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February
21, 2002
It
has been a week since Slobodan Milosevic was put on "trial"
before the Hague Inquisition. The prosecution's opening statement
made clear their goal: to convict Milosevic of causing every
misfortune in the Balkans over the past decade, and through
him, the entire Serbian people. In the words
of Milosevic's bane, Vojislav Kostunica, the Inquisitors wallowed
in "shallow misinterpretation of history," and their
claim that Serbs were not on trial was "extremely stretched."
And this is about as emotional as Kostunica gets.
The
Inquisition proudly stands by its "history." It
is a work of incredibly talented dark arts, to be sure, on
par with some of the most twisted deliberate misinterpretations
of reality ever concocted. They are considerably less comfortable
with the accusation of imposing collective guilt, since that
is so terribly politically incorrect these days (unlike the
"history," mind you). Yet what their words deny,
their deeds confirm, and no spin ever invented can cover that
up.
Not
that many try. The BBC, for example, ranted
at length about "the Serbs' guilt" and the "need
for punishment" just before the trial opened. Their choice
of source to prove this claim almost seems inspired by the
Inquisition: Miroslav Filipovic, a reporter in pay of a violently
Serbophobic British
NGO, who was jailed for writing about a Serb massacre
of some 800 Albanian children. His employers and many Western
NGOs demanded his release as a "political
prisoner," and eventually succeeded. Yet Filipovic
never offered a shred of evidence to back up his story. He
was no political prisoner, but simply an accomplished liar.
Which brings up an interesting point
OPERATION
DELIBERATE MALICE
Politicians
lie all the time. They are expected to lie, more or less.
The press, on the other hand, is expected to tell the truth.
Always. So what happens when the Guardians of Truth indulge
in wholesale proliferation of lies? Just that "shallow
misinterpretation" of history Kostunica spoke of, in
his usual understatement of a much darker reality.
There
is so much evidence that the media all over the place have
lied
about the Balkans wars of the 1990s, from Slovenia to Kosovo,
reviewing just some of it would take up volumes. There is
one thing, however, which has been so consistently misreported,
it represents a textbook example of media mendacity: Slobodan
Milosevic's speech at Kosovo Field on June 28, 1989. Routinely
described as "whipping up nationalist fervor" or
something equally sinister, the speech is never actually quoted.
A recent
scholarly analysis reveals why. It is chilling reading,
for it raises questions about the very consistency of deception
and its widespread character, neither of which can be adequately
explained by anything except deliberate malice.
ORDER
OF BATTLE
Suddenly,
the press coverage of the "trial" in The Hague seems
to make much more sense, as the subtext of all reports designed
as subliminal background noise now becomes readily apparent.
At the beginning of his opening argument, Milosevic referred
to the indictment against him as an "ocean of lies."
Take the metaphor further, and imagine a battle fleet sailing
on that ocean, big guns blazing, focusing on one target. It
shouldn't be too hard.
First
come the flagships, the semi-official media of the Western
World, whose cloak of credibility allows them to decide what
is "fit to print" or broadcast. Thus the New
York Times presented
the prosecutors' claims as fact with gleeful relish, and
omitted
the cross-examination of the first witness, thus failing
to note that his "points" were promptly discredited
as false. The BBC was positively subtle
in comparison, resorting more to editorial
guidance.
Next
in line are cruisers, reporters whose adventures in the Balkans
won them riches, fame and awards. Any questioning of their
"discoveries" would risk exposing them as frauds
(at the very least), and thus deserves a vitriolic
counterattack. Illustrating the depths of journalistic
depravity, one is even so bold as to accuse Milosevic of wanting
to "rewrite history".
All
around them, supplying them with source information and smokescreens,
are the wire services. No
matter what their reports
from the "trial" are about, they are routinely leavened
with a paragraph or two that always mentions Nuremberg, calls
the ICTY an "international" or "UN"
tribunal, and mentions prosecution's allegations
as facts. To save space, of course. Expensive, those electrons.
If that were the case, why spend half the report
about Milosevic's defense repeating the prosecution's accusations
while leaving out most of the defense anyway? Some electrons
must be more expensive than others.
Bringing
up the rear are common
slander and rants
by special interests, who seek to use the trial to further
their often ludicrous
agendas. Milosevic's process is already used, crudely,
in propaganda
efforts to justify Empire's new "crusade against
evil."
Finally,
there are the raiders who cause most damage with a sudden,
deep strike, pretending
till the last minute to be friendly.
A
LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN
Individual
liars, however bold, pale in comparison to this indomitable
fleet. Mahmut Bakalli, leader of Kosovo Albanian Communists
before
Milosevic's time, tried on Tuesday to accuse Milosevic
of apartheid, but all he did was fall
apart under cross-examination (the one the New York
Times did not report).
Seeing
Bakalli's incoherent rambling might induce Croatia's current
President, Stipe Mesic, to change his mind about gladly
testifying at the Inquisition. He was, after all, the
sidekick of Croatia's chauvinist leader Franjo Tudjman tasked
in 1991 with destroying
Yugoslavia by becoming its president.
Why
not subpoena Alija Izetbegovic, former Bosnian Muslim leader
whose diplomatic shenanigans are directly responsible for
Bosnia's slide into war? Now retired, at Empire's "suggestion,"
he would welcome a chance to do something important. Maybe
he could entertain the tribunal with his famous principle
of diplomacy: "I think one way in the morning, another
in the afternoon."
That's
precisely the point, though. Most of the Inquisition's "witnesses"
seem to be Milosevic's bitter enemies from Croatia, Bosnia
and Kosovo, who all stand to profit personally from his conviction.
As precedent has shown and the Inquisition gets to make
its precedents into law, being omnipotent like that perjury
before the Inquisition is only a crime if it helps the accused.
THE
MOTHER OF ALL LIES
The
fleet's most potent weapon is "Greater Serbia"
namely, the accusation asserted so often that it has become
the assumed truth, that Milosevic planned
to establish an ethnically pure state for all Serbs. This
accusation is at the core of the Inquisition's "indictment,"
at the foundation of Imperial policy of intervention and occupation,
a staple of university curricula, and woven into the very
fabric of reporting about the Balkans.
Yet,
as Milosevic pointed out and no one disputed him Serbia
itself is anything but ethnically pure. Strange, is
it not, that while rushing to paint him as another Hitler,
Milosevic's accusers overlook the simple truth that Hitler
first exterminated his victims in Germany, then moved
beyond its borders. Then again, Simple Truth definitely
does not sail the Great Press Fleet's ocean
Now
consider these quotes:
'Yugoslavia'
represents the crown of the hegemonic-imperialist policy of
the bloody rule by Greater Serbian fascists. [
] Albanians
are being expelled, and their homes settled by Serbs trusted
by the regime. [
] Down with the military-fascist dictatorship!
Down with the Greater Serbian policy of ethnic oppression!
It
sounds eerily familiar, does it not? Here's why:
Down
with the bloody Serbian monarchy! Long live the union of workers,
peasants and the oppressed nations! Long live independent
Croatia, Montenegro, Slovenia, Bosnia, Voivodina and Serbia.
Long live the worker-peasant government! Long live the federation
of worker-peasant republics in the Balkans!
This
is from the first issue of the Yugoslav Communist Party's
official newspaper, Proleter (The Proletarian), issued
on December 1, 1929.
TOOL
OF THE TRADE
The
canard of "Greater Serbia" is far older than the
1990s, or Milosevic. It was concocted
by Austria-Hungary in the early 1900s, for its own nefarious
expansionist purposes. Most Red leaders in pre-WW2 Yugoslavia
had grown up suckling on this, so it is little wonder they
thought of it as the perfect political weapon against the
Serb monarchy chiefly responsible for Austria's fall. During
World War Two, both they and the invading Nazis sought to
destroy Serbian statehood using the "Greater Serbia"
lie.
In
the 1990s, the chorus was picked up by a wide-ranging coalition
of neo-Nazis, Islamic fundamentalists, Albanian chauvinists
(whose drug-running, wanton murder and sex slave trade VP-wannabe
Joe
Lieberman famously dubbed "fighting for American
values"!) and even Montenegrin separatists.
One
thing they've all got in common? Their "reformist"
leaders could never have come into power, or kept it in the
face of imploding economies, without appealing to their flock
to rally against an outside enemy. Just guess who that
was
REVERSALS
Milosevic
himself accused his foes of projection i.e. accusing the
other party of something one is doing oneself. More accurate,
perhaps, would have been to call it "reversal."
When his detractors respond with counter-claims that Milosevic
is the one really doing the projecting, the argument really
boils down to the facts: who really did what, and if that
can be proven by something other than bellicose assertions.
Yet
the Masters of Mendacity have no desire for facts. They are
so easy to fabricate, and they have the wherewithal to do
so with impunity (another thing they love to project
on their current prisoner). More importantly, if it ever came
down to facts even though they might even get a few truths
in their column they would still abysmally lose.
And
when one serves those aspiring to rule the world, losing is
not an option.
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