KOSOVO AND DOUBLESPEAK
By Edward S. Herman
War, propaganda, and the proliferation of doublespeak have always gone
hand-in-hand. As was the case during the Persian Gulf war, the NATO
war against Yugoslavia witnessed a collapse of mainstream media
integrity and a new surge of doublespeak in the service of the war
party. It was grimly humorous that NATO and its compliant media
partners justified the bombing of Serbian radio and TV on the grounds
of propaganda service to Milosevic's war machine. In reality, the
parallel service of the U.S. and British media differed from that of
the Serbs mainly in their ludicrous self- designation as objective and
propaganda-free.
Let me briefly review here a short-list of purr and snarl words that
have been of outstanding service to U.S. and British propaganda.
Credibility: Credibility is a purr word, that oozes goodness. Hawks
always resort to credibility as a form of flag-waving, using it to
make compromise or withdrawal a form of moral and unpatriotic defeat.
But it is an appeal to irrationality and assures that a mistake can be
transformed into a catastrophe. The media have been extremely lax in
giving uncontested space to Senator John McCain and Zbigniew
Brzezinski to play the credibility gambit and failing to look behind
this purr word to the real issues at stake. And they have thereby
allowed it to serve as an instrument of war propaganda.
Humanitarian bombing: NATO allegedly began bombing in March for
humanitarian purposes. Humanitarian is a purr word, but humanitarian
bombing is an oxymoron, blending the warm-hearted with dealing death.
As the NATO bombing exponentially increased the damage inflicted on
the purported beneficiaries, as well as large numbers of innocent Serb
civilians, it has been anti-humanitarian at all levels. The CIA and
NATO military officials like General Wesley Clark have admitted that
the negative humanitarian effects were expected. The phrase is a
propaganda fraud covering over a hidden agenda, in which Kosovo
Albanian welfare had little or no place. But the media have never
considered the phrase an oxymoron or the policy a human rights fraud.
Victory: With the end of the bombing, the media trumpet the official
view that NATO won a "victory," but they do not ask whether this
triumph was in fulfillment of the alleged humanitarian aim--they have
implicitly abandoned that purported objective in favor of celebrating
a mighty military victory over another tiny and overmatched enemy
power. The NATO and media celebration recalls George Santayana's
words: "Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have
forgotten your aim."
Military targets: NATO repeatedly claimed that it was avoiding
civilian and sticking to military targets. However, it steadily
expanded the definition of military target to encompass anything that
directly or indirectly helped the Serb war effort, so that electric
and water facilities (among other things) primarily serving civilians
were included as military targets. This is in violation of
international law and the army's own rules of warfare, and therefore
amounts to the commission of war crimes. Christopher Simpson recently
cited a President's Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection
finding that the bombing of electric and water facilities in U.S.
cities would be criminal "terrorism." The media have of course never
mentioned this report, which suggests that NATO engaged in wholesale
criminal terrorism, and they have treated the commission of war crimes
with the lightest touch. In fact, pundits like Thomas Friedman of the
New York Times have urged the direct bombing of civilians and thus the
commission of war crimes.
Collateral damage: This is our old friend from the Vietnam and Persian
Gulf wars. It purrs, suggesting inadvertence and "errors." But where
the likelihood of "errors" in a bombing raid have a probability of
over 90 percent, the damage is intentional even if the particular
victims were not targeted. If somebody throws a bomb at an individual
in a crowded theater, and 100 bystanders are also killed, would we say
that the bomb thrower was not clearly guilty of killing the 100
because their deaths were "unintended" and the damage was
"collateral"? The propaganda agencies reserve such purr word excuses
for "humanitarian" bombing.
Negotiations: During the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars, U.S. officials
regularly claimed to be interested in "negotiations," when in reality
they were only ready to accept surrender. With patriotic gullibility
the media swallowed the official propaganda claims and helped pave the
way for war and the prolongation of war. At Rambouillet, NATO offered
Yugoslavia an ultimatum that included NATO's right to occupy all of
Yugoslavia. This offer was one no sovereign nation could accept and
was designed to be rejected. But just as in the earlier cases, the
media accepted the false official claim that Milosevic rather than
NATO was unwilling to negotiate or accept reasonable terms. And once
again the media helped pave the way for war.
Rule of law: This is a purr phrase, that is used only when convenient.
During the Persian Gulf war, at which time the Bush administration
could get Security Council agreement for action against Iraq,
President Bush declared that the issue at stake was the "rule of law"
versus the law of the jungle. However, at the time of the U.S.
incursion into Panama in 1989, when Security Council approval was not
obtainable and the incursion was in clear violation of the OAS
agreement, the matter of law was muted. Similarly, unable to obtain
Security Council approval for the NATO attack on Yugoslavia, with the
attack in evident violation of the UN Charter, and with U.S.
participation eventually in violation of the War Powers Act, U.S. and
NATO officials were singularly uninterested in questions of law. And
the U.S. mainstream media cooperated by setting this issue aside as
well. They now ignore their old favorite Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who
says today that "The aggressors have kicked aside the UN, opening a
new era where might is right."
Genocide and ethnic cleansing: These snarl words have been frequently
applied to the Serbs, helping justify the NATO war. In a recent
masterpiece of propaganda (June 13, 1999), New York Times reporter
Michael Wines explains that "Fifty-four years after the Holocaust
revelations, America and Europe had finally said 'enough,' and struck
a blow against a revival of genocide." The West found a "revival of
genocide" in a locale where some 2000 people had been killed in the
year prior to the NATO attack, which inspired those great moralists
Clinton and Blair to act. If this seems like a relatively small number
in the light of other modern day slaughters, Wines advises us that
"there is a yawning gap between the West and much of the world on the
value of a single life." The West is concerned with each individual
life, so 2000 can understandably activate its sensitive leaders.
Wines does not mention that Clinton and Blair are the leaders
supporting the sanctions against Iraq that, at the time they had "had
enough" of genocide in Kosovo, had killed a million Iraqi civilians.
Blair is still the biggest arms supplier to Indonesia, and both the
moralists sell arms to and are on entirely friendly terms with the
Turkish government that has ethnically cleansed Kurds on a large scale
for many years. The greatest single case of ethnic cleansing in
Yugoslavia in the 1990s occurred at Krajina in Croatia in 1995, where
several hundred thousand Serbs were put to flight and many killed.
This action was done with U.S. and NATO aid and was not objected to in
any way by NATO.
In short, U.S. and NATO policy toward Kosovo has been riddled with
contradictions and hypocrisies, and has enlarged a local human rights
crisis to a regional disaster. This has been helped by a system of
doublespeak that the mainstream media have not only failed to
challenge but have incorporated into their own usage. Contrary to
their proclaimed objectivity, this failure has made them agents of
state propaganda, rather than information servants of a democratic
community.
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