In light of David
Lindsay’s reminder
that just past is the lamentable fifth anniversary of Kosovo’s ‘independence’,
I thought this piece might be a propos.
There was an
excerpt from the first chapter of a book in the New York Times, The
Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War by Stephen Budiansky, which I had
the occasion to read when it was first published, back in 2008. It is a highly
journalistic account – unsurprising, given that it comes from the editor of US
News and World Report, but it is a remarkably vivid account; I encourage my
gentle readers to read it in its entirety.
Waving the bloody
shirt: it would become the standard retort, the standard expression of
dismissive Southern contempt whenever a Northern politician mentioned any of
the thousands upon thousands of murders, whippings, mutilations, and rapes that
were perpetrated against freedmen and women and white Republicans in the South
in those years.
The phrase was used over and over during the Reconstruction
era. It was a staple of the furious and sarcastic editorials that filled
Southern newspapers in those days, of the indignant orations by Southern white
political leaders who protested that no people had suffered more, been
humiliated more, been punished more than they had. The phrase has since entered
the standard American political lexicon, a synonym for any rabble-rousing
demagoguery, any below-the-belt appeal aimed at stirring old enmities.
That the Southerners
who uttered this phrase were so unconcerned about the obvious implications it
carried for their own criminality, however, seems remarkable; for whoever was
waving the shirt, there was unavoidably, or so one would think, the matter of
just whose blood it was, and how it had got there. That white Southerners would
unabashedly trace the origin of this metaphor to a real incident involving an
unprovoked attack of savage barbarity carried out by their own most respectable
members of Southern white society makes it all the more astonishing.
The unprovoked attack
which gave rise to the turn of phrase was an incident in Monroe County,
Mississippi where the superintendent of the local freedmen’s public schools,
Allen Huggins, was forcibly removed from his home by ten wealthy, ‘respectable’
white locals, and beaten mercilessly with a stirrup and threatened with murder
if he did not leave Mississippi within ten days’ time. And Huggins left… but to
testify before Congress about his treatment, before returning to Monroe County
with the powers of a deputy US marshal to bring the perpetrators of such terror
before the law.
The story that his shirt was retrieved by an Army lieutenant
who delivered it to Benjamin Butler, who then proceeded to wave it during his
speech against the terrorism, however, was a fabrication. Senator Butler did
make such a speech referring to the incident, but there is no indication that
he ever so much as touched Huggins’s actual shirt, let alone waved it about on
the Senate floor. Still, as Budiansky makes clear, the phrase became a stock
favourite in the Southern press, and it was employed ceaselessly to make, as it
were, ‘a victim of the bully and a bully of the victim’.
Even if the phrase
‘waving the bloody shirt’ is not explicitly used, a similar rhetorical tactic
has been employed with every bit as much constancy and malice, against another
nation which has sought to retain its union, and which has fought for the
rights of its citizens to freedom and dignity through education and economic
self-sufficiency, and which as thanks for its efforts has been subject to campaigns
of secessionist terror and guerrilla war – and then blamed and sarcastically
ridiculed for even mentioning those campaigns in its own history.
Just as the
Southerners crafted stories about how Huggins’ bloody shirt and other such
tokens became the fetishes of Unionist and African-American mythologies against
them, the media and the academies of the pseudo-West have crafted narratives of
how ‘the Serbs’ make a mythological fetish of their own victimhood, the better
to paint ‘the Serbs’ as ignorant and sub-rational.
The only difference is
that the Serbians lost the war to save their Union, and to maintain the
economic freedoms and dignities that its constituent peoples had had under it.
I was only a schoolboy
at the time of the Yugoslav Wars, but they marked my first awareness of world
affairs. At the time, the media were rife with comparisons of Milosevic to
Hitler (I remember a Newsweek cover making that explicit comparison
graphically), and images of starving, wounded and dead Bosnian and Albanian
refugees, particularly old people and children – all victims of that
ever-faceless monster, ‘the Serb’. I remember having an image in my head –
completely imagined – of a hulking, unthinking brute in a blood-stained
uniform, doing the bidding of his depraved and sadistic commanders’ orders.
But
I also remember my mother refusing to vote for Clinton’s second term on account
of the Yugoslav Wars, and my Mennonite religious upbringing always kept urging
me to look at both sides, to remember that there is always a better solution
than war. It was not until much, much later that I was able to take a critical
look at that war and how it was waged, and how arguments from that war went on
to pave the way for the murderous folly in Iraq.
As Neil
Clark wrote, bashing of ‘the Serbs’ is one of the few acceptable prejudices
left in the Anglo-American West. Their great crime was not, as is popularly
imagined, that they were somehow uniquely, intractably, genocidally hostile to
all the other peoples of the region – they weren’t, though certainly Serbian
units did commit atrocities and deliberate attacks against civilians all during
the Yugoslav Wars, as did Bosnians, Croats, Albanians and NATO countries.
Their great crimes were that they wanted to retain the dream of Yugoslavia,
that they opposed most vociferously the ethnic-nationalist secessions of great
chunks of the country they loved, and that they got in the way of the biggest
bully on the block in doing the above.
Milosevic, Mladic and Karadzic were
familiar and ominous names to me all throughout the ‘90’s and early 2000’s, but
not once did I hear a peep about Franjo Tudman and the revival of neo-Nazi
Ustase ideology in his newfangled Croatia, nor anything about the
genocidal Operation Storm led by Ante Gotovina (who was risibly
acquitted of war crimes on appeal by the ICTY in November of last year).
Never did I see a word written anywhere about the brutal crimes of the Kosovo
Liberation Army against not only Serbians but also Roma and fellow Albanians,
nor about their proven trade in drugs and arms (and suspected trade in human
organs harvested from their victims) to finance their terrorism. (Ramush
Haradinaj was also
acquitted of war crimes at the same time as Gotovina et al.) Not
until I was much older did I even know where to look for such accounts.
Whenever Serbians and
journalists who have lived in Serbia point out the clear double standards which
have prevailed in the ICTY since the Yugoslav Wars ended, or make mention of
the civilian casualties they sustained, or reference the fact that breakaway
portions from Serbia have invited unilateral recognition from many Western
nations where other secessionist movements have not (the Kurds in Iraq, or the
Ossetians and Abkhazians in Georgia, for starters), the gentlemen’s club of
decent, respectable pro-intervention Anglo-American ‘public intellectuals’ and
pundits (notably Oliver Kamm, Marko Attila Hoare, the denizens of Harry’s Place
and, until his death, Christopher Hitchens) accuse them with depressing
regularity of ‘waving the bloody shirt’.
This being an age where political spin
is a science, however, rather than an art, they employ much more sterile,
prolix means of saying the same thing. ‘The Serbs’ have a ‘persecution complex’
and a ‘narrative of victimisation’, and the term itself is the result of
conspiracy theories and nationalist propaganda. With such rhetorical tricks the
victims are turned into the bullies, and all too many of the actual bullies are
rendered invisible.
Serbians have no need
of a ‘narrative of victimisation’. They – along with the Bosnians, Croatians
and Albanians who got caught in the middle – were the victims, of a
series of wars every bit as tragic and fratricidal as the American Civil War
was. Two thousand Serbian civilians were killed as part of Operation Storm, and
nearly two hundred thousand were forcibly evicted. Similar casualties were
incurred in Kosovo during the NATO intervention there: two thousand Serbians
dead in Kosovo and five hundred throughout the rest of Serbia, and one hundred
seventy thousand displaced – near half of the total civilian deaths and a
quarter of the total displacements in a territory where Serbs made up only
about eight to twelve percent of the population. And for these crimes, they
have not yet seen justice.
The truly frightening
thing is, the apologists for the NATO-backed ultra-nationalist secessionists
continue to stand up as brave opponents of genocide and proclaimers of truth
and moral objectivity when the victims are Bosnian, Croatian or Albanian… and
then they turn around and cravenly deny that Serbians can possibly be
victims (except in their conveniently-typecast roles as unthinking brutes and
willing executioners of their sadistic commanders and politicians), with the exact
same postmodern, relativising argumentation that they project onto sceptics
of the official NATO narrative of the Yugoslav Wars (whether Chomsky or Media
Lens or CounterPunch), and proceed to declaim in hyperventilating
terms as outrageous, monstrous and beyond the pale genocide-apologetics.
Blessedly, the
neoconservative and liberal-interventionist worldviews which led to both the
Yugoslav and the Iraq Wars, between which there are generally only differences
in semantics rather than differences in kind, are slowly but surely losing
their credibility. And the damage is almost entirely self-inflicted: the
experience of Iraq shows the extent to which neocons and
liberal-interventionists both are willing to deny, relativise, cover up,
deflect attention from and rationalise away their complicity in the single
greatest geopolitical and humanitarian debacle of the past decade, in a way
which undercuts their entire philosophical raison d’être in the first
place as an outgrowth of the Augustinian just war tradition.
The healthy dose
of scepticism which came from both left and right over Syria arguably prevented
another outright intervention there and arguably also headed off multinational
support of France’s Malian adventure, even if it failed to do so in Libya
before it was too late.
