To Kill a Nation

by Michael Parenti

Book Overview

Drawing on a wide range of unpublished material and observations gathered from his visit to Yugoslavia in 1999, Michael Parenti challenges mainstream media coverage of the war, uncovering hidden... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1859843662
• ISBN13: 9781859843666
• Release Date: September 2002
• Publisher: Verso
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.0" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

The Other side of the STORY...

In the old Cold War era movie, "Red Dawn" about a Soviet/Chinese Communist invasion of the United States, the United States was systematically dismantled into several territories based on old regional and cultural divisions. For isntance, the southern states were split out based on the lines of the Old Confederacy. The Southwest consisting of California, Arizonia, New Mexico and Texas was returned to Mexico. New England states formed another unit. The Upper Midwest States from Minnesota to Michigan were returned to French Canada. And so on. Sound bizarre? Well that's what the United States did to Yugoslavia. This is a great book! After all the liberal media propaganda apologizing for the Clinton foreign policy, it's about time the real truth that the liberals and the Democrats protests about Bush's foreign policy are mere partisian political opportunism. Truth is Democrats like "Democrat" Wars, and oppose "Republican Wars". If I recall even peacenik Wellstone supported Clinton in this horrible mess.

Dynamic, muckraking at its finest

I found this book to be one of the most honest attempts to discern the dynamic forces acting upon and precipitating the spate of late 20th Cent Balkan Wars. This book is certainly written from a left wing perspective. If you think that the IMF and World Bank are great institutions, then you are going to disagree with Parenti. Parenti unearths many important details that alter some of the predjudices that the press constructs in an almost a priori way. The Serbs must always be bad. I visited Serbia in 2001; while they were bitter at America, most were very polite and accomodating. After all, how would you feel about Serbia if they bombed your city for 79 straight days. Some of the details that Parenti shares: 1. Toward the end of the war, the Croats bombed, with German artillery, in the Krajinia/Knin fleeing Serbian civilians as they were ethnically cleansed. In 2001, while taking the bus through Knin, I sat near a cute Croat girl, maybe 25. "We got rid of the Serbs in this area" she stated with a grin. "They just ran away." Perspective? 2. The marketplace bombing that really brought the conflict to the nightly news, was a bit of a hoax. Forensic experts examined the corpses and found that they had died earlier than the date of the bombing. The press just does not follow up their claims when they are wrong. 3. The role of the IMF and World Bank were huge. The central federal bank in Belgrade was frozen after Milosevich refused to accomodate some of the SAP's that the IMF were insisting upon. Without the transfer of money to the provinces, the people grew angry. There are many other points he makes, I found these interesting. I think an accurate analysis is needed to create foreign policy on, rather than preconceived notions.

Bombs for Peace?

One reviewer has lambasted Parenti for portraying a "World Imperialist Conspiracy masterminded by the United States." Well, that's not quite true, but Parenti does interpret the attack on Yugoslavia as an expression of neo-colonialism. And for good reason. You just can't argue with the wheelbarrow-load of facts this book will dump on you. Of particular note were details of wholesale infrastructure bombing followed by multi-million-dollar reconstruction contracts for international (read: Western) corporations - a textbook example of corporate profiteering from US-lead bombing campaigns. But don't take my word for it. Read the book for yourself. It will blow your mind. Or better, visit Yugoslavia and SEE the aftermath of for youself. j.w.k.

Valiant

Parenti's book is not a historical account of Yugoslavia's conquest by the West. Few dates are mentioned and only a rough chronology is followed. Instead it's a valiant attempt to set the record straight following years of drumfire propaganda aimed at toppling the Yugoslav federation and its non-western economy. By no means, is Parenti attempting a whitewash of Milosevich, his regime, or real crimes against non-Serbs. He is combatting the vicious, one-sided campaign waged in Western media against all things Serb or Yugoslav. That NATO has finally succeeded is testament to an overwhelming military and political superiority, not to any inherent rightness in the cause, ( consider the spate of international law violated by NATO's attack). This is the burden of the book and the author handles it well, with documentation and sources outside the usual CNN-NATO axis.Two key points are worth mention. The vaunted killing fields of Kosovo never materialized despite near hysterical reports all over Western networks. Turns out that many of these claims were based on rumor, exaggeration, or KLA mendacity. That these reports of Serb massacres were circulated as fact by an uncritical media testifies to a level of subservience to NATO war aims, which , not incidentally, work to strengthen European prospects of this same corporate media. Now that the conquest is complete, backtracking is quietly underway, but so what, the damage has been done, and more of the same cheerleading can be expected next time Western peace-keepers go after some rogue nation or crazed foreign devil.A second point: Parenti documents terms of the Rambouillet conference, a NATO-Yugoslav diplomatic meeting that set the stage for the armed attack on Serbia. Seems this parley was sabotaged from the outset. To meet Western terms for peace, Serbia was required to permit NATO forces to occupy the country, renouncing in effect sovereignty over its own territory. In short, it was a demand Serbia could not afford not to refuse - just as NATO had calculated, and the air attack got underway against what was now portrayed as an unreasonable regime in Belgrade! (This is reminiscent of the diplomatic trickery surrounding talks between April Glaspie, US ambassador to Iraq, and Saddam Hussein, prior to the Gulf War, in which Hussein was told the US had no interest in the disposition of Kuwait or its royal family, thereby setting a trap that Hussein immediately fell into.)What should be apparent to critical observers, is that truth, goodness, and fellow feeling mean nothing when power and wealth are at stake, regardless of the regime involved. Western transnationals see an opportunity to gobble up the world economy behind a facade of "free trade" and "democracy" and, by god, they're going to do it, whether people like it or not. That's their version of democratic thinking. If this seems an exaggeration, read the book. The truth is out there, but don't expect to hear it on the six o'clock news.