Commentary: “Crisis In Kosovo:” The First Internet War

On the day that NATO began making air strikes on Kosovo I was at work, unable to follow the news on the radio or television. I was, however, able to keep up with the story’s developments by going to various news sites on the internet. On “abcnews.com” I found a link to the Yugoslavian home page.

It was very surrealistic, sitting safe behind a desk in Winston-Salem while opening the home page for the country that we are bombing, like being in a scene in “1984” with Big Brother telling me, via the telescreen, that “Oceania is at war with Eurasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.”

The Yugoslav site presented a minimalist approach to propaganda. First there was a graphic of a rather proud looking Yugoslavian flag, accompanied by an introductory script that read very much like a “Welcome To Virginia” sign on the side of the highway. There was a button to click to read their constitution (very long and vague), another to look into their legal system and another for information on their provinces. There was no indication that this was a nation under direct military attack.

In fact, at first glance there was nothing to suggest that the nation was experiencing any political unrest whatsoever. After scrolling the screen down, however, there was a button that was smaller than the rest, labeled “Kosovo.” Here was the Yugoslav government’s official version the situation with the Albanians.

The lengthy text began with an explanation of the importance of the rule of law, avowing that the law applies to all people of Yugoslavia, no matter what their “native language,” an obvious euphemism for ethnicality. According to their telling, there is terrorist activity in Kosovo and the government, like any government, has a right to protect itself from terrorist acts. They even went so far as to use the American FBI’s definition of “terrorism,” belaying their point by including a graphic of the U.S. FBI seal as the only graphic in the text.

As I read their Agnewesque version of the Albanian situation, I began to realize that just as Vietnam had been the first “television war,” this was the first internet war. I was certain that I was not the only one who sat at a desk that afternoon, turning frequently to news sources on the web. War is becoming an instantaneous interactive virtual reality. A hundred years ago, when the English were fighting the Boer War, Londoners didn’t get news of battles until weeks or months after they happened. Now, I could watch the war unfold on the fly.

A couple of days later, about the same time that email was being disrupted by the Melissa virus, the internet became something of a battlefield in this conflict. It seems that the Yugoslavs had managed to break into the public home page of NATO and damage it with a virus. We were assured that no vital information was compromised, with the whole thing being presented as if this was the Slavs attempt at a virtual scud missile (it’ll get there, but it’ll miss its mark).

The real story here is that we can now go to all parties involved in war for an up-to-the-minute report on their official version of the story. NATO warns all Serbs to lay down their guns and stay in their homes, while the Yugoslavian government answers, “What’s the big deal. We’re only fighting a terrorist insurrection.” At the same time, the White House promises not to introduce ground troops and the Italians begin to say, “Maybe this was a mistake.”

I don’t know if this military action is a mistake or not, but I do know that we have to do something to help these people. The truth is, we have a debt to these people that is born out of the promises we offered the Warsaw pact during the cold war. “Resist your communist rulers,” we said, “and your lives will be improved immensely.” During those days, when Eastern Europe was under control of the Soviets, the western model held out the promise for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Ironically, this message was brought most effectively to the people of Eastern Europe by the western media, not by official pro-American propaganda sources like Voice of America or Radio Free Europe. Cassette boom boxes told the kids behind the iron curtain that in America everyone was listening to rock n’ roll and having fun. In fact, it was the advent of satellite television beaming “Dynasty” and “The Simpsons” into Soviet block homes that finally broke the back of old style Soviet communism, not the threat of “star wars” technology. After all, when you’ve got a couple of hundred nuclear warheads aimed your way, what more are you going to be afraid of?

Since the early days of radio, our media has been very effective at supplying the propaganda that we use to bolster our own self-esteem. Through television, the movies and popular music, we convince ourselves that we are a great nation and people. This same media convinced those living under the tyranny of foreign domination to agree that we are a great people. From what they saw, everything about us told them that everything would be just fine if they joined the free world and got with the program.

Well, they’ve attempted to join the free world and they’ve developed some problems in the process, which is not surprising since this is their first try at democracy. With good conscious, we can’t afford to stand-by and wait for a horrific man-made “natural selection” to take care of the situation - which will eventually happen if we don’t interfere. Whether this military expedition will accomplish anything is anybody’s guess, but if we don’t do this, we must do something . For decades we promised all citizens of Eastern Europe that without evil Russia they could live a self-determined life.

In other words, we have a karmic debt to these people. We became partly responsible when we helped destabilize the region by forcing out the “evil empire.” We must now help find a solution to the current crisis.

I wish us good luck.

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