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| Return to: Left History: a digital archive | Return to: Say no to imperialist wars! | Return to: NATO-Yugoslav War Internet Resources |
Americans should never forget that their government and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization lied through their teeth repeatedly to justify the unjustified attack on Yugoslavia.
The attack, which was never authorized by the United Nations, was justified on "humanitarian grounds" to prevent a "human catastrophe" and "genocide." Why, those nasty old Serbs may have killed 100,000 Kosovars, U.S. politicians speculated. Finally, they seemed to accept the British estimate of 10,000 to 11,000 dead. The American press frenziedly reported these wild accusations and added their own.
Well, after months of being totally in control of Kosovo, guess how many bodies NATO has found. A tad more than 2,100. Some gravesites remain to be examined, but, because the worst were done first, the count isn't likely to go much higher.
Richard Gwyn, a columnist with the Toronto Star, was one of the first to report the discrepancy between NATO assertions and the evidence found so far. He cites a case in which NATO said that as many as 1,000 bodies had been dumped down a mine shaft. Then he reports that the International Criminal Tribunal reported the results of its investigation, using Western forensic experts. How many bodies did they find in the mine shaft? Zero.
Like the soccer stadium at Pristina supposedly filled with Kosovar prisoners, according to our State Department, the mine shaft was empty. There was no genocide. There was no human catastrophe. There was no second holocaust. It was all lies. Comparing a two-hour ride on a passenger train from Pristina to the border with World War II Jews being packed like sardines into cattle cars and shipped all the way across Europe was absurd on its face, but when the national press gets all lathered up, spreading propaganda, nothing is too absurd to report.
Now one might think that the American press, as it discovers that it was lied to and used as a vehicle for propaganda, might be all over the story, exposing these lies and exaggerations. No, members of the press are using their typical tactic: When the facts refute their earlier stories, journalists simply lose interest in reporting it.
So you are probably unaware that, "under the protection of NATO," more than 100,000 Serbs have been forced out of Kosovo and that numerous Christian churches and monasteries have been destroyed or desecrated.
The kernel of the nut is that NATO lied to justify the attack, lied during the attack and lied about its intentions after the attack. Furthermore, the organization is denying aid to Yugoslavia on the grounds that Slobodan Milosevic is still in power, which is the pattern of U.S. and British behavior. After all, 500,000 Iraqi children have died because these toddlers refuse to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Imagine these kids not obeying the U.S. government.
In the first place, Milosevic was elected. Does NATO approve of democracy only when it likes the result of the vote? It seems so. In the second place, if there was no genocide, as there obviously was not, Milosevic is not a war criminal. It's true a lot of Serbs want to throw him out of office, but they are not mad at him for fighting to keep Yugoslavia intact. They are mad at him for losing the wars.
Apparently, though, Americans have become anesthetized to government lying. The American people are lied to all the time about all sorts of things, and it seems not to bother them. That is a sign of a dead society. We may not be a dead poets society, just a dead consumers society.
Oswald Spengler in his Decline of the West published in 1918 predicted the end of Western democracies in the 1990s. His timing made be off a smidgen, but just a smidgen. In the meantime, chalk up Kosovo as one more example of the Big Lie about a genocide that never happened.