There is another notorious Hitler's quote that is appropriate regrading the coverage of war in Bosnia:
" that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. These people know only too well how to use falsehood for the basest purposes."
Bosnia media coverage is a homage to Adolph Hitler.
Hello DTA, also Richard Poe has compared it with Führer Hitler's strategy:
April 13, 1999
'Save the Albanian Kosovars!' Clinton cries. 'Save the Sudeten Germans!' Hitler trumpeted in 1938. The names have changed, but the strategy remains the same.
For more than 50 years, we Americans have looked down our noses at the Germans, for having followed Hitler so blindly. But now it's our turn. We are proving no more resistant to propaganda than those cheering crowds in Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will.
Back in the 1930s, Adolf Hitler needed an excuse to seize Czechoslovakia. So he invented one. Three and a quarter million ethnic Germans lived in the Sudetenland, under Czech rule. As William L. Shirer recounts in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Hitler secretly funded an extremist group called the Sudeten German Party and ordered it to provoke an uprising against the Czechs.
Kosovo, too, appears to have been destabilized by outside forces. For years, Kosovars protested Milosevic peacefully. But in 1997, a group called the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) suddenly started shooting. Who were these people?
The Times of London (March 24, 1999) described the KLA as 'a Marxist-led force funded by dubious sources, including drug money.' European police suspect the KLA of connections to Albanian gangsters. At least two of the group's backers appear to have been the CIA and the German spy agency BND, according to intelligence analyst John Whitley, quoted in the Truth in Media Global Watch Bulletin (April 2, 1999).
The purpose of staging a provocation is to create a backlash. This strategy certainly worked for Hitler in 1938. As unrest spread in the Sudetenland, the Czechs cracked down. Czech President Eduard Benes ordered troops into the region and declared martial law.
Right on cue, the German press went wild. 'Women and Children Mowed Down by Armored Cars,' ran a typical Berlin newspaper headline in September 1938. 'Poison Gas Attack on Aussig' cried another.
Hitler accused Benes of waging a 'war of extermination' against Sudeten Germans. 'The Germans he now drives out!' cried Hitler, in a September 16, 1938 speech. 'We see the appalling figures: on one day 10,000 fugitives, on the next 20,000... and today 214,000. Whole stretches of country were depopulated, villages are burned down, attempts are made to smoke out the Germans with hand-grenades and gas.'
Sound familiar? Hitler's rhetoric bears an eerie resemblance to the CNN news blitz on Kosovo. Of course, Hitler was exaggerating. Many of the atrocities he alleged later turned out to be fabrications. But the same is true of our newscasts on Kosovo.
Take the alleged massacre of 45 Albanian civilians at Racak, for instance, reported in January 1999. Forensic and other evidence now suggests that the bodies were those of KLA guerrillas killed in combat.
The hoax has been widely discussed in the European press (including Le Monde, Die Welt, Le Figaro and the BBC). But U.S. news outlets have been as silent on the controversy as if they were taking orders from Goebbels himself.
In the Sudeten crisis, Hitler claimed to be inspired by internationalist ideals. 'Among the fourteen points which President Wilson promised ...' the Fuhrer proclaimed, 'was the fundamental principle of the self-determination of all peoples ...' By freeing the Sudeten Germans, Hitler argued, he was fulfilling Wilson's vision.
Clinton too claims he is fighting for human rights. But ethnic cleansing does not bother Clinton when his friends are the ones doing the cleansing. He ordered no bombing when the Croatians drove 300,000 Serbs from Krajina, burning their homes and killing many. Nor did he intervene when our NATO ally Turkey slaughtered over 35,000 Kurds.
Every schoolchild today knows that Hitler's real goal, in seizing Czechoslovakia, was to use it as a stepping stone for his planned invasion of Russia.
But what is Clinton's real interest in Kosovo? Nobody knows.
Many theories have been floated. Some point to the Trepca mines of northern Kosovo, rich in gold, zinc, silver and lead. The New York Times called them the 'Kosovo war's glittering prize' (July 8, 1998).
Others see a more far-reaching strategy. The Russians claim that NATO, like Hitler, wants to use the Balkans as a stepping stone for extending its power eastward -- eventually meddling in the affairs of Russia itself.
But this is all speculation. Only time will reveal Clinton's true intentions, as it ultimately did Hitler's.
In his memoir Inside the Third Reich, Albert Speer recalled the anxious mood of Berliners, in September 1939, as they digested the news that England and France had declared war.
'The atmosphere was noticeably depressed,' he recalls. 'The people were full of fear about the future. None of the regiments marched off to war decorated with flowers as they had done at the beginning of the First World War. The streets remained empty. There was no crowd on Wilhelmsplatz shouting for Hitler."
A wise man once said that those who fail to study history are condemned to repeat it. Should Clinton actually succeed in sparking a world war, Americans will no doubt react with the same shock and fear as Berliners did in 1939. But we will have only ourselves to blame.'
Richard Poe is a New-York-Times bestselling author and cyberjournalist. His latest book is The New Underground: How Conservatives Conquered the Internet. His previous book is The Seven Myths of Gun Control.
The Big Lie About Kosovo by Richard Poe (<- click)
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Another Comparison by US Rep. Ron Paul, MD Member of Congress:
"March 13, 2000
Citizens of a free country ought to expect they won't be burdened with the kind of propaganda barrage that has come to be associated with Nazi 'interior ministers' such as Josef Goebbles or Soviet 'media spokesmen' like Vladimir Posner. However, the more information that comes out about the NATO war in Kosovo, the more evident is the fact that NATO made an apparent 'policy decision' to lie about Serbian atrocities. It seems the western democracies 'stole a page from the play books' of their former totalitarian adversaries in Germany and the Soviet Union.
Writing recently in Liberty Magazine, David Ramsey Steele points out that in Kosovo we were told before the bombings that there was mass genocide occurring, the figure of '100,000 or more' was tossed around even though there was no evidence to back-up this claim. One media pundit suggested the number would be a quarter-of-a-million dead. NATO even gave a name to this 'campaign of mass genocide,' it was dubbed 'Operation Horseshoe' but, as Steele says, the factual basis for the existence of such a genocide is spurious at best. In fact, Steele likens it to the Bryce report that reported falsified claims of genocide in Belgium in World War I.
Later after the NATO bombs began dropping, the official NATO claim was dropped to around 10,000 as it became clear no mass graves or killing fields even existed. The actual number of people found in the reported mass-graves totals slightly more than 2,000, a far cry from the hundreds of thousands that we were told originally. The loss of 2,000 lives is a great tragedy, but there are more Americans than that killed domestically every year and it hardly warrants the kind of violent response we saw in Kosovo. In fact, Mr. Steele states that Kosovo was safer than any major U.S. city prior to the NATO bombing. Moreover, as Steele shows, it is hardly evident that each of those bodies was killed as a result of a campaign of genocide.
Finally, Steele points out that the stories about Kosovo came not only from NATO officers but also from officials of the United Nations as well as from our own government. However, a few sources closely followed developments and seemed to get the story about right. Pablo Ordaz of El Pais magazine, Audrey Gillan of the London Review of Books and even two members of an inspection team sent to Kosovo for the purpose of investigating purported mass graves all challenged the stories of the propaganda machine.
Steele also shows that while we were told of ethnic cleansing and Kosovars who were being forced from their homes, the truth of the matter is they were being forced from their homes because of the danger and destruction being caused by NATO bombing in the region. If anything, this so-called ethnic cleansing appears as a direct result of NATO action. In fact, as Steele states, now that NATO and the KLA have control of Kosovo there have been widespread reports that the people we were supposedly protecting, the Kosovars, are now engaged in a murdering spree against the Serbians. Instead of hearing the truth from our leadership, we were fed emotional tales of mass killing that were entirely blown out of proportion in order to justify force and violence in the region.
The sad trail of lies in Kosovo merely reinforces two facts. The first is that our republic depends upon a press that will question the claims of our leaders instead of just accepting them. The second is that Congress has shirked both its Constitutional responsibility to declare war before U.S. troops are sent into battle and its oversight responsibility to closely monitor the administration in its carrying out of foreign policy."
The Big Lie -- NATO's Campaign of Deception in Kosovo, March 13, 2000
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