THE POWER OF MEMORY: HOW WESTERN COLLECTIVE MEMORY OF THE HOLOCAUST FUNCTIONED IN DISCOURSE ON KOSOVO by Tajana Bjellos A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, Florida August 2010 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to give many thanks to the School of Communication and Multimedia Studies at Florida Atlantic University, and to its Director, Dr. Susan Reilly. I would like to thank Dr. James Tracy and Dr. Caren Neile for their valuable input that greatly enhanced the composition of this thesis. Words cannot convey the depth of my gratitude to my thesis advisor, Dr. David Williams, for his support, patience, guidance, and help. iii ABSTRACT Author: Tajana Bjellos Title: The Power of Memory: How Western Collective Memory of the Holocaust Functioned in Discourse on Kosovo Institution: Florida Atlantic University Thesis Advisor: Dr. David C. Williams Degree: Master of Arts Year: 2010 This thesis provides a rhetorical analysis of the Western representation of the Kosovo conflict and its resolution in the year 1999. By reviewing political, scholarly and media rhetoric, the thesis examines how the dominant narrative of “genocide in Kosovo” was created in Western discourse, arguing that it gained its persuasive force from the legacy of the collective memory of the Holocaust. Using the framework of Kenneth Burke‟s theory of Dramatism and Walter Fisher‟s theory of the narrative paradigm, this thesis aims to understand how language, analogy and collective memory function in rhetoric to shape audience perceptions and guide political and military action. The study illustrates the mechanics of the operating rhetoric by analyzing two primary sources, the rhetoric of U.S. President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS I. Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 1 Yugoslavia in the 20th Century Until the End of the Cold War ................................................... 7 The Post-Cold War Breakup and the Notion of Civil War ........................................................ 14 Serbia and Kosovo in Focus ...................................................................................................... 17 Status of NATO in Post-Cold War Europe ................................................................................ 25 II. Review of Literature .................................................................................................................. 28 Political Rhetoric Drawing Parallels .......................................................................................... 29 Media Coverage Analogies to the Holocaust ............................................................................. 36 The New York Times .............................................................................................................. 38 The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) ....................................................................... 42 The Cable News Network (CNN) .......................................................................................... 45 Dissent in Scholarly Discourse .................................................................................................. 48 III. Methodological Orientation ..................................................................................................... 56 A Dramatistic Perspective .......................................................................................................... 57 Unity as the Motive for Rhetoric ........................................................................................... 58 Terministic Screens ................................................................................................................ 60 Purgation by Scapegoat .......................................................................................................... 62 The Narrative Paradigm ............................................................................................................. 65 IV. Analysis ................................................................................................................................... 70 v Dominant Trends in Discourse .............................................................................................. 71 Transferring the Story ............................................................................................................ 71 Supplying the Moral Imperative ............................................................................................ 74 Identifying the Perpetrator ..................................................................................................... 76 President Clinton‟s Address to the Nation ................................................................................. 80 Prime Minister Blair‟s Article ................................................................................................... 87 V. Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 94 A Rhetorical Legacy of Kosovo ................................................................................................ 95 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................ 100 Books and Academic Journals ................................................................................................. 100 Western News Articles ............................................................................................................ 105 Political Speeches, Interviews, and Official Transcripts ......................................................... 109 APPENDIX .................................................................................................................................. 112 Transcript of President Clinton‟s Address to the Nation ......................................................... 112 Transcript of Prime Minister Blair‟s Article for BBC News Online ....................................... 117 vi I. INTRODUCTION In dealing with human conflict in general, and war in particular, it is difficult to determine the absolute truth. As Riikka Kuusisto points out, “there are only contending alternatives and various versions of what has happened, how things are and what should be done” (335). This understanding is very important in dealing with any kind of human conflict, and more vitally so when dealing with war. The topic of this thesis is a war that took place in the Southern Yugoslav province of Kosovo between the Serb authorities and the Albanian majority seeking secession. After a series of violent incidents in Kosovo, and failed political negotiations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) deployed its armed forces into Operation Allied Force and carried out airstrikes against Yugoslavia (then comprised of Serbia and Montenegro) in the spring of 1999.1 The aerial campaign went on for eleven weeks, resulting in victory for NATO and withdrawal of the Yugoslav authorities from Kosovo. The Kosovo conflict, or any other conflict for that matter, is complex and ought to be examined from several different perspectives in order to do it justice. The perspective I will use is rhetorical, based upon the notion that both conflict and its resolution are made possible through the use of language and rhetoric as means of human communication that can shape perceptions, offer interpretations and move people to act. 1 This very brief and general account of events is taken from Kuusisto for introductory purposes only. The Kosovo conflict will be examined in more depth later in the thesis. 1 In examining the rhetorical representation of the Kosovo conflict in the West, and by “the West” I mean the United States and Western Europe, I came across many instances in which the language presented to the public by politicians and media functioned to stir traumatic memories of the collective historical experience of the Nazi Holocaust carried out sixty years earlier. The Kosovo conflict was not represented as a distinct case of human conflict brought on by unique historical and socio-political complexities, but as a case of genocide, a déjà vu consistent with the collective memory of the Holocaust in which genocide was a political objective of Nazism and played out incrementally, starting with verbal abuse and social exclusion of certain groups and resulting in physical abuse and mass killings.2 In this thesis, I argue that the Western political, media and scholarly rhetoric in dealing with the Kosovo conflict utilized the collective memory of the Nazi Holocaust and that the power of that memory functioned to justify, and thereby procure public support for a particular type of political and military action. By examining the rhetorical function of the collective memory of the Holocaust in the case of Kosovo, this thesis aims to add to the field of rhetorical studies in the following ways: (1) to enable a better understanding of the Kosovo conflict by illuminating the function of language and rhetoric in bringing about conflict and its resolution, (2) to examine the function of analogy in shaping audience perceptions, and (3) to explore the relationship between rhetoric and collective