Bullshit - John Pilger on the west's demonisation of Milosevic
, | 24.03.2006 14:04 | Analysis | Anti-militarism
The War Lovers by John Pilger, 22nd March 2006
The war lovers I have known in real wars have usually been harmless, except to themselves. They were attracted to Vietnam and Cambodia, where drugs were plentiful. Bosnia, with its roulette of death, was another favourite. A few would say they were there "to tell the world"; the honest ones would say they loved it. "War is fun!" one of them had scratched on his arm. He stood on a landmine.
The war lovers I have known in real wars have usually been harmless, except to themselves. They were attracted to Vietnam and Cambodia, where drugs were plentiful. Bosnia, with its roulette of death, was another favourite. A few would say they were there "to tell the world"; the honest ones would say they loved it. "War is fun!" one of them had scratched on his arm. He stood on a landmine.
I sometimes remember these almost endearing fools when I find myself faced with another kind of war lover - the kind that has not seen war and has often done everything possible not to see it. The passion of these war lovers is a phenomenon; it never dims, regardless of the distance from the object of their desire. Pick up the Sunday papers and there they are, egocentrics of little harsh experience, other than a Saturday in the shopping mall.
Turn on the television and there they are again, night after night, intoning not so much their love of war as their sales pitch for it on behalf of the court to which they are assigned. "There's no doubt," said Matt Frei, the BBC's man in America, "that the desire to bring good, to bring American values to the rest of the world, and especially now to the Middle East . . . is now increasingly tied up with military power."
Frei said that on 13 April 2003, after George W Bush had launched "Shock and Awe" on a defenceless Iraq. Two years later, after a rampant, racist, woefully trained and ill-disciplined army of occupation had brought "American values" of sectarianism, death squads, chemical attacks, attacks with uranium-tipped shells and cluster bombs, Frei described the notorious 82nd Airborne as "the heroes of Tikrit".
Last year, he lauded Paul Wolfowitz, architect of the slaughter in Iraq, as "an intellectual" who "believes passionately in the power of democracy and grass-roots development". As for Iran, Frei was well ahead of the story. In June 2003, he told BBC viewers: "There may be a case for regime change in Iran, too."
How many men, women and children will be killed, maimed or sent mad if Bush attacks Iran? The prospect of an attack is especially exciting for those war lovers understandably disappointed by the turn of events in Iraq. "The unimaginable but ultimately inescapable truth," wrote Gerard Baker in the Times last month, "is that we are going to have to get ready for war with Iran . . . If Iran gets safely and unmolested to nuclear status, it will be a threshold moment in the history of the world, up there with the Bolshevik revolution and the coming of Hitler." Sound familiar? In February 2003, Baker wrote that "victory [in Iraq] will quickly vindicate US and British claims about the scale of the threat Saddam poses".
The "coming of Hitler" is a rallying cry of war lovers. It was heard before Nato's "moral crusade to save Kosovo" (Blair) in 1999, a model for the invasion of Iraq. In the attack on Serbia, 2 per cent of Nato's missiles hit military targets; the rest hit hospitals, schools, factories, churches and broadcasting studios. Echoing Blair and a clutch of Clinton officials, a massed media chorus declared that "we" had to stop "something approaching genocide" in Kosovo, as Timothy Garton Ash wrote in 2002 in the Guardian. "Echoes of the Holocaust", said the front pages of the Daily Mirror and the Sun.
The Observer warned of a "Balkan Final Solution". The recent death of Slobodan Milosevic took the war lovers and war sellers down memory lane. Curiously, "genocide" and "Holocaust" and the "coming of Hitler" were now missing - for the very good reason that, like the drumbeat leading to the invasion of Iraq and the drumbeat now leading to an attack on Iran, it was all bullshit. Not misinterpretation. Not a mistake. Not blunders. Bullshit.
The "mass graves" in Kosovo would justify it all, they said. When the bombing was over, international forensic teams began subjecting Kosovo to minute examination. The FBI arrived to investigate what was called "the largest crime scene in the FBI's forensic history". Several weeks later, having found not a single mass grave, the FBI and other forensic teams went home.
In 2000, the International War Crimes Tribunal announced that the final count of bodies found in Kosovo's "mass graves" was 2,788. This included Serbs, Roma and those killed by "our" allies, the Kosovo Lberation Front. It meant that the justification for the attack on Serbia ("225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59 are missing, presumed dead", the US ambassador-at-large David Scheffer had claimed) was an invention. To my knowledge, only the Wall Street Journal admitted this. A former senior Nato planner, Michael McGwire, wrote that "to describe the bombing as 'humanitarian intervention' [is] really grotesque". In fact, the Nato "crusade" was the final, calculated act of a long war of attrition aimed at wiping out the very idea of Yugoslavia.
For me, one of the more odious characteristics of Blair, and Bush, and Clinton, and their eager or gulled journalistic court, is the enthusiasm of sedentary, effete men (and women) for bloodshed they never see, bits of body they never have to retch over, stacked morgues they will never have to visit, searching for a loved one. Their role is to enforce parallel worlds of unspoken truth and public lies. That Milosevic was a minnow compared with industrial-scale killers such as Bush and Blair belongs to the former.
Turn on the television and there they are again, night after night, intoning not so much their love of war as their sales pitch for it on behalf of the court to which they are assigned. "There's no doubt," said Matt Frei, the BBC's man in America, "that the desire to bring good, to bring American values to the rest of the world, and especially now to the Middle East . . . is now increasingly tied up with military power."
Frei said that on 13 April 2003, after George W Bush had launched "Shock and Awe" on a defenceless Iraq. Two years later, after a rampant, racist, woefully trained and ill-disciplined army of occupation had brought "American values" of sectarianism, death squads, chemical attacks, attacks with uranium-tipped shells and cluster bombs, Frei described the notorious 82nd Airborne as "the heroes of Tikrit".
Last year, he lauded Paul Wolfowitz, architect of the slaughter in Iraq, as "an intellectual" who "believes passionately in the power of democracy and grass-roots development". As for Iran, Frei was well ahead of the story. In June 2003, he told BBC viewers: "There may be a case for regime change in Iran, too."
How many men, women and children will be killed, maimed or sent mad if Bush attacks Iran? The prospect of an attack is especially exciting for those war lovers understandably disappointed by the turn of events in Iraq. "The unimaginable but ultimately inescapable truth," wrote Gerard Baker in the Times last month, "is that we are going to have to get ready for war with Iran . . . If Iran gets safely and unmolested to nuclear status, it will be a threshold moment in the history of the world, up there with the Bolshevik revolution and the coming of Hitler." Sound familiar? In February 2003, Baker wrote that "victory [in Iraq] will quickly vindicate US and British claims about the scale of the threat Saddam poses".
The "coming of Hitler" is a rallying cry of war lovers. It was heard before Nato's "moral crusade to save Kosovo" (Blair) in 1999, a model for the invasion of Iraq. In the attack on Serbia, 2 per cent of Nato's missiles hit military targets; the rest hit hospitals, schools, factories, churches and broadcasting studios. Echoing Blair and a clutch of Clinton officials, a massed media chorus declared that "we" had to stop "something approaching genocide" in Kosovo, as Timothy Garton Ash wrote in 2002 in the Guardian. "Echoes of the Holocaust", said the front pages of the Daily Mirror and the Sun.
The Observer warned of a "Balkan Final Solution". The recent death of Slobodan Milosevic took the war lovers and war sellers down memory lane. Curiously, "genocide" and "Holocaust" and the "coming of Hitler" were now missing - for the very good reason that, like the drumbeat leading to the invasion of Iraq and the drumbeat now leading to an attack on Iran, it was all bullshit. Not misinterpretation. Not a mistake. Not blunders. Bullshit.
The "mass graves" in Kosovo would justify it all, they said. When the bombing was over, international forensic teams began subjecting Kosovo to minute examination. The FBI arrived to investigate what was called "the largest crime scene in the FBI's forensic history". Several weeks later, having found not a single mass grave, the FBI and other forensic teams went home.
In 2000, the International War Crimes Tribunal announced that the final count of bodies found in Kosovo's "mass graves" was 2,788. This included Serbs, Roma and those killed by "our" allies, the Kosovo Lberation Front. It meant that the justification for the attack on Serbia ("225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59 are missing, presumed dead", the US ambassador-at-large David Scheffer had claimed) was an invention. To my knowledge, only the Wall Street Journal admitted this. A former senior Nato planner, Michael McGwire, wrote that "to describe the bombing as 'humanitarian intervention' [is] really grotesque". In fact, the Nato "crusade" was the final, calculated act of a long war of attrition aimed at wiping out the very idea of Yugoslavia.
For me, one of the more odious characteristics of Blair, and Bush, and Clinton, and their eager or gulled journalistic court, is the enthusiasm of sedentary, effete men (and women) for bloodshed they never see, bits of body they never have to retch over, stacked morgues they will never have to visit, searching for a loved one. Their role is to enforce parallel worlds of unspoken truth and public lies. That Milosevic was a minnow compared with industrial-scale killers such as Bush and Blair belongs to the former.
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Comments
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war graves
24.03.2006 17:45
not really.
sceptic
The Kosovo War was NOT about destroying Yugoslavia
24.03.2006 17:53
Why do I remind people of this essential fact? Because, while Pilger's outrage about the Kosovo War is honest, his understanding of the reasons for the war are totally mistaken.
Serbia was NOT attacked over Kosovo to destroy the already dying remnants of the old Yugoslavia. The US was NOT the driving force of NATO's response. One man, and one man alone created the Kosovo War, and that man was Blair.
Blair took NATO to war with Serbia for one reason, to get the US army to fight its first major ground campaign since Vietnam, and REACTIVATE the political potential of US military power. Kosovo was to be a safe, but slightly challenging battleground. The Serbs had some interesting ground forces, vaguely comparable to soft, lightly armed Russian units. Serb air power had, of course, been totally neutralised, so that US ground forces would be in no danger of air attack.
A scenario was crafted down to the last detail, including the TOTAL demonisation of the Serbs by a propaganda campaign ENTIRELY created by his media and political teams in Britain (so that the US could safely murder Serbs at will, without any moral backlash). Blair made only ONE mistake. He forgot just how chicken the US are when it comes down to any kind of fair fight (you know, the kind where the US ONLY has a ten-to-one advantage).
Historically, it wasn't the time, or the place for the US to rediscover the thrill of ground warfare. Blair failed (the ONLY significant time I can recall this happening), and as a direct consequence, the 911 plan was created instead. Blair, of course, was only a little ahead of himself. Those powers in the US that were waiting for their moment did NOT seek to prove their fairness by first killing white European troops. They had NO problem with showing a clear racist intent by only striking muslim targets. Blair had calculated an initial need for greater political subtlety. You or I would have made the same calculation in his place, at the time. Even a few years ago, no-one, no matter how evil, would have guessed that we would soon reach the point where people would give widespread support to the publication of racist cartoons against muslims, created for the self-same reason as the nazi cartoons that attacked the jews.
Blair doesn't fear people like Pilger in the slightest. The ONLY conclusion people like him ever draw about Blair are the self-same conclusions that Blair has his people report daily in the ruthlessly controlled mass media. If the papers state that NATO sought to destroy Yugoslavia, Pilger would NEVER be bright enough to think perhaps this was about as true as the reasons given for attacking Iraq.
Hitler had a master plan, and so does Blair. Hitler became unstoppable because far too few people allowed themselves to believe that he acted according to a greater plan, and thus concerned themselves ONLY with those things that he did at any one moment in time. Even then, they bent over backwards to assign the most harmless motive possible to Hitler's actions.
Blair benefits in the exact same way. Their is ZERO analysis of the historical consequences and purposes of his actions. Instead, Blair seeds the discussion about himself via the press, and his critics restrict themselves to stupidly chasing their own tails.
Blair intends to use the coming NUCLEAR war against Iran, and the coming GENOCIDE of muslims as a stepping stone to the FINAL CONFLICT with China. Sound familiar? Like THE EXACT SAME PLAN used by Hitler on route to war with Russia?
Perhaps what shocks me the most is how those that despise Blair allow themselves (as a result of Blair's OWN psy-ops) to be mislead by the insults that the press carefully lay against the guy's personality and physical qualities. I am shocked, because from a personality and physical point of view, Blair is amazing like the real Hitler. Do people REALLY think that it is only time to fear a leader when he is a young thug, visibly abusing those around him?
If Blair were not in power, at this moment in history there would be ZERO probablity of a nuclear strike by the West (and the NeoCons would NOT be in power in the US). With Blair in power, there is a 100% likelyhood of this happening, as Blair's strike on Iran will very soon illustrate. This is what we, the Human race, have allowed to happen, by NOT accepting the true and clear purpose behind Blair's actions.
twilight
Milsovic was responsible for the war in Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Kosovo!
24.03.2006 19:11
Also contrary to what John Pilger, states, the targets for the bombings during the Kosovo war were NOT hospitals, schools, homes or civilian buildings but military bases and arms factories. If as he said only 2 per cent of NATO bombs had hit military targets then NATO would have lost the war!
Friend of the Kosovo Albanians