How to Tell That A Book Has An Ideological Axe to Grind

In the spirit of "I don't need to eat the whole fish to know it's rotten", I will not be launching a comprehensive, chapter-by-chapter review of Shadows on the Mountain: The Allies, the Resistance, and the Rivalries That Doomed WWII Yugoslavia by Marcia Christoff Kurapovna. The book is concerned with the rescue of 500 American airment by Chetnik forces near the end of World War II, but while this incident is often used as propaganday by Serbian nationalists and their allies, Kurapovna has gone one better and written an entire book centered on that rescue. However, she seems to engage in quite a bit of questionable revisionism and out-and-out one-sided propagandizing in her efforts to not only put the rescue in "context" but to give it a significance that it does not warrant.

The subtitle of the book hints at what this context is--she argues that the Allies wrongly betrayed Mihailovic and the Chetniks (who at least once she claims were fighting for "Western values"), were duped into supporting the Partisans, and therefore "doomed" Yugoslavia.

Needless to say, it takes a lot of creative use of selectively chosen facts to make this argument; but while Kurapovna's footnote-laden book certainly manages to avoid the bombast of more obviously biased works, her agenda is clear. One can learn this with a cursory read through, but one can save even more time by restricting oneself to the mercifully brief Preface. There is enough coded language and unexamined inferences in these first four pages to alert the reader.

Echoing Diana Johnstone's disclaimer near the beginning of Fool's Cruade, she immediately begins with the "I'm only pro-Serb in the sense that the big bad Western media is anti-Serb" rhetoric, Kurapovna immediately plays to the nationalist mythological motifs of Serbia's specialness and it's sense of martyrdom. She is not subtle. The third sentence reads:

"Yet anyone writing about Serbia must remain constantly on the defensive--to respond to usually knee-jerk, ill-informed hostility toward the country and to the questionable tallying of its various abuses and atrocities as recorded by less than scrupulous international media."

The contradiction between the book's ostensible concern with the fate of Yugoslavia versus the singular concern with Serbia in the Preface is quite telling. Considering that the book goes on to portray Serbia as surrounded by enemies , one wonders what sort of Yugoslavia would have been possible under the royalist Chetniks and the Nedic government.

To date, this book has received very little traction. Rather than give it any more attention, I am merely greatful that the propagandists for the other side are often so clumsy.

"Listening to Grasshoppers" by Arundhati Roy

The newest book from author Arundhati Roy is a collection of essays entitled Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers, a collection of essays on the political situation in her native India. The book is not directly concerned with Bosnia at all, nor has Roy herself had much to say on the subject; although I believe she did sign at least one petition in support of Slobodan Milosevic.

However, the essay "Listening to Grasshoppers" is of some interest here because it seems to be part of the larger campaign being waged by the anti-Western reactionaries of the far Left to redefine "genocide" in such a way as to make the term almost meaningless; at which point, of course, charges related to "genocide" would no longer be a viable tool of any agencies of international justice. Something petty tyrants and non-Western authoritarian regimes worldwide would welcome.

The first four pages of this essay concern Hrant Dink, who was murdered in Istanbul after being demonized by the Turkish courts for the "crime" of bringing up the genocide against the Armenians during World War I. This section is deeply felt and righteously moving. It acknowledges the reality of the Armenian genocide, the sinister consequences of continued Turkish denial, and is devoid of any of the sterile, amoral legalisms that Balkan revisionists like Parenti and Johnstone rely on.

Alas, things shortly turn sour. The next section starts off fine, with a consideration of the 2002 genocide against the Muslims of Gujarat. Roy immediately points out that labeling this atrocity as a genocide is in line with Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. She notes that the number killed is small compared to the numbers killed in the Congo, Rwanda, and (yes) Bosnia. She reiterates what Article 2 says, after noting that the term genocide was only defined in the mid-20th Century.

But then she begins to shift things. At first, this shift seems quite reasonable--she points out that the legal definition for genocide leaves out the "persecution of political dissidents". This is true. She argues that the definition given by Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn is better:

"...a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator."

I have not read their book The History and Sociology of Genocide so I will hold off on making any judgment on this brief definition for now--although it does strike me as problematic, but not necessarily fatally so. She immediately moves on to suggest that extermination, as crude as it is, might be the better term. There is some validity to this, given the necessity of dehumanizing the victim group by the perpetrators of genocide prior to the actual campaign of genocide. But I fear she is moving the goalposts.

She then abruptly switches gears by bringing up genocide denial--and then immediately stating that genocide denial is

"...a radical variation on the theme of the old, frankly racist, bloodthirsty triumphalism. It probably evolved as an answer to the somewhat patchy dual morality that arose in the nineteenth century, when Europe was developing limited by new forms of democracy and citizen's rights at home while simultaneously exterminating people in their millions in her colonies."

And right there, in that jarring transition, she has suddenly completed her redefinition of the notion of genocide to simply mean any massive loss of life within one or more oppressed group(s). The notion of intent is suddenly absent. Genocide is now simply the worst-case scenario of racist colonization gone wrong.

The essay gets more bizarre:

"Of course, today, when genocide politics meets the free market, official recognition--or denial--of holocausts and genocides is a multinational business enterprise. It rarely has anything to do with historical fact or forensic evidence."

This remarkably brazen statement is backed up with nothing...nothing other than that Diana Johnstone-esque "Of course" at the beginning. But one must remember--this is an Arundhati Roy book, and if one is looking for war crimes one never need look farther than the United States.

In short--the absolutely horrifying and unjustifiable consequences of the American-led sanctions and no-fly zones against Iraq are now to be considered a "genocide", even though the intention of the (grossly misguided) American policy was not to eliminate or destroy the Iraqi people. It's worth noting that Roy felt the US-led invasion of Iraq was also a war crime--apparently, nothing short of leaving the Iraqi people to the continued mercies of the Baathist regime would suit her.

The horror of American slavery was also a "genocide" because so many died and so many cultures were disrupted--never mind that genocide was not the intention. The same with the "holocaust" against American Indians, as if the initial death of most of them from exposure to disease was a result of conscious, deliberate policy. These were human tragedies and cover a multitude of sins, atrocities, and human rights abuses. But if such events as these--and even the invasion of Mexico in 1848--are "genocides", then the term has no meaning.

But that is not so bad; the USA certainly has a great historical burden to deal with and if a lone writer wishes to stretch that point I won't complain overmuch. But she takes this argument too far when she goes on to claim that there is a world ranking of genocides, in which victims are ranked as "worthy" or "unworthy." She implies that there is something wrong with the Holocaust of the Jews being "number one" in this hypothetical world ranking (there are no footnotes to refer to; as a former fiction writer perhaps she feels that such prosaic devices are an ugly intrusion). She slyly points out that there were non-Jewish victims in the Holocaust as well, victims who receive less attention and validation. This on the heels of a paragraph in which she seems to hint that Israeli actions in the Occupied Territories amount to genocide--a charge I would hotly deny, even though I believe Israel's occupation, de facto annexation, and continued colonization of Arab Palestine is wrong.

And so on. She eventually returns to recent Indian events in the second half of the essay, and one wonders what the purpose of this digression was. But this is a woman who at least tacitly supported the organization working to free and exonerate Slobodan Milosevic. Like all far Left allies of the Balkan Revisionist project, she implicitly acknowledges in order for international justice to be meaningful, there must be some party able to hold war criminals accountable. Like many in her camp, Roy preaches international justice even while seeking to undermine the legitimacy of the admittedly quite imperfect institutions and national powers capable of enforcing it, however haphazardly.

"In Harm's Way" by Martin Bell [22]

Epilogue

This brief conclusion to the book finds Bell realizing that he needs to leave Bosnia--not only is the war over, but he finds himself feeling genuine anger at the needless waste of it all. Needless, because the Western world could have and should have intervened much earlier to save thousands of lives and the chance for multiethnic Bosnia to survive. Bell believed that the international community bore some responsibility for the massive war crimes in Bosnia--unlike many observers, he never forgot that Srebrenica was a UN "safe area" nor does shy away from confronting the sad reality that in the end the Dutch UN contingent was concerned with nothing more than its own survival.

And so he left, and the book ends rather abruptly--but then again, even the second edition was published in 1995, while the peace was still new and untested. This is in many ways a raw book, informed by immediate reactions and fresh, direct impressions. Some of Bell's judgments could be fairly questioned, but it is crucial to note that he gets the big questions right. Precisely because this is not an impassioned work of partisan advocacy, "In Harm's Way" is ultimately a quite effective argument in favor of humanitarian intervention by the international community. It is also a thoughtful meditation on the role of the media in wartime and on the function of the mass media in the post-Cold War world. And it is many other things as well.

I highly recommend this book; it won't tell the average reader of this blog much about Bosnia that he or she doesn't already know, but Bell's point of view is worth knowing.

*************

It is fitting to finish this book review just a few hours before I finish the first decade of the 21st Century. I would reflect at more length on the decade and on where Bosnia and the cause of humanitarian intervention and internationalism--but my wife informs me that it is time to get ready for our New Year's Eve outing! So I wish all my readers a happy 2010, and I look forward to continuing our ongoing dialogue in the new year. Best wishes to all.

"In Harm's Way" by Martin Bell [21]

Chapter 23: Fainthearts Confounded

The final chapter of the book finds Bell observing and commenting on the endgame of the Bosnian war. Bell was called away from the field to provide his expertise in studio back home in Britain, where he confronted the difficulties of trying to distill the war and its denouement in short soundbites for a public which was suddenly paying attention again.

As for the war--Bell recognized the key to why the war came to a sudden end; as he reiterates over and over in this book, force works. A muscular use of force by NATO forced the Serbs to the negotiating table, and a determined show of arms by IFOR immediately following the Dayton treaty ensured that both sides kept the peace and respected the peacekeepers. There would be no more ceasefire violations, no more terrorist kidnappings of hapless UN personnel to act as human shields.

Even though it was disturbingly clear that all Dayton had accomplished was essentially to force the Bosnian Serbs to accept their own plan for de facto ethnic partition (albeit with far less territory than they would have liked), the main lesson Bell learned was this--it could have been done sooner, meaning that more lives could have been saved, less injustice would have been enshrined at Dayton, and something of the old multiethnic Bosnia might have been saved.

A lot of trouble, death, and destruction could have been avoided, and our Western values much less betrayed, had the world known in advance what Bell saw in hindsight.

"In Harm's Way " by Martin Bell [20]

Chapter 22: Darkest Before Dawn

Bell continues his account of the final months of the war, here recounting the despair he was falling into in the summer of 1995, as Srebrenican and Zepa both fell to well-organized militias of genocidal mass murderers with the United Nations watching on and the Western world still did nothing. Bell found it hard to even get airtime for his reports, even as he knew that the war was entering a new phase of violence and ferocity. And then there was another marketplace massacre in Sarajevo, and he found himself wondering what the UN would do, even though by now he had learned that the answer would be--once again--nothing.

But this time he was wrong.

"In Harm's Way" by Martin Bell [19]

Chapter 21: Showdown

This chapter is a brisk and exasperated account of events in Bosnia from late May up until around the fall of Srebrenica as witnessed by Bell and other members of the media, who were unable to witness much of what was happening first hand.

Mostly, this is account of the final, craven capitualation of the United Nations to the Bosnian Serb forces and of the continued increase in the volume and ferocity of the armed combat between those forces and the Bosnian government. It was clear to Bell at the time, as it is to all reasonable students of the war in hindsight, that the UN was a spent force at best by this point. Bell correctly notes that its mission had become an absurd anomoly, a protection force which seemed only interested in protecting itself. The UN was by now occupied with little other than negotiating for its own hostages and urging NATO to leave so that the Serbs would no longer threaten them. The fall of Srebrenica was the final, humiliating proof that it was well past time for the United Nations to leave.

"In Harm's Way" by Martin Bell [18]

Chapter 20: A Day in the Life

Literally an account of one day of war reporting; notable in that the day in question was May 24, 1995, and the war was ramping up in intensity and ferocity. It seems that this was the day Bell either say or actually reported the use of phosphorus weapons by the Bosnian Serbs.

The endgame was near.