David Gibbs--Another Balkan Revisionist

Any readers of Greater Surbiton or Daniel Toljaga's excellent blog is already aware of the minor storm that was kicked up when Gibbs--who proved himself to be as thin-skinned in debate as he is confused or (more likely) dishonest about American intervention in Yugoslavia--took offense at Marko Attila Hoare's review of his perfectly awful book First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia.

Gibbs' response to Hoare wastes no time in indulging in self-pitying hyperbole--the title "The Second Coming of Joe McCarthy" is evidently intended with irony or self-depreciating humor. Gibbs, seemingly, actually believes that he is a persecuted victim simply by virtue of having his horrid little book subjected to a negative review in a blog.

Gibbs' petulant tantrum speaks for itself--he lashes out without dealing in any meaningful way with the substance of Hoare's criticisms, while throwing out unsubstantiated innuendo about "ethnic partisanship" and other slights against his motives. Meanwhile, he actually makes the claim that while Hoare is fluent in Serbo-Croat and he is not, he is actually more qualified to write about the conflict because he is fluent in German! As if being able to read primary sources regarding German diplomacy is more important than Serbo-Croat documents from the region in question; it is astounding that the man was able to write that and not then realize how stupid it makes him sound. But again, I refer you to the hysterically pathetic title of his response. David Gibbs seems to lack both self-awareness and shame.

Those shortcomings come into play in the comments section below, particularly after Marko showed up to defend himself against the ridiculous charges. Gibbs--with an assist from his fanboy Louis Proyect, a hideous defender of the genocide in Bosnia who at one point seriously attacks the Modernity Blog by mocking its low readership (sounding very much like a preteen girl mocking the less popular crowd)--keeps throwing things at Hoare in an increasingly desperate attempt to hope something sticks, or at least distracts the less discerning participants in the argument from the substance of Hoare's arguments and the thinness of his own. At one point, he even throws in a veiled attack on Marko's parents--a loathsome and gutless tactic. Gibbs and Proyect reveal themselves as cowardly, passive-aggressive bullies who turn nasty and vindictive when exposed.

The weakness of Gibbs' book has been ably detailed by others, so for the time being I won't waste any more pixels dragging my poor readers through yet another piece of disengenuous dreck. However, the important thing to know about this book--and the reason that it potentially could be slightly more damaging to the historical record than Johnstone or Parenti's assaults on the truth is because Gibbs has learned a painful lesson that many of his fellow revisionists have yet to fully digest--the facts are in, and their cherished myths have wilted and died in the harsh light of reality. It is no longer possible to pretend that Srebrenica didn't happen or the Racak massacre was faked or the Bosnian Serb Army committed widespread crimes against humanity. That ship has sailed.

Instead, Gibbs hangs his hat on the equally-debunked (but less publicly so) myth that it was Western intervention, not domestic politics, economic insecurity, and constitutional instability, which destroyed Yugoslavia. In order to make this argument, he constructs a strawman caricature of humanitarian interventionism in the first chapter. In this chapter, he reveals the intellectual shallowness and crudeness of his method; despite the superficial improvement over Johnstone and Parenti, Gibbs ultimately makes an argument which requires the reader to accept a simplistic view of the Western/American handling of the Yugoslav wars. He claims a level of deliberate planning and centralized coordination that simply isn't there.

One example will hopefully suffice--while repeatedly dismissing the notion that Western powers were reacting to intense media coverage rather than quietly guiding events from behind the scenes, he often quotes media sources such as the New Republic by way of demonstrating what "the interventionists" believe. In other words--the media are part of the whole conspiracy when it suits his rhetorical purposes, and they are not when they aren't.

And that, really, just about sums it up--facts count when they fit his argument, they don't count when they don't. Context, intellectual honesty, using source material in a manner consistent with the argument and thesis of the source--such traits are absent here. Gibbs seems more reasonable than the rest, but ultimately underneath his sober facade is the same tune being played in a slightly different key.