The Nato Empire in 1999

On June 5, 1999 in Washington, D.C. I spoke at a demonstration, near the Vietnam War memorial,  of many thousands of people protesting President Clinton's decision to bomb Serbia.  The program was put together by a coalition of American Serbs, Pacifists, and international Socialists, and the speakers included former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark and such a  bizarre gaggle of usual suspects as I had not seen since 1968, when my department chairman told me to attend meetings and rallies arranged by the Graduate Students Association of UNC.  The rallies, which were dominated by fat ugly feminists,  inarticulate ethnic minority spokesmen, and the classic flamers speaking for erotic  minorities.  It made me feel sorry for the poor SDSers who were trying to run a revolution. There were a few normal people--Serbian Americans and American combatI veterans.   spent part of my time at the "Pentagon Rally" doing a live interview with a conservative talk show host in St Louis.  I recall he opened up with, something like,"My lord, Fleming, what in the world are you doing with those freaks?"  Here, then, is a slightly edited version of my remarks.

This is a great day in the history of our country.  Here we are--Christians and Jews, Serbs and Greeks and Anglos and African-Americans, people from left and right.  If you believe CNN and the media, we must have come here because we hate our country or want to kill Albanians.  Do you believe them?  Do you believe anything that NATO’s state-controlled media say?  Abraham Lincoln said you couldn’t fool all of the people all of the time--but that was before CNN was on 24 hours a day, making up the news.  You are not people who hate their country.  You are the conscience of America.

The others--the NATO chiefs, the presidents and foreign ministers and their lapdogs in the press--they have no conscience.  They plot the slaughter of the innocent and watch it with glee on their television sets.   Someone should design a poster with  a photograph of Bill Clinton, grinning at the camera, with a sign on his chest reading" Stop me before I kill again.  That is what we are here for--to stop them all before they kill again.

Let us be very clear: this so-called war is not about human rights or ethnic cleansing, it has nothing to do with helping Albanians or punishing Slobodan Milošević.  This NATO war is an act of criminal aggression against a small nation.  It is the latest chapter in a history of American imperialism that began in Cuba and the Phillipines 100 years ago, and its most recent victims include the nations of Somalia,  El Salvador and Nicaragua

Some of us here today, 30 years ago, were demonstrating against the War in Vietnam, but some of us believed we had to stand up against an evil Communist empire that wanted to destroy our religion, subjugate small nations, and rule the world.  Today, though, there is no division: We oppose the war but we are also against the new evil empire that wants to rule the world, the NATO empire.

This NATO empire makes war on the Christian religion in the Balkans, but the US government, which controls NATO, is also killing Muslims in the Middle East, and if the Buddhists get in the way, it will kill them too.  It’s Kosovo today, Greece tomorrow, Kashmir next week.  They will always find a reason for killing women and children--anything but actually fighting soldiers who shoot back.  They’ve killed a million civilians in Iraq and before next winter who knows how many will be dead in Yugoslavia, even if no more bombs are dropped.  Is this the United States we were brought up to love?

But why start with Kosovo?  Some people think it’s about oil and strategic resources--and they may be important factors--but there is something more important.  What does Kosovo mean to the Serbs?  It is their land of heart’s desire; for Serbs Kosovo means what Jerusalem means for Jews or Rome for Catholics.  It is the land where the Serbian nation was forged in defeat.  It was after the battle of Kosovo--over 600 years ago--that Serbs dedicated themselves to God, and it is in Kosovo, where their greatest churches are located.  In taking Kosovo from the Serbs we are robbing them of their history and their identity, we are committing a kind of cultural genocide against their nation and that is the point.

In the NEW WORLD ORDER of the NATO empire, there will be no nations, no religions, no cultures.  Just one vast free-trade global marketplace of producers and consumers.  In destroying Kosovo, we are destroying the Serbs but we are also destroying ourselves.  The bombing may have stopped for the moment, now that the Serbs have been bombed back into the stone age; the war is probably over, and NATO’s empire of half a billion people has crushed 10 million Serbs; but the real task for us Americans has just begun: the Serbs have destroyed themselves fighting for our freedom.  Now it is our turn.

It’s time for honest people of the left and right to set aside their differences--as Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader did when they campaigned against NAFTA.  NATO is simply a global free trade zone backed up by nuclear weapons, and we must band together to resist it.   Now it is up to people like us to dismantle NATO’s evil empire before it comes after us.