THE
BRITISH ARE COMING
Two
weeks into the war, and suddenly the lilting tones of British accents
are everywhere: half the weekend anchors on CNN, and certainly all
of the NATO spokesmen are Brits – Commodore Wilby and Jamie Shea
being the most visible. The daily press briefing aired on television has
an eerie quality, as if we are living in an alternate universe where the
American Revolution never happened. British Prime Minister Tony Blair
is even more militantly outspoken on the need for NATO intervention in
Kosovo, and the British media are even more rabid than our own. Public
opinion in the United Kingdom is solidly behind ground troops – on
the implicit understanding that most of those troops will be Americans,
of course. How are the American people going to take the casualty figures
being announced by these arrogant limeys, with their insufferable air
of priggish self-righteousness? The Brits dragooned us into two world
wars – are they now angling for a third?
MERRY
OLD ENGLAND
Last
time the Brits intervened in Yugoslavia, they worked mightily to undermine
the anti-Communist Mikhailovich and his Chetnik resistance movement and
finally succeeded in installing the Communist dictator Tito. Marshall
Tito and his Communist Partisans were ensured of a postwar victory by
the direct intervention of the British Foreign Office, which was at that
time filled with Soviet moles. As the Soviets advanced closer to Nazi-occupied
Yugoslavia, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill made the decision
to abandon the anti-Communist resistance movement. The pro-Communist Partisans,
working in tandem with the Germans, the pro-Axis Croatian Ustashi
and the Moslem Militia units (whose uniforms and insignia are incorporated
into today's KLA) eliminated the Chetniks. This time around, the Brits
are building up the KLA and doggedly undermining what is left of Yugoslavia
- in both cases making sure that Serbian nationalism is crushed.
THE
CASE OF THE "MISSING" ALBANIANS
We
keep hearing about the mystery of the "missing" Albanian men
from hysterical newscasters and NATO propagandists: where oh where are
the young Albanian men in the Great Kosovar Exodus? There is a "strange
lack" of fighting-age men among the hundreds of thousands of refugees,
they say, and the clear implication is that the Hitlerian Serbs have shipped
them off to "death camps" and made them into lampshades. There
has, in fact, been an almost frantic search for such "death camps,"
with fuzzy aerial reconnaissance photos of indeterminate significance
and all kinds of speculation treated solemnly as fact. Like the search
for evidence of UFOs, however, the quest for hard evidence of "genocide"
– a word that has been bandied about quite freely of late –
is so far not forthcoming. But the whole tissue of lies begins to come
apart, like a cheap sweater, once we begin to pull at the loose ends.
For example, the brouhaha about the "missing" Albanian men is
a complete hoax. Last week, Jamie Shea demanded "Will the authorities
in Belgrade please tell us what has happened to the Kosovo Albanian men
between the ages of 16 and 60?" A few hours later, the answer was
in: as the Boston Globe put it, "the mystery was not simply
where the men had gone, it was why, after days of reports about missing
Albanian men, they suddenly appeared to be streaming across the border
from Kosovo." By late night on April 3rd, the UN High Commissioner
for Refugees confirmed the sudden influx of Kosovar males into Albania
and Macedonia. "The reappearance of so many of the presumed dead,"
caustically observed Globe reporter Anne E. Kornblut, "raised
broader questions about the quality of the information NATO officials
receive and distribute to the world."
YOU'RE
IN THE ARMY NOW
But
still the UN High Commissioner said that "this doesn't account for
all the missing men," and the stories of mass slaughter persist.
What these stories ignore is that the KLA has announced that it is drafting
all men of military age. The rebels set up roadblocks at the Kosovo border
and kidnapped the men as they came out. The London Independent
[3/31/99] reported that KLA fighters, armed and with the cooperation of
the Albanian authorities, were stationed at border crossings looking in
vehicles and under awnings for draft-resistors, stopping all young men
and forcibly conscripting them into the Kosovo "Liberation"
Army: "Fatmir Krasniqi, 21, was forcibly recruited to the struggle
by the KLA at the Kosovo-Albanian border." Hours before, his mother
had died of a heart attack after the long trek from Pristina. "They
took Fatmir last night, " said the boy's father, "but I went
and showed them the death certificate for my wife, so they released him
for one or two days." The "missing" Albanian men will be
found soon enough - when they come roaring back into Kosovo armed and
outfitted courtesy of the U.S. taxpayers, an army of "liberation"
backed up by U.S. air power.
DEPARTMENT
OF OBSCURE
FACTS AND FIGURES
The
total number of Yugoslav dead as a result of the bombing has, today, reached
300, according to the Yugos, with 3,000 injured, many of them seriously.
This is what they call "collateral damage" – one of the
choicer phrases in NATO's vocabulary of mass murder.
THE
THREE "D'S"
Speaking
of the vocabulary of mass murder: How many times do we have to hear everyone
from General Wesley Clark to President Clinton to various and sundry NATO
spokesmen repeat the same odious phrase over and over when describing
the fate they seek to inflict on the Serbian people? We intend, they say
at every opportunity, to "disrupt, degrade, and diminish" not
only Serbian air defenses but the Serbian economy, the Serbian will to
resist, and the Serbian people themselves. The monstrous evil of the "Allies"
and their political goals is reflected in the ugliness of their language
– and the sadistic gleam in their eyes as they intone this grotesque
mantra.
BELGRADE'S
BELIEVE IT OR NOT
Aside
from continuing reports coming out of Greece that the bodies of 15 American
servicemen, casualties of the war, have secretly been shipped back to
the States from a hospital in Thessalonika, we continue to monitor reports
in the Yugo media that claim they have downed many more Allied planes
than NATO has acknowledged. If we take their claims seriously, then as
many as 80 Allied planes have been shot down. We have not run these stories
because they are sketchy, at best, and not too credible. But on second
thought, these stories are no more or less credible than the propagandistic
swill coming out of the press room at NATO headquarters. Look at the record:
NATO at first denied that the three captured American soldiers were anywhere
near Serbian territory, and then admitted to the "possibility"
that they may have wandered over Macedonia's border with Kosovo. NATO
initially denied shelling Pristina into oblivion and actually tried to
blame the Serbs – and then admitted that their "surgical"
airstrikes had caused some "collateral damage." A few days ago,
Commodore Wilby was absolutely certain that a Serb-run "concentration
camp" was in operation near Pristina, but this was quickly disproved.
We already know that several prominent Albanians who were listed as dead
by NATO – supposedly murdered by the Serbs - have since been resurrected.
The question must be raised: what else are they lying about?
NATO
VERSUS THE MOST
BEAUTIFUL WOMAN IN THE WORLD
While
the War Party has recruited heavily among the Hollywood glitteratti, with
such Valkyries of political correctness as Bianca Jagger and Vanessa Redgrave
beating the drums for war, not all the Beautiful People want to reduce
Belgrade to ashes. The Drudge Report (4/12/99) reveals that Elizabeth
Taylor is none too pleased at the escalation of the NATO airstrikes. In
London to receive an award from the British Academy of Film and Television
Arts, Liz let loose at the War Party: "This could accelerate into
something disastrous where unnecessary lives are lost. I think that would
be just awful. I think everyone should tend to their own wars!" If
we must have a female Secretary of State, why not replace the malevolent
frump Madeleine "Bombs Away" Albright with the glamorous Liz,
who shows more foreign policy acumen than Albright, Sandy Berger, and
James Rubin combined?
LEFT-WING
IMPERIALISM,
A GERIATRIC DISORDER
The
number of aging Vietnam war protesters and left-wing cranks who have suddenly
discovered the virtues of U.S. imperialism continues to grow. Bogdan Denitch
and Ian Williams make the left-wing case for war in the current issue
of the Nation: "Real internationalists can hardly use the
dubious rights of 'national sovereignty' to oppose action to stop massacres,"
they opine. "Opposition to US military intervention is an understandable
rule of thumb, but it shouldn't become obsessive dogma." Why be "obsessive"
about such trifles as principles – after decades of apologias for
foreign totalitarian regimes, it shouldn't be too hard to perform the
same service on behalf of NATO. Besides, it pays much better, as no doubt
Denitch, director of the Institute for Transitions to Democracy, which
operates in Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia, is well aware. His Institute has
been heavily subsidized by George Soros, the multi-billionaire speculator
and fellow "internationalist" whose hatred of capitalism is
second only to his hatred of nationalism, whether it be American or Serbian.
As the chief moneybags behind the American Committee to Save Bosnia and
the Action Council for Peace in the Balkans, two major interventionist
groups instrumental in getting us into the Bosnian quagmire, Soros has
been buying up left-wing intellectuals and publicists by the dozen –
an investment that seems to be paying off in spades.
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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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