Issue #07/62, April 8 - 21, 1999  

Continued from the previous page.

51. This war has revealed the American media to be a more effective conduit for state propaganda than the state-controlled press of the Soviet Union. See PRESS REVIEW.

52. Educated Westerners are supposed to be opposed to imposing their moral rules on other cultures. The Balkans are a distinct cultural area, within which inter-ethnic war has always been the norm. This is the single most indisputable fact about Balkan culture. If what we're seeing in Kosovo is an expression of a basic cultural pattern, why are we entitled to judge it, let alone kill thousands of Serbs to stop it? What is the deal here--are we supposed to be cultural relativists only as long as nothing serious is involved? Are we supposed to give up on cultural relativism the moment another culture does something which makes us really uncomfortable? Or are we just going to drop the whole pretense of relativism and go back to simple Victorian arrogance, imposing the moral rules of the English-speaking world everywhere our navy and air force can reach? You can't have it both ways. Either you accept that other cultures have their own moral rules (some of which involve different ways of making war) which are not subject to our judgment--or you take up the white man's burden and recolonize in earnest.

53. NATO committed a series of rhetorical blasphemies to drum up support for the action. Here's one word they shouldn't have used, but did:

Genocide. (n) The systematic, planned extermination of a racial or ethnic group. (Greek: genos, race + -CIDE, Latin: caedere, to kill).

On March 29th, British Defense Minister George Robertson said: ``We are confronting a regime which is intent on genocide," while German Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping said on the same day that the Serbs were committing a genocide. Folks, in a genocide, you don't let a single refugee go. You kill every single one of them, either out of hatred or because you fear they might come back some day. The Serbs don't qualify.

Just so we don't forget, "genocide" means to kill everyone in a race. The Serbs are doing something else: savagely expelling a hostile ethnic group from territory it claims as its own. There are many precedents for this. In 1945, the Czechs expelled over two million ethnic Germans from the Sudetenland, causing horrific human tragedies in the name of ethnically cleansing their nation. No one called that a genocide. It was evil and horrible, but it wasn't a genocide. As of this past Tuesday, the UN was using words like "extreme brutality and ruthlessness," and "mass deportations" to describe the Serb actions, while Britain had toned it down to "brutal ethnic cleansing." This week, now that the West might be forced to take in refugees exactly because they've falsely raised the moral stakes so high, the word "genocide" has been dropped, meaning we can intern them behind barbed-wire at Guantanamo Bay with a clear conscience.

54. We have driven Ukraine back into alliance with Russia. Prior to this bombing, Ukraine was still officially in the running for acceptance into NATO--an expansion of the alliance which would have represented an enormous coup for the West, and a nearly insurmountable obstacle to any conceivable Russian aggression. Now Ukraine is back in the Russian huddle. Ukraine for Albania--even Al Davis wouldn't make that trade.

55. NATO's bombing violates both the UN charter and NATO treaty itself. Article 2, section 7 of the UN Charter expressly forbids UN intervention "in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state...." Both the United States and NATO are signatories to the UN Charter and bound by it under international law. By bombing Serbia without first getting Security Council approval, NATO broke the law. Making them war criminals. Not that we expect NATO to try itself in the Hague...

56. Every Serb has a rifle and knows how to use it. Serbs were trained in guerrilla warfare all through the Tito years, and there are bunkers, arms caches and shelters hidden all over Serbia. If NATO invades and occupies Serbia, the trouble will just be starting.

57. The United States insisted that the air force of Turkey participate in the attack, demonstrating a remarkable lack of both military wisdom and cultural sensitivity. Because its 14th-century massacre at the hands of the Turks represents the central event in Serbia's history, one which has imbued Serbs with a desperate craving for revenge that has not spent itself in 600 years, the U.S., by shoving Turkey into its ranks, has virtually guaranteed that Serbs will fight this war at a fever pitch of ethnic hatred, with maximum determination, resolve, and sacrifice.

58. The Kosovo attack has revealed America to be a country in a cultural abyss.

Nothing means much at all to Americans. But there are some things that mean everything in the world to the Serbs. And it shows. Consider this poem about Kosovo, written by King Nikola late last century:

Over there, o'er there, beyond those hills,
Where the heavens bend the blue sky,
Toward Serb fields, toward martial fields,
Over there, brothers, let's prepare to go!
Over there, o'er there, beyond those hills,
One can find they say, Milos's tomb...
Over there!... My soul will receive its rest
When the Serb no longer will be a slave.

Contrast this to the one song most associated with American tragedy: the inevitable captured soldier's white trash family house, sickly trees in the front yard adorned with cloying yellow ribbons. Join hands and soak in the hallowed verse of Tony Orlando & Dawn:

Tie a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree
If you still want me
It's been ten long years, if you still want me
If I don't see a yellow ribbon around the old oak tree
I'll stay on the bus
Forget about us
Put the blame on me
If I don't see that yellow ribbon
Ro-o-o-und that o-o-old oak tree!

59. The world hates America more than ever, as evidenced by a spontaneous series of anti-American demonstrations on a scale not seen since the seventies. Here's a small list of all the anti-American demonstrations since March 24th.

• Formerly Western-leaning Montenegro last weekend brought out 30,000 demonstrators, or 5% of the republic's population, to rally against NATO and for Serbia
• Skopje, capital of Macedonia, was the scene of violent demonstrations on the first night of the bombing. Demonstrators burned vehicles and tried storming the embassy, forcing US ambassador Chrisopher Hill to hide in the basement. Riot troops broke it up. Security has since been beefed up by the addition of Macedonian police, 40 Marines and an American anti-terrorist squad.
• On April 1st, over 10,000 people demonstrated in Paris calling for a return to the peace talks, Patras, Greece saw 4,000 people chanting anti-U.S. and anti-NATO slogans, and in Prague, 300 Czech and Serb residents demonstrated against the air strikes.
• On March 31st, some 2,500 Serbs demonstrated in the Slovenian capital Ljubljana against NATO air strikes; approximately 3,000 people demonstrated in front of the U.S. Information Center in Podgorica, Montenegro, denouncing both the U.S. and the Montenegran governments.
• some 5,000 people pelted the U.S. consulate in Greece's second largest city, Thessaloniki, with stones, firecrackers, and eggs on the evening of March 29, in protest of NATO air strikes in Yugoslavia. It follows other major demonstrations last week in Athens and on March 28 outside the U.S. military base on Crete.
• On March 27, several thousand people, mostly supporters of the reformed communist party, PDS, demonstrated against NATO in Berlin. About 700-1,300 people demonstrated in The Hague and some of them were arrested for throwing rocks at the German embassy. In Italy, several thousand people participated in demonstrations in Milan and Rome. Also, about a thousand demonstrators demolished the U.S. embassy in Cyprus. In Romanian Timosoara, about 1,100 people, mostly Romanian Serbs and supporters of far-right Romania Mare party, demonstrated against NATO attacks. About a thousand Serbs also held a protest at the gates outside Downing Street in London.
• Not to mention Moscow...

60. Desperate to keep "democratic" Russia afloat and out of the hands of communist or nationalist extremists, the U.S. has been forced, once again, to engineer a loan to the Yeltsin government through the IMF. Since the Russian government has pledged to help the Serbs, the U.S. will therefore be pledging military assistance to its own enemies.

61. There is no compelling economic interest at stake for the United States in the Balkan conflict. Do you know anyone who bought a Yugo?

62. There are a lot of cheap, shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles floating around these days, many of them sold by the Afghans after delivery by the CIA. They work.

63. Carol J. Williams is covering Yugoslavia and the war for the L.A. Times.

64. The Clinton administration, as it has done several times in the last few years, will almost certainly use the Balkan conflict as the justification for a series of ambitious new "security" or "anti-terrorist" bills which will further scale back and threaten domestic civil rights. A counterterrorism bill passed in 1996 already enhanced the Federal government's fight against arbitrarily-designated foreign "terrorist" organizations by allowing the government to bar entry to any alien they say is associated with a terrorist group. Furthermore, in a provision which directly counters the individual American citizen's constitutional protection against the doctrine of guilt by association, the bill gives federal law enforcement officials the right to wiretap, search, perform surveillance upon, even prosecute as accessories any American shown to have supported any of the terrorist organizations on its list. It is worth noting, incidentally, that Nelson Mandela's ANC was designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. government throughout Mandela's incarceration. The 1996 bill also allowed for immediate deportations based upon secret evidence, a manifestly unconstitutional provision. Meanwhile, this year, on January 25, the Clinton administration announced that it would be sending to congress a broad new antiterrorist bill that would create a domestic military "commandante"--we're not making this up--under whom soldiers would serve in a role combating domestic terrorism. If it passes, this new anti-terrorism bill would repeal the Posse Comitatus act of 1878, which decreed that the government may not deploy members of the military as a domestic law-enforcement personnel. All of these measures were instigated, mind you, BEFORE the NATO attack began, before the U.S. embassies in Russia and Montenegro were attacked, before there was a real live enemy to threaten U.S. security. Are you ready for what's next?

65. NATO was formed to help Western Europe repel a massive conventional attack from the Warsaw Pact. Its armies are still configured for that task, and its most important purpose is to make it unprofitable for anyone even to contemplate attacking Western or Central Europe. NATO forces have no mandate to police little provincial skirmishes like those going on in Kosovo. NATO forces aren't likely to be very good at that sort of job, either. And when the NATO campaign in Kosovo fails, NATO will become too timid to act in a real crisis of the kind the alliance was designed to confront.

66. By needlessly making a show of our utter disrespect for Russians by leaving them out of the decision-making process prior to the bombing of their former satellite state, the United States forced Russia to either publicly admit to its geopolitical irrelevance, or else take a stand and defy the United States militarily.

67. From the vantage point of pure self-interest, the bombing is a disaster for foreigners doing business here in Russia. Now that NATO has made us all look like unpredictable cowboys who speak with forked tongue, forget about making money here. No one will trust you anymore, your "Made In The USA" is no longer a sign of distinction, and some may even be looking for sweet revenge. Bombing Russia's friends is bad for business.

68. Kosovo was the cradle of Serb civilization before it was cleansed by Turk invaders who dispersed the Kosovo Serbs throughout the Balkans. While the Albanians have been a majority for quite some time, it hasn't come without its spells of mass ethnic cleansing of Serbs. In 1941, after the Italians took control of Greater Albania, the Kosovo Albanians immediately set about slaughtering Serbs, forcing the Italians to intervene. It is estimated that 100,000 Serbs fled their homes in Kosovo in 1941 alone. Also, the Albanians have the highest birth rate of any people in Europe, while the Serbs seem to have been slaughtered at a greater rate than any people. This might help explain the ethnic imbalance between the two in what is claimed to be Serbia's heartland.

69. The KLA are diehard Marxist-Leninists who have been linked to Osama bin Laden, the terrorist we launched two ineffective missile attacks to stop. A January 21st article in the French newspaper Liberation claims that KLA frontman Adem Demaci is an unabashed disciple of Mao, and that the KLA leaders are all deep admirers of the late Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha. Furthermore, in almost the only instance of American reporting on the KLA, the March 28th edition of The New York Times wrote that the KLA was "originally made up of diehard Marxist-Leninists, as well as by descendants of the fascist militias raised by the Italians in World War II." The U.S. has fought two lengthy shooting wars and one 45-year Cold War to contain communism; now we're fighting alongside them to depose a democratically-elected leader.

70. It sounds like an old issue, but it's still valid: the United States Constitution prohibits the use of military force without a 2/3 majority vote in both houses of congress, except in cases of emergency. That Presidents have in this half of this century done so in Korea, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Sudan, among others, does not make it right or even legal. As congressman Tom Campbell (R-CA), a former Stanford law professor, said last week in voicing his objections to yet another "undeclared" war: "Previous constitutional violations do not justify subsequent ones."

71. Despite its moral posturing about Serb ethnic cleansing, NATO itself has provided air cover for the same kinds of atrocities it now accuses the Serbs of committing. In 1995, NATO planes, responding to what many now suspect was a Bosnian-government-staged massacre of Muslim civilians, attacked and crippled the Bosnian Serb army with punishing air assaults. At the same time, a massive two-pronged ground assault was unleashed on the Serbs both from Croatia into Serb-populated Krajina and from the Muslim-Croat alliance into Serb-populated regions of central and west Bosnia. Nearly all of Croatia's 600,000 Serbs were brutally expelled, fulfilling Ante Pavelic's Ustashe dream. Several hundred thousand more Bosnian Serbs were uprooted in the Croat-Muslim offensive within Bosnia. Altogether, in a matter of weeks, up to a million Serbs were ethnically cleansed. No one knows how many died.

72. The Serbs are one of the tallest, most beautiful European tribes. Somalis, too, are tall and elegant, as are the Tutsi, who actually call themselves `'The Tall People." Why are the most beautiful tribes being wiped out by the squat and ugly?

73. When President Clinton first asked Congress over three years ago to authorize sending American troops to Bosnia as part of SFOR peacekeeping troops, he promised they'd be home in six months. According to Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX), "The years have passed, more than $20 billion has been spent, and our soldiers are still there. Very few seriously ask anymore when these troops are coming home - or even what it is they are supposed to be accomplishing."

74. The war marks the return of liberal warmongers. You thought they became extinct in 1968, but you were wrong. NATO head Javiar Solana was a Marxist, Socialist and anti-NATO demonstrator up to the mid-80s; Tony Blair leads the once-left-wing Labor Party; Clinton burned his draft card; Gerhard Schroeder is a Socialist, and his Foreign Minister a Greens Party sellout; French Premier Lionel Jospin is a Socialist; and vermicelli-spined hawk Italian Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema heads the most left-wing government in Italian history. A horrifying bunch of Eurofags trying to pass themselves off as pinstriped "realists". In other words, meet the New Left, same as the Old Left. America has plenty of its own liberal war groupies, too. Ever on the Easter Egg hunt for an easily-defeatable Hitler to smash, America's liberals thought they'd found it in Milosevic. Now that the air war has failed (no duh!), they're crying for a ground war. Among the more conspicuous: Former avuncular nice guy Mark Shields, who now praises Clinton for showing "courage" in flouting popular opinion by bombing the Serbs, and called on him to prepare Americans for some serious slaughter. Other pampered liberals screaming to throw American kids into a Kosovo ground war include Sen. Joe Biden, Joseph Lieberman and Charles Robb. What these liberals never understand is that no matter how bravely they rattle America's military saber, they'll never, ever be feared or respected by anyone but their page boys.

75. Ask five people you know if they've heard how many Serbs have been killed or maimed so far in the bombing.

76. Then ask those same five people if they've seen the videotape of the three captured American POWs.

77. Poetry slams. They're going to pop up like herpes in every college town in the US, giving every English major the chance to compose a safely ambiguous rant against the horrors of war and perform it in front of other, likeminded people, increasing his/her chances of mating. These people should not be encouraged to breed.

78. Because the NATO action comes on the heels of a year-long sex scandal/impeachment process which tied up virtually the entire government for a year, the bombing campaign in Serbia means that the most powerful and influential nation in the world will continue to be paralyzed after having done virtually nothing of substance except bomb Iraq and provide fodder for blowjob jokes for the last 15 months.

79. Bill Clinton reportedly said "We can't lose this one" at a White House policy meeting a few nights into the bombing, providing an ugly insight into the extent to which Americans view the entire world, and their role in it, as a sports contest. This is just one more reason why the rest of the world has gradually come to hate America's guts--because military action is a game for Americans, who have nothing but their careers on the line, while for people in other countries-not just for Serbia, but for Albania, Montenegro, Croatia, Macedonia, even for Italy and the rest of the countries neighboring the Balkans- this is a life-or-death situation. How do you think people in these countries like to see Clinton fretting about losing "this one"?

80. Here's how you die in the kind of war we're starting: you're standing in the hatch of your APC as it rolls through a wooded valley in Kosovo when suddenly your head jerks to the right and pops like a zit, splattering your brains over the hood of the APC. About a second later, your crewmates hear the crack of a hunting rifle from somewhere in the woods. Your APC can't get up there. You call for air support, but the Apaches don't go in close to sweep the woods anymore because they've been taking too many hits from shoulder-fired SAMs. Your unit has two choices: do nothing, or blow the nearest Serb village to bits in reprisal. Either way, the Serbs get stronger and the NATO occupying army gets weaker.

81. In the sixties, Martin Luther King, Jr. told blacks to oppose U.S. involvement Vietnam because it was a war whose human cost was being disproportionally paid by the poor, i.e. by them. The same will be true if the U.S. commits to a ground war in Serbia, but the American black leadership apparently isn't what it used to be in terms of watching out for its own. Jesse Jackson, expressing his unequivocal support of The Man, said last week that the risk of American lives was acceptable because "the military is meant to be used". Meanwhile, the Final Call, the Nation of Islam's newspaper, came out Monday with an editorial which began as follows: "The fiercest battle being fought today is not the battle in Iraq, nor is it the fighting in Kosovo or Sierra Leone." So what was the most urgent and outrageous issue of the day, according to the Final Call? A political cartoon in the Village Voice, depicting, to the paper's horror, the Minister Farrakhan being attended to by Jewish doctors.

82. Why haven't Nobel Peace laureates Elie Wiesel, Nelson Mandela, Yassir Arafat, Desmond Tutu, and the rest spoken out more volubly against this war? For that matter, where are one-joke acts like Bob Geldof? Sally Struthers? Yoko Ono? If nothing else, this war has proven that it's passe to be a peacenik. Last week, at the California State Democratic Convention-the traditional Mecca of America's most fervent peace/love hippie anti-war political activists, the home to the delegate contingent that throughout the 1960s picketed national party meetings with chants of "Stop the Bombing"--the solidly pro-Clinton proceedings were only interrupted once, by a single heckler, who shouted at Tipper Gore, "Bring them Home!" before being dragged away. As for the rest of the participants, they were mostly ex-hippies and ex-lefties who in the process of becoming establishment players in the 1990s had acquired a new fluency in the language of elitist cop-outs-- and were on hand at the convention to show off their skills. ''I never believed I'd have to go back and vote on airstrikes,'' wondered aloud Senator Barbara Boxer. ''But human rights belong to everyone in the world,'' she added, and ought not to be denied ''because of ethnicity, religion, or background.'' (Boston Globe, March 31, 1999)

83. We'll get tired of the whole mess and leave--and when we do, the Albanians will suffer alone. There won't be a single photo of their suffering in any of the Western media, because they will be old news.

84. Does anybody miss the Mekong Delta? We lost that and managed to survive. We'll lose Kosovo for the same reason: we don't care about it, and the people we're fighting do.

85. If there is a ground war, it will almost certainly inspire the production of at least one grossly over-funded, falsely soul-searching film about a crippled war veteran that will star a healthy, nautilus-trained hunky tanned American actor. Coming Home and Born on the Fourth of July were only appetizers...Are you ready for Brad Pitt in a wheelchair? Leo De Caprio with "Kosovo syndrome"? Keanu Reeves as a blinded field surgeon, shown thirty feet tall in theaters all around the globe, confidently mispronouncing "Kosovo Polje" with a hard "j"? You'd better be. These are our next ambassadors to the world.

86. America's top brass was against the bombing. According to the April 5th edition of the Washington Post, the American military's top command argued against Madeleine Albright's reasoning that "losing" Kosovo would eventually destabilize the entire Balkans. They also said bombing Serbia would likely lead to a sharp escalation in the war against the Kosovo Albanians.

87. Slobodan Don't Surf! There are no beaches in Serbia.

88. What's all this "we," anyway? Are you planning to join up in time to take part in the first wave of the attack on Kosovo? If not, then drop the "we" stuff. One of the worst verbal consequences of the war is that people who have no intention of volunteering to fight in Kosovo will use the pronoun "we" to describe the NATO forces, saying things like "We kicked some ass!" when discussing the war. Anyone using "we" to describe the NATO forces in Kosovo should be forcibly inducted and sent to the front.

89. Now that Ukraine and Belarus have been forced back into alliance with Russia, the three countries are talking about redeploying nuclear weapons which were withdrawn to Russia in Ukraine and Belarus.

90. Among all the announced and expected year 2000 U.S. presidential candidates, none-- with the possible exception of semi-lunatic right winger Pat Buchanan--are against this action. In this sense, the bombing proves how few real political choices Americans have. Not only can President Clinton commit troops without bothering to secure full congressional approval, he can do so without having to worry about dissent within his party obstructing Al Gore's path to the nomination.

91. Even U.S. toadies like Yegor Gaidar are against this thing.

92. We've just about smoked our last pack of cruise missiles, and our bag of stealth planes is dented. Guess who's paying for the next trip to the store?

93. Inevitable Pulitzer Prizewinning photo of weeping worn-torn Albanian civilian.

94. America cares so much about Albanians, they're taking in 20,000 refugees-and putting them in a barbed wire compound on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba...

95. The Germans initially pledged to accept 40,000 Albanian refugees. Now they say they'll only take 10,000.

96. In contrast, tiny Macedonia has been saddled with over 130,000 refugees. Its prime minister, Llubco Georgievski, accused NATO of dumping the whole refugee problem on Macedonia and called NATO "completely irresponsible" this past Tuesday for ignoring warnings that NATO airstrikes would trigger a humanitarian disaster.

97. There is a great deal of evidence that points to pre-ordained war strategy on the part of the Clinton Administration. An August 12, 1998 analysis by the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee (RPC) noted that "planning for a U.S.-led NATO intervention in Kosovo is now largely in place.... The only missing element seems to be an event - with suitably vivid media coverage - that would make the intervention politically salable, in the same way that a dithering Administration finally decided on intervention in Bosnia in 1995 after a series of 'Serb mortar attacks' took the lives of dozens of civilians - attacks which, upon closer examination, may in fact have been the work of the Muslim regime in Sarajevo, the main beneficiary of the intervention."

"That the Administration is waiting for a similar 'trigger' in Kosovo is increasingly obvious," observed the RPC report.

During the negotiations at Rambouillet, American negotiators very openly entreated the KLA representatives to just sign the damn agreement so that all the blame would be put on Serbia, and bombing could commence. The day after the war began, the London Telegraph reported that General Clark, NATO's supreme military commander, "received his activation order for hostilities last October....The supreme commander does not need new permission from politicians or diplomats whenever he wishes to change tactics, or increase or scale back operations."

98. The KLA may have duped the United States and Serbia both to serve its own Machiavellian domestic agenda.The guerrilla tactics of Marxists like the KLA call for the terrorist group to kill enough enemies (in this case, ethnic Serbs) in order to trigger reprisals so terrible that life for the average Kosovar becomes unbearable, thereby radicalizing the situation. Now that the situation is suitably radicalized, KLA military police are now forcing, at gunpoint, male Kosovar refugees into service, according to an April 1 Associated Press wire. The KLA is even forcing refugees in Albania and Macedonia into service. In other words, the U.S. bombing and the subsequent Serbian reprisals against Albanians have both perfectly served the KLA's domestic agenda, providing it with defenseless refugees to fatten its rolls. This is yet another example of why the "ethnic cleansing" issue is not as black and white as the American press would have you believe.

99. Despite all of the above, the U.S. hopes to increase the influence of the KLA. On March 26th, the Global Intelligence Report claimed that "several foreign policy-makers, including Senators Mitch McConell, R-Ky. and Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., are reportedly promoting the idea of increased support for the KLA." Yep, we sure know how to pick 'em.

100. The strength of the KLA would seem to belie President Clinton's claim that the Serbs planned to ethnically cleanse Kosovo this spring "all along anyway." The KLA only appeared in February of last year. They announced themselves by launching terrorist attacks on Serb police and villagers. By early-mid summer, some estimates were that the KLA had controlled up to two-thirds of Kosovo. The big powers only got involved when the Yugoslav forces retaliated and retook most of Kosovo, which is, after all, internationally recognized as an integral part of Yugoslavia. Furthermore, although the operation was by no means civilized, the number of casualties-roughly 800 dead total on both sides during last year's battles-was remarkably low compared to the opening months of the Bosnian war, when it's estimated by some that tens of thousands were slaughtered and raped.

101. "America does not need to go abroad in search of monsters to destroy...America... well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extraction, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force... She might become dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit."
      - John Quincy Adams; Address, 4 July 1821

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