Allied
Farce: A
Wartime Diary
by Justin Raimondo
A
SIGHT FOR SORE EYES
It
was a sight that doubtless cheered virtually everyone who
saw it – the American media being chased down the street
by an angry crowd of their slandered victims. In Skopje, Macedonia,
thousands of Serbians, outraged by the relentless media barrage
of anti-Serbian propaganda, converged on news crews, destroyed
equipment, and literally chased American, British, and German
reporters down the street and out of town. The same journalistic
cleansing occurred in Pristina, capital of Kosovo province,
and in Belgrade, where Western journalists were expelled.
As bombs rained death on Serbian civilians and soldiers alike,
the big story on Ted Turner’s Cable News Network that
night was CNN correspondent Brent Sadler’s brush with
mortality. The New York Times reports that, after secretly
transmitting images of the first NATO air strikes on Kosovo,
Sadler was taken quite by surprise when, at 3 A.M. in the
morning Serbian security came crashing through the door of
his hotel room. "I thought it was curtains," moaned
Sadler, who sustained no damage except for a few broken cameras
– and his wounded vanity. In a tone of bewildered indignation,
CNN reporters complained on the air that they had been singled
out. But those Western journalists who have placed themselves
and their profession in the service of Allied Force should
not be too surprised to find that the people they have demonized
are less than hospitable.
OVER
THERE
The
Clinton administration takes the position that the Serbian
province of Kosovo should be granted autonomy, and that the
main problem of the Albanian Kosovars is an oppressive and
even tyrannical federal government of Yugoslavia – the
only known instance in which they have been known to take
up the cause of state’s rights. Unfortunately their sympathy
for secessionism only seems to apply overseas.
PORTRAIT
OF THE WAR PARTY:
THE OBITUARY WRITER
This
column will carry a regular feature, Portrait of the War Party,
which focus in on the war propaganda apparatus maintained
by the interventionist lobby. Well-funded and well-connected,
the War Party is such a varied and complex phenomenon that
a detailed description of its activities, and its vast system
of interlocking directorates and special interests, both foreign
and domestic, would fill the pages of a good-sized book. The
alternative is to break down the story, and serve up its constituent
parts in brief glimpses, portraits of individuals and organizations
that lobbied hard for this war and its bloody prosecution.
This
week, we focus on the smallest of the small-fry: Stephen Schwartz
is, nevertheless, a particularly instructive example of the
interventionist lobby at work. On day 2 of the bombing, no
sooner had I turned on my television set but there he was,
on a local cable news channel, BayTV, ranting about
how the United States has to liberate the Serbian people.
As a former fellow traveler of the Spartacist League –
a Trotskyist sect that used to show up at demonstrations in
the eighties with banners proclaiming Hail Red Army in Afghanistan!
– he wound up in the neoconservative orbit. Associated
with the Institute for Contemporary Studies, the unofficial
thinktank of the arms industry, Schwartz landed a job at the
San Francisco Chronicle. He would often show up at
the informal conservative journalist’s roundtable that
Bill Rusher used to preside over at the Union Club on San
Francisco’s Nob Hill, trying to convince a rtaher skeptical
bunch of right-wingers of the virtues of labor unions and
telling stories of his leftist past. He bitterly denounced
Bay Area Stalinists who he insisted were out to get him: according
to him, he lived in perpetual fear of his job due to the all-pervasive
atmosphere of political correctness in the newsroom. I hadn’t
seen Schwartz in years, but there he was as I turned on the
television, calling for an all-out American effort and confidently
predicting victory over Serbia in a week. The KLA is a heroic
band of freedom fighters, like the contras in Nicaragua, he
explained, and the Serbians are like the Nazis. Considering
reports about the Marxist leadership and ideology of the KLA,
from hailing the Red Army to hailing the Kosovo Liberation
Army is not all that long a road to travel. A scant two hours
later, there he was again, whooping it up for war, this time
on MSNBC. Clearly enjoying his soapbox, Schwartz boasted about
how many times he had been to Bosnia, and declared that he
would soon be leaving the Chronicle for an unspecified
position in the Bosnia-Kosovo region – whether as minister
in charge of propaganda for the NATO army of occupation he
did not say. In both appearances, the host had introduced
him as Stephen Schwartz, of the San Francisco Chronicle.
What the they had tactfully left out was that his reporting
has been confined to the obituary page of that newspaper,
where he specializes in paeans to departed San Francisco leftists
and avante garde artistes. It is only natural, in times such
as these, that a writer of death notices is instantly elevated
to the role of a national spokesman and expert.
DEATH
ALL AROUND
As
the all-news networks shuttle between shots of the Belgrade
burning and the trial of Doctor Kevorkian, the Kevorkian death-mask
morphs into the boyish face of State Department spokesman
James Rubin glibly deflecting reporters’ questions. At
the end of a murderous century, the cult of Thanatos has replaced
Christianity as the dominant religion. It is Day Three, and
the Serbian death toll is 100 and rising . . .
THE
WAR FOR PUBLIC OPINION:
THE POLLS
Polls
ostensibly showing that support for the administration’s
war of aggression at 50 percent yesterday took a precipitous
6-point decline in less than twenty-four hours – and
that is after three days of the war for public opinion conducted
by the Clintonians and their supporters in the conservative
movement such as Jeanne Kirkpatrick and the usual suspects,notably
Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, whose
magazine a few years ago editorially relished the prospect
of crushing Serb skulls.
OLLIE,
BY GOLLIE
Ever
since the end of the Cold War, the swing of the conservative
movement away from world-saving internationalism and toward
a new American nationalism has been widely noted. The conversion
of Patrick J. Buchanan to a policy of America First noninterventionism
during the Gulf War was the first breakthrough, and the process
is being completed this time around as congressional Republicans
are in vanguard of the antiwar opposition. The well-funded
but essentially soldier-less neoconservatives over at the
Weekly Standard have vehemently pushed military action
against Serbia for years, but on this issue they are essentially
generals without an army. The triumph of the Old Right and
its noninterventionist foreign policy in the conservative
movement and the Republican party is signified by the emergence
of none other than Colonel Oliver North, the contras’
poster boy, as an articulate spokesman for the antiwar opposition.
Welcome you to the ranks of the emerging antiwar movement,
Ollie – your presence marks a definite improvement.
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