“Truth and reason are eternal,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to Rev. Samuel Knox in 1810. “They have prevailed. And they will eternally prevail…” Jefferson was wrong. As the current media pack coverage of the 20th anniversary of the “Srebrenica massacre” indicates, his belief that “error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left to combat it” was somewhat naive.
It is noteworthy that “Srebrenica” in the mainstream media discourse is no longer a geographic location that needs to be preceded by a noun (“the massacre in…”). It has been developed into a stand-alone term that denotes horror, on par with “Auschwitz,” “Katyn,” or “Hiroshima.” In reality, unlike those very real horrors, it is a postmodern myth based on a distortion of facts and their willful omission.