Balkan Revisionism meets Apocalyptic Christian Fundamentalism

One of these days, when I'm finished with graduate school and have more time to once again devote to this blog and Bosnia-related issues, one of the deeper questions/issues I'd like to dig into is to try and determine whether or not there is any cohesive ideological or psychological motivation behind the various, seemingly-incompatible strands of Balkan Revisionism and Bosnian Genocide Denial.

For now, though, I'll just pass along this piece of drivel I discovered, in which the theoretical basis for the Michael Parenti/Diana Johnstone post-Stalinist school of thought is embraced by Christian fundamentalist/prophetic end-of-times believers:

What Really Happened in Bosnia [Note: This is the title of the article, not my own take on the content--far from it].

It's the same nonsense we've all heard before, only this time is service to Rapture-believing right-wing Christian fundamentalists. The Z-magazine crowd must be so proud.

Sorry if you feel I'm wasting your time with this drivel, but I need to periodically touch base just to keep this blog on life support until I once again have the time to do more substantive work. Hope my regular readers are all fine.

Marko Attila Hoare on Seymours "The Liberal Case for Murder"

While I am in the middle of reviewing his mother's book, historian Marko Attila Hoare has tackled yet another in a long line of books adding to the genre of Bosnian/Balkan revisionism and Srebrenica Genocide denial literature. You can--and should--read his thorough demolition of what seems to be yet another example of this dreary, incestuous (revisionists always, ALWAYS quote each other), morally suspect school of disingenuous polemic here. I have some other works of this revisionism in my sights, but Dr. Hoare has pretty systematically made any commentary I would add redundant at best.

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I apologize that it has been over a week since my last post on The Destruction of Yugoslavia: Tracking the Breakup 1980-92. I can only promise that I have not abandoned the project, I simply have been busier than usual lately. I will be posting on Part Three in the next day or two.

Also, in my original post on the book I said I would be writing four posts on the book, one for each Part. Which sounds sensible, except that the book has five parts, not four. Hopefully nobody who read that is already familiar with the book was concerned that my American edition was abridged!

Does Diana Johnstone Believe Her Own Bullshit?

In the interest of keeping up with one of my favorite Balkan revisionists, I read the latest installment of the ongoing saga of Diana Johnstone Versus Reality, and I found myself wondering--as I did frequently during my months-long slog through her delusional epic Fools' Crusade--to what extent she actually, sincerely believes the garbage she writes?

In her case, this question is a bit more interesting than it would be if it were applied to a clumsy propaganda tool like Michael Parenti; Johnstone actually seems to have done a little actual research in her work. Unlike some other revisionists, she occasionally throws some stray facts which would not be readily available to readers of nothing but mainstream news coverage of the Balkan wars. It goes without saying that her facts are very carefully and selectively chosen to match her argument, and usually taken very much out of context and presented out of proportion to their actual import in the grand scheme of things, but that is exactly the point. In her writings on Kosova, for example, she is obviously aware of the existence of the Kosovar Albanians underground parallel government and health care system from the 1990s, as well as the high numbers of students at the University of Pristina, and the use of Albanian-language texts from Hoxha's Albania.

But how does one acquire those facts and yet miss so much of the context surrounding them? How does one know that Albanian-language schools were importing textbooks from Albania without also learning that Serbian authorities had been clamping down on the production of Albanian-language texts--indeed, the teaching of or even the use of the Albanian language--for years before that? How does one know that the KLA had become a heavily-armed, popularly supported guerrilla army without knowing that Ibrahim Rugova had been leading a non-violent movement of resistance against a police state which responded with further repression and terror for years?

I am past wondering why a so-called "progressive" chose to side against an oppressed, impoverished minority against a well-armed and oppressive minority--Johnstone's bias is less understandable than Parenti's naked admiration for neo-Stalinist brutality, but it is so thorough and relentless as to be beyond discussion. While "Fools' Crusade" made her preferences clear, it did not explain them. She was forever twisting facts and data and random quotes in an effort to cast doubt on the generally accepted version of events in the former Yugoslavia, without ever producing a compelling reason to accept the need for such a convoluted re-reading of what seems quite obvious. Of course, there is a ready audience of gullible would-be leftists and knee-jerk anti-Americans eager to sop up any critique of Western hegemony as long as it sounds coherent and reasoned. True believers don't need to scratch the surface to see the logical inconsistencies and factual errors tied together with the weak thread of bogus "anti-imperialism".

I get that; I understand why there are people willing to believe this garbage, and why this kind of shoddy pseudo-scholarship can get published and read and even receive favorable reviews from people who desperately want to believe what she is saying. There are well-meaning who don't know enough to recognize the fraudulent hodgepodge of scattershot insinuations and mischaracterizations for what it is, and who have no motivation to do the very small amount of reading and critical analysis needed to blow the illusion of a cohesive oppositional critique to pieces.

And as noted above, I don't even question her motivations anymore--she is a collectivist at heart, a dogmatic leftist who has internalized the idea that nations can be 'progressive' or 'reactionary' as corporate entities; internalized this notion so much so that she slips into the language--and the mindset--of the implicitly racist ethno-nationalist without missing a beat. She is what she is.

But I still wonder--idly, perhaps, since I care nothing for the woman except so far as she continues to cloud the discourse on the Balkans--what goes on in her mind as she goes about her business. In place of honest inquiry and diligent research, instead she scours the recent historical record for the very few, select facts which--removed from the living texture of history, shorn of any relation to the other disparate tidbits of reality she has gathered, and forced into a predetermined narrative--serve to do little more than feed into paranoid tribal mythologies and further the bitterness and isolation of the Serbs she pretends to care so much about.

And then, I wonder how she and her ilk sleep at night.

Darko Trifunovic--Srebrenica Denier

I haven't written anything on the case of the loathsome Darko Trifunovic, and rather than rehashing what others have written, I encourage you to read up on the story:

Daniel and Srebrenica Genocide Blog has followed the story, including this latest update.

I encourage all visitors to this blog to read Daniel's coverage of this troubling development in the ongoing Bosnian revisionist crusade against truth and reconciliation.

"To Kill A Nation" by Michael Parenti [31]

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: YUGOSLAVIA'S FUTURE: IS IT BULGARIA?

In 1999, a former member of the UDF, Bulgaria's center-right anti-Communist party, wrote an "open letter" to the Serbian opposition. The author was Blagovesta Doncheva, who had her letter to be published on Balkan Revisionist Jared Israel's Emperor's Clothes.

A cursory Google search for Doncheva turns up various links to her letter and a second letter, as well as a handful of other works in support of Serbia against NATO, and very little else. One does learn that Doncheva, at least for awhile, was enamored with a Russian writer by the name of Alexander Dugin. To get a taste of his ideals (from an article translated into English by Doncheva herself--a real labor of love), you should check out this link:

War Is Our Mother!

Parenti, perhaps desperate for fresh material and quote sources, essentially turns Chapter 18 over to Doncheva. Most of this chapter is simply a discussion of the issues and concerns she raises in her "Open Letter to the Serbian 'Democratic Opposition.' "

Even if Doncheva were merely a disappointed and distraught former UDF member, Parenti's decision to essentially lean on the text of her open letter to the Serbian opposition betrays the intellectual weakness of Parenti's argument and the lack of substance to his objections.

In order to appreciate how weak Doncheva's arguments are, and to experience how crudely she expresses them, read for yourself:

With Her Eyes Opened

Aside from the maudlin, almost Dickensian, tone of the letter (it should be noted that I have not found a single post or letter or article by Doncheva which does not mention how destitute she is), a few things stand out. Given that this letter was written in implicit support of Milosevic and the Socialist Party in Serbia, the last item on her short list of actions taken by Bulgaria in support of NATO's war is worth noting:

"For the first time since the end of the 500 year Turkish Yoke last century Turkish ground force passed through Bulgaria."

Oh the horror--the Turks are coming! This is not the only example of such sentiment in her work. Not surprisingly, Parenti makes no notice of her implicit bigotry.

As for much of the "substance" of her charges, two factors need to be kept in mind. One--I myself spent an entire summer in Bulgaria in 2000, and my wife and I have many Bulgarian friends who have lived through the entire post-Communist period and continue to live there. There were indeed hard times, and Doncheva is not lying when she says that street beggars, extreme poverty, and a weakening of the health care system are elements of the new Bulgaria. It is also true that in 1999, it would not have been at all clear that things were going to get better--the latter half of the 1990s had not been good even for educated and employed Bulgarians, and there were no obvious indicators that the worse was behind for good.

However, Doncheva was being rather selective in her use of statistics and anecdotes to paint a picture of life in Bulgaria. 1999 was not nearly as bad as 1996 had been, for example, and even in 2000 at least some of the Bulgarians I know were cautiously optimistic. There were still areas of real concern--indeed, there still are--but there were also signs that the imminent collapse into Third-World level economic collapse had been avoided.

Secondly, Doncheva makes much of the social and economic disruptions incurred by the sudden (and admittedly often painful and poorly or even criminally managed) transition to a free-market economy. Left unsaid is the fact that the society and economy being disrupted were the products of draconian wholesale top-down changes carried out by the Bulgarian Communist Party; Bulgaria's agricultural sector was completely collectivised, and like all Warsaw Pact nations Bulgaria's economy was geared to serve as part of the larger Socialist Bloc economy, rather than as an organically developed and diversified domestic economy. Any changes to the old system--a system which was brought down from the inside in part because it was failing--was bound to bring about drastic and often painful social and economic changes.

Parenti apes Doncheva's logic throughout this chapter, extending his thesis to suggest that the fate of Serbia under NATO/UN/EU/IMF rule might be even worse than Bulgaria--maybe Yugoslavia would end up just like Romania. Revealing his true nature and his real values underneath the patina of humanist concern, Parenti writes:

"A November 1999 poll stunned the capitalist-restorationist Romanian government when it reported that 61 per cent felt that life had been better under the Communist government of Nicolae Ceausescu. Despite the shortages and serious problems under that regime, everyone had some measure of security and the problem of survival was neither an everyday challenge nor frequent tragedy."

Given that Parenti think Stalin has been unfairly maligned by historians, such an interpretation should not come as any surprise. Still, I trust the reader possesses the requisite intellectual flexibility needed to reject Parenti's simple-minded interpretation of that bare statistic.

Parenti also brings Iraq into the discussion; given current events and my desire to keep this blog moving to the next subject (only two short chapters to go), I will not take up this comparison, which is only in passing at the end of the chapter regardless.

Doncheva published a second letter on this subject, just as bathetic and bombastic as the first. If the reader is interested:

Slavery Is Freedom

While virtually worthless as a serious critique of Bulgaria's situation, of the geopolitical issues regarding Serbia in 1999, or of Western foreign policy, this chapter does an admirable job of exposing the thinness and reactive nature of Parenti's analysis of world events. If the man wanted to be taken seriously, he could have started by deleting this entire chapter from his manuscript before he ever submitted it to the publisher.

"To Kill A Nation" by Michael Parenti [27]

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: WHERE ARE ALL THE BODIES BURIED?

Given that Balkan revisionists often complain about being dismissed as genocide deniers (the truth hurts, don't it?), one would think that Parenti would shy away from such an obvious Holocaust denier parallel. Yet he doesn't--he really titles this chapter "Where Are All the Bodies Buried?" which brings up obvious echoes of the "Where are all the piles of ashes at Auschwitz" type claims of Holocaust deniers.

And the level of "discourse" and analysis in this chapter is on the same level as the title. As such, I won't dignify this chapter with a review at all. The fact that NATO wildly overestimated the number of dead Albanians at the beginning of the campaign is of no significance to me--frankly, I'm glad we overestimated the number of killed; it's one indication that we intervened quickly enough. Parenti's charge that NATO exaggerated the nature of Serb operations in order to justify invasion is weak: if NATO leaders chose to trumpet worst-case scenarios in order to justify an intervention to put an end to the brutalization of an entire people, I can live with that. NATO may have been guilty of sloppy Holocaust parallels (oh, the irony), but Milosevic's regime was guilty of imposing a brutal apartheid, and ultimately of attempting to expel and entire people.

And at any rate, the later revised figures have been verified. And, contrary to Parenti's snide remarks, plenty of forensic evidence has proven a coordinated campaign by Serbian forces to disguise and remove mass graves, many outside of Kosovo altogether.

Parenti compares the "inflated" death tolls to the "inflated" numbers of dead at Srebrenica. Since investigation and forensic work have since verified the number of dead at Srebrenica as well, it would behoove Parenti to release a revised edition of this book with an updated version of this chapter acknowledging that voluminous facts have come to light contradicting his revisionist version of events.

I am not holding my breath.

"To Kill A Nation" by Michael Parenti [26]

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: THE GENOCIDE HYPE CONTINUES

Aside from the standard redefinition of "genocide" to exclusively denote campaigns of absolute extermination, this chapter mainly serves to discount or diminish the suffering of Albanians expelled from Kosovo while simultaneously transferring as much blame as possible to NATO for what level of suffering Parenti is willing to acknowledge. Aside from the obvious blind spots in his vision, this chapter also reveals a callousness towards refugees and other victims which would be shocking if the reader weren't already accustomed to Parenti's thinly veiled contempt for ethnic Albanians.

There is very little to comment on here, especially since I am somewhat impatient to have this horrible, dishonest, and stupid book behind me. So what follows is merely a brief summary of a few select points:

-Parenti harps quite a bit on what evidence he can muster that Serbian operations were not genocidal in intent but rather focused on "counter-insurgency" against the KLA. Aside from the obvious bias--Parenti never, as far as I've seen, doubts Serb sources--this point entirely ignores the gap between literally stated goals versus implied intent, not to mention the reality of how orders were interpreted and implemented. Balkan revisionists love to point out that Milosevic never wrote his own "Mein Kampf" -like master plan, as if this and only this (rather than actual actions) could be the only possible smoking gun.

-As noted before, a common theme of Balkan revisionism is that refugees are fundamentally unreliable sources of information. But furthermore, we should demand a very, very high level of desperation and need before refugee status can even be granted. It is striking how often Parenti makes note of the high standard of material well-being and health most Albanian refugees displayed. They weren't destitute enough, apparently. What's more, he discounts the impact of one refugee's story thusly:

"A man told of fleeing to the railroad station to get a train out of Kosovo: "We were frightened by the police," he said (not shot, beaten, or tortured, but frightened)."

These were the same police who were shooting and beating plenty of other ethnic Albanians, but clearly this guy was just being skittish when he made a run for it. Then again, Parenti also discounts another women's story because she was merely driven from her home by police, which he claims is "not exactly an atrocity." When armed paramilitaries evict you from your home at gunpoint, I hope you'll be able to keep that in mind.

And so on...there are fourteen pages of this garbage. At the end Parenti tries to display some balance of humanity by acknowledging that

"...the refugees that Clinton spoke to certainly had endured the terrible experience of being uprooted from their homes and sent off with few possessions, in some cases being separated from loved ones."

But in Parenti's world, this is pales next to the far greater injustice committed by a NATO which had to oversell it's war to a skeptical public. It's easy to look at a complex, multifaceted issue such as international intervention in Kosovo and do nothing more than pick and choose certain inconsistencies for ridicule. Easy; but also just about the extent of Parenti's critical abilities. Normally, one must go to a campus coffeehouse to find such a mixture of self-righteous bombast and clueless simplemindedness. Reading Parenti's book is like experiencing youthful hard-left idealism shorn of its redeeming qualities--namely, youth and inexperience. Parenti is old enough to know better. But not wise enough, or sophisticated enough, or mature enough, or compassionate enough.

"To Kill A Nation" by Michael Parenti [25]

CHAPTER TWELVE: NATO'S WAR CRIMES

[continued]

Parenti makes a drawn-out and rather odd analogy comparing civilian casualties in wartime to pedestrians killed by a reckless driver. As Parenti tells it, since a driver who kills bystanders through reckless driving can be held liable for their deaths, then shouldn't the accidental killing of civilians during military action, specifically bombing, automatically be considered a war crime?

Unfortunately, Parenti doesn't delve any deeper into this comparison--which would be necessary, since he makes no exceptions and adds no qualifiers. He does not draw any distinction between precision guided bombs versus carpet-bombing, for example. Because Parenti has written in other places in defense of revolutionary violence, and because he certainly is no anarchist--the man has no problem with state power when the state is socialist (or, preferably, Stalinist), he should have examined this point further. I do not believe he is advocating absolute pacifism, so to leave the analogy hanging is simply lazy.

But no matter--he goes on for several pages attempting to imply that civilian casualties were intended. That is his choice of words; he is not claiming that NATO planners were indifferent to the civilian suffering on the ground in 1999, or that the military and political restraints pushed NATO to use tactics which placed pilot safety ahead of ensuring the highest standards of accuracy (which would have been a fair point to make). No--Parenti says this:

"But there is a real question as to how unintended the killing of civilians has been."

This is a very serious accusation, yet the evidence he gathers is rather weak. It may come out that NATO knowingly dropped cluster bombs onto civilian areas--I am no fan of the manner in which the Kosovo campaign was implemented--but Parenti hardly makes a convincing case.

And so this chapter goes--more quotes and occasional stray facts gathered in an attempt to reverse the guilt. Predictably enough, the fact that most of the expulsions of ethnic Albanians began after the onset of bombing is used to somehow damn NATO--as if the planning for such ethnic cleansing wasn't already in place; as if forcing over a million people out of their homes is a moral and reasonable response to military assault. But this is standard Balkan revisionism, and Parenti adds nothing new to this tired storyline.

There is a list of "Fictions" and "Facts" in which Parenti presumes to uncover various Western "deceptions". The list ends with this "fact":

"The "stiffest military challenge" in NATO's history was actually a sadistic, one-sided, gang-battering of a small country by the most powerful military forces in the world."

I defy any undergraduate to cite that "fact" in a paper.

And so the chapter ends, with yet more protestations that ethnic Albanians were not being driven from their homes in large numbers until the bombing started and the usual outrage about diplomatic hardball at Rambouillet. And then the standard list of past US crimes and foreign interventions and invasions. Noam Chomsky does this too, as does Diana Johnstone, and I can only repeat what I've written previously--for the far-left Balkan revisionists, the problem isn't that we cared too little for the people of East Timor, it is that we care too much about the Muslims of Bosnia and the Albanians of Kosovo. Because the motives of the world's most powerful nation are never pure and wholly altruistic, then those motives must be entirely suspect. And it is the motives--not the actual actions, or the effects of those actions, which matter most to Parenti and his fellow travelers.

"To Kill A Nation" by Michael Parenti [24]

CHAPTER TWELVE: NATO'S WAR CRIMES

[I've been busy and out of town for most of the past week--sorry it's taken me so long to get back to blogging]

Parenti has a big ax to grind--NATO, not Milosevic or Seselj or Karadzic, was the real war criminal in Yugoslavia in his version of events. To begin, he lists the laws both national and international that NATO, in his opinion, violated.

The problem with this section is not that he is incorrect--strictly speaking, Parenti sticks to the facts in these opening paragraphs (although he seems to consider the NATO Charter to be "international law"--I'm not so sure about that). His objections are all over the map and rather disjointed. He objects to the violation of Serbian sovereignty on the basis of the UN Charter (which, in better hands, could have prompted a worthwhile examination of how the UN deals with domestic crises). He also claims that the Clinton Administration violated the War Powers Act as well as bypassing Congress altogether. Again, there are merits to these objections--so it is all the more distressing that Parenti doesn't seem the least bit interested in discussing them further. He throws the information out, raw and unexamined, and assumes that his job is done. Other than another couple of legalistic paragraphs on about the War Powers Act, he has already moved on.

We next discuss how NATO represents a newer and more sinister form of imperialism because it represents no particular people or geographic entity. NATO is a lot like a corporation, you see, and corporations are bad. I apologize for the glib tone--Parenti has actually quoted an interesting point--but once again the man has borrowed an insight without adding anything to it. Much of this book has the feel of a hastily-written undergraduate paper with random quotes inserted into the text post de facto in order to make the instructor happy.

Just as Parenti lacks the intellectual curiosity and even-handedness to make anything interesting of the issue state sovereignty, international interventions, and international law, he lacks the honesty necessary to discuss the issue of diplomacy. In short, he returns to the scene of Rambouillet. We already know that Parenti wants to believe that the Belgrade regime were unfairly set up; there is no need to rehash that imaginary scenario.

What follows is an odd exercise in logic; one that seems to suggest that any and all military actions by a state are fundamentally immoral, no matter what the cause or circumstance. We will consider this in the next post.

"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.

"To Kill A Nation" by Michael Parenti [16]

CHAPTER SIX: BOSNIA: NEW COLONIES

[continued]

The Alija Izetbegovic of Parenti's book is a familiar figure to anyone conversant with Balkan revisionism and contemporary Serbian ultra-nationalism--an Islamic fanatic intent on imposing Sharia onto non-Muslims throughout Bosnia. Parenti's version of Izetbegovic is, typically, a Frankenstein's monster made up of quotes from Islam Between East and West and other equally context-free quotes from Western observers and so forth. The only new wrinkle Parenti adds--compared to Johnstone's very similar treatment--is that Parenti dwells for a page or so on Fikret Abdic, described as "one figure who behaved honorably throughout the war." Given Parenti's blind spot when it comes to the kleptocratic nature of Milosevic's and Karadzic's regimes, this soft spot for a Godfather-like opportunist is just about par for the course.

In spite of himself, however, Parenti has brought up some interesting issues. I have not yet found an English-language biography of Izetbegovic, who remains a somewhat difficult figure to understand. It is difficult to guess the man's motivations both before and after the outbreak of the war. More importantly, there is not enough information on the SDA as a whole available in English, but it seems clear that in many ways the party was more avowedly "Islamic" than the ethnic Muslims who voted for it. This is not to validate the ridiculous claims of Parenti, Johnstone, and others; instead, I believe that a more thorough accounting of the ideological debates within the SDA, as well as an objective study of Izetbegovic's policies and strategies during his years in power would not only help to flesh out our understanding of the era, it would also give readers the ammunition needed to deflate the menacing caricature of a cold-blooded Islamist unleashing gangs of mujahideen against the frightened Christians of Bosnia.

After the expected Muslim-bashing, the chapter peters out with more ravings against the privatization of the Muslim-Croat Federations infrastructure and economy. More plotting by those evil global capitalists, you know.

There is a boxed aside near the end of the chapter; this one is entitled "Who Wanted Peace in Bosnia?" The answer, of course, was...Slobodan Milosevic, who is contrasted to Izetbegovic. The setting is Dayton, at which--as is well known--Milosevic was quite willing to negotiate a peace treaty, even to give up the suburbs of Sarajevo to Izetbegovic, who is portrayed as being stubborn and belligerent because he wanted control over his own country. The lack of context (sure, Milosevic wanted peace in 1995--he didn't want to lose any more of what war had gained him) is expected and typical and not worth comment. What is worth comment is his source--Diana Johnstone.

The Balkan revisionists cite each other's works in a closed circle of mutually reinforcing citation. In fact, if one peruses the footnotes it does not take long to see that much of the "source material" for this book are the usual Balkan revisionist writers (Johnstone, Elich, Chossudovsky, Woodward, etc.) as well as some sources so blatantly biased and transparent in their propaganda intent that even Johnstone might have hesitated to rely to much on them--I am thinking especially of the website http://www.jasenovac.org/, an absolute masterpiece of revisionism in that the ostensible cause--commemorating victims of the Usashe genocide of World War II--is a worthy one, therefore putting critics in the position of seeming to argue against sympathy for Serb, Jewish, and Roma victims.

Why this is interesting is that, in the Introduction, he makes a point of claiming that:

"In any case, I want to point out that almost all the information used in this book emanates from well-established Western sources:"

which he goes on to list in rather exhaustive detail. It provokes a rather "methinks he doth protest too much" reaction, a reaction which a subsequent examination of his actual uses of the quotes and information he does actually (selectively) retrieve from such sources thoroughly vindicates. And while he does refer to a couple of "progressive" sources, he makes no mention of the myriad of not-so-mainstream (to put it kindly) sources he utilizes.

There were times when, reading Johnstone, I suspected that she might actually believe much of what she was saying. Parenti, though, is too transparent and thorough a dissembler of truth and information for that. Parenti believes so strongly in his version of the truth that he holds mere facts in contempt, and reassembles them as he sees fit.

"To Kill A Nation" by Michael Parenti [15]

CHAPTER SIX: BOSNIA: NEW COLONIES

Diana Johnstone twists and distorts facts and history to suit her ideological ends, but Michael Parenti seems to live in an alternate reality altogether. I originally believed that this review would be shorter and require less time than my review of "Fools' Crusade" because Parenti's motives were more obvious and his lies more blatant. Instead, I have found this task to be at least as difficult as reviewing most sections of Johnstone's book. She wrote her book as an attempt to "correct" what she saw as a biased and incomplete Western version of events in the former Yugoslavia. As a result, it was generally possible to juxtapose her version of events and her intellectual framing of the issues against verifiable facts and an articulated, generally accepted narrative.

Parenti is simply telling a tale, a narrative manufactured wholesale and accessorized with whatever facts, sensational data, and random anecdotes might flesh it out and lend it some authenticity. It is very, very difficult to grapple with such a slippery and amorphous text. Parenti doesn't play fair.

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

Chapter Six starts off with this dispatch from an alternate universe:

"Bosnia-Herzegovina represents another unhappy episdoe in the Western campaign to dismember Yugoslavia. After a protracted armed struggle between Croats, Muslims, and Serbs--aided and abetted by NATO bombings that helped break the Serbian defenses in 1995--Bosnia-Herzegovina was partitioned into two new "republics": the Muslim-Croat Federation of Bosnia and Republika Srpska (Serb Republic) composed of Bosnian Serbs."

Where to begin? We can dispense with any consideration of the first sentence--we already know that the entire premise of Parenti's book is that Yugoslavia was primarily destroyed from without by Western imperialist powers and global capitalists.

The next sentence is quite a piece of work--redefining the Bosnian war as a "protracted armed struggle" between three (presumably evenly-matched) ethnic groups is par for the course for Balkan revisionists, but adding the touch about NATO bombing breaking "the Serbian defenses" takes that fantasy one step further.

The final sentence is really over-the-top: the insane notion that it was at Dayton that Bosnia was partitioned goes beyond anything even Diana Johnstone is willing to claim, as far as I recall. Not only does this fly in the face of every known fact about the war, it also contradicts Parenti's own claims earlier in the book that Bosnian Serbs were fighting to stay unified to Yugoslavia (and, therefore, very much partitioned from the UN member nation of Bosnia).

One last point from this paragraph worth noting--Parenti's choice of words when describing the two entities of post-Dayton Bosnia. He describes the Republika Srpska as being "composed of Bosnian Serbs" rather than being comprised of 49% of Bosnia, or as encompassing the borders negotiated at Dayton, based on the territory held by the Bosnian Serb Army at the end of the war. It may only by a slip of phrasing, but I believe it is a telling one.

From here, the chapter goes in predictable directions--the Handzar Division of World War II stands in for the entire Slavic Muslim population, as it usually does in Balkan revisionist propaganda, and we are reminded of Izetbegovic's membership in the Young Muslims. Parenti is adamant that Izetbegovic was an Islamic Fundamentalist, and this accusation, combined with his allegedly right-wing politics, provide Parenti with a convenient monster. We shall see this imagined monster in action in the next post.

"To Kill A Nation" by Michael Parenti [14]

CHAPTER FIVE: CROATIA: NEW REPUBLIC, OLD REACTIONARIES

[continued]

After three pages of "context," Parenti is finally ready to discuss contemporary events. Sort of.

"Between 1991 and 1995, the army of the newly proclaimed Croatian republic conducted its own ethnic cleansing operation, replete with rapes, summary executions, and indiscriminate shelling, driving over half a million Serbs from their ancestral homes in Croatia, including an estimated 225,000 Serbs from Krajina in August 1995 during what was called "Operation Storm." The resistance of the Krajina Serbs was broken with assistance from NATO war planes and missiles. "We have resolved the Serbian question," crowed Tudjman in a speech to his generals."

This paragraph is all the space that Parenti devotes, out of nine pages, to the four years of actual military conflict on Croatian soil during those four years. That's it. No mention of Vukovar, Dubrovnik, or of the actions and policies of the breakaway Knin regime. This paragraph is all we get.

He devotes roughly the same amount of space to the revival of the kuna as the unit of currency (after claiming that the new government was "set up with the help of NATO's guns") and the checkerboard emblem, which he falsely describes as a Ustashe symbol, even though he then acknowledges that the design was a traditional Croat design. The Ustashe, it should be noted, added a large "U" to that design. He is correct that the revival of such symbols, combined with the sinister and vulgar rhetoric coming out of Zagreb, was certain to send ominous signals to non-Croats (primarily Serbs) in Croatia; were his account not so one-sided and myopic he might have created the opportunity for substantive debate rather than hysterical incitement.

And so it goes; a dreary accounting of some of the gruesome and despicable acts of Tudjman's regime and it's heinous appeals to implicitly or even explicitly fascist sentiment. All of which deserve serious attention, but in a measured, balanced fashion. Parenti mixes various ugly details without discrimination or context. He makes claims such as "Serb-hating was abundantly evident during Tudjman's reign," a typical example of Parenti's tendency to wallow in rhetorically heated phraseology.

In the end, Parenti implies that Tudjman was a tool of Western financial powers, who gutted his own economy and poisoned his society with resurgent fascism, leaving his nation an economic and social wreck with nothing to show but the blood on its hands. People who have visited the Croatia of today might have a very hard time recognizing the country they see with the grotesque nation of Parenti's imagination. And concerned observers who would like to focus more attention on the sins of the HDZ during the war most likely will wish Parenti had turned down the intensity of his outrage a few notches, so that the rest of us can hear ourselves think.

"To Kill A Nation" by Michael Parenti [13]

CHAPTER FIVE: CROATIA: NEW REPUBLIC, OLD REACTIONARIES

Having acknowledged some of the troubling issues surrounding Croatia, Tudjman, the HDZ in both Croatia and Bosnia, and the lingering poison of Ustashe nostalgia, let us now consider Parenti's far less balanced and nuanced consideration of Croatia during the 1990s.

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

Parenti and Johnstone share many underlying assumptions about events and realities in the Balkans, but they also operate under a similar overriding assumption about their intended readership; they assume--or, more likely, they hope--that the reader is not particularly well-read on the subject. Aside from being able to pass off biased or even incorrect information as fact without fear of challenge, and being able to decontextualize at will, they also rely on a sense of astonishment and outrage at "revelations" which should be common knowledge to anyone with even a modicum of interest in the historical context of the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

Which means this--the first three pages of this chapter consists of a brief rehash of Franjo Tudjman's fascist past. This is not news to most people, but that doesn't stop Parenti from presenting this portrait of who he strangely names "the White House's man-of-the-hour" as a devastating expose. His summary of the Usatshe years is predictably gruesome and devoid of nuance. Parenti shares Johnstone's penchant for ethnic collectivism, so any indication that the Ustashe only represented a minority of Croats is missing in his version of history. Indeed, I suspect that Parenti would be incapable of acknowledging the complexities and ambiguities of individual affiliations and actions during such a conflict.

Perhaps I am not expressing myself well; Parenti's disingenuous analysis is so devoid of balance and nuance, not mention factual comprehensiveness, that it becomes nearly impossible to find a coherent position to critique. Parenti is not making an argument or developing a thesis, he is merely waving the bogeyman of resurgent fascism in the reader's face, seeking to incite revulsion and shut down critical faculties.

I will resist the urge to respond in kind. In my previous post, I considered the importance of acknowledging and examining the sins of Tudjman and the HDZ during the Balkan wars. Wallowing in the horrors of World War II is not the path towards unlocking the political motives of cynical autocrats and hate-driven nationalists in the 1980s and 1990s. Let me state--I absolutely agree that Franjo Tudjman was a thug, a Holocaust denier (Parenti's outrage about this point is repulsively ironic, given later chapters of Omarska and Srebrenica), and on the whole a toxic and destructive factor in the Bosnian war.

I will not indulge Parenti's crude rhetoric any further. In the next post, I will continue with the rest of the chapter, where Parenti begins to consider contemporary issues.

"To Kill A Nation" by Michael Parenti [12]

CHAPTER FOUR: CROATIA: NEW REPUBLIC, OLD REACTIONARIES

Anyone who takes up the cause of Bosnian mulit-ethnic nationalism and who defended efforts to maintain the territorial integrity of the Bosnian state during the war of aggression maintained by Belgrade's proxies must, at some point, come to grip with the problem of Croatian nationalism as practiced and exploited by Franjo Tudjman and the HDZ in both Croatia and Bosnia.

I am not for one second suggesting that any sort of equivalence can be drawn--as loathsome as the rhetoric used by the HDZ leadership, including Croatia's wartime leader, there was clearly never any systematic, prewar planning for large-scale ethnic cleansing. Comparisons between the numbers of Krajina Serbs who fled in the wake of "Operation Storm" (over 200,000 people, at least a third of the entire prewar population of Croatian Serbs) and the Muslims of the Drina valley in eastern Bosnia are not as damning as Parenti, Johnstone and others would like us to believe since they substitute quantitative data for qualitative information.

However, the following points are not in doubt, and should not be downplayed by anyone who wants to lift the cloud of disinformation from the Bosnian war:

1) Franjo Tudjman was a genuine nationalist.
2) The HDZ was a hardline nationalist party that utilized extreme propaganda and worse, aimed at non-Croats--primarily ethnic Serbs.
3) The HDZ in Hercegovina often acted in bad faith, and the attempt to set up the statelet of "Herceg-Bosna" was little different, in rhetoric or in substance, from the efforts to create Republika Srpska by force.
4) "Operation Storm" was an often brutal operation that favored vengeance against the Serb civilians of the breakaway Krajina republic at the expense of justice and fundamental respect for human rights.

I could list more, but hopefully any informed reader will already know what I am trying to convey. Downplaying the sins of nationalist Croats simply because the HDZ has much less blood on its hands, and because the Croat republic was at a distinct disadvantage at the onset of war in terms of military and infrastructural resources only leads to further obfuscation. And, it should be noted, it provides ammunition for those like Parenti, who wish to create a bogus case for equivalence.

The case of Croatian nationalism and the darker motives of the Tudjman regime merit serious attention. Such concerns will inform my review of Chapter Five, in the next post.

"To Kill A Nation" by Michael Parenti [10]

CHAPTER THREE: DIVIDE AND CONQUER

[continued]

In the last post, I considered the easily refutable assertion that the Bosnian Serb army was merely "holding" 70% of Bosnian territory, rather than taking it by force--and clearing non-Serbs out by terror and force. In the next paragraph, Parenti manages to top that statement with an audacious callousness that should infuriate any informed reader:

"A ceasefire, the "Dayton accords," was brokered by the Western powers in Nobember 1995, with terms that insured Western suzerainty over a thoroughly partitioned Bosnia-Herzegovina. The larger portion became the Bosnian Federation (Muslim-Croat) and a smaller territory became Republika Srpska, into which the Bosnian Serbs were corralled, those who had not fled to Serbia."

In light of events at Srebrenica, Zepa, and a thousand other smaller, less infamous places, it is an act of spiteful dishonesty and revisionism which can lead a writer to describe the ratification of separatist Serb territorial gains as Serbs being "corralled". "Blaming the victim" simply doesn't capture the level of callousness in that statement.

At this point, the chapter veers into a tangle of tired, abstract legalisms familiar to anyone who read my review of "Fool's Crusade." I won't even bother--if Parenti sees no difference between the right of Bosnia to secede from an increasingly Serb-nationalist dominated rump Yugoslavia versus the status of Scotland within the UK, then there is no point continuing the discussion--the man will not even acknowledge the raw facts on the ground, let alone the subtle distinctions between the various examples he provides. It is not that some of his examples aren't relevant, but he brushes facts and complexities aside with such contempt that any measured debate would be impossible. For example--he compares the status of Puerto Rico in the USA to the status of Krajina Serbs as if the parallel were absolute and self-evident; yet I would assume that even the most passionate of Puerto Rican nationalists hoping for independence (and I acknowledge--they have a strong case) would argue that the government in Washington has engaged in a policy of ethnic cleansing against islanders. And, if they had--is Parenti arguing that two wrongs make a right? Like Johnstone, Parenti is not interested in practical, just solutions--he just wants to smear the US and the West in general.

Not only does he argue that the secession of the republics was illegal under the Yugoslav constitution (ignoring the actions of the Belgrade regime at the time), he also frets that the recognition of Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia were both illegal and interventions in Yugoslavia's internal affairs. That's what we in the reality-based community call "disproportionate outrage."

How far is willing to take this insistence on abstract legalism over the reality on the ground? This far:

"The United States does not acknowledge the right of any state or other constituent political unit or ethnic community within its boundaries to secede from the Union or, for that matter, to override the supremacy of federal power in any way. This was made perfectly clear in 1861-65, when the Southern Confederacy's secession was forcibly repressed in one of the bloodiest wars of the nineteenth century."

He does go on to quote Jefferson, using the same logic that Confederate leaders used to justify their actions. He does seem to be arguing that the United States was both the aggressor and in the wrong during the American Civil War. I will let the reader draw his or her own conclusions.

He concludes the chapter by comparing the effect of the sanctions against Serbia to those imposed against Iraq. This is, in itself, not a bad point--I find the use of sanctions distasteful since they mainly target the civilians of a country, not its leadership or military. It took 34 pages, but Parenti has finally said something that I can agree with.

But he uses this insight to draw very different conclusions--but first, he puts the cart in front of the horse and claims that the sanctions contributed to the rise of "ethnic violence" when a simple look at any almanac would demonstrate that sanctions were not imposed until after the outbreak of war and the onset of ethnic cleansing.

But never mind that--we know how cavalier Parenti is when it comes to chronology. He goes on--by quoting Susan Woodward (both he and Johnstone rely heavily on Balkan Tragedy, which I have skimmed but not yet read--it may be next, to give fair warning), who claims that:

"Tensions along ethnic, racial or historical fault lines can lead to civil violence but to explain the Yugoslav crisis as a result of ethnic hatred is to turn the story upside down and begin at its end."

We are now going to "learn" how the West manipulated the situation they had deviously created in order to create a convenient bloodbath in the middle of Europe. In the next post, we will begin to see how Parenti manipulates reality in order to bring this paranoid fantasy to life.

"To Kill A Nation" by Michael Parenti [9]

CHAPTER THREE: DIVIDE AND CONQUER

[continued]

For the record, the closing paragraph of my previous post was not strictly accurate--Parenti does acknowledge the distinction between ethnic nationalism and, if not exactly civic nationalism, at least the notion of sovereignty as being predicated on geopolitical entities:

"The separatist movements in Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia revived Serbian nationalists' dream of a nation-state, as promoted by those who believed that self-determination belongs to ethnic nationalities not to republics or federations."

That sentence, for all its faults, at least gives the illusion that Parenti is not taking sides or serving as a mouthpiece for the aims of hardline Serb nationalists. Such flawed but at least ostensibly even-handed objectivity proves to be an illusion, however.

Slovene independence, we are told, was the wedge that broke up the rest of Yugoslavia. Parenti is all-too casual with the facts here:

"Secession for Croatia proved more difficult. Fighting between Croats and the large Serbian population that had lived in Croatia for centuries reached intensive levels and lasted several years."

First, there is no mention of war crimes committed by the Knin regime. Second, Parenti, like Johnstone and other revisionists, loves to point to German and American recognition for Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia, but neglect to mention that the United Nations itself also recognized all of the newly independent republics of Yugoslavia.

More importantly, note how the language of collectivism creeps into the text--the fighting is not between the armed forces of the breakaway Krajina republic and the Croatian army, but between "Croats" and the "Serbian population." The masses act as a single unit, indistinguishable from the actions of their leadership.

In the same paragraph (this chapter is the shortest history of the Yugoslav wars you will ever read), Parenti goes on to decry the actions of Operation Storm. I will not defend the atrocities carried out against the Krajina Serbs in 1995; since Parenti, like Johnstone, has not another word to say about their fate after their flight, and since he exaggerates the death tolls by implication (his book is remarkably bereft of hard data and footnotes compared to "Fools' Crusade"), it is safe to assume that his concern has little to do with outrage and simple compassion; this is simply a propaganda weapon to use against the US.

He gives Macedonia all of two sentences, yet still manages to misrepresent reality.

"Spurred by US support, its independence may be something less than complete, given the US troop occupation that Macedonia has had to accept."

What is significant about this statement is not the fact that the presence of 300 US peacekeepers along the Macedonian-Serbian border is characterized as an "occupation." Such dishonesty and hyperbole is to be expected from a book like this. Rather, we see that Parenti's tendency to see the people of the Balkans and their political leadership as being helpless pawns in the hands of the West, no matter what. The fact that Macedonian president Gligorov was actually a pretty astute leader who played a weak hand as well as he could, and managed to take his ethnically divided, landlocked republic (surrounded by unfriendly, or at least unsupportive, states) out of Yugoslavia without descending into war and chaos should evoke at least a small degree of separation. But Parenti cannot conceive that the people of Yugoslavia were in any way responsible for, or capable of, controlling their own destiny.

His "history" of Bosnia's war is equally brief and selective with the facts. Bosnian revisionists often twist the chronology of events in order to uncover post de facto "proof."

"It is a matter of public record that the CIA fueled the Bosnian conflict. Consider these headlines: the Manchester Guardian, November 17 1994: "CIA Agents Training Bosnian Army", the London Observer, November 20 1994: "America's Secret Bosnian Agenda", the European, November 25 1994: "How The CIA Helps Bosnia Fight Back."

[As always, underline text in quoted sections was italicized in the orginal.]

Thus, events from 1994 and 1995 somehow "prove" the true instigator of a war that was already several years along.

Parenti then quotes Charles Boyd--approvingly and in agreement--who makes a statement as shocking in its dishonesty as it is callous and indifferent to the reality he is covering up:

"Charles Boyd, former deputy commander of the US European command, commented: "The popular image of this war [in Croatia] is one of unrelenting Serb expansion. Much of what the Croatians call 'the occupied territories' is land that has been held by Serbs for more than three centuries. The same is true of most Serb land in Bosnia--what the Western media frequently refer to as the 70 per cent of Bosnia seized by rebel Serbs. In short the Serbs were not trying to conquer new territory, but merely to hold onto what was already theirs." As a result of the war, Serbian land holdings in Bosnia were reduced from 65 to 43 per cent."

Where does one begin? Boyd seems to be living in the Dark Ages, where land is "held" by tribal groups as a collective. This idea that land was being "held" in a modern nation-state by homogeneous social collective united by blood and religion is almost as troubling as his complete disregard for fundamental facts--how does he square his assertion that 'the Serbs' "held" 70 percent of Bosnia prior to the war? How does one define "held." It is true that the Muslims were more urbanized and therefore were the predominant group in a proportionately smaller part of Bosnia, but 70% is simply an outrageous figure even if Jones is only arguing for a simple majority in a municipality. These are basic, easily verifiable demographic facts that Jones and Parenti simply ignore. The crudeness of the lie is stunning.

Even darker is this--once you have asserted that an ethnic group in a modern nation-state "held" 70% of the land, the next question is how did they "hold" it? What demographic realities verified that a given geopolitical subunit of Bosnia was "held" by the Serbs?

Important questions--which Parenti ignores completely.

We will conclude this chapter in the next post.