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Virtual Macedonia Bookstore - Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis
![Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis]()
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List Price: $75.00
Our Price: $75.00
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Availability: Usually ships in 10 to 12 days
Manufacturer: Pluto Press
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Average Customer Rating:   
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 949.703
EAN: 9780745316321
ISBN: 0745316328
Label: Pluto Press
Manufacturer: Pluto Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 224
Publication Date: 2000-08-01
Publisher: Pluto Press
Studio: Pluto Press
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Deserves ten stars
Comment: If you just look at the contributors and authors of this book you will know how good it is. Those who rate this work with one star are same people who do this with every other book that exposes anti-serb propaganda. It is now more than obvious that they are doing this proffesionaly, as a full time job.Neither they have read this book neither they really know what is inside the covers. Their only task is to downgrade any work that could open your eyes regarding ex-Yugo affairs. Do not listen to them and don't let them influence you- this book is a rare gem, and after you read it you will know why.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Left revisionism at its worst!
Comment: Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it!
The people of Serbia know what happened in Bosnia and Kosovo. They know that genocide occurred and that the Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo were the primary victims. I wonder why Mr. Hammond fails to explain why Serbia refuses to extradite Karadzic and Mladic? Why are they refusing to admit the truth about the gruesome massacre in Srebrenica? Is the whole world conspiring against the Serbian people and more important is there a covert Western campaign to dehumanize the Serbian people? Since Mr. Hammond refuses to condemn the Serbian atrocities, the present reviewer will attempt to bring clarity as to why Serbia keeps providing shelter for notorious war criminals, such as Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic.
Even though he has been accused of committing egregious atrocities in Bosnia, Mladic is still hiding in Serbia under the protection of the Serbian authorities. Considered a national hero in Serbia, Mladic commands great respect and admiration. How does one explain the non-compliance of the Serbian authorities to accommodate the international community?
According to some estimates, more than 50% of the Serbian population still believes that there was no massacre in Srebrenica. The figure is probably much higher among the Bosnian Serb population. I recently watched a debate on Serbian TV about Mladic's role in the Srebrenica massacre. The central question of the debate was whether or not the massacre in Srebrenica had actually taken place. One participant remarked that there had been no massacre in Srebrenica and that Mladic has always been a Serbian hero. When asked why she believed in Mladic's innocence and why she held him in such high regard, she replied that Mladic had been killing "bloody Turks" in Srebrenica. She seemed completely oblivious to the fact that more than six hundred years have passed since the Turkish presence in the Balkans. In order to understand the root causes of the Serbian nationalism we will have to return to year 1389. It was in this year that the infamous battle between the Turks and the Serbs took place in Kosovo, the outcome of which had come to play a pivotal role in the rise of the Serbian nationalism. Considered God by many Serbs, Prince Lazar's death probably still constitutes the most significant event in the Serbian history. Islam has ever since been viewed as Serbia's primary enemy in spite of the fact that more than six centuries have passed since Lazar's death.
This enormous hatred of the Turks was easily transferred onto the Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo, even though their only common denominator was Islam. In point of fact, many Serbs still make no distinction between the Turks and the Bosnian or Kosovo's Muslims. In contemporary Serbian literature, Muslims are frequently portrayed as backward, uncivilized and belligerent savages, for corroboration see for example books by Vuk Draskovic and Njegos. Paradoxically, despite their grossly distorted let alone parochial views of Islam, Draskovic and Njegos have many readers in Serbia. What better way to mislead the public than to have "experts" like the notorious Serbian ultra-nationalist Draskovic spread vicious anti-Islamic propaganda? Once these so called experts had managed to create a sense of "victimization" in the Serbian people, justifying a war to defend the Serbian people from the "Islamic threat" and the "Albanian nationalism" was easy. Of course, there were no such threats, if anything, the situation was reversed. The Albanians in Kosovo had been suffering from the Serbian repression for years. The Muslims of Bosnia were and still are the most secularized Muslims in the world so all talk of the Islamic fundamentalism in Bosnia has always been nonsensical and completely groundless. For a thorough analysis of Islam in Bosnia see Noel Malcolm's Bosnia a Short History. Thus, it is clear that the Serbian nationalism has always been fuelled by myths (see Michael Sells's brilliantly researched The Bridge Betrayed for a comprehensive analysis of the root causes of the Serbian nationalism).
Thus, the principal reason Serbia refuses to turn over Ratko Mladic to the War Tribunal in The Hague is the ancient Serbian dream of a "Greater Serbia". Many Serbs believe that Mladic was fighting for a creation of the "Greater Serbia" and for that reason they tend to deny or at best downplay his atrocities. I think that this also explains the Serbian unwillingness to admit the truth about the Srebrenica massacre. Acknowledging the truth about Mladic's role in Srebrenica massacre would have severe repercussions for Serbia. First, the Serbian people would finally realize that their government had been deceiving them all the time about the war in Bosnia and Kosovo. More important, they would learn that the Serbs were not the victims as their government had been telling them from the very beginning of the war in Bosnia and the subsequent Serbian aggression in Kosovo.
Hammond's central thesis is that the NATO's intervention in Kosovo only exacerbated the conflict. What Hammond however fails to explain is what was the alternative to a military intervention. To keep negotiating with Milosevic until his troops exterminate all Albanians? For three years the Western diplomats had been trying to negotiate an end to the war in Bosnia but to no avail. Approximately 300,000 people had to die because the international community refused to intervene in Bosnia. Had the NATO intervened immediately many innocent lives would have been saved. This is irrefutable!
Sometimes when there is no peaceful resolution in sight we must fight fire with fire! When someone is defenseless and powerless
(as the people of Bosnia and Kosovo were) then we are all obliged to put an end to their suffering, be it by diplomacy or by force.
Another aspect clearly neglected by Hammond, Diana Johnstone, Christian Parenti and other left revisionists is the incontrovertible fact that the Serbs were heavily armed while the Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo lacked sophisticated weaponry. Had the international community lifted the arms embargo then they would not have needed to intervene.
Hammond's book thus provides an inaccurate and flawed analysis of the war in Kosovo. Based on the assumption that the NATO's intervention merely escalated the atrocities, this book offers a grossly distorted view of the war in Kosovo.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Finally a book that shows the true face of the Wetsern Media
Comment: I have been waiting for such a book for a long time. First of all let me tell the reader of this review to ignore those morons that gave this book a low grade and call the author boring, reading "entertaining" and "short" history is what made the Kosovo war so appealing to the public in the first place.
Book is very well written, not boring to a person interested in the subject, and tells in great detail what and how the western media did during the Kosovo crisis. It tells about the bias that western media had against the Serbs, people who fought bravely against Nazis in WW2, and how the war was manufactured, and many other GREAT FACTS about the "civilised west" that we will not see on FOXNEWS or read in New York Times.
Also the book NEVER says that Serbs did not commit atrocities (whoever says this clearly did not read the book), but it remindes the casual reader that Serbs were not the only ones who did violent things, a major ommission in the western media.
I would recommend this book to any student that needs an excellent source on the subject and to anyone else who thought that the coverage of the balkan conflicts were not objective.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Revisionist minimisation of anti-Albanian atrocities
Comment: This is NOT simply a set of articles criticising NATO's 1999 assault on Serbia. Rather, its contributors appear horrified with the very thought of human empathy for the oppressed Albanian people of Kosovo on the part of Western observers. They count corpses, deny atrocities and minimise suffering to the point where it appears almost as though life for the Albanians in Milosevic's Kosovo was actually pretty rosy. There is a great deal of insincerity here. Thus Mick Hume professes concern at comparisons between Milosevic and Hitler: they involve minimising the unique horror of the Holocaust, he says. This is a bit rich coming from someone who spent much of the 1990s equating the Croats and Germans of today with the Nazis. Diana Johnstone views the Serbs almost as a kind of 'chosen people' whom she imbues with mystical powers of resistence to her imaginary Western imperialist conspiracies. After reading this book, I do not believe that even if Milosevic really had exterminated six million people in gas chambers the reaction of these authors would have been any different. Whatever next ? Perhaps a sequel claiming that the Taliban were great feminists and that their atrocities against women were the invention of the Western media...
Customer Rating:
Summary: Best book yet on NATO's illegal assault on Yugoslavia
Comment: This is the best book yet on the NATO aggression of March-June 1999. It also studies the media coverage of the war. The first part consists of four essays on the background to the war, David Chandler's essay, Western intervention and the disintegration of Yugoslavia, 1989-1999, being outstanding. The second and third parts comprise fourteen essays on media coverage around the world, including a brilliant essay on CNN's role as NATO's mouthpiece. Unfortunately, however, there is no essay studying the huge popular opposition to the war in Europe and America.This was NATO's first war, and it attacked a sovereign country with no UN authorisation. It showed itself as an alliance with no legal or geographic limits, in which the USA and Germany quarrelled like rats in a sack. To trigger the war, the US government demanded that NATO forces occupy the whole country. As a US official said, "We intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing, and that's what they are going to get." It was also the EU's war. From 1990, the EC intervened in Yugoslavia's internal affairs, aiding those seeking to secede. Its recognition of Yugoslavia's seceding republics breached international law, precipitating war. The EU's social democratic governments embrace capital, `the market' and big business: their enemy is nationalism, politics, demonised as the source of all evil. Germany, the USA, Austria and Albania armed the Kosovo Liberation Army. In early 1998, the KLA's first major attack provoked a Serb crackdown. NATO claimed that the Serbs killed 100,000 people. Later the International Criminal Tribunal of The Hague counted 2,500 dead. The NATO bombing killed 2,600 people. Who should be tried for war crimes? After the war, the US Congress voted $100 million to `independent' forces in former Yugoslavia, seeking its further disintegration. NATO was supposed to disarm the KLA and to protect Serbs and Roma Gypsies in Kosovo. But it has allowed the KLA to kill more than 200 Serbs and to expel 240,000 Serbs and 90,000 Roma.
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Editorial Reviews:
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The media served a highly partisan and propagandistic role in Nato’s Kosovo war, uncritically reproducing official spin in a way that was incompatible with their proclaimed democratic role as objective purveyors of information. Degraded Capability is the first book to integrate a critical interpretation of Western policy toward the former Yugoslavia with analysis of media coverage of the Kosovo crisis and war.
The first part of the book deals with the war itself and the build-up to it, placing this in the context of earlier Western intervention in Yugoslavia. Part two discusses key issues raised by the media coverage, including the demonisation of the enemy, and the role of CNN. In the final section, contributors analyse how the war was reported in different countries around the world, including the United States, Britain, Germany, India, Greece, Russia, and France. The book offers an important corrective to the hysteria and misinformation that permeated media coverage. Subjects covered include the role of the internet, the changing media-military relationship, the depiction and definition of ‘war crimes,’ and how Yugoslav television was presented as a legitimate military target. Contributors include John Pilger, Edward S. Herman, Phil Hammond, Diana Johnstone and Jim Naureckas.
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