From
Diem and Arbenz to Milosevic
10 Jan 2003
PROPAGANDA SYSTEM NUMBER ONE:
From Diem and Arbenz to Milosevic
Edward S. Herman
The way in which the mainstream media have handled the turning
of Milosevic over to the Hague Tribunal once again reinforces my
belief that the United States is not only number one in military
power but also in the effectiveness of its propaganda system, which
is vastly superior to any past or present state-managed system. The
main characteristic of the U.S. model is that, while offering
diversity on many subjects, on core issues--like "free trade"
and
the need for a huge "defense" establishment--and on the occasions
when the corporate and political establishment needs their service-
-as in legitimating George W. Bush's presidency in the wake of an
electoral coup d'etat, or supporting the "sanctions of mass
destruction" on Iraq--the media can be relied on to expound and
propagandize what would be called a "party line" if done in
China.
They do sometimes depart from the official position as regards
tactics, arguing, for example, that the government is not attacking
the enemy with sufficient ferocity (Iraq and Yugoslavia), or that
the cost of the enterprise is perhaps excessive (the Vietnam war,
from 1968), but that the enemy is truly evil and the national cause
meritorious is never debatable. The debates over tactics helpfully
obscure the agreement on ends.
A further important feature of the U.S. system is that this
propaganda service is provided without government censorship or
coercion, by self-censorship alone, with the truth of the
propaganda line internalized by the numerous media participants.
This internalization of belief makes it possible for media
personnel to be enthusiastic spokespersons in pushing the party
line, thereby giving it a naturalness that is lacking in crude
systems of government-enforced propaganda.
A third feature of the system is that the party lines are
regularly supported by non-governmental and self-proclaimed "non-
partisan" thinktanks like the American Enterprise Institute and
Independent International Commission on Kosovo, non-governmental
organizations like the Open Society Institute and Human Rights
Watch, and assorted ex-leftists and liberal and left journals that
on particular subjects "see the light." These organizations
are
commonly funded by interests (and governments) with an axe to
grind, and they serve those interests, but the media feature them
as non-partisan and give special attention to the ex-leftists and
dissidents who now see the light. This helps firm up the consensus
and further marginalizes those still in darkness.
A final feature of the U.S. system is that it works so well that
a sizable fraction of the public doesn't recognize the media's
propaganda role, and accepts the media's own self-image as
independent, adversary, truth-seeking, and helping the public to
"assert meaningful control over the political process" (former
Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell). This public bamboozlement is
aided by the facts that the media are fairly numerous, are not
government controlled, have many true believers among their editors
and journalists (the second characteristic), are supported by NGOs
and elements of the "left" (the third feature), and regularly
proclaim their independence and squabble furiously with government
and among themselves. Even those who doubt the media's claims of
truth-seeking are often carried along, or confused, by the force
and self-assurance of the participants in this great propaganda
machine.
Party Line Consensus
An important operational characteristic of the system, which
facilitates general adherence to the party line without overt
coercion, is the assurance and speed with which the line is
established as a consensus truth, so that deviations and dissent
quickly take on the appearance of foolishness or pathology, as well
as suspiciously unpatriotic behavior. Noam Chomsky and I found that
the very asking of questions about the numerous fabrications,
ideological role, and absence of any beneficial effects for the
victims in the anti-Khmer Rouge propaganda campaign of 1975-1979
was unacceptable, and was treated almost without exception as
"apologetics for Pol Pot."
That "free trade" is beneficial and in the "national interest"
whereas "protectionism" is hurtful and a creature of "special
interests" is a consensus party line of the mainstream media today
that profoundly biases their treatment of trade agreements and
protests against corporate globalization at Seattle, Washington,
D.C., Quebec City, and Genoa (see Herman, "NAFTA, Mexican Meltdown,
and the Propaganda System," chapter 14 in Myth of the Liberal
Media; Rachel Coen, "For Press, Magenta Hair and Nose Rings Defined
Protests," EXTRA! [July-August 2000]; FAIR, "Action Alert: Police
Violence in Genoa--Par for the Course? Media complacency helps
normalize assaults on demonstrators," July 26, 2001).
The consensus around a party line is very quickly established in
dealing with international crises. Once an enemy is demonized--from
Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam and Jacobo Guzman Arbenz in Guatemala in the
early 1950s to Slobodan Milosevic in the 1990s and up to today--the
media display a form of hysteria that helps mobilize the public in
support of whatever forms of violence the government wishes to
carry out. They become a virtual propaganda arm of the government,
joining with it in the common fight against "another Hitler."
Under
these conditions remarkable structures of disinformation can be
built, institutionalized, and remain parts of historic memory even
in the face of ex post confutations, which are kept out of sight.
Let me give a few short illustrations before showing how this
exceptional propaganda service applies to the Milosevic/Tribunal
case.
Red Threat as Party Line: Vietnam and Guatemala
In the Cold War years, propaganda service and mobilization of
the public was commonly framed around the Red Threat. This general
demonization of the target produced the requisite hysteria and
media identification with "us" and complete loss of critical
capability. When the U.S.-imported puppet to South Vietnam, Ngo
Dinh Diem, won a plebiscite in 1954 with over 99 percent of the
votes, an outcome that would elicit much sarcasm if realized in an
enemy state, this was not news here. And from then onward, U.S.
support of a government admittedly lacking an indigenous
constituency, relying on state terror and U.S. financial and
military aid, was treated in the mainstream media as entirely
reasonable and just.
The self-deception and patriotic biases internalized by media
personnel were displayed in their 100 percent inability, from 1954
to today, to call the U.S. intervention and ultimate direct
invasion of Vietnam either an "invasion" or "aggression."
It was
also beautifully illustrated in James Reston's Orwellian statement
of 1965 that the United States, which from beginning to almost the
very end believed it could impose its preferred rulers by virtue of
its superior military power, was in Vietnam to establish the
"principle...that no state shall use military force or the threat
of military force to achieve its political objectives."
Another remarkable case of propaganda service occurred as the
United States destabilized Guatemala's democratic government in the
years 1950-1953 and then removed it by means of a U.S.-organized
"contra" invasion in 1954. U.S. hostility began when this
government passed a law in 1947 allowing the organization of
unions, and active destabilization followed and accelerated upon
its attempt to engage in moderate land reforms, partly at the
expense of the United Fruit Company. From 1947 the search was on
for "communists" to explain the reformist policies and to
rationalize the hostile intervention. The U.S. mainstream media
became completely hysterical over this Red Threat from 1950 onward,
very worried that Arbenz would not allow elections to take place in
1951--this same media had not been bothered by the Ubico
dictatorship, 1931-44, and was entirely unconcerned with the
absence of democracy from 1954 onward--and featured a stream of
alarming reports on Red influence in that country and an alleged
"reign of terror." There were endless headlines in the New York
Times like "Soviet Agents Plotting to Ruin Unity, Defenses of
America" (June 22, 1950); "Guatemalan Reds Seek Full Power"
(May
21, 1952); "How Communists Won Control of Guatemala" (March
1,
1953), and even The Nation ran a sleazy putdown of the democratic
government under attack (March 18, 1950).
This was all hysterical nonsense--even Court historian Ronald
Schneider, after reviewing the documents seized from the Reds in
Guatemala, concluded that the Reds had never controlled Guatemala,
and that the Soviet Union "made no significant or even material
investment in the Arbenz regime" and paid little attention to
Central America--but it was effective in making the overthrow of an
elected government acceptable to the U.S. public. And the media's
propaganda service was completed by their long coverup of the
hugely undemocratic aftermath of the successful termination of the
brief democratic experiment (on the history of this propaganda
campaign, Edward Herman, "Returning Guatemala to the Fold,"
in Gary
Rawnsley, ed., Cold-War Propaganda in the 1950s [Macmillan, 1999];
more broadly, Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope [Princeton, 1991]).
No government-managed propaganda system could have done a better
job of mobilizing the public on the basis of systematic
disinformation; and the achievement here is especially impressive
given the fact that it was all done with the aim and effect of
ending a liberal democracy by violence and installing a terror
state.
Bulgarian Connection
Another illustration of outstanding, even remarkable, propaganda
service, and one pertinent to the ongoing Milosevic-Tribunal drama
because it involved a judicial proceeding, was the "Bulgarian
Connection." The Reagan administration had been anxious to demonize
the Soviet Union in the early and mid-1980s, and the assassination
attempt against Pope John Paul II in May 1981, provided an
opportunity to pin the attempt on the KGB and their Bulgarian
client. The Turkish fascist, Mehmet Ali Agca, who had shot the
Pope, had spent time in Bulgaria (along with ten other countries).
After 17 months in prison in Italy, and after numerous visits by
secret service, judicial, and papal personnel, who had admittedly
offered him inducements to "confess," he claimed that he was
on the
Bulgarian-KGB payroll, had cased the joint with Bulgarian officials
in Rome, and had visited one of them in his apartment. Although the
case was laughably implausible, the U.S. mainstream media bought it
with enthusiasm, and failed to acknowledge their gullibility and
propaganda role even after CIA professionals told congress during
the CIA confirmation hearings on Robert Gates in 1991 that they
knew the Connection was false because, among other reasons, they
had penetrated the Bulgarian secret services.
A very important feature of the media's treatment of the
Bulgarian Connection, very similar to that which they apply now to
the Hague Tribunal in its pursuit of Milosevic, was their pretense
that the Italian judiciary, police and political system were only
seekers after truth and justice, even a bit fearful of finding the
Bulgarians guilty. The New York Times even editorialized that the
Reaganites were aghast at the implications of a Soviet involvement
in the assassination attempt ("recoiled from the devastating
implication that Bulgaria's agents were bound to have acted only on
a signal from Moscow," Oct. 30, 1984), a propaganda lie confuted
by
the CIA professionals in 1991, who explained that their own doubts
were overruled by the Reaganite leaders of the CIA who insisted on
pushing the Connection as true. The Bulgarian Connection can be
well explained by the exceptional corruption of the Italian system
and the service of this manufactured connection to the Cold
Warriors serving the Italian state (and their U.S. parent). This
explanation was expressed often in the Italian media during the
1980s, but not in the U.S. mainstream media where, with only
insignificant exceptions, the propaganda line functioned without a
hitch. (See Herman and Brodhead, Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian
Connection, chap. 7.)
Hague Tribunal: Serving Us, So No Awkward Questions, Please!
In the case of the Hague Tribunal also, the mainstream media
portray it as a presumably unbiased judicial body seeking justice
with an even hand, despite the massive evidence that it is a
political and propaganda arm of the United States and other NATO
powers. Its ultimate propaganda service was performed in May, 1999,
when the prosecutor of the International Crimes Tribunal for the
former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Louise Arbour, announced the indictment
of Yugoslav president Milosevic and four associates for war crimes.
This was done, hastily, at a time when NATO was increasingly
targeting the civilian infrastructure of Yugoslavia in order to
hasten that country's surrender. NATO needed this public relations
support as a cover for its own war crimes--the Sixth Convention of
Nuremberg prohibits and makes a war crime the targeting of civilian
facilities not based on "military necessity"--and the ICTY
provided it, with the indictment quickly greeted by Albright and
James Rubin as justifying NATO's bombing policy.
To my knowledge the U.S. mainstream media have never once
suggested that this indictment servicing the NATO war discredited
the Tribunal as an independent judicial body. The New York Times's
Steven Erlanger even explained to Terry Gross that this indictment
displayed Arbour's independence, as she was allegedly fearful that
Milosevic would escape punishment in a political deal if she didn't
move quickly! (Fresh Air, National Public Radio, July 12, 2001).
Erlanger was not alone in offering this imbecile analysis, which
not only failed to recognize the indictment's service to NATO's
immediate policy needs, but also ignored other evidence of Arbour's
and the Tribunal's deference to U.S. and NATO desires.
The media also failed to raise any questions about Arbour's
statement of May 24, 1999, that although people are "entitled to
the presumption of innocence until they are convicted," she was
issuing the indictment because "the evidence...raises serious
questions about their suitability to be guarantors of any deal, let
alone a peace agreement"--that is, she found them guilty before
they were convicted and thought that on this basis she should
interfere with any possible political settlement.
On the other hand, Arbour and her successor Carla Del Ponte have
never found allies of the NATO powers or the NATO powers themselves
worthy of indictment, even when they did exactly the same things
for which the NATO targets were indictable. Thus, Serb leader Milan
Martic was indicted for launching a rocket cluster-bomb attack on
military targets in Zagreb in May 1995, with the very use of
cluster bombs cited by the Tribunal as showing the aim of
"terrorizing the civilians of Zagreb." But NATO's cluster-bomb
raids on Nis on May 7, 1999, far from any military target, and the
48-hour Croat army shelling of civilian targets in the city of Knim
during the August 1995 Croat Operation Storm, produced no
indictments. Operation Storm, supported by U.S. officials and
helped by U.S.-related professional advisers, resulted in large-
scale expulsions and the killing of many Serb civilians, but
neither Croat leader Tudjman nor the supportive U.S. officials were
indicted, and Croat military officials also escaped indictment till
Del Ponte recently claimed several in an effort to show her
"balance" in the context of the bringing of Milosevic to The
Hague.
This double standard, which makes a mockery of justice, has been of
absolutely no interest to the U.S. mainstream media; and in his
long session with Terry Gross on July 12, when asked "What
Americans might be brought to stand trial before an international
court?," Steven Erlanger failed to come up with a single name for
any actions in the Balkans (and Gross did not follow up on his non-
response).
Under pressure to address NATO's wartime activities, which had
resulted in the deaths of many Serb civilians--estimates run from
500 to 3,000--Tribunal prosecutor Carla Del Ponte issued a report
in June 2000, that declared NATO not guilty. But the document
supporting this conclusion was not based on any investigation by
the Tribunal, and it openly acknowledged a heavy dependence on NATO
sources, asserting "that the NATO and NATO countries press
statements are generally reliable and that explanations have been
honestly given." Canadian legal scholar and expert on the Tribunal,
Michael Mandel, asks: "Can you imagine how many indictments would
have been issued against the Serb leadership if the Prosecutor had
stopped at the FRY press releases?" But this remarkable Del Ponte
report was of no interest to the mainstream media.
Also of no interest to the media is the fact that the Tribunal
has been described by John Laughland in the Times (London) as "a
rogue court with rigged rules" (June 17, 1999). As normal practice
it violates virtually every standard of due process: it fails to
separate prosecution and judge; it does not accord the right to
bail or a speedy trial; it has no clear definition of burden of
proof required for a conviction; it has no independent appeal body;
it allows a defendant to be tried twice for the same crime;
suspects can be held for 90 days without trial; confessions are
presumed to be free and voluntary unless the contrary is
established by the prisoner; and witnesses can testify anonymously,
with hearsay evidence admissible. These points are almost never
mentioned in the U.S. mainstream media or considered relevant to
the legitimacy of the Tribunal or the likelihood that Milosevic
will get a fair trial.
The Tribunal's biased performance follows from the fact that it
was organized by the United States and its close allies, is funded
by them and staffed with their approval, and depends on them for
information and other support. The Tribunal's charter requirements
that its expenses shall be provided in the UN general budget
(Article 32), and that the Prosecutor shall act independently and
not take instructions from any government (Article 16), have been
systematically ignored. Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, former president
of the Hague Tribunal--before that a director, and now "Special
Counsel to the Chairman on Human Rights," of Freeport-McMoRan
Copper & Gold Inc., a notorious human rights violator working in
Irian Jaya with the cooperation of the Indonesian army--stated in
1999 that Tribunal personnel regard Madeleine Albright as the
"mother of the tribunal." NATO PR man Jamie Shea pointed out
in a
May 17, 1999 press conference in Brussels that Arbour will
investigate "because we will allow her to;" that the NATO countries
are the ones "that have provided the finance to set up the
Tribunal;" that they are the ones who do the leg work "and have
been detaining indicted war criminals"; and that when she "looks
at
the facts she will be indicting people of Yugoslav nationality" and
not folks from NATO.
But neither this open admission that the NATO powers controlled
the Tribunal, nor the evidence of serious abuses of the judicial
process that has characterized its work, have been of interest to
the mainstream media. As with the prosecution of the Bulgarian
Connection, the Hague Tribunal is servicing the U.S. government and
its aims, and the media therefore regard any bias or political
service as reasonable and take them as givens. Because of their
internalized belief that their country is good and would only
support justice, the media can't even imagine that any conflict of
interest exists. This is deep bias.
Also, no questions come up in this context as to why there are no
tribunals for Suharto, Wiranto (the Indonesian general in charge of
the destruction of East Timor in 1999), or Ariel Sharon. These are
our allies, even if major state terrorists, who received and still
receive our support, so that in a well-managed propaganda system
the failure to mention their exclusion from a system of global
enforcement of the new ethical order opposed to ethnic cleansing
and human rights violations is entirely appropriate.
Disinformation as Consensus History: Milosevic and the Balkans
From the time the U.S. government decided to target Milosevic
and the Serbs as the root of Balkan evil in the early 1990s, the
U.S. propaganda system began its work of demonization of the
target, enhanced atrocities management, and the necessary rewriting
of history. The integration of government needs and media service
was essentially complete, and was beautifully symbolized by the
marriage during the crisis years of State Department PR chief James
Rubin and Christiane Amanpour, CNN's main reporter on the Kosovo
war, whose reports could have come from Rubin himself. More
recently, in connection with Milosevic's transfer to the Hague,
Amanpour entertained Richard Holbrooke on the subject, and the two,
speaking as old comrades-in-arms congratulated one another on a
joint success, just as a policy-enforcing official might express
mutual congratulations with a PR officer (Holbrooke applauded
Amanpour's "fantastic coverage of the war throughout the last
decade" [CNN Live At Daybreak, June 29, 2001]).
It should be noted that Holbrooke visited Zagreb two days
before Croatia launched Operation Storm in August 1995, almost
certainly talking over and giving U.S. approval to the imminent
military operation, reminiscent of Henry Kissinger's visit to
Jakarta just before Indonesia's invasion of East Timor in September
1975. As Operation Storm involved a major program of killings and
expulsions, with killings greatly in excess of the numbers
attributed to Milosevic in the Tribunal indictment of May 22, 1999,
an excellent case can be made that Holbrooke should be being tried
for war crimes. We may also be sure that Christiane Amanpour's
"fantastic coverage" of the wars in Yugoslavia did not deal
with
Operation Storm or mention Holbrooke's and the U.S. role in that
butchery and massive ethnic cleansing.
As NATO prepared to go to war, which began on March 24, 1999,
the media followed the official lead in focusing heavily on Serb
atrocities in Kosovo, with great and indignant attention to the
Racak massacre of January 15, 1999. The failure of the Rambouillet
Conference they blamed on Serb intransigence, again following the
official line. During the 87-day bombing war the media focused even
more intensively on atrocities (Serb, not NATO), and passed along
the official estimates of 100,000 Kosovo Albanian murders (U.S.
Defense Secretary William Cohen), and other estimates, smaller and
larger. They also accepted the claim that the Serb violence that
followed the bombing would have taken place anyway, by plan, so
that the bombing, instead of causing the escalated violence was
justified by its occurrence ex post.
In the post-bombing era a number of developments have occurred
that have challenged the official line. But the mainstream media
have not let them disturb the institutionalized untruths. Let me
list some of these and describe the media's mode of deflection.
1. RACAK MASSACRE. The only pre-bombing act of Serb violence
listed in the Tribunal indictment of Milosevic on May 22, 1999, was
an alleged massacre of Albanians by the Serbs at Racak on January
15, 1999. The Serbs had carried out this action with invited OSCE
representatives (and AP photographers) on the scene, but on the
following day, after KLA reoccupation of the village, some 40 to 45
bodies were on display for the U.S.-OSCE official William Walker
and the media. The authenticity of this massacre, which follows a
long pattern of convenient but contrived atrocities to meet a PR
need--well described in George Bogdanich's and Martin Lettmayer's
brilliant film "The Avoidable War"--was immediately challenged
by
journalists in France and Germany, but no doubts whatever showed up
in the U.S. media. Christophe Chatelet of Le Monde was in Racak the
day of the "massacre," and left at dusk, as did the OSCE observers
and Serb police, without witnessing any massacre. The AP
photographers and on-the-scene OSCE representatives have never been
available for corroboration or denial, and the forensic report of
the Finnish team that examined the bodies at the behest of the OSCE
has never been made public. The issue is still contested, but a
very strong case can be made that the Racak "massacre" was a
staged
event (see, Chatelet, in Le Monde, Jan. 19, 1999; Professor Dusan
Dunjic [a Serb medical participant in the autopsies], "The (Ab)use
of Forensic Medicine,"
http:www.suc.org/politics/kosovo/documents/Dunjic0499 html; J.
Raino, et al., "Independent forensic autopsies in an armed
conflict: investigation of the victims from Racak, Kosovo,"
Forensic Science International 116 [2001], 171-85).
But the strong challenging evidence has been effectively blacked
out in the U.S. mainstream media, and the "massacre" is taken
as an
established and unquestioned truth (e.g., Amanpour and Carol Lin,
CNN Live at Daybreak, July 3, 2001; Steven Erlanger in his July 12
interview with Terry Gross). Why didn't the Serb army remove the
incriminating bodies, as the propaganda machine claimed then and
now that they were doing as a matter of policy directed from above?
As in the case of the analyses and evidence in the 1980s that Agca
might have been coached to implicate the Bulgarians and KGB, the
U.S. mainstream media refuse to burden a useful party line with
inconvenient questions and facts.
Also, while giving heavy, uncritical and indignant attention to
Racak, the media have never allowed the far larger and unambiguous
massacre of civilians at Liquica in East Timor on April 6, 1999--
three months after Racak--to reach public consciousness. This was
a massacre by the U.S. ally Indonesia, U.S. officials did not
feature it, and the media therefore served national policy by
giving it short shrift.
2. U.S. AND NATO OPPOSITION TO SERB "ETHNIC CLEANSING" AND
"GENOCIDE" AS THE BASIS OF THE NATO BOMBING. The official and
media
propaganda line is that the United States and NATO powers were
deeply upset by Serb violence in Kosovo and eventually went to war
to stop it. But there are problems with this view. For one thing,
evidence has turned up showing that Washington, through its own
agencies or hired mercenaries, actually aided and trained the KLA
prior to the bombing, and in this and other ways encouraged them in
provocations that stimulated Serb violence (Peter Beaumont et al.,
"CIA's bastard army ran riot in Balkans," The Observer [London],
March 11, 2001). The postwar publication by the NATO Parliamentary
Assembly, General Report: Kosovo Aftermath, noted that "Under the
influence of the Kosovo Verification Mission the level of Serbian
repression eased off" in late 1998, but "on the other hand,
there
was a lack of effective measures to curb the UCK [KLA]" which had
an interest in "worsening the situation." In short, U.S. policy
before the bombing encouraged violence in Kosovo. The evidence for
this has been made public abroad, but it has not yet surfaced in
the U.S. mainstream media.
A second problem is that NATO supplied greatly inflated estimates
of Serb killings and expulsions in Kosovo, quite obviously trying
to prepare the ground for bombing. The claim that Serbian policy
constituted "ethnic cleansing" and even "genocide"
has long been
confuted by OSCE, State Department, and human rights groups'
findings of limited and targeted Serb violence, and by disclosure
of an internal German Foreign Office report that even denies the
appropriateness of the use of "ethnic cleansing" to describe
Serb
behavior ["Important Internal Documents from Germany's Foreign
Office," http://64.4.20.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_lang=EN&lah=80d50207d03a3940a6cc
760c6627357c&lat=
1050336523&hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fwww%2esuc%2eorg%2fkosovo_crisis
%2fdocuments%2fgergov%2ehtml].
These contesting points of evidence, even though coming from
establishment sources, are not only off the screen for the
mainstream media, they are ignored and the old lies are repeated by
Christopher Hitchens in The Nation ("Body Count in Kosovo,"
June
11, 2001) and Bogdan Denitch in In These Times ("Citizen of a Lost
Country," May 14, 2001).
A third problem is: how could this humanitarian motive be driving
Clinton and Blair in Kosovo when they had both actively supported
Turkey's far larger-scale ethnic cleansing of Kurds throughout the
1990s? The mainstream media dealt with this and similar problems by
not letting the issue be raised.
3. NATO REASONABLENESS, SERB INTRANSIGENCE AT RAMBOUILLET. On the
question of negotiations versus the use of force, the official line
has been that the NATO powers made reasonable negotiating offers to
the Serbs, trying to get "Serbia and the Kosovo Albanians to come
to a compromise" (Tim Judah), but that the Serb refusal to
negotiate led to the bombing war. This line was demonstrated to be
false when it was disclosed that NATO had inserted a proviso
demanding full occupation by NATO of all of Yugoslavia, admitted by
a State Department official to have been a deliberate "raising of
the bar" to allow bombing (George Kenney, "Rolling Thunder:
The
Rerun," The Nation, June 14, 1999). This disclosure has been
comprehensively suppressed in the mainstream media, allowing the
propaganda lie to be repeated today (Judah's repetition of the lie
was on June 29, 2001).
4. SERB GENOCIDE BY PLAN DURING THE NATO BOMBING. Three big lies
expounded during the NATO bombing war were that (1) the Serbs were
killing vast numbers; (2) they were doing this and expelling still
larger numbers in a process of "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide;"
and (3) that they had planned mass killing and expulsions anyway,
so that these could not be attributed to the bombing war or the
kind of fighting and atrocities characteristic of a brutal civil
war. It is now clear that while large numbers did flee, this
included at least an equal proportion of Serbs, and that many fled
without forcible expulsion; and it is also clear that while there
were brutal killings, these fell far short of the 10,000-500,000
claimed by NATO. It is also now on the record that NATO and the KLA
were engaged in joint military actions during the bombing war, and
that expulsions were concentrated in areas of KLA strong support,
pointing to a military logic to Serb actions (Daniel Pearl and
Robert Block, "War in Kosovo Was Cruel, Bitter, Savage; Genocide
It
Wasn't," Wall Street Journal, Dec. 31, 1999). The claim that the
Serbs intended to do this anyway has never been supported by any
evidence.
In Guatemala after 1947 the search was on for communists; in
Kosovo during and after the bombing war the search was on for dead
bodies (whereas there was no interest in or search for dead bodies
in East Timor after the Indonesian massacres of 1999, in accord
with the same propaganda service). The bodies found in Kosovo
received great publicity, but the fact that this immense effort
yielded only 3-4000 bodies from all causes and on all sides, and
the fact that it fell far short of the NATO-media propaganda claims
during the bombing war, has received minimal attention. However,
with Milosevic now transferred to The Hague, and a fresh demand
arising for bodies whose deaths can be attributed to him, once
again the media are coming through with fresh claims of bodies
transferred from Kosovo under the villain's direction.
5. WAR A SUCCESS, REFUGEES RETURNED TO KOSOVO. But the refugees
were produced by the NATO bombing policy itself, and they returned
to a shattered country. Furthermore, after the NATO war there was
a REAL ethnic cleansing--in percentage terms the "largest in the
Balkan wars" according to Transnational Foundation for Peace
director Jan Oberg--with some 330,000 Serbs, Roma, Jews, Turks and
others driven out of Kosovo, while some 3,000 people were killed
and disappeared. However, as this has taken place under NATO
auspices, the mainstream media, insofar as they mention the real
ethnic cleansing at all, have treated it as a semi-approved
"vengeance." But they have mainly dealt with the subject, as
they
did the post-Arbenz REAL terrorism, by eye aversion.
6. MILOSEVIC AS THE SOURCE OF BALKAN CONFLICT. In virtually all
mainstream accounts, it was "Milosevic's murderous decade"
(Nordland and Gutman in Newsweek, July 9, 2001), Milosevic who "set
Yugoslavia to unraveling" (Roger Cohen, NYT, July 1, 2001), "the
man who had terrorized the turbulent Balkans for a decade" (Time,
April 9, 2001). The wars were a "catastrophe that Slobodan
Milosevic unleashed" (Tim Judah, The Times [London], June 29,
2001). This is comic book history, that follows the standard
demonization process, and is refuted by every serious historian
dealing with the area (Susan Woodward, Robert Hayden, David
Chandler, Lenard Cohen, Raymond Kent, Steven L. Burg and Paul S.
Shoup).
Serious history takes into account, among other matters: (1) the
fact that long before 1990 Yugoslavia had persistent "deep regional
and ethnic cleavages," with Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo "all
areas
of high ethnic fragmentation" (Lenard Cohen and Paul Warwick,
Political Cohesion in a Fragile Mosaic), whose suppression required
a strong federal state; (2) the effects of the Yugoslav economic
crisis, dating back to 1982, and the IMF/World Bank imposition of
deflationary policies on Yugoslavia in the late 1980s, and their
consequences; (3) the post-Soviet collapse ending of Western
support for the Yugoslav federal state, and German and Austrian
collaboration in encouraging the Croatian and Slovenian secession
from Yugoslavia without any democratic vote and without any
settlement on the status of the large Serb minorities; (4) the
West's and Western Badinter Commission's refusal to allow
threatened ethnic minorities to withdraw from the new secession
states; (5) the U.S. and Western encouragement of the Muslims in
Bosnia-Herzegovina to hold out for unity under their control in the
face of Serb and Croatian fears and opposition; (6) the U.S. and
NATO support of Croatia and its massive ethnic cleansing of Serbs
in Krajina.
The media rarely mention these extremely important external,
NATO-inspired causes of ethnic cleansing, or the fact that
Milosevic supported many diplomatic initiatives such as the Owen-
Vance and Owen-Stoltenberg plans, both unsuccessful because of U.S.
encouragement of the Muslims to hold out for more. Heavy German and
U.S. responsibility for the breakup of Yugoslavia; the NATO
governments' help in the arming of Slovenia, Croatia, the Bosnian
Muslims, and the KLA; and the U.S. sabotaging of efforts at
negotiated settlements in the early 1990s, are all well documented
in Bogdanich's and Lettmayer's "The Avoidable War." The film
was
shown on the History Channel on April 16, but has otherwise been
ignored in Propaganda System Number One for good reason: it not
only shows dominant NATO responsibility for the Balkan disaster, it
makes the mainstream media's supportive propaganda role crystal
clear.
7. MILOSEVIC'S NATIONALIST SPEECHES OF 1987 AND 1989. It is now
rote "history" that in April 1987 Milosevic "endorsed a
Serbian
nationalist agenda" at Polje in Kosovo, and did the same there on
June 28, 1989--supposedly heralding his project of Greater Serbia
and the coming wars to achieve it. People like Roger Cohen and
Steven Erlanger who cite these as "inciting Serb passions" almost
surely never bothered to read them (nor did Joe Knowles, who
mentions Milosevic's "infamous" speech of June 28 in In These
Times
[Aug.6, 2001]). In both speeches, Milosevic actually warns against
the dangers of nationalism, and while he promises to protect Serbs,
he is clearly speaking of the citizens of the Republic of Serbia,
not ethnic Serbs; and he describes "Yugoslavia" as "a multinational
community...[that] can survive only under the conditions of full
equality for all nations that live in it" (June 28, 1989).
8. MILOSEVIC AS DICTATOR. The June 28, 2001 amended indictment of
Milosevic notes that he was "elected" president of Serbia on
May 8,
1989, was elected again "in multi-party elections" held in December
1990, was "reelected" in December 1992, was "elected president
of
the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia" on July 15, 1997, and was
defeated and ousted from power in an election in September 2000.
But as Milosevic is on the U.S. hit list, he is referred to
repeatedly in the media as a "dictator," a word they were extremely
reluctant to apply to Suharto during his 32 years as a prized U.S.
client. The designation of dictator created a problem for the media
because they also found, and continue to find, the Serb populace
guilty as "willing executioners" who were properly punished
by
bombing and who need to acknowledge their guilt. How a people
suffering under a dictatorship and dictator-controlled media could
be guilty of crimes committed elsewhere is unexplained, but in the
U.S. mainstream media the contradiction remains unchallenged.
9. THE DICTATOR AS RESPONSIBLE KILLER. In Manufacturing Consent
Chomsky and I showed how in the case of the murder of Jerzy
Popieluszko in communist Poland the media repeatedly sought to
prove that the leaders of Poland knew about and were responsible
for the killing, whereas in cases where our own leaders or clients
are involved, the media are not interested in high level knowledge
and responsibility. It was therefore a foregone conclusion that the
media would jump on every claim that Milosevic was behind the
deaths in the Balkan wars, and as the Tribunal has to confront the
need for such proof to convict the demon, the media are working
this terrain with vigor. Some of the alleged new evidence is
clearly being leaked from the Tribunal itself (e.g., Bob Graham and
Tom Walker, "Milosevic Ordered Hiding of Bodies," Sunday Times
[London], July 8, 2001), a form of propaganda once again revealing
that it is not a judicial body but a political instrument. This
evidence, which cites the very words used by the dictator in
Belgrade in March 1999 instructing his subordinates to commit
crimes ("all civilians killed in Kosovo have to be moved to places
where they will not be discovered," in ibid.), has the odor of
NATO-bloc disinformation and should be treated with the utmost
scepticism. And we may be sure the media will never ask why, with
this instruction, "45 bodies" were left on the ground in Racak
for
the convenience of William Walker and other NATO propagandists.
Concluding Note
The U.S. propaganda system is at the peak of its powers in the
early years of the 21st century, riding the wave of capitalism's
triumph, U.S. global hegemony, and the confidence and effective
service of the increasingly concentrated and commercialized
mainstream media. It is a model propaganda system, its slippages
and imperfections adding to its power, given its assured service in
times of need. And as described above, in such times its ability to
ignore inconvenient facts, swallow disinformation, and work the
public over with propaganda can easily compete with--even surpass--
anything found in totalit