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THE NEW MILITARY HUMANISM:
Lessons from Kosovo
Naom Chomsky
Common Courage Press
THE NEW MILITARY HUMANISM
is a carefully wrought study by an important scholar with a lifelong
commitment to individual liberty, rational thought, free speech, and
critical habits of mind, scarce commodities in this era of interlocking
media empires and totalistic propaganda systems. Readers of the Independent
Reviews Site will not soon find another review of this important book
elsewhere, certainly not in the mainstream US media. A leading American
intellectual, Noam Chomsky wrote this book for those of us handed
a sugar-coated version of the war. His aim: to confront us with the
sordid reality.
"They made a desert and called it peace," said Tacitus
describing the foreign policy of the Roman Empire as quoted by Chomsky
appros the US - NATO pacification of the Federal Republic Yugoslavia
(FRY) concluded a year ago last June. Perhaps former Secretary General
of the United Nations Boutros Boutros-Ghali had that in mind when
he said, "It would be some time before I fully realized that the United
States sees little need for diplomacy. Power is enough. Only the weak
rely on diplomacy...The Roman Empire had no need for diplomacy. Nor
does the United States." Just last month, Amnesty International presented
a case against NATO for war crimes.
A damning indictment, extensively documented, of
US rejection of peace initiatives, of official complacency and unconcern,
of repression, distortion and cowed submission on the part of the
mainstream media. This book is a meticulous history of an avoidable
catastrophe as well as a detailed and shrewd treatment of dissent
and resistance before and during the war, within the US and from outside.
THE NEW MILITARY HUMANISM is more than another chronicle of recent
US aggression and criminality; it also details the role of the corporate
media in crafting the official U.S. - NATO version of events for domestic
consumption.
Here, combining quotations from the NATO high command
with an examination of the Rambouillet Negotiations, Chomsky shows
how the attack on the FRY really came about. No more echoes of official
war-time propaganda or of immediate postwar bunkum created for the
American public, but straight talk based on the known facts.
THE NEW MILITARY HUMANISM provides knowledge of
what United States policy makers and their European counterparts really
intended during the recent U.S.-led NATO war on Yugolslavia in elaborate
and sometimes terrifying detail. I believe that no one can really
understand contemporary U.S. foreign policy unless she is acquainted
with the grim story Professor Chomsky presents.
Richard Modiano |
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