ARE
WE TO BE SPARED NOTHING?
NATO
has announced that its warplanes will target Serbian television studios
unless they agree to run "two to three hours" of "Western"
footage every night: Serb TV, said NATO spokesman David Wilby, is "hate
speech," and therefore not allowed: "It is an instrument of
propaganda and repression," and is therefore a fair target. The knowing
smirk on Wilby's porcine face, the sarcasm in the clipped tones and arrogant
limey lilt of his voice, spoke volumes about the real meaning of what
was being said. With endless stories of the plight of the Albanians and
the uncritical reporting of unverifiable "atrocities" about
which no one has produced any hard evidence, what is our own lockstep
media promoting if it isn't war? And, always, the endlessly reiterated
question that pops up at least five or six times during the Pentagon's
daily press briefing: "When are you going to bring in the ground
troops?" That has been the role of the media from the first day of
this war, yapping like the dogs of war at the heels of the military men,
demanding to know when the real killing is going to start. This
is clearly reflected in their reporting, and especially the television
reporting, which may as well have been produced at NATO headquarters.
They are the Madam LaFarges of this conflict, as bloodthirsty and vengeful
as any of the actual combatants. CNN has become a virtual mouthpiece for
the Allied Supreme Command, but the perpetrators of this war are not satisfied
with that. They want to make sure that no inconvenient images of the rape
of Serbia seep through into America's living rooms. Bill Clinton well
remembers the effect of seeing American atrocities in Vietnam in living
color on television every night. Blasting Serbian TV with a few cruise
missiles will turn off the flow of those pictures, and allow Slick Willie
and his spinmeisters to control the terms of the debate. This was what
these great champions of "democracy" and "diversity"
did in Bosnia: storming television stations and shutting down what they
called "hate radio" -- which is something they'd like to do
right here in America, if they thought they could get away with it. With
all information filtered through NATO and the American military, and a
press corps more gung-ho than the Joint Chiefs, Clinton and the War Party
think they can stage-manage this war. But there are a few variables that
they didn't count on, the chief one being the pride and tenacity of the
Serbian people. We shall see what "spin" the President's flunkies
put on a death toll in the hundreds, and, all too soon, the thousands.
SERVICING
BILL
"It's
impossible for Bill Clinton to fail without America failing," says
Rep. Christopher Cox, the ambitious young Republican from southern California.
"The cards have already been dealt." From being a perjurer worthy
of impeachment to the virtual embodiment of America , and all in the space
of a few weeks-- this strange disparity surely cries out for some explanation.
Here's one theory: After months and months of poring over Monica's testimony,
debating it in Congress, and salivating over the pornographic details,
some Republicans have begun to identify with their material , indeed to
over-identify with it, to the extent that they have become
just like Monica: pliant, obsessive, passive-aggressive, and all too willing
to submissively give pleasure without reciprocation. The Monica-ization
of the GOP is a truly bizarre phenomenon to behold, yet another nightmarish
aspect of this war.
PORTRAITS
OF THE WAR PARTY:
QUEENS FOR MILITARISM
As
befits a war for political correctness, the War Party is a model of "diversity,"
a veritable rainbow coalition of special interests and even some very
special interests, as revealed in the latest issue of the Bay Area
Reporter, San Francisco's oldest gay newspaper. With the war in its
second week, the subject was finally broached not in the news columns
or on the editorial page, but in the Reporter's gossip column,
"Out There," by Roberto Friedman and "Jack Boots,"
and I quote: "Ah, springtime, and a young man's fancy turn [sic]
to thoughts of . . . genocide. So far it hasn't been a pretty spring at
all, has it, not with Yugoslav totalitarian Slobodan "the Slob"
Milosevic's 'ethnic cleansing' (hated term) of Kosovo finally looming
in the national consciousness, such that it is. We can only be amazed
at the capacity for denial on the part of isolationists proclaiming it's
'not our business!' But like fashion victim Cleopatra, there are always
plenty of queens of da Nile."
Naturally,
the thought of all those men in sexy uniforms packed close together in
tents and trenches makes a certain type of warmonger swoon. War is, after
all, about domination and submission. Young men, bursting with testosterone,
thrown together in the chaos and horror of war: think of the possibilities!
Now we know why the first rabbit our of Slick Willie's hat was gays in
the military: in the coming military occupation of the Balkans, we are
going to need every man available -- even if some insist on their right
to fight in full leather. While this may be a tantalizing prospect for
Roberto and his fellow gay militarists, somehow I don't think they are
going to be the first to sign up for the battle of Kosovo.
POLLS
AS PROPAGANDA
Today's
Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll claiming that 73 percent of the
American people support putting in ground troops is a transparent fraud.
The poll was conducted by Hart Research, a Democratic polling firm whose
clients include scores of congressional Democrats, the AFL-CIO -- and
Bill Clinton. The senior Vice President of Hart, Fred Yang, frequently
authors articles offering "the Democratic perspective" on issues
for such magazines as Campaigns and Elections. In any poll, phrasing
is all-important: in this one, before the key questions were asked, the
respondents were told: "As you may know, hundreds of thousands of
civilians have been forced to leave Kosovo" -- a preface that assumes
the villainy of the Serbs and the justice of NATO's intervention. The
question on sending in ground troops was phrased to push the right emotional
buttons: "Would you favor or oppose a decision to send U.S. and NATO
soldiers into Serbia if the Serbs continue to drive people out of Kosovo?"
Professional pollsters call this "stacking the deck," a time-honored
propaganda technique designed to yield the desired results -- in this
case, public "approval" of a predetermined policy. The only
problem with this method is that it tends to backfire when people's real
sentiments break through the smokescreen of lies.
POWER
COUPLE
Am
I the only one who dares to bring up the subject of CNN correspondent
Christiane Amanpour's obvious conflict of interest as a journalist married
to a prominent government official -- James Rubin, the State Department's
official mouthpiece? Amanpour's role as an activist and advocate of the
Muslim population of the Balkans has been vocal and unashamed. "In
certain situations," she told the author of a 1996 American Journalism
Review article, "the classic definition of objectivity can mean
neutrality, and neutrality can mean you are an accomplice to all sorts
of evil -- in this case, genocide and crimes against humanity." Neutrality
is something the Iranian-born Amanpour never had to worry about: she has
made Bosnia's Muslims her own personal crusade, embarrassing Clinton in
a live "attack interview" in which she accused him of inaction
and flip-flopping. Here is an award-winning "journalist" who
has spent years in Bosnia and yet somehow missed the ethnic cleansing
of 350,000 Serbs from the Krajina region. Now that the war she wanted
is in full swing, Amanpour is in her glory, covering the war her husband
is a paid apologist for with uninhibited enthusiasm, and interviewing
KLA terrorists as if they were the Albanian equivalent of the Founding
Fathers. She has become such an adjunct of U.S. government policy over
the years that, as one media critic put it, "there is the story that
in the Central Operations Room of the Pentagon there is a map, with little
pushpins, to keep constant track of Christiane Amanpour. As a military
event, the location of this reporter is considered an item of national
security." The American media is so prissy when it comes to showing
footage from Serbian sources that they insist on labeling it as originating
with the "Serbian government-controlled media." Yet they are
strangely lenient about their otherwise exacting standards when it comes
to Amanpour, whose intimate connection to the U.S. government surely requires
some kind of warning label.
Please Help Antiwar.com
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Justin
Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com. He is also the author
of Reclaiming
the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement
(with an Introduction by Patrick J. Buchanan), (1993), and Into the
Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against U.S. Intervention in the Balkans (1996).
He writes frequently for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.
He is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard
(forthcoming from Prometheus Books).
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