LIES MY COUNTRY TOLD ME

How the former Yugoslavia is a model of Western interference and disruption under the guise of concern.

Imagine you were at a public function of some kind and one of the participants were to declare themselves a worshipper of the god Zeus. What would your reaction be? No doubt you would assume the person was either joking or absurdly deluded, possibly unstable. You see mythology is largely thought of now as a belief system that existed long ago in order to explain a seemingly unexplainable world to the ignorant masses. And that, in part is true. But there was another dimension to mythology and that is that it allowed for control of those masses. Do what the gods say, via the rulers on earth, and accept our authority as you should accept theirs.

Today we look back on the great unwashed of the ancient world with a sense, ironically, of disbelief. After all, how could people simply be told what is true and adjust their behaviour accordingly. Couldn’t they see that there was little to no proof and that this belief system benefited only the elite? We take a condescending attitude towards them because of it.

But here is where our condescension becomes unintentionally a source of humour. But the laugh comes at our expense. For we in the west live according to a mythology as well. The only difference is the mythology of our time is secular. It is full of untruths and half truths and sometimes, quite accidentally, truth as well. And that mythology allows a very small percentage of our world, the very wealthy, to rule not with an iron hand, but a manipulative one. We have been told the world is a certain way and we must act accordingly. We don’t object, we sheep-like agree and march, very literally in some cases, right along.

The foundation of modern political mythology comes first with a very important premise: that the world is, in fact, quite simple. There are good guys and bad guys and it is incumbent upon the good ones to stop the bad ones from doing bad things. Very fairy tale like. Villains and heroes, dragons and knights, the sort of narrative we soaked up as children. As we grew and we looked around the world we hoped that this bit of chaos had a similar simplicity. It doesn’t, but childlike, we have been gifted with that worldview in the political realm via the elite. Using Yugoslavia as a model of this deceit, I hope to show a flagrant example of the manipulation of worldview which still lingers, despite a plethora of proof that it is a lie today.

Yugolsavia is, perhaps, the most iconic of examples of the sort of manipulation and mythology that has been foisted upon the world in most recent memory. It is a sad comment on the reporting of current events as well as what passes for the history of any country that more people are not enraged not only for what happened in Yugoslavia, but also for the lies that have been consigned to what passes for history today.

So what exactly made this country unique? Remarkably, and similarly remarkably as it is so little known, Yugoslavia conducted a balancing act between the politics of east and west. Never fully willing to embrace the hard communism of The Soviet Union, yet never willing to completely disregard the west and what it had to offer, Marshall Tito walked a fine line. For decades it was an affront to both sides. On the one hand it dealt with state run corporations that gave its people affordable necessities such as heat, medicine, transportation and the like. Yet on the other there was a degree of free enterprise that allowed some individuals to live as an elite, with large homes and privilege that hard communists would have eschewed. Regardless that such elites existed in The Soviet Union, on paper they did not. And to allow for such abominations would have been contrary to official policy. Yugoslavia was much more moderate in their approach.

As a result, Tito, while not turning his back on Mother Russia, at least turned aside from her. As for the west and the illusion of mass wealth for the masses, Titio knew this to be just that, an illusion. And so he walked that fine line between the two, and very successfully.

This was a possible, though awkward, situation as long as there were two sides to walk

between. But with the fall of the Soviet Union and hard communism, Yugoslavia was left prey to the machinations of weterns capitalism. And the west licked their lips at the prospect of dismantling a country who had been a model of socialism as well as ethnic cohesion. It was time to bring the curtain down on the dream of socialism before it spread. The iron hand of capitalism was about to crash down on what was arguably the most successful and peaceful nation of Europe.

Now let’s first examine the “humanitarian” concern that the UN held for Yugoslavia and why they intervened. Even the very term intervened is full of the most peaceful intentions. One intervenes when a situation is getting out of hand and one wants to prevent it from getting worse.

Interesting the UN, acting on the leash of the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Canada and several other minions, perpetrated an intervention that resulted in the dropping of twenty thousand (please note the number) tons of bombs and the killing of upwards of three thousand children, women and men. All in the name of preventing perceived POTENTIAL Serbian atrocities. In fact, as the respected but not surprisingly lesser known political commentator Michael Parenti pointed out in his book To Kill a Nation, until the UN attacked, (let’s now dispense with the euphanistic “intervened”) there was no civil war, no widespread killings and no ethnic cleansing.

What was Yugoslavia before Western attacks? A highly successful model of socialism. The people, ALL the people of the nation regardless of ethnicity, enjoyed a 90% literacy rate, guaranteed right to an income, one month’s vacation a year, a booming economy and a life expectancy that more than rivaled other nations in Europe and around the world that the US\UN marraige had foisted “freedom upon”. Please forgive the frequency of these quotation mark qualifiers, but as we wade through the sea of lies dished up by this unholy marriage, we must qualify and qualify terms that are so casually used that they almost become meaningless in an Orweillian fashion...War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is strength, etc.

So the enemy is clearly in sight. The enemy being the independent state of Yugoslavia with an ethnically cohesive population who live in a shared prosperity largely unheard of in the world, never mind Europe. But while it is fairly straightforward to declare a nation as rogue, out of control and in need of having its more vulnerable citizens protected, the aggressor nations, under the UN flag, must find a way of convincing the rest of the world why the military option is necessary. And here is where the machine of propaganda goes into fifth gear.

We need only look at a couple of examples of the layers of mendacity with which Yugoslavia was painted to see how effectively the UN was able to play upon the harp strings of the public in the west. There is, they argued, a humanitarian crisis unfolding and it must be stopped. Of course humanitarian crises have reared their ugly heads countless times in modern history.

What is interesting is the selective response to these events. When a million Irish were being starved during The Famine, while wheat grown in Ireland was being exported for profit , the silent response of the world was almost deafening. Was that reflective of an older time and poorer communications? Not at all. Two to three million Indians starved during WWII because of a famine. What did the great humanitarian Winston Churchill do? For one he credited the famine as the result of Indians “ breeding like rabbits. “ He sent excess food reserves to troops who had no need for it, and that food rotted as millions starved. Today? We have schools and roads and so much named after this racist. Why? Because that is part of the historical mythology of Churchill being a good guy. So simple, and such a lie. Rwandan genocide? The displacement of over a million Palestinians from the Arab-Israeli war? 3.8 million Vietnamese killed in their war? The Gulf Wars? The list is sadly huge. Countless millions killed or displaced.

What these victims had in common was that they had become either the enemies of powerful First World nations or were simply not cared about by those powerful countries. And that is where Yugoslavia found itself at the end of the last century.

When Davd Scheffer, an American state department mouthpiece announced that upwards of 100,000 ethnic Albanian men are unaccounted for, the media reported it as truth without any investigation. The state department then went on to describe the half a million Kosovo Albanians who were missing and feared dead. Again, the list goes on and is worth looking up.

Mass graves containing thousands of bodies were never found. Graves were found with hundreds and in some cases they were clearly the bodies of soldiers killed in the fighting. But numbers and circumstances aside, all these “atrocities'' were clearly laid on the doorstep of Serbia. And while vilifying a people is effective, it’s always nice to have a face, a leader who embodies all the evil, and the UN found it in Slobodan Milosevic. The Trepca MIne attorocity was, in the press, credited to him. At least a thousand bodies, more victims of Serbian atrocities, were thrown down these mines, an ignominious end at the hands of evil incarnate. Here’s the trouble. After the war it was discovered, and not widely reported, that independent investigators did not find one body.

But that doesn’t matter. Propaganda is meant to be effective and immediate, not true. And when the effect is past, when the perpetrators of well packaged lies have achieved what they want, truth becomes just another casualty of war.

Propaganda can come in many forms. Essentially propaganda is a deep lie with a veneer of truth. The campaign against Yugoslavia, perpetrated by the UN, as the puppet of the United States, was a circus of propaganda intended to convince what are largely an apathetic public that their money and their bombs and troops were involved in a campaign to prevent human rights abuses and atrocities of various kinds. The problem was that the focus of the campaign was against Serbians. They were, after all, the ones who were up to no good. The “no good” that truly concerned the west was that their socialist model of government, which was highly successful and ethnically cohesive, was an anathema to the capitalist model of greed, acquisition and polarity of wealth. So, this model must be removed. And what better way to justify that removal than by invoking the mantra of human rights abuses. There is one example that is still trotted out in the west to this day as an example of Serbian monstrosity, and that is the events around the slaughter of civilians.

Not to pore over the various misrepresentations of facts and events, but in order to highlight to what degree lies were passed off as “news” in order to sway the general public, let’s just look at reporter Bill Moyers reporting of events around one event in a village in the Srebrenica area.

This public, please note...public, reporter described how over 7000 Bosnian Muslims were executed by Bosnian Serbs. He reported this slaughter to his American public without having visited the village or having interviewed anyone around this said incident. At the end of his report he concedes that to that date officials had only identified 70 bodies as having been victims. Recently released British reports around the Srebrenica slaughters, withheld for 20 years, indicate the number to be a thousand and not the over 7000 used as a figure for two decades. Of course the slaughter of even one innocent is a crime, so why the wildly varying numbers? For dramatic effect and then manipulation of public opinion.This is not speculation, it is simply a lie. The extent to which Serbian “atrocities'' are reported as fact without even the most amateurish attempt at confirmation speaks not to the quality or professionalism of the journalists, but rather to their mandate. And that mandate quite simply was to paint Serbia as the bad guy and all its enemies as the bastions of freedom and human rights. But from whence did this attitude come? It does not take much to employ the legal maxim when trying to apply who is guilty of a crime. It is simply this: Who benefits?

It would take a casual look at Yugoslavia after its breakup to see who benefited from that dismantling. Western corporations swept in to take over previously government run institutions.

The profits to be made were huge, the suffering of ordinary Yugoslavians equally massive. The blood of innocent civilians oiled the wheels of neo-capitalism now imposed upon this country.

And all in the name of freedom and human rights. The West, particularly the United States, has for decades marched, quite literally, around the world rearranging economic systems to fall in line with the profit margin.

And in  this case, one of countless in the sad annals of modern history, Serbia was dealt the death blow of propaganda in order to paint them as killers, plain and simple. Were atrocities committed by Serbia. Certainly. By Croats, by Bosnians, by Muslims, by Christians by,,,well, take your pick, Of course they were. But the crimes committed by Serbia were over reported, misrepresented or often simply not true. And what lesson can we learn from this? Quite simply that we must beware when we are told that the world is composed of black and white, good guys and bad guys. It is a facile and frankly insulting simplification of complex issues. And we must always ask when our troops are bombing civilians and dropping toxic radioactive weapons with a life expectancy so long that it, ironically, lessens the life expectancy of innocent victims who live with them. Long after the pilots have gone home to a hero’s welcome.

Legacy? Shall we start with the deaths of civilians, the destruction of infrastructure, the spread of fear and outright racism? Recently an article ran about the daughter of a Serbian war lord.

Her activities had nothing to do with her father, yet the headlines had to mention that she was the daughter of a Serbain war lord. An episode on the Canadian programme Murdoch Mysteries featured a Serbian who was beyond a caricature of evil, the beard, the accent, the contempt for authority and seeming to revel in acts of evil. Interestingly, in that same series there is a semi regular character, Nikola Tesla. Tesla was one of the most profoundly intelligent inventors of any age. And he was Serbian. Yet in his presence in this series he is not identified as a Serbian. Why? Obviously because he is a positive role model and not simply a constructed stereotype that falls into the 20th century view, both puerile and insulting, that Serbians are the bad guys. Stereotypes are reprehensible and cheapen what human beings are. Yet when our leaders indulge in these stereotypes and portray a nation as bad and needing correcting by the “moral” hand of the west, we accept it. The legacy? It’s all around us. The Serbian people are often portrayed as a dark force in the news and popular imagination. The west as a light one.

And we continue to swallow the lies of propaganda as truth. Yugoslavia, Palenstine, Iran, Iraq, Ireland….take your pick. Please take your pick and research and find out in all these conflicts who benefits, who suffers and where the truth is. I can assure you the truth does not lie in the hands of those with their hands on the mainstream media. We, as citizens of this suffering planet, have an obligation to seek out the truth and raise our voices. Otherwise we might well expose our necks to the sword of lies wielded by the few who control the many. If we do, democracy will become an historic theory, sometimes practiced, and rarely remembered.

Erwin Coombs

March 2020