Hello everybody,
As a new member of the list, I thought I should send you an article by Mark Steel on the next war in the Balkans. The article can also be found in the following web site. It has a number of interesting articles on the war in Yugoslavia.
http://members.tripod.com/~sarant_2/ks26steele.html
Now the U.S. has a new rationale for its presence in the Balkans and its
coming invasion of Yugoslavia -- to do something about the appalling
"humanitarian tragedy" its own bombing has created. Some European
observers, such as Vaclav Klaus, speaker of the lower house of the Czech
parliament, stated that it was clear that the humanitarian tragedy was a
direct result of NATO bombing, but these statements were, to say the least,
under-reported in the U.S. (And what does Klaus think he's playing at? Does
he want cruise missiles on Prague?)
The rationale for bombing Yugoslavia is so threadbare, so ludicrous, so
absurd, that it carries a simple message: anyone, anywhere in the world may
be bombed. The only precondition I can see is that it's necessary to
prepare American opinion first, but this is a simple matter, given the
"oral-anal contact," to borrow a phrase from the Starr Report, between the
genuflecting American press corps and the U.S. ruling class.
Milosevic has been compared with Hitler, the symbolic message being that a
"dictator" must be stopped before he tries to take over the world. Aside
from the fact that Germany was the world's second industrial power, whereas
Yugoslavia is one of the poorest countries in Europe. Germany in the 1930s
kept on adding territory, whereas Yugoslavia has been losing it. In the
1930s nervous people wondered, where will Germany strike next? Today,
nervous people ask, whom will NATO bomb next? There has been talk of some
NATO members leaving the alliance. But they must hesistate to do this, for
surely any country that leaves NATO might very well be bombed.
This is how it would work. Greece leaves NATO. Immediately, or after a
brief delay to cement the American decimation of the Serb population and
occupation of Yugoslavia, there is a flurry of well-funded seminars about
Greek treatment of ethnic minorities. With NATO funding, Turkish and
Albanian troublemakers do everything they can to engineer incidents that
will exacerbate relations. The thrilling intellectual exercise for the
seminars is this: can Greek behavior be termed "ethnic cleansing," a term
until now reserved only for Serb atrocities?
After six months of this, that question is quietly dropped, and references
to Greek ethnic cleansing become regular and unchallenged. Now the question
is: what shall NATO do about Greek ethnic cleansing? Shall we stand idly by
while this mayhem goes on, or shall we act decisively? Every urban legend
about the Greeks distributed by the Turkish or Albanian equivalents of the
Roswell nuts is taken for gospel by the American media. On the serious TV
talk shows, in the pages of The New York Times and other ruling-class house
journals, all the blinkered apologists for mass murder, one robotic
Kondracke or Barnes or Fund or Ingraham after another, raise this vital
question which we neglect at our peril. On the many Beltway wonk circuits,
plans are eagerly discussed for the bombing of Greece, incorporating all
the practical lessons gained from the bombing of Serbia.
Then, one day, perhaps when the president is, quite by coincidence, facing
a sex or an espionage scandal, we turn on our TV sets to see the Acropolis
in rubble. (We never claimed these weapons had pinpoint accuracy. And, it
so happens, we have just received a disturbing report that the Greeks were
about to use the Acropolis for the mass killing of 50,000 Albanians.) It
comes out that the French had raised an objection to the bombing of Athens,
but were whipped into line with a raised eyebrow. (Do you want to see the
Louvre in flames?)
The model for this operation, and for today's Yugoslav war? Germany's
annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938.