A dull apparatchik whose ambition exactly matched his bloodthirst, Mr. Milosevic was reliant on the oppressive machinery of his police, secret service and the paramilitaries. He made a habit of ordering the killings of his political rivals. He turned Serbia into a war-addicted kleptocracy, ruined its economy, lost every war he fought and was deposed by his own people in 2000. To Mr. Handke, he was “a rather tragic man” who did what anyone would do in his position.

I haven’t been able to read Mr. Handke’s work since he devoted himself to the lost cause of Mr. Milosevic and Serbia. By virtue of being Bosnian, I am not as European as the wise Swedes on the Nobel Committee, who awarded Mr. Handke the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. I am therefore repeatedly failing at not seeking the connection between his writing about, say, a goalie who suffers from penalty-kick anxiety and his belief that the defenders of Sarajevo dropped a shell onto the packed city market only to blame the Serbs for it.

Mr. Handke’s politics irreversibly invalidated his aesthetics, his worship of Mr. Milosevic invalidated his ethics. At Mr. Milosevic’s funeral, he said, “The world, the so-called world, knows everything about Yugoslavia, Serbia. The world, the so-called world, knows everything about Slobodan Milosevic. The so-called world knows the truth … I don’t know the truth. But I look. I listen. I feel. This is why I am here today, close to Yugoslavia, close to Serbia, close to Slobodan Milosevic.” The writer who could speak those words can’t have anything of value to say.

Evidently, not knowing the truth about Mr. Milosevic and genocide was not a problem for the Nobel Committee, mandated by Alfred Nobel to reward “the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.” Maybe the engaged literature of the great Olga Tokarczuk is to it but one among many aesthetic, ethical options of value equal to Mr. Handke’s.

Perhaps the esteemed Nobel Committee is so invested in the preservation of Western civilization that to it a page of Mr. Handke is worth a thousand Muslim lives. Or it could be that in the rarefied chambers in Stockholm, Mr. Handke’s anxious goalie is far more real than a woman from Srebrenica whose family was eradicated in the massacre.

The choice of Mr. Handke implies a concept of literature safe from the infelicities of history and actualities of human life and death. War and genocide, Milosevic and Srebrenica, the value of the writer’s words and actions at this moment in history, might be of interest to the unsophisticated plebs once subjected to murder and displacement, but not to those who can appreciate “linguistic ingenuity” that “has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience.” For them, genocide comes and goes, but literature is forever.

In the midst of a global epidemic of Islamophobia and white nationalism, Mr. Handke’s Nobel Prize has validated an aesthetic untroubled by decency, a literary project whose value should dissolve like a body in acid before the magnitude of crimes its author repeatedly denied and thus endorsed. Mr. Handke is the Bob Dylan of genocide apologists. The Nobel Committee has shown us that it knows little about literature and its true place in this so-called world.

Aleksandar Hemon teaches at Princeton and is the author, most recently, of “My Parents: An Introduction/This Does Not Belong to You.”

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