Early this week, as NATO and the Russians jockeyed for position in Kosovo, few commentators could resist the obvious parallels with Berlin in 1945. There were, indeed, superficial similarities in the competition to establish zones of influence by filling the spaces left by a departed regime.
But the real parallels are much more important and much more profound. The victorious armies have rolled in to confront horrors even worse than those they had steeled themselves to expect.
The terrible fate of Kosovo resulted from something very like fascism. The defeat of Milosovic was the work of an alliance as morally flawed but as historically justified as that which defeated Hitler.
Nearly five years ago, the Serbian deputy prime minister Vojislav Seselj outlined, in an article for his own Radical Party newspaper, the "goals of Serb national policy in Kosovo". Published on October 14th 1995, Seselj's strategy sets out a step-by-step approach to the destruction of the Kosovar Albanians. Long before NATO became involved in the region, long before the bombing campaign started, Seselj made a clear, frank and public declaration of intent.
The plan as outlined begins with "the revision of citizenship rights". The Albanians (90 per cent of the population) would be required to possess a citizenship certificate "something none of them of course have", or face expulsion. These citizenship laws would also be used to deny employment to Albanians. "Such a measure would first and foremost affect the educated portion of their population, so that the rest would not be able to organise resistance and could be easily manipulated."
Next on the list is education. The curriculum in State schools should be purely Serbian, so that Albanians would be forced to set up their own education system, whose qualifications would not be recognised. "This way, all the doors to employment and incorporation in the society will be closed."
Then comes the "revision of land ownership laws". Land that had "in one way or another ended up in the hands of Albanians" would be "given back to its Serb owners or their successors".
Finally and most importantly there is the goal of "changing the ethnic structure of the population". The "colonisation of Kosovo" should be "carried out quickly and conclusively". Serb settlements should be expanded until they squeezed out the Albanian enclaves. Water and electricity should be cut off to make the lives of the Albanians "unbearable".
Fraternisation should be discouraged: "If Serbs from neighbouring enclaves start to patronise Albanian businesses incidents or beatings and violence must be prompted in these areas."
And the Albanian leadership would be wiped out and shamed: "Important political figures should be eliminated by traffic accidents and jealousy killings or by infecting them with the Aids virus when they travel abroad. . . Through adequate propaganda, such events can create the sense of an intolerable percentage of virus carriers, which could be used to isolate large groups of Albanians and would promote a stereotype of Albanians as an infected people."
For anyone with any sense of modern history, it is not hard to recognise the inspiration for Seselj's plan. Using the law to make life intolerable for a defined group, squeezing it out of education and employment, and stigmatising it as an unclean menace is the strategy adopted by the Nazis against the Jews in the early years of Hitler's regime. And we know, too, what that prelude portended. Sooner or later, the softening-up process would be followed by the quick and conclusive Final Solution.
If Seselj had been merely an obnoxious crank, his strategies could have been ignored. But he was, and is, an immensely powerful figure in what is left of Yugoslavia. And he showed in Bosnia that he meant business. Much of his programme, moreover, was openly implemented in Kosovo over the last few years. No one could pretend that a programme of genocide was not under way in the middle of a Europe that had heard the cry "Never Again" just 50 years before.
What could be done to stop it? Ideally, the Milosevic regime would have been confronted by a civilised, morally consistent international community, speaking through the United Nations and acting from a clear set of democratic principles. But there is no such community. Many of the leading Western nations have supported and funded regimes no less repugnant than the present Serb government. Democratic principles have been hostage to the cynical pursuit of selfish interests. The United Nations, both in Bosnia and Rwanda, has quite literally stood and watched while mass murderers have gone about their business. There are no white knights.
But there were none in 1945 either. The forces that then defeated fascism in Europe were hardly themselves without moral blemish. Was Stalin a decent democrat? Was Churchill free of racist and imperialist attitudes? Could the United States really be regarded as a selfless upholder of the rights of small nations?
Nor was their actual conduct of the war against fascism without its own appalling violations of human rights. The fire bombing of Dresden, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to mention just the most obvious examples, were, by any standards, crimes against humanity, unjustified even by the fierce necessities of the cause they were meant to advance.
But surely it is possible at one and the same time to be appalled by the bombing of Nagasaki and to support the war against fascism? Just as it must be possible to criticise the reckless bombing of civilians in Yugoslavia while still supporting the essential principle of intervention to stop the genocide of the Kosovars.
The problem with the way much of the left has responded to the Kosovo war is that justified criticism of the way NATO conducted its campaign was not matched by any sense of urgency about the need to stand up to fascism. The approach of left-wing intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and John Pilger would have led, during the second World War to a position of pure but meaningless impotence: we don't like Hitler and we don't trust the Allies, so would the League of Nations kindly solve everything by diplomatic means without any bloodshed.
People who believe that neo-fascists like Jean-Marie le Pen must be opposed at every opportunity suddenly became remarkably reluctant to stand up to old-style fascists like Seselj.
There was even, running through much leftist criticism, a classic tendency to blame everyone for the massacres, the rapes, and the tortures except the people who planned and executed them. In spite of the overwhelming evidence that the Serb regime was moving inexorably towards the elimination of the Kosovar Albanians long before NATO took an interest, it is implied that it was NATO's bombing that led to the atrocities. Just as, presumably, Hitler was provoked to the Holocaust by the Allies.
Instead of this double-think, we ought to reflect on what has actually happened and what can be learned from it. And in that process of reflection, the first and most obvious truth is that, in a broad sense, NATO's campaign has worked. A process of genocide has been, for the first time in history, stopped in its tracks. While the Allied liberation of Germany came too late to save European Jewry, and the hand-wringing of the international community did nothing to stop the virtual extermination of the Rwandan Tutsi, the Kosovar Albanians, in spite of their appalling suffering, will survive in their homeland. That is not a small achievement.
The next thing to reflect on is that NATO's campaign very nearly didn't work. It was massively weakened by the insistence, from the start, on ruling out a ground invasion. And it was deeply undermined by the ever more desperate tendency to fall back on basic military instincts and to lose a sense of moral and human purpose.
The mounting toll of civilian casualties, the use of cluster bombs, the offensive smugness of NATO's spokesman Jamie Shea and the terrifying jargon of its commander Wesley Clark threatened a descent into war for war's sake. If Milosevic had not blinked when he did, and if the search for a solution had not been broadened beyond the NATO powers, a war of attrition with no higher purpose than victory itself was in prospect.
And the final area for reflection is that a horrible cynicism will now follow unless the principles for which the war was fought are taken seriously by the victors themselves.
Kosovo must be rebuilt as a multi-ethnic, pluralist democracy in which Serbs have a real and respected place. The United States must be pressured to drop its opposition to the International Criminal Court, the body established to pursue war criminals regardless of their origins. The United Nations must be restored as an effective protector of human rights. The NATO powers must stop supplying arms to brutal dictators.
If these things happen, Kosovo will be a watershed between the barbarities of the 20th century and the gradual emergence of a civilised world in the 21st.