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