In an uncharacteristic show of restraint, Jonah Goldberg has yet to claim vindication, on his Liberal Fascism blog, from the fact that Radovan Karadzic, the Serbian butcher of Srebrenica, eluded an international manhunt for a dozen years by posing as a New Age healer named Dr. Dragan Dabic. (Click here to see the Web site Karadzic maintained as Dabic; this one, which, helpfully, includes an English translation, is an apparent hoax.) Liberal Fascism, a book I reviewed unfavorably, argued that the New Age movement was descended from fascism—exhibits A and B being that Hitler was a vegetarian and that Rudolf Hess was into homeopathy way before it was cool—and “fascist” would indeed seem a fair description of Karadzic’s genocidal nationalism.
Writing in the Guardian, Peter Walker and Arnel Hecimovic report that the Web site for “Dabic”
liberally mixes Christian iconography, seemingly half-understood eastern mysticism and some often-baffling talk of human “energies.”The overall method—referred to as “psy-help energy” or “human quantum energy”—claims to be an effective remedy for everything from depression to diabetes, asthma, arthritis and MS.”We are energetic beings,” the Serbian-language site begins. “Numerous energetic processes in us, on which all the functions of our body are dependent upon, are caused by the energy of the higher source (cosmic energy, prana, mana, organic energy, quantum energy, the Holy Spirit). They flow in us and around us and they are our highest good and the source of health and our well being.”
On the Web site, “Dabic” sold various tchotchkes, including a necklace described thusly, according to Walker and Hecimovic:
This necklace is for personal protection. It is worn on the chest at the height of the fourth chakra and thymus gland, the gland of youth and immune system. It harmonizes the energies of the aura and the physical body, protects from harmful rays … If you hold it in the palm of your hand for a few minutes it causes a turbulence of energy of the chakra, heats up, and vibrates even though it is not battery powered.
Too bad the good doctor didn’t set up his Web site a decade earlier. Somewhere between 7,000 and 8,000 of those necklaces might have come in handy on July 13, 1995, the day Dabic’s alter ego began the mass slaughter of unarmed Muslims in a Kravica warehouse.
Is New Ageism inherently fascist? Of course not, though I’m happy to pronounce its babble about chakras and cosmic energy errant quackery. But hey, this isn’t about me. Jonah, it’s your moment. Take a bow.
