--- Begin Message ---
In the haunted British hack tradition of Victor Marsden, Churchill,
Douglas Reed, Ian Fleming, Telegraph, Spectator, etc, etc, comes
another (Sick) Orwell. Enjoy!!!!
MacNamara
http://www.spintechmag.com/0105/jy0501.htm
Spintech: May 20, 2001
Open Letter on Christopher Hitchens to Avi Lewis
Jim Yarker
April 21, 2001
Dear Avi,
For the second time in the last month or so I've been treated to the
nauseating spectacle of Christopher Hitchens presenting himself in
the electronic media as a scourge of U.S. "war criminals." The most
recent case was just three nights back, on your TV program
CounterSpin. The first was an interview he did with the almost
identically-named radio program produced by FAIR, CounterSpin. In
both cases the "theme" was his book on the war crimes and other
iniquities of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Your program
featured Hitchens in "debate" on the merits of Kissinger with a
laughable Nixonian dinosaur.
Drawing upon his apparently inexhaustible reserves of gall, Mr.
Hitchens wants us to believe he takes umbrage at U.S. leaders
launching aggressive wars, bombing civilians, and so on. This is the
same Hitchens who, for the last decade or so, has served as a
leading "left-lib" supporter of U.S. aggression, destabilization, and
illegal intervention against Yugoslavia, until recently one of the
most economically and politically sovereign countries in Europe.
Hitchens teamed up with some of America's most odious neo-con
imperialists in the "American Committee to Save Bosnia" (ACSB). The
ACSB lobbied for expanded U.S. intervention on behalf of the
fascistic Bosniak r�gime of Alija Izetbegovic, whose rapsheet of war
crimes is impressive and well-documented. A government of recycled
and second-generation Ustashas, whose cronies have embezzled millions
in "international aid." Izetbegovic survived in power only through a
combination of U.S. arms transfers (including illegal ones in mockery
of an "international arms embargo'), the trampling of Bosnia's own
republic constitution that mandated a rotating presidency, and
utterly massive vote fraud. To this day Hitchens denies the many
crimes of Washington's puppet r�gime in Sarajevo, including staged
bombing massacres of its own people in order to frame the Bosnian
Serb Army and provide Nato with a pretext for bombing Serb-held
Bosnia, which duly followed, in concert with the mass slaughter and
expulsion of Serbs from the Bosnian and Croatian Krajina. The latter
operations claimed 1000's of Serb lives and made displaced Serbs in
the rump Yugoslav federation the largest refugee population in
Europe. And thanks to the mendacious clamour of discount Balkanists
like CH, Serb-inhabited Bosnia has been rendered a depleted uranium
wasteland. Where are the Hitchenses and the Sontags now to "save"
Bosnian Serbs dying from the toxic ravages of Nato bombing?
More recently Hitchens lent his full support to Nato's criminal
bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, and vituperated against even the
mildest and most qualified objections to the war from fellow left-
libs such as Noam Chomsky and Tom Hayden. This "humanitarian
intervention," bearing the ironic acronym OAF (Operation Allied
Force), involved a host of brazen, text-book war crimes and
violations of humanitarian law, including: the deliberate bombardment
of vital civilian infrastructure, killing 1000's of non-combatants,
conspiracy to initiate a war of aggression, the willful and lethal
targeting of journalists, the use of anti-personnel weapons such as
cluster bombs in areas of high civilian concentration far removed
from any military conflict, and bombing with the intent and effect of
unleashing environmental catastrophe. As I listened to Hitchens
pontificate about the criminality of targeting civilians, committing
aggression, and so on, I realized that the word "Yugoslavia" could
replace "Cambodia" in virtually every sentence, and likewise the
words "Albright" and "Clinton" could substitute
for "Kissinger," "Nixon," etc.
As you cut for a commercial break I heard Hitchens exclaim, apropos
of the "debate" underway, that "this is too easy." Well, of course it
was, but then that was the whole idea behind his phony, self-
promoting "expos�" of Kissinger and the book tour around it. That
Kissinger and Nixon were the architects of some of the most heinous
Western war crimes of the post-WWII era is very old news, and has
long since become a part of safe left-liberal orthodoxy with regard
to Indochina. Doonesbury cartoons were calling Kissinger a war
criminal 25 years ago. Hitchens puts absolutely nothing on the line
in his smug, self-contained left-lib milieu with these "claims."
Basically, we've heard them all before, and know they're true. This
is a transparent bid to polish his deservedly � though not
sufficiently! - tarnished reputation as a "critic" of U.S. foreign
policy. If he had any guts and any minimal human decency, he'd go
after the what John Dolan calls the "the denim and suede fascists" �
viz. his bomb-throwing colleagues at Salon, Vanity Fair, The Nation
and elsewhere whose decade of racist shilling, lies, and arrogant
hyperbole about "the Serbs" have helped to visit so much avoidable
terror and destruction on the people of the Balkans.
I must say, Avi, that it's pretty disappointing to see this
pompous "anti-imperialist" poseur still being taken seriously on the
Left at all, and being granted fawning, soft-ball interviews on
programs like yours and FAIR's. CounterSpin squandered a good
opportunity for its own tv expos� of this fake-left warmonger. But
with any luck some enterprising free-lance war crimes investigators
will track him down and picket his book-signings and speaking
engagements, sporting "HITCHENS THE WAR CRIMINAL" placards, and
leafleting the crowd, and then things won't be so "easy."
Sincerely,
Jim Yarker
Toronto
http://www.counterpunch.org/snitch.html
Hitch the Snitch
"'Okay,' I said, giving him a chance to rationalize his snitching,
which all informants have to do when they start out."
J. Wambaugh, Blue Night
Many people go through life rehearsing a role they feel that the
fates have in store for them, and we've long thought that Christopher
Hitchens has been asking himself for years how it would feel to plant
the Judas kiss. Indeed an attempted physical embrace has often been
part of the rehearsal. Many's the time male friends have had to push
Hitchens' mouth, fragrant with martinis away, as, amid the welcomes
and good-byes, he seeks their cheek or lips.
And now, as a Judas and a snitch, Hitchens has made the big time. On
February 5, amid the embers of the impeachment trial, he trotted
along to Congress and swore out an affidavit that he and his wife,
Carol Blue, had lunch with White House aide Sidney Blumenthal last
March 19 and that Blumenthal had described Monica Lewinsky as a
stalker. Since Blumenthal had just claimed in his deposition to the
House impeachment managers that he had no idea how this linking of
the White House stalker stories had started, Hitchens' affidavit was
about as flat a statement as anyone could want that Blumenthal has
perjured himself, thus exposing himself to a sentence of up to five
years in prison. At the very least, Hitchens has probably cost
Blumenthal about $100,000 in fresh legal expenses on top of the
$200,000 tab he's already facing. Some friend.
And we are indeed talking about friendship here. They've been pals
for years and Hitchens has not been shy about trumpeting the fact.
Last spring, when it looked as though Blumenthal was going to be
subpoenaed by prosecutor Starr for his journalistic contacts,
Hitchens blared his readiness to stand shoulder to shoulder with his
comrade: "...together we have soldiered against the neoconservative
ratbags," Hitchens wrote in The Nation last spring. "Our life a deux
has been, and remains an open book. Do your worst. Nothing will
prevent me from gnawing a future bone at his table or, I trust, him
from gnawing in return." This was in an edition of The Nation dated
March 30, 1998, a fact which means -- given The Nation's scheduling
practices-- that Hitchens just writing these loyal lines immediately
before the lunch -- Hitchens now says he thinks it was on March 17,
at the Occidental Restaurant near the White House -- whose
conversational menu Hitchens would be sharing with these same neo-
conservative, right-wing ratbags ten months later.
The surest way to get a secret into mass circulation is to tell it to
Hitchens, swearing him to silence as one does so. His friends have
known this for years. As a compulsive tattler and gossip Hitchens
gets a frisson we'd guess to be quasi-sexual in psychological
orientation out of the act of tattling or betrayal.
This brings us to Hitchens' snitch psychology, and the years of
psychic preparation that launched him into the affidavit against his
friend Blumenthal. Like those who question themselves about the
imagined future role -- "would I really leap through fire to save my
friend", "would I stay silent if threatened with torture" -- Hitchens
has, we feel certain, brooded constantly about the conditions under
which he might snitch, or inform. A good many years ago we were
discussing the German Baader-Meinhof gang, some of whose members were
on the run at the time. Hitchens, as is his wont, stirred himself
into a grand little typhoon of moral outrage against the gang, whose
reckless ultra-leftism was, he said, only doing good to the
right. "If one of them came to my front door seeking shelter,"
Hitchens cried, "I would call the police in an instant and turn him
in!" Would you just, we remember thinking at the time. We've often
thought about that outburst since, and whether in fact Christopher
was at some level already in the snitch business.
Over the past couple of years the matter of George Orwell's snitching
has been a public issue. Orwell, in the dawn days of the cold war and
not long before his own death, compiled a snitch list of Commies and
fellow travelers and turned them over to Cynthia Kirwan, a woman for
whom he'd had the hots and who worked for the British secret police.
Now, Orwell is Hitchens' idol, and he lost no time in defending
Orwell's snitch list in Vanity Fair and The Nation. Finally,
CounterPunch co-editor Alexander Cockburn wrote a Nation column
giving the anti-Orwell point of view, taking the line that the list
was mostly idle gossip, patently racist and anti-Semitic, part and
parcel of McCarthyism. Bottom line snitching to the secret police
wouldn't do. Hitchens seemed genuinely surprised by our basic
position that snitching is a dirty business, to be shunned by all
decent people.
Then, in the middle of last week, he snitched on Sidney. Why did he
do it? We didn't see him with Tim Russert on Meet The Press, but
apparently he looked ratty, his physical demeanor not enhanced by a
new beard. We have read the transcript where, as we anticipated,
Hitchens says he simply couldn't let the Clinton White House get away
with denials that they had been in the business of slandering women
dangerous to them, like Monica, or Kathleen Willey.
There were couple of moments of echt Hitchens. Unlike Blumenthal,
Hitchens said, "I don't have a lawyer." Only Hitchens could charge
someone with perjury and then sneer that the object of his
accusations was contemptible for having a legal representative. And
only Hitchens could publicly declare Blumenthal to have lied to
Congress and then with his next breath affirm in a voice quivering
with all the gallantry of loyal friendship that "I would rather be
held in contempt of court" than to testify in any separate court
action brought against Blumenthal.
Did Hitchens really think things through when he told the House
impeachment people towards the end of last week he was willing to
swear out an affidavit on the matter of the famous March lunch? Does
he think that with this affidavit he "reverse the whole impeachment
tide, bring Clinton down? Or is he, as Joan Bingham told Lloyd Grove
of the Washington Post, merely trying to promote a forthcoming book?
A woman who knows Hitchens well and who is inclined to forgive, has
suggested that the booze has finally got to him and that his behavior
exhibits all the symptoms of chronic alcoholism: an impulsive act,
dramatically embarked upon and, in the aftermath, only vaguely
apprehended by the perp.
It's true, Hitchens does drink a staggering amount with, as all
acquaintances will agree, a truly amazing capacity to pull himself
together and declaim in a coherent manner while pint of alcohol and
gallons of wine are coursing through his bloodstream. But he does
indeed seem only vaguely to understand what he has done to Sidney. On
Sunday February 7, he was telling one journalist that he still
thought his friendship with Sidney could be saved. By Tuesday, he was
filing a Nation column, once again reiterating his friendship for
Blumenthal, intimating he'd done him a big favor, blaming Clinton for
everything he, Hitchens, was doing to Blumenthal and concluding with
a truly revolting whine of self-pity that the whole affair would
probably end with he, Hitchens, being cited for contempt of court.
Perhaps more zealously than most, Hitchens has always liked to have
it both ways, identifying himself as a man of the left while, in fact
being, as was his hero Orwell particularly towards the end of his
life, a man of the right. "I dare say I'll be cut and shunned," he
told the Washington Post and we had the sense of a halo being tried
for size, with Hitchens measuring himself for martyrdom as the only
leftist who can truly think through the moral consequences of
Clintonism and take appropriate action.
But the problem is that even though Chris Buckley, also quoted by
Lloyd Grove in the Washington Post, tried to dress up the affair with
the historical dignity of return of the duel between Alger Hiss and
Whitaker Chambers, this is a footnote to history, costly though the
footnote will be costly to Blumenthal at least in lawyers' fees. The
worst price Hitchens will have to pay will be in terms of Georgetown
party invitations. In Georgetown, as Buckley also told Grove in The
Washington Post, it is "a tectonic event for our crowd."
There is the final question: is Hitchens making it all up, about the
March 17 lunch? Blumenthal says he has no recollection, and adds, as
all agree, that there had already been hundreds of references in the
press to Monica being a stalker, and he may just have repeated to
Hitchens and Blue what he'd read in the papers. It was a month,
remember, when the White House was being very careful in what it was
saying about Monica because they were uncertain which way she would
jump and didn't want to piss her off. Joe Conason of The New York
Observer, certainly an eager recipient of White House slants at the
time, says he spoke to Blumenthal in that period and Blumenthal
refused to talk about Lewinsky at all. It's true, Hitchens can be a
terrific fibber, but, short of willful misrepresentation, maybe,
amidst his insensate hatred for Clinton he's remembered the
conversation the way he deems it to have taken place rather than the
way it actually happened. In his own affidavit Hitchens did not say
that Blumenthal had directly cited Clinton as describing Lewinsky as
a stalker and on CNN he tagged only Blumenthal as describing Monica
thus. Yet, in her affidavit, filed after her husband's from the west
coast where she has been staying, Carol Blue said that Blumenthal had
indeed cited Clinton has describing Lewinsky as a stalker and also as
crazy. It seems extraordinary that Hitchens and Blue couldn't get
their affidavits straight, and it seems that Blue's affidavit was
filed purely with the intention of further damaging Blumenthal--which
indeed it has.
We think Hitchens has done something utterly despicable. It wasn't so
long ago that he was confiding to a Nation colleague, in solemn
tones, that for him the most disgusting aspect of the White House's
overall disgusting behavior was "what they have done to my friend
Sidney". He's probably still saying it. Hitchens always could cobble
up a moral posture out of the most unpromising material. CP
http://zena.secureforum.com/Znet/zmag/zarticle.cfm?
Url=/articles/jan2000herman.htm
Hitchens on
Serbia and East Timor
By Edward S. Herman
In each U.S. war there are liberals and leftists who lend it support,
and even larger numbers who don't oppose it because the issues and
stakes involved seem unclear. Both support and silence are encouraged
by the invariable demonization of the enemy and the surge of
patriotic support for our troops fighting the demon, which makes
opposition costly. Liberals like Anthony Lewis, under steady attack
for their mildly dissenting views, are eager to join the
establishment throng in an Operation Benevolence, and as they age
they find it less and less difficult to see their country doing good
as it bombs and sanctions the forces of evil abroad.
The liberal and left response to U.S. wars varies by the nature of
the war, the character of the target�and ease and effectiveness of
demonization�and the state of liberalism and the left. However, even
in the most blatant cases of imperial aggression for a bad cause, as
in the U.S. attacks on Guatemala (1954), Vietnam (1949-1975), the
Dominican Republic (1965), and Nicaragua (1981-1990), there were
numerous liberals and some leftists who gave intellectual service to
the state.
It was, of course, much easier to support the Persian Gulf War, as
Saddam Hussein had committed aggression against Kuwait and he was
(and is) a brutal dictator. In addition, he was an enemy of Israel
and Israel was pleased to see him crushed militarily, a factor that
fed into liberal-left opinion in this country. In the case of
Yugoslavia, also, liberal-left support of a U.S.-led war was greatly
aided by the fact that Milosevic, if not a brutal dictator was a
manipulative and opportunistic leader who used nationalistic appeals
and violence against Serbian enemies without much scruple. Although
hardly alone as a sponsor of violence in the Yugoslavia breakup, and
in fact the head of a state and ethnic group that was the target of
Western political attack from 1990 if not earlier, Milosevic was the
chosen demon and was given the same "another Hitler" treatment in the
U.S. as his predecessors (most recently, Manuel Noriega and Saddam
Hussein).
Liberals and leftists who joined the NATO crusade against Milosevic
had at least three serious problems to contend with in justifying
their support. One is that NATO bypassed UN authority and ignored
international law in attacking Yugoslavia. A second is that NATO
deliberately and openly used extreme violence against the Serbian
civil society to achieve its political aims in the Kosovo war. As in
Iraq, the entire population was victimized as a collective hostage,
and the means employed were in violation of the rules of war.
Christopher Simpson has pointed out that infrastructure attacks such
as NATO carried out against Serbia were labelled "terrorism" by a
1999 President's Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection, if
done against the U.S. Anthony Lewis has deteriorated morally to the
point where he finds this mode of war to be fine because Serbian
civilians deserve it, having supported the "tyrant." The
contradiction between calling Milosevic a dictator-tyrant and blaming
the Serbian populace for the dictator's actions was widespread in
liberal writings. Other liberals and leftists were unconcerned with
the plight of Serbs, who had been made "unworthy victims"
and "unpeople" by the political establishment, and the liberals and
leftists joined this throng.
A third problem for pro-war liberals and leftists has been fending
off evidence that the NATO powers were heavily responsible for the
breakup and ethnic group struggle for spatial control in the former
Yugoslavia, and that NATO didn't want a peaceful resolution to the
Kosovo crisis but instead wanted to punish and weaken or destroy
Serbia. The liberal-leftist warriors have largely avoided this set of
issues, and implicitly or openly claimed that NATO's effort was truly
humanitarian.
On negotiations versus war there is a telling analogy between U.S.-
NATO policy in Kosovo and the earlier U.S. policy in the Persian
Gulf. After Iraq occupied Kuwait on August 2, 1990, virtually by U.S.
invitation, Saddam Hussein became aware that he had misunderstood
U.S. signals and he was prepared to get out with only face-saving
concessions. But the Bush administration wouldn't let him exit
without "his tail between his legs" (Dick Cheney), rejecting a string
of negotiating offers by Iraq and third parties. In the pre-bombing
maneuvering in 1990-1991 the mainstream media served as perfect
propaganda instruments of the state, claiming that Saddam was
unwilling to negotiate and setting the stage for the destruction of
Iraq.
In the case of Kosovo, it is now on the record that NATO put up
conditions at Rambouillet designed to be rejected in order to permit
the destruction of Serbia and NATO occupation of Kosovo. One State
Department official eventually acknowledged that "We intentionally
set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They needed some
bombing." Serbia had made negotiating proposals that could easily
have led to a peaceful resolution of that crisis, but NATO didn't
want that, the media pretended that Serbia was blocking negotiations,
and as with Iraq, the ground was laid for returning the target to the
stone age.
Christopher Hitchens has several serious problems in writing on the
Kosovo war. One is that although he hates Clinton passionately, he
hates the Serbs even more and is driven into the position of
supporting and justifying Clinton's war despite its approval of a
major Clinton enterprise. His hatred of Serbs and Milosevic is so
intense that he comes off as a racist and supporter of ethnic
cleansing and mass killing, if the victims are Serbs. The Serb army,
much of it a conscript army, is "drunken robotic militias" ("Port
Huron Piffle," The Nation, June 14), and in his latest he notes
that, "The NATO intervention repatriated all or most of the refugees
and killed at least some of the cleansers" ("Genocide and the Body-
Baggers," The Nation, November 29). That is all he ever says about
Serb victims of the NATO war, many thousands of whom were ordinary
civilians, but "unpersons" for Hitchens. He mentions that one alleged
plan for Kosovo by the "slavo-fascists" was "importing of Serb
settlers from Krajina." He has not a word of sympathy for the several
hundred thousand Serbs ethnically cleansed from Krajina, never
expresses concern that Clinton and NATO supported that expulsion or
suggests that they should be repatriated to the homes from which they
were driven. Now that the NATO-KLA alliance is in charge of Kosovo,
the ecumenical ethnic cleansing of several hundred thousand Serbs,
gypsies, and Turks doesn't concern him any more than the
dead "cleansers." He never mentions that several thousand Albanians
live in Belgrade, and are not abused there by the slavo-fascists,
which suggests that the Serb actions in Kosovo cannot be explained by
a model of "genocide."
A second problem for Hitchens is that as a leftist he should be
against an imperialist war, and a war led by Clinton and Blair
against a small country doing its brutal repression within its own
borders has a strong smell of imperialism. Hitchens says
that "Chomsky really does oppose imperialist war on principle. But
his argument [in his The New Military Humanism] rests too heavily on
the issue of double standards." This is both an evasion of the issues
and a misrepresentation of Chomsky's position. The main issues are,
first, the war's effects; second, its compatability with the rule of
law; and third, the motivations and aims of the war-makers�whether
they were driven by humanitarian concerns or by more mundane
political-economic factors.
On motivation and aims, Hitchens refuses to discuss this in his
November 29 piece, but earlier he stated that NATO responded "when
the sheer exorbitance of the crimes in Kosovo became impossible to
ignore." In other words, Clinton was driven by humanistic concerns.
This, of course, is nonsense�the crimes in Kosovo by the time the
NATO bombing began were far less extensive than those in Turkey or
East Timor, which Clinton found it easy to ignore and even support,
so anybody not snowed by NATO propaganda and/or an anti-Serb fanatic,
requires a bit more. NATO propagandists, of course, provided this
with claims of the destabilizing effects of the Kosovo struggle that
necessitated bombing, and by inflating and dwelling intently on Serb
crimes preparatory to military action. NATO's demonization comports
well with Hitchens's own demonization and double standard.
On the first issue, of effects, Hitchens is happy with the results
("The NATO intervention repatriated all or most of the refugees...").
He ignores the misery and deaths in the exodus precipitated by the
bombing (which Hitchens supported), and anticipated by NATO, and the
current 300,000 homeless Kosovo Albanians, as well as the suffering
of the very large number of "unpeople" (ethnically cleansed gypsies,
as well as Serbs within Kosovo and in the shattered Serbia). On the
question of the rule of law, Hitchens is uninterested, presumably
because of the beneficent results for the worthy victims (of Serbia).
In a remarkable innovation Hitchens goes on to argue that the double
standard "may still be made to operate against itself," and that it
has actually worked out as helpful to the East Timorese. Although the
Western intervention was "disgracefully late (and no punishment was
visited on Indonesian forces or `infrastructures')...it seems to me
obvious that without the Kosovo operation and the exalted motives
that were claimed for it, the pressure to save East Timor would have
been considerably less." This again is nonsense, and is also blatant
apologetics for a Western betrayal and criminal behavior by
Indonesia. East Timor was not saved, it was destroyed, and many
thousands of East Timorese are still held in West Timor under deadly
conditions, without any outcries about "genocide" from Hitchens and
his buddies still spending their energy defending NATO and focusing
on Serb crimes. The attention given to East Timor was not a spinoff
from Kosovo humanitarian claims, but resulted from the publicity
associated with UN-sponsorship of an election for an abused people,
an election nominally supported by Clinton, Blair, et al. The miracle
was not the sadly belated and puny intervention, but the fact that
Clinton and his gang could let Indonesia carry out its savageries
with impunity, even after having proclaimed the new humanitarianism.
Their success in getting away with this major betrayal can be read
from Hitchens's kindly treatment of it.
As regards the double standard involving East Timor, Hitchens says
that Chomsky finished his book "before the international detachments
arrived in Dili and before the Indonesian occupiers sailed away." But
despite the "disgraceful lateness" of the intervention, "I cannot
think of any other ground on which Chomsky could have opposed it."
But Hitchens misses the point in Chomsky's stress on double
standards, which is to show both the frequency with which Western
intervention worsens human rights conditions and the unlikelihood
that the Kosovo intervention was based on any humanitarian concerns.
Chomsky believes that the NATO intervention in Yugoslavia worsened
human rights conditions and the general welfare of the purported
beneficiaries (as well as many others victimized by the attacks) and
that its effects contradicted the claimed humanitarian ends.
In his November 29 article Hitchens asserts that "doing nothing" is a
form of intervention, but in evaluating the West's role in East Timor
he sets aside his own standard and limits the use of the word
intervention to the "disgracefully late" entry of Western troops,
ignoring the West's having done nothing in the face of Indonesian
terror for the prior year (not to mention the prior 24 years of
murderous occupation). Chomsky has pointed out elsewhere that the
United States knew what Indonesia was up to from the beginning of its
disruption of the referendum and had the power to call the whole
thing off, but didn't. If the Serbs had done to Albanians what they
did after the NATO bombing began, and the West only watched and
said "please don't," and after the Indonesians had completed their
dirty work the West sent a small contingent to Pristina, but did
nothing about a hundred thousand Albanians held in Serb concentration
camps, you can be very sure that Hitchens would not treat this so
complacently.
As regards Hitchens statement that he couldn't think of "any other"
grounds than disgraceful lateness why Chomsky would oppose the East
Timor intervention, Chomsky no doubt wouldn't have opposed the
intervention that finally took place, but he would have stressed its
after-the-fact character and the West's failure to intervene to stop
a slaughter before it took place, which it could have done easily and
without resort to bombs.
Hitchens's attempt to show that the Serbs were carrying out something
called genocide in Kosovo is on an intellectual par with his handling
of Chomsky, double standards, and East Timor. He is, of course,
troubled by the fact that the forensic studies are showing fewer
bodies than the NATO spokespersons and apologists had predicted. The
people who "so wittily question the casualty figures in Kosovo" he
calls "revisionists," a misuse of the word as the accused individuals
thought NATO was lying and inflating the count from the
beginning. "Revisionism" for Hitchens means citing evidence contrary
to the Hitchens-NATO claims.
His case for Serb genocide rests, first, on an alleged statement made
in Greece by Serb official, Zoran Angelkovic, that all he wanted was
to reduce the non-Serb population of Kosovo to "a manageable level."
Curiously, this statement, supposedly heard and reported to Hitchens
by a friend, was not picked up by the Greek press. Hitchens asserts
that this "horrific" statement wasn't "quite enough to discompose
some of our native revisionists," though how we are to be discomposed
by unpublished remarks to Hitchens is unclear.
Hitchens supplements this with the claim by his Greek friend that
stage two "would have been the importing of Serbian settlers from the
Krajina." No evidence is given for believing this claim. Again,
NATO's collaboration with Croatia in pushing out those Croatian Serbs
who would allegedly be moved to Kosovo does not disturb Hitchens, or
cause him to condemn the earlier NATO-Croatian operation as genocidal
although it fits precisely his criterion for Serb genocide.
His main argument for Serb genocide is the evidence of what Milosevic
intended for Kosovo, for which "there is no room for doubt." The post-
bombing clearing of the cities rested surely on "a deeply laid
contingency plan...ethnic cleansing squadrons do not just blossom
from nowhere..." (There is really solid evidence that ethnic
cleansing squadrons were organized by the Indonesian army in East
Timor, and allowed to function for many months by the West, but the
word genocide is not applied to that case by Hitchens as the
Indonesians "sailed away" after extended destruction and killing.)
But a contingency plan, if it exists, is not evidence of intent, as
it may be one of many plans and requires a further triggering event
and decision. Milosevic and Angelkovic were steadily willing to allow
large numbers of international monitors in Kosovo and to pledge
increased autonomy for its inhabitants. Hitchens doesn't mention this
alternative "contingency plan," nor the previously mentioned
acceptance of large numbers of Albanians in Serbia who are not being
harassed or expelled.
The accelerated Serb violence and expulsions was a response to NATO
bombing, which the Serbs interpreted correctly as NATO air support
for the KLA. Vicious and counterproductive as that Serb policy was,
it was not genocide, but was part of a sequence of violence and
counter-violence that has been forwarded by the Western policy of
encouraging the dismantlement of the former Yugoslavia. Those
policies, culminating in the NATO bombing assault on Yugoslavia,
pushed so hard by humanitarians Clinton, Albright, and Blair, have
been given important intellectual support by liberals and erstwhile
leftists like Christopher Hitchens.Z
Edward S. Herman is an economist and media analyst. His latest book,
published by Peter Lang, is The Myth of the Liberal Media: An Edward
Herman Reader.
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