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Nothing Is Left
By Marko Attila Hoare
October 2003
Philip Hammond and Edward S. Herman, Degraded
capability: The media and the Kosovo crisis, Pluto
Press, London 2000, 222 pp.
Michael Parenti, To
kill a nation: The attack on Yugoslavia, Verso,
London 2000, 246 pp.
Diana Johnstone, Fool’s
crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western delusions,
Pluto Press, London 2002, 317 pp.
Noam Chomsky, A
new generation draws the line: Kosovo, East Timor and
the Standards of the West, Verso, London 2000, 154
pp.
Michael Moore, Stupid
White Men.... and other Sorry Excuses for the State of
the Nation!, Regan Books, New York 2001, 277 pp.
Kate Hudson, European
Communism since 1989: Towards a New European Left?,
Palgrave, London 2000, 254 pp.
Following the build-up to the Iraq War, I
was struck by the paradox of Tony Blair’s position. The
British Prime Minister appeared to find it very
difficult to mobilize public opinion behind this
unpopular war, despite his own firm belief in the
necessity of confronting the Saddam Hussein regime. This
regime was universally acknowledged as being
exceptionally brutal toward its own citizens and
aggressive toward its neighbours. Yet British newspapers
and TV news reports were not filled
with images of Iraqi Baathist atrocities. While the
debate raged fiercely among columnists and pundits,
between supporters and opponents of the war, there was
little in the British media’s coverage of the crisis
that might have mobilized the British people more
solidly behind the war. Without a state-propaganda
machine in control of the media, Blair was forced to
rely almost entirely on the strength of his political
message concerning the alleged threat of Iraqi weapons
of mass destruction. The political problems this created
for him are well known.
The situation of John Major’s
Conservative government ten years previously was almost
the exact reverse. Faced with the crisis created by Milošević’s
expansionist campaign, the British government did its
very best to appease Milošević and
to avoid confronting the Serbian armed forces - as
Brendan Simms has brilliantly demonstrated in Unfinest
Hour - Britain and the destruction of Bosnia (Allen
Lane, London 2001). Yet on that occasion the media were
filled with reports of the atrocities carried out by
Serb forces, seriously embarrassing the British
government. In the US meanwhile, the climate created by
media reports of these atrocities, above all of the
Srebrenica massacre of 1995, put the vacillating Clinton
Administration under such pressure that it was
eventually forced to carry out air-strikes against Serb
forces in Bosnia, dragging the reluctant British
government along with it.
Thus on at least two recent occasions -
Bosnia in the 1990s and Iraq in the 2000s - the overall
effect of British media coverage ran contrary to
British government policy. British Foreign Secretary
Douglas Hurd lamented in September 1993 - at the height
of Britain’s appeasement of Milošević -
what he viewed as the British media’s excessive interest
in Bosnia and comparative lack of interest in other
wars: ‘We see little on our screens of the tragedies in
Liberia, in Angola and in Sudan; they feature little in
debate in the House [of Commons], they feature little in
the editorials of our papers, they bother British
citizens only occasionally. If it costs more to maintain
the correspondent in southern Sudan than in Bosnia then
the world will know less of the fighting there - and
care less. The public debate is run not by events but by
the coverage of events.’ Hurd went on to complain that
‘most of those who report for the BBC, the Times,
the Independent,
the Guardian, have
been all in different ways enthusiasts for pushing
military intervention in Bosnia.’
Media diversity
In reality, journalists and reporters
were deeply split over both wars, with Misha Glenny,
Simon Jenkins, Eve-Ann Prentice, Michael Sheridan and
many others broadly sympathetic to the British
government’s position. Glenny, whose account of the
break-up of Yugoslavia was perhaps more widely read than
any other, was praised by none other than David Owen,
the EU’s mediator in the Bosnian conflict. Glenny’s
views on the conflict - as the present author has
explored in detail elsewhere (‘Misha Glenny and the
Balkan mind’, Bosnia
Report, New Series no. 3, March-May 1998) - were
more sympathetic to the Serbian than to the Croatian or
Bosnian side, and supportive of the British government’s
stance vis-B-vis
those of the Germans and Americans. In the US, the
influential New York
Times carried stories on the former Yugoslavia from
a variety of different standpoints, some of which upheld
Serb-nationalist viewpoints. Reporter David Binder, for
instance, wrote from a standpoint of hostility to
Bosnia-Herzegovina; a past admirer of such Serb
extremists as indicted war-criminal Ratko Mladić and
Nazi-collaborator Momčilo Đujić,
Binder has recently written a violently hostile obituary
of former Bosnian President Alija Izetbegović. New
York Times columnist Thomas Friedman condemned the
presence of Croatian President Tuđman
at the VE anniversary celebrations in London in 1995, on
the grounds that ‘many Croats fought for the Nazis’. New
York Times reporter Stephen Kinzer frequently
repeated uncritically Serb-nationalist stereotypes of
Croat behaviour in World War II.
In Britain during the Kosovo War,
outright opponents of the war like Tony Benn and the
Serbian Information Centre’s Marko Gašić were
able to state their views on prime-time television. Independent journalist
Robert Fisk covered the war from a position of absolute
hostility to the British government; seven years earlier
Fisk had responded to the revelation of the existence of
concentration camps run by Serb forces by writing a long
article about the crimes committed by Croat fascists half
a century before - the almost inescapable
implication being that those earlier Croat crimes
somehow mitigated the contemporary Serb crimes,
therefore making Western military intervention to stop
the latter unjustified. The media in Britain and the US
have not, therefore, been guilty of ‘anti-Serb bias’ or
of ‘demonising the Serbs’; nor have they upheld the
policies of the British government or made propaganda on
its behalf; nor have they been a monolith; they have, on
the contrary, represented a diversity of opinions.
Media targeted
Yet it is the Western media, more than
any other institution, that have borne the brunt of
condemnation from members of the far left for their role
in the wars in the former Yugoslavia. These members of
the far left, whom I shall refer to as ‘left
revisionists’, downplay, deny or minimize the crimes of
the Milošević regime,
its security forces and its proxy forces in Croatia,
Bosnia and Kosovo. They blame the media for
‘exaggerating’ these crimes in order to justify Western
military intervention. Degraded
Capability: The media and the Kosovo crisis, edited
by Philip Hammond and Edward S. Herman, is a collection
of essays condemning the Western media for allegedly
promoting the Kosovo War. In the view of the editors,
‘the ‘humanitarian war’ concept is promoted through the
media, which play a vital role in preparing public
opinion and acting as cheerleaders and advocates of
war.’ Yet in reality it is the far left that has
demonized ‘the media’, not ‘the media’ that have
demonized the Serbs. Nowhere in Degraded
Capability is there any balanced appraisal of the
range of opinions expressed in the Western media, both
‘pro-war’ and ‘anti-war’, ‘pro-Serb’ and ‘anti-Serb’.
Nor is there any investigative journalism explaining how
the alleged ‘anti-Serb media conspiracy’ was organized.
Rather, ‘the media’ become almost a
single, homogenous, demonic force in the eyes of the
contributors. They assume that ‘the West’ was
‘anti-Serb’ and ‘anti-Yugoslav’ from the start of the
wars in the former Yugoslavia; that the media serve the
interests of their governments; and that the media
represent only one single, official viewpoint. All of
these assumptions are false. At issue here is the
unwillingness of too many left-wing intellectuals to
acknowledge any facts or information that interfere with
their comfortable assumption that ‘Western governments =
bad; everyone else = less bad’. The fact that Milošević’s
regime was a neo-Communist one and that his party was
called the ‘Socialist Party of Serbia’ partly explains
this unwillingness. Media reports of atrocities carried
out by Serb forces allowed liberal and ‘bourgeois’
critics of these atrocities to take the moral high
ground; the far left was forced either to fall in behind
the ‘bourgeois liberals’ in their condemnation of a
‘socialist’ regime, or to attempt to recapture the moral
high ground by pretending that Serb atrocities were all
a lie, or at least an exaggeration.
The obsession of the left revisionists
with the Western media is well demonstrated by David
Chandler in his contribution to Degraded
Capability. Chandler argues: ‘For the beleaguered
Sarajevo government, with few resources to fall back on,
fighting the war soon became of secondary importance to
winning support for international intervention. Weakness
became an asset as the war became increasingly staged
for international media crews, with the government
attempting to provoke incidents around Sarajevo and
UN-declared safe areas to encourage military
intervention. This strategy included exaggerating
numbers of war casualties, preventing the reconnection
of water supplies to Sarajevo, halting the evacuation of
civilians from war zones and government shelling of
their own territory.’ Chandler’s source for these
assertions is a single article by Charles Boyd, a
retired General of the United States Air Force. That the
views of an American general might themselves not be
objective does not seem to have occurred to the
‘anti-interventionist’ Chandler. In Chandler’s distorted
view, it is the Bosnians who are the puppet-masters and
the Western public the victims; it is the Bosnians who
are waging war to intervene in the internal affairs of
Western countries - something that might have surprised
the average Bosnian Army frontline soldier. If Bosnian
civilians are blown up by a Serb shell, it is still the
Bosnians who are the perpetrators and the Western public
the victims: How dare they get blown up in front of us !
How dare they make us feel guilt that isn’t left-wing
guilt !
Flimsy sources
Chandler’s statement is characteristic of
much of the left-wing discourse on the former
Yugoslavia, in which fantastic assertions are made on
the basis of the flimsiest supporting ‘evidence’,
provided they run contrary to the supposed ‘mainstream’
interpretation of events. This raises the question of
why so many left-wing commentators are so determined to
challenge this ‘mainstream’ interpretation - in which
the war was caused by the expansionism of Milošević’s
Serbia. After all, a genuine anti-interventionist would
argue that, even if all the accusations levelled against
Milošević’s
Serbia had been true, Western military intervention
against it was wrong. This was the argument made by some
supporters of Workers Aid for Bosnia and Workers Aid for
Kosovo, for whom condemnation of the crimes of the Milošević regime
went hand-in-hand with opposition to Western military
intervention. The revisionist left, however, as
represented by books such as Degraded
Capability, seem intent on downplaying the extent of
Albanian suffering, arguing that the Albanian death-toll
in Kosovo at the hands of the Serbian security forces
was greatly exaggerated by spokesmen for the Western
Alliance, as Peter Gowan argues in Degraded
Capability. This raises the interesting question of
whether, if 100,000 Albanian civilians had really been
killed by Serbian security forces and this had been
proved incontrovertibly, the left revisionists would
then have supported intervention. In other words, were
Serbian atrocities in Kosovo simply not bad enough to
justify intervention ? And if not, just how bad would
they have to be before John Pilger and co. would come
out in favour of NATO air-strikes ? The actual Nazi
Holocaust was, after all, ended thanks in large part to
the military intervention of the United States and
Britain, something that nevertheless caused a lot of
civilian casualties. Was this a bad thing ? These are
just some of the questions to which it would be
interesting to hear an answer...
Part of the reason why left revisionists
are determined to minimize the crimes of the Milošević regime
may be that they feel that the ‘anti-war’ argument is
otherwise too weak. The right-wing website ‘Antiwar.com’
has made an opportunistic alliance with Great Serb
nationalism: it contains a regular column by Serb
hardliner Nebojša
Malić,
and this ‘anti-war’ website has remarkably few
references to the destruction of Vukovar and Sarajevo,
or to other war crimes committed by Europe’s most
war-mongering regime in half a century. Yet so far as
the left revisionists are concerned, their unwillingness
to acknowledge Milošević’s
crimes may spring from the fact that in some bizarre way
they still consider him to be a ‘socialist’ and
therefore ‘one of them’. In his foreword to Degraded
Capability, Harold Pinter claims: ‘Milošević is
brutal. Saddam Hussein is brutal. But the brutality of
Clinton (and of course Blair) is insidious, since it
hides behind sanctimony and the rhetoric of moral
outrage.’ Milošević is
therefore a practitioner of ‘non-insidious brutality’,
which is presumably more acceptable and one of the
reasons why Pinter has joined the ‘International
Committee to Defend Slobodan Milošević’
(ICDSM), run by the outright Milošević-supporter
Jared Israel.
‘Objectivity’
This being the case, it is reasonable to
ask whether the revisionist left is really just trying
to be ‘objective’ in its efforts at downplaying or
denying Serbian atrocities, as it claims, or whether it
is in fact made up of closet Milošević sympathizers.
The journal New Left
Review (NLR)
commissioned the present author in October 2000 to
travel to Belgrade to write an article on the popular
rebellion against Milošević that
was then taking place. NLR paid
my air-fare and I arrived in Belgrade on the day that
Milošević fell.
But when I produced my report NLR refused
to publish it: editor Susan Watkins explained to me that
the editorial board objected to my article’s implied
support for the Hague Tribunal and for Serbia’s
integration into European institutions - these views
were considered politically unacceptable. I was reminded
of this some months later while reading Michael
Parenti’s To kill a
nation: The attack on Yugoslavia, published by NLR’s
sister organization, the publishing house Verso. The
book is simply an outright apologia for Milošević and
his regime. Period. Thus while it would appear that
supporting the prosecution of war-criminals at the Hague
Tribunal is unacceptable to NLR/Verso,
actually supporting the principal war-criminal himself -
orchestrator of the worst acts of imperialist aggression
and racial mass-murder in Europe since the death of
Stalin - is entirely acceptable.
Lest any reader believes I am
exaggerating Parenti’s views, his book recently appeared
in Serbian translation (Majkl Parenti, Ubiti
Naciju: Napad na Jugoslaviju, Mediagraf, Belgrade
2002) - with a foreword by none other than Slobodan
Milošević himself.
So proud was either Parenti or his publisher of this
that a facsimile of Milošević’s
handwritten foreword was included in the book. In
Milošević’s
words:
I
congratulate all those who have contributed to the
book To kill a nation: The attack on Yugoslavia -
being translated and published in our country. Its
author Michael Parenti is an American to whom every
genuinely truth-loving inhabitant of our planet owes
gratitude for his great bravery and competence in
seeing and understanding the events that have marked
the last decade of the twentieth century... The
attack on Yugoslavia was waged and is being waged
without any regard for morality. The illegal ‘Court’
in The Hague is one of the means for waging that war
and proof that the war is continuing still. But what
has happened, contrary to the wishes of the new
world order and the Hague ‘Tribunal’, from day to
day shows that in the world the consciousness of the
need for uniting the forces of resistance to the new
enslavers is becoming stronger. Michael Parenti
falls among those who have given this resistance an
undoubtedly great personal contribution.
Parenti has also become chairman of the
US section of the ICDSM.
Parenti’s book is simply worthless. The
first indication of the author’s profound ignorance of
Yugoslavia and its history may be found in the title: To
kill a nation: The attack on Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia
was not a ‘nation’ any more than was the Soviet Union -
and certainly not in its own self-definition. Parenti
seeks to explain the break-up of Yugoslavia, yet not
knowing any of the former-Yugoslav languages, he is
limited to English-language sources - his task is
therefore as hopeless as that of a historian of the
English Civil War who does not read English. Parenti
several times refers to the pre-1991 Yugoslavia as the
‘FRY’ (Federal Republic of Yugoslavia), though it was in
fact the SFRY (Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia)
- the FRY was not proclaimed until April 1992.
Interestingly, this basic error was not corrected
in the Serbian-language version of Parenti’s book.
Parenti essentially argues that the
destruction of Yugoslavia was orchestrated by a
conspiracy of the Western imperialist powers. An idea of
the standard of ‘documentation’ Parenti employs to
uphold this ‘thesis’ is his claim that Germany had
‘openly championed Yugoslavia’s dismemberment in 1991,
but was giving Slovenia and Croatia every encouragement
long before then.’ Meanwhile, ‘the United States did
little to deter Germany’s efforts.’ For these two
statements - the first an outright falsehood and the
second entirely meaningless - Parenti’s sole ‘source’ is
an article by his ideological fellow-traveller Peter
Gowan (‘The NATO powers and the Balkan tragedy, NLR no.234,
March/April 1999); Gowan is no better informed or
qualified to write about the former Yugoslavia than
Parenti himself, relying heavily as he does on Susan
Woodward’s biased and inaccurate The
Balkan Tragedy (see my review in Bosnia
Report first series 15, April-July 1996), and a
pamphlet by ‘John’ Zametica, sometime official spokesman
for Radovan Karadžić.
Still more bizarre is Parenti’s claim that the Kosovo
War was waged in order to destroy Serbia’s socialized
industry: ‘As far as Western free-marketeers are
concerned, these [Yugoslav] enterprises had to be either
privatized or demolished. A massive aerial destruction
like the one delivered upon Iraq might be just the thing
needed to put Belgrade more in step with the New World
Order.’ This without citing a single piece of evidence
to substantiate the claim. Parenti not only supports
Milošević but
shares his Manichean view of the world, in which there
are only two sides: Milošević’s
regime and everyone else. Thus the leaderships of
Britain, France, Germany, the USA, Croatia,
Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Kosovo Liberation Army and even
the Serbian opposition are lumped indiscriminately
together to comprise a single ‘anti-Serb’ or
‘capitalist/imperialist camp’.
Closed circle
In the absence of any genuine
documentation, Parenti flings into his book any ‘source’
that will back up his line. Some of these are articles
or statements by his ideological fellow-travellers: Joan
Phillips, Ramsey Clark, Michel Chossudovsky, Sean
Gervasi, Diane Johnstone and others, which he appears to
believe make his compilation of ‘evidence’ more weighty.
Indeed, about half the ‘sources’ he cites in the first
half of his book are precisely such non-sources. In
turn, the left-revisionist authors cited by Parenti
themselves tend to cite the same or other similar
authors in support of the same set of allegations,
creating a closed circle of mutually supporting
references that substitute for any genuine documentation
or historical enquiry. Yet if one traces the path of
references back to the ‘original source’ on which each
left-revisionist allegation is based, one finds that it
is invariably dubious. For example, one of Parenti’s
sources is Michel Chossudovsky, who claims in his
article ‘Dismantling Yugoslavia, colonising Bosnia’ (Covert
Action, 56, spring 1996) that German support for
Croatian secessionism was part of ‘long Western efforts
to undo Yugoslavia’s experiment in market socialism and
workers’ self-management and to impose the dictate of
the free market.’ Chossudovsky claims that the German
Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher ‘gave his
go-ahead for Croatian secession’. Chossudovsky’s
‘source’ for this claim is Sean Gervasi’s article
‘Germany, the US and the Yugoslav crisis’ (Covert
Action, 43, winter 1992-93). Gervasi’s ‘sources’ for
the alleged German plot to break-up Yugoslavia were
accusations made by two US foreign-policy officials. One
of these officials was anonymous, the other was former
US Ambassador Warren Zimmermann, whose published memoirs
(Origins of a
catastrophe: Yugoslavia and its destroyers, Random
House, 1999) express a viewpoint hostile to Croatian
independence and sympathetic to the Yugoslav People’s
Army. Though hardly objective, therefore, in this
instance the claims made by ‘American imperialist
propaganda’ appear to be taken by the left revisionists
entirely at face value.
More dubiously still, Parenti relies on
US General Charles Boyd’s statement that ‘the Serbs were
not trying to conquer new territory, but merely to hold
onto what was already theirs’; EU mediator Lord Owen’s
statement that ‘no seasoned observer in Sarajevo doubts
for a moment that Muslim forces have found it in their
interest to shell friendly targets’; Indian UN commander
Satish Nambiar’s statement that ‘Portraying the Serbs as
evil and everybody else as good was not only
counterproductive but dishonest’; French UN commander
Philippe Morillon’s accusation that the ‘Bosnian
government repeatedly refused to let UNPROFOR establish
a ceasefire because it wanted to keep Sarajevo a focal
point for world sympathy’; and British UN commander
Michael Rose’s ‘conclusion’ that ‘it was Muslim
operatives who had bombed Bosnian civilians... in order
to induce NATO involvement’. Parenti laments: ‘The
moderated truths enunciated by observers like
Lieutenant-General Nambiar, US Deputy Commander Boyd,
General Morillon, General Rose, negotiator Owen and
various UN administrators and eyewitnesses cited above
went largely unnoticed in the mass of Nazi-imaged,
Serb-bashing stories broadcast unceasingly around the
world.’
It is a peculiar imperialist conspiracy
that Parenti portrays: one in which most of the senior
leaders of the Western imperialist intervention in the
former Yugoslavia actually become sources of truth and
objectivity. What Parenti seems to be arguing is that
there are two viewpoints on the war in the former
Yugoslavia: one consisting of journalists such as Roger
Cohen and Roy Gutman who ‘demonize the Serbs’; and the
other consisting of Parenti himself plus leading
representatives of Western imperialism in the former
Yugoslavia (Rose, Nambiar, Owen and Morillon), who
believe that Karadžić’s
Serbs have been unfairly treated by the media and that
the Bosnian government forces were really to blame for
shelling their own civilians and besieging their own
capital city. Parenti has a very original and
imaginative view of historical evidence: a source
accusing Serbian forces of atrocities is ‘Serb-bashing’
and ‘demonising the Serbs’, thus evidence of an
anti-Serb imperialist media conspiracy; a source
accusing Bosnian forces of atrocities is taken entirely
at face value, as proof that the Bosnians were really
the villains, which then highlights the fact that the
first set of sources must be part of the conspiracy. In
this manner, ipso facto, all evidence
must necessarily support Parenti’s thesis.
As a socialist, Parenti’s sympathies are
much more with the socialist Slobodan Milošević than
with the socialist Josip Broz Tito, the anti-Nazi
resistance leader who founded socialist Yugoslavia in
the first place. Tito’s only appearance in Parenti’s
book is in reference to his support for Kosovo’s
autonomy, which Parenti believes crippled the Yugoslav
federation - his ‘source’ being not a proper historian
or history book, let alone several, but the same NLR article
by Peter Gowan that he cited earlier to ‘prove’ that
Germany had engineered the secession of Croatia. Parenti
believes that ‘Tito did little to discourage the
Albanian campaign to ethnically cleanse Kosovo of
non-Albanians.’ In this way, Parenti’s ‘socialism’ leads
him into support for Milošević’s
brand of ‘socialist’ Serb nationalism, in which Tito
himself was guilty of grave injustices against the Serb
nation. Parenti abandons internationalism in favour of
uncritical support for the nationalism of his own
‘chosen people’.
Another left-wing author for whom
‘anti-imperialism’ slips into a virtually uncritical
support for Milošević’s
version of Serb nationalism is Diane Johnstone. Her
book Fool’s Crusade:
Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions is a survey
of the history of Yugoslavia and its break-up. As a
scholar, Johnstone is one or two steps up the
evolutionary ladder from Parenti, since her historical
account does at least refer to a handful of serious
historical sources, though not many, and none in the
Serbian/Croatian language. Yet she makes some truly
bizarre statements. One of her peculiarities is her
habit of systematically comparing all forces working
against Great Serb nationalism with the Nazis, in one
way or another. Thus the following reference to Titoist
nationality policy: ‘Tito deliberately played down the
role of Serbs and Serbia in an effort to placate the
nationalist feelings of the Croats and Albanians,
exploited by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy to dismember
the country during World War II.’ Or this reference to
the US role in establishing the Bosnian Federation in
1994: ‘Dismissing history as of no importance, United
States diplomats created a "Federation" that was
inevitably reminiscent of the Nazi-backed Independent
State of Croatia set up in 1941'. Or this reference to
German media criticism of Serbian policy toward Slovenia
and Croatia: ‘Nineteen months after German
reunification, and for the first time since Hitler’s
defeat in 1945, the German media resounded with
condemnation of an entire ethnic group [the Serbs]
reminiscent of the pre-war propaganda against the Jews.’
The Nazi brush
It is somewhat ironic that Johnstone
should seek so systematically to tar Germans, Croats,
Americans, Albanians and even Tito with the Nazi brush.
A couple of years before the publication of her book,
the same Johnstone had cautioned soberly: ‘Analogies
should be employed with care, especially with such
emotion-laden subjects as Hitler and the Holocaust. When
applied to unfamiliar situations, they can create a
powerful semi-fictional version that actually masks
reality’ (‘Hitler Analogies betray both past and
present’, ZNet Daily Commentaries Website, 28 August
1999). Johnstone was lamenting the fact that, because of
alleged Western media demonization, ‘Suddenly, Milošević was
the new Hitler’. In her book, she builds on this theme:
‘Once the Yugoslav imbroglio was dramatized as a new
version of the Nazi Holocaust, any effort to return to
reality was stigmatized as equivalent of "Holocaust
denial", and critics were dismissed as "revisionists"
and "negationists", comparable to apologists for Nazi
crimes.’ One can only conclude that Johnstone took the
lesson to heart and borrowed a couple of weapons from
her opponents’ armoury. That being the case, it is only
fair to point out the historical connotations of some of
Johnstone’s own views. Giving a sympathetic account to
the suggestion of Dobrica Ćosić,
father of contemporary Serb nationalism, that Kosovo be
partitioned between Serbs and Albanians, Johnstone
complains of the lack of Western receptivity to the
idea: ‘a priori dismissal
of any suggestion [for the partition of Kosovo] does not
help the search for peaceful resolution of a difficult
problem.’ Johnstone may be unaware that this plan was
first enacted in 1941 by none other than Adolf Hitler,
who divided Kosovo between the Nazi-puppet state of
Serbia and a Great Albania.
Whose sovereignty?
The left revisionists are motivated in
part by opposition to the supremacy of US power. They
complain of the West’s ‘calculated disregard for
sovereignty’ and belief that in the former Yugoslavia
‘the people of the region are assumed to be incapable of
self-government’, in the words of Hammond’s and Herman’s
introduction to Degraded
Capability. Yet the ‘sovereignty’ and ‘self
government’ the left revisionists uphold seem to apply
only to Milošević’s
Serbia; never to the people of Croatia, Bosnia or
Kosovo. There was a time when left-wingers spoke up for
the rights of oppressed people without independent
states of their own - Kurds, Palestinians, East Timorese
and others. This time has now apparently passed, as the
far left now largely prefers to defend the ‘sovereignty’
of murderous regimes rather than their subject peoples,
provided these regimes are in some way ‘opponents’ of
the West. George Galloway, a prominent British left-wing
supporter of Saddam Hussein, was recently reported as
refusing to meet with or even speak to an Iraqi Kurdish
refugee who wished to challenge him on his ‘anti-war’
stance - his sympathies appearing to be with the
dictator, not with the dictator’s victims.
In the former Yugoslavia, left
revisionists denounced the Rambouillet agreement as an
alleged ‘violation’ of the sovereignty of the Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia. They failed, however, to
denounce the Dayton Accord’s far greater violation of
the sovereignty of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
That Milošević himself
signed the Dayton Accord, violating the sovereignty of a
neighbouring state and pledging Serb cooperation with
the Hague Tribunal, is quietly forgotten amidst the
impassioned left-wing defence of the dictator’s
‘sovereignty’ and ‘rights’. But ultimately it is not
just a question of left-wing hypocrisy, but of a
profound belief among the left revisionists that
non-Western peoples have no history of their own; that
the history of the former Yugoslavia is merely the
history of Western intervention in the former
Yugoslavia. If the ‘people of the region are assumed to
be incapable of self-government’ by the West, as Hammond
and Herman argue, they are assumed by the left
revisionists to be incapable of starting their own wars
and conducting their own massacres. This left-wing
attitude is simply imperialism in another form.
The subordination of the interests of the
former-Yugoslav peoples to the global interests of
left-wing radicals is demonstrated by Noam Chomsky’s A
new generation draws the line: Kosovo, East Timor and
the Standards of the West. Chomsky seeks in a
particularly tortuous and long-winded manner to prove
that Western leaders are hypocritical: they bombed
Serbia in 1999 for allegedly ‘humanitarian’ reasons - to
protect the Kosovo Albanians - yet failed to bomb
Indonesia to protect the East Timorese. To emphasize the
extent of Western hypocrisy, Chomsky seeks to downplay
the extent of Kosovo Albanian suffering in comparison
with East Timorese suffering.
Double standards
Chomsky is of course guilty of precisely
the sin of which he accuses the US leaders: of employing
double standards and allowing his response to crimes
against humanity to be conditioned by his own political
interests. When it is a case of a US client state
oppressing a subject people, Chomsky paints a
black-and-white picture: Turkey is guilty of ‘massive
atrocities’ against the Kurds; Indonesia of ‘aggression
and massacre’ of ‘near-genocidal levels’ in East Timor;
Israel of ‘murderous and destructive’ operations in
Lebanon, while Chomsky makes no mention whatever of
Kurdish, East Timorese or Palestinian atrocities. When
it is a case of a US opponent state oppressing a subject
people, Chomsky paints a grey picture: Serbia’s
atrocities against Albanians are a ‘response’ and
‘reaction’ to KLA attacks, while he accuses the KLA of
‘targeting Serb police and civilians’; ‘killing six
Serbian teenagers’; the ‘killing of a Serb judge, police
and civilians’; and so on. The picture Chomsky
consequently sketches is of atrocities by both sides
and, since KLA actions were ‘designed to elicit a
violent and disproportionate Serbian response’, the
implication is that the Milošević regime
was actually less to
blame than the KLA.
A genuine internationalist - one more
sympathetic to the plight of the downtrodden - might
conclude that, while both KLA and Hamas atrocities are
reprehensible, they are ultimately the product of the
respective desperation and suffering of the Kosovo
Albanian and Palestinian people, for which the
responsibility ultimately lies with the occupying powers
- Serbia and Israel respectively. But whereas Chomsky is
never sparing in his denunciations of Israel, he seems
concerned to divest Milošević of
as much blame as possible. Thus the massive Serbian
ethnic-cleansing campaign against Kosovo Albanians was,
in Chomsky’s view, the fault of the NATO intervention
that ‘triggered’ it: ‘the NATO bombing was followed by a
rapid escalation of atrocities and ethnic cleansing. But
that, in itself, is a condemnation of the bombing, not a
justification for it.’ Funnily enough, the spurious
argument that NATO intervention increased Kosovo
Albanian suffering is never made by the Kosovo Albanians
themselves. But their suffering is hypocritically used
by left revisionists to justify their own political
agenda - the very thing that the left revisionists
accuse the US administration of doing. As a final irony,
the leadership of the East Timorese resistance publicly
supported the NATO action in Kosovo.
The tendency of some American
left-wingers to view foreign nations entirely in terms
of their relation to the US - as having no meaning or
interest except as the subject of US foreign policy - is
most graphically demonstrated by Michael Moore, author
of the paper-thin critique of contemporary American
political life, Stupid
White Men.... and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of
the Nation.
Who is the racist?
This book is largely about white American
racism against African Americans, but also involves
Moore complaining about Americans’ ignorance and lack of
education: the US is an ‘idiot nation’ - why, he asks,
is it the case that ‘out of the seventy major American
universities, only twenty-three now require English
majors to take a course in Shakespeare ?’. It is
therefore illuminating to note what this champion of
anti-racism and the importance of education has to say
about the former Yugoslavia:
‘This godforsaken corner of the world
has been the source of much of our collective misery
for the last century. Its residents’ inability to
get along - with Serbs fighting Croats fighting
Muslims fighting Albanians fighting Kosovars
fighting Serbs - can be traced to the following
single event: in 1914 a Serb anarchist by the name
of Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Archduke
Ferdinand. This incident kicked off World War I.
Which led to World War II. Over fifty million people
died from both wars. I don’t know what it is about
these people. I mean, I don’t go around killing
Texans. I don’t go burn down whole villages in
Florida. I’ve learned to live with it. Why can’t
they?’
Moore believes that Yugoslavia was a
civilized country under Tito. However:
‘Then Tito died, and all hell broke
loose. Croats started killing Serbs. Serbs killed
Muslims in Bosnia. Serbs killed Albanians in Kosovo.
Then the United States bombed Kosovo, to show them
that killing was wrong. In the past few years there
has been peace, then war, then peace again, and now
war again. It never stops. These people are
addicts.’
The present writer will not insult the
intelligence of the reader by actually attempting to
criticize these lines of Moore. One can only note that,
in the light of the popular left-wing stereotype of
President George Bush Jnr as a brainless, uneducated,
provincial-American hick, it is deeply ironic that Moore
has become such a left-wing celebrity on both sides of
the Atlantic. Bush, unlike Moore, has to the best of my
knowledge never made the enormous suffering of foreign
peoples into a subject of ridicule and cheap racist
jibes for the amusement of an American audience.
New alignment?
This then is the face of the Western far
left - with a few honourable exceptions - in the
twenty-first century: intellectually superficial;
morally bankrupt; callous about the suffering of foreign
peoples; and cynical and hypocritical in its use of both
facts and arguments. Kate Hudson in European
Communism since 1989: Toward a New European Left argues
that since 1989 there has been ‘the emergence,
consolidation and, more recently, advance of what can be
described as a new European left.’ She argues that the
end of the Cold War and the fall of the Communist bloc
in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union have permitted
the emergence of a new alignment of left-wing social
democrats and Communists in Europe, one that bridges the
divide between East and West and that sets itself in
opposition to the new European capitalist order. She
describes in some depth the policies of Gennady Zyuganov,
leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation
(CPRF), arguing that Zyuganov’s ‘strategic decision that
the CPRF should lead the opposition to Yeltsin on the
patriotic basis that integration into the world economy
on IMF terms would destroy Russia... is clearly the
correct strategy for opposing the restoration of
capitalism....’ Elsewhere she notes that ‘polls which
showed that more than 90 per cent of the population of
Russia were opposed to the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia
were understandable.’
It is unclear from Hudson’s account why
any of this should be viewed in a positive light by
progressively minded people. Although Hudson frequently
refers to the NATO intervention in Kosovo, which she
views negatively, she does not even mention the
incomparably more bloody and destructive Russian
intervention in Chechnya, which Zyuganov and other
Russian ‘left-wingers’ and ‘patriots’ supported and
continue to support. Potential backers should perhaps
consider what possible moral purpose there can be for a
‘New European Left’ that is brought together in
opposition to the Kosovo War, but that turns a blind eye
to the destruction of Grozny, Vukovar, Sarajevo and
other European cities, and to the extermination or
dispossession of tens of thousands of Chechens, Kosovars
and Bosnians - or even supports such crimes.
Originally published in the Bosnia
Report, October-December 2003
http://www.bosnia.org.uk/bosrep/report_format.cfm?articleid=1041&reportid=162
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