Edward S. Herman’s Life and Work – Part 8

Ed’s work on Yugoslavia

Edward S. Herman did not collaborate with Noam Chomsky much after the demise of Lies of Our Times.  They did a joint interview on the Propaganda Model in 2009, Noam wrote some forewords to Ed’s books (The Myth of the Liberal Media and The Politics of Genocide), but that is all that I can recall seeing.  Ed later admitted that Noam was not happy that Ed took on so-called “leftists” such as Christopher Hitchens, Todd Gitlin, and other pro-war “leftists,” as Noam thought that it would divide the left.  Hitchens and Gitlin supported the USA-led “humanitarian” bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, and Hitchens enthusiastically endorsed the USA’s invasion of Iraq (and Gitlin supported the invasion of Afghanistan), which is the greatest crime of the 21^st-century so far.  Ed dubbed them members of “The Cruise Missile Left.”  I never saw Ed advocate violence, which is partly why I became his biographer. 

The American-led bombing of Yugoslavia initiated Ed’s writings on what happened to Yugoslavia, and he began writing about it in late 1999, only a few months after the bombing campaign, as he called Bill Clinton the world’s leading active war criminal.  Ed’s thesis was that the West tore apart Yugoslavia after the Soviet Union collapsed.  For the rest of his life, Yugoslavia became one of Ed’s most prominent topics, particularly the “genocide” at Srebrenica.  Ed led an effort that was published in 2011.  Ed’s basic point about the Srebrenica massacre was that it was a “nefarious” bloodbath, so it was subjected to a barrage of Western propaganda from the beginning, as the slaughter of maybe 800 men, mainly soldiers, was inflated into a “genocide” of 8,000 people. 

As usual, Ed framed it in terms of the media’s treatment of the facts, and compared the Srebrenica massacre to a slaughter of at least 8,000 men, women, and children in a Hutu refugee camp in Rwanda by Paul Kagame’s Tutsi forces.  Even though ten times as many people were murdered, it was a “benign” bloodbath committed by an American asset, so almost nobody in the West ever heard of the Kibeho massacre, which happened only a few months before the Srebrenica massacre.  The only Western media that covered the Kibeho massacre was Australian, because an Australian UN contingent witnessed it and helped prevent it from becoming worse. 

Ed and David Peterson contributed a chapter on CNN in a 2000 book that Ed helped edit on the media’s performance on Yugoslavia.  As late as 2015, Ed and David wrote about the Srebrenica massacre.  In early 2000, Ed co-wrote an article with human-rights attorney Christopher Black, who led Slobodan Milošević’s defense effort at the kangaroo court tribunal that the USA ran.  Chris thought that the tribunal may have poisoned Milošević, as he was defending himself quite capably, while Ed argued that denying Milošević the medical treatment that he requested is what killed him.  Either way, Milošević’s blood was on the tribunal’s hands and several defendants died in that tribunal’s custody. 

In Ed and David’s The Politics of Genocide, published in 2010, they introduced a novel statistic: how many people died in an incident versus how often the media called it a genocide.  A civilian death in Kosovo was called part of a genocide more than 25,000 times as often as the death of a Hutu refugee was.  I have never encountered a more extreme statistic in the social sciences.  It made Ed’s ratio of worthy and unworthy victims in Manufacturing Consent, of a disparity of less than 200-fold, pale to insignificance.  Ed’s many assailants completely ignored those kinds of disparities, as they never mounted credible critiques of his work that I ever saw, and I have read many of them, going back to the 1990s.