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Reader comments on
Subject: Review of Your Review - Part II
Date: Apr 16, 2004
Curiously enough Tanzer doesnât manage to identify by name in the body of his review <b>any</b> of the American liberal-left commentators in the film. One of the filmâs major commentators is Susan Woodward of the liberal Brookings Institution, Prof of Political Science at CUNY, senior visiting fellow at IISS, Visiting Fellow at the Hellenic Observatory, LSE, author of such thin obscure volumes as <u>Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution After the Cold War </u>(Brookings, 1995), and <u>Socialist Unemployment: The Political Economy of Yugoslavia 1945-1990 </u>(Princeton Univ. Press, 1995), various published articles in scholarly revues on SE Europe, etc. Needless to say her oeuvre is a chocabloc of Cetnik war whoops and one-sided incitement to ethnic warfare, etc. Woodward heinously suggests in one scene that in order for major Western powers to use their good offices to broker peace in civil war situations like Yugoslaviaâs, they cannot take or be perceived to be taking sides or de-legitimizing any sideâs concerns. The side being favoured becomes more intransigent by believing it can call in its powerful backer, while the side not being favoured sees the West as losing its trustworthiness and credibility as moderator. This is the kind of balmy thinking which gets you through the door of Brookings, evidently.<p>
Then thereâs the late Sean Gervasi, former research professor at the Institute of International Politics and Economics in Belgrade and a consultant to the United Nations for 15 years. See some more of his CV <a href=äLink Then thereâs John Rick MacArthur, left-liberal publisher of <u>Harperâs</u> magazine and author of <u>Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War </u> (Hill and Wang, 1992), which is must reading of course for all who hate Muslims, and more recently of the arch-reactionary <u>The Selling of ãFree Tradeä: NAFTA, Washington, and the Subversion of American Democracy</u> (Univ. of California Press). The appeaser MacArthur puts forward the girly protestation that journalists had a moral and professional responsibility to report the Bosnian conflict from all sides and failed to do so. Heâs supported in this twaddle by another commentator, former U.S. State Dept Yugoslavia desk officer George Kenney, whose crimes against humanity included pointing out in the <u>New York Times Magazine</u>, <u>The Nation</u> and other white supremacist rags that barely a year into the war the Izetbegovic government had inflated nearly tenfold the fatality figures for its side within the space of weeks, and that the figure of a quarter million dead was spread far and wide by a parti pris pushover press without any checking and without a scintilla of proof. Never mind that Kenneyâs critique has held up. Letâs hope he and his ilk get a whiff of Nuremberg. In what was doubtless a bid to manicure his rŽsumŽ to the liking of the Serbian Unity Congress, MacArthur recently published in <u>Harperâs</u> an article which heaps praise on the Hague tribunal and its work in prosecuting Milosevic. Itâs a puff piece for trial judge Richard May, whose ãmanagingä of the trial is the object of schoolboy-like fawning. Mayâs inspired trial management includes arbitrarily placing limits on the defendantâs time to cross-examine, while granting the prosecution and its coddled witnesses all the time they like, a technique which would raise eyebrows among American trial lawyers in U.S. courts, and lead to mistrials. Perhaps this is a curtain-raiser for more <u>Harperâs</u> pandering to the powerful Serb lobby.<p>
To name some other commentators in the doc which Tanzer thought not to in his review, there were British peacekeeper Michael Rose, Lord David Owen (see his girly appeaser-type comments in the transcript excerpt), and former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, whose efforts to rehabilitate the Confederacy included working on Civil Rights legislation for the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations in the 1960âs and currently his work with the A.N.S.W.E.R. coalition. Evidently none of these commentators, as well as the left-liberals mentioned above, provide any basis for the filmâs ãkey conclusions,ä or else perhaps Tanzer was power-napping through their segments. <p>
Tanzer gives as a supposedly incongruous example the presence of ãrespectableä Lord Carrington amidst the filmâs landscape of fascist loonies. He spares us mention however of Carringtonâs comments to the effect that there was legitimacy to Serb perceptions in Croatia and Bosnia of being ãdone out of their countryä in developments which had eerie parallels and antecedents in what happened to Serbs there in 1941-45, namely, their mass slaughter by the 100âs of 1000âs at the hands of indigenous Croat and Bosniac fascists running an Axis statelet with a zeal that often made Hitlerâs and Mussoliniâs diplomats embarrassed and occasionally prompted them to protest to their protŽgŽs to whom theyâd subcontracted the local Holocaust. Among the eerie parallels too trivial to warrant comment by Tanzer was Tudjmanâs ãindependentä Croatia bringing notorious Axis war criminals out of exile from places like Argentina and elsewhere and according them plum sinecures in the government and diplomatic corps, the arming and financing of fascist militias and importation of European neo-nazis and skinheads to help keep order in the restive Serb regions, the naming of streets and public places after WWII fascist murderers, etc. Like most good American liberals Tanzer waves this off as the stuff of Serb paranoia and obsessive fixation with the past. Serbs, unlike all the other peoples who were the target of decimation in the Holocaust, should indeed <b>forget</b> and they shouldâve accepted nicely to swear loyalty to the chequerboard flag like they were being asked to do, the chequerboard flag which flew over the transit centers and death camps where they were snuffed in the 100âs of 1000âs. This is reasonable, though of course the idea that Polish Jews should accept to live under the Swastika and swear loyalty to it would be a tougher sell to Tanzer and his hip crowd. Remember, this are <b>Serbs</b> weâre talking about, and so the otherwise accepted standards of Holocaust victimhood and vigilance can not only be relaxed, but put to sleep. The cry of ãNever Againä so associated with Jewish Holocaust survivors should perhaps mutate, for Serb survivors, to something like, ãHey, No Biggie.ä How appropriate, then, that Tanzerâs review has as one of its subtitles ãRevisionism.ä<p>
Tanzer also spares us mention of things in the film like the study by the U.S. Information Agency which found that Serbs report the most lost family members of any group in Bosnia in the war of the 1990âs. Itâs bad enough that taxpayers paid for this spurious ãstudyä but Bogdanich compounds the wrong by <b>reporting</b> it, thus giving unsophisticated viewers the harmful impression that perhaps Serbs were massacred, imprisoned, and displaced in the conflict also. And the film errs further in not putting the finding in context by pointing out that Serbs are genetically wired to lie and exaggerate, unlike all the studyâs other participants. Another example of the malady is Univ. of Maryland historian John Lampe, who puts the Serb share of war fatalities at ã30-35%ä, viz. proportionate to their presence in the population immediately antebellum, reckoned to be 31.3% of the population in the 1991 census. Clearly, America needs some serious hate speech legislation.
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Comment index:
Unreal from Dragon, Nov 17, 2005
o from shayna, Feb 25, 2003
Bias? from Red neck, Oct 11, 2003
» Review of Your Review - Part II « from Jacqueline, Apr 16, 2004
Sources from Johny Darius, Sep 21, 2004
Jabbe from strenglepore, Nov 25, 2004
hurt from Shelby, Jan 10, 2005
hurt from mk, Jan 10, 2005
Truth from Atheist, Oct 18, 2005
crap from secret, Feb 12, 2006
OML!!!!! from Ashtin Ewing, Feb 17, 2006
TRUTH from TRUTH, Mar 22, 2006
JOSHUA from miro, Jan 30, 2008
Re from Toba, Feb 24, 2008
GROSS! from emelia, Mar 21, 2008
Happy from Altair, Mar 4, 2009
sorry from enis, Mar 25, 2009
Unreal from Dragon, Nov 17, 2005
o from shayna, Feb 25, 2003
Bias? from Red neck, Oct 11, 2003
» Review of Your Review - Part II « from Jacqueline, Apr 16, 2004
Sources from Johny Darius, Sep 21, 2004
Jabbe from strenglepore, Nov 25, 2004
hurt from Shelby, Jan 10, 2005
hurt from mk, Jan 10, 2005
Truth from Atheist, Oct 18, 2005
crap from secret, Feb 12, 2006
OML!!!!! from Ashtin Ewing, Feb 17, 2006
TRUTH from TRUTH, Mar 22, 2006
JOSHUA from miro, Jan 30, 2008
Re from Toba, Feb 24, 2008
GROSS! from emelia, Mar 21, 2008
Happy from Altair, Mar 4, 2009
sorry from enis, Mar 25, 2009
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