A Colossal Wreck

by Alexander Cockburn

  Before calling the Serbs “neo-Nazis” Patterson should read a little history. Hitler invaded Serbia in World War II and more than a million Serbs lost their lives, many of them in Jasenovac, a concentration camp run by the Croats. And the Serb fighters for whom Patterson displays such contempt still managed to tie down several Nazi divisions for years.

  March 29

  It was Jeff Frieden, some time in the mid-1980s, who urged me to call Lynn Turgeon for advice and counsel on Eastern European economies. Lynn, he explained, was a prof of economics at Hofstra and an original thinker. I talked to Lynn—the first in hundreds of such conversations—and swiftly realized he had the quality, so admired by harried columnists, of expressing ideas in clear, unpatronizing terms. Lynn was a passionate Keynesian, which sometimes lent an unguarded edge to his discussion of Hitler’s economic policies or Reagan’s military deficits. Across a decade or so of phone calls, he gave me an education in the economic history of the twentieth century that was always bracing.

  Lynn wasn’t a lively writer and surely his many friends learned to dread his mimeographed accounts of his journeys through Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. He was relentless in reporting the price of potatoes in the local markets. In conversation he was often droll, rendering history as both drama and parable. A conversation could slide from myths about the consequences of Weimar inflation, Britain’s policy on the gold standard, to Hitler’s Keynesianism, to Bretton Woods, to Marriner Eccles, to Leon Keyserling’s evolving of military Keynesianism in the Truman era, to the Kennedy arms spending spree, to Volcker’s spell at the Fed, to the factors that finally did in the Soviet Union. Even if, down the years, one got to know Lynn’s themes and peeves (as a farm boy, he had no love for the rural condition), there was always something to be learned. His books, among them The Advanced Capitalist System and Bastard Keynesianism—were tonic too.

  Lynn was polite in disposition and manner, a radical. His mother lived to be 100, and I thought he’d be around for years, but cancer took him off at the age of seventy-six in early March. He navigated an intellectual and analytic course that, over the years, left him far more often right than wrong.

  March 31

  It’s bracing to see the Germans taking part in NATO’s bombing. It lends moral tone to an operation to have the grandsons of the Third Reich willing, able and eager to drop high explosive again, in this instance on the Serbs. To add symmetry to the affair, the last time Serbs in Belgrade had high explosive dropped on them was in 1941 by the sons of the Third Reich. To bring even deeper symmetry, the German political party whose leader, Schroeder, ordered German participation in the bombing is that of the Social Democrats, whose great grandfathers enthusiastically voted credits to wage war in 1914, to the enormous disgust of Lenin, who never felt quite the same way about social democrats ever after. Whether in Germany or England or France, all social democratic parties in 1914 tossed aside previous pledges against war, thus helping produce the first great bloodletting of our century.

  Today, with social democrats leading governments across Europe—Schroeder, Blair, Jospin, Prodi—all fall in behind Clinton. This is, largely, a war most earnestly supported by liberals and many so-called leftists. Bernie Sanders has voted Aye, and in London Vanessa Redgrave cheers on the NATO bombers. There’s been some patronizing talk here about the Serbs’ deep sense of “grievance” at the way history has treated them, with the implication that the Serbs are irrational in this regard. But it’s scarcely irrational to remember that Nazi Germany bombed Belgrade in World War II, or that Germany’s prime ally in the region, Croatia, ran a concentration camp at Jasenovac where tens of thousands of Serbs—along with Jews and gypsies—were liquidated. Nor is it irrational to recall that Germany in more recent years has been an unrelenting assailant of the former Yugoslav federation, encouraging Slovenia to secede and lending determined support to Croatia, in gratitude for which Croatia adopted, on independence in 1991, the German hymn, “Danke Deutschland.”

  So much for Serb feelings about Germany. Serbia has some reason to feel similar resentment toward the United States. The biggest single ethnic cleansing of the mid-1990s in the former Yugoslavia was conducted by Croatia under the supervision of the United States, whose military generals and CIA officers issued targeting instructions to Croatian artillery for the ethnic clearing. The targets were Serbs, living in Serbian territory, in the Krajina. Heading the Croatian cleansers was President Franjo Tudjman, who has rehabbed Nazi war criminals. Yet somehow it is Serbia’s Miloević who is demonized here as Hitler.

  April 14

  Just like the blacks and Hispanics we’ve been reading about lately I get pulled over once in a while by the cops and it’s clear they think I’m a possible drug transporter. I make a distinction here between the pretext stops and the speeding offenses. Drive over 75 miles an hour regularly and you’ll get a ticket once in a while. And since everyone in America except people carrying high explosives drives at some point over 75 mph, everyone in America at some point gets a ticket.

  I commute fairly regularly between Petrolia in Humboldt County and Berkeley, a distance of about 350 miles. The other day I was driving a 1964 Newport station wagon north and was astounded suddenly to see a red light go on behind me, somewhere near Ukiah, and a pissy young CHP officer, on the short side, come around to the passenger door, hand on holster.

  By the time a police officer reaches the passenger door any prudent driver should already have license, registration and proof of insurance held between finger and thumb, with both hands high on the driving wheel and no sudden movements, thus hopefully averting what we may term the Diallo Effect. I did everything wrong, the reason being that the ziplock bag holding my papers was under the driver’s seat and so, contrary to procedures just outlined, I was bowed down with my head under the steering wheel trying to find the bag. The officer stared tensely as I finally surfaced with the bag and leaned over to try and get the passenger door open. This is a station wagon that had been sitting in a field for the preceding six years. All the door locks, except for the driver’s side, had frozen. There had been a wood rat nest in the glove compartment, which was why the papers were under the seat. The passenger door handle broke when I tried to wrench it open.

  Finally I got the passenger window down. The cop said, as though already testifying in court, that he had been heading south, rounding a bend and had seen me come the other way, overtaking a car as I did so, in the outside lane.

  At this point a CHP officer will usually have sized you up, figured you are no major menace to civilization, not drunk and—computer check on license pending—maybe not the big catch of the evening. Courteous behavior by the driver usually yields rewards, with the ticket written up for 72 mph instead of a reckless driving citation for going over 90. I was polite, peppering my remarks with “officer.”

  It got me nowhere.

  “I’m going to my car to write the citation,” he snapped. His costume was the blue fatigue jumpsuit that the French riot police used to wear back in the 1960s. He had a particularly large gun. Off he trotted to run my license and after five minutes came back with a ticket accusing me of driving at seventy-eight miles an hour, a speed which, he remarked, he would have thought “this old car” incapable. “Did you just eyeball the car or get me on the radar?” I asked, and he, rather too quickly, said “radar.” This seemed to me intrinsically unlikely, given the circumstances.

  The problem here is that the California Highway Patrol has organized things so that now local counties get a larger cut of the fine. If no one drove over the limit in California there would be an immediate cash crunch in the administration of the state. Speeding here is a civic duty.

  The fines are getting higher and higher too, with add-ons and extra penalties and special taxes and fines of one sort and other, so that running an amber light (not my particular specialty) can see the offender writing out a check for $150 by the time it’s all over.

  The pretext stops, as related to the d
rug war, are of a different order.

  Three years ago I was taking a 1972 Imperial two-door hardtop, known to the cognoscenti at the time as a hardtop convertible, across the country and was driving along Interstate 90 through Montana. Not far out of Butte I could see the state trooper behind me. He kept his car just to my left rear so that my natural reaction, looking to keep an eye on him in my left side mirror, was to run a little further right to the edge of the inside lane. Suddenly his light went on. The trooper, a trim twenty-eight-year-old with a slightly less trim twenty-six-year-old trainee beside him, said that I had driven across the inside white line of the Interstate verge. This was the pretext.

  If possible—though these days they tell you urgently to stay in your car—get out and stand at an equal setting with the cop. This I did. He hemmed and hawed a bit and after a while asked if I was carrying large sums of money. I laughed and said “I wish.” By this time we’d gravitated to the back end of the car and he was looking hopefully at the trunk. Was I carrying arms? Absolutely not. Truth be told, I remember I had half a bottle of gin in the trunk and wondered whether it was illegal in the state of Montana.

  Now, there are a million ways he could have got me to open the trunk, even without a search warrant, starting with a simple statement that he feared for his life. But instead he blurted out hopefully, “Are you carrying large amounts of drugs?” “No.” Well, though I was unshaven, wearing dark glasses, beautiful Daria in the passenger seat and driving a boat, he didn’t order me to open up. Maybe it’s because I’d told him I was a writer. He saw a red stain on my ringers and cried out, “Is that blood?” I said no, it was ink and showed him the fountain pen and that broke his spirit.

  April 21

  Strange are the ways of men! It feels like only yesterday that the New York Times was denouncing President Bill as a moral midget, deserving of the harshest reprobation for fondling Monica Lewinsky’s breasts. And today here’s the New York Times doling out measured praise to the same President for blowing little children in pieces. The Times last Thursday had pictures of those dead refugees on its cover, bombed by NATO’s aviators. Editorial page editor Howell Raines staked out the Times’ official view that “For now, NATO must sustain and intensify the bombing.” What a weird guy Raines must be. Kiss Monica’s tits and he goes crazy. Bomb peasants and he shouts for more.

  Maybe some corner of Clinton’s brain reckons that bombs on Serbia will extinguish Monica Lewinsky from popular memory. But what man of mature judgment and compassion would not prefer to be remembered by the Starr report than by bomb craters and dead bodies? Many people thought Clinton would be the first President who would somehow prefer Starr’s volume as his epitaph, however embarrassing. But no. Like all the others he wants craters and corpses as his requiem. Memoirs: “I took the grave decision to request punitive …,” NOT “I took the delightful decision to reach for her magnificent breasts …” What a puritan culture we live in.

  April 28

  Now concerts of Marilyn Manson and KMFDM have been canceled. President Clinton will probably propose laws soon banning long black coats and making it an indictable offense to use the word “gothic.” In his radio broadcast last Saturday Clinton said piously—amid celebrations of the violent NATO alliance—that “every one of us must take responsibility to counter the culture of violence. The government must take responsibility to counter the culture of violence.” In terms of hypocrisy, this is on par with Clinton telling little kids in a school in Anacostia to conduct themselves in an upright moral fashion not long before he was unzipping his pants for Monica L. There’ll be further vindictive assaults on the rights of young people, who as usual will incur collective guilt. Meanwhile the obvious lesson that war breeds violence will be carefully ignored.

  By now mandatory apologies for what happened at Columbine High are incumbent on Marilyn Manson, video-game manufacturers, Hollywood, publishers of Mein Kampf, and the internet. The only people who apparently don’t have to apologize are the US military and their civilian overseers who trained and paid the pilot dad of one of the teen killers; who sent F-16s over the funerals in Littleton; who are now pounding the Serbs each day and night; who mint the currency of violence.

  No so far from Columbine High School in Littleton is Fort Carson Army base, where they practice invading countries like Serbia. One of the families of the killers (two-parent, suburban) had a breadwinner retired from the military. This is Harris’s dad. His mother works at a gourmet food shop. Mr. Klebold is a geophysicst and Mrs. Klebold works with the disabled. Klebold Jr. drove a BMW. If the parents had been single mothers on welfare, or hippies, or in a small religious sect, we surely would have been inundated with preachments against single mothers, hippies and religious sects as trainers for mass murder. But there’s been a certain embarrassment about the parents of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who appear to have embodied the suburban American dream.

  Commentators have fastened onto the fact that one of the two youths had a personal website “espousing an addled philosophy of violence.” Those were the words of the New York Times’ editorial writer, either Howell Raines or one of his stable. Yes, the same editorial team that espoused an addled philosophy of violence a few days earlier, suggesting that NATO “intensify the bombing” of Serbia. Perhaps nytimes.com was the website the kid had on his computer.

  May 26

  In mid-May the British government moved with frantic speed to disable the website on which a former disgruntled MI6 officer posted the names of British intelligence agents. Too late. On May 14, the LaRouchies posted the list, heading it with the statement “ ‘The MI6 factor’ in the murder of Princess Diana,” and announcing that the LaRouchies’s Executive Intelligence Review had already identified three MI6 agents as “suspected culprits acting on behalf of the House of Windsor, under the personal order of Prince Philip.” The LaRouchies claim that Sir David Speeding, head of MI6, was ordered—presumably by Prince Philip and his consort—to murder Diana and her consort; toward this end he sent his assistant to Paris, along with other MI6 personnel.

  May 30

  It seems that Bill Clinton’s staff schedules three hours each day for the Commander in Chief to read books and make phone calls. Michael Kaufman disclosed this in the New York Times last Saturday. At least these days Clinton is getting a bit more honest in describing his reading habits. In 1992, he tried to pretend that he liked nothing better than to curl up with the infinitely tedious Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Now he admits straightforwardly that he likes Walter Mosely, Sue Grafton and Jonathan Kellerman.

  June 2

  In the final months of World War II the Nazis tried to delay the advance of the Allies by opening the dikes in Holland. The man issuing this order was the German high commissioner in Holland, Seyss-Inquart. By the end of 1944 about 500,000 acres of land had been flooded, leading to what historian Gabriel Kolko called “the most precipitous decline in food consumption any West European country suffered during the war.” Of the 195 Nazis indicted at Nuremberg, Seyss-Inquart was one of twenty-four sentenced to death.

  Seyss-Inquart merely opened dikes in Holland. Kolko, who commented on that consequent fall in Dutch food consumption, was testifying about this German war criminal at the Vietnam tribunal, convened by Bertrand Russell in 1967 to hold hearings into US war crimes in Indochina. Kolko told the tribunal how the US Air Force had bombed the Toksan dam near Pyongyan. The plan was to destroy the irrigation system supplying 75 percent of North Korea’s rice farms. A subsequent USAF study of the bombing of the Toksan and Chasan dams noted, “These strikes, largely passed over by the press, military observers and news commentators … constituted one of the most significant air operations of the Korean war.” Of these deeds, the USAF historian remarked equably that the timing was aimed to be devastating in its psychological effect, when the exhausting labor of rice transplanting had been completed, but before the roots had become firmly embedded.

  The bombing of the North Korean dams was a rousing s
uccess. Water bursting through the holes in the Toksan dam made by US bombs “scooped clean” miles of valley below, with the added bonus of not only wiping out the rice paddies but also drowning Korean civilians in underground shelters. The USAF study exulted that “to the Communists the smashing of the dams meant primarily the destruction of their chief sustenance—rice. The Westerner can little conceive the awesome meaning that the loss of this staple food commodity has for the Asian—starvation and slow death.” Another study detected “oriental fatalism” in the way the North Koreans carried on desperate repair efforts without regard for the delayed-action bombs also dropped around the target area.

  Similar successful assaults were made on dams in Vietnam. In 1969 Henry Kamm, a New York Times reporter, recounted how there had been a dam south of Hue “blasted by American jets to deprive the North Vietnamese of a food supply.” Kamm returned later to find that the paddies had then been destroyed by salt water encroaching from the South China Sea.

  June 9

  The sole purpose of the bombing was to demonstrate to Serbia and to the world NATO’s capacity to bomb, thus killing nearly 2,000 civilians, destroying much of Serbia’s infrastructure, and prompting the forced expulsion and flight of around a million Kosovars. Wars have been triggered by the frailest of excuses and prolonged on the slightest of rationales.

  This was the Cowards’ War, bombing a country for two and a half months from 30,000 feet. It was the Liberals’ War waged by social democracy’s best and brightest, intent on proving once again that wars can be fought with the best and most virtuous of intentions: the companion volume to Hillary Clinton’s It Takes a Village turns out to be It Takes an Air Force.