NATO’s Willing Executioners
The Goldhagen thesis about Serbia is not merely
academic. This Harvard professor has deliberately
attempted to motivate an aggressive war of conquest.
His grave and unsubstantiated accusations are
incitement to hatred of an entire nation.
Goldhagen claims that, like the Germans and Japanese in
the early 1940s, the "majority of the country’s populace"
in Serbia "believed fanatically" in the rightness of
criminal actions. This is simply and wholly untrue. The
majority of Serbs do not agree on much of anything;
many, perhaps most, Serbs readily and willingly
acknowledge with regret that Serbs have committed
crimes during the civil wars and believe such crimes
should be punished. However, they also believe, indeed
they know (because it happens to be true), that similar
crimes have been committed by others and that the
United States and other NATO countries have adopted
double standards.
Goldhagen declares that there will be no peace in the
Balkans "as long as the Serbs continue to harbor the
burning hatred of ethnic nationalism." The Serbs, he
claims, are "now caught in the grip of delusions,
hatreds, an ever-more-belligerent society and culture,
war, and death."
But why can this not be turned around to claim that, for
instance, Harvard professors are "now caught in the grip
of delusions and hatreds"? The evidence would be what
Harvard professors, or at least one of them, says about
the Serbs—and the others are not denying it, or
removing him from his position. The case here is
probably stronger against Harvard professors than
against the Serbs, since one will look for a long time to
find such a vicious tirade by a Serb against Albanians or
anybody else, and the proportion of Serbs who would
subscribe to such a blanket condemnation of a people is
certainly less than the proportion of Harvard professors,
even if Goldhagen is the only one.
The outlandish conclusion of this Goldhagen tract is that
the Serbian people "consists of individuals with damaged
faculties of moral judgment and has sunk into a moral
abyss from which it is unlikely, anytime soon, to emerge
unaided." By "supporting or condoning Milosevic’s
eliminationist policies" (which, incidentally, never existed
except in the imaginations of New Republic writers), the
Serbian people "have rendered themselves both legally
and morally incompetent to conduct their own affairs"
and "their country must be placed in receivership."
This should be done by a NATO invasion, in order to give
Serbia the benefit of the same treatment that
de-Nazified Germany. The "criminals’ supporters,
composing a large percentage of the Serbian people,
need to be made to comprehend their errors and
rehabilitated." Since there never was an "eliminationist
ideology" of "virulent nationalism," it will be a hard task
indeed to make the Serbian people give it up. But proof
of success is already at hand: "if people accept that it
was both morally correct and wise to occupy and
transform Germany and Japan in 1945, it follows that
they must endorse, in principle, the desirability of
pursuing a similar course in the Serbia of 1999."
So Goldhagen has a schema. In his schema, neither
Hitler’s Germany nor the Holocaust were unique events,
but models, patterns, that are reproducing themselves
and will probably continue to do so. A bad country in
the grip of a bad ideology attacks everybody around; it
commits genocide; the populace sees nothing wrong
with that and even applauds, since it is filled with "the
burning hatred of ethnic nationalism"; moreover, this
errant country is prey to "delusions" that it itself is the
victim. But there is a solution to this problem: the
"international community," a/k/a the United States and
its military allies, must conquer the errant country,
punish its leaders and "rehabilitate" its inhabitants by
teaching them all how to be politically correct. (Harvard
University can hope for big contracts in this task.) Then
everybody will live happily ever after.
As those who really remember World War II, Hitler, and
Nazi genocide grow old and die off, we are seeing a sad
but no doubt inevitable and oft-repeated process: the
transformation of history into myth. And not just any
myth, good for story books: the sort of active myth
that is used for assertion of power. The mythical event
is ritualistically repeated to cement the community and
reassert the legitimacy of its identity. World War II has
become the source not of wisdom but of self-justifying
myth.
For a long time, an extraordinary quantity of lies about
Yugoslavia have been sent into circulation, taken up,
and fervently believed. The original motives for lying are
not sufficient explanation for this phenomenon. Why
people in power tell lies is the easy part. The hard part
is why other people believe them. The lies about
Yugoslavia quite evidently fill a gap and meet a need
that goes beyond strategic bases on the way to
Caspian oil or other purely rational reasons—which exist
but are not adequate to explain an illusion of such
proportions.
The Founding Myth
From Fukayama’s "end of history" to Huntington’s
"conflict of civilizations" and now to "humanitarian
warfare," the United States establishment has been
groping recklessly for Big Ideas to accompany the New
World Order. A constant characteristic of these big
ideas is a total cynicism cloaked in a ruthless
self-righteousness. There is never any critical
self-examination (the basis of what used to be moral
conscience), the motives of the power with which the
ideologues identify being above any possible reproach.
"Our" system, "our" civilization, "our" values have been
certifiably proven the best by "our" defeat of
communism. The only moral question that remains is
what we need to do to bring the others in line. Is it
easy (Fukayama), difficult (Huntington), or a welcome
challenge to NATO? Goldhagen is contributing to
development of the third possibility, the one known as
"humanitarian warfare."
Yugoslavia has been the "common enemy" needed to
bring Europe and the United States together in a new
missionary NATO. This new moralizing Atlantic union
obviously corresponds to U.S. strategic interests. But
European NATO leaders and media have bought into the
demonizing of the Serbs with equal enthusiasm, nowhere
more than in France. The French response, because the
most surprising, may be the most significant. During the
bombing, there was greater protest, more critical
analysis, in Italy and even in Germany, than in France,
which historically was Serbia’s closest ally in Western
Europe. Moreover, while the United States and Germany
can be seen to have strategic or economic interests to
advance in the Balkans, it is difficult to see how France
will get enough of the pickings to make up for what the
Kosovo adventure is costing her. Does this mean that
the French have been more genuinely idealistic? That
they believe in the "humanitarian war"? To an extent,
perhaps, all the more in that the French media have on
the whole been singularly biased for years, and that the
French are particularly ill-informed about recent events
in former Yugoslavia. Nevertheless, in the higher spheres
of official circles in France, the war is widely viewed as
an American power play, and not at all as a
humanitarian venture. Yet public criticism is practically
inaudible.
The French élite that runs the government, the
economy, and the media has for years now been totally
dedicated to a single project: European union built
around a close partnership with Germany and sealed
with a common currency as the only way for France to
survive in the competitive world of U.S.-led
"globalization." There is widespread ennui, if not yet
exactly disillusion, with this monetary Europe. This
"Europe" is made up of too many technocrats, too many
obscure regulations, too much hype about the euro, too
many lobbies, and not enough jobs, too much
competition and too little common purpose.
The European Union is in need of a common identity
more spiritual than a common currency. These days it
can’t be religion; Christianity is not only out of style,
despite the Pope as Superstar, it is politically incorrect
to identify Europe with Christendom, since this would
risk implying exclusion of other religions. Both
anti-communism and anti-fascism are out of date. What
is left? Human rights.
Europe needs a moral identity. The perfect formula,
especially for France which is proud of having invented
the Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme, is human
rights—especially human rights as a creed that
transcends national boundaries and justifies the
abandonment of long-cherished national sovereignty
required by the European Union’s treaties of Maastricht
and Amsterdam.
In 1994, a number of European intellectuals, mostly
French, organized meetings and even an ephemeral
electoral list around the slogan, "Europe lives or dies at
Sarajevo." This was in fact extravagant hyperbole. But
it caught the need to associate "Europe" with a
dramatic cause, equal to the Spanish Civil War, and the
intellectuals feeling this need grasped onto a totally
idealized "Bosnia" as the symbol of this "Europe" that,
rather than an economic powerhouse technocratically
organized to take its place alongside the United States
in world domination, was actually a tender bud of
multi-ethnic civilization in danger of being trampled to
death by a new Hitler.
Yugoslavia was the first crisis to be poured whole into
the mold of the ideological myth of World War II.
Milosevic became "Hitler," the Serbs became the new
"Nazis," and their adversaries were all victims of a
potential new "Holocaust." The eagerness with which
European intellectuals believed the "unbelievable,"
exclaiming "we thought it couldn’t happen here" without
taking the trouble to find out whether in fact "it" was, or
perhaps wasn’t, happening here, perhaps merits the
term Schadenfreude. There was a sort of pleasure in the
damage, and the pleasure was that of discovering our
collective identity as "the West."
If they are guilty, we are innocent.
They, of course, are the terrible Serbs, guilty of
everything the Germans used to be guilty of under
Hitler. But now, the Germans are innocent and on the
side of the angels, as well as the common currency.
Nazism has been replaced as the evil that Europe, and
Germany, must eliminate.
We, on the other hand, we are (on the West end of the
Atlantic) America, the New World Order, the one last
best hope of mankind and so on; or, on the East side of
the Atlantic, the new Europe of the European Union, the
exact opposite of the Old Europe of wars between
nation-states, that wicked Europe whose surviving (but
not for long) remnant is Serbian Yugoslavia.
This is a ritual for anthropologists to describe. Myth is
built on history and transformed into a ceremony whose
roles must be assumed by succeeding players on the
stage of history. Finally, the scapegoat. Yugoslavia
bears all the sins of Europe’s past, it represents
everything Europe is not, or does not want to be. It
must be destroyed. After the bombs, an embargo.
Ostracism, further destruction, until nothing is left.
In Serbia, thoughtful people are struggling with the
question: What can we do?
Even if Milosevic miraculously resigned tomorrow, there
could be no certainty that his successor might not
quickly be hailed by western media as Hitler’s latest
clone. The job would be made easier by establishment
career moralists such as Goldhagen ready to expound on
the "moral abyss" into which the Serbian people are
plunged, unable to extricate themselves without being
"placed in receivership," that is, under a NATO
protectorate. And the destruction could go on until
conditions are ripe for the required national lobotomy of
the miscreant people.
Caught in such a death trap, how responsible, now, are
the Serbian people for what is happening to them? And
how responsible are we?
Footnotes
1. Michael R. Gordon, "NATO General Urges Hits on
Serbian Leaders; Belgrade People Must Suffer, Too, He
Says," New York Times/International Herald Tribune,
May 14, 1999.
2. Joseph Fitchett, "Is Serb Economy the True Target?
Raids Seem Aimed at Bolstering Resistance to Milosevic,"
International Herald Tribune, May 26, 1999, p. 1.
3. Clinton was warned by the U.S. intelligence
community and by Italian prime minister Massimo
D’Alema (who feared the consequences for Italy) that
bombing would produce an explosion of refugees, and
NATO commander Wesley Clark himself acknowledged
that the military authorities fully anticipated the Serb
response to the bombing, while insisting that the NATO
operation was not designed to stop ethnic cleansing.
See Noam Chomsky, The New Military Humanism:
Lessons from Kosovo (Monroe, Me.: Common Courage
Press, 1999), pp. 20, 21, 36.
4. See Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard:
American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives
(New York: Basic Books, 1997); see also Tariq Ali, ed.,
Masters of the Universe? NATO’s Balkan Crusade
(London: Verso, 1999).
5. See Chomsky, op. cit., n. 3, pp. 152-3.
6. William Branigin, "The Shadow of Intelligence... U.S.
Gave Tribunal Classified Data," Washington
Post/International Herald Tribune, May 29, 1999, p. 1.
7. See Diana Johnstone, "Making the Crime Fit the
Punishment," in Ali, ed., op. cit., n. 4.
8. International Herald Tribune, May 31, 1999.
9. "Vengeance of a victim Race," Newsweek, Apr. 12,
1999.
10. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, "If you rebuild it... A New
Serbia," The New Republic, May 17, 1999.
11. See Robert Thomas, Serbia under Milosevic: Politics
in the 1990s (London: Hurst & Company, 1999), for an
unusually fair and detailed account of the conflicting
currents in Serbian politics.
12. By the same token, quite a number of U.S.
Presidents and other leaders of democratic countries
could find themselves in the dock, most recently,
President Clinton and Prime Minister Blair, who command
the NATO-run forces that expelled police from Kosovo
and then looked the other way while gunmen of NATO’s
ethnic Albanian "paramilitary" ally massacred 14 Serb
farmers during hay harvest, among others.
13. It remains unclear to this day whether the ethnic
Albanians killed in Racak were, as claimed by the KLA
and U.S. officials, innocent civilians massacred by Serb
police, or, as Serbian officials claimed and was widely
believed among European observers, they were guerrillas
killed in battle with police whose bodies were lined up
overnight by the KLA to give the appearance of a
"massacre." All that is certain is that a police operation
and fire fight with KLA rebels had taken place there the
day before the bodies were found.
14. This massacre was thoroughly reported outside
Yugoslavia only, so far as I am aware, by the
anti-Milosevic Association for Independent Media (AIM)
which provides e-mail news reports to subscribers and is
supported financially by the European Union, among
other outside sources.
15. The Human Rights Watch researcher for Kosovo,
Fred Abrahams, was quoted by Newsweek as saying, "I
strongly believe these were innocent civilians, and they
were gunned down by Serbian police forces simply
because of their ethnicity." Abrahams may have
"strongly believed" as much, but there was no proof.
16. See Phillip Knightley, "Propaganda Wars," The
Independent on Sunday (London), June 27, 1999.
17. Rebecca Chamberlain and David E. Powell, "Serbs’
system of rape; The crime is a key part of their military
policy. Slobodan Milosevic must be held responsible,"
Philadelphia Inquirer, May 24, 1999.
18. Dr. Richard Munz, a University of Bochum surgeon
working with humanitarian aid in Macedonia, testified to
the demand for rape stories when he complained to the
German daily Die Welt about the inability of most
reporters to accept the fact that among the 60,000
refugees in their camp, medical aid workers had not
encountered a single case of rape.
19. Philip Smucker, "NATO shies away from KLA tactics,
ideology," Washington Times, May 5, 1999.
20. International Herald Tribune, Mar. 27, 1999.
21. Ibid., May 8, 1999.
22. Ibid., June 23, 1999.
23. Frederick Bonnart, editorial director of NATO’s
Nations, in a guest column in the International Herald
Tribune, June 28, 1999.
24. For comparison, after the German blitzkrieg through
the Ardennes in southern Belgium on May 10, 1940, 1.2
million Belgians became refugees in three weeks’ time.
The population of Belgium was about 8.5 million at the
time.
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