"To Kill A Nation" by Michael Parenti [21]

CHAPTER TEN: ON TO KOSOVO

Parenti is simply begging for a beat-down in this chapter His ignorance has been on display throughout this book, but while most of his chapters have begun with overheated rhetoric or laughable assertions (the Serbs were targeted because a larger percentage of them were Communists, for example), he begins this chapter (after a short initial paragraph recapping that "all that remained" of Yugoslavia was Montenegro and Serbia with its two autonomous provinces) with the following declaration:

"Let us begin with some history.".

Well, historical context is good--let's see where Parenti starts, and what historical facts he chooses to emphasize:

"During World War II, the Albanian fascist militia in western Kosovo expelled seventy thousand Serbs and brought in about an equal number of Albanians from Albania."

On the one hand, I'm oddly thankful that Parenti didn't go back much, much further into the historical record in order to muddy the issue with even more half-baked nationalist myths and questionable demographic facts. One of the main impediments to any US involvement in Bosnia was the ridiculous claim that the war was a tragic by-product of "ancient hatreds". Serious observers of the crisis realize that it was more recent history--the vicious, multi-faceted civil war that raged during WW II and the clampdown on discussion imposed by Tito--rather than unfinished business from the Ottoman invasion which truly fueled whatever genuine nationalist passions were inflamed by cynical and irresponsible politicians in the years after Tito's death.

So I do not object to the decision to begin his brief historical sketch during WW II in principle, but while it should be possible to present a balanced view of the conflict there without examining previous events such as the 1908 conquest, such a balanced presentation is clearly not Parenti's intention. His account is incredibly one-sided, and riddled with misinformation clearly derived from Serb nationalist sources.

The claim that thousands of ethnic Albanians entered Kosovo during World War II has long been a staple of Serb nationalist propaganda, so there is little mystery as to where Parenti is getting his information (there is no citation for this claim in the text). He goes further still in deferring to the views of his Serb nationalist allies when he regurgitates claims that there was an ongoing ethnic cleansing of Serbs and other non-Albanians throughout the post-WW II period.

The portrayal of Kosovar Serbs as being victims of ethnic cleansing in the years before Milosevic is not without a grain of truth--relations between the two communities were not good--although Parenti, typically, does not bother detailing any of the history of the region prior to WW II, when the province was conquered and a policy of harassment against the Albanian population as well as a colonization project to settle ethnic Serbs in the region in order to turn the demographic balance in Belgrade's favor.

The chapter continues to list all the failings and shortcomings of Kosovo and its Albanian majority in language very similar to the logic used by 19th Century imperialists to justify the subjugation and exploitation of colonial peoples.

And then we get to the Milosevic era and beyond. The rest of this chapter will be discussed in the next post.

"A Problem From Hell" by Samantha Power [3]

The Problem of Sovereignty

Whenever we consider the crime of genocide, and especially when we consider any possible responses to an act of genocide, the issue of state sovereignty nearly always must be factored in. I qualify my statement with "nearly always" because I imagine that it is not completely out of the realm of possibility that an act of genocide could occur somewhere in the world without the complicity or--more usually--the involvement of the government. There are countries in the world with weak central governments, as well as countries with certain areas out of the practical reach of national authority.

However, almost every act of genocide I know of has been committed by a state actor, sometimes through proxies, or at the very least is tolerated or even tacitly encouraged by the central government. The Holocaust of World War II was unusual in that the majority of the victims were not citizens of the state responsible for the genocide. The Indonesian campaign of terror against East Timor is another example. However, when an act of genocide occurs, it is most often committed:

1) By the government of a state; and
2) Is committed against citizens of that very same state.

One consistent theme in Power's book is the tendency of the international community to fall back on diplomatic protocol and on traditional state-to-state diplomacy in response to genocide. And the problem with this, of course, is that all too often the state is the guilty party either directly or through proxies. We see this dynamic being played out today, as the UN and other international actors continue to negotiate with the Sudanese government over Darfur; while the regime in Khartoum continues to dither and drag its' feet, the people of Darfur continue to live in fear and hunger--when they are allowed to live at all.

We might be at an important juncture in the development of world civilization. It may be time to recognize that once-progressive concepts such as the Nation-State and the "self-determination of peoples" are no longer the best mechanisms by which to secure the greatest possible freedom and liberty for the most possible people.

It may be time to stop thinking of the world as being made up of countries and peoples, and to start thinking of it as being inhabited by billions of individuals. It may be time for us to begin thinking seriously about how to make the concept of "global citizenship" a reality.

The sanctity of "sovereignty" is no longer a rational means by which to defend regional or global stability; nor is it acceptable to place the inviolability of a governments' control over its own affairs above the well-being and human rights of that governments citizens.

In that light, it is interesting to note that the the website http://antiwar.com/, which was started specifically to protest American involvement in the former Yugoslavia, states in the "Who We Are" section that "This site is devoted to the cause of non-interventionism" specifically, rather than "War" in general. More specifically, they seem to be against American intervention--anywhere, at any time, for any reason.

The anti-interventionists rallied to the cause during the debate over the war in Bosnia, they continued their crusade during the Kosovo war, and they presumably are keeping a close watch on any potential "intervention" there. As long as the slaughter in Darfur remains a purely internal and domestic issue within the borders of the sovereign nation of Sudan, out of reach of American interference, all will be right in the world of the non-interventionist movement.

When reading Diana Johnstone I frequently tried to ascertain what she was hoping for; her book made it very clear what she was against, and she spends much of the book finding fault with the way events in Bosnia played out and with the international order as it stands. But what is she--and Parenti, and Chussodovsky, and Elich, and the good people at AntiWar.com FOR? They all make it very clear what they are against, and why the international order should not work as it does, but how SHOULD the world look, according to them?

Power gives a fairly graphic glimpse to the answer to this question in Chapter 10: Rwanda: "Mostly in a Listening Mode". In Rwanda, despite the best efforts of Romeo Dallaire and his skeletal force of poorly equipped and mostly-abandoned UN troops, it can be said with essentially no hyperbole that the international community--and, as she so painfully documents, particularly the United States--did precisely nothing. We stayed out of it. In Rwanda, we were all non-interventionists. If one wants a vision of the world where sovereignty and strict legalisms and the orthodoxy of non-interventionism reign unimpeded, then revisiting the horrors of Rwanda during that apocalyptic summer of 1994 would be a good place to begin.

Americans have a long tradition of prizing individual rights, protecting the individual from the abuses of the state or any other unchecked power, and believing in the primacy of the individual over any collective. We also have a long tradition of cherishing civic nationalism over racial, ethnic, tribal, or religious nationalism. We understand the transcendent value of the secular, non-sectarian ideal of undifferentiated citizenship. It is time to formulate new international laws and institutions to ensure that our rhetoric about the universality of these values truly extends beyond our own borders.

"To Kill A Nation" by Michael Parenti [20]

CHAPTER NINE: DEMONIZING THE SERBS

This chapter is simply loathsome genocide denial of the basest sort. It's all here--the "Living Marxism" claim that the ITN footage was faked; bogus refutations of Roy Gutman's reporting; and, of course, claims that Muslim deaths at Srebrenica were highly exaggerated while the Western media ignored the "hundreds" of Serb civilians reportedly killed in the hills surrounding Srebrenica. Typically, Parenti demands impossible standards of accuracy as far as the Muslim deaths at Srebrenica are concerned, while he relays stories about supposed massacres of Serb civilians without bothering to provide any substantiation whatsoever.

After ten pages of this drivel, he ends the chapter with a dismissal of the public relations firm of Ruder & Finn (who represented both Croatia and Bosnia), human rights (or, in his telling, "human rights"--the quotes are the typographical equivalent of a contemptuous sneer)--groups such as Human Rights Watch and Doctors Without Borders, and of the wide spectrum of leftists who chose to speak out against the Serbian genocide. That he derides people such as Salman Rushdie and Susan Sontag as "half-informed" is unconscious irony of the highest order.

This chapter is 14 pages long--the longest in this rather flimsy book so far--and there is absolutely nothing of merit in it to discuss. The 'charges' he makes in this book have long since been refuted; or rather, they were refuted by reality before he ever wrote them. Confronted with the truth, Parenti merely clamps his hands over his ears and screams louder.

This tedious compendium of lies and misinformation is nothing but hateful garbage. Refuting the completely discredited accusations in this chapter would be to dignify them with a response. I won't do it. We will move on.

"To Kill A Nation" by Michael Parenti [19]

CHAPTER EIGHT: THE OTHER ATROCITIES

[continued]

Having listed a number of incidents involving Croat, Muslim, and Bosnian government forces, Parenti now turns to attention to the seige of Sarajevo.

This is interesting--I would have expected him to go for broke and break out the Srebrenica denial material at this point, but Sarajevo it is. And unlike Srebrenica, there is far too much visual evidence of the siege to deny that it happened, so instead Parenti opts for the argument that it wasn't really a siege at all--or at least not a very bad one--and it was the Bosnian government's fault.

Parenti's 'evidence' for this assertion essentially boil down to two points--the Bosnian government's intermittent intransigence both with the international community and its own citizens; and the fact that, at certain (no doubt carefully chosen) points in time, life in Sarajevo was less than completely hellish. Parenti inadvertently betrays his own dishonesty in the first paragraph. First, he writes:

"The key story that set much of world opinion against the Serbs was the siege of Sarajevo which lasted, on and off, from April 1992 to February 1994."

(The "on and off" is a condescending little touch, isn't it?)

Then he approvingly quotes Charles Boyd, who noted that local markets were selling produce at reasonable prices on the day the Bosnian government was commemorating the 1,000th day of the siege.

Boyd has become quite the darling of Balkan revisionists (apparently US generals are not guilty of being imperialists if they happen to have convenient excuses) but Parenti could have at least addressed how a siege that lasted less than two years "on and off" could have made it to Day One Thousand.

And then, of course, the usual charges that Bosnian forces (always--ALWAYS--ABiH forces are referred to as "Muslim" forces; but then, he later talks about an interview on "Muslim television") systematically shelled their own citizens; that the famous marketplace bombings were actually bombs planted by "Muslim" troops; and of course that the entire siege (as it were) was entirely the fault of the Izetbegovic government, which refused to accept cease-fire and peace agreements. God forbid we blame the heavily armed troops in the surrounding mountains and hills. Parenti even praises the Serb forces for this:

"Bosnian Serb forces had offered safe passage to all civilians. With noncombatants out of the way, especially women and children, the Serbs would be able to treat Sarajevo as a purely military target."

He honestly seems to believe that this was a noble, humane, and reasonable gesture. It is worth noting that in this chapter, Parenti's previously noted pretense of relying mostly on Western sources has gone out the window--nearly all of his 'information' comes from fellow revisionists.

At the end of the chapter, Parenti cynically plays at being even-handed by admitting that "Violations of the Geneva convention can be ascribed to Serb forces, especially Chetnik paramilitary units and irregulars." He proceeds to list a series of rather random and unconnected atrocities (almost as an aside, he concedes that Serb forces bore "much of the responsibility for Sarajevo").

But this all comes after several pages of predictable and decontextualized incidents, a crude and barely-sourced attempt to snow the gullible reader. The Bosnian government forces are blasted for refusing to allow the UN access to the Sarajevo marketplace after the infamous 1994 bombing. Which begs the question--why should the UN expect to have unrestricted access, anyway? Where is Michael Parenti's concern about sovereignty now? Why should the UN be allowed to go anywhere and see anything in the Bosnian capital? He does not explain--in the former Yugoslavia, the sanctity of state sovereignty was apparently only for Serbia and the RS.

This tedious and thoroughly dishonest chapter closes with a comparison between the "moderated truths" mouthed by mealy-mouthed neutralists like Boyd, Rose, and so on versus the "barrage" of "Serb-bashing stories broadcast unceasingly around the world." This level of hyperbole and paranoia is worthy of Karadzic and Cosic at their best. In the next chapter, Parenti signs on to the Serb nationalist cause whole-heartedly.

"To Kill A Nation" by Michael Parenti [18]

CHAPTER EIGHT: THE OTHER ATROCITIES

Anyone familiar with the conspiracy-minded arguments of the Balkan revisionist movement will most likely be able to guess both the general theme of this chapter and some of the specific incidents cited with a great deal of accuracy merely from reading the title.

First, he sets the stage by introducing that favorite revisionist strawman--the reflexively anti-Serb--and monolithic--West.

"To accomplish this, [support for "costly, illegal, and often bloody intervention"] they filled the air with charges about brutally depraved Serbian aggressors who perpetrated genocidal atrocities against innocent Croats, Muslims, and ethnic Albanians."

At the end of my previous post, I quoted Parenti's snotty aside about the US media being "propaganda and tools of war" without adding much comment. I still do not feel like addressing this point--there are important issues regarding the corporate nature of the mass media in the US, and various institutional biases which are deeply embedded in the vast majority of major new outlets. And it is certainly true that, all too often, mainstream media outlets tend to be too chummy with government leaders and too deferential to accepted orthodoxies.

None of these criticisms, however, validate Parenti's crude and silly assertion that the US media served as a propaganda arm in Bosnia. Many of the journalists who covered the war so passionately advocated their views so passionately in an effort to influence official policy back home. Parenti blithely ignores the clearly documented record which shows extreme reluctance towards involvement in the former Yugoslavia, so his characterization of the purposes and motivations fueling media coverage should not be surprising. Suffice it to say that both the Bush and Clinton administrations sought to keep Bosnia off the front pages. Warmongering was the last thing they were trying to do.

So what follows is a list of atrocities committed by Croat and Bosnian Army forces--after a disclaimer that:

"Atrocities such as murder and rape are committed in almost every war (which is not to consider them lightly). Indeed, murder and rape occur with appalling frequency in many peacetime communities, and political leaders who wish to fight such crimes could start by directing their energies closer to home."

The cynicism and moral reductionism of such a statement (Diana Johnstone made the exact some point in "Fools Crusade") is hard to overstate. Parenti attempts to elevate his lowest-common-denominator moralizing by going on to state that:

"What should be remembered is that the Serbs were never accused of having committed murder and rape as such, but of (a) perpetrating mass murder and mass rape on a "genocidal" scale, and (b) doing such as part of an officially sanctioned systematic policy."

I had three reactions to this paragraph:

1) Well, DUH. Of course that's what "the Serbs" were accused of. That's why 'they' got the 'bad press,' Michael.
2) About that "the Serbs." Plenty of the press coverage of the war was very simplistic and over-generalized, but I've yet to see a single formal charge from The Hague against "The Serbs" as a whole. Like Johnstone, Parenti regards ethnic groups as uniform, singular entities, and therefore regards any attack on members of the group or of its self-proclaimed leadership to be an attack on the whole.
3) Nice touch putting "genocidal" in quotes--like most Balkan revisionists, I presume Parenti intends to set the threshold of 'genocide' so high that nobody short of the Nazis could ever meet it.

I have already discussed the shortcomings of this intellectual approach in my review of "Fools Crusade" and have no inclination to rehash that discussion right now. Parenti, like Johnstone, deliberately blurs the distinction between often heated, rushed, and often broadly-described press coverage with actual actions taken by and legal procedures implemented by the international community.

And so Parenti begins a tired, predictable, and conceptually disjointed survey of various human rights abuses carried out by different Croat, Bosnian Croat, Bosnian Muslim, and Bosnian Government forces. Operation Storm is here, as well as the ethnic cleansing of the Bosnian Croat statelet of Herceg-Bosna; none of these atrocities are defensible, all deserve to be decried. None of them negate the powerful and compelling case made by Norman Cigar and many, many others that the government of Slobodan Milosevic and his proxies in Bosnia and Croatia bear responsibility for planning and committing genocide amidst the wreckage of Yugoslavia.

-----------

I will summarize the rest of this chapter in my next post.

"To Kill A Nation" by Michael Parenti [17]

CHAPTER SEVEN: REPUBLIKA SRPSKA: DEMOCRACY, NATO STYLE

This is the somewhat infamous chapter in which Parenti argues that the Republika Srpska was the unwitting victim of a Western capitalist plot to destroy a legitimate, democratic and socialist state. By this point in the book, it is clear that Parenti is either a pathological liar or, more probably, a classic case of the "true believer" who filters all received information through a dogmatically ideological preconception.

It is instructive to read this book in tandem with Samantha Powers' A PROBLEM FROM HELL--Powers' impassioned but also well-researched book exposes the myopic and cramped vision that Balkan revisionists present. The information needed to expose the lies of Parenti, Johnstone, and company is voluminous and readily available. Her chapter on Bosnia relies on plentiful information, data, and testimonial which collectively make a mockery of Parenti's paranoid and simplistic fairy-tale about a sinister and well-executed Western plot to destroy Yugoslavia. The true story, course, is that the US government, under two Presidents--one from each party--was desperate to stay out of Bosnia and mostly managed to do so for several years. The facts, and vast bulk of documentation available to any person even mildly curious about the war, are clear. In order to avoid the obvious conclusion, one must refuse to see what is clearly there.

Therefore, there is little point in wasting time refuting the minutiae in Parenti's screed. I will briefly summarize the contents of this truly insane chapter with only a couple of comments.

--------------

The reader cannot claim, at the outset of this chapter, that he or she was not warned--Parenti writes that:

"Gregory Elich provides an excellent and well-documented account of the Western colonialist rule imposed on Republika Srpska. What follows is drawn almost entirely from his writing."

As always, the Balkan revisionists are a self-contained, self-referential closed loop. Don't worry, it isn't all Elich in this chapter--our good friend Diana Johnstone gets quoted more than once, as well.

In Parenti's world, Radovan Karadzic is a misunderstood and tragic figure; a well-meaning champion of minority rights and a victim of a smear campaign by Western capitalists. His crime, as it turns out, was that:

"...although Karadzic was not a Communist, he appointed many Communist and leftist officers because they were his most capable military men, and they shared his anti-separatist goal."

Well, that's one way to put it, I suppose. In Parenti's telling Karadzic was brushed aside by NATO in favor of Biljana Plavsic, whom he dismisses as "a right-wing monarchist", who would prove more compliant with the demands of the free-marketers. Karadzic was "now branded as a war criminal" (as if he weren't already). Parenti is not content to merely whitewash Karadzic's actual war crimes out of existence, he goes one further and writes:

"Although sent down the Orwellian memory hole, Karadzic was still at large and being hunted by Western intelligence agents as of 2000."

Now that we've all shed a tear for Radovan Karadzic (mysteriously, Parenti has a not a word in defense of that good leftist anti-separatist military officer Ratko Mladic), we move on to more ranting about Plavsic's purge of 'leftists' from the Western colony of RS and the maneuvering to place OSCE approved politicians in positions of power, all in the name of dismantling the worker's paradise of Republika Srpska. Parenti and Elich's complaints about the unconstitutional nature of such moves appears to be genuine--they seem to regard the RS as a legitimate state conceived under normal circumstances, it's internal affairs no concern to the international community.

The entire chapter essentially makes the same 'point' over and over again--the moves to hold war criminals accountable for their actions and to oust nationalists from positions of power and influence were all just a front, a Trojan Horse allowing capitalists to destroy an free, democratic, and socialist economy with impunity.

The NATO moves to shut down the RS police stations is regarded with all the horror and outrage you would expect--Parenti uses a quote from UN police spokesperson Liam McDowell--"We basically let them know what is expected of a normal police force; not a socialist police force..."--to alert the reader that free-market capitalism at the point of a gun, not war crimes, was the real motivator at work. But even if one acknowledges that the quote is not only genuine but really does convey the thrust of the move to take over the police stations, rather than being a throwaway line--so what? Does Parenti believe that a police force should be "socialist"? How would a police unit fight crime in a "socialist" manner? Are police in the USA generally "capitalist"?

The takeover of TV stations is cast in the same light--Parenti dismisses Western portrayals of the stations as being run by hardliners as complete piffle. At this point, Parenti and Elich have things so completely backwards one could write a chapter-length essay refuting the assumptions underlying almost any paragraph chosen at random. Comments such as:

"Under the guise of "democratic reform," foreign powers were dictating what the media could or could not say in their own nation."

both misrepresent the mandate of the forces attempting to create space for a secular, tolerant civil society to flourish away from the withering blizzard of nationalist bombast; and are completely disingenuous as far as accurately conveying the motives and actions of the supposed victims of these Western diktats.

There is more, but I assume the reader has had more than enough by this point. However, it is worth noting that Parenti makes dark and sinister claims about NATO which I suspect Johnstone, for one, would hesitate to state so baldly. Namely:

"Under the guise of hunting down war criminals, NATO continued to commit war crimes of its own, including kidnapping and assassination."

Yes, he really says "kidnapping" and "assassination." He recounts the arrests of several different war crimes suspects (these are the "kidnappings"), as well as a couple of attempted arrests which ended in gunfire, with the suspects dead "the "assassinations"). One telling detail--in his account of the arrest of Djordje Djukic and Aleksa Ksrmanovic (arrests which were certainly ambushes, a tactic which is not an uncommon law enforcement technique no matter how much outrage Parenti brings to the story), Parenti mentions that they were taken by "Bosnian Muslim soldiers" rather than Bosnian government soldiers, or even soldiers from the Muslim-Croat Federation. His choice to identify them by ethnicity rather than by their official provenance is telling.

And thus Parenti's story of the tragic debasement of RS ends--with its people reduced to colonial status, at the complete mercy of the Western imperialists, who had even cut the country in half by turning control of the Brcko corridor over to joint control. The irony of his outrage on this particular point would be laughable if it weren't so stupidly offensive on more levels than I have patience to articulate.

---------

There is a boxed aside in this chapter, as well, entitled "Imperial Double Standards," and the reader can most likely guess the thrust of the piece with a reasonable degree of accuracy. Parenti complains that the US government is guilty of

"...characterizing Serb media as propaganda and tools of war (as if the US media weren't)..."

The rest of this short piece is equally sophomoric and crude. Parenti is preaching to very devoted and uncritical choir.

"A Problem From Hell" by Samantha Powers [2]

Chapter One, "Race Murder," begins the story of the United States and 20th Century Genocide by way of the infamous genocide against ethnic Armenians by the Ottoman imperial government. The term "race murder" was coined by the US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire at the time, Henry Morgentuau. Morgenthau risked his diplomatic relations with the Turkish government and went outside the limits of his job in his efforts--ultimately unsuccessful--to provoke a reaction from the Wilson Administration and Congress. Morgenthau, then, is the first in a long line of principled and conscience-stricken Americans (keep in mind this book focuses specifically on official US responses to genocide) who swam against the tide of official indifference and tried to make a difference. There are many people in this book who deserve to be remembered, and he is the first.

I will not go into details of the Armenian Genocide here--I trust that most readers of this blog are aware of at least the broad outlines of the story, and are aware that to this day the modern Turkish government continues to insult the memory of those killed by perversely maintaining the fiction that the killings and deaths were merely the unfortunate collateral damage associated with total war and the instability of a multinational empire coming apart at the seams. Any readers of this blog who might criticize me for dredging up the recent past rather than moving on and allowing for "healing" might pause to consider this.

The pattern of increasing violence against an unwanted group--couched in euphemisms about "security" and so forth--as well as an unwillingness by the outside world to act or even to acknowledge the reality of the situation, would become distressingly familiar as the the bloodiest century in human history played itself out.

The Armenian Genocide occurred before Raphael Lemkin (who is a central figure in this book) had even coined the word "genocide"--Morgenthau's anachronistic "race murder" was only one of many attempts to convey the scale and nature of the atrocity. This not only left concerned observers (of which there were tragically very few) grappling for words, it also presented a challenge to those morally brave souls who cried out for some sort of international response--there was no mechanism for such a response, nor was there any legal, procedural, or ideological basis for doing so.

The crucial point is illustrated in a couple of places in this chapter. On page 8, Powers writes:

"Morgenthau had to remind himself that one of the prerogatives of sovereignty was that states and statesmen could do as they pleased within their own borders. "Technically," he noted to himself, "I had no right to interfere. According to the cold-blooded legalities of the situation, the treatment of Turkish subjects by the Turkish Government was purely a domestic affair; unless it directly affected American lives and American interests, it was outside the concern of the American Government." the ambassador found this maddening."

And then, on page 14, U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing argued against setting up what would have been the first international tribunal for war crimes to try German and Turkish leaders for "violations of the laws of war and "laws of humanity."" Lansing's reasons for doing so are worth quoting:

"In general the Wilson administration opposed the Allies' proposals to emasculate Germany. But it also rejected the notion that some allegedly "universal" principle of justice should allow punishment. The laws of humanity, Lansing argued, "vary with the individual." Reflecting the widespread view of the time, Lansing said that sovereign leaders should be immune from prosecution. "The essence of sovereignty," he said, was "the absence of responsibility." The United State could judge only those violations that were committed upon American persons or American property."

There's that word 'sovereign' again. We will consider this further in the next post on Power's book.