…that make many of them so damn credulous? As we have mentioned in many previous articles on Samizdata, just because a person is deeply distrustful about modern states (as we are here on this blog), that should not make us regularly fall prey to the sort of garbage being peddled as ‘fact’ by pretty much anyone with an anti-US/anti-UK axe to grind.
We constantly warn about the growing Panopticon surveillance state rapidly developing in Britain and marvel at how Americans tolerate the state not just ignoring their own precious constitution on a massive scale with its forfeiture laws and victim disarmament laws, plus its egregious ‘citizenship’ laws… yet just because we do not regard the US and British states as ‘the good guys’ that does not make us fall prey to apologists for mass murderers like Saddam Hussain and Slobodan Milosevic on the theory that as the states in which we live are demonstrably anti-liberty in so many ways, then if those states says terrible things about Hussain or Milosevic then those guys, and their apologists/revisionists, must therefore be okay. Q.E.D…
And so when I read the ‘those poor old Serbian cetnics may have been a bit naughty but they were not really so terrible compared to the Bosnians and Americans’ remarks over on Strike the root, I can only sympathize with the hapless Jews who have had to endure this sort of ‘big lie’ crap that transcends ‘mere fact’ for generations. If only people had just trusted Slobodan it would have worked out okay eh? Yeah, right. The notion that Milosevic seriously wanted to just break Bosnia Herzegovina into cantons ‘to ‘protect the Serbs’, after they had violently ethnically cleansed the parts of Croatia they had occupied, is hilarious.
Sorry guys, but the atrocities in Bosnia were not publicity stunts by the Bosnian government. The depopulated villages are proof enough of that, as were the eye witnesses to horror after horror. Most of the murder happened well and truly off-camera and away from the media spotlight in Sarajevo. To blame the Americans for how bad things got in Bosnia, whose foreign policy in the Balkans was largely incoherent for the first three years of the war, is rather like blaming America for how nasty things got in Poland for the Jews after 1942.
Why otherwise rational commentators buy into these ludicrous revisionist conspiracy theories and sundry ‘black helicopter’ shite, making common cause with mass murdering tyrants in countries whose names they can barely spell, is just one of the great marvels of our time.
