They're Shocked, Absolutely Shocked!

News, both outrageous and ridiculous, reported by the BBC and Reuters today:

“Serbian President Boris Tadic has appeared on TV to express deep shock over a gruesome video showing Serbian soldiers killing Bosnian Muslims.... [it] begins with a Serbian Orthodox priest blessing paramilitaries before they go into battle. It ends with what appears to be the same paramilitaries shooting badly beaten civilians prisoners in the back with machine guns..... The killers are wearing the uniforms of a unit known as the Scorpions, which prosecutors say fell under the command of the Serbian interior ministry.”

“Nonetheless, only one newspaper carried the story of the video on its front page on Thursday..... a survey last week suggested that only half the Serbian population believe the Srebrenica massacre actually took place.... the same survey suggested that two-thirds of the public believe Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic are heroes.”  (my italics; BBC, June 3, 2005)

News like this is outrageous because it shows how everyday people, in this case Serbians, can remain distant from genocide and ethnic cleansing carried by their government.  News like this seems ridiculous because it seems impossible to me that the public did not know what was happening -- if they were ignorant, they chose to be so.  When we are all confronted with tangible evidence such as this, atrocities made visible -- in a homemade video -- horrifying events like this make belief in ethical progress, or innate human sympathy, seem utterly absurd.