Edward S. Herman

The way in which the
mainstream media have handled the turning of Milosevic over to the Hague
Tribunal once again reinforces my belief that the United States is not only
number one in military power but also in the effectiveness of its propaganda
system, which is vastly superior to any past or present state-managed system.
The main characteristic of the U.S. model is that, while offering diversity on
many subjects, on core issues—like “free trade” and the need for a huge
“defense” establishment—and on the occasions when the corporate and political
establishment needs their service—as in legitimating George W. Bush’s
presidency in the wake of an electoral coup d’etat, or supporting the
“sanctions of mass destruction” on Iraq—the media can be relied on to expound
and propagandize what would be called a “party line” if done in China. They do
sometimes depart from the official position as regards tactics, arguing, for
example, that the government is not attacking the enemy with sufficient
ferocity (Iraq and Yugoslavia), or that the cost of the enterprise is perhaps
excessive (the Vietnam war, from 1968), but that the enemy is truly evil and
the national cause meritorious is never debatable. The debates over tactics
helpfully obscure the agreement on ends.

A further
important feature of the U.S. system is that this propaganda service is
provided without government censorship or coercion, by self-censorship alone,
with the truth of the propaganda line internalized by the numerous media
participants. This internalization of belief makes it possible for media
personnel to be enthusiastic spokespersons in pushing the party line, thereby
giving it a naturalness that is lacking in crude systems of
government-enforced propaganda.

A third feature
of the system is that the party lines are regularly supported by
non-governmental and self-proclaimed “non-partisan” think tanks like the
American Enterprise Institute and Independent International Commission on
Kosovo, non-governmental organizations like the Open Society Institute and
Human Rights Watch, and assorted ex-leftists and liberal and left journals
that on particular subjects “see the light.” These organizations are commonly
funded by interests (and governments) with an axe to grind, and they serve
those interests, but the media feature them as non-partisan and give special
attention to the ex-leftists and dissidents who now see the light. This helps
firm up the consensus and further marginalizes those still in darkness.

A final feature
of the U.S. system is that it works so well that a sizable fraction of the
public doesn’t recognize the media’s propaganda role, and accepts the media’s
own self-image as independent, adversary, truth-seeking, and helping the
public to “assert meaningful control over the political process” (former
Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell). This public bamboozlement is aided by the
facts that the media are fairly numerous, are not government controlled, have
many true believers among their editors and journalists (the second
characteristic), are supported by NGOs and elements of the “left” (the third
feature), and regularly proclaim their independence and squabble furiously
with government and among themselves. Even those who doubt the media’s claims
of truth-seeking are often carried along, or confused, by the force and
self-assurance of the participants in this great propaganda machine.

 

Party Line
Consensus

An important operational
characteristic of the system, which facilitates general adherence to the party
line without overt coercion, is the assurance and speed with which the line is
established as a consensus truth, so that deviations and dissent quickly take
on the appearance of foolishness or pathology, as well as suspiciously
unpatriotic behavior. Noam Chomsky and I found that the very asking of
questions about the numerous fabrications, ideological role, and absence of
any beneficial effects for the victims in the anti-Khmer Rouge propaganda
campaign of 1975-1979 was unacceptable, and was treated almost without
exception as “apologetics for Pol Pot.”

That “free
trade” is beneficial and in the “national interest” whereas “protectionism” is
hurtful and a creature of “special interests” is a consensus party line of the
mainstream media today that profoundly biases their treatment of trade
agreements and protests against corporate globalization at Seattle,
Washington, DC, Quebec City, and Genoa.

The consensus
around a party line is very quickly established in dealing with international
crises. Once an enemy is demonized—from Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam and Jacobo
Guzman Arbenz in Guatemala in the early 1950s to Slobodan Milosevic in the
1990s and up to today—the media display a form of hysteria that helps mobilize
the public in support of whatever forms of violence the government wishes to
carry out. They become a virtual propaganda arm of the government, joining
with it in the common fight against “another Hitler.” Under these conditions
remarkable structures of disinformation can be built, institutionalized, and
remain parts of historic memory even in the face of ex post confutations,
which are kept out of sight.

Let me give a
few short illustrations before showing how this exceptional propaganda service
applies to the Milosevic/Tribunal case.

 

Red Threat
as Party Line

In the Cold War years,
propaganda service and mobilization of the public was commonly framed around
the Red Threat. This general demonization of the target produced the requisite
hysteria and media identification with “us” and complete loss of critical
capability. When the U.S.-imported puppet to South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, won
a plebiscite in 1954 with over 99 percent of the votes, an outcome that would
elicit much sarcasm if realized in an enemy state, this was not news here.
From then onward, U.S. support of a government admittedly lacking an
indigenous constituency, relying on state terror and U.S. financial and
military aid, was treated in the mainstream media as entirely reasonable and
just.

The
self-deception and patriotic biases internalized by media personnel were
displayed in their 100 percent inability, from 1954 to today, to call the U.S.
intervention and ultimate direct invasion of Vietnam either an “invasion” or
“aggression.” It was also beautifully illustrated in James Reston’s statement
in 1965 that the United States, which from beginning to almost the very end
believed it could impose its preferred rulers by virtue of its superior
military power, was in Vietnam to establish the “principle…that no state
shall use military force or the threat of military force to achieve its
political objectives.”

Another
remarkable case of propaganda service occurred as the United States
destabilized Guatemala’s democratic government in the years 1950-1953 and then
removed it by means of a U.S.-organized “contra” invasion in 1954. U.S.
hostility began when this government passed a law in 1947 allowing the
organization of unions, and active destabilization followed and accelerated
upon its attempt to engage in moderate land reforms, partly at the expense of
the United Fruit Company. From 1947 the search was on for “Communists” to
explain the reformist policies and to rationalize the hostile intervention.
The U.S. mainstream media became completely hysterical over this Red Threat
from 1950 onward, very worried that Arbenz would not allow elections to take
place in 1951—this same media had not been bothered by the Ubico dictatorship,
1931-44, and was entirely unconcerned with the absence of democracy from 1954
onward—and featured a stream of alarming reports on Red influence in that
country and an alleged “reign of terror.”

There were
endless headlines in the New York Times like “Soviet Agents Plotting to
Ruin Unity, Defenses of America” (June 22, 1950); “Guatemalan Reds Seek Full
Power” (May 21, 1952); “How Communists Won Control of Guatemala” (March 1,
1953), and even the Nation ran a sleazy putdown of the democratic
government under attack (March 18, 1950).

This was all
hysterical nonsense—even Court historian Ronald Schneider, after reviewing the
documents seized from the “Reds” in Guatemala, concluded that the Reds had
never controlled Guatemala, and that the Soviet Union “made no significant or
even material investment in the Arbenz regime” and paid little attention to
Central America—but it was effective in making the overthrow of an elected
government acceptable to the U.S. public. And the media’s propaganda service
was completed by their long coverup of the hugely undemocratic aftermath of
the successful termination of the brief democratic experiment. No
government-managed propaganda system could have done a better job of
mobilizing the public on the basis of systematic disinformation; and the
achievement here is especially impressive given the fact that it was all done
with the aim and effect of ending a liberal democracy by violence and
installing a terror state.

 

Bulgarian
Connection

Another illustration of
outstanding, even remarkable, propaganda service, and one pertinent to the
ongoing Milosevic-Tribunal drama because it involved a judicial proceeding,
was the Bulgarian Connection. The Reagan administration had been anxious to
demonize the Soviet Union in the early and mid-1980s, and the assassination
attempt against Pope John Paul II in May 1981, provided an opportunity to pin
the attempt on the KGB and their Bulgarian client. The Turkish fascist, Mehmet
Ali Agca, who had shot the Pope, had spent time in Bulgaria (along with ten
other countries). After 17 months in prison in Italy, and after numerous
visits by secret service, judicial, and papal personnel, who had admittedly
offered him inducements to “confess,” he claimed that he was on the
Bulgarian-KGB payroll, had cased the joint with Bulgarian officials in Rome,
and had visited one of them in his apartment. Although the case was laughably
implausible, the U.S. mainstream media bought it with enthusiasm and failed to
acknowledge their gullibility and propaganda role even after CIA professionals
told Congress during the CIA confirmation hearings on Robert Gates in 1991
that they knew the Connection was false because, among other reasons, they had
penetrated the Bulgarian secret services.

A very
important feature of the media’s treatment of the Bulgarian Connection,
similar to that which they apply now to the Hague Tribunal in its pursuit of
Milosevic, was their pretense that the Italian judiciary, police, and
political system were only seekers after truth and justice, even a bit fearful
of finding the Bulgarians guilty. The New York Times even editorialized
that the Reaganites were aghast at the implications of a Soviet involvement in
the assassination attempt (“recoiled from the devastating implication that
Bulgaria’s agents were bound to have acted only on a signal from Moscow,”
October 30, 1984), a propaganda lie confuted by the CIA professionals in 1991,
who explained that their own doubts were overruled by the Reaganite leaders of
the CIA who insisted on pushing the Connection as true. The Bulgarian
Connection can be well explained by the exceptional corruption of the Italian
system and the service of this manufactured connection to the Cold Warriors
serving the Italian state (and their U.S. parent). This explanation was
expressed often in the Italian media during the 1980s, but not in the U.S.
mainstream media where, with only insignificant exceptions, the propaganda
line functioned without a hitch (see Herman and Brodhead, Rise and Fall of
the Bulgarian Connection).

 

Hague
Tribunal

In the case of the Hague
Tribunal also, the mainstream media portray it as a presumably unbiased
judicial body seeking justice with an even hand, despite the massive evidence
that it is a political and propaganda arm of the United States and other NATO
powers. Its ultimate propaganda service was performed in May 1999, when the
prosecutor of the International Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
(ICTY), Louise Arbour, announced the indictment of Yugoslav president
Milosevic and four associates for war crimes. This was done, hastily, at a
time when NATO was increasingly targeting the civilian infrastructure of
Yugoslavia in order to hasten that country’s surrender. NATO needed this
public relations support as a cover for its own war crimes—the Sixth
Convention of Nuremberg prohibits and makes a war crime the targeting of
civilian facilities not based on “military necessity”—and the ICTY provided
it, with the indictment quickly greeted by Albright and James Rubin as
justifying NATO’s bombing policy.

To my knowledge
the U.S. mainstream media have never once suggested that this indictment
servicing the NATO war discredited the Tribunal as an independent judicial
body. The New York Times‘s Steven Erlanger even explained to Terry
Gross that this indictment displayed Arbour’s independence, as she was
allegedly fearful that Milosevic would escape punishment in a political deal
if she didn’t move quickly. (“Fresh Air,” National Public Radio, July 12,
2001). Erlanger was not alone in offering this imbecile analysis, which not
only failed to recognize the indictment’s service to NATO’s immediate policy
needs, but also ignored other evidence of Arbour’s and the Tribunal’s
deference to U.S. and NATO desires.

The media also
failed to raise any questions about Arbour’s statement of May 24, 1999, that
although people are “entitled to the presumption of innocence until they are
convicted,” she was issuing the indictment because “the evidence…raises
serious questions about their suitability to be guarantors of any deal, let
alone a peace agreement”—that is, she found them guilty before they were
convicted and thought that on this basis she should interfere with any
possible political settlement.

On the other
hand, Arbour and her successor Carla Del Ponte have never found allies of the
NATO powers or the NATO powers themselves worthy of indictment, even when they
did exactly the same things for which the NATO targets were indictable. Thus,
Serb leader Milan Martic was indicted for launching a rocket cluster-bomb
attack on military targets in Zagreb in May 1995, with the use of cluster
bombs cited by the Tribunal as showing the aim of “terrorizing the civilians
of Zagreb.” But NATO’s cluster-bomb raids on Nis on May 7, 1999, far from any
military target, and the 48-hour Croat army shelling of civilian targets in
the city of Knim during the August 1995 Croat Operation Storm, produced no
indictments. Operation Storm, supported by U.S. officials and helped by
U.S.-related professional advisers, resulted in large-scale expulsions and the
killing of many Serb civilians, but neither Croat leader Tudjman nor the
supportive U.S. officials were indicted, and Croat military officials also
escaped indictment till Del Ponte recently claimed several in an effort to
show her “balance” in the context of the bringing of Milosevic to The Hague.
This double standard, which makes a mockery of justice, has been of absolutely
no interest to the U.S. mainstream media; and in his long session with Terry
Gross on July 12, when asked “What Americans might be brought to stand trial
before an international court?,” Steven Erlanger failed to come up with a
single name for any actions in the Balkans (and Gross did not follow up on his
non-response).

Under pressure
to address NATO’s wartime activities, which had resulted in the deaths of many
Serb civilians—estimates run from 500 to 3,000—Tribunal prosecutor Carla Del
Ponte issued a report in June 2000, that declared NATO not guilty. But the
document supporting this conclusion was not based on any investigation by the
Tribunal. It openly acknowledged a heavy dependence on NATO sources, asserting
“that the NATO and NATO countries press statements are generally reliable and
that explanations have been honestly given.” Canadian legal scholar and expert
on the Tribunal, Michael Mandel, asks: “Can you imagine how many indictments
would have been issued against the Serb leadership if the Prosecutor had
stopped at the FRY press releases?” But this remarkable Del Ponte report was
of no interest to the mainstream media.

Also of no
interest to the media is the fact that the Tribunal has been described by John
Laughland in the Times (London) as “a rogue court with rigged rules”
(June 17, 1999). As normal practice it violates virtually every standard of
due process: it fails to separate prosecution and judge; it does not accord
the right to bail or a speedy trial; it has no clear definition of burden of
proof required for a conviction; it has no independent appeal body; it allows
a defendant to be tried twice for the same crime; suspects can be held for 90
days without trial; confessions are presumed to be free and voluntary unless
the contrary is established by the prisoner; and witnesses can testify
anonymously, with hearsay evidence admissible. These points are almost never
mentioned in the U.S. mainstream media or considered relevant to the
legitimacy of the Tribunal or the likelihood that Milosevic will get a fair
trial.

The Tribunal’s
biased performance follows from the fact that it was organized by the United
States and its close allies, is funded by them and staffed with their
approval, and depends on them for information and other support. The
Tribunal’s charter requirements that its expenses shall be provided in the UN
general budget (Article 32), and that the Prosecutor shall act independently
and not take instructions from any government (Article 16), have been
systematically ignored. Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, former president of the Hague
Tribunal—before that a director, and now “Special Counsel to the Chairman on
Human Rights,” of Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc., a notorious human
rights violator working in Irian Jaya with the cooperation of the Indonesian
army—stated in 1999 that Tribunal personnel regard Madeleine Albright as the
“mother of the tribunal.” NATO PR person Jamie Shea pointed out in a May 17,
1999 press conference in Brussels that Arbour will investigate “because we
will allow her to”; that the NATO countries are the ones “that have provided
the finance to set up the Tribunal”; that they are the ones who do the leg
work “and have been detaining indicted war criminals”; and that when she
“looks at the facts she will be indicting people of Yugoslav nationality” and
not folks from NATO.

But neither
this open admission that the NATO powers controlled the Tribunal, nor the
evidence of serious abuses of the judicial process that has characterized its
work, have been of interest to the mainstream media. As with the prosecution
of the Bulgarian Connection, the Hague Tribunal is servicing the U.S.
government and its aims, and the media therefore regard any bias or political
service as reasonable and take them as givens. Because of their internalized
belief that their country is good and would only support justice, the media
can’t even imagine that any conflict of interest exists.

Also, no
questions come up in this context as to why there are no tribunals for
Suharto, Wiranto (the Indonesian general in charge of the destruction of East
Timor in 1999), or Ariel Sharon. These are our allies, even if major state
terrorists, who received and still receive our support, so that in a
well-managed propaganda system the failure to mention their exclusion from a
system of global enforcement of the new ethical order opposed to ethnic
cleansing and human rights violations is entirely appropriate.

 

 Milosevic
and the Balkans

From the time the U.S.
government decided to target Milosevic and the Serbs as the root of Balkan
evil in the early 1990s, the U.S. propaganda system began its work of
demonization of the target, enhanced atrocities management, and the necessary
rewriting of history. The integration of government needs and media service
was essentially complete, and was beautifully symbolized by the marriage
during the crisis years of State Department PR chief James Rubin and
Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s main reporter on the Kosovo war, whose reports
could have come from Rubin himself. More recently, in connection with
Milosevic’s transfer to the Hague, Amanpour entertained Richard Holbrooke on
the subject, and the two, speaking as old comrades-in-arms congratulated one
another on a joint success, just as a policy-enforcing official might express
mutual congratulations with a PR officer (Holbrooke applauded Amanpour’s
“fantastic coverage of the war throughout the last decade” [CNN “Live At
Daybreak,” June 29, 2001]).

It should be
noted that Holbrooke visited Zagreb two days before Croatia launched Operation
Storm in August 1995, almost certainly talking over and giving U.S. approval
to the imminent military operation, reminiscent of Henry Kissinger’s visit to
Jakarta just before Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor in September 1975. As
Operation Storm involved a major program of killings and expulsions, with
killings greatly in excess of the numbers attributed to Milosevic in the
Tribunal indictment of May 22, 1999, an excellent case can be made that Hol-
brooke should be tried for war crimes. We may also be sure that Christiane
Amanpour’s “fantastic coverage” of the wars in Yugoslavia did not deal with
Operation Storm or mention Holbrooke’s and the U.S. role in that butchery and
massive ethnic cleansing.

As NATO
prepared to go to war, which began on March 24, 1999, the media followed the
official lead in focusing heavily on Serb atrocities in Kosovo, with great and
indignant attention to the Racak massacre of January 15, 1999. The failure of
the Rambouillet Conference they blamed on Serb intransigence, again following
the official line. During the 87-day bombing war the media focused even more
intensively on atrocities (Serb, not NATO), and passed along the official
estimates of 100,000 Kosovo Albanian murders (U.S. Defense Secretary William
Cohen), and other estimates, smaller and larger. They also accepted the claim
that the Serb violence that followed the bombing would have taken place
anyway, by plan, so that the bombing, instead of causing the escalated
violence was justified by its occurrence ex post.

In the
post-bombing era a number of developments have occurred that have challenged
the official line. But the mainstream media have not let them disturb the
institutionalized untruths. Let me list some of these and describe the media’s
mode of deflection.

1. Racak
massacre. The only pre-bombing act of Serb violence listed in the Tribunal
indictment of Milosevic on May 22, 1999, was an alleged massacre of Albanians
by the Serbs at Racak on January 15, 1999. The Serbs had carried out this
action with invited OSCE representatives (and AP photographers) on the scene,
but on the following day, after KLA reoccupation of the village, some 40 to 45
bodies were on display for the U.S.-OSCE official William Walker and the
media. The authenticity of this massacre, which follows a long pattern of
convenient but contrived atrocities to meet a PR need—well described in George
Bogdanich’s and Martin Lettmayer’s brilliant film The Avoidable War—was
immediately challenged by journalists in France and Germany, but no doubts
whatever showed up in the U.S. media. Christophe Chatelet of Le Monde
was in Racak the day of the “massacre,” and left at dusk, as did the OSCE
observers and Serb police, without witnessing any massacre. The AP
photographers and on-the-scene OSCE representatives have never been available
for corroboration or denial, and the forensic report of the Finnish team that
examined the bodies at the behest of the OSCE has never been made public. The
issue is still contested, but a very strong case can be made that the Racak
“massacre” was a staged event (see, Chatelet, in Le Monde, January 19,
1999; Professor Dusan Dunjic [a Serb medical participant in the autopsies],
“The (Ab)use of Forensic Medicine,” www.suc.org/politics/kosovo/
documents/Dunjic0499; J. Raino, et al., “Independent forensic autopsies in an
armed conflict: investigation of the victims from Racak, Kosovo,” Forensic
Science International 116 [2001], 171-85).

But the strong
challenging evidence has been effectively blacked out in the U.S. mainstream
media, and the “massacre” is taken as an established and unquestioned truth
(e.g., Amanpour and Carol Lin, CNN “Live at Daybreak,” July 3, 2001; Steven
Erlanger in his July 12 interview with Terry Gross). Why didn’t the Serb army
remove the incriminating bodies, as the propaganda machine claimed then and
now that they were doing as a matter of policy directed from above? As in the
case of the analyses and evidence in the 1980s that Agca might have been
coached to implicate the Bulgarians and KGB, the U.S. mainstream media refuse
to burden a useful party line with inconvenient questions and facts.

Also, while
giving heavy, uncritical and indignant attention to Racak, the media have
never allowed the far larger and unambiguous massacre of civilians at Liquica
in East Timor on April 6, 1999—three months after Racak—to reach public
consciousness. This was a massacre by the U.S. ally Indonesia, U.S. officials
did not feature it, and the media therefore served national policy by giving
it short shrift.

2. U.S. and
NATO opposition to Serb “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide” as the basis of the
NATO bombing. The official and media propaganda line is that the United
States and NATO powers were deeply upset by Serb violence in Kosovo and
eventually went to war to stop it. But there are problems with this view. For
one thing, evidence has turned up showing that Washington, through its own
agencies or hired mercenaries, actually aided and trained the KLA prior to the
bombing, and in this and other ways encouraged them in provocations that
stimulated Serb violence (Peter Beaumont et al., “CIA’s bastard army ran riot
in Balkans,” The Observer [London], March 11, 2001). The postwar
publication by the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, General Report: Kosovo
Aftermath, noted that “Under the influence of the Kosovo Verification Mission
the level of Serbian repression eased off” in late 1998, but “on the other
hand, there was a lack of effective measures to curb the UCK [KLA]” which had
an interest in “worsening the situation.” In short, U.S. policy before the
bombing encouraged violence in Kosovo. The evidence for this has been made
public abroad, but it has not yet surfaced in the U.S. mainstream media.

A second
problem is that NATO supplied greatly inflated estimates of Serb killings and
expulsions in Kosovo, quite obviously trying to prepare the ground for
bombing. The claim that Serbian policy constituted “ethnic cleansing” and even
“genocide” has long been confuted by OSCE, State Department, and human rights
groups’ findings of limited and targeted Serb violence, and by disclosure of
an internal German Foreign Office report that even denies the appropriateness
of the use of “ethnic cleansing” to describe Serb behavior [“Important
Internal Documents from Germany’s Foreign Office,” www.suc.org/
kosovo_crisis/documents/gergov.html]. These contesting points of evidence,
even though coming from establishment sources, are not only off the screen for
the mainstream media, they are ignored and the old lies are repeated by
Christopher Hitchens in the Nation (“Body Count in Kosovo,” June 11,
2001) and Bogdan Denitch in In These Times (“Citizen of a Lost
Country,” May 14, 2001).

A third problem
is: how could this humanitarian motive be driving Clinton and Blair in Kosovo
when they had both actively supported Turkey’s far larger-scale ethnic
cleansing of Kurds throughout the 1990s? The mainstream media dealt with this
and similar problems by not letting the issue be raised.

3. NATO
reasonableness, Serb intransigence at Rambouillet. On the question of
negotiations versus the use of force, the official line has been that the NATO
powers made reasonable negotiating offers to the Serbs, trying to get “Serbia
and the Kosovo Albanians to come to a compromise” (Tim Judah), but that the
Serb refusal to negotiate led to the bombing war. This line was demonstrated
to be false when it was disclosed that NATO had inserted a proviso demanding
full occupation by NATO of all of Yugoslavia, admitted by a State Department
official to have been a deliberate “raising of the bar” to allow bombing
(George Kenney, “Rolling Thunder: The Rerun,” the Nation, June 14,
1999). This disclosure has been comprehensively suppressed in the mainstream
media, allowing the propaganda lie to be repeated today (Judah’s repetition of
the lie was on June 29, 2001).

4. Serb
genocide by plan during the NATO bombing. Three big lies expounded during
the NATO bombing war were that (1) the Serbs were killing vast numbers; (2)
they were doing this and expelling still larger numbers in a process of
“ethnic cleansing” and “genocide;” and (3) that they had planned mass killing
and expulsions anyway, so that these could not be attributed to the bombing
war or the kind of fighting and atrocities characteristic of a brutal civil
war. It is now clear that while large numbers did flee, this included at least
an equal proportion of Serbs, and that many fled without forcible expulsion;
and it is also clear that while there were brutal killings, these fell far
short of the 10,000-500,000 claimed by NATO. It is also now on the record that
NATO and the KLA were engaged in joint military actions during the bombing
war, and that expulsions were concentrated in areas of KLA strong support,
pointing to a military logic to Serb actions (Daniel Pearl and Robert Block,
“War in Kosovo Was Cruel, Bitter, Savage; Genocide It Wasn’t,” Wall Street
Journal, December 31, 1999). The claim that the Serbs intended to do this
anyway has never been supported by any evidence.

In Guatemala
after 1947 the search was on for communists; in Kosovo during and after the
bombing war the search was on for dead bodies (whereas there was no interest
in or search for dead bodies in East Timor after the Indonesian massacres of
1999, in accord with the same propaganda service). The bodies found in Kosovo
received great publicity, but the fact that this immense effort yielded only
3,000-4,000 bodies from all causes and on all sides, and the fact that it fell
far short of the NATO-media propaganda claims during the bombing war, has
received minimal attention. However, with Milosevic now transferred to The
Hague, and a fresh demand arising for bodies whose deaths can be attributed to
him, once again the media are coming through with fresh claims of bodies
transferred from Kosovo under the villain’s direction.

5. War a
success, refugees returned to Kosovo. But the refugees were produced by
the NATO bombing policy and they returned to a shattered country. Furthermore,
after the NATO war there was a real ethnic cleansing—in percentage terms the
“largest in the Balkan wars” according to Transnational Foundation for Peace
director Jan Oberg—with some 330,000 Serbs, Roma, Jews, Turks, and others
driven out of Kosovo, while some 3,000 people were killed and disappeared.
However, as this has taken place under NATO auspices, the mainstream media,
insofar as they mention the real ethnic cleansing at all, have treated it as a
semi-approved “vengeance.” But they have mainly dealt with the subject, as
they did the post-Arbenz real terrorism, by eye aversion.

6. Milosevic
as the source of Balkan conflict. In virtually all mainstream accounts, it
was “Milosevic’s murderous decade” (Nordland and Gutman in Newsweek,
July 9, 2001), Milosevic who “set Yugoslavia to unraveling” (Roger Cohen,
NYT, July 1, 2001), “the man who had terrorized the turbulent Balkans for
a decade” (Time, April 9, 2001). The wars were a “catastrophe that
Slobodan Milosevic unleashed” (Tim Judah, the Times [London], June 29,
2001). This is comic book history, that follows the standard demonization
process, and is refuted by every serious historian dealing with the area
(Susan Woodward, Robert Hayden, David Chandler, Lenard Cohen, Raymond Kent,
Steven L. Burg, and Paul S. Shoup).

Serious history
takes into account, among other matters: (1) the fact that long before 1990
Yugoslavia had persistent “deep regional and ethnic cleavages,” with Croatia,
Bosnia and Kosovo “all areas of high ethnic fragmentation” (Lenard Cohen and
Paul Warwick, Political Cohesion in a Fragile Mosaic), whose
suppression required a strong federal state; (2) the effects of the Yugoslav
economic crisis, dating back to 1982, and the IMF/World Bank imposition of
deflationary policies on Yugoslavia in the late 1980s, and their consequences;
(3) the post-Soviet collapse ending of Western support for the Yugoslav
federal state, and German and Austrian collaboration in encouraging the
Croatian and Slovenian secession from Yugoslavia without any democratic vote
and without any settlement on the status of the large Serb minorities; (4) the
West’s and Western Badinter Commission’s refusal to allow threatened ethnic
minorities to withdraw from the new secession states; (5) the U.S. and Western
encouragement of the Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina to hold out for unity under
their control in the face of Serb and Croatian fears and opposition; (6) the
U.S. and NATO support of Croatia and its massive ethnic cleansing of Serbs in
Krajina.

The media
rarely mention these extremely important external, NATO-inspired causes of
ethnic cleansing, or the fact that Milosevic supported many diplomatic
initiatives such as the Owen-Vance and Owen-Stoltenberg plans, both
unsuccessful because of U.S. encouragement of the Muslims to hold out for
more. Heavy German and U.S. responsibility for the breakup of Yugoslavia; the
NATO governments’ help in the arming of Slovenia, Croatia, the Bosnian
Muslims, and the KLA; and the U.S. sabotaging of efforts at negotiated
settlements in the early 1990s, are all well documented in Bogdanich’s and
Lettmayer’s The Avoidable War. The film was shown on the History
Channel on April 16, but has otherwise been ignored in Propaganda System
Number One for good reason: it not only shows dominant NATO responsibility for
the Balkan disaster, it makes the mainstream media’s supportive propaganda
role crystal clear.

7.
Milosevic’s nationalist speeches of 1987 and 1989. It is now rote
“history” that in April 1987 Milosevic “endorsed a Serbian nationalist agenda”
at Polje in Kosovo, and did the same there on June 28, 1989—supposedly
heralding his project of Greater Serbia and the coming wars to achieve it.
People like Roger Cohen and Steven Erlanger who cite these as “inciting Serb
passions” almost surely never bothered to read them (nor did Joe Knowles, who
mentions Milosevic’s “infamous” speech of June 28 in In These Times
[August 6, 2001]). In both speeches, Milosevic actually warns against the
dangers of nationalism, and while he promises to protect Serbs, he is clearly
speaking of the citizens of the Republic of Serbia, not ethnic Serbs; and he
describes “Yugoslavia” as “a multinational community…[that] can survive only
under the conditions of full equality for all nations that live in it” (June
28, 1989).

8. Milosevic
as dictator. The June 28, 2001 amended indictment of Milosevic notes that
he was “elected” president of Serbia on May 8, 1989, was elected again “in
multi-party elections” held in December 1990, was “reelected” in December
1992, was “elected president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia” on July
15, 1997, and was defeated and ousted from power in an election in September
2000. But as Milosevic is on the U.S. hit list, he is referred to repeatedly
in the media as a “dictator,” a word they were extremely reluctant to apply to
Suharto during his 32 years as a prized U.S. client. The designation of
dictator created a problem for the media because they also found, and continue
to find, the Serb populace guilty as “willing executioners” who were properly
punished by bombing and who need to acknowledge their guilt. How a people
suffering under a dictatorship and dictator-controlled media could be guilty
of crimes committed elsewhere is unexplained, but in the U.S. mainstream media
the contradiction remains unchallenged.

9. The
dictator as responsible killer. In Manufacturing Consent Chomsky
and I showed how in the case of the murder of Jerzy Popieluszko in communist
Poland the media repeatedly sought to prove that the leaders of Poland knew
about and were responsible for the killing, whereas in cases where our own
leaders or clients are involved, the media are not interested in high level
knowledge and responsibility. It was therefore a foregone conclusion that the
media would jump on every claim that Milosevic was behind the deaths in the
Balkan wars, and as the Tribunal has to confront the need for such proof to
convict the demon, the media are working this terrain with vigor. Some of the
alleged new evidence is clearly being leaked from the Tribunal (e.g., Bob
Graham and Tom Walker, “Milosevic Ordered Hiding of Bodies,” Sunday Times
[London], July 8, 2001), a form of propaganda once again revealing that it is
not a judicial body but a political instrument. This evidence, which cites the
very words used by the dictator in Belgrade in March 1999 instructing his
subordinates to commit crimes (“all civilians killed in Kosovo have to be
moved to places where they will not be discovered,” in ibid.), has the odor of
NATO-bloc disinformation and should be treated with the utmost scepticism. And
we may be sure the media will never ask why, with this instruction, “45
bodies” were left on the ground in Racak for the convenience of William Walker
and other NATO propagandists.

 

Concluding
Note

The U.S. propaganda
system is at the peak of its powers in the early years of the 21st century,
riding the wave of capitalism’s triumph, U.S. global hegemony, and the
confidence and effective service of the increasingly concentrated and
commercialized mainstream media. It is a model propaganda system, its
slippages and imperfections adding to its power, given its assured service in
times of need. As described above, in such times its ability to ignore
inconvenient facts, swallow disinformation, and work the public over with
propaganda can easily compete with—even surpass—anything found in totalitarian
systems.                                        Z