The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

Introduction
a demonized enemy, and claims of vast killings can be institutionalized
without serious evidence. In the case of Khmer Rouge killings in Cambodia
in the 1970s, Jean Lacouture claimed that Khmer Rouge leaders
had “boasted” of having killed two million people. Subsequently, he
was compelled to admit that he had manufactured the boast and figure
out of the whole cloth, but the number two million had already been
absorbed in the mainstream as the truth, and it persisted long after the
recantation. 19
I believe that we have witnessed a similar process of truth-creation
with the 8,000 at Srebrenica.
In the 1980s, the U.S. mainstream media accepted without question
the claim that the Soviet KGB and Bulgarians were behind the attempted
assassination of Pope John Paul II in Rome in 1981. This claim
fitted well the Reagan administration program of denigration of the Soviet
Union as an “evil empire,” and the absurdity of the purported evidence
and the likelihood (and evidence) of pressure, coaching and
self-interest on the part of the Turkish rightist who eventually “confessed”
to the crime, never struck the editors and reporters of the New
York Times or other mainstream journalists. 20 The claim was false, but
the journalists’ and editors’ gullibility quotient was exceedingly high in
this case where the allegation of criminality fitted state demands; their
critical capability and investigative zeal were minimal.
This has also been true of the treatment of the Balkan wars by the
mainstream Western media and intellectuals from 1991 into 2011. In
this case, Western governments intervened continuously in the breakup
of Yugoslavia, and from the beginning of that intervention were partisan,
with Serbia as their target. 21 This had profound consequences for
the news and editorialists’ and intellectuals’ perspectives. The official
bias and willingness to lie, inflate claims against the chosen target, select
evidence, and use instruments like the ICTY to score points and
vindicate official actions, was quickly complemented by a parallel biased
selectivity in news reporting, in the establishment and institutionalization
of untruths and myths, and in the rewriting of history. 22
One important myth has been that the NATO powers entered the
fray regrettably and unconscionably late, 23 in response to long-standing
abuses by the Serbs. This mythical history ignores important facts,
such as: (1) that with the ending of the Soviet Union and resultant West-
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