Propaganda System Number One
From Diem and Arbenz to Milosevic
by Edward S. Herman
Z magazine, September 2001
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"
think tanks 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, DC, Quebec City, and Genoa.
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
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. 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 statement
in 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. 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, 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," October 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).
Hague Tribunal
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 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. 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 person 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.
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.
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 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, January 19, 1999;
Professor Dusan Dunjic [a Serb medical participant in the autopsies],
"The (Ab)use of Forensic Medicine," www.suc.org/politics/kosovo/
documents/DunjicO499; 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 1 980s 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," www.suc.org/ kosovo_crisis/documents/gergov.html].
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,
December 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 3,000-4,000 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 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. 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 ln These Times [August 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).
Milosevic's nationalist
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 (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.
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 totalitarian
systems.
Edward
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