What got me started on this nasty road is the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1244 which was enacted to stop the “loose zipper affair” of Bill Clinton (with regards to the mouth of Lewinsky), so he decided to bomb Serbia, and the good people of the UN enacted the above resolution to stop more bloodshed or “collateral damage” (that’s when you kill innocent people on purpose but you don’t want the world to know). So this 1244 basically states that all borders of the existing countries will be respected and the existing governments will retain their sovereignty. Surpirse, surprise, next week in Vienna, there will be a conference to see if the borders of some of those Balkan countries should be moved or not. See that? We publicly enacted, signed and endorsed a UN document, but now, we shall walk all over it with muddy shoes. Something doesn’t quite sound right to me. I feel I am being lied to. Is it really that time now? Truth died? Got killed? Requiem for the truth? Let’s consult people who are far smarter than me.

In my attempts to find answers I consulted the “usual suspects” (Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, etc.) all rather UNPOPULAR, but none of them ever suffered from lack of truth which is the main issue here. So let’s see if we can make some sense of it:

1. I contend that truth is only a little angular and inconvenient for most of the politicians during their tenure. Look at the JFK assassination, 40 years later we still don’t know the truth – largely because Arlen Specter (PA) is still around, ex-president Gerry Ford was involved too, etc. etc. So we’re better off waiting for them to pass on before the truth is revealed to us. Just as if we were children or is it that the governments fear the people would lynch the culprits once we found out who was it that fooled us all these years. Just you wait for the Clintons to die – that will be the day of suppressed lynch to end all lynches. Here is how a single cell germinated into a moral Frankenstein in a span of 10 years: During the Cold War, Mr. Gaddis admits, the United States didn’t always live up to its own principles. In the early 1950’s, the C.I.A. spent close to $100 million a year on covert operations, helping overthrow leftist leaders in Iran and Guatemala. To foil the pernicious plots of the Politburo, policy planners proclaimed, “Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply.” Over time, “a kind of moral anesthesia settled in,” as compromises once thought regrettable were deemed necessary, even desirable. Richard Nixon became “the American president least inclined—ever—to respect constraints on his own authority.” You do remember Richard (I am not a crook) Nixon, don’t you?

2. Zinn: We're forgetting the past because neither our educational system nor our media inform us about the past. For instance, the history of the Vietnam War has been very much forgotten. I believe this amnesia is useful to those conducting our present foreign policy. It would be embarrassing if the story of the Vietnam War were told at a time when we are engaged in a war which has some of the same characteristics: government deception, the killing of civilians through bombing, scaring the American people (world communism in that case, terrorism in this one). As for the history beyond Vietnam, that would certainly be damaging to present policy. Because if young people knew the long history of U.S. expansion, through violence and deception, they would not easily believe that we are in Iraq to promote democracy. They would know how many false claims were made in the past to justify aggressive acts. They would learn of the expansion across the continent, destroying Indian villages, committing massacres. They would learn of the deceptions surrounding the Spanish-American War, of the bloody war in the Philippines leading to the deaths of perhaps 600,000 Filipinos. They would learn of the many interventions in the Caribbean. And they would see that these interventions did not bring democracy, and they were connected to U.S. commercial interests. You gotta agree with the man, his views are simple, irrefutable and to the point. So far Requiem 1, truth 0, let’s press on.

3. Chomsky: Not just America, but the state capitalist world. Very fundamental. It draws in part from the anarchist tradition, but it partly draws from the working class tradition in the United States. And by now it has mostly been beaten out of people’s heads... a striking example of amnesia. But if you go back to the early indigenous working class movement, right around where I happened to be – the industrial revolution was mostly in Eastern Massachusetts in those early stages – Lowell, Lawrence, Salem, and so on, which drew in young women from the farms, Irish working men from the slums of Boston, and so on...they had a very lively and active, independent, working-class culture, also a very interesting press. It’s the period of most free press in the history of the country, in England too. The period of maximal freedom of the press was in the late 19th century. First of all there was very wide readership of the press, but the press was to a large extent run by working people, ethnic groups, and other associations. Very substantial involvement...it was before capital concentration created a commercial press, it was before advertising reliance, which greatly narrowed the content and range of the press. Oopsy daisy – the press got his goat, and I think he’s only 100% right, bringing us the current score Requiem 2, truth 0. Onwards we go.
4. Benjamin Schwartz: President Clinton's actions toward the conflict in Kosovo are directed by a guiding principle of his foreign policy: that America must "give back to a contentious world some of the lessons we learned during our own democratic voyage." Indeed, exporting "democratic values," specifically tolerance and pluralism that have come to be regarded as central to the American creed, has emerged as a foreign policy imperative embraced by both Democrats and Republicans. Statesmen and foreign policy mandarins tout these "democratic values" and America's supposed heritage of harmonious diversity and civic comity as the solution to the world's civil wars - the Kosovos, the Albanias, the Bosnias and the Chechnyas - that have proliferated in the post-Cold War world.

U.S. policymakers smugly urge (and then, paradoxically, try to force) these fragmented societies to play nice: to elevate compromise and tolerance above ethnic, nationalist or religious domination as their organizing principles, just as we do in multiethnic, multicultural, multifaith America. But these bromides are rooted in an idealized view of America's development, not the historical reality. Before Americans cast stones at aggrandizing Serbians, they should realize that the United States was built through conquest and force, not by conciliation and compromise. The founders described the United States not as a country but as an empire. For reasons of national security, economic development and racial chauvinism, they embarked on a course of imperial expansion. This meant taking land that belonged to others, subjecting foreign peoples to American rule and crushing separatist movements. The process began with genocidal wars against American Indians, a 300-year conflict that impels today's historians to characterize American expansion on the continent as "invasion" rather than "settlement." These wars, one of the longest series of ethnic conflicts in modern history, were resolved not by power-sharing or the other "reasonable" solutions today's foreign policy experts recommend, but by obliteration. As one congressman asked with resignation in 1830, describing the United States' destruction of Native Americans as the price of its development, "What is history but the obituary of nations?" Also crucial to America's development was the Mexican War, in which a democratic United States swallowed two-fifths of the republic of Mexico, that is California and Texas and all the territory in between. (Who said that republics were less likely to engage in wars of expansion than kingdoms? WFI Editor). In decrying the merciless use of force in Kosovo, Americans seem not to realize that their own Civil War was hardly different. The United States nearly destroyed itself in the central episode of its nation-building - a brutal and irreconcilable nationalist-separatist conflict in which one vision of America crushed another. Although the Constitution (of 1787), like many of the means lauded by foreign policy analysts today to forestall civil conflict, attempted to equalize sectional differences by guaranteeing the South a disproportionate voice in national politics, this could not work in the long run for the United States. The arrangement foundered as the North's power and ambitions grew, and the South refused to become subordinate to or dependent on an opposing, and increasingly threatening, ideology and political economy. In the end the North's vision - of a powerful centralized state, a so-called "Yankee Leviathan," deemed necessary for capitalist development - emerged as the nation's. This vision, despite a persistent mythology promulgated by the victors, was triumphant not because it was intellectually or morally superior; it prevailed, as the United States prevailed over Mexico 20 years earlier, through superior force. Now this was a three pointer from mid-court in my view. Requiem 4, truth 0, and the battle rages on.

Nobody would have ever said that my own views are firmly conservative and pro-republican, but equally pro-liberal and pro-peace. Fine, if it is a conflict I hope to come to a resolution before I die, even if I never come to it – I’ll be OK, I am allowed to hope the impossible can happen. In my view most of our governments were really good at murdering the truth (all for good reasons, mind you – but I personally don’t care about reasons which is why we don’t take law into our own hands and we do not practice vigilantism on a daily basis – it would be a total chaos – however our governments do). So, we see that good reasons do not add up to a hill of beans. We are lied to on a constant basis and history is not taught to us with a very good reason. It is no wonder our education system is flat on its face most of the time. What’s a man (woman, plant, animal, mineral, liberal) to do?

Elbow grease, and learn on your own. As in the immortal words of General George S. Patton Jr. “Lack of orders (from the command) is no excuse for inaction”. Yes for the time being we have a nasty set-back where Requiem is leading 4 or 5 to 0, but with that one little tool, usually found in the frontier spirit of most of us recent or older generation immigrants, the fighting spirit, the inner voice of truth that we all recognize no matter what language we speak, what faith, what skin color, no matter what planet we are from, it is that little spark of dissent which flourishes only in democracies like ours which gives me eternal hope. OK, so you may call me a fool for two foolish hopes, but I refuse to surrender either one of my foolish hopes. It is the new start and the new everything that will grow within the flames of those hopes.

With all my naiveté, and a heart full of hope (and DISSENT), I salute you the American public my fellow victims in this nasty game of media manipulations. As they said: A mind is a terrible thing to waste. Do something for your country - EDUCATE yourself.

Iliya Pavlovich PhD