STOP NATO: ¡NO PASARAN! - HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK
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Dear Richard,
Thanks for the insightful comments on
this - thoroughly - distressing topic.
The most perplexing, most damnable aspect of this
whole affair has been the enthusiastic support of,
when not aggressive agitation for, NATO's wars in the
Balkans by many ostensibly anti-establishment and even
on the left.
I'll add a few additional sources after your comments.
> It's the old "we haven't/didn't do enough" line, to
> pysche up establishment liberals/ left to support
> the
> policy and campaign for it.
>
> What they are saying is "the West's governments and
> establishment politicians were always doing deals
> with
> Milosevic", so liberals/lefties will demand MORE
> action and feel good in themselves at attacking the
> establishment for their misdeeeds, thereby
> transforming the anti-Jugoslav campaign into a
> trendie liberal/left ie one.
> If anyone doubts this I have had bitter arguements
> with such people for the last DECADE, I repeat
> DECADE,
> all convinced "we must intervene more" and the
> Jugoslavs are monsters/fiends/invading themselves
> etc.
>
> Also the same technique was the basis of
> American/British propaganda to get America into WW1
As you've perceptively picked up on the prototype of
this betrayal being that of World War I, the single
most important historical writing I know of on this
analogy is that of the American radical Randolph
Bourne written 1n 1917 - "War And The Intellectuals."
I'm appending it below, as I went back to it again and
again during the war against Yugoslavia in 1999 and,
if a few person/place names were changed, it seemed
perfectly contemporary in its analysis and
accusations.
As supplements, see also (though it's not a perfect
piece) Philip Knightley's "Propaganda Wars" from The
Independent of June 27, 1999:
http://www.transnational.org/features/propagandawars.html
for an insightful study of the origin of "atrocity
stories" during the Boer War and World War I used to
build up war fever.
See also Part Two of Diana Johnstone's "Yugoslavia:
Through A Glass Darkly" at Emperor's New Clothes
(http://www.emperors-clothes.com - Search) for an
investigation of the role of public relations firms,
reporters and so-called NGOs, and the role of all in
both subverting local community control and in beating
the war drums in the Balkans.
http://www.bigeye.com/thewar.htm
Reprinted from The Seven Arts, II (June 1917), pp.
133-146.
The War and the Intellectuals
Randolph Bourne
To those of us who still retain an irreconcilable
animus against war, it has been a bitter experience to
see the unanimity with which the American
intellectuals have thrown their support to the use of
war-technique in the crisis in which America found
herself. Socialists, college professors, publicists,
new-republicans, practitioners of literature, have
vied with each other in confirming with their
intellectual faith the collapse of neutrality and the
riveting of the war-mind on a hundred million more of
the world's people. And the intellectuals are not
content with confirming our belligerent gesture. They
are now complacently asserting that it was they who
effectively willed it, against the hesitation and dim
perceptions of the American democratic masses. A war
made deliberately by the intellectuals! A calm moral
verdict, arrived at after a penetrating study of
inexorable facts! Sluggish masses, too remote from the
world-conflict to be stirred, too lacking in intellect
to perceive their danger! An alert intellectual class,
saving the people in spite of themselves, biding their
time with Fabian strategy until the nation could be
moved into war without serious resistance! An
intellectual class, gently guiding a nation through
sheer force of ideas into what the other nations
entered only through predatory craft or popular
hysteria or militarist madness! A war free from any
taint of self-seeking, a war that will secure the
triumph of democracy and internationalize the world!
This is the picture which the more self-conscious
intellectuals have formed of themselves, and which
they are slowly impressing upon a population which is
being led no man knows whither by an indubitably
intellectualized President. And they are right, in
that the war certainly did not spring from hysterias,
of the American people, however acquiescent the masses
prove to be, and however clearly the intellectuals
prove their putative intuition.
Those intellectuals who have felt themselves totally
out of sympathy with this drag toward war will seek
