(5 of 5)
In Bosnia the cotton-and-diamonds tradition, alas, applies, and the rapists know it. Part of the enduring disaster of rape is this: the husband often enough blames the woman who was raped as much as he blames the man who raped her. All the dynamics of rape are ingeniously destructive. It tears the social fabric apart. It profoundly degrades the women and disgraces -- absolutely -- the men who were unable to protect the women.
Rape is inherently unforgivable: no woman has ever forgiven the man who raped her. No man has ever forgiven the man who raped his wife or daughter or mother. There is little hope of reconciliation. As T.S. Eliot wrote, "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" Rape is also inherently unforgettable. No one who has been raped ever forgets, as long as she lives. No raped woman can look at men without fearing it will happen again. Rape lives on and on in the anger and grief and depression and adhesive shame that it creates in one evil burst of violence.
Rape in the Bosnian war is clearly a policy of scorched emotional earth with intent to achieve ethnic cleansing. The only possible benefit one can see emerging from the rapes might be a grace of widened perception, a clearer moral focus on the idea that rape is really a form of warfare, like, say, germ warfare, and that sometime in the future, it will become unthinkable. At the end of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Jake Barnes says to Lady Brett Ashley, "Isn't it pretty to think so?"