Diana Johnstone

The

war was launched to protect an oppressed ethnic minority, to punish a massacre,

and to secure a New World Order. Which war was that? Why, Hitler’s war of

course, which came to be known as World War II. The ostensibly oppressed ethnic

minority was the Germans in Slavic countries, the aggression was a fake Polish

incursion into Germany denounced as a "massacre," and the "New

World Order" was the declared goal of Nazi Germany. These pretexts or aims

of Hitler’s war of conquest are largely forgotten in the United States. They are

never cited by politicians or media drawing parallels between then and now.

However, everyone remembers the Holocaust, Hitler and Munich. Reduced to these

three elements, the standard "lesson" of World War II goes like this:

There was an evil man, Hitler, who wanted to kill all the Jews. At Munich, the

West failed to stop him. The result was the Holocaust.

 Therefore

we must "stand up" to whatever "new Hitler" comes along.

This simplistic formula discredits diplomacy and justifies the use of military

force. To call out the hounds of war, all that is needed is to identify the

latest adversary as a new "Hitler" and to dismiss any attempt to find

a reasonable compromise as "Munich." >From the beginning of the

Yugoslav crisis in 1991, the media took the easy way of reporting on an

extremely complex and unfamiliar situation by resorting to analogy. The

Washington public relations firm, Ruder Finn, on contract to Croatia and the

Kosovo Albanians, took shrewd advantage of this tendency by likening Serb

relocation camps in Bosnia–horrific places such as exist in conflicts around

the world, and indeed existed in Bosnia under Muslim and Croat control as

well–to "Auschwitz." Suddenly, Milosevic was "the new

Hitler." A journalist who might challenge such exaggeration not only risked

missing the "big story" but could be accused of

"revisionism" or "Auschwitz denial." More recently, a number

of American journalists have indeed managed to produce excellent and balanced

articles from Yugoslavia. Steven Erlanger’s reports from Kosovo for the New York

Times reflect the complexities and ambiguities of a province devastated by NATO

bombing, obscure combat, crime, intimidation and panic. Such serious reporting

has a long way to go to counteract years of simplified analogies, distorted and

inaccurate facts and outright propaganda by editorialists, columnists and

cartoonists echoing each other in endless variations on the "new

Hitler" theme.

The

tragic-comic fate of mankind seems to be to fail to see the next trap in the

effort to avoid the last one. By constantly recalling Auschwitz, the collective

imagination has projected it onto much more ordinary human disasters. At

present, the truly successful "revisionism" is not denial of Auschwitz

but its relativization, by seeing it where it isn’t.

The

dangers of analogy construction Analogies should be employed with care,

especially with such emotion-laden subjects as Hitler and the Holocaust. When

applied to unfamiliar situations, they can create a powerful semi-fictional

version that actually masks reality. Faced with a "new Hitler" and

alleged "genocide," there can be no inquiry as to the real motives and

interests of the various parties. Instead, the issue is reduced to identifying

the "bad guy" and "standing up" to him. This mindset

virtually precludes serious efforts to grasp why people are acting as they do.

It has even helped to obscure the causes and motives of Nazi aggression. In

reality, Hitler’s vicious anti-Semitism could not in itself have led Germany

into a war of conquest stretching from North Africa to Norway to the Volga. The

military, financial and industrial elites of Germany were motivated by

geo-strategic goals: a German-dominated Europe known as the "New World

Order."

The

propaganda that incited Germans to fight told them that they were on a mission

to bring good German "Western" order to the world. To achieve such

order, elements of disorder had to be identified and eliminated. Here is where

Hitler’s anti-Semitism came in: For Hitler, disorder in the form of both

communism and capitalism was caused primarily by Jews and secondarily by Slavs

(considered an incompetent sub-race), as well as by minor trouble-makers such as

Gypsies and homosexuals. If parallels are to be drawn between the present NATO

war and the Nazi blitzkreig, some of them could be extremely embarrassing to the

NATO allies. But American media have never cared to dwell on the fact that the

"New World Order" was a Nazi slogan resurrected by President Bush once

the Soviet Union collapsed, nor on the fact that Hitler ordered the bombing of

Belgrade to punish it for opposing that "Order," while rewarding

Croatian and Albanian secessionist nationalists with enlarged states from which

they proceeded to drive out Serbian inhabitants.

These,

however, are the parallels seen by most Serbs, whether they support or detest

Slobodan Milosevic. If this is not understood, the Serbs cannot be understood.

Condemning the Serbian "race" As the NATO bombing inevitably fails to

win the hearts of the Serbian people, they themselves increasingly have become

the target not only of the bombing but also of the propaganda campaign. Their

resistance is attributed to perverse stubbornness, or to complicity in the

presumed crimes of "the new Hitler."

The

demonstrable fact that the Serbian people strongly favor a multi-ethnic society,

the fact that Serbia is indeed the closest thing to a genuine multi-ethnic state

in the region–this is ignored, or denied, by constant reference to the new

invisible phantom haunting Europe, "Serbian nationalism." President

Clinton’s claim to be destroying Yugoslavia in order to achieve what has long

existed–a multi-ethnic society–while the United States supports an armed

ethnic Albanian movement fighting to establish an ethnically pure Greater

Albania, raises ignorance, or dishonesty, to new levels of absurdity. Since they

refuse to respond to NATO bombing by overthrowing Milosevic, the conclusion

drawn by the NATO propagandists is that the Serbian people themselves are the

"new Nazis." In mid-May, the BBC posed its question of the week: Could

Serbia reform itself? No, said a British academic, Mark Wheeler, who was of the

opinion that Serbia would have to be occupied militarily, like Germany after

World War II, and "denazified." An individual citizen can sue a

publication for libel. There is no such recourse for the population of a country

that finds itself targeted by NATO.

Anything

goes when it comes to insulting "the Serbs." The April 12 Newsweek did

not hesitate to characterize the Serbs as a "race" displaying uniquely

negative qualities, in an article by Rod Nordland entitled "Vengeance of a

Victim Race." "Serbs," readers were told, "are expert

haters."

Malicious

generalizations alternate with lies. "This is the nation that invented the

term ‘ethnic cleansing’–as a wartime boast in 1991 when they were kicking

Croats out of Croatia," wrote Nordland. This is not true. As Jim Naureckas

points out (Extra!, 5 6/99), the term was appearing in U.S. newspapers a decade

earlier to describe Albanians’ treatment of Serbs in Kosovo. The practice is

age-old. It has been repeatedly practiced in the Balkan region as a forcible way

of ending border disputes, most dramatically in the huge population exchanges

between Greece and Turkey in the first part of the 20th Century. As for the war

in Croatia in 1991, the practice was mutual, as part of the dispute over

boundaries in a fragmented Yugoslavia. This was the inevitable result of Western

approval of a hasty and unnegotiated dismantling of Yugoslavia. Newsweek

presumes to delve into the Serb psyche. It finds a "sense of

victimization"–a convenient element to disparage and dismiss preemptively

in a people selected to be victims of NATO bombing.

Anything

that we do to them is only in their minds. "The other critical element of

the Serb psyche: inat, which means ‘spite’ but also includes the idea of revenge

no matter what the cost. A taste for revenge mixed with self-pity is a dangerous

combination." As it happens, "inat" is a word that also exists in

the Albanian language, with exactly the same meaning. In fact, "inat"

is a Turkish word, which was adopted in all the languages of the region from the

ruling Ottoman Turks. If the existence of the term in the national vocabulary is

a key to the national "psyche," it applies just as much to the

Albanians, and perhaps most of all to the Turks. But they are our allies, and

thus do not require such scrutiny. Such an article is nothing but propaganda,

which can serve only to justify subjecting a whole people to pariah treatment

and even eventual destruction. The subtitle of Nordland’s article is: "The

Serbs are Europe’s outsiders, seasoned haters raised on self-pity. Even the

‘democrats’ are questionable characters." Substitute "Jews" for

"Serbs", and you have a sample of the sort of rhetoric the Nazis

applied prior to "the final solution." If parallels are to be drawn

with World War II, it is high time to explore all the angles.