During the Balkan war of 1912, Leon Trotsky was a war correspondent for a group of liberal Russian and Ukrainian newspapers. He understood that pan-Slavic and Christian Orthodox chauvinism was a crucial element in Russian tyranny — just as it is today in the warped worldview of our ally Boris Yeltsin. Trotsky witnessed atrocities committed in Kosovo, and wrote that Russian indulgence had made it much easier for Serbian and Bulgarian gangs “to engage in their Cain’s work of further massacres of the peoples of the Crescent in the interests of the ‘culture’ of the Cross.”
Quoting a Serbian soldier whose civil and political conscience had been revolted, Trotsky reported:
“The horrors actually began as soon as we crossed the old frontier … The darker the sky became, the more brightly the fearful illumination of the fires stood out against it. Burning was going on all around us. Entire Albanian villages had been turned into pillars of fire — dwellings, possessions, accumulated by fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers were going up in flames.”
But most Europeans found that they could contemplate the immolation of obscure Muslims with relative equanimity. As indeed can we. In order to understand the shame of what has lately occurred (or better say recurred) in Kosovo, one must revisit the shame of what occurred at Srebrenica. It is unlikely that even the Serbian “irregulars” in Kosovo have yet exceeded what they accomplished in that Bosnian “safe haven” in July 1995: the organized killing and interment of perhaps 10,000 male captives.
That slaughter was carried out as American satellites whirled calmly overhead, recording the information, and as NATO troops stood by and exchanged pleasantries with the overworked executioners. Even Richard Holbrooke, a man trained to realpolitik in a hard school, had the grace to look embarrassed and awkward when asked what the United States knew, and when it knew it. As Mark Danner put it in his brilliant reconstruction of the slaughter for the New York Review of Books:
Even on that Sunday afternoon, as he sat answering the reporter’s questions, Holbrooke tells in his memoirs, ‘Precise details of what was happening in Srebrenica were not known … but there was no question that something truly horrible was going on.’
An odd construction, that sentence, defining what is known only by what is not: Five days after the Serbs swept into Srebrenica, Holbrooke and other officials, men and women perched on the heights of the United States’ national security bureaucracy and benefiting from all its vast powers of perception (satellites gazing down from space; spy planes snapping photographs from the upper atmosphere; unmanned drone planes relaying real-time video images; diplomats and attachis in-country working their informants for secrets and rumors and gossip), could know no “precise details” of Serbian actions in this one tiny place in eastern Bosnia, but were able nonetheless to harbor the certainty that “something truly horrible was going on.”
Srebrenica, however, was described by many liberals, and accepted by the Clinton administration, as “a blessing in disguise.” It so horrified and terrified the Bosnian leadership that it brought them to the conference in Dayton, Ohio. And so grateful was Slobodan Milosevic for the forebearance of Washington in understating and even concealing his role in the mass murder that he consented to come to Dayton also, and to become the valued co-sponsor of a Pax Americana. From this glorious page of diplomacy it was but a step to a whole new chapter: a NATO assault on what seems to most Serbs like all of Serbia, with the ethereal war machines flying high over the continuing pogrom while soliciting another handshake from — the same Mr. Milosevic himself! To get the worst of so many worlds (if the expression is not itself an insult to so many victims past, present and future), one has to have a regime that is numb to all questions of history and all matters of principle.
The tactical and strategic wisdom of confronting Milosevic in this way, and over, if not on, his territory, is debatable in a paltry way. You can forget all the half-baked nonsense about Kosovo being Milosevic’s “Holy Land” or his Jerusalem. It would be more accurate to call it his Sudetenland or his Anschluss. In Kosovo, thanks to the Albanian boycott of the rigged elections, his party gets 20 percent of its seats. In Kosovo in April 1987, thanks to a quick-change from Balkan Stalinism to Balkan National Socialism, he was able to don the mantle of racial and populist demagogue. (There is live footage of the clumsy and obvious staging of this provocation.) It would cost him his head, never mind his job, if he backed down too fast. But, in the cleansing interval that was both provoked and provided by the threat of air attacks on other parts of Yugoslavia, he may have won enough ground and displaced enough people to call for another Dayton, and perhaps get Yeltsin and Holbrooke to help broker it.
One says “other parts of Yugoslavia” because our heroic president and commander in chief could not have been more wrong, in his patronizing speech on Day One of the airstrikes, than in referring to Kosovo as “a province of Serbia.” Internally speaking, it is a formerly autonomous region of former Yugoslavia. Its constitutional autonomy was unilaterally revoked by Milosevic when he began his seizure of power and his demented campaign to redefine Yugoslavia as a Serbian mini-empire. Externally speaking, the frontier demarcating Kosovo from Albania is only recognized, by international treaties, as a Yugoslav border. Should Montenegro secede, as Montenegrin democrats wish, from the rump federation, then there will be no more “Yugoslavia” for Kosovo to belong to.
It would be nice to believe that there was anyone in Washington who had allowed for this possibility or pondered its implications. But then, just try asking whether Kosovo, in the United States’ design, is intended to get its autonomy back, or to become a part of Serbia, or to be subject to an improvised partition, or to become independent, or to federate with a future “Greater Albania” (which would itself be an ugly metastasis of the model Greater Serbia). Blank looks is what you get. These people don’t think, and probably can’t think, beyond the next news cycle. Which is why another Dayton may succeed another Srebrenica.
The likeliest outcome is obviously a de facto partition of an “ethnically cleansed” Kosovo; the very objective proposed by Milosevic’s then-crony Dobrica Cosic back in 1988. Such a partition in which our Russian allies would be eager to help out as brokers would be the infallible cause of another and even nastier war. But by then, President Clinton will have retired to his presidential library in Arkansas. In Bob Woodward’s book “The Agenda,” Clinton was depicted telling his aides that he wished he had been president during World War II. I remember feeling very afraid when I read that.
As humanitarian concerns increased last week — overiding the question of how well-protected were billion-dollar stealth airplanes — I called Srdja Popovic, the chief human-rights lawyer and dissident in former Yugoslavia. Popovic has only recently decided to identify himself as a Serb, and has done so as a further means of denouncing Milosevic. I wondered if anyone from the administration had been in touch with him lately. No, he said, not since 1992.
“I told them then that intervention was required for the sake of Serbia as well as Bosnia and Macedonia and Croatia and Kosovo. They hated this idea so much that they never called me again. What they do now is sporadic, and improvised, and I have the feeling that they have not thought it through at all.” A bad enough feeling, but not as bad as the suspicion that there was a carve-up in the works all along.
The “line of the day” among administration spokesmen, confronted by masses of destitute and terrified refugees and solid reports of the mass execution of civilians, is to say that “we expected this to happen.” They did? (They never told anyone.) If they want to avoid being indicted for war crimes themselves, these “spokesmen” had better promise us that they were lying when they said that.
There was a time in my life when I did a fair bit of work for the tempestuous Lucretia Stewart, then editor of the American Express travel magazine Departures. Together, we evolved a harmless satire of the slightly driveling style employed by the journalists of tourism. “Land of Contrasts” was our shorthand for it. (“Jerusalem: an enthralling blend of old and new.” “South Africa: a harmony in black and white.” “Belfast, where ancient meets modern.”) It was, as you can see, no difficult task. I began to notice a few weeks ago that my enemies in the “peace” movement had decided to borrow from this tattered stylebook. Their mantra was: “Afghanistan, where the world’s richest country rains bombs on the world’s poorest country.”
Poor fools. They should never have tried to beat me at this game. What about, “Afghanistan, where the world’s most open society confronts the world’s most closed one”? “Where American women pilots kill the men who enslave women.” “Where the world’s most indiscriminate bombers are bombed by the world’s most accurate ones.” “Where the largest number of poor people applaud the bombing of their own regime.” I could go on. (I think No. 4 may need a little work.) But there are some suggested contrasts for the “doves” to paste into their scrapbook.
Incidentally, when they look at their scrapbooks they will be able to reread themselves saying things like, “The bombing of Kosovo is driving the Serbs into the arms of Milosevic.”
If the silly policy of a Ramadan pause had been adopted, the citizens of Kabul would have still been under a regime of medieval cruelty, and their oppresssors would have been busily regrouping, not praying. Anyhow, what a damn-fool proposal to start with. I don’t stop insulting the Christian coalition at Easter time. Come Yom Kippur I tend to step up my scornful remarks about Zionism. Whatever happened to the robust secularism that used to characterize the left? And why is it suddenly only the injured feelings of Muslims that count?
A couple of years ago, the same people were striking pompous attitudes about the need to avoid offending Serbian and therefore Russian Orthodox sensitivities. Except that those sensitive people, or their leaders, were engaged in putting the Muslims of Europe to the sword.
There’s no pleasing some people, but as a charter supporter of the nuclear disarmament campaign, I can remember a time when the peace movement was not an auxiliary to dictators and aggressors in trouble. Looking at some of the mind-rotting tripe that comes my way from much of today’s left, I get the impression that they go to bed saying: What have I done for Saddam Hussein or good old Slobodan or the Taliban today?
Well, ha ha ha. It was obvious from the very start that the United States had no alternative but to do what it has done. It was also obvious that defeat was impossible. The Taliban will soon be history. Al-Qaida will take longer. There will be other mutants to fight. But if, as the peaceniks like to moan, more bin Ladens spring up to take his place, I can offer this assurance: Should that be the case, there are many, many more who will also spring up to kill him all over again. And there are more of us and we are both smarter and nicer, as well as surprisingly insistent that our culture demands respect, too.
Reprinted with permission from the London Guardian.
If it were not for William Jefferson Clinton, that overrated and under-written speech by George W. Bush in Philadelphia would have been over before it began. Imagine: An ignorant and spoiled mediocrity opens his acceptance address by comparing himself to George Washington! Only a few years ago, such a comparison, even offered in jest, would have invited ridicule and contempt. (Recall what happened when even the popular Ronald Reagan described the Contra bandits in Nicaragua as the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.) But this time, no one dares to challenge such a piece of flagrant profanity. George W. is free to taunt away because he knows the Democrats dare not raise the issue of character or stature. And he is free to drape his dismal program in the camouflage (part Special Olympics and part gorgeous mosaic or Rainbow Coalition) of correctness. Why not? It worked for the last cynic who tried it. Like Clinton, Bush hopes to get good press for getting good press.
It’s almost impossible to distill all one’s dislike of Clinton into one valedictory article, but this is the moment to try. In the past eight years, he has hugely shrunk the area of the possible while greatly expanding the area of the thinkable. When he took office, there was everything to play for with Russia and China, and a real chance for serious disarmament. Our first post-Cold War president now faces us with a renewed missile race, even more expensive and inefficient than its predecessor, and a sterile confrontation with post-Communist authoritarians with whom he is otherwise on much too easy terms.
But then, when he took office, the idea that a sitting president would rent the Lincoln bedroom to the nearest bidder was also a remote one to most people. Washington was to belong to those who worked hard and played by the rules, not to the Riadys and Tamrazes and the other riffraff to whom (through the agency of the lovely Dick Morris) this president repeatedly sold his office.
In between, and taking up much more of his real commitment and energy than any reform program, we have had a president who, while in office, has had to settle a sexual harassment suit to the tune of nearly a million bucks, has had to face disbarment for lying to a federal judge, has been cited by another judge for a criminal violation of the Privacy Act, and has been plausibly accused of rape. To the suggestion that he induced the aforesaid Mr. Riady, emissary of the Indonesian military dictatorship, to use some of his funny money to pay off a disgraced and imprisoned deputy attorney general, the former master of detail and king of the briefing book now pleads total amnesia.
This is how our time and opportunity has been squandered since 1992. There are those who might want to plead that the economy is sound, but they have Alan Greenspan’s policy to thank for that, as Clinton is, by his endless deference to the man, the first to admit. And if you wanted Greenspan, with all his orthodoxy about unemployment inflation and corporatism, you could have voted for George W(ashington)’s daddy to begin with. Only he would not have asked you to keep quiet, lest you jeopardize his plan for national health care.
Covering Clinton in New Hampshire in 1992, I concluded (and wrote) that he was stop-at-nothing ruthless, that he was exorbitantly lousy about political money, that he was a near-pathological liar and that he was exceptionally foul in his relations with women. I haven’t had to take anything back. Three things about his record still strike me as monstrous. And the silence of liberals on these three points still strikes me as degrading:
1) The execution of Rickey Ray Rector. Lobotomized by his own bullet, this disabled black convict did not understand either his trial or his sentence. Executed by Clinton to draw attention from the Gennifer Flowers flap (about which he also lied) Rector outdoes Willie Horton by every definition of racist grandstanding. His snuffing was not just an election tactic, bad enough though that would have been. In power, Clinton fast-tracked capital punishment to the point where even Republican governors and legislatures have had to try and slow it down.
2) The wag-the-dog bombing of Sudan. Nobody in the political, military or intelligence establishment any longer pretends that the target hit by Clinton in August 1998 was anything but a medical facility. And few pretended even at the time. But something had to be hit in the week of Monica Lewinsky’s return to the grand jury, and Clinton borrowed the movie lines of Michael Douglas from the film “The American President” in order to justify the atrocity. A truly chilling Strangelove moment.
3) The rape of Juanita Broaddrick. This woman’s allegations check out at every point where they can be tested (and are corroborated, in my recent book, by the similar testimony of at least two other women). Clinton refuses to comment, and refused even to help NBC when it tried to establish his alibi for the relevant day. Again, he seems to have counted — successfully — on decent people’s reluctance to face the possibility that such a thing could be true.
The president needs therapy, as even his awful wife has conceded. But this does not excuse the gruesome apologists who have told us that his problems should be kept private. The Oval Office private? It belongs to the people. The Lincoln bedroom, private? The Justice Department, a private law firm? Those who defended Clinton in this way did not just avert their eyes from corruption, violence and injustice, and to the use of state power to slander and defame female witnesses who turned out to be telling the truth. They invented excuses for power that we can be sure his successors will eagerly employ. Did you see the White House claiming that George (W)ashington had borrowed Clinton’s vapid lines for his successful speech? Are these hacks so dumb that they don’t know what they are acknowledging? The fact is that Clintonism has set a lower bar for political obscenity of all kinds, and that we are all the losers for it. All this — and Starr wars, too.
Some things may be true even if Pat Buchanan says them: The inescapable fact is that the 2000 presidential election has so far been a rigged affair, bearing more resemblance to a plebiscite in some banana republic than to anything recognizable as a democratic contest.
The entry of Buchanan as a supposed “insurgent” presidential candidate is itself part of the prearrangement and manipulation. Here we have a loyal Beltway veteran, grown like a mold on the dank sponge of the national security state, and well-known to the powers that be as someone absolutely reliable. He’s already shown himself quite willing to play the game of slush funds and matching funds. There’s your designated dissident. Just for fun, why not set him up against Donald Trump for the Reform Party nomination, so that even the supposed outsider faction can replicate the only allowable division in American politics — that between machine-produced clones on the one hand and nutball narcissistic tycoons on the other.
A genuine foe of oligarchy like Ronnie Dugger, co-chair of the organization Alliance for Democracy, with his reasoned case for the public financing of campaigns, really does seem like a quixotic loony to our consensual press. (And since he doesn’t manifest any obvious nostalgia for, say, the Third Reich, he doesn’t even count as a colorful character for style section purposes.)
The brave volunteers of Public Campaign and the Alliance for Democracy took their protest to the Capitol steps recently, but the Washington Post ignored the rally, where the largest groups of attendees were high-school students not yet inured to cynicism and not yet old enough to vote. The defeat of the rather tepid McCain-Feingold initiative in the Senate, which was the proximate cause of the protest, also marked the eclipse of any remaining hope for a fair or open race next year.
The fix is in: The special interests will pretend to have an election, and you, if you choose, can pretend to vote in it. The only recourse I can see is an appeal to the international community and the United Nations, to send accredited observers to monitor the process.
The United States loves nothing better than to certify other countries’ ballots as “free and fair,” so there can hardly be any principled objection to a delegation of monitors, from democratic nations, taking up position, pens in hand, as America makes its “choice.” Indeed, given the awful power of the U.S. president and Congress over the affairs of other nations, it’s surprising that this hasn’t been suggested already.
Here are some of the questions that the U.N. and international monitors would have to consider before validating the 2000 election:
1) Has there already been the open purchase of votes, as seemed to be the acknowledged case in the
href="/news/feature/1999/08/16/straw/index.html">Iowa straw poll?
2) Has there already been the open purchase of candidates, as is implied by the immense (and, in point of the source of donations) largely secret fund amassed by Texas Gov. George W. Bush?
3) Are there restrictions placed on the entry of third-party or independent candidates? Have these restrictions been imposed by a collusion of the existing parties?
4) Are there impediments to the placing of minority parties on ballots?
5) Are there impediments to voter registration?
6) Is access to the media fairly apportioned as between candidates and parties, irrespective of wealth?
7) Do the laws barring convicted felons from voting constitute discrimination against any minority group?
Does the allotment of federal matching funds constitute a subsidy to a duopoly?
These questions are not exhaustive. I have not, for example, included the misgivings felt by some experts about the reliability or integrity of the voting machines that are used to count and register ballots. Nor have I space to discuss the flagrant disenfranchisement of voters in the nation’s capital — a grotesque anomaly that seems on the face of it to be decidedly racist in both cause and effect. Conditions vary from state to state, so that question No. 7 for example would need to be measured differently according to local conditions.
But it’s already clear that self-policing is not enough in most jurisdictions. It’s also clear that the American mass media — chief recipient of the largesse raised and spent by candidates — has simply abdicated its watchdog role in the election process.
Some elements of the deficit of democracy in this country should have been put to the test long ago. The Supreme Court ought to have heard arguments about whether campaign donations constitute common-law bribery, and there is no reason not to ventilate the question of the Electoral College, with its inbuilt bias against urban and minority voters. However, these and other options are unlikely to be exercised unless the entire system is challenged in a thoroughgoing way. A monitoring force from the international community seems to me to provide the best chance for such an alteration in perspective. What is needed, therefore, is an appeal from a large group of respected Americans for such a monitoring force to be brought into being.
We have less than a year to refuse the front-loaded, bought-and-paid-for pseudo-election that is being prepared for us. Already, the primary process has been short-circuited, and it looks as if the presidential “debates” will be rigged as they were last time, by the same unelected and unaccountable corporate interests.
All those interested in signing an appeal for inspection, and for the verifying and certifying of an open political process, should contact Public Campaign at 1320 19th St NW, Suite M1, Washington DC 20036.
Here is what Pat Buchanan’s hero, the “Lone Eagle,” Col. Charles Lindbergh, wrote in the November 1939 Reader’s Digest under the heading “Aviation, Geography and Race”:
Aviation is a tool especially shaped for Western hands, a scientific art which others only copy in a mediocre fashion; another barrier between the teeming millions of Asia and the Grecian inheritance of Europe — one of the priceless possessions which permit the White race to live at all in a pressing sea of Yellow, Black and Brown … We can have peace and security only as long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races.
The best air force, wrote Lindbergh (who had accepted a large and swastika-infested medal from Reichsmarshall Herman Goering himself) was the German one. Now take another look at the date on the article. It’s still springtime for Hitler, but autumn for Poland and, soon, France. Winter is not far behind, for other and lesser peoples.
The question to ask about Lindbergh is not whether he was a crackpot and a racist. The above screed, and his infamous speech in Des Moines (“The greatest danger to this country lies in the large Jewish influence”) make the exercise superfluous. No, the question is, Why is an “isolationist” or a neutralist licking the boots of Goering, or having his own boots licked? Also, why is he echoing the wild theories of a putative “master race”? Surely the whole point of Fortress America is precisely to stay out of European quarrels and avoid taking sides?
Certainly that is how Buchanan himself claims to view matters. In the opening pages of his new book, “A Republic, Not an Empire,” he speaks easily and positively about George Washington’s Farewell Address and Thomas Jefferson’s warning against “entangling alliances.” I must say that I had no idea, when I watched Buchanan flacking for Nixon in Vietnam and shouting for Reagan in Grenada and positively sobbing with ecstasy over Col. Oliver North (his Lindbergh surrogate) that he had been such a closet stay-at-home all along. It would certainly have been impressive if he’d said so at the time. But his latest effort is not presented as any kind of re-think or self-criticism. Rather, it shows how highly compatible the concepts of expansionism and racism are with the ideas of the parochial and the nativist.
Here are two contrasting examples:
1) “Annexation of Texas, the Southwest, and California was Manifest Destiny, not imperialism.” (Page 122).
2) “In mid-March 1939 Hitler took a fateful step. He ordered his army into Prague and declared Czechoslovakia a Nazi protectorate. Poland and Hungary each bit off a chunk, and the Slovaks declared their independence … The injustice and folly of Versailles had now produced disaster.” (Page 258)
In the first example, American annexation is fine because, Buchanan says, it did not make Mexican citizens into a subject people (and because it was ordained by Heaven). In the second instance, he only just distinguishes between a possible German reunion with the Sudeten volk, for whom his heart still bleeds (far as they were from American shores) and a conquest and occupation of the whole of Czechoslovakia. Moreover, he blandly describes the Slovak puppet state, a contemptible subsidiary of the Third Reich, as having “declared independence.” The leader of that Slovak vassal statelet was of course Monsignor Josef Tiso, an ordained Catholic priest.
Having been accused by my critics of Catholic-bashing, and given that current anti-Catholic-bashing crusader Rudolph Giuliani remains one of the few prominent Republicans to have held his tongue on the subject of Buchanan — tongue-holding not being Mayor Giuliani’s everyday mode — I may as well say straightaway that Buchanan’s book is a loopy and inconsistent piece of Catholic fundamentalism and that this, and mainly this, is the reason for its weird and self-destructive sympathy for the fascist cause.
For example, the names Franco, Salazar, Mussolini, Pavelic, Horthy and Coughlin — the Vatican-sponsored clerical fascists — are almost entirely absent from the book. Yet Buchanan has spent a political career, and several essays in other books, defending all of them. A nativist Catholic sectarian is of course well within his rights to hymn local talents like Father Coughlin (and even Cardinal Spellman, though this seems to involve a relaxation of Buchanan’s position on gay rights). But how is it his business to decide the internal affairs of Spain, Portugal, Italy, Croatia and Hungary? Acid test: Buchanan demanded U.S. intervention in favor of the Croats in 1991 and opposed it for the Bosnians after 1992.
Another giveaway comes on Page 153, where Buchanan reveals that he’s been against the Spanish-American war all along: Playing a supporting role was the “black legend,” the “stereotype of Spaniards as blood-thirsty despots that Americans had inherited from their English forebears.” The Protestant press was up in arms over Spanish barbarities and wanted Catholic Spain driven out of the hemisphere in humiliation. “English forebears”? I thought that Buchanan was famous for wanting an Anglo-Saxon, or at least Anglo-Teutonic, immigration policy. But where he doesn’t “think with the blood,” he thinks with his sect. Nothing — nothing — could be more un-American.
I myself would vastly prefer a republic to an empire, which is why I wrote so much against the Buchanan-North campaign against Nicaragua and El Salvador — a campaign that knowingly involved imperialism abroad and subversion of the Constitution at home. It’s depressing to see liberal commentators — even some Nation contributors like Benjamin Schwartz and Christopher Layne — falling so easily for such demagogy and excusing Buchanan because he doesn’t like NAFTA or because he doesn’t care about Kosovo. The blunt fact is that the tradition of Lindbergh and Buchanan would not have kept America out of war, or innocent of overseas adventures. But it would have pledged a not-so-surreptitious neutrality to the other side in that conflict, and perhaps come by its empire that way.
Before you ask, I should say that it’s pronounced med-you-gorey. This is worth stressing, because it’s almost the only thing about the place that is complicated in the least.
The non-facts are these: On June 24, 1981, a 14-year-old peasant girl, unoriginally named Ivanka Ivankovic, unoriginally came across a light that she took to be the Virgin Mary. Not many hours later, three other girls and two boys claimed to have had the identical experience, or sense-impression. Within a matter of weeks, thousands of the credulous had started to appear at the site, and it has now been trampled by millions. Those who turn up have emanated a number of false claims, such as the ability to stare calmly and without harm at the sun (a pointless achievement even if verifiable) and the more acquisitive and medieval capacity to turn their rosary beads into pure gold. Every sort of foolishness is indulged, and every green acre of this once backward village has been transmuted into a knick-knack mall.
Three things, however, distinguish Medjugorje from the average racketeering religious hub. First, the children claimed to go on seeing the Virgin Mary every day, and some of them keep up this claim to the present moment. Since she exists in their imaginations, and is not a weeping or bleeding statue of the traditional sort — smeared with pig’s fat or otherwise rigged — she is harder to expose than the more palpable frauds at the shrine of San Gennaro, say. Second, the Vatican and the local hierarchy will not, as they have with similar hallucinations at Fatima or Lourdes or Knock, bestow recognition on the supposed miracle. Third, the political element of this miracle is so obvious as to do what no cowled blue lady can do: make a non-believer catch his breath in wonder.
Part of the fraudulence of Medjugorje is manifested in its political opportunism The site is in the territory of Bosnia-Hercegovina, but it also lies within the area claimed and occupied by Croatian irredentists. In the unbelievably awful souvenir shops that pollute the entire landscape, the accepted local currency is the Croatian kuna, supposed by the Dayton accords to be illegal tender in these parts.
Here, the wreckage of an entire city and the ruin of an entire society is still open to view. The bridges are down, the minarets are amputated: In many parts of town there is still not one stone piled on another. And all this was done, in plain view of NATO, by Croatian government forces who had pictures of the Virgin taped to their rifle-butts. While the pilgrims chanted only a matter of miles away, and gave out stupid and cupiditous yelps about their rosaries turning into gold, the soldiers of Christ were methodically leveling every sign of the existence of another monotheism — Islam. They were also killing, deporting and torturing those of their fellow citizens who professed the wrong faith, or who didn’t profess the right one, or who professed no faith at all.
This episode of atrocity weighs still on the meditations of serious Catholics. It doesn’t weigh quite enough, or his holiness the pope would not have beatified the late Cardinal Alojzije Stepanic, who was the clerical face of the wartime Croatian Nazi regime led by Ante Pavelic. (If Pat Buchanan were a mere “isolationist,” rather than someone soft on fascism, he would not be such a strong supporter and endorser of the Croatian extreme right, past and present.) Still, even on that dismal occasion the holy father was constrained to utter a few words against genocide and sectarianism. And I imagine that it is this atrocity — unstated yet inescapable — that moves the church to speak softly but skeptically to its over-eager Medjugorje flock. Bad as things are, they are not so counter-ecumenical as to make us bow down before Our Lady of the Ustashe.
There is a principle or saying in the world of Catholic scholasticism: “Whatever is received is received in the manner of the receiver.” An alternative, or looser, rendering of the Latin would be: “Garbage in — garbage out.” The children were asked excitedly and often, and understandably, what the Virgin had said to them. They replied that she recommended prayer, Bible study, fasting and the rosary. The dullest Croatian parish priest could have said as much, a message worse than the pointless burblings from the beyond that are produced at spiritualist seances. A pretty young guide took me to see a statue of Our Lady outside an ugly new basilica in the center of town. “This one,” she breathed reverently, “is the one which the children say looks most like the apparition.” I gazed. The banal stone figure precisely resembled every wayside mass-produced Virgin I had ever seen. Perhaps this is why, from Guadeloupe to Knock, she only ever manifests herself to people who have been trained to recognize her.
By contrast to the reverence of Our Lady’s followers, the hostility of the local church hierarchy and (thus far) even of an extremely Marian pope is more difficult to explicate. But — as with the Vatican’s denunciation of the supposed apparition at Garabandal in Spain in the 1960s — we can make a good guess. People “channeling” the Virgin of Medjugorge have interpreted her as preferring the Franciscans to the Jesuits. None of her purported “healings” has survived even the scrutiny of the clerics at Lourdes. Pagan conduct and superstitious ecstasy has been observed at the site, as has the grossest commercialism. And anyway, as Aaron’s Old Testament competition with Pharoah’s sorcerers can attest, the ability to conjure is not in itself proof of a Christian or even monotheist God, because otherwise the polytheistic sorcerers wouldn’t be able to do it. (The latter point is not made by the pope, but it ought to be.) So holy mother church has reached a compromise, whereby the faithful are neither enjoined to worship at Medjugorge nor discouraged from doing so. On the verge of the millennium, Rome does not need another embarrassing bogus revelation.
