RON UNZ 

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Earlier this month I published a long article on the notorious 1994 genocide in Rwanda, explaining that the actual facts may have been very different than what I’d always assumed.

As reported by the Western media, Hutu extremists assassinated the country’s moderate Hutu president by shooting his plane out of the sky and then immediately unleashed a campaign of mass slaughter against Rwanda’s Tutsis, seeking to completely exterminate that 15% minority population. Inflamed by genocidal radio broadcasts, Hutu mobs often armed merely with simple machetes soon killed many hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

That rampage was only halted by the military victory of a rebel Tutsi army led by the heroic Paul Kagame, who then reunified his ethnically-divided country and has very successfully governed it for the last thirty years, becoming the exemplar of a new generation of enlightened African rulers. Meanwhile, the horrified world established an international tribunal to prosecute the Hutu leaders of that African genocide, who had fled the country after their defeat.

This shocking story was very widely covered in our media at the time, and has been reinforced over the decades by numerous books and articles, even becoming the subject of Hotel Rwanda, a successful, Oscar-nominated Hollywood film. Much of the most important early reporting on the Tutsi genocide and its aftermath came from journalist Philip Gourevitch, whose series of long New Yorker articles later became the basis of his award-winning 1998 bestseller. That famous work was glowingly reviewed in our leading publications, thereby bringing elements of his gripping narrative to the attention of many additional millions of readers, myself included.

Although in previous decades, most major countries had signed anti-genocide conventions, when the minority population of a weak and impoverished African nation suffered exactly that fate, all our international leaders stood by and did nothing. In the aftermath of the Cold War, the leaders of the Clinton Administration had boastfully proclaimed America as the world’s sole superpower, but faced with reports that a genocide was taking place in a small African nation, they looked the other way.

As I explained in my article, during the months and years that followed, many writers and public intellectuals reacted with outrage to these horrific events, and one journalist decided to write a long book on the genocides of the previous hundred years. That work became a huge bestseller, attracting enormous attention and eventually having an important impact on global public policy.

Once the grim facts about the massive scale of the genocide became widely known, elite Western political and media circles felt tremendous shame that their governments had done nothing.

Samantha Power was then in her mid-20s, a naturalized Irish immigrant who had graduated from Yale and was working as an overseas war correspondent. She and many others were outraged that no American officials had resigned in protest over their government’s lack of action over Rwanda, a personal sacrifice that might have provoked enough media attention to pressure the West into taking action, thereby saving hundreds of thousands of lives. Returning to America to attend Harvard law school, that simmering righteous anger—heightened as she realized that lack of timely government action had also occurred in other such situations—inspired her to write a paper on the subject.

That paper eventually grew into her first book, “A Problem from Hell” running 600 pages and carrying the subtitle “America and the Age of Genocide.” Published in 2002 when Power was just 31, it quickly became an international sensation, glowingly reviewed almost everywhere, a huge bestseller that won her a Pulitzer Prize and launched her career as a leading figure in human rights doctrine, someone who had seemingly shifted American national policy on an important global issue.

Although I’d certainly been aware of her book when it first appeared, I only just recently read it as part of my Rwanda investigation and discovered that it had attracted even more accolades than I’d ever realized. My 2013 paperback edition devoted a full page to listing the awards it won and another page to the many major newspapers and other publications that had named it one of the best books of the year. Seven additional pages contained excerpts from 63 glowing reviews and endorsements by a very long list of prominent intellectual and political figures, a list so extremely long that I noticed the careless editor had accidentally duplicated at least one of those entries. I can’t recall the last time I’d seen a book that had attracted such seemingly near-universal praise.

Although Power’s weighty book dealt with the general problem of genocide, as might be expected her chapter on Rwanda was one of the longest, and she explained:

The Rwandan genocide would prove to be the fastest, most efficient killing spree of the twentieth century. In 100 days, some 800,000 Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus were murdered. The United States did almost nothing to try to stop it.

It’s very rare that a single book changes the world, but Power’s blockbuster achieved that notable distinction, promoting the legal principle of “Responsibility to Protect,” a phrase that became so ubiquitous it was soon abbreviated as “R2P.” A unanimous 2005 vote of the UN General Assembly later endorsed that new international doctrine, which obligated America and other major world powers to protect citizens around the world who were threatened with massacre or genocide at the hands of any government including their own, thereby seeming to authorize militarily intervention. Wikipedia helpfully explains that R2P contained three main pillars, whose lofty contents were somewhat abstract and ambiguous but strongly expressive:

1. Pillar I: The protection responsibilities of the state – “Each individual state has the responsibility to protect its population from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity”
2. Pillar II: International assistance and capacity-building – States pledge to assist each other in their protection responsibilities
3. Pillar III: Timely and decisive collective response – If any state is “manifestly failing” in its protection responsibilities, then states should take collective action to protect the population.

The elevation of R2P completely reshaped international law, overturning almost four centuries of the world’s post-Westphalian diplomatic tradition as well as the Charter of the United Nations, both of which had prohibited intervention in the domestic affairs of another state. Whereas at the Nuremberg Tribunals, aggressive war was condemned as “the supreme crime,” it now might become legally justified if it could be presented as supporting a humanitarian R2P operation. This powerful new principle became an important element of Western statecraft, used to justify our military interventions in Libya, Syria, and other countries, operations that led to the successful or attempted toppling of various world leaders.

However, to our considerable chagrin, other countries have sometimes drawn upon that same legal framework, with Russia partly justifying its “special military operation” in Ukraine by claiming it was acting to protect the lives of the threatened ethnic Russian citizens of the Donbass. Meanwhile, we and our NATO allies have harshly condemned the Russian action as a grossly illegal invasion of a sovereign nation. So what appears like a humanitarian military intervention to some observers seems more like an illegal foreign invasion to others.

The tendency of the West to be extremely selective in its application of that supposedly universal principle has become glaringly obvious in the ongoing Israel/Gaza conflict. Tens of thousands of Gazans have already died at Israel’s hands in the greatest televised massacre of helpless civilians in the history of the world. Many Israeli leaders have used explicitly genocidal language in describing their plans for the Palestinians, with their statements compiled in South Africa’s 91 page legal brief to the International Court of Justice, whose jurists then issued a series of near-unanimous rulings that the Palestinians were at great risk of suffering a “genocide” at Israel’s hands. In January, Princeton’s Richard Falk, an eminent international human rights scholar long associated with the United Nations, described the horrific events in Gaza as “the Most Transparent Genocide in Human History.”

For twenty years Western leaders have regularly issued idealistic R2P proclamations, but neither America nor any of its allies regarded themselves as having any “responsibility to protect” the dying Palestinians. Instead, our military role has actually been entirely on the other side, providing the massive shipments of American munitions to Israel that have allowed that country to maintain its devastating attacks. It is also clear that if any other regional power such as Turkey or Iran were to begin fulfilling its R2P commitments by intervening on behalf of the Gazans, America and its media would surely denounce that action as an unprovoked act of aggression and retaliate militarily. Indeed, when the Houthi forces of Yemen began counter-blockading Israeli-connected shipping in the Red Sea in hopes of pressuring Israel into allowing food supplies into Gaza, America declared this an act of terrorism and bombarded the Houthis with bombs and missiles.

So the international R2P legacy of the Rwanda Genocide has been an extremely skewed and selective one. But I’ve gradually discovered that the historical roots of the R2P doctrine were equally dishonest.

Until very recently, I’d never read the books by Gourevitch, Power, or any others on the story of Rwanda, but the basic facts of that genocide had always seemed absolutely certain to me. These had been uniformly presented in all of my media outlets, and I regarded the story as solidly established a historical event as anything could possibly be.

Therefore, I was quite surprised several years ago when an unfamiliar Canadian writer named Antony Black suggested that I republish several of his articles, and one of those claimed that the true facts of the Rwanda killings had been the polar opposite of what I’d always been led to believe. According to his account, originally published in 2014, enormous bloodshed had indeed occurred, but the overwhelming majority of the victims had been Rwanda’s Hutus, with perhaps a million or more of them massacred by Kagame’s Tutsi rebel army, which had successfully conquered the country after assassinating its Hutu president.

The essay seemed very solidly written and his several other articles were mostly reasonable and convincing, so I gladly featured his provocative contrarian analysis as a perfect fulfillment of the mission statement of our alternative media webzine. But although it certainly raised questions and doubts in my mind, I still found it quite difficult to believe that this one article might be true and all the previous hundreds or thousands of media stories on Rwanda that I’d absorbed over the previous three decades almost entirely false. So my long-held understanding of the Rwanda story had been shaken but hardly overturned.

However, that completely changed a few weeks ago when I discovered a 2014 book on the same subject written by Prof. Edward Herman of the University of Pennsylvania and journalist David Peterson. As a longtime friend and colleague of Noam Chomsky, Herman had a strong reputation as a distinguished and fearless leftist critic of government policies, and the conclusions in his short book entirely matched those in Black’s account of events. But the former work was also heavily documented with more than 250 footnotes and strongly endorsed by several prominent journalists and researchers, including authors of two other books on the Rwandan tragedy.

Virtually all our mainstream media sources agreed with Gourevitch and Power that Kagame had been the shining hero of the story, but Herman and Peterson instead portrayed him as the darkest of villains, a leader whose political ambitions led him to overturn the Rwandan peace agreement by assassinating the country’s president, then immediately launching a genocidal war of conquest in which as many as two million Hutus had been slaughtered. Another 1.5 million Hutus fled across the border to neighboring Congo, and Kagame later began an invasion of that resource-rich neighbor, starting wars that according to Wikipedia ultimately cost well over five million civilian lives. For thirty years, virtually all mainstream media outlets had followed Gourevitch, Power, and others in presenting Kagame as Rwanda’s great international hero, but Herman and Peterson painted a very different picture, describing him as “quite possibly the greatest mass murderer alive today.”

I decided to balance this contrarian account by also carefully reading the books by Gourevitch and Power, but still found the totally contrasting analysis of Herman and Peterson much more persuasive. The Wikipedia article on the Rwandan genocide runs 21,000 words, but I noticed that it contained absolutely no mention of their latter book, once again demonstrating how unreliable that establishmentarian information source tends to be on any controversial subject.

Thus I was faced with two diametrically opposed historical narratives. According to the award-winning books by Gourevitch and Power, backed by nearly 100% of three decades of mainstream media coverage, the Rwandan genocide had involved the massacre of Tutsis by Hutus, with Kagame its great hero; but according to Herman, Peterson, and a few others, the Tutsis had instead massacred the Hutus, with Kagame being the leading villain of the story. Although I couldn’t be entirely sure who was correct, I leaned towards the latter position, shocked at how the dispute had been entirely concealed from me, and I closed my article on that note.

• American Pravda: The Rwandan Genocide
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • March 4, 2024 • 7,400 Words

Many or most of my readers seemed just as shocked as I had been that the very widely reported “Tutsi Genocide of 1994” may have actually been a hoax and the exact opposite of the truth, and one of them came upon some very telling additional material.

The year 2014 marked the twentieth anniversary of the killings, and Herman, Peterson, and Black were not the only individuals interested in reexamining the facts. That same year the BBC produced and broadcast an hour long documentary investigation of the Rwanda genocide that came to almost exactly the same conclusions as those authors. Some of Kagame’s former top military commanders were interviewed on camera, revealing that he had been responsible for the assassination of Rwanda’s Hutu president, and then used that crime to provide cover for his renewed invasion of the country and the massacre of its Hutu population. There were also interviews with American academics whose careful quantitative field work contradicted the widely-held narrative of events and instead confirmed that the overwhelming majority of the victims had been Hutu civilians, who died at the hands of Kagame’s Tutsi forces, with interviews of some Hutu survivors. In subsequent years, Kagame had solidified his control through a reign of terror, and any Rwandans who challenged his official account faced imprisonment or death as “Genocide Deniers.” His regime even made efforts to track down and assassinate defectors or political dissidents who had fled the country.

Taken together with all the other evidence I’d already digested, I regarded the 2014 BBC documentary as absolutely compelling, and I would urge all those interested in what might be reasonably called Rwanda’s “Tutsi Genocide Hoax” to watch it and decide for themselves.

Although I found the facts and interviews presented in the BBC documentary important and persuasive, even more shocking to me was that it had received virtually no coverage in the rest of the Western media in the decade since it had been released, leaving me completely unaware of its existence. For generations, the BBC has been regarded as one of the world’s most prestigious and reputable mainstream sources of news information, yet none of our other media outlets had taken any notice of a major documentary that completely overturned the existing Rwanda narrative.

Perhaps after decades of promoting the official story of a Tutsi genocide, editors were very reluctant to admit that they’d gotten their facts entirely backward. That would obviously be even more true of someone like Samantha Power, who had parlayed her book into a highly successful political career, serving as American Ambassador to the UN under Obama, and marrying Cass Sunstein, another influential Obama Administration official in 2008; most recently, she has become director of USAID in the Biden Administration. How could Power or those journalists under her influence possibly admit that they’d long promoted a story that was the exact opposite of the truth, apparently spending two decades praising the genocidal killers and denouncing the miserable victims?

Although I frequently consult Wikipedia as a very useful source of information, I certainly recognize that its contents are under the tight control of Intelligence agencies, PR firms, and activist groups, so it must be treated with extreme caution on any controversial topic. But this strict regime of dishonest censorship can sometimes be used to provide an important indicator of the truth.

Consider that long and explosive BBC documentary. No mention of it appears anywhere in the extremely long Wikipedia article on the Rwanda killings, nor even in the separate Wikipedia article devoted to all the films and documentaries on those events, which contains some 37 entries. Most of those latter productions are by obscure film-makers, none of whom have a sliver of the BBC‘s mainstream credibility, while the several BBC Panorama shows had appeared soon after the massacres, long before any of the true facts had gradually come to light from the work of academic researchers and the legal proceedings of the war-crimes tribunal. So by any reasonable standard, that 2014 BBC expose appears by far the most credible production devoted to the topic, yet it was completely omitted by the Wikipedia editors, even from the page listing all the various Rwanda documentaries.

I think this evidence from silence—“the dog that didn’t bark”—demonstrates that those organizations controlling the Wikipedia pages on the Rwanda genocide fully recognized the BBC documentary’s massive potential importance and believed that they needed to suppress its explosive contents. Indeed, from what I’ve been told, the report was only broadcast once on BBC2 and if not for the copy made available on the Vimeo video platform, it might have completely vanished without a trace. This is hardly surprising since it portrayed former British Prime Minister Tony Blair as a willing dupe of Rwanda’s Tutsi ruler, an African dictator responsible for many millions of civilian deaths. Similarly, the important Herman/Peterson book was also carefully excluded from the very long Wikipedia page on the Rwanda genocide.

Herman and Peterson emphasized that one of their important sources was Canadian attorney Christopher Black, who had defended a number of the Hutu leaders at the war crimes tribunal, and I discovered that he himself had published a long 2014 article presenting his side of events, while also providing that material to his brother Antony, whose article had first brought the issue to my attention.

Much of Christopher Black’s account was eye-opening, and if even just a fraction of his accusations can be credited, the legal proceedings were a complete kangeroo court. Every sort of improper pressure was exerted upon both the defendants and their attorneys in order to secure convictions against the accused Hutu leaders, with Herman and Peterson saying the same things.

• Rwanda and the Criminalisation of International Justice: Anatomy of War Crimes Trials
  Christopher Black • Global Research • October 19, 2014 • 5,400 Words

Over the years, I’d produced my long American Pravda series, calling into question many other major historical events. But for nearly three decades, I’d never once doubted the official narrative of the Rwandan genocide, which I’d always regarded as solidly established as anything in modern world history. So if I now concluded that it was very likely false and indeed the opposite of the actual reality, there were important implications worth pursuing.

If Herman and Peterson had been right about Rwanda while almost everything else I’d read in the media for thirty years had been wrong, their credibility on related matters was dramatically raised. I soon discovered that a few years earlier they’d published a short 2010 book entitled The Politics of Genocide on that broader topic, including a chapter on Rwanda but also covering many other examples, and I decided to read it as well.

The authors squarely took aim at the entire historical and ideological framework successfully erected by Power and her allies, and indeed her book was the first one they briefly critiqued, focusing less upon its errors than upon its striking omissions.

They noted that across more than 600 pages, Power devoted only a single sentence to the case of American-backed Indonesia, which had killed 100,000 to 200,000 East Timorese during its brutal occupation of their island. Even more remarkably, she totally ignored the massive slaughter of Indonesia’s own ethnic Chinese population during the mid-1960s. That ethnic bloodbath had killed as many as two or three million civilians, being so extreme that a top secret CIA report at the time stated that the massacres “rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century.” I’d noticed the same striking omission when I’d read Power’s book, shocked that such a hefty volume devoted to mass ethnic killings of the the last century could have completely ignored one of the most worst such examples of that period.

The obvious reason for her telling exclusion was that the American government at the time supported or even encouraged that enormous Indonesian Cold War massacre, and highlighting such a story would have been uncomfortable for most of her American audience, let alone the editors, publishers, and reviewers that a young, first-time author such as Power needed to keep on her side. The late 1990s represented the arrogant, self-satisfied peak of America’s post-Cold War triumph, and dredging up unfortunate events from three decades earlier might have diminished any pride in our own moral rectitude as citizens of the “indispensable nation.”

Similarly, the wars and massacres in Congo unleashed by Kagame led to the deaths of more than five million civilians. But his regime was strongly backed by America and he was one of Power’s shining heroes so the word “Congo” was entirely absent from her index.

By contrast, Power devoted three full chapters—nearly one-third of her book—to the bitter Balkan wars of the 1990s, in which various alleged “genocides” by the Serbs were used to justify NATO military intervention. But Herman and Peterson noted that when the smoke cleared, outside researchers found that across all those years of bitter conflict, there had only been a total of about 100,000 deaths on all sides combined, mostly fighters killed in combat, with the casualty figures promoted by our media and uncritically accepted by Power having been wildly exaggerated.

So a supposedly comprehensive book on ethnic “genocide” completely ignored cases involving millions of civilians massacred along ethnic lines while devoting a large fraction of its text to a conflict involving a far smaller total of mostly battlefield deaths in a Balkan civil war, with the common factor apparently being the particular side the American government had taken in that conflict.

The most extreme example of this grotesque imbalance came in Power’s long chapter on the killings following the 1995 fall of Srebrenica. In that incident, which received absolutely massive global media coverage, Serb militias allegedly killed a few thousand Bosnian men, most of them probably former fighters, and even the details of that paltry supposed “massacre” have been sharply disputed over the years. Yet according to Wikipedia that “genocide” of Bosnians became a central impetus for the adoption of the R2P doctrine.

Thus, the Western media and Power gave enormous coverage to the killing, lawful or otherwise, of a few thousand individuals during Yugoslavia’s bloody secessionist civil war, while totally ignoring other cases involving millions of civilian deaths. Herman and Peterson supported their critique by providing a handy table presenting the ratio of deaths to media mentions of “genocide” across a number of recent cases, with those figures ranging from 12-to-1 for Kosovo to more than 300,000-to-1 for Congo. That difference of more than four orders-of-magnitude, along with the numerous hoaxes and propaganda falsehoods they discuss, brought to mind a passage from one of my previous articles that I’ve quoted on a number of occasions:

We naively tend to assume that our media accurately reflects the events of our world and its history, but instead what we all too often see are only the tremendously distorted images of a circus fun-house mirror, with small items sometimes transformed into large ones, and large ones into small. The contours of historical reality may be warped into almost unrecognizable shapes, with some important elements completely disappearing from the record and others appearing out of nowhere. I’ve often suggested that the media creates our reality, but given such glaring omissions and distortions, the reality produced is often largely fictional. Our standard histories have always criticized the ludicrous Soviet propaganda during the height of Stalin’s purges or the Ukrainian famine, but in its own way, our own media organs sometimes seem just as dishonest and absurd in their own reporting. And until the availability of the Internet, it was difficult for most of us to ever recognize the enormity of this problem.

The Herman/Peterson book was barely a quarter of the length of Power’s long work, but it covered a far wider range of modern historical examples and did so in a much more even-handed manner, lacking the tendentious ideological framework that Power was always working to establish. For example, they noted that the crippling sanctions that America had imposed upon Iraq after the end of the Gulf War destroyed the civilian infrastructure of one of the Arab World’s most modern countries, and probably cost well over a million Iraqis their lives. Indeed, in a notorious interview, Secretary of State Madelaine Albright had publicly declared that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children were a necessary price to pay as part of our unsuccessful efforts to bring that country to its knees and drive Saddam Hussein from power. Perhaps three million Vietnamese civilians died, mostly at American hands, because of our military involvement in that country, but none of that appeared anywhere in Power’s account.

In some cases, three or four pages in the Herman/Peterson book seemed to do a better job of accurately and objectively summarizing a major historical example than the corresponding fifty or sixty pages in Power’s work. The authors’ longest chapter by far was the 18 pages they devoted to Rwanda and the Congo, later expanded into their 2014 book on the same subject, and they effectively demolished the entire factual framework assumed by Power and nearly all of our mainstream journalists.

Despite all these severe flaws, Power’s book received almost unprecedented attention and accolades, while the far superior work by Herman and Peterson was totally ignored by the mainstream media, but I strongly concur with the glowing assessments the latter drew from independent if left-leaning journalists and writers such as John Pilger, Norman Solomon, and Diana Johnstone. Noam Chomsky provided the Foreword, in which he concluded that the term “genocide” had become so heavily abused and dishonestly weaponized by Western political leaders and their media lapdogs that it should probably be expunged from the language of international discussion.

Chomsky soon proved prescient in his concerns. The book had originally been published in 2010 and the authors added a long preface to their reissued 2011 edition, noting that NATO forces had attacked and destroyed Libya that year, with its longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi killed in particularly brutal fashion, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proudly declaring: “We came. We saw. He died.” The figleaf excuse for that remarkable attack on a sovereign state had been Gaddafi’s successful military efforts to suppress a Western-backed uprising by Islamicist fighters loosely associated with Al Qaeda, which NATO leaders claimed might potentially lead to civilian massacres, allowing them to invoke the “R2P” doctrine so successfully popularized by Power.

As a consequence of that NATO intervention, the wealthiest, most prosperous state on the African continent was destroyed and politically fragmented into territories held by violent rival factions, a situation that persists down to the present day. Even at the very early date that the authors wrote, widespread massacres of the African workers previously imported by the overthrown regime had already taken place, along with the establishment of public slave-markets. So a military intervention purportedly aimed at preventing a purely hypothetical civilian massacre had instead led to an actual one, largely along ethnic lines, but no mention of any of these facts let alone any apologies appeared in the 2013 edition of Power’s text.

Although her book had appeared a few years before the beginning of ethnic bloodshed in the Darfur region of Sudan, she covered it in some of her later articles, at a time when that alleged “genocide” had become an enormous topic in the Western media, eventually leading to military intervention. Herman and Peterson devoted a few pages to their scathing criticism of her ignorant and biased coverage, which falsely racialized a conflict between two groups of Muslim black Africans, involving relatively small numbers of deaths compared to Congo, Iraq, or many other places. They argued that the obvious motive for the Darfur propaganda campaign was to support American policy interests and deflect media coverage from other events, something that I had myself noticed at the time. Thus the media endlessly vilified the allegedly genocidal “Arabs” of Darfu even as America’s occupation of Iraq was causing the deaths of many hundreds of thousands of Arab civilians.

Such periodic use of Darfur for propaganda purposes seems to continue even today. On Friday, the front-page of the Wall Street Journal was filled with a photo-laden story of the current horrors of Darfur, thereby allowing that newspaper to relegate Israel’s ongoing massacre and starvation of Gaza’s two million helpless civilians to a much smaller item at the back.

Although I regarded the Herman/Peterson book as a very effective counter-weight and rebuttal to Power’s volume, its focus was considerably different. Given the rather small number of civilian deaths in the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, the former work only devoted about a dozen pages to those events, half of them debunking the claims of an infamous Serb massacre of 45 Kosovans, heavily promoted by the Western media, but largely fictional. Meanwhile Power’s coverage ran three full chapters, totaling over 180 pages including the copious footnotes. Such a heavy emphasis on the Balkans was partly due to the massive Western media coverage devoted to those years of warfare on the European continent and the NATO intervention. But another obvious factor was Power’s own background as a young war reporter who covered that fighting during the middle years of the 1990s.

I therefore decided to read an additional book on the same subject by Diana Johnstone, a longtime writer on European and international affairs, heavily praised by Herman and published by the same small leftist press. Fool’s Crusade had appeared in 2002, the same year as Power’s book, but although it attracted scarcely a sliver of the latter’s coverage and reviews, I found it provided a vastly superior treatment of both the factual details of the 1990s Balkan Wars and their complex origins.

The West’s war against the Serbs became a tremendous cause celebre, not merely for the NATO officials eager to demonstrate that their half-century old military alliance still had a purpose after the end of the Cold War, but also among the left-liberal literati, who sought to relive the heroic stories they’d imbibed about their grand-parents’ triumph over the evil Nazis. Since Nazis had grown scarce in Europe, they had to settle for the stubborn Serbs of the former Yugoslavia. Ironically enough, those same Serbs had actually been a major thorn in the side of the Axis occupation forces during World War II, but they were now portrayed as the absolute villains of these new conflicts and the latter-day heirs of the Third Reich. This certainly included the Serbian political leader, Slobodan Milošević, a rather bland and pudgy former banker who was often denounced as “the new Balkan Hitler.”

Given this widely-accepted simple morality play, Johnstone’s nuanced and detailed contrary analysis naturally provoked enormous outrage, leading to the rejection of her manuscript by its Swedish publisher. But quite a number of prominent leftist international luminaries—intellectuals and journalists including Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Arundhati Roy, and Tariq Ali—all rallied to her defense, declaring her book “an outstanding work” and “an appeal to fact and reason,” and after carefully reading it, I’d strongly concur. I’d never really understood why the Balkan Wars had broken out, and after digesting Power’s very lengthy coverage of those conflicts, I remained just as mystified, aside from her implication that the Serbs and their leaders were racist, genocidal evildoers. But the first couple of chapters in Johnstone’s excellent book greatly clarified matters for me.

Although Yugoslavia’s ethnic groups had often been fractious—regularly massacring each other during World War II—for the previous couple of generations the country had been peacefully held together under the tight grip of Marshal Tito’s dictatorship. But his death in 1980 had left a political power vacuum and the complex system of ethnic apportionment he had established led to a great deal of political paralysis. As a result, the country limped along in the years that followed, but faced growing problems of economic inefficiency, with the wealthier regions angry that they were heavily subsidizing the poorer ones. While the Soviet Union still existed, NATO countries had always viewed independent Yugoslavia as a thorn in Moscow’s side, and therefore provided heavy political and financial support; but after the Cold War ended and the Warsaw Pact dissolved, Western attitudes hardened.

Meanwhile, the wealth of the EU became a tremendous lure for many Yugoslav republics, which yearned to break free and join that enticing economic bloc. Prior to 1918 several of these such as Croatia and Slovenia had spent centuries ruled from Vienna as components of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and they deeply longed to rejoin their prosperous former partners. In addition, large numbers of Yugoslavs had spent many years as guest-workers in Western European industries or had close relatives who had, and they had been greatly impressed by the much higher standard of living and superior lifestyle they had seen.

Given such enormous temptations, it was hardly surprising that Slovenia—the wealthiest and most Westernized republic—soon seceded from the Yugoslavian state, a step that involved only relatively minor bloodshed.

Croatia soon followed as well, but that separation posed far more serious problems since Serbs and Croats had brutally massacred each other during World War II and the populations were also intermingled. Portions of Croatia were majority Serb and those inhabitants were very fearful of what they would face as a small minority in a new country completely ruled by their traditional Croat enemies. Furthermore, much of the financial and political backing for independence came from the Croatian diaspora communities of North America and Western Europe, many of whose members had emigrated after the defeat of their independent fascist wartime state, which they still fondly remembered. But for Serbs, Croatia’s new checkerboard flag recalled many terrible wartime atrocities, having cultural connotations similar to that of the Nazi Swastika banner. So those Serb regions attempted to secede from secessionist Croatia, leading to considerable bloodshed and an eventual round of massive ethnic cleansing against hundreds of thousands of Serbs. Those latter events were hardly emphasized by the Western media, which treated the Serbs as the designated villains of their storyline.

Although Milošević was regularly demonized as a fierce, even bloodthirsty ultra-nationalist, Johnstone argued that this portrayal was dishonest propaganda based upon misinterpreting a few isolated sentences in his public speeches. Instead, the Serbian leader regarded ethnic nationalism as a deadly threat to his multi-ethnic Yugoslavian state, but after being forced to accept the departure of Slovenia and Croatia, the remaining Yugoslav population became overwhelmingly Serbian, leading to further strains with the other groups that remained.

This was especially the case in Bosnia, which contained a complex tangle of Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims, leading to communal and secessionist violence. At the time, the Serb leadership claimed that they were facing an influx of fanatic Islamic Jihadis, many of them veterans of the Afghanistan war, who arrived to support the Bosnian Muslims, and I’d always regarded that as merely wartime propaganda, but Johnstone asserts it was absolutely true. Furthermore, she suggested that many of the highest-profile attacks on Bosnian civilians that inflamed sentiments in the West and led to NATO involvement seemed suspiciously like the false-flag operations that Serb advocates had often claimed they were.

Although Serb hands were hardly clean in Bosnia or in the later conflict with Muslim Albanian secessionists in the Kosovo region of Serbia itself, the Western claims of huge Serb massacres and wholesale ethnic cleansing were grotesquely exaggerated, intended to justify NATO military efforts that were actually motivated by geopolitical and ideological factors. Thus, just as in Rwanda, Western journalists became the “useful idiots” manipulated by NATO propagandists into “manufacturing consent” for what essentially amounted to a Western war of aggression against the Serbs of the former Yugoslavia.

I’m hardly a Balkan expert, but Johnstone’s account of the war and its roots seemed quite convincing to me, certainly much more so than what was sketched out in Power’s book, and the former’s depth of knowledge was considerable. Although a Minnesota native by birth, Johnstone had become very active in the movement opposing the Vietnam War and eventually relocated to Paris in the early 1970s, so she’d been living on that continent and extensively writing about its political conflicts including Yugoslavian issues since Power’s infancy.

Even a casual examination of the two books demonstrated Johnstone’s far greater depth of understanding. For example, the complete bibliography of Power’s long work included nearly 500 titles, but just as I’d expected every single one of them was in English, suggesting that the author lacked solid knowledge of any other language. I can hardly fault her on that score since I suffer from that same disability, but I noticed that Johnstone’s discussion of the Balkan conflict and its history drew very heavily upon publications in French and especially German. For generations, that last language had dominated most academic scholarship, certainly including important works on the Balkans which had spent centuries within Vienna’s orbit, while German political leaders had more recently played a central role in the NATO decision-making regarding that conflict. So Johnstone obviously had access to a wealth of information while Power was forced to rely upon a much narrower range of sources.

Over the years I’d occasionally read Johnstone’s articles at Alex Cockburn’s Counterpunch, and always found them very solid and thoughtful, but I had little knowledge of her background. Then in 2020, she’d published Circle in the Darkness, her personal memoirs, and the very favorable comments it had attracted led me to read it soon afterward. I found her personal history an interesting and impressive one, and her background greatly strengthened the credibility of her analysis when I very recently read her account of the Balkan conflicts, which diverged so sharply from that of Power and almost all other mainstream Western journalists.

Johnstone celebrates her ninetieth birthday this year, but the acuity of her thought and her analysis remains entirely undiminished as demonstrated by her excellent recent pieces on the current Israel/Gaza conflict and the political reactions in France and America.

Although I’ve been sharply critical of Power’s book and the rather superficial analysis of events it provided, in all fairness we should consider her circumstances. She apparently researched and wrote most of it while she was still in her late 20s, enrolled as a Harvard Law School student, so it was hardly surprising that she lacked the deep knowledge of noted scholars such as Herman, who had been publishing books on important policy issues years before Power was even born.

Should we really expect a fledgling young policy writer such as Power to strongly challenge the almost universally accepted factual narrative on major world events such as the Balkan Wars or those in 1994 Rwanda while still enrolled in law school? Only a twenty-something writer of extraordinary knowledge, skill, and self-confidence would have done so.

Even if Power had possessed that rare combination of impressive traits, would her book have even been published, let alone received a sliver of the massive recognition that it did? Surely an unknown, uncredentialed first-time author proposing any such “conspiratorial” narrative would have merely collected rejection-slips, while severely damaging her own career prospects in the process. Herman was a long-tenured professor at an Ivy League school who had already published 18 previous books, some of them enormously influential volumes, yet his short 2010 contrarian analysis on the same topic of genocide was only released by a small leftist press and was never reviewed in any mainstream publication so that I only first heard of it a few weeks ago.

I’d spent the decade of the 1990s almost entirely focused on domestic American policies, so I paid little attention to the Balkan wars that broke out in the former Yugoslavia, drawing my limited understanding of those conflicts from the numerous articles in my regular newspapers and other publications. During those years, my favorite magazine was The New Republic, which I read cover-to-cover every week, and I’ve now discovered that much of its Balkan coverage came from the young Samantha Power, then working as a war reporter in the region, who published nearly a dozen TNR pieces during those years, few of whose details had stuck in my mind.

Reading them all again, I think they mostly seemed fine though written in the saucy, ironical TNR style of that era. I don’t doubt that Power was an honest journalist, and that her factual statements and the incidents she described were accurate. But as a young reporter on her first overseas assignment, she naturally seemed to absorb all the broader assumptions about the underlying causes of the bloody conflict that were ubiquitous among her senior colleagues and the NATO political officers who presumably fed them much of their information. Since her account so closely matched everything else I was reading in my other mainstream publications, I’d vaguely assumed that this description of events was probably correct, so I can’t really condemn Power without condemning myself as well, and for very similar reasons. In those pre-Internet days, obtaining information sharply divergent from the official narrative was a much more difficult undertaking.

Similarly, although the horrors in Rwanda had been a major inspiration for her influential book, she seems never to have actually visited that country nor done any personal reporting on those 1994 events, but instead relied upon media accounts and works by Gourevitch and others. Her Rwanda bibliography included almost two dozen mainstream books and reports, supplemented by her extensive reading of declassified Clinton Administration documents and interviews with former American officials. So it appears that she merely absorbed and digested the official narrative of events, then regurgitated them overlaid by her own interpretation, soon receiving enormous adulation as a consequence. Around the time she completed her manuscript, she also published an 18,000 word article on Rwanda in The Atlantic Monthly, a somewhat shortened and reworked version of her chapter on that same subject, so those interested in her perspective can easily read it online.

Over the decades, I assume that Power has gradually become aware that very serious questions have been raised about the accuracy of the Rwandan and Balkan portions of her book, which may have presented an inversion of reality. Similarly, she must recognize that her demonization of Saddam Hussein for killing tens of thousands of Iraqis helped enable our subsequent Iraq War and occupation, during which probably more than a million Iraqis died and many additional millions were displaced. But it is only human for her to brush those concerns aside, given that those writings became the foundation of her very successful humanitarian career.

Although we should not be too harsh on the serious mistakes made by Samantha Power as a young writer, her more recent activities raise far graver issues.

In her influential book, one point she had emphasized that was widely repeated in many of its glowing reviews was her outrage that no prominent member of the Clinton Administration had spoken out against the ongoing genocide in Rwanda or resigned as an act of protest.

But Power wrote those words more than twenty years ago, and today she herself holds exactly that sort of prominent position in the Biden Administration even as it facilitates Israel’s genocidal rampage in Gaza, now pushing two million Gazans to the brink of starvation, so her own silence speaks volumes. Unlike the confused and obscure pattern of killings taking place across rural Rwanda—which were probably the opposite of what most Westerners believed—scenes of war crimes and slaughter in Gaza are easily available to the entire world on social media, with many Israeli soldiers gleefully broadcasting their brutal atrocities and a very long list of important Israeli officials publicly declaring their genocidal aims. But Power apparently recognizes that the international “Responsibility to Protect” principle that she had helped to establish contains one huge exception.

Presumably her continuing silence mostly reflects her careerist ambitions to remain in the good graces of the zealously pro-Israel donor class of her own Democratic Party and therefore position herself as a possible Secretary of State in a future administration. But perhaps there may be another factor as well.

As would be expected, three of the earliest chapters of her book focus upon the Nazi campaign to exterminate Europe’s Jews during World War II, certainly the archetypal example of a twentieth century genocide, and her framing narrative explained how it gave rise to that newly invented term. Power was born in 1970 and her entire life has probably been lived in the cultural shadow of the Holocaust.

But if she fully admitted to herself that the conclusions she had reached in her chapters on Rwanda and the Balkans may have been upside-down and backwards, a far more horrifying possibility might begin to enter her thoughts. Those former events happened in the here and now and she herself had covered some of them as a journalist. So if her understanding had been inverted, perhaps that could also be the case for matters that took place long ago and far away.

As she watches the terrible events unfolding in Gaza, somewhere in the back of her mind she might begin to wonder whether the Nazi Holocaust—surely a central pillar of her entire world-view and belief system—may have merely represented an extreme example of Jewish psychological projection.

• Why Everything You Know About World War II Is Wrong
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 12, 2023 • 12,600 Words
• More Falsehoods of World War II
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 19, 2023 • 7,500 Words
• Hitler, Churchill, the Holocaust, and the War in Ukraine
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 17, 2023 • 9,700 Words

Related Reading:

• American Pravda: The Rwandan Genocide
• Hotel Propaganda by Antony C. Black
• American Pravda: War Crimes and Atrocity-Hoaxes in the Israel/Gaza Conflict
• Why Everything You Know About World War II Is Wrong
• John McCain: When “Tokyo Rose” Ran for President
• American Pravda: The Nakba and the Holocaust