War & Peace Quote by Franjo Tudjman

Tudjman’s sentence is built like an accountant’s correction, but it functions as something darker: a political attempt to launder mass murder into a dispute about methodology. The key move is rhetorical displacement. Instead of naming Jews, camps, or perpetrators, he names “testimonies,” “data,” “reckonings,” “squaring of accounts.” Human suffering becomes a paperwork problem, and the moral gravity of genocide is re-framed as a quarrel over postwar bookkeeping.

Its intent is not merely skepticism; it’s to shift the burden of proof from perpetrators to survivors and prosecutors. By branding testimony as “emotional” and “biased,” Tudjman borrows the language of courtroom credibility to imply that witnesses are unreliable by nature. “Exaggerated data” and “postwar reckonings” insinuate a self-serving conspiracy: the victors inflating numbers to justify punishment and humiliation of the defeated. That final phrase, “squaring of accounts,” is particularly telling. It casts accountability as vengeance, making justice look petty and transactional.

Context matters. Tudjman rose to prominence in late socialist Yugoslavia and then led Croatia through the nationalist upheavals of the 1990s, a period when competing historical narratives were weaponized to legitimize new states and redraw moral boundaries. Minimizing Nazi crimes, or recasting them as propagandistic overreach, wasn’t an abstract historiographical debate; it was a way to soften the stigma around wartime collaboration, re-center Croatian victimhood, and clear space for a new national story. The line’s cold, technocratic tone is the point: cynicism dressed as “reason.”