this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2025
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To Kill a Nation (which I highly recommend reading, by the way) does seem to be the culprit here. Michael Parenti questioned the circumstantial evidence that the capitalist media put forth for its conspiracy theory that the Federal Rep. of Yugoslavia sought to create an ethnostate, notably the infamous Srebrenica massacre of 1995. Although it was criminal, I doubt that it was genocidal, which seems like a petty distinction until you remember that ‘genocide prevention’ was a necessary criterion for NATO intervention.
Sanders (a one-time friend of Parenti) voted, post facto, for the bombing by NATO, siting "genocide" as the chief concern at the time. However, one of the major critiques of NATOs actions is that it accelerated ethnic cleansing in the region. An article in The Guardian from 2009 had this to say:
It's also true that some of the targets hit by the NATO bombings were things like, schools and hospitals, and neighborhoods.
Parenti stated at a talk once that Sanders' vote for the bombings is what terminated their friendship.
The write-up you posted looks very detailed, I'll have to give it a read soon. There has been a long history of challenging the "genocide" narrative surrounding NATO's involvement. The claim NATO made at the time just doesn't seem to stand up to scrutiny.