Words matter, but context? – 2024-04-06 05:37:01

The official explanation for Prime Minister Kiril Petkov’s decision to so suddenly fire Defense Minister Stefan Yanev was determined semantic differences regarding the conflict in Ukraine – “military operation” or “war”.

I agree with the Prime Minister – words are the alpha and omega not only in politics and can lead to extremely serious consequences. Words are that imaginary matrix shaping our perceptions of what is reality and what is not. The key question, however, is who is empowered with the veil of legitimacy for their selection. The answer is obvious and as old as our civilization – those who own, who are in charge and who control the Ministries of Truth, in Orwell’s words.

The ability to juggle not only the different caliber, but also the frequency of these semantic bullets, is a whole art aimed at victory on the battlefield of “future empires”. Here I quote another famous Englishman, Winston Churchill, according to whom: “Future empires are empires of the mind.” Without a doubt, this is the titanic battle of our century.

One example. Could the #1 terrorist also be a world champion for peace, human rights and a role model for future generations? The answer is not seemingly ridiculous if what we perceive as objective reality is precisely that reality that ignores the so-called context. What do I mean?

27 years in a gloomy prison cell on Robben Island (deliberately chosen to be in close proximity to the site of executions) it took Nelson Mandela to reach the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. Ten years later in 2013 at the official Mandela’s funeral in Johannesburg was attended by more than 100 world leaders, including Obama, Hollande, Cameron and Merkel.

Another geographically closer example: According to the US State Department, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was designated as a terrorist organization, but suddenly just months before the beginning of the conflict in Kosovo, the State Department radically changed the vocabulary from “terrorists” to “freedom fighters”. Let’s remember that back in 1999, Kosovo became the center of a major military operation, in which nearly 500 NATO aircraft in 38,000 sorties bombed Yugoslavia for… 78 days.

It is debatable whether this was a military operation or just a war. One of the experts of this conflict, Prof. Michael Mandelbaum, estimates the victims at over 10,000 (these figures are disputed), civilian infrastructure was destroyed – hospitals, bridges, gas stations, warehouses, the Yugo automobile plant… During the NATO military campaign, the Serbian government estimated that the bombing damaged 25,000 residential buildings and destroyed 470 kilometers of roads and 600 kilometers of railways. lines.

I remember how then the world media (the most active – CNN, BBC) applauded the bombing, but I don’t remember anyone uttering the slogan “Today we are all Serbs!’ (a reference to the late Senator John McCain, during the Georgian war of 08.08.2008 “Today we are all Georgians”). The Serbs were vilified, and the Yugoslav head of state, Slobodan Milosevic, was called a “Mad Dog”, the “Butcher of the Balkans” and was described as the last reincarnation of the Antichrist and Adolf Hitler combined. As we know, the moral compass of the world conscience was directed towards Pristina, not towards Belgrade (which was not spared by the NATO bombs), because Yugoslavia was perceived as a miniature version of the former evil empire – the USSR.

This conflict was presented not as aggression, not as war, but as an act of “humanitarian intervention”. It was the first time since World War II that military intervention was used without the approval of a UN Security Council resolution. This was a violation of Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations – i.e. an act of aggression. NATO’s legal department launched the definition of humanitarian intervention, according to which: “Humanitarian intervention is an armed intervention in another country without the consent of that State to address or the threat of humanitarian disasters caused by serious and large-scale violations of fundamental human rights.’

The idea behind this new doctrine Responsibilitytoprotect (R2P) is that the principle of sovereignty must be sacrificed on the altar of the protection of human rights (in case human lives are threatened by aggression, genocide, etc.). .Simply put, according to the new imperative in international relations, the moral principle prevails over the principle of sovereignty. Of course, in this axiom, sovereignty is far more amenable to deconstruction. As we know, the reason for the large-scale NATO operation was the killing of 44 residents in the village of Racak in central Kosovo (the official version blamed the Serbian security forces, but there is also an alternative version, according to which the AOK de facto legitimized NATO’s military intervention with this incident).

But here we are faced with an ontological paradox of words and their, let’s call it, fluid context. It is for this reason, according to Derrida, that the claim of objectivity ceases to be valid, it is simply illusory.

In 2016, Slobodan Milosevic’s “Balkan Hitler-Antichrist” label was changed. As expected, this news did not make the front page of “Le Monde” and “New York Times”, but in the same year, the International Criminal Court in The Hague found the “Bloody Butcher of the Balkans” innocent.

So, as Prime Minister Kiril Petkov said, words matter. But let’s return for a moment to the suffering Ukraine, asking a question of decidedly reduced difficulty. Where was that awake world opinion, where was CNN, ABC and other mass media during the last 8 years when Ukrainian artillery killed 13,000 (according to UN data) residents in Donetsk and Luhansk?. Where was the conscience of Europe? According to the legal framework of the doctrine of humanitarian intervention, Moscow could have intervened militarily as early as 2014. I wonder what the consequences would have been then, compared to today?

Let’s end the lexical meanderings about the conflict in Kosovo, after all, was this conflict a humanitarian intervention or just a war? What is the role of the specific context. It depends who you ask this question? For the Serbs it was definitely an aggressive war, for Russia too, for the Albanians in Kosovo it was a humanitarian intervention, for the Americans too.

Let’s recall that one year after the end of the conflict in 2000, the largest American military base after the end of the Camp Bondsteel base in Vietnam was built in Kosovo, including 300 buildings, and American military engineers took control of 320 kilometers of roads and 75 bridges in the surrounding area for military use. The context? The radical geopolitical reformation of the Balkans and the whole of Eastern Europe?

I close with a quote from an article by George Monbiot of the British “Guardian” that sheds some light on this matter: “This is about America’s energy security. It is also about preventing strategic incursions by those who do not share our values. We are trying to move these newly independent countries to the West. We would like to see them rely on Western commercial and political interests. We have made a significant political investment in the Caspian Sea and it is very important for us the map of pipeline and politics (Kosovo) to coincide.“Statement by Bill Richardson, 1998, US Secretary of Energy, on US Policy on Caspian Oil Production and Transportation”. “Discreet pipeline deal – NATO scoffs at those claiming Caspian oil plan”. Guardian, 15 February 2001

I conclude where we started, context is paramount when it comes to selecting semantic preferences.

But let’s land on home territory. As it turned out, the Bulgarian Prime Minister has certain gaps with the geography and the international trade infrastructure of the country (Danube bridges). So far so good, but he must be aware that all wars, without exception, by their nature, to quote a colleague of his, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, are “terrible, terrible business with unforeseeable consequences”. Alas, they are not just semantics.

Unlike Minister Stefan Yanev, I am afraid that Prime Minister Petkov does not realize the seriousness of the “correlation” between the intervention in a war and the resulting unpredictable consequences.