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http://globalresearch.ca/articles/HER312A.html
Propaganda System Number One:
From Diem and Arbenz to Milosevic
by Edward S. Herman
Propaganda, Politics, Power ISSN 1741-0754 Volume
1: 15-28 ~ www.globalresearch.ca The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/HER312A.html
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 A third
feature of the system is that the party lines are regularly supported by
non-governmental and self-proclaimed "non-partisan" thinktanks 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, D.C., Quebec City, and Genoa
(see Herman, "NAFTA, Mexican Meltdown, and the Propaganda System,"
chapter 14 in Myth of the Liberal Media; Rachel Coen, "For Press,
Magenta Hair and Nose Rings Defined Protests," EXTRA! [July-August 2000];
FAIR, "Action Alert: Police Violence in 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 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. And 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 Orwellian statement of 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 cover-up of the hugely
undemocratic aftermath of the successful termination of the brief democratic
experiment (on the history of this propaganda campaign, Edward Herman,
"Returning Guatemala to the Fold," in Gary Rawnsley, ed., Cold-War
Propaganda in the 1950s [Macmillan, 1999]; more broadly, Piero Gleijeses,
Shattered Hope [Princeton, 1991]). 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, very
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," Oct. 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, chap. 7.) Hague Tribunal: Serving Us, So No Awkward Questions, Please!
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 very
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, and 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 man 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. This is deep bias. 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. Disinformation as Consensus History: 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
Holbrooke should be being 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 78-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, Jan. 19, 1999; Professor Dusan Dunjic [a Serb medical participant in
the autopsies], "The (Ab)use of Forensic Medicine," ; 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,"]. 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, Dec. 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
3-4000 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 itself, 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, New York Times, 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 [Aug.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 9. THE
DICTATOR AS RESPONSIBLE KILLER. In Manufacturing Consent Chomsky and I showed
how in the case of the murder of Jerzy Popieuszko 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 itself (e.g., Bob
Graham and Tom Walker, "Milosevic Ordered Hiding of Bodies," Sunday
Times [ 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. And 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. The Centre
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