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. 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