Humanitarian Interventionism
The superlative media critic Ed Herman has teamed up with indy-journalist David Peterson to publish what I consider to be one of the most important series of the last decade over at Monthly Review. It is about Yugoslavia: its history, its break-up, the geopolitical forces involved in that break-up, and the highly successful propaganda effort surrounding US/NATO intervention there for “humanitarian” reasons.
The reason this is so important is that no effort to co-opt left-liberals into support of US military adventures has been so successful. This co-optation was engineered for that very purpose; and the narrative of the propaganda effort has now solidified into the standard history of Yugoslavia to such a degree that to contest it is seen as tantamount to holocaust denial.
DeAnander recently wrote here about the Zionist thaw, the long-overdue breakdown of the pernicious lie that anti-Zionism is synonymous with anti-Semitism… another example of a highly successful disinformation campaign in the US. Herman and Peterson have made an important contiribution here to breaking down the disinformation Yugoslavia, and explaining how this episode paved the way for the current occupation of Iraq. Diane Johnstone has written a very important book that expained this; but this series — now available on line to the general public — will take this story to a far broader audience… with the help of those of us who call attention to it.
When I went to a meeting with my Congressman, Democrat David Price, in 2003, along with other military families opposing the war, we directly asked Congressman Price why the Democrats were failing to cite the United Nations Charter — to which the US is a signatory — when it was so clearly violated (therefore violating US law) in the invasion of Iraq absent a Security Council Resolution. Congressman Price told us — with atypical candor — that they could not cite the UN Charter because Democrats had overwhelmingly violated the same law when they authorized President Bill Clinton to take military action in Yugoslavia.
In my own account of the Jessica Lynch saga, which was incorporated into Sex & War, my book on gender and imperial militarism, there is a fairly detailed account of the hired PR flaks at Rendon Group, who openly boasted that their Serbophobic propaganda on Yugoslavia was designed to vector in support for US miltary intervention from “feminists and Jews.”
This was so successful that the strategy was redeployed in support of liberating women in Afghanistan and Iraq, and transferring the discursive mantle of Adolph Hitler from Milosevic to Saddam.
Here is the series The Dismantling of Yugoslavia: A Study in In Humanitarian Intervention (and a Western Liberal-Left Intellectual and Moral Collapse), by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson.
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The breakup of Yugoslavia provided the fodder for what may have been the most misrepresented series of major events over the past twenty years. The journalistic and historical narratives that were imposed upon these wars have systematically distorted their nature, and were deeply prejudicial, downplaying the external factors that drove Yugoslavia’s breakup while selectively exaggerating and misrepresenting the internal factors. Perhaps no civil wars—and Yugoslavia suffered multiple civil wars across several theaters, at least two of which remain unresolved—have ever been harvested as cynically by foreign powers to establish legal precedents and new categories of international duties and norms. Nor have any other civil wars been turned into such a proving ground for the related notions of “humanitarian intervention” and the “right [or responsibility] to protect.” Yugoslavia’s conflicts were not so much mediated by foreign powers as they were inflamed and exploited by them to advance policy goals. The result was a tsunami of lies and misrepresentations in whose wake the world is still reeling.
From 1991 on, Yugoslavia and its successor states were exploited for ends as crass and as classically realpolitik as: (1) preserving the NATO military alliance despite the disintegration of the Soviet bloc—NATO’s putative reason for existence; (2) overthrowing the UN Charter’s historic commitments to non-interference and respect for the sovereign equality, territorial integrity, and political independence of all states in favor of the right of those more enlightened to interfere in the affairs of “failing” states, and even to wage wars against “rogue” states; (3) humiliating the European Union (EU) (formerly the European Community [EC]) over its inability to act decisively as a threat-making…
Richard:
Thanks so much for this link. I’ve read the Johnstone book, and it’s great (of course, she routinely gets attacked for it).
20 November 2007, 2:36 pmLegume Sam:
The FAIR archives page on the Balkans is a good source of information about the propaganda campaign supporting Clinton’s war on Serbia. My favorite piece is this one, in which we are told this about the Rambouillet ultimatum:
Defenders of the Clinton administration over at Big Orange need to know all about Clinton’s gratuitous war on Serbia.
20 November 2007, 9:53 pmxenia:
Thank you very much Stan. This is a valuable source. Yet, to my mind, the authors still do not emphasize to what extent people were intermixed in many parts of Yugoslavia, especially in the cities. In Bosnia, every fourth urban family was “mixed”. Underestimating this factor leads to distortion, as many people do not lend themselves to easy classifications. As a person who was born in Bosnia in a “mixed” marriage and who lived in both Croatia and Serbia, I have always refused to “decide” which ethnicity I belonged to. Religion is of little concern to me. But this was no mere matter of personal predilection, it could decide political status, medical aid, etc. Various bureaucracies have classified me as Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian…and I have had to bite my tongue.
I am sure that Iraq is very similar. Much of it has its roots in British imperial classification of peoples as “races”. Races, of course, are not supposed to mix, so we have the Greek race, the Turkish race, the Irish race etc, all neatly separated. In that sense, the lessons of Yugoslavia are universal — if you pour enough ideology into people’s heads, they will believe that they are truly intrinsically different, and they will not espouse any common causes.
21 November 2007, 8:59 amDanielle Zora:
stan - i tried to write you at the feral scholar.org on the contact page but it got a failure notice-have spent an hour trying to find the tutu quote you had up previously on swapping bibles for land- do you know where it is from? i am leaving the seminary- it is miore conservative than i imagined and yeah, clearly my imagination is not rooted in 2007-but i would like to go out with a bang so let me know if you know it off the top of your head- love the blog-check it weekly- hope your holidays are happy! say hi to adam sotak if you still see him-
22 November 2007, 2:34 pmStan:
“When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.”
Not sure of the context…
Best to you, Danielle.
23 November 2007, 6:19 amJim:
Thanks for pointing-out a superb series. Another interesting piece, this time regarding Iran, is the review, in Al-Ahram, by Hamid Dabashi of “Reading Lolita in Tehran”: “Native informers and the making of the American Empire” : http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/797/special.htm
23 November 2007, 6:00 pmDirk:
Hello,
this is just an exerpt of Slavoj Žižek. I’m aware that many US-lefists just think he’s a blablabla Lacanian-Postmodernist, but I don’t care; because I think more often than not, he has something to say.
I did just found this quote on a webblog of a german comrade and I remembered the article Stan did post about human interventionism. Here’s the quote:
Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View
On the Critique of Human Rights
6. Januar 2008 in English und Analysis human rights, theory, third world, war
From this specific insight, we should move on to the general level and consider the problem of the very depoliticized humanitarian politics of “Human Rights” as the ideology of military interventionism serving specific economic-political purposes. As Wendy Brown argues apropos of Michael Ignatieff, such humanitarianism “presents itself as something of an antipolitics — a pure defense of the innocent and the powerless against power, a pure defense of the individual against immense and potentially cruel or despotic machineries of culture, state, war, ethnic conflict, tribalism, patriarchy, and other mobilizations of instantiations of collective power against individuals.” […]
What happens to Human Rights, then, when they are reduced to the right of Homo sacer, of those excluded from the political community, reduced to “bare life” — that is to say, when they become useless since they are the rights of those who, precisely, have no rights, are treated as inhuman? Here Rancière suggests a very striking dialectical reversal:
>>when they are of no use, you do the same as charitable persons do with their old clothes. You give them to the poor. Those rights that appear to be useless in their place are sent abroad, along with medicine and clothes, to people deprived of medicine, clothes, and rights. It is in this way, as the result of this process, that the Rights of Man become the rights of those who have no rights, the rights of bare human beings subjected to inhuman repression and inhuman conditions of existence. They become humanitarian rights, the rights of those who cannot enact them, the victims of the absolute denial of right. For all this, they are not void. Political names and political places never become merely void. The void is filled by somebody or something else. … If those who suffer inhuman repression are unable to enact Human Rights that are their last recourse, then somebody else has to inherit their rights in order to enact them in their place. This is what is called the “right to humanitarian interference” — a right that some nations assume to the supposed benefit of victimized populations, and very often against the advice of the humanitarian organizations themselves. The “right to humanitarian interference” might be described as a sort of “return to sender”: the disused rights that had been sent to the rightless are sent back to the senders.
12 January 2008, 12:14 amDirk:
the rest of the quote:
So, to put it in Leninist terms: what the “Human Rights of suffering Third World victims” actually means today, in the predominant Western discourse, is the right of Western powers themselves to intervene — politically, economically, culturally, militarily — in Third World countries of their choice on behalf of the defense of Human Rights. A reference to Lacan’s formula of communication (in which the sender gets back from the receiver-addressee his own message in its inverted — that is, true — form) is absolutely relevant: in the reigning discourse of humanitarian interventionism, the developed West is, in effect, getting back from the victimized Third World its own message in its true form. And the moment Human Rights are depoliticized in this way, the discourse about them has to resort to ethics: reference to the prepolitical opposition of Good and Evil has to be mobilized. Today’s “new reign of Ethics,” clearly discernible in, for example, Michael Ignatieff’s work, thus relies on a violent gesture of depoliticization, of denying the victimized other any political subjectivization.
Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 339, 341.
12 January 2008, 12:16 am