NATO: “Armed Force of Western Civilization”

NATO: "Armed Force of Western Civilization" [NATO; Balkans; Kosovo] The question is whether the Balkans can be civilized, that is to say Europeanized," wrote Ismail Kadaré in Le Monde April 10, as NATO bombed Belgrade. "The very meaning of the war which the Atlantic alliance, the armed force of western civilization, is now leading is linked precisely to this question."     The theme of NATO as a force for democracy and human rights, even a force to "civilize" the populations of Eastern Europe, was a constant refrain building up to NATO's 50th anniversary ceremony in Washington in late April.     For years, "Western" has been used as an Orwellian euphemism for rich capitalist states, having nothing to do with geography (Japan is a member, Cuba and other "Third World" countries are not).     In keeping with Orwell, it is also used to convey a subliminal feeling of openness and sunlight. It was used by the British and French imperialists in the 19th century to justify their conquests east of Suez, where societies were depicted as closed, rulers as despotic, and religious services as dark, smoky and obscurantist.     Phrases like "western values and institutions" are constantly used in the media for NATO,  and it is very clear which "western values and institutions" are meant.     Included are the Magna Carta, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the American Bill of Rights, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, the British House of Commons, the New England town meeting.     Excluded are the Spanish Inquisition, the worldwide system of slavery, the genocidal campaigns against indigenous populations, the Opium War, the Ku Klux Klan, fascism, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the War in Vietnam, the School of the Americas.     The monopoly of the mass media is so absolute that this ludicrously one-sided depiction of "western" history, values and institutions can be presented with the certainty that everyone will understand the coded language and virtually no one will question it.     There is the same one-sided depiction of "non-western" areas of the world, only in reverse.     "The Balkans produce more history than they consume," Le Monde quotes Churchill as saying, with the obvious suggestion that much of the export-quality excess production of history is sent abroad, causing uninvited catastrophes in those lands as well.  The Balkans are the source of both World Wars, declares Clinton, echoing the same line in a statement widely ridiculed for its brazen display of historical ignorance.     In fact, from the Crusades to the IMF, the Balkans are the lands that have been importing murderous insanity, from the West.  It was Germany, Austria, and Italy that invaded Yugoslavia in World War II entirely without provocation, carved it up, and parceled it out among their fascist cohorts. SS head Heinrich Himmler then cut the infamous "river of blood" between ethnic communities, the better to divide and rule.  The Croatian Ustashe, created by the Nazis, carried out a mass murder campaign against Serbians. After the war, the CIA brought many of the worst Ustashe war criminals to the United States.     NATO's arming of the "Kosovo Liberation Army" (UCK or KLA) appears to copy U.S. imperial recruitment of local armies in Laos, Central America, and Afghanistan. It more closely resembles Himmler's effort and is a continuation of NATO's decade-long policy of dividing  and subdividing Yugoslavia.     NATO's effort to pose as champion of "human rights," has required a superhuman effort to air-brush out its sponsorship of military and fascist dictatorships in Turkey and Portugal, its role in the fascist military coup d'etat in Greece in 1967, and its work with some of the deadliest and most emphatically anti-democratic state security agencies in Italy-just for starters.     There is no mystery where NATO's, and the U.S.'s, "Drang nach Osten," or drive to the East, is now aimed:  at the Caspian Sea.  Steven Lee Myers reported in the New York Times March 15 that the U.S. Army is training  for a new post-Cold War role: "protecting"  Caspian  Sea  oil.     "Army strategists who once conducted war games against the Soviet Union will soon be waging their mock wars in former Soviet states like Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan," he wrote, quoting military sources who discussed the new "stew of challenges" they would face.     "Among them: ethnic rivalries, austere terrain, a lack of major seaports, regular and irregular forces, and a threat of chemical or biological weapons," wrote the Times. By remarkable coincidence, the war in the Balkans includes most of that "stew of challenges."     The fact that NATO, instead of disappearing after the Cold War, is actually growing in global reach, scope and aggressiveness, has revealed what many long suspected:  that NATO, falsely labeled a defensive alliance, is and always was a military organization aimed at seizing control of markets, natural resources, and cheap labor markets on behalf of capitalist transnational corporations.  That, in essence, has been its only business since 1989. -Mark Cook

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