>The "clearheaded" L-M is out of business because they were caught in a rather
>bold-faced lie about ethnic cleaning in Yugoslavia by some mainstream
>journalists who had no compunctions about using British libel law to make
>that point.
The bold-faced lie, in my opinion, has been the Western mass media's attempt to force us to understand the dissolution of Yugoslavia as if it were the World War II ("the West appeasing and then fighting fascists"). According to the mass media, Serbia = Nazi Germany, Bosnian Muslims who rallied for Alija Izetbegovic = Jews in concentration camps. Both Saddam Hussein and Milosevic have been compared to Hitler by the mass media and in some quarters of the Western Left. Why? Because both _had_ to be presented as extraordinarily evil, the demonic powers that rivaled the Nazis, in order to sway the opinion of liberals & leftists. And the media framing succeeded, in Germany, in the USA, in the U.K., and many other parts of the West. (It was less successful in the manufacturing of consent in Italy, Greece, etc. & the Third World.) The rhetoric matters a lot in the manufacturing of consent (recall Chomsky's ideas of worthy and unworthy victims, to take just one example; the Serbs & the Hutus who have been murdered or displaced became unworthy victims in the mass media). Serbian deeds _had_ to be compared to Nazi deeds, not American deeds during the Vietnam War for instance, even though American tactics -- be they direct or through proxies -- have been incomparably worse throughout its long imperial history up to the present than anything done by the Serbs during the civil war. The thought that all combatants in the Yugoslav civil wars committed atrocities is a big ideological no-no (forget Nasir Oric and his kind). As for the SAPs that impoverished Yugoslavia (beginning in 1980), providing the material cause for its endgame, they are truly unspeakable.
>Yoshie again:
><< What is surreal?
>
>1. Anyone who questions the mass media's framing of this issue risks being
>taken for mouthing "surreal" nonsense, or worse yet, an apologia for
>genocide. To me, what is truly genocidal is the continued reproduction &
>expansion of capitalism worldwide. I say this based upon works by such
>scholars as Amartya Sen (no socialist, much less "Stalinist"). Ever read
>"More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing," _New York Review of Books_,
>December 20, 1990?
>
>2. What's really surreal, in my view, is that those who reproduce the mass
>media's framing do not have to respond to criticisms of it; they simply need
>to repeat keywords: genocide, mass murder, Stalinism, etc. Ideology defines
>the terms of debate, and anyone who offers an alternative explanation (e.g.,
>alternative to the idea that the dominant Hutus tried to exterminate the
>Tutsi minority in genocide motivated by ethnic hatred in 1994) as Heartfield
>has gets accused of "denial" of genocide. In ideology, it doesn't matter
>what happened before or after 1994 in Rwanda, what happened before or after
>1989 in Yugoslavia. Ideology has already defined good and evil and provided
>ethnicized explanations. Historical materialist analysis of the political
>economy of the nations in question as well as of imperialism goes out of
>window. >>
>
>This is farce to the sixteenth power. In the 1930s, Communists and CP
>sympathizers would dismiss accounts of the Moscow trials, of the mass
>starvation in the Ukraine, of the elimination of all of the central
>leadership of the Bolsheviks save Stalin, of mass murder, as these accounts
>appeared in the "mass media," in precisely the same manner you do here,
>because the "bourgeois press always lies." In the 1950s and 1960s, leftists
>celebrated Mao's Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, turning a blind
>eye to accounts in the "mass media" of massive repression and hundreds of
>thousands of deaths, because the "bourgeois press always lies." In the 1970s,
>leftists denied all of the reports of the incredible auto-Holocaust in
>Cambodia conducted by the Khymer Rouge, because the "bourgeois press always
>lies." The FIRST time was tragedy; seventy years and many repeat performance
>later, farce doesn't even begin to describe this willful blindness.
Well, it was the USA that supported Pol Pot, against the Vietnamese Communists. John Pilger writes in "The Long Secret Alliance: Uncle Sam and Pol Pot" (at <http://www.caq.com/CAQ/caq62/caq62PolPot.html>):
***** The US not only helped create conditions that brought Cambodia's Khmer Rouge to power in 1975, but actively supported the genocidal force, politically and financially. By January 1980, the US was secretly funding Pol Pot's exiled forces on the Thai border. The extent of this support-$85 million from 1980 to 1986-was revealed six years later in correspondence between congressional lawyer Jonathan Winer, then counsel to Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation. Winer said the information had come from the Congressional Research Service (CRS). When copies of his letter were circulated, the Reagan administration was furious. Then, without adequately explaining why, Winer repudiated the statistics, while not disputing that they had come from the CRS. In a second letter to Noam Chomsky, however, Winer repeated the original charge, which, he confirmed to me, was "absolutely correct." Washington also backed the Khmer Rouge through the United Nations, which provided Pol Pot's vehicle of return. Although the Khmer Rouge government ceased to exist in January 1979, when the Vietnamese army drove it out, its representatives continued to occupy Cambodia's UN seat. Their right to do so was defended and promoted by Washington as an extension of the Cold War, as a mechanism for US revenge on Vietnam, and as part of its new alliance with China (Pol Pot's principal underwriter and Vietnam's ancient foe). In 1981, President Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, said, "I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot." The US, he added, "winked publicly" as China sent arms to the Khmer Rouge through Thailand. As a cover for its secret war against Cambodia, Washington set up the Kampuchean Emergency Group (KEG) in the US embassy in Bangkok and on the Thai-Cambodian border. KEG's job was to "monitor" the distribution of Western humanitarian supplies sent to the refugee camps in Thailand and to ensure that Khmer Rouge bases were fed. Working through "Task Force 80" of the Thai Army, which had liaison officers with the Khmer Rouge, the Americans ensured a constant flow of UN supplies. Two US relief aid workers, Linda Mason and Roger Brown, later wrote, "The US Government insisted that the Khmer Rouge be fed ... the US prefered that the Khmer Rouge operation benefit from the credibility of an internationally known relief operation." In 1980, under US pressure, the World Food Program handed over food worth $12 million to the Thai army to pass on to the Khmer Rouge. According to former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, "20,000 to 40,000 Pol Pot guerrillas benefited." This aid helped restore the Khmer Rouge to a fighting force, based in Thailand, from which it Although ostensibly a State Department operation, KEG's principals were intelligence officers with long experience in Indochina. In the early 1980s it was run by Michael Eiland, whose career underscored the continuity of American intervention in Indochina.... *****
Read the full article at the URL supplied above.
Anyhow, as I said before, you have not supplied any concrete response, based upon research, to criticisms of the imperial media. The only thing you have to say is such criticisms are by definition "Stalinist."
BTW, it's interesting that in your mind, the CPers, Trotskyists, Stalinists, Chomskyists, etc. are all the same -- as if leftists had never had fratricidal ideological struggles! You really live in the most reductionist of the anticommunist worldviews, don't you? I rather prefer more sophisticated anticommunists to your kind.
>And "genocide" is now just an ideological frame, a social construction of the
>"mass media": is Yoshie a pen name for Alan Skokal, and this line of
>argumentation the latest take-off on inanity in the name of post-modernism?
Mass murders were committed by many Hutus in the course of the U.S.-backed RPF invasion of Rwanda (beginning in 1990), evidence of which has been documented by Joan Casòliva and Joan Carrero (see the post titled "Rwanda & the USA"), among others; as I said, history did not begin in 1994, and the U.S. government was not standing by twaddling its thumbs as you allege -- according to your interpretation, the U.S. government intervened on the "correct" side, so what's your complaint? That the U.S. government did not prevent mass murders in 1994? How can you even _imagine_ it would? Neoliberalism imposed by the U.S. ruling class and governing elite has created economic conditions which are the material cause, and the U.S. imperial plan for Central Africa (with Kagame & Museveni as new instruments) the formal cause, for the mass murders in Rwanda in 1994. This even aside from the colonial legacy left by Europeans -- the Black Man's Burden.
In short, you have _nothing_ to say about Rwanda & Yugoslavia that I have not already heard from mainline articles in the corporate media. In the world of the UFT bureaucracy, I am sure the New York Times & Co. are more reliable sources on imperialism than assorted left-wingers of various political persuasions (all of whom must be "Stalinist-Trotskyist-Maoists"!).
Yoshie