan wrote a book called “The Hidden Hitler” released in 2001. It is here that he exposed his thesis that Adolf Hitler’s concealed yet rampant homosexuality “shaped several of his political decisions and key historical events during the Nazi era.” Mostly due to fear of being discovered and blackmailed, Hitler’s homosexuality led him to be a ruthless leader and reclusive politician outside of official functions.
Machtan does not go much further in his suppositions and his sources accordingly support, at best, preliminary evidence of Hitler’s homosexual leanings during his early life. Nevertheless, there is no firm evidence of his homosexuality, homosexual actions or attitude towards homosexuals (Machtan argues that the extermination of homosexuals in the Reich were due to social undesirability in the eyes of other Nazi officials whereas Hitler would support the measure in order to avoid possible exposure and extortion by homosexuals that presumably knew the crooked leaning of the Fuhrer). All in all, the book is on very shaky ground, especially when proposing this theory as a fundamental reason for Hitler becoming who he became and what he did (also when proposing that Eva Braun was just a ‘beard’). Nonetheless, it sold very well. The Treaty of Versailles, the outcome of WW1, the Great Depression, rampant anti-Semitism, megalomania and paranoia are still probably a better amalgam of Hitler’s personality when it comes to the man and his monstrous actions.
Homosexuality made victims in the Catholic Church
Child abuse cases are not disappearing amongst the Churches of the world. Recently, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, Vatican official to the UN clarified that ‘homosexuality’ is the cause of the abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, that the Church has not been rife with paedophiles for the last few decades (publicly documented decades that is). The archbishop went on to clarify that the victims were between the ages of 11 and 17 and therefore they were not the prey of paedophilia but rather of homosexual men (victim groups have not commented on this clarification…). He finished the speech by imploring the world media to focus on Judaic, Muslim and Protestant institutions that have much more such sexual deviance scandals but that these have been kept quiet in order to pick on Rome. Tomasi backs up this accusation with research that is not made available to the public but that allegedly shows that “only 1.5% of the Catholic clergy has been implicated in cases of child sex abuse.” By my, admittedly summary, count, that would still be 3345 clerics worldwide, still a very big number. Victim groups were again not available to comment on how comforting this statistic is to them.
The continuing and now decades-old scandal of underage male abuse in the Church, in all reality, cannot be blamed on an abstract concept or definition. ‘Homosexuality’ didn’t do anymore here than he/she/it did in Nuremberg in 1935 or in Srebrenica in 1995.
In conclusion and to reiterate my main point, bringing up homosexuality as a scapegoat in these three cases would be much like bringing up colour-blindness as a catalyst of history. Homosexuality is just a lot more sensational and is still a pejorative taboo in many cultures today. In the end, very rarely can such complex, long-term and tragic events be reduced to a single factor, much less one as superfluous as sexual orientation. If you ask me, the good general Sheehan may be letting out a little bit more prejudice than historical analysis in this case.