Kosovo, Littleton, and Media Warps

by Jerry Kroth, Ph.D.

If we bombed the capital city of Yugoslavia in 1985, it would have brought us to the brink of nuclear war. We are seriously in denial about the magnitude and implications of our actions, and our media is doing little more than fanning the flames of war.

The United States bombed a train and killed twelve people which our correspondents called an "unfortunate mistake." We killed sixty five more in a convoy -- another "unfortunate but inevitable consequence of war." Last month we sliced a bus in two and incinerated sixty people, many senior citizens. A few days before, we killed a three year old baby in Belgrade.

When an Islamic militant throws a grenade into a bus and kills a child, we call him "barbaric," "evil," "insane," a "terrorist." Armed to the teeth with these buzz words, the media then splices in video snippets showing the the grieving parents with pleading eyes saying "how could they do this to our baby?!" Our hearts respond. Our empathy swells. Tears well up.

But when the tables are turned, and a pilot drops two thousand pounds of TNT on the same innocent three year old, we call it "a surgical bombing strike with minor collateral damage." The grieving parents are neither interviewed nor shown. The fact is a mere footnote to the news of the day. No empathy, no tears. No sense that what we may be doing is immoral, incorrect, or [god forbid] hostile!

The pleading eyes of the parents have been edited out. Their grief censored. Our culpability denied. "No apologies will be forthcoming" says a Pentagon spokesman. Most people have very little awareness of how many people we killed.

Instead our cameras pan to Los Angeles, to the mother of one of "our" captured servicemen. She tells us how she prays for her son's release. Our hearts flutter. Empathy returns. Her prayers are our prayers. All of it reminding us of our righteousness and nobility. Flash to another humanitarian organization taking supplies to refugees in Kosovo.

The three-year old's screaming mother in Belgrade is still crying, but exclusively into Serbian cameras, not CNN or NBC. We are barely cognizant of how much we ignore how the other side sees and feels about what is going on.

To think this through with non-media tainted lenses presents a whole new set of facts: We invaded another country. We aggressed against a sovereign people. We attacked a nation thousands of miles from our shores. They did not invade us. They did not drop bombs on Pearl Harbor or attack a NATO nation. Is it not worth bringing up this conspicuously missing rationale?

We were bombing a city with a population approaching two million people for 73 nights. When was the last time CNN covered just one of Belgrade's 200,000 children screaming from fear and huddling in her mother's arms night after night under US bombs?

Can we not spend a minute or two reminding ourselves that in the course of the last year we bombed Iraq, entered a war in Serbia, attacked the Sudan, sent cruise missiles into Afghanistan, dropped one by mistake in Pakistan, killed people in Bosnia, and killed some people in Bulgaria too with a wayward bomb.

Are we getting out of control? Is there really no connection between our obsessions with violence, Hollywood's incredible output of satanic movies, the preoccupation with mayhem in our local news, the outbreak of insanity in Littleton, and what we are doing in the Balkans?

We are increasingly living inside some cyber-dream world and act as if war is some kind of action-at-a-distance video game. Our children dress up in trench coats and act out movie scripts in real life massacres, but our shock over these incidents is not enough to wake us out of our dream world.

It is time to raise consciousness now about ourselves and our actions instead of absorbing like sponges reflexive media propaganda that "they" are always the bad guys and "we" are the good cyber-soldiers who reluctantly shuttle from one humanitarian video-war to the next.

To us what the Serbs are doing is "ethnic cleansing" -- reminiscent of fascist, Nazi genocide. Do the Serbs actually call what is happening in Kosovo "ethnic cleansing?" Do they use this lexicon or is this just another accepted, mainstream, media euphemism that keeps things clear for us?

Why is the Serbian point of view almost never presented? Is it possible the Serbs see themselves as "deporting" people they considered foreigners who started a war of liberation, a revolutionary insurgency in the very heart of their ancient Serbia?

There are shrines in Kosovo built in the thirteenth century central to Serbian identity. The fact that we are fighting on the side of rebels, or that "ethnic Albanians" wish to transform Serbian Kosovo into Albanian Kosovo is virtually censored from our collective perception. But already the Albanian flag is being raised all across Kosovo.

It is time to put aside our video games and fantasies. That does not mean we must accept the Serbian point of view, much less condone their atrocities, but it does mean our yellowed, narcissistic journalism needs to stop in its tracks. Most Americans do not realize how distorted their perceptions have become as a consequence. We do not even recognize that we are celebrating and savoring winning a war which the majority of Americans refused to even declare.

If a Serbian captain ordered a train to stop, lined up the civilians along side it, shot them, and then burned their bodies, we would indict him as a war criminal, and consider this another act of genocide. If he says he chose the wrong train, and it was a mistake, he would not be forgiven, excused, nor would such a lame excuse undo his murders.

But when an American pilot "mistakenly" bombs a train, kills 60 people, incinerates them in their seats, and then says it was a mistake, and he meant only to bomb a bridge, this is not perceived as genocide, a war crime, or even murder. Ted Koppel opines that these are the "regrettable" consequences of war and happily moves on to his next story.

Back to the dream world, our media-induced hypnogogic trance. As long as the reverse exodus of Serbian refugees is not reported as obsessively as our media covered displaced Kosovars, as long as the mass graves of the people our B-52s blew up in a silent, surprise raid are not shown, and as long as the parents of the people we killed are never interviewed... to that extent do we know that coverage of this war is biased, one-sided, and our collective perception of events correspondingly distorted and confused.