BALKAN WITNESSArticles on the Kosovo and Bosnia Conflicts
Deniers of Serbia's War Crimes:
Edward S. Herman
Last modified April 25, 2024
Reviews of The Politics of Genocide (by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson)Once more on "left-wing" genocide denial Edward Herman and David Peterson, in their reply to George Monbiot, do little to respond to the wave of incredulity and revulsion which their denial of genocide and its endorsement by Noam Chomsky are causing. By Martin Shaw, May 22, 2012
See No Evil How did genocide denial become a doctrine of the internationalist left? By George Monbiot, May 21, 2012
Genocide Denial: Expert Assessments Additional Critiques of The Politics of Genocide, by Adam Jones, Linda Malvern, Martin Shaw, and Marko Hoare. May 21, 2012
Naming the Genocide Deniers In a recent book, Herman repeats his denial of Bosnia and Rwanda genocides. By George Monbiot, June 13, 2011
Correspondence with Noam Chomsky, in which Chomsky shows himself to be incapable of responding to criticism that he endorsed Edward Herman and David Peterson's denial of the Bosnia and Rwanda genocides. By George Monbiot, June 2011
The politics of denialism: The strange case of Rwanda Review of The Politics of Genocide, by Edward Herman. This article focuses on Herman's denial of the Rwanda genocide, but Herman's approach to that issue is similar to his denial of the Serbian genocidal campaign in Bosnia and Serbia's attempted genocide in Kosovo. The author aptly dissects Herman's propensity for inverting the roles of perpetrators and victims. By Gerald Caplan, Pambazuka News, June 17, 2010
See also
° Sources and Testimonies - a Response to Herman and Peterson, by Gerald Caplan, July 16, 2010
° On Genocide Deniers - Challenging Herman and Peterson, by Adam Jones, July 16, 2010
° Srebrenica deniers get their mucky paws on Rwanda, by Marko Hoare, September 7, 2010
° "Left-wing" genocide denial, by Martin Shaw, The Journal of Genocide Research, June 2011 Why do they do it? The obvious answer is political: they have such a huge investment in the idea that the USA and the West are the source of all the world’s evils, that they can only process information to fit this case. More complex answers might include that they are building an intellectual and political niche out of contrarian positions. The danger is that such nonsense, with its pseudo-scholarly apparatus of extensive footnotes and media science, finds a ready audience among the political idealistic.Denial and Defamation: The ITN-LM Libel Trial Revisited This exhaustive recapitulation of the Living Marxism (LM) episode covers some of Herman and Noam Chomsky's complicity in spreading Serbian lies about its chain of concentration camps. By Jamie Palmer, Quillette, November 1, 2019
Genocide-denying charlatans have poisoned the Left Herman assiduously whitewashed the crimes of the worst thugs and dictators in the post-war world provided only that they defined themselves against America. On Srebrenica, Herman wrote that “the claims of 8,000 executed have never been verified by forensic or credible witness evidence of anything like this scale of killing”. This is like Holocaust denial but in fact the fraud is even more blatant, for in the case of Srebrenica the bodies have been found. By Oliver Kamm, November 23, 2017
What Motivates Edward Herman and the Balkan Revisionists? Why is he reflexively living out a Cold War paradigm, apologizing for those who have committed ethnic mass murder in the name of a shadow of socialism? By Roger Lippman, April 26, 2009
Why Yugoslavia Still Matters (Follow-up discussion here.) Edward Herman manages to construct an alternative universe in which Serbian military forces only acted in defense, Slobodan Milosevic was a benevolent Gorbachev figure, and the international legal community functioned as some kind of adjunct to NATO. The article critiques Herman's latest recitation of his usual themes. By John Feffer, Foreign Policy in Focus, April 6, 2009
The Dismantling of Yugoslavia Monthly Review does its readers a disservice in presenting Edward Herman and David Peterson's skewed version of the Yugoslav conflicts. The Serbian wars of conquest and genocide (attempted and partially accomplished) against other Yugoslav ethnic groups deserve a more nuanced analysis. At the very least, the MR issue could have presented a range of Left perspectives. Instead, the magazine discredits itself with its endorsement of two indefatigable propagandists who fantasize about Western plots to undermine Yugoslavia while downplaying the Serbian war crimes that have been broadly recognized and condemned in the world community. For example, on the tenth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre of about 8000 Bosnian Muslims by Serbian forces, Herman and Peterson's "Srebrenica Research Group" called a press conference at the UN not to offer support for the survivors, but rather to deny the essential facts of the massacre. By Roger Lippman and Peter Lippman, December 2007
Srebrenica: Response to left-wing apologists for genocide The Srebrenica genocide has been actively denied by a coalition of people on the far right and left of the political spectrum. The apex of this campaign was the publication by Ed Herman, who now appears to work full time on such issues, of "The Politics of the Srebrenica Massacre." I will respond to the main allegations within it. By Michael Karadjis, November 11, 2007
The lists of missing at Srebrenica Of Edward Herman’s many dubious and outright false assertions about Srebrenica, one of the most contemptible is his attempt to make disappear from history the roughly 8000 Bosnian civilians massacred by Serbian forces. Some of his mystification is couched in slippery deniability, in a half-hearted attempt to deflect the criticism he deserves. But taken together, his comments comprise a clear endeavor at war-crimes denial. By Balkan Witness staff, August 2005
Edward Herman: The Politics of the Srebrenica Massacre On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, Herman insulted the survivors with denials of Serbian atrocities and apologetics for Serbian aggression. Several readers responded. July 2005
Srebrenica and the London Bombings: The ‘Anti-War’ Link This article examines what unites the left-wing and right-wing deniers of Serbia's war crimes. Includes discussion of Edward Herman, Justin Raimondo, Nebojsa Malic, Neil Clark, Tariq Ali, and others. By Marko Hoare, July 23, 2005
The Left Revisionists An extensive review of a broad array of those on the Left who downplay the violence and suffering involved in the wars in the former Yugoslavia and shift the blame to the Western alliance. Among those discussed are Edward Herman, Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Michel Chossudovsky, Diana Johnstone, Mick Hume, John Pilger, Harold Pinter, and Jared Israel. By Marko Hoare, November 2003
The Kosovo Verification Mission at Racak A summary of the events surrounding the Racak massacre and its investigation. Concisely refutes some of the inaccurate statements of Edward Herman, Diana Johnstone, Philip Hammond, and David Peterson. By Alex J. Bellamy, 2002
Mediating Denial Martin Shaw reviews Edward S. Herman and Phillip Hammond's anthology Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis. Shaw analyzes distortions by Diana Johnstone, John Pilger, Mick Hume, and others. June 2000
Diana Johnstone, whose work has been praised by Herman, and from whom he casually lifts many of the misrepresentations he repeats, has been critiqued in the articles below:Diana Johnstone's Fools Crusade is reviewed by Kirk Johnson, 2006. Several installments, linked from the cited page.
Johnstone's article "Srebrenica Revisited," is reviewed by Eric Gordy, October 13, 2005.
Raçak - Mutation of a Massacre This review of a Diana Johnstone article shows that she uncritically repeats Serbian government propaganda on Racak, and that her work is characterized by missing evidence, a paucity of sources, the spreading of untruths, and conspiracy theories. By Peter Wuttke, November 18, 1999 (Newly translated from the original German, March 2002.)
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