New age of humanitarian vigilante power-1
The order of events is strange. On March 24, 1999, the NATO forces led by the
United States began an eleven-week-long punishment of Yugoslavia's President, Slobodan
Milosevic, which amounted to capital punishment for an undetermined number of citizens of
that unfortunate country. Two months later, on May 27, the U.S.-backed International
Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia issued an indictment of Milosevic for "crimes
against humanity" having occurred after the punishment began.
Then, in late June, the Clinton administration dispatched 56 forensic experts from
the Federal Bureau of Investigation to Kosovo to gather material evidence of the crimes
for which Milosevic and five of his colleagues had already been indicted and for which his
country had already been severely and durably punished.
The FBI had no instructions to search for evidence of crimes
as such, including those that might have been committed by, say, armed rebels fighting
against the established government of Yugoslavia. The only crimes of interest were those
for which Milosevic had previously been accused, and all evidence was assumed in advance
to point to his guilt.
Thus the world entered the new age of humanitarian vigilante
power.
At the end of World War II, a world political system was put in place to outlaw
war. In its triumph as sole superpower destined to govern the world, the United States is
currently striving to replace the system that outlaws war by a system that uses war to
punish outlaws.
Who the outlaws are is decided by the United States.
Alongside economic globalization, this vigilante system corresponds to a dominant American
world view of a capitalist system inherently capable of meeting all human needs, marred
only by the wrongdoings of evil outcasts.
At home and abroad, the social effort to bring everybody into a community of equal
rights and obligations is abandoned in favour of universal competition in which the rich
winners exclude the losers from society itself. On the domestic
scene, as the rich get richer, the well-to-do escape from the very sight of the poor by
moving into gated communities, social programs are cut, while prisons and execution
chambers fill up. Punishment, even vengeance, are popular values.
Twenty years ago, the United Nations and its agencies provided a political forum
for discussions of such matters as a "new economic order" or a "new
information order" that might seek to narrow the enormous gap between the rich
Atlantic world and most of the rest of the planet. All that is past,
and today, the United Nations is instrumentalized by the United States to pursue dissident
States which it has chosen to brand as rogues, terrorists or criminals. Capitalist
competition is being forced onto the entire world as the supreme law by new bodies such as
the World Trade Organization. NATO-land is a gated community whose armed forces are being
prepared to intervene worldwide, at the bidding of Washington, to defend members'
interests, in the name of the war against crimes against humanity.
Below are all the rest of the articles 2-11.
[ Clinton Doctrine ] [ Importance of War Crimes ] [ Humanitarian Realpolitik ] [ Cultural Divides ] [ Scenarios Reach the TV Screen ] [ Abramowitz-Albright Policy For Yugoslavia ] [ How to sabotage the OSCE ] [ How to obtain "Justice" ] [ Unified Empires ] [ History as Melodrama ]
