Armenian, Assyrian and Hellenic Genocide News

Distorted Records
by Professor Botsas - a member of HEC
Posted: Friday, January 05, 2001 11:21 am CST

Killing has become routine. We have come to expect it without any protest. Yet, it was only a short time ago that critics of the Vietnam War demonstrated against American foreign policy in Southeast Asia. Television brought the atrocities of war to our living rooms. We were terrified at the inhumane burning of innocent children with napalms. The pictures caused revulsion, although now with U.S. officials welcomed in Hanoi it is hard to think of the recent past.

Last year television brought to our living rooms pictures of shiny B-2 airplanes bombarding innocent Yugoslav farmers and their livestock. In his March 24, 1999, address to the nation President Clinton said: "We learned that in the Balkans, inaction in the face of brutality, simply invites brutality." Notice that in President Clinton's words the Balkans are different. Not only the number of refugees, victims, and prisoners were exaggerated, but also we made a distinction between Balkan and other people. NATO threw out the doctrine of state sovereignty in Yugoslavia, but not in Turkey because Yugoslavia was more of a Balkan country than Turkey.

This year television has brought to our living room pictures of Palestinian children killed in the arms of their parents, and Jewish children killed just because they are Jewish. Neither the killing of innocent Yugoslavs nor pictures of tanks and helicopters fighting unarmed Palestinians sensitized us. Like the Palestinians the Balkans are disposable. We have accepted violence as part of living. There is nothing new about ethnic conflict. What is new is the ability of journalists and some pseudo-intellectuals to perpetuate in the West a cultural image of the Balkan people as intolerant and slaves of ancient hatreds. Even people who know better spice their work with artificial images with no critical point of reference to the West's role in shaping modern Balkan history. For example, David Owen starts his book on the Yugoslav conflict with the observation that "NOTHING IS SIMPLE in the Balkans. History pervades everything and the complexities confound even the most careful study." He says nothing about the Basque conflict in Spain or the Irish Republican Army in his own country. Nothing about the sacrifices of the partisans to rescue British soldiers during World War II.

Others choose the Balkan countries they admire or get paid to write about in public relations format that they present as scholarship. Some historians, like Justin McCarthy of the University of Louisville, Kentucky, find only glory in the slaughter of Christians by the Ottoman Turks. Indeed, Professor McCarthy sympathizes with the plight of Turks in the hands of Balkans, "refugees from the Balkans and Caucasus"! "In the 1950s the Turks created a real democracy," says Professor McCarthy. Indeed, Professor McCarthy, Turkey was so democratic in the 1950s that it destroyed almost all Orthodox churches, exhumed the bones of the Christian dead, and had quite a number of coups d'etat. The military who took over and executed the president and Prime Minister were angels of democracy! We face here not just a historical interpretation of the past. We face a deliberate distortion of facts. Turkey may be a Balkan country but in the eyes of the "revisionists" it is a good Balkan country. It is like cholesterol, some is good and the rest is bad. They do not see the destruction of thousands of Kurdish villages as being as bad, or worse, than the destruction of a few houses by the Serbs in Kosovo. Some of us in academia see no ethical constraints to historical records.

While it was "cool" to demonstrate against the war in Vietnam, the social norms had changed dramatically by the 1990s. First, because of the draft there was self-interest among college students to oppose the war. Secondly, a large part of the educated community viewed the struggle of the Vietnamese as a struggle against colonialism. Thirdly, rightly or wrongly, African Americans viewed the war in Vietnam as a war of white men against people of color, while the war against Serbia was a family squabble among white Europeans. Above all, policy makers and journalists had successfully demonized the Serbs. As we said before, the Yugoslavs were people of the Balkans, and people of the Balkans were inferior. State Department interns became, or imagined themselves, experts on things Balkan overnight.

The problem is that shallow popular culture enters the thinking of decision makers that decide on foreign investment and trade. As long as a society is depicted as marginal and anarchic, multinational corporations avoid heavy investment. Indeed it the admission of Spain and Portugal into the old European Community increased the investment flows into those countries, as well as Ireland. Gradually, Spain became a magnet in attracting foreign investment. Portugal and Ireland followed closely. Journalists and serious writers started presenting these countries in favorable light. Their achievements and contributions to the world society were not misrepresented. The overall picture in the minds of the Americans was that the Europeans were basically good. The Turks were viewed less favorably. Thus, starting with the Truman Doctrine, the U.S. official and unofficial strategy has been to transform the American opinion on Turkey. We are rewriting history. So Professor McCarthy writes (on the WEB) a short piece on 400 years of Turkish history where the Turks never did anything bad. We know that no society has ever existed to be this good, but a professor of history provides the stamp of authority on matters like this. In economics we say that there is some price for almost everything that satisfies human desires. I do not know what the price of a very efficient distortion of reality is.

Lefteris N. Botsas, Ph.D.
Professor of Economics and Management
School of Business Administration
Oakland University
Rochester, MI 48309

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