Reprinted with the author’s permission. May be re-posted on condition
that you notice that it will appear in the May 1999 issue of

Culture Wars

and that Mr. Jones can be reached at culturewars.com or Fidelity Press,
206 Marquette Ave., South Bend, IN 46617.

The Evil Empire “R” us

By E. Michael Jones

Good news! Baton Haxhui is not dead. Like Mark Twain objecting to his
obituary, Haxhui, the editor of Pristina’s Daily Times, arrived in
London in early April, at the end of the first week of NATO’s bombing of
Yugoslavia, to announce the obvious to Robin Cook, British Foreign
Secretary, and to various reporters. “I heard of my death on the radio,”
Haxhui announced, giving the impression that he didn’t believe
everything he heard. Not that he wanted to cast aspersions on the
accuracy of the reporting that was going on in the aftermath of the NATO
booming, but somehow, in his heart, he knew that there was something
amiss about the report announcing his death. NATO had announced Haxhui’s
death at the start of the bombing campaign that was initiated to prevent
such things; then they confirmed that he was dead; then they used his
death as a justification for the bombing; then, a week later, Haxhui
showed up for a press conference.

The bombing of Yugoslavia, we were told when it began, was necessary to
prevent genocide. In the rush to achieve that goal, the American press
gave little or no mention to the precedents this ill-fated action
involved. NATO violated its own charter by attacking a sovereign nation
without provocation. As it did during its attack on a pharmaceutical
firm in the midst of the Clinton impeachment campaign, the United States
once again dispensed with obtaining the approval of the United Nations,
which is to be consulted apparently only when they are willing to ratify
US objectives, as in, say, the dissemination of birth control devices.
Finally, Germany, in the first time since World War II, engaged in an
act of war against another country. The Serbs, who have long memories
when it comes to things like this, still remember the Luftwaffe attack
on Belgrade in 1941. The leaders of the Red/Green coalition in Germany
seemed a bit taken aback by the historical significance of their
actions. As abortion has already shown, there is nothing so bloodthirsty
as a liberal humanitarian of vaguely pacifist inclinations, who can
order airstrikes, like Herr Fischer, the Green foreign minister, while
at the same time wringing his hands in public and talking about his
“scruples.”

Truth, they say, is the first casualty in any war. The war in Kosovo was
proving to be no exception to that rule. In fact it was emerging as the
latest and perhaps most outrageous example of a long-line of public
relations campaigns to demonize one group and mobilize another to punish
it. In comparison to Kosovo, the military action in Kuwait has the same
moral aura as the allied campaign against the Nazis in World War II.
Saddam Hussein, after all did invade another country, and the United
Nations in reaction did condemn the invasion and then authorize a
multi-national force to reverse it. But even in Kuwait, the masters of
the universe couldn’t just let the facts speak for themselves. In a
report that has now become famous, a tearful young lady came before the
TV cameras and announced that Iraqi soldiers had burst into a Kuwaiti
hospital and dumped babies out of incubators onto the hospital floor.
That young lady, it turns out was the daughter of a Kuwaiti diplomat,
and the script of her report had been written by Hill & Knowlton, one of
the biggest public relations firms in the United States. Larry Tye
mentions the incident in his recent biography of Eddie Bernays, the
self-crowned “Father of Public Relations.” “The whole notion that the
United States had been rallied to war by a massive hidden PR campaign,”
Tye continued, “left many Americans doubting the soundness of their own
opinions and wondering whether our very thoughts were being tampered
with right here in the hub of democracy.”

Why Tye would frame the issue thus is anyone’s guess. His book documents
the fact that Eddie Bernays got America into a war with Guatemala in
1954 for the benefit of United Fruit, from whom he received a retainer
of $25,000 per annum. Eddie Bernays had been paid handsomely to
manipulate public opinion for his wealthy clients since before World War
I, where he served his country as part of George Creel’s Committee for
Public Information, America’s first propaganda ministry. Indeed, our
entry into that war was a propaganda coup, complete with stories of
German soldiers skewering Belgian babies on their bayonets, from which
this country has yet to recover. The only thing that has changed since
World War I is the power and intrusiveness of the media. The one
casualty that has remained constant throughout these wars is the
American mind and its ability to discern the truth. The soundness of the
collective American opinion was demonstrated shortly after the bombs
started falling on Belgrade when the Gallup poll people announced that
roughly 50 percent of the American people supported the bombing even
thought over 50 percent of the American people couldn’t locate Kosovo on
a map.

The only difference between Kuwait and Kosovo is that provocation has
been replaced ever more nakedly and brazenly by pretext. In the latter
instance, the pretext was provided by an incident which occurred in the
Kosovo village of Racak in mid-January. According to official news
reports, over 40 civilians were massacred by Serb death squads, of the
sort that supposedly murdered Mr. Haxhui. Der Spiegel, which is by no
means the most supine of propagandists in the world of regime
journalism, served this stew of misrepresentation straight up. William
Walker, an American observer with the OSCE, arrived on the scene with a
group of journalists, who photographed him looking at the bodies, and
concluded that what we had here was “a massacre of defenseless
civilians.” Spiegel then went on to say that  “a group of Finnish
forensic medical doctors, examined the bodies and confirmed Walker’s
suspicions.” What Spiegel didn’t tell us is that the Finnish doctors’
report still hasn’t been released. In fact, another German newspaper,
Die Welt, claimed that it would not be released because if it were its
contents might “get in the way of the peace process.” Just why this is
so becomes apparent when one considers that a report by Yugoslav and
Belarus forensic teams stated that the bodies had been redressed and
shot at close range after they had been dead. In addition to all that,
an AP TV crew which accompanied the Serb police into the village on the
day of the alleged massacre said that the Serbs and the KLA were
involved in a pitched battle, and that it would have been impossible to
massacre anyone under those circumstances.

The Spiegel report also failed to tell us anything about William Walker.
Walker, the head of the NATO-imposed inspection team in Kosovo who broke
the story and called for action on the part of the Hague war crimes
tribunal, was, according to an article by Gary Wilson, “a key operator
in the Reagan White House’s operation to overthrow the Nicaraguan
government.” In other words, Walker was far from a disinterested
observer. He was a veteran of CIA insurgency operations of the sort
which had destabilized Nicaragua and which now seemed to be
destabilizing Yugoslavia through the efforts of the KLA. As part of his
duties in Central America, Walker operated an airbase, ostensibly for
humanitarian purposes, at Ilopango, El Salvador, which was used to
supply the Nicaraguan contras with guns, ammunition and other supplies.
Walker was ambassador to El Salvador form 1988 to 1992, during the time
when the death squads killed, among others, six priests, the priests’
cook and her 15 year old daughter. Walker’s immediate identification of
Racak as a Serb atrocity fits in with the same pattern of
destabilization in Central America. Instead of the contras, Walker is
now aiding the KLA. The goal is the same.

The Serb account of the story gives some indication of what kind of
people the KLA are. To begin with, the Yugoslav officials came to Racak
in the early morning hours to arrest Sadik Mujota, the head of the local
KLA faction. Mujota and his men, which included his brothers, three sons
and a daughter, had been charged with the murder of Svetislav Przic, a
local policeman, five days before. The same group had been charged with
the murder of other policemen as well (Sinisa Mihajlovic, killed on
September 10 and Nazmija Aluri, murdered on October 29, 1998). In
addition to murdering Serb policemen, the Mujota KLA group had also
murdered two civilians on December 31, 1998 and January 2, 1999
respectively. They had also kidnapped members of the ethnic Albanian and
Gypsy communities, and had set fire to the house of an ethnic Albanian
(Djemalj Batici of Racak) on November 18, 1998. Add to this the accounts
of KLA involvement with drug dealing, and reports of extensive murder
rape and torture, including an incinerator where the bodies of those
kidnapped were cremated and you get a picture fundamentally different
than the one of helpless refugees proposed by the media. As in the case
of the atrocities in Sarajevo, the people most likely to perpetrate them
are the Muslims themselves because the news reports will attribute them
to the Serbs thereby bringing NATO in on the side of the Muslims. As in
Bosnia, so in Kosovo, although not in the way the media links those two
regions.

By ignoring this aspect of the KLA, the Western media also make it
virtually impossible to understand the motivation of the Serbs, both in
the immediate context and the historical context as well. The central
event of Serb history, their defeat at the hands of the Turks at the
Battle of Kosovo Pole in 1389, took place in Kosovo. To demand that the
Serbs hand over Kosovo to the Muslims is like demanding that the United
States give back Texas to the Mexicans, with the added provision that
they use the Alamo as their headquarters. The KLA’s role in Kosovo can
best be understood by the same analogy. Suppose for a moment that a
group of Mexican terrorists arrived in Texas and started murdering
policemen. What would Janet Reno’s reaction be? For a hint, look up what
Reno’s troops did to the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas.

If we extend this analogy a bit, and imagine that China then recognized
this group of thugs as the Texas Liberation Army, and then gave the
United States an ultimatum, either return Texas to the Mexicans, from
whom you stole it 150 years ago, or we start firing cruise missiles at
Washington, and you have some idea of the position NATO put Slobodan
Milosovic in when they issued their ultimatum to him to accept NATO
troops on Yugoslavian soil.  No Serbian president would accept any such
ultimatum. The very fact of delivering it showed that the United States
was itching to provoke a war with the Serbs. How would Abraham Lincoln
have reacted to this sort of ultimatum from England during our Civil
War, which was after all prosecuted by a federal government determined
to bring back rebellious provinces and willing to engage in horrific
military savagery against a defenseless civilian population to
accomplish that end?

Recent Serbian history only confirms the past. In April 1987, a Serb
communist from Belgrade, tired of hearing of the atrocities that
Albanian Muslim terrorists had been perpetrating against the indigenous
Serb population, which had been undergoing a steady decline in the years
since World War II, broke with the Tito position of repressing
discussion of national minorities in favor of international socialist
brotherhood and vowed to support the Serbs. That politician was Slobodan
Milosevic, and the action was the beginning of his rise to power in the
Communist Party, and, after the fall of Communism, to the head of
Yugoslavia. To expect a man whose very existence as a politician came
about as a result of the Kosovo question bespeaks either a breathtaking
ignorance of Serbian history or a deliberate attempt to provoke the very
war and subsequent ethnic cleansing those actions purport to avoid.

Ignoring these fact, the Spiegel report instead switched its attention
to a man by the name of Feriz Brahimi, who claimed that he had been
ethnically cleansed and then, lest all of the evidence be too subtle to
the average reader, asked, half-rhetorically, in what we can almost
imagine as perfect German, “Wann kommt die NATO um uns zu beschuetzen?”
“When is NATO going to come and protect us?”

Mr. Brahimi didn’t have long to wait. The story appeared in the March 22
issue of Der Spiegel, and two days later the bombing started. After the
bombing started, the ethnic cleansing began in earnest, which was seized
upon as justification for the bombing and not explained, more logically,
as a result of the bombing. Even if we attribute the worst of motives to
Slobodan Milosevic, it was clear that once the threat of the bombing
dissolved into its reality, he felt that he had nothing to lose. As a
result the bombing brought about the very thing it was supposed to
hinder. And that fact was used then as the pretext for sending in ground
troops. One pretext led to another in a ever-widening spiral of violence
that by the third week of the war, when Russia was threatening to send
in its troops to counter NATO’s ground troops, was starting to resemble
the start of World War I in a frightening and uncanny way.

With the benefit of hindsight it was easier to establish what really
happened, but that would have no effect on the bombing. The age of
instant communication is also the age of instant manipulation. The
people who purvey the imagery use it to set certain policies in motion.
That is the reason for the imagery in the first place.

As the manipulation became clear, so also the strategy behind the
manipulation became clear as well. The United States had become the evil
empire which Ronald Reagan had inveighed against. The conquest of Europe
was going to take place after all, except that it would proceed from
West to East, and not as the cold warriors on this side of the Atlantic
had warned, from the opposite direction. With Poland, Hungary, and the
Czech Republic now safely members of NATO, Serbia was the only vestige
of recalcitrance still standing in the aftermath of Communism’s demise.
However, what looked like the inexorable spread of freedom and democracy
from the Wilsonian/Whig point of view, looked like a foreign invasion
from the point of view of the Serbs. In the years since the fall of the
Berlin Wall, Serbia watched as Yugoslavia was dismembered in the name of
either freedom and/or national autonomy. While each nationality was
guilty of both ethnic cleansing and other crimes, Serbia was the only
country branded as genocidal in the media, this in spite of the fact
that at the time of Croatia’s departure from Yugoslavia, there were
600,000 to 800,000 Serbs living in that country who needed protection.

Then not content with the independence of Croatia and Slovenia, the West
decided that it was going to make Bosnia a sovereign nation, in spite of
the fact that it had never been an independent country in the entire
history of the Balkans and in spite of the fact that everyone living
there had an allegiance to some place else other than Bosnia. The
simplest solution, the one that would have avoided the most bloodshed,
the one that almost happened, would have been the partition of Bosnia,
and this is precisely what Franjo Tudjman and Slobodan Milosevic would
have done, had not the United States intervened and made Bosnia into
what was on paper an Islamic republic, but what was in effect a legal
no-man’s land run by three separate war lords. The Americans, never
quite able to shake off the ghost of Woodrow Wilson, decided that Bosnia
was to become a lesson in multiculturalism. Which is precisely what it
became, although probably not the lesson that the State Department
intended. Once Bosnia’s fate was decided by the US. State Department,
people like George Will could attack the Bosnian Serbs as invaders of a
sovereign country. The fact that these Serbs had lived for hundreds of
years in the country they were purportedly invading did not register on
Mr. Will’s radar screen.

Whether the current crisis is the beginning of World War III, or a
replay of World War II, or the legacy of World War I, Slobodan Milosevic
is being consistently miscast in this drama. The West claims that he is
Hitler reincarnate, when in reality he is the Balkan version of Neville
Chamberlain. Milosevic thought that he would get peace by abandoning the
Bosnian Serbs. What he got was one more slice taken out of his salami.
The provocation over Kosovo was the next step in what any objective
observer would have to call the final dismemberment of Yugoslavia and
the subjugation of the Serbian people to the exigencies of the New World
Order, which decrees that national sovereignty only has meaning insofar
as powers like the United States grant it meaning, and this means that
small countries have no sovereignty. National sovereignty according to
the standard of the Clinton Administration means that small nations
accept 28,000 NATO troops on their soil or they get bombed back into the
stone age.

And why is that? The simplest answer is a one-word response: empire.
Empire has its own internal logic which is in the final analysis and all
or nothing proposition. National borders do not fit into the concept of
free trade. What the rulers of the universe want, what people like
George Soros and the people he represents want, is a world in which the
free movement of capital and labor is not hindered by the political
considerations of small nations who act in the interest of their own
ethnos.

In the 10 years since the end of the Cold War, the United States has
embarked upon a policy of progressively increasing lawlessness that
seems bent on substantiating the worst fears of the Communists of
America as a rapacious imperialistic power. In 1990 the United States
had an unprecedented amount of good will on its side. It was the sole
remaining superpower to have survived the Cold War. In the course of
those ten years, that goodwill has been squandered by a foreign policy
that is every bit as reckless as President Clinton’s sex life. The
president of the United States is a man who lunges for immediate
gratification of passion and then tries to lie his way out of the
consequences when power proves unable to suppress truth. Now, almost ten
years after the fall of communism, no one is talking about the end of
history anymore. Instead, Samuel Huntington, writing in the most recent
issue of Foreign Affairs, claims that the US is becoming, in the eyes of
most of the world, “the rogue superpower” we always claimed that the
Soviet Union was. President Clinton is a man of appetite, and appetite
can impose no curb on itself. In the absence of reason, the only thing
that stops appetite is superior force, and so appetite unchecked in
nations, another word for empire, inevitably leads to war.

This also explains why Serbia is the object of the regime’s wrath. To
put it simply, Serbia will not back down from its national interests. It
is the one nation in Europe which has always insisted on its
independence as a nation. Empire, to use the analogy that the State
Department used to use to describe Soviet Communism, is like a wind-up
toy. It only stops when it bumps into something stronger, something that
will not move. This was the essence of our policy of containment. If the
West doesn’t stand up to Communism with superior force, Communism will
take over the entire world. Now, in one of the great ironies of history,
the same argument applies to the regime in the United States. There is a
war in Yugoslavia primarily because Serbia said no to the New World
Order when the Clinton Regime demanded that they accept foreign troops
on their soil. Whether Serbia prevails, whether Russia enters the war,
whether Clinton involves us in World War III, all of these options are
dependent on the logic of imperial expansion, an idea which knows no
such thing as internal restraint. Now that there is no one to stop the
expansion of American Imperialism, American Imperialism will expand
according to pure force. It has no principle of internal coherence. It’s
only principle is that of the universal wolf appetite, a principle
President Clinton demonstrated admirably in the Monica Lewinsky affair.
If the Clinton administration has made one thing perfectly clear, it is
that lust and empire go hand in hand. “We cannot say no to our desires,”
wrote Carl Tucker in the Saturday Review describing the trajectory of
both personal and political appetite.

Augustine discusses the connection between personal and political
appetite in The City of God, by explaining that since every home should
be a beginning or fragmentary constituent of a civil community, and
every beginning related to some specific end, and every part to the
whole of which it is a part, it ought to follow that domestic peace has
a relation to political peace. In other words, the ordered harmony of
authority and obedience between those who live together has a relation
to the ordered harmony of authority and obedience between those who live
in a city. This explains why a father must apply certain relations of
civil law to the governance of his home, so as to make it accord with
the peace of the whole community. (Book XIX, chap. 16).

Justice, Augustine says as a later point, is the essence of a republic.
If so, then, domination is the essence of empire. Empire is the
quintessential political expression of Augustine’s term libido
dominandi. It is the opposite of peace which is based on the
tranquillity of order, which is to say its own internal rational
principle whereby the parts work harmoniously to create a whole. Empire
is the political expression of the lust for domination which is the
essence of the restless soul of the denizen of the City of Man. If the
City of God is based on love and service, its opposite can be based only
lust and domination. Empire is then the opposite of community; it is, in
fact, the death of a community. In order for a nation to become an
empire, one group of citizens must break internally with the notion of
justice that is the essence of a republic and embark upon a war of
domestic subjugation, dominating its neighbors and fellow citizens,
before it can embark on domination overseas.

In his recent book, The Cousin’s Wars, Kevin Philips celebrates what he
calls the “Triumph of Anglo-America.” The thesis of the book is clear:
East Anglia has conquered the world. Or to put it in terms more
comprehensible to American readers: Boston (founded by dissenting
ministers from East Anglia) has conquered the world. They accomplished
this in three decisive battles—the English Civil War, the American
Revolution, and the American Civil War—in which the Cavaliers, the high
church Anglicans and the values they represented were defeated by the
Roundheads or Yankees, a group who believed in “a guiding political
culture of a Low Church, Calvinistic Protestantism, commercially adept,
militantly expansionist, and highly convinced, in Old World, New World,
or both, that it represented a chose people and a manifest destiny” (p.
xv).

Perhaps because he is himself a part of the media priesthood, Philips
spends little time discussing the down-side of Puritan hegemony, not in
this country, not in the rest of the world, where “freedom” often means
working for global companies like Nike for slave wages in colonies like
Vietnam. The “triumph of Anglo-America” is just another word for empire,
and empire is based on subjugation, no matter how much the
Anglo-American empire likes to use words like “freedom” and “democracy.”
So when Boston conquered Virginia in the Civil War, it accomplished the
political subjugation at home that the English accomplished when they
conquered Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, and that left it poised to
expand abroad, which is what happened during the 1890s with the war
against Spain and the conquest of Cuba and the Philippines.

This, in turn, led to the next battle with the next domestic opponent:
the struggle over whether the United States should get involved in
European Wars that began in earnest during World War I and ended
conclusively with Pearl Harbor, the entry into World War II and the
defeat of the America First isolationist position. That 20 year long
debate, which included the 1920s revulsion at the cost of Wilson’s war
to end all wars was the last real debate this country had over whether
we should continue the Anglo-American march to empire. Philips minces no
words in describing the outcome: “The Germans, in a sense, were the
final losers of the cousins’ wars, after the Irish, the black slaves and
ex-slaves, and the Native Americans, although their defeat was of a
different kind.”

Well, not quite the final losers. Philips omits the anti-Catholic
crusade which followed World War II, which was prosecuted primarily as a
psychological warfare campaign, and which culminated in the sexual
revolution of the ‘60s and the implementation of those policies of
population control in Henry Kissinger’s NSSM-200 of 1974. “The Puritans,
by nature and faith, were arch-expansionists.” Once they conquered the
Catholics and the Communists, they ended up in Serbia. In each instance
we are talking about the triumph of a particular ethnic group, one which
covers its tracks by talking about “freedom” and “democracy.” Ethnic
struggle has always been the engine for imperial expansion. In this
regard, what happened in Philadelphia in the ‘60s is happening in Kosovo
now. Then as now, the regime decreed that a particular ethnic group was
good and its opponent was bad, or to use the terminology of the ‘60s’
struggle, “racist.” What followed was the destruction of the ethnic
group which the Puritan expansionists found more threatening—the
Catholic ethnics, the Serbs—and the promotion of their opponents—the
blacks, the KLA Muslims—to the status of freedom fighters. This is the
modus operandi of empire, or at least the Anglo-American empire. Kosovo
is another version of Grays Ferry.

Empire, as those who have studied it know, is an all or nothing thing.
“Any contracting out of the global marketplace,” writes William Appleman
Williams in his book Empire as a Way of Life, “threatened both the
theory and the practice of capitalism.” The free-marketeers might lose
individual assets, but as our Open Door Policy made clear, the liberal
interests were not going to write off whole sections of the globe as
inaccessible to our products. As the power of the free-market regime
increased, so did its intolerance with those who disagreed. The United
States might have to accept Cuba because Krushchev faced down Kennedy,
but in the absence of the Soviet Empire it would not have to tolerate a
recalcitrant Serbia. Hence, the ultimatum. Hence, the war. “The most
militant imperialists,” writes Williams, “emphasized the necessity of
prompt and strong action to prevent such withdrawals from their global
system.”

Hence, the resurrection of the Cold War, or worse, which may be only
lasting effect of Clinton’s reckless attack on Yugoslavia, was
inevitable. Empires are by their nature expansionist, and the Puritan
empire is, as Mr. Philips, says, “arch-expansionist.” By his
recklessness in the Balkans, Bill Clinton seems determined to create the
opposition which he failed to find in the supine behavior of the United
States Senate. Remember, for those who believe that appetite is the
ultimate good, there are no internal controls. There is only superior
force. People who worship the universal wolf know no other law. This
means that people who are driven by appetite inevitably lead their
countries to war. Hitler could have gotten away with taking Austria and
the Sudetenland, but the logic of his lust for power led him to invade
Poland and ultimately the Soviet Union, and in that act he found the
object which ultimately thwarted his appetite for domination. He found
it there because he could find it nowhere within himself. The same is
true of people like Bill Clinton. And so by following the path of
appetite and empire—which are ultimately the same thing—uncontrolled
appetite is to the soul what empire is to the body politic— leaders like
Bill Clinton lead the country step by step closer to its demise.  As the
examples of Hitler and Napoleon have shown, the devotees of Empire can
only follow the logic of their appetite until some external force shuts
them down. Appetite knows no other law. It is incapable of regulating
itself. In the course of European history, the name of that external
force has been Russia. Given the current constellation in Serbia, that
may be its name once again.

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