On March 24, 1999, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization initiated a bombing campaign from 15,000 feet vectored towards designated targets inside the territory of Yugoslavia. NATO’s spokesmen stated that the systematic aerial assaults were a response to brutalities being carried out on the ground by Serb military and para-military forces against the ethnic Albanian majority in the southern province of Kosovo, and to President Slobodan Milosevic’s refusal to sign the Rambouillet peace accords. A few days after the beginning of the bombings, television news anchorpersons and NATO officials informed their media audiences that the Serbian killings and unlawful mass expulsions of Kosovar Albanians from their homes and villages were criminal acts of genocide, comparable to the Holocaust. Critics of NATO’s air strikes (Noam Chomsky on the left, Pat Buchanan on the right, and Henry Kissinger somewhere in between, for example) argued cogently that prior to March 24 the armed conflict in Kosovo was a relatively low-grade civil war, with “only” two thousand Kosovars killed up until that point, and that it was the NATO bombings themselves, and the accompanying compelled departure of on-site international peacekeeping observers, which had triggered the dramatic escalation of the Serbs’ barbarism and “ethnic cleansing.”
An international anti-nuclear weapons lawyers’ association (IALANA) later obtained intelligence reports which had been circulating inside the German State Department that seemed to offer concrete evidence that no “humanitarian catastrophe” had been ongoing in Kosovo during the months immediately preceding the initialization of NATO’s bombing attacks. In a January 12, 1999 report to the Administrative Court of Trier, the Bonn Foreign Office stated that “in Kosovo an explicit political persecution linked to Albanian ethnicity is not verifiable.” German government authorities (such as Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping) then scrambled to find videotapes of bona fide January and February Serb massacres, but the photographic images which they retrieved and broadcasted only served to evoke more doubts in the minds of viewers regarding the truth status of their own tele-perceptions. The affectively intense still pictures left open unresolvable ambiguities as to whether they in fact displayed Serbian violence against Kosovar civilians or rather against the underground belligerent adversary, the Kosovo Liberation Army. The fiasco of the pre-March 24 atrocity exhibition photos contributed to the growth of anti-war sentiment within German public opinion.
Considered from within the framework of a traditional historical chronology, with distinguishable past, present, and future modalities, the Kosovo “events” made no logical sense. How could the NATO strategists have been so unaware of the high probabilities of the disastrous local and regional upheavals which would follow from their actions? Why were not better preparations made in advance to provide real humanitarian assistance to the hundreds of thousands of Kosovar deportees? Why did NATO so self-assuredly continue to insist for so long that its operations were proceeding exactly according to plan, that its “victory” would inevitably be achieved at the end when the abject victims were slated to be escorted back to their (possibly divided) homeland, even though by that time there would be many deaths, and the physical territories, ecological substrata, and social tissues of the Kosovar Albanians’ existence (Pristina reduced to rubble) would have already been cataclysmically devastated?
Saturated, permeated, and bombarded on all sides by the cacophony of instantaneous multimedia information; ensnared in real-time’s abstracted, fragmented nano-moments of the permanently emphatic present; flooded by the excessive brightness of overexposed images and context-less data which nihilistically “irradiate in all directions” (Baudrillard) – we have forfeited the archetypal, durational sense of occurrences with a beginning, a middle, and an end. (Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending; Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End). We have lost our rationalist grip on the durability of those arrows of time under the shadows of which we “remember the past and anticipate the future.” The computer and new media technologies which have displaced living memory and become our standardized means of recording, archiving, and playing back events of the past have ironically brought about cognitive outcomes which are the very opposite of the educational and solemn remembrances which are intended. These digital, futurological technologies absorb and neutralize the past through their hyper-proximity to it. They obliterate the dramaturgy and singularity of real events into scattershot “history-effects” which cyber-citizens can then “experience” while reclining into the domestic comforts of their own new and customized forms of forgetting.
In an information-saturated, science fictional culture, all attempts to seriously analyze the genuine circumstances of highly significant current events such as the war in Kosovo are diluted and thwarted, in the first degree, by the slick, commodified message which is the medium (Marshall McLuhan) of the densely designed, corporate-run Internet news sites.
At MSNBC.com, for example, we can mouse-click directly from our own personal Pentium command-and-control center to hear Tom Brokaw’s RealAudio interview with President Clinton aboard Air Force One, see the Kosovar refugees’ “story in video,” or explore the cool interactive features of TrueColor charts or animated graphics of NATO’s product palette of spitfiring aircrafts in full mission deployment. The happenings of the present (of any present) are nothing more than niche fetishistic details and fresh content-meat to feed the hungry hypermedia databases and globalized consumer infotainment systems. Reality is nearly murdered as it is transformed into capital-intensive, object-oriented software instances.
To Rudyard Kipling’s “truth is the first casualty of war” we can add The X-Files‘s motto: “trust no one.” The humanistic, phenomenological “here and now” or the existentialist, prospective, open-ended present – still ripe with potential for freedom and action – is the second casualty of our new technologies of time. From the crisis and subsequent breakup of time’s normal, sequential processes, we have crossed over even further into an interval-expanse laid entirely open to the distorting temporal turbulence fields of recurrence, reversibility, and retroversion. (See the 1997 film Retroactive: Gefangene der Zeit, directed by Louis Morneau, starring James Belushi). This fatal disruption is the twilight zone of time travel technologies.