John Xiros Cooper

28 May 1999

The war in Kosovo is the first war commanded almost entirely by people born during or after the Second World War, that is, by baby boomers. It reflects their generation's values. Both positive ones and the negative. Boomers like Michael Ignatieff, Lloyd Axworthy, Bill Clinton, Sandy Berger, Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroeder, Joschka Fischer, and Robin Cook like to point out that the Kosovo campaign was not about territory, or empire. It was a moral war, a humanitarian war. A few mistakes were made, but the entire effort was guided by the best of intentions.

So, how did they do? Is this a better kind of war? Have we finally arrived at the intellectual and moral maturity to get past the Bismarckian realpolitik of old? How do boomers 'do' war? And in case you're asking why I think I know the answers? Well, let me confess that I'm one of them. I did university in the 60s, opposed the war in Vietnam, dropped out for a while, came to my senses in the 70s, got a career, have done well since then, and I'm a little more than a decade from retirement. And, oh yes, I'm a student of the culture of war.

First some general points. The Volvo nation is a savvy nation. We're a very well educated bunch. Actual learning, mind you, is good, but not absolutely necessary. The word is savvy, not learned. How else explain the fact that U.S. President Bill Clinton can pass through several prestigious universities and end up telling a news conference in April that the Serbs started the Second World War? Come to think of it, they didn't even start the First World War.

So, the chief boomers in the NATO alliance are all very well educated at the elite schools of the Atlantic world. The Ivy League, the Ancient Universities of England and Scotland, and the higher schools of administration and politics in France and Germany.

Even our own Dr. Lloyd Axworthy is a Princeton boomer. Can you see now why Art Eggleton, who has no education at all according to the Department of National Defense web site, was overlooked when the invitations went out to the NATO defense ministers for that strategy meeting in May? And you thought it was because he was a colorless non-entity.

And what was the chief lesson most of us learned inside the hallowed halls and dreaming spires? That "a little learning" was, pace Pope, not a "dangerous thing" thing at all. For jumping through academic hoops, learning that's a mile wide and an inch deep was more than adequate. Twinned with a vivacious prose style it might even get you a First.

If you were unlucky enough to fall under the sway of a charismatic professor and drank deep of "the Pierian spring," you would more than likely find yourself, at age 55, drifting down a very narrow, bottomless river in an academic sub-speciality with no end in sight. Meanwhile that other Yalie, Bill Clinton, is sitting in the Oval office, 'doing' the presidency and saving humanity with stirring slogans, a forged probity, and cluster bombs.

The Volvo nation is not only well educated; it is also very media savvy. We have come to understand better than any generation before us the absolute primacy of the camera angle over reality. Perception IS reality. Truth is all about optics, perspectives, and videotape, and not at all about, well, . . . truth.

That's why the upbeat Dr. Jamie Shea, a Cambridge man, still thrills to magnificent video footage from incoming rocketcams pulverizing all those rubber tanks. Did we destroy 40% of the Yugoslav army, or not? In the generation of Bomber Harris the answer to that question mattered. For my generation, the question is simply part of a discursive effect.

In the early going, when NATO was trying to get its PR off the ground there was a good deal of confusion. The British PM's office dispatched its top spin doctor, Mr. Alastair Campbell, to Brussels to get everyone spinning in synch. His advice? First get the narrative straight, and the factoids will take care of themselves. Instead of information, tell the people the story you want them to hear. Never lose track of the characters, the setting, and the plot. And never forget that a good story has a beginning, a middle, an end, and plenty of fiery action.

Here you have one of the most important practical results of the baby boomer deconstruction of the Western intellectual tradition. From its base in philosophy, history, and science, the great tradition migrates to its new home literature, theory, and technology. In boomer war, narratology outguns empiricism.

There was certainly an armed insurgency in Kosovo before March 24, but was there systematic ethnic cleansing and genocide? OSCE monitors, like Canada's Roland Keith, said no, the German Foreign Office intelligence services said no, other NGOs on the ground said no. But the NATO story line needed the right kind of beginning in order to make sense of the epic struggle in the middle and in order to set up the happy ending to come.

When you have total, and I mean total, military power, you write the story any which way you want it to hang. If the story required that the demonic Serbs were out there in February mowing down as many Albanian babies as they could find, then that's what history will show. In this game, literature trumps reality every time.

The German thinker Friedrich Nietzsche once said that "truth is a mobile army of metaphors." He thought he was making a comment about the decline of Western metaphysics. Little did he know he was helping shape the communication policy of boomer democracy.

As it is, it's amazing that the Yugoslavs managed to get in a couple of paragraphs of their own to mess up the narrative continuity of NATO's literary artifact. And it's difficult to tell whether Madeline Albright was angry that the Russians snatched a strategic victory in their sprint to be first in Pristina or simply squished the euphoria that was meant to adorn the NATO victory parade at the end of their story.

The Volvo nation is also highly moral. Enter that witty Oxonian Mr. Tony Blair, NATO's most talented performer of ethical discourse. His part in the story was to insist in the style of intelligent talk that this was a humanitarian crusade. And, apart from his annoying self-righteousness, he did this very, very well. The fact that the real humanitarian catastrophe began after March 24, as a result of NATO bombing, was not part of the script. When Mr. Blair has the floor, no one else's metaphors and imagery can get a word in edgewise.

But the thing to remember about my generation's appeal to morality is that actually acting morally is not an absolute necessity. What's necessary is making sure that all those people and institutions which are identified in the mass culture as moral, are brought on side.

If someone like the immaculately liberal diva and California senator Barbara Boxer is for the war then the war must be moral. Of course, you all know this media genre - it's called product endorsement.

It's like Wayne Gretzky selling insurance on TV. What does he know about insurance? Probably not much. And we viewers know that Wayne is probably clueless about insurance. Why we accept his endorsement as something more than comical chicaney is the fact we feel confident his business advisers would not let him associate his name to something that wasn't more or less on the level. Our confidence lies in the smarts of Wayne's handlers for keeping his name out of trouble.

Here is precisely where boomer savvy about the media and morality intersect. So, as the US stepped up the war on Serbia in April, Mr. Harold Koh, Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, summoned the leaders of several US human rights groups to a special meeting in Washington in order to win their endorsements and to allow the administration to bask in the moral radiance which these groups cast throughout the culture.

It worked. Dr. William Schulz, head of the US branch of Amnesty International, got on board on the promise that Koh's boss Madeleine Albright cared deeply for human rights in Kosovo and that she would arrange for the groups, which are usually ignored in Washington, to meet with her personally some time down the road.

According to New York's Counterpunch magazine, the Assistant Secretary did have to try to explain why the Clinton administration's commitment to human rights did not extend to the extradition of the Chilean strongman General Pinochet to Spain. He explained that the nasty Department of Defense had won that argument, and it was not the fault of Madame Albright.

Like Niles Crane, the Volvo nation is also very squeamish. We shudder at the thought of blood. Wait, let me put it another way. We can handle blood as literature. We just don't like seeing the real thing. As long as the real blood is invisible, way down there on the ground, so that it isn't even a faint smudge on the green fields or the market squares, then we're happy.

When the other side has the temerity, the unmitigated gall, to beam video back at us with the torn up bodies of their old age pensioners, or those demented war criminals the children of Surdulica, or train passengers, or even the very refugees over whom Tony and Cherie, Bill and Hilary, Al and Tipper have shed so many tears, then the Volvo nation is truly affronted and destroys, not Serbia's capacity to wage war, but its capacity to tell a story of its own.

That's why our chief boomers are happier taking out TV stations than worrying about a few puny tanks. Against our weight of arms what does it matter whether we actually destroy the Yugoslav army. But if we can take away their ability to speak and to show us pictures of their dead, then it can be said that we have really and truly won the war.

(John Xiros Cooper teaches at the University of British Columbia and writes about current affairs from Vancouver)

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