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>From WorldNetDaily
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> -- <Picture: WND Exclusive Commentary>
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> -- Ethnic cleansing, American-style
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>
> By James Bovard
> © 1999 James Bovard
>
> The United States is intervening in a civil war in Yugoslavia.
> President Clinton and other western leaders have justified the NATO
> bombing by the brutal crackdowns that Serbian forces conducted on
> Kosovar Albanian rebels and civilians.
>
> However, prior to the onset of NATO bombing, the actions of the
> Serbian forces may have been less abusive than were the actions of the
> northern armies during our own Civil War. Once the NATO bombing began,
> Serbian persecution and NATO bombs provoked a massive exodus from
> Kosovo. In order to put the Yugoslavian civil war in perspective, it
> is helpful to recall the brutality of our own federal government
> during the War Between the States.
>
> The American Civil War did not involve ethnic cleansing, per se. But
> the attitude of some of the northern commanders paralleled those of
> the Serbian commanders more than many contemporary Americans would
> like to admit. The tens of thousands of southern civilian casualties
> during the war were no accident.
>
> In a Sept. 17, 1863 letter that Union General, William Tecumseh
> Sherman, wrote to the general in chief of the Union Armies: "The
> United States has the right, and ... the ... power, to penetrate to
> every part of the national domain. ... We will remove and destroy
> every obstacle -- if need be, take every life, every acre of land,
> every particle of property, everything that to us seems proper."
> Halleck liked Sherman's letter so much that he passed it on to
> President Lincoln, who declared that it should be published.
>
> On June 21, 1864, before his bloody March to the Sea, Sherman wrote to
> the secretary of war, "There is a class of people [in the South] men,
> women, and children, who must be killed or banished before you can
> hope for peace and order." A few months later, Sherman informed one of
> his subordinates, "I am satisfied ... that the problem of this war
> consists in the awful fact that the present class of men who rule the
> South must be killed outright rather than in the conquest of
> territory, so that hard, bull-dog fighting, and a great deal of it,
> yet remains to be done. ... Therefore, I shall expect you on any and
> all occasions to make bloody results."
>
> On Sept. 27, 1864, Sherman wrote to Gen. John Hood, the confederate
> commander of the Army of Tennessee, and announced that "I have deemed
> it to the interest of the United States that the citizens now residing
> in Atlanta should remove, those who prefer it to go south and the rest
> North." Sherman's comments could have been a model for the Serbian
> leaders who drove ethnic Albanians out of Kosovo.
>
> On Oct. 9, 1864, Sherman wrote to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, "Until we can
> repopulate Georgia, it is useless to occupy it, but the utter
> destruction of its roads, houses, and people will cripple their
> military resources. ... I can make the march, and make Georgia howl."
>
> Scorched-earth tactics were also used in the Shenandoah Valley in
> 1864-65. On Sept. 28, 1864, Gen. Phil Sheridan ordered one of his
> commanders to "leave the Valley a barren waste." Gen. Grant ordered
> Union troops to "make all the valleys south of the Baltimore and Ohio
> railroad a desert as high up as possible ... eat out Virginia clear
> and clean ... so that crows flying over it for the balance of the
> season will have to carry their provender with them." Union General,
> Wesley Merritt, proudly reported to Sheridan on Dec. 3, 1864 that "the
> destruction in the valley, and in the mountains bounding it, was most
> complete."
>
> Many Union officers were horrified at the wanton destruction their
> armies inflicted on the South. On March 8, 1865, Gen. Cyrus Bussey
> reported: "There are several thousand families within the limits of
> this command who are related to and dependent on the Arkansas soldiers
> in our service. These people have nearly all been robbed of everything
> they had by the troops of this command, and are now left destitute and
> compelled to leave their homes to avoid starvation. ... In most
> instances everything has been taken and no receipts given, the people
> turned out to starve, and their effects loaded into trains and sent to
> Kansas."
>
> The source of the preceding quotes is The War of the Rebellion: A
> Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate
> Armies (128 volumes published by the Government Printing Office).
> Thomas Bland Keys compiled some of the most shocking comments in his
> excellent 1991 book, "Uncivil War: Union Army and Navy Excesses in the
> Official Records," published by the Beauvoir Press in Biloxi, Miss.
>
> Some northern leaders claimed to be deeply concerned about the
> wellbeing of slaves liberated by the northern armies. However, Union
> tactics intentionally devastated the economies of much of the South --
> leaving people to struggle for years to avert starvation. This
> destruction made the South's recovery far slower than it otherwise
> would have been -- and greatly increased the misery of both white and
> black survivors. Similarly, the NATO devastation of Kosovo will make
> life far harder for any Kosovo Albanians who do return to their land.
>
> Civil wars routinely show humanity at its worst. U.S. government
> officials have accused both sides of the civil war in Kosovo of
> atrocities. Unfortunately, American bombs have only made a bad
> situation far worse. No amount of Clinton-style righteousness can
> provide a just pretext for the bombing of foreign civilians in the
> name of peace.
>
>
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> --
>
>
> James Bovard is the author of Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State
> & the Demise of the Citizen (St. Martin's Press, 1999). To see the
> first chapter of this book, check out his website, JamesBovard.com.
>
>
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