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127 of 144 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Collective guilt, August 1, 2003
Much has been said in times recent about the need for Serbs to come to terms with their collective guilt over the extreme violence surrounding the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. This book makes it abundantly clear that, as far as collective guilt is concerned, it's not the Serbs that should be in the dock.The litany of lies and misinformation that was used to convince the clueless masses of the righteousness of the case against 'the Serbs' is quite astounding. The big lie technique to justify war is well known, and has been documented extensively elsewhere. However, this wasn't the case with the Balkans, where instead many many small lies were used effectively to create a smoke screen around the reality of the situation. These lies were, and still are, constantly and persistently perpetuated by a subservient media and presscorp, hungry for the gratuities earned from deceptions as gratuitous as the carnage they portray. Reports every bit as bad as that last sentence. The small lie that convinced the world that the Serbs were the new Nazis, the so-called 'concentration camp' picture from Trnopolje. The small lie, the Srebrenica massacre, that diverted the worlds attention from a massive piece of cognitive dissonance, the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from the Croatian krajina. It's over 8 years now since the alleged genocide occured, and still the media persists in stating as fact, every time Srebrenica is mentioned, that 7000 Muslim men and boys were slaughtered by Serbs, despite the evidence which is at best inconclusive, and at worst indicative of a grand deception. On the other hand, the media never seems to mention the krajina at all. The small lie about the Croatian and Bosnian leaderships. Would the anti-Serb rhetoric have been so easily swallowed if we had known the truth about Tudjman and Izetbegovic? All of these small lies worked so well because the vast majority of us corn sucking westerners have been so thoroughly depoliticized that we can only see conflicts in terms of human rights violations. Any political context goes straight out the window. This is a bizarre situation, because the first thing defenders of Empire say when confronted with western power atrocities is 'you've got to consider the political context.' And when you only see, and are only told about one sides human rights violations, what else are you going to think. Another irony to come from the Balkans conflicts is the ICTY, and it's relationship to the ICC. The US rejects the ICC because it believes that it will be used for political purposes. Well, duh! That's exactly the precedent set by the ICTY. The whole Milosevic situation, from indictment right through to the trial has been a string of political manipulations. My favourite one is the externally driven kidnapping of Milosevic, and extradition to the Hague, to undermine Kostunicas' credibility, and allow Djinjic (who never was concerned with credibility) to take the power. This book, as the author states, is not the whole story, but it is a good primer. From this and several other books, and numerous essays on the subject (some of the most damning being from Bosnian Muslims and Croats), I'd say that interventionist westerners need to come to terms with their collective guilt.
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by Michael Parenti
by Michel Collon
by J. Bricmont
