ATROCITIES MANAGEMENT
Edward S. Herman
It is extremely easy to demonize by atrocities management. I became
steeped in this subject during the Vietnam War era, and even published a small volume in
1970 entitled Atrocities in Vietnam: Myths and Realities. The marvel of that era was how
easily and effectively the U.S. establishment and media focused on the cruel acts and
killings of the indigeous National Liberation Front (NLF, "Vietcong") and made
them into sinister killers ("terrorists"), when in fact the terror of the U.S.
and its local and foreign proxies was worse by a very large factor. The violence of the
Diem government in the late 1950s was extremely brutal, indiscriminate, and massive; and
when the US entered the fray directly in the 1960s a new level of (wholesale terror) was
reached with chemical warfare, napalm, fragmentation bombs, "free fire zones,"
and high level B-52 bombing raids on "suspected Vietcong bases" (i.e.,
villages). The NLF was always more selective in its killing, for strategic and political
reasons--it had a mass base in the countryside that it did not want to harm or alienate.
The Diem government, its successors, and the US, were less discriminating for the same
reason--they had little or no peasant support, so that indiscriminate terror and mass
killing was the understandable strategy of aggression.
But the U.S. media featured the relatively small and selective
terrorist acts of the enemy, dramatized and personalized them with details, and gave
correspondingly slight and more antiseptic attention to the horrendous behavior of our
clients and ourselves, also presented as defensive and retaliatory. I recall being one-
upped on a radio debate on the war when my opponent pulled out an article in Time magazine
showing a picture of two Vietnamese, hands-tied, allegedly executed by the NLF. This may
or may not have been an instance of NLF terror, but two things were clear: the political
selectivity of Time here and in general completely distorted the overall truth regarding
terror in Vietnam, and the selectivity and dramatization made for very effective
propaganda. While the U.S. was destroying Vietnam in order to "save" it, the
U.S. media found only the Vietnamese enemy evil; the U.S. failed there, but with the
noblest intentions.
Another important result of the effective demonization of the NLF as
terroristic was to paralyse many liberals and leftists, unwilling to be tagged as not only
unpatriotic but siding with terrorists. Many lapsed into silence; others condemned both
sides, calling weakly for restraint and compromise; and only "extremists" were
willing to call the U.S. aggression and long struggle against Vietnamese
self-determination by its right name. This paralysis and marginalization of a principled
position weakened the oppositional movement to the war.
The U.S. also destroyed Cambodia in a "sideshow" to the
Vietnam war (1969-75), and following the devastating four year rule of the Khmer Rouge,
the US supported the ousted Pol Pot forces as the "enemy of my enemy" (Vietnam).
The U.S. media focused intensively and indignantly on the Khmer Rouge genocide, but from
1969 to today have largely blacked out the atrocities of the "sideshow" years,
the misdeeds of the Khmer Rouge during the period of U.S. support, and the fact of that
support. Here again, the power of media propaganda has been such that calling attention to
the U.S. role as the first phase genocidists and its badly compromised position as Pol Pot
supporter after 1978 is virtually unheard of, and departures from an exclusive focus on KR
crimes makes one an apologist for the KR. This process extends to the "left,"
with repeated illustrations in the Progressive and In These Times, and in an Institute for
Policy Studies (IPS)-Interhemispheric Resource Center publication, Foreign Policy in
Focus. In the latter case, a 1997 essay on Cambodia by Philip Robertson focused entirely
on KR crimes, portrayed the US as a neutral party in that country and suitable adjudicator
of policy, and supplied a list of policy recommendations for it to implement there,
including U.S. support for war crimes trials for KR leaders.
Another sideshow of the Vietnam war was the mass killings in
Indonesia in 1965-66, which destroyed the base of the Communist Party and brought
Indonesia into the U.S. sphere of influence. This sideshow was greeted enthusiastically by
the U.S. establishment. Given this approval, and 33 years of U.S. support for the Suharto
dictatorship, atrocities management has required that the large- scale murders and rule by
violence, and the mass killings in East Timor from 1975-1999, be kept under the rug. The
U.S. media have done a great job here. There are no UN forensic groups over there looking
at bodies, and there are no demands for ending Suharto's impunity.
Similarly, with the US "constructively engaged" with South
Africa, Israel, and Turkey over the past several decades, the South African occupation of
Namibia, assaults on the front line states, and support of Renamo and Savimbi, Israel's
invasions and "iron fist" attacks on Lebanon, and Turkey's scorched earth
policies and killings of Kurds, could proceed for many years killing hundreds of thousands
unimpeded by any intense focus on atrocities or serious attention from the
"international community." Turkey could even offer to lend armed support to the
NATO effort in Kosovo, presumably diverting troops from killing Kurds, without eliciting
the slightest sense of irony in the West.
Only when the Godfather needs atrocities--as with the NLF, PLO, or
Serbs--do atrocities come on line, with intense focus and indignation. This is done with
such assurance and self-righteous virtue that liberals and leftists jump on the bandwagon
and welcome the Godfather's gracious willingness in this particular case to finally
properly lead and bring justice to the targeted villain and area. The willingness of
leftists to accept the U.S. (and NATO) as proper authorities to decide, judge and drop
bombs is nothing short of astonishing. Some of them might the previous week have condemned
the murderous U.S. sanctions that are killing more Iraqi children each month than the
aggregate casualties in Kosovo, U.S. support of the Turkish war against the Kurds, the
U.S. bombing of the Sudan, etc., but still their political vision is so limited, their
response to atrocities so elemental, that they collapse intellectually and morally. One
leftist is reported to have said that the Serbs are pulling people out of houses and
killing them, implying that this justified the NATO bombing of Serbia. On this kind of
reasoning, Israel would have been bombed after Sabra- Shatila and on many other occasions;
and of course the governments of El Salvador and Guatemala would have been bombed
incessantly in the 1980s, instead of being supplied and protected by the US.
With Milosevec and the Serbs effectively demonized, the left even
puts forward spokespersons who openly favor the NATO bombing. Both IPS and Mother Jones
offer as an expert and spokesperson Albert Cevallos of the International Crisis Group, who
urges "the need of bombing to bring Serbia back into the peace process," to be
followed by an international peacekeeping army in Kosovo. Mother Jones also provides Doug
Hostetter of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, who proposes that as Milosevic is carrying
out "genocidal acts" the U.S. should seek to bring him before the war crimes
tribunal. Reminiscent of the Vietnam War paralysis, the IPS and Mother Jones leftists
oppose the bombing (Cevallos excepted) mainly because it won't work in achieving
purportedly humane goals, whose substantive primacy is taken for granted. Not one of these
experts condemns the U.S. and NATO for tearing Yugoslavia apart, for violating
international law in the bombing, and for their political selectivity and gross double
standard in choice of innocents to be protected from crimes against humanity.
Atrocities management works, but it also requires a complementary
gross misunderstanding of the issues at stake and context of the actions taken. The Serbs
have committed terrible acts in Kosovo and deserve condemnation; and international efforts
to end that crisis are eminently desirable. But past NATO policies have contributed to the
ongoing violence and are part of the problem--their bombing strategy is the culmination of
policies that have exacerbated the crisis. The bombing is not merely immoral and illegal,
it is part of an ugly and destructive policy sequence rooted in self-serving geo-political
strategies.
Document compiled by Dr S D Stein