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| Kosovo War |
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| Scale of Tyrants |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, March 31, 1999. We're at war in Kosovo, and we've had enough of these entertaining things now, going back to Grenada, Lebanon, the Middle East, and specifically Iraq, that certain little journalistic routines be-come so accepted as blather that they have no effect whatsoever on the public. This is good. Nothing denigrates a language more than exaggeration and misuse of words. Nothing prompts those tendencies more than war. It is good, for example, that when Sadaam Hussein was called a new Hitler by members of an exasperated government during the Bush administration, essentially nobody believed it and wrote it off to hyperbole of an exhausted President, which was probably correct. In any case, Hitler is no longer the horror, the epitome of monsterhood he was when I was growing up. First, we now know that Stalin probably killed more, and we have had the Khymer Rouge example, and various others that dilute the effect of genocide, a word misused and overused so much it has no effect whatsoever. But Hitler still stands alone in that he mustered the power of a major state in order to eradicate a specific group of people, people who did him no harm, who were super loyal citizens that could in fact have offered him much help had he not had a personal prejudice against them. His goal, for no reason but irrational hatred and something beyond mere prejudice, was their extermination, and it is possible he invaded Rus-sia and Poland partially to harvest the relatively large populations of Jews there. Nobody else in history has risen so high so long with genocide as a specific goal. Stalin killed people who, he thought, stood in his way. Hitler killed people who would have helped him just because. Hitler still is the monster in history's closet. Milosovich does not, perhaps, seek the extermination of a specific people. He seeks the elevation of Serbs above all others within a greater, mythical Serbia, but he has no hesitation about killing any who disagree with this noble goal. To be sure, there are Croats, and Albanians, and any number of Balkan nitwits who feel the same way, only about their own people, but Milosovich has the power, and he is now busily uprooting ethnic Albanians from their home in Kosovo and pushing them out of the land. Ethnic cleansing, he says it is, and has said for several years. He inches towards Hitlerdom, but he is not there yet. He doesn't resent a people's existence, just their presence on land he would like to give to his own people. This may be cutting it too fine, but for the moment it stands. NATO and the United States in particular have initiated air attacks against Yugoslavia for their horrid behavior and the slaughter of innocents, all wildly popular events in Serbian circles. Our media, which traditionally has trotted out the Munich agreement as a low point in European history, has often inquired what would have happened if France and England had stood up to Germany several years before 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland and from which the Second World War is dated. Investigation has shown that Germany would probably have been crushed, an opinion offered by Albert Speer, Hitler's production genius and the guy who would have known. Western historians have concluded that there should be no more Munichs, no more signing away of people's lives as Neville Chamberlain did to Czechoslovakia and Austria. In the interim, there has been Somalia and Lebanon and Vietnam, which can be oversimplified into attempts to intervene to prevent a worse fate for the indigenous peoples. All were failures, in that tens of thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of probably innocent civilians were killed to no evident purpose. The media again locks on: no more stupid foreign interventions. In Yugoslavia, these arguable mutual exclusives collide. Does civilization allow mass murder and pillage to go unpunished? Does the United States have an exit strategy, and if it does, would you tell the press and therefore your military opponents now so that we can scoop the opposition? The press is confused as to which way to pander to an audience that may have grown sick to death of its news sources' all knowing, self-congratulatory posturing, and its use of aging cliches to express a changing world.American journalism has deteriorated to the point that we now just show microphones under the mouths of people in crisis, hope they say something stupid, incoherent, or bizarre, and then spend the rest of the newscast getting others to react to that statement. They do this rather than investigate an issue themselves, which is expensive and time consuming. It is a routine wearing thin. So when a F117 stealth fighter-bomber went down, apparently with a powerful assist from an aging Sam missile, the microphones were waved and horror went up about the Russians being handed this technology. When it was pointed out that these planes have been around for almost twenty years, and that the technology is well known but requires computers and production methods nobody else on the planet could afford to mass, the issue evaporated. So now people are trying to find a face-saving way to end the fighting. The Russians are trying to rehabilitate Milosovich to a deservedly skeptical world, encouraging the signing of treaties that nobody believes he will adhere to. A Munich, in other words, as an exit strategy. |
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