Wednesday, June 15, 2005

Atrocity Porn Failure Frustrates Peddlers

Since the video of Serb militiamen executing six Bosnian Muslim captives first appeared two weeks ago, there has been a relentless barrage of propaganda in the Western press about how this was the "irrefutable" proof that the "genocide" in Srebrenica really happened, and that units and authorities from Serbia itself were involved. But despite the initial confusion, born of understandable nausea at the shocking images, many people in Serbia still refuse to swallow the pail of garbage the Imperial propaganda is so insistently shoving down their throats.

I've got a whole column dedicated to this coming out tomorrow on Antiwar.com, so I won't rehash the points I've made therein. But another article came across my desk this morning, by one Beth Kampschror of the Christian Science Monitor - a champion of Balkans intervention if there ever was one, and a paper with vested interest in the Official Truth about Srebrenica, as it was one of their reporters, David Rohde, who helped craft the original story.

Kampschror's piece is simply awful, wallowing in double-talk, deceptive phrasing and outright lies. One is tempted to take it apart sentence by sentence - but it would actually take more time and space than it takes to write such trash. I'll try to hit just the salient points.

The "images are gripping and seem irrefutable," she says. They are indeed; no one can refute that six Muslims were killed on that slope, just as shown in the video. No one has tried. It's the implication that this somehow proves that 8000 Muslims were killed, or that the killers were Serbian police, that is rightly doubted. So Kampschror complains the video "has not yet busted the myth that Serb officers did not commit Europe’s worst massacre since the Holocaust." That is because the real "myth" here is precisely what she asserts to be the truth. And where is the Anti-Defamation League when you need it, to put a stop to these incessant and fraudulent comparisons to the Holocaust?

While maintaining that somehow the executioners of the six men were "Serbian officers," Kampschror actually calls the Scorpions - a militia unit formed in 1992 by Serbs who rebelled against Croatian rule - "Serbian-funded." Well, what is it? Were they Serbians, or funded by Serbia? Were they under orders from Belgrade, as Kampschror's colleagues far and wide keep repeating, or was Belgrade paying for their lunch? The question itself is absurd when considering who is CSM's source on this: yes, none other than Natasa Kandic. She claims no one could have gone to Bosnia without government approval and support - an assertion as false as it is idiotic.

"Public opinion in Serbia has long held that the Srebrenica massacre never happened, or that the Muslims were equally guilty if it did," goes Kampschror's straw-man argument. Certainly, Serbians did not believe the official story of the "genocide" in Srebrenica, partly out of instinctive refusal to believe one's own people can commit such atrocities, but also because the same media that authored the Official Truth on Srebrenica have lied shamelessly about other things - e.g. never mentioning the documented atrocities against Serbs. Crimes of the Muslim militias against the Serbs in and around Srebrenica are even more horrifying than the Kandic video (see here).

Eventually, Kampschror gets to the real gripe, and its source: the Hague Inquisition and its collaborators, who were frustrated that their conference on Srebrenica this past weekend was ignored by the Serbian government. The ICTY representative in Belgrade, Alexandra Milenov, tells Kampschror that despite the "overwhelming quantity of evidence," the Krstic conviction, and the Republika Srpska report that "confirmed what the tribunal had already ruled on, you still have voices of denial." Yet the ICTY's "evidence" is hardly overwhelming in quality, consisting mostly of allegations repeated ad nauseam, assumed to be true. General Krstic was convicted of "aiding and abetting" genocide, but the genocide itself was simply asserted as a fact. The RS report from last year was extorted by viceroy Ashdown, and is as valid as the confessions of Stalin's purge victims.

Finally, Kampschror objects that the "nationalist majority" in the Serbian parliament refused to pass a resolution written by Kandic and her fellow ICTY partisans, because they insisted "that crimes were committed individually, rather than blaming the Serbian institutions that made those crimes possible."

What institutions? Kampschror names them earlier in the article as "traditional voices of denial" and "Milosevic-era leftovers": the military, the police, the Serbian Orthodox Church. Tie this back in with the distasteful but deliberate Holocaust comparison from the opening paragraph, and you realize that CSM's correspondent is arguing that the Serbian people and its government were the modern incarnation of the Third Reich. She's not the only one, either.

There is much more legerdemain in the article, but it all follows the same pattern: how dare these Nazis still deny what the Official Truth has proven through endless repetition?

It's because they aren't Nazis, Beth, and the "truth" and "proof" you claim they should accept is nothing but a rotting pile of lies.

No comments: