Conservative Soup - food for thought

NATO propaganda portrayed Serbs as "the new Nazis".......Who are the Serbs? Branded by some as Europe's new Nazis, they are seen by others—and by themselves—as the innocent victims.The successful demonization of the Serbs, making them largely responsible for the Yugoslav wars, and as unique and genocidal killers, was one of the great propaganda triumphs of our era. It was done so quickly, with such uniformity and uncritical zeal in the mainstream Western media, that disinformation had (and still has, after almost two decades) a field day. “The media did more damage to us than Nato bombs.” (Radovan Karadzic)…NATO propaganda portrayed Serbs as "the new Nazis." Serbia’s earliest defeat came in the PR war. Early on, Serbia’s enemies engaged Ruder Finn, an American public relations firm, to get their message out. James Harff, director of Ruder Finn’s Global Public Affairs section, boasted about his success against Serbia.“Nobody understood what was going on in (former) Yugoslavia,” he said in an October 1993 interview. “The great majority of Americans were probably asking themselves in which African country Bosnia was situated.”"Our work is not to verify information," said Harff. "We are not equipped for that. Our work is to accelerate the circulation of information favorable to us, to aim at judiciously chosen targets. We did not confirm the existence of death camps in Bosnia, we just made it widely known that Newsday affirmed it. ... We are professionals. We had a job to do and we did it. We are not paid to moralize."
 

The 'Holocaust model',promoted by governments and media, and generally accepted by western public opinion, presented the war as a genocidal war by Serbs against the Bosnian Muslim (Bosniac) population. The war was presented as morally equivalent to Auschwitz - and western intervention as a moral crusade, which no reasonable person could oppose. Few people in western Europe today believe that Serbs are 'a nation of genocidal rapists', but that is how many people saw them in the mid-1990's.One fabrication got headlines around the world as in 1992 an ITN TV-news shot footage of men staring out from behind barbed wire. They were Bosnian prisoners inside a Serbian concentration camp, ITN explained. An emaciated Muslim caged behind Serb barbed wire, filmed by a British news team, became a worldwide symbol of the war in Bosnia. But the picture is not quite what it seems. It took years before a German journalist Thomas Deichman described how the famous photo was staged by its takers. The picture was very misleading: the ITN photographers were actually inside the compound, and their subjects were outside the fence, looking in. Deichmann reveals the full story in his article The picture that fooled the world. However by that time (1992) the image had done its deed, labeling the Serbs as genocidal mass murderers.The identification of Muslims as defenseless victims and Serbs as genocidal monsters inflamed fears and hatreds within Yugoslavia, and prepared the way for power to be shifted from the people of the region to such international agencies as NATO.
 

What happened in Bosnia was not different from any other civil war. The same happened in the ethnic and religious conflict in Cyprus between Greeks and Turks. Each ethnic faction established control of territory driving out the population of the opposing faction. In 1974, 40,000 Turkish troops invaded Cyprus and occupied 37% of the island.The same happened in the Lebanese civil war that erupted in 1975 between Muslim and Christian factions.For centuries Sarajevo was the predominant urban centre in Bosnia and enjoyed a mixture of cultures and ethnicities,but now no more. 150,000 Serbs were driven out of Sarajevo,forever!!......Remember why NATO spent 78-days bombing Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999? There was the ethnic cleansing. The atrocities. The refugees chased out of Kosovo by the Serb army. The mass graves. The heaps of bodies tossed into vats of sulphuric acid at the Trepca mines.NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said there were 100,000 Kosovars unaccounted for.Remember?If you're like most people, you have at least a vague recollection of something that seemed to approach a modern-day Holocaust.Problem is, none of it happened.Dr. Peter Markesteyn, a Winnipeg forensic pathologist, was among the first war crimes investigators to arrive in Kosovo after NATO ended its bombing campaign."We were told there were 100,000 bodies everywhere," said Dr. Markesteyn. "We performed 1,800 autopsies -- that's it."Fewer than 2,000 corpses. None found in the Trepca mines. No remains in the vats of sulphuric acid. Most found in isolated graves -- not in the mass graves NATO warned about. And no clue as to whether the bodies were those of KLA fighters, civilians, even whether they were Serbs or ethnic Albanians.http://www.srpska-mreza.After WWII, Serbs generally lived in peace with their ethnic neighbours; by 1999, Serbia was the only former republic, where ethnic groups coexisted peacefully. The war against Yugoslavia didn't come about because of a crudely staged incident or provocation, like wars of old. It came about by virtue of a state and corporate media working in unison to create an entire world in which falsehood and lies were passed off as facts, and such facts, once established, became the building blocks for even greater fabrications.The history of Yugoslav civil war was written by the agressors.