There was a report half way through the war of an Italian refugee charity arriving at the border of Kosovo with a camera crew and ambulance, and spiriting away an old woman refugee who’d collapsed – all of it faithfully filmed for Italian TV. It was the first time during the war the charity had done anything. It turned out that the woman had merely fainted – and, as a result of this dramatic intervention she became extremely upset, hardly surprising, since she’d been separated from her family who, in the meantime, had been shoved off to some other refugee camp, and no-one knew where they were. Once you enter this world of TV, of image, of the appearance of goodness, “care”, “charity” & “humanitarianism” are but masks for indifference: everything’s just a photo-opportunity. The more all-pervasive these role-bound relations are the more such functionalising of people appears as ‘natural’. The media is simply an arm of the State, making modern alienated spectacular relations seem reasonable and inevitable.
An article from a former soldier in Bosnia said that when an American TV crew turned up at his base they asked to see a burnt-out village previously inhabited by Bosniaks – which they were duly shown. When the UN soldiers asked if they wanted to take photos of a burnt-out village previously inhabited by Bosnian Serbs the journalists refused, saying it would confuse the issue: their viewers wanted clear ideas about what was going on. The soldier then went on to say that this was a typical American desire for black and white opinions. In fact, this American TV crew were merely being loyal servants of their masters, the US ruling class, loyal servants of dominant ideology, which is not simplisticly a lie, but a half-truth that omits any facts that contradict the official “truth”. […]
Of course, in Kosovo 1999, the refugees were very real. But the aim of scum like Jamie Shea, and the media in general, is to make you interpret this reality along the lines most useful to justify “the lesser evil” and hide the real reasons behind the war, and for this aim he certainly found the research for his M.A. very useful.
The only worthwhile ‘participation’ in such media would be in order to practically sabotage it – physically subvert its form and content. This is not to say that mass “media” couldn’t exist in a free society – but it would be used and controlled in an unmediated way – for example, to broadcast the different debates and decisions of mass popular assemblies of people transforming the world directly. But as things stand, people are permitted to criticise this or that detail because that can only help the system manipulate people better – but attacking the essential is forbidden. So, for example, everything in the mass media has said that NATO’s intentions were good — the debate was reduced to merely how the intentions were carried out. Even in the ‘serious’ papers it’s rare to hear criticisms of NATO’s intentions — and I’ve not seen any attempt to reveal their real intentions.
Just as an individual who constantly lies is never believed, so the media lies sparingly – all the better to con people with a Big Lie.
Sure, there have been a few “small” lies in this war — but the media were careful to quote others as reporting these lies. For example, the story of the rounding up of Kosovars to imprison them in a stadium, when there was no stadium. Or Robin Cook quoting sources from a village in Kosovo which said that 20 teachers from the village had been killed, when the village only had one teacher. But then these are later admitted to be “mistakes”, rather like the killing of civilians. The belated admission to certain factual mistakes (usually muted and long after their propaganda value has served its purpose) serves a similar function to the admission of military “mistakes”: if you apologise you can always get away with so much more.
“Freedom of expression” in this society is mostly reserved for those who make a profession out of “expressing themselves”. For the rest – well, we take our chances. Thus a demonstration in April in Brussels against NATO was banned by the Town Council, as were any leaflets or posters. And the few demonstrators who turned up were beaten brutally by the police, with many of them being arrested, and the non-Belgians being ejected from the country. This repressed attempt at “free expression” was not reported in the media here, despite the fact that a journalist cameraman was also beaten up when he refused to hand his camera over to the cops. Likewise, for the most part, independent opposition in other countries throughout the world was hardly reported, and, then virtually only in the “quality” papers. However, in other respects, outright censorship was not normally employed, unlike in Serbia. Instead, facts were mentioned very sparingly— for instance, the bombing, of Montenegro’s main airport a month into the war was mentioned for a couple of hours on TV, but hardly anywhere else, and then apparently forgotten about: what they wanted to emphasise was Serbia’s military manipulation of Montenegro. Likewise, incubators being turned off in a Belgrade hospital as a result of NATO bombing of electricity plants was shown on TV just twice and without comment – compare that to how much the lie about Iraqi soldiers turning off the incubators in Kuwait in 1990 was constantly repeated.
[…] Essential facts are often not censored, but are buried under a welter of largely irrelevant details.
Despite the depression, the confusion, the horror, the feelings of uselessness, the desire to just forget about or numb ourselves to this war, certain cold heavy concrete facts have to be faced. Perhaps they are even obvious:
A few days before this war began Carl Bildt, ex-PM of Sweden, and a former European ‘peacebroker’ in Bosnia, declared that if Serbia was bombed there’d be “more than one million refugees from Kosovo”. Since NATO knew this, it’s clear it couldn’t care less about the Kosovars, except as pawns in their sick game. That’s why the Serb airforce were informed by NATO that if they kept below 5000 metres in Kosovo they wouldn’t be fired upon (publicized in France, but not here).
Beneath the ‘humanitarian’ pretext, the calculating cynicism of competing capitalist interests.
The destruction of over $250 billion worth of infrastructure in the Balkans is a war against us – the international mass of dispossessed individuals forced to survive in the increasingly overwhelming jungle of the world market. The Balkans has been chosen for this massacre partly because, despite years of manipulated nationalism and ethnic slaughter, the working class there have continued to resist the IMF-imposed austerity of the ‘free’ market. That’s why the Rambouillet declaration of war insisted that ‘the economy of Kosovo shall function in accordance with free market principles’. That’s why a car factory occupied by workers fighting its threatened closure was one of the first to be bombed. And that’s why it’s Albania that’s been chosen to be militarily, hierarchically, organized: after all, the armed rebellion of ’97 there dangerously threatened any notion of national identity, even if its class identity was unclearly expressed.
From first-hand reports we’ve heard that Kosovar refugees in the Macedonian camps who criticise NATO’s bombing and say they have nothing against ordinary Serbs have been prevented by the KLA from speaking to the media there: it’s disrespectful to their saviours. The KLA high-ups play expedient complicity-rivalry politics with NATO because they’ll be rewarded, at least temporarily, with power and money as subservient rulers of the future hell of Kosovo. Partly financed by German capital, the KLA pushes nationalism as the illusion of community, the fantasy of some exit from meaningless desperation. Ironically, the slogans “NATO is our only hope” and “Blair – you lead, we die” is expressed by those who believe in “self-determination”, slogans that admit that the vast majority of selves will be determined by international capital in its most brutal contemptuous unopposed form.
As for the reasons for the war: there were certainly other reasons for the war than those mentioned here. For example, as a challenge to Russian interests in the area. But reducing reasons for this or that to merely one thing is the typical attitude of intellectual specialists in interpretation rivalrously dismissing any other possible reason.
