“The Bosnian War Was Brutal, but It Wasn’t a Holocaust”

On November 17, the Guardian offered its apologies to Noam Chomsky and repaired the mistakes made concerning my work and that of Emma Brockes. However, despite the retractions, the impression persists that my work consists of denying the atrocities committed.
My book Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions, published in 2002, is a documented analysis about the historical and political context of the Yugoslavian disintegration wars. It insists on underestimated issues such as the German policy toward the minorities, Slovene politics, and the divisions between Muslim Bosnian politicians and Kosovo’s turbulent history. It was not my purpose to bring up what happened in Srebrenica, but to focus on how the media covered it. I studied the way the mass media approached this event to the detriment of others, how they have always used the highest figures in relation to the number of deaths without any official confirmation whatsoever and how they have played down a complex reality by multiplying the analogies with Hitler or the Holocaust. The media has replaced analysis with Manichaeism and excitement. Anything else that would not fit this interpretation would be stigmatized.
During this period, the European Left finally chose to reject nationalism and considered the Serbian the worst of all. Croatian and Albanian nationalisms were, in contrast, minimized. This ended in the NATO war against Serbia in violation of the law. However, such attacks on the law, as well as the US, pose a greater threat for the world than Serbian nationalism does.