Was Communism defeated or conquerred?Western media resembles Brezhnev's Pravda and Izvestya: No truth and no news inside. ICTY is copycat of Vishinsky's Moscow trials. I would say that Communism merely changed the shape and color. And sneaked to locale near you.
It's still long way to conquer the beast.
I was going to bring this up when Hoplite brought up the credibility of ICDSM.
People have posted recent Pravda articles that were more factual than the Western press. And not just about the Balkans but in general.
It's depressing quite frankly. However, this is the battleground for FreeRepubic.com and the Washington Post and LA Times and others know it. Who will control the levers of the press. The Bloggers (essentially FR members) or the Western Media-Matrix that is now under an oligarchy of ownership.
The Newark Star Ledger, essentially my local paper, has an 800,000 subscriber list and sells over 1 million papers including non-subscribers. It is the 800 pound guerilla of news in NJ. The most they have done with respect to the Milosevic trial is reprint the AP story of the day if that.
I've made note a number of times that my grandparents all came from Ireland and I really had little interest or knowledge about the Balkans until Beelzebubba started to threaten Yugoslavia with bombing. During the bombing campaign, I felt like I was participating in history as we deconstructed everything Gen. Clark, Albright, Cohen and of course Clinton and Blair had to say. Real time proof of bald faced lies!
What was surreal for me then was the thought of the baby boomers (I'm Gen X) running the press outlets that outright backed the bombing and uncritically presented the lies. This includes the BBC (What my Ireland born wife likes to call "The real news"). These were the same people out on college campuses protesting the war in Vietnam. Robert McNamara, defense secretary for Kennedy and Johnson, published his book, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam in 1996, in which he reveals he was a traitorous liar (how he walks around in public I'll never understand) and not only allowed US service members to die but pushed them to their death. Given these revelations, you would think the baby boomers writing the articles and questioning the government (Remember "Question Authority") would have been more circumspect.
Alas, it is up to us DTA.