Though my site is primarily devoted to Balkan issues, its inspiration is opposition to oppression wherever it exists. Indeed, that is why when we first read of the new book by Herman and Peterson, 'The Politics of Genocide', many of us on the left may at first have been encouraged, because it promises to discuss the important issue of how the imperialist media has double standards – the oppression, terror and genocide carried out by governments that at some point become official enemies of the main western imperialist states is called oppression, terror and genocide, while the oppression, terror and genocide carried out by imperialist states and their puppets and allies is either glossed over or given full support. After all, our hatred of oppression is precisely a reason we become anti-imperialists.



I mean, we would be encouraged at the appearance of such a book, that is, if we did not already know who the has-been crackpot, Ed Herman, and his sidekick blogger, someone called David Peterson, were. But unfortunately we know them well enough. As may be expected, their book merely reverses the biases they claim exist in the imperialist media (and indeed do exist, if often not even remotely in the way they claim they do). For them, oppression, terror and genocide carried out by a government that has become an official enemy of Washington (usually for some tactical, conjunctural reason, never due to principle), is glossed over or essentially given support to. And the reason people such as I get worked up over this is precisely because these people – unlike the imperialist powers whose method they copy – actually claim to be leftists, and in the case of Herman actually have some pedigree due to his past association with Chomsky. The problem being that what they write is a monstrous betrayal of everything it means to be of the left, to be a relentless opponent of oppression of all kinds, no matter what the source.

Herman and Peterson have been engaged almost full-time in the most savage genocide-denial over the events in the Balkans in the 1990s for years. Their crowning ‘achievement’ to date was their work of perfidy called ‘The Politics of the Srebrenica Massacre’, where Herman and sidekick go out of their way to reference whatever ultra-rightist creep they can find, alongside some spurious ‘research’ that would bore an amoeba, to claim that this extremely well-documented massacre of over 8000 defenceless Bosnian Muslims by the Bosnian Serb Chetnik army in July 1995 – termed even by the lame International Court of Justice a genocide - never really happened.



Thus, people in the know weren't expecting much. 



Yet even some of them have apparently been surprised that they now go so far as to regurgitate the truly awful genocide denial regarding the far larger genocide of at least 500,000 Rwandan Tutsi in 1994. This author, however, was not the least surprised; I was just waiting for it to come out more in the open from the various hints they had earlier dropped. Much of this story derives from another crackpot of similar ilk, a lawyer named Chris Black, who has acted previously to both defend and to build disgraceful political apologia for Serbian war-criminals and genocidists. For many years now Black has shifted his attention from the Balkans to Rwanda. Herman and Peterson mostly regurgitate Black's stuff.


I feel vindicated that people like Herman, Peterson and Black are also deniers of the Rwandan genocide, because it may help some still confused over Balkan events to understand where the Balkan genocide deniers are coming from, they are made of the same cloth, when they are not the same people, as those who deny much bigger genocides. I would hope that people read Herman and Peterson on the Balkans (that is, if they must read their trash at all) with this fact in mind. I am also very pleased that such a useful deconstruction has been done of their garbage on Rwanda.



Monthly Review has lowered itself to producing a chapter of this crap book (but then again, it also allowed Herman a whole book-length series of articles a couple of years ago to display his horrible Balkan revisionism). Noam Chomsky and John Pilger, who have both written wrong things about the Balkans in trying to ‘relativise’ the crimes of ‘all sides’, but who ultimately earn more respect than Herman and others because they at least condemn, in no uncertain terms, the terror and oppression launched by the Serbian side, here also discredit themselves by giving this new book eulogies. That is a great shame.

Gerald Caplan’s article is an excellent response to Herman and Peterson on Rwanda.

(Whole article reproduced at http://mihalisk.blogspot.com. Readers may search the archives here for my other exposes of Herman’s genocide denial on Srebrenica, Bosnia more generally, and Kosovo/a).