"I was amazed how the Serbian people resisted the attack of the whole world"

Gouillon states in the author's text that his solidarity with the Serbian people was initially an instinctive rapture and enthusiasm, and then it took a real shape.

"I was amazed at how one nation resisted the attack of the whole world united against it and how it tried to save everything that could be saved, starting from the bridges in Belgrade to the enclaves in Kosovo. It was a fight between David and Goliath. After 78 days of bombing and 38,0000 military operations, the Serbian people, without giving in, stood tall," said Gouillon, the Office for Public and Cultural Diplomacy announced.

He stated that he was young at the time, but aware enough to understand the injustice inflicted on the Serbian people. The war that NATO waged against Serbia showed how powerful propaganda is and how the truth can be distorted for the sake of geopolitical goals, he pointed out.

Gouillon, in the text entitled "How the Serbian people are unjustly demonized", states that the media in the West continuously conveyed a black and white picture of the conflict and that the Serbs were assigned the role of criminals, without the right to defend themselves, without a voice that could explain the other side of the story.

He also points out that it is devastating that an entire nation was presented as an enemy, and that "brainwashing" was carried out by politicians and the media.

"Their goal was to convince public opinion of the "need" to wage war as well as the "humanitarian" character of that war. How can war be done for good? Western "advertising agencies" found the answer: by killing the devil, we will do a good deed. Thus began the demonization of the Serbian people, followed by "good" and "just" bombing.

The famous "horseshoe" plan was invented, allegedly a deliberate attempt at "ethnic cleansing" that ultimately turned out to be a scandalous newspaper hoax, says Gouillon.

As he recalls, the most serious media said that the Serbs kidnapped or killed 500,000 "Kosovars of Albanian origin fit for a gun and a fight".

"At the very mention of the Serbs, politicians raced in insults and condemnations, even in Le Monde, the most respected French daily newspaper, it was possible to read that "the extermination carried out in Kosovo is reminiscent of the time of Genghis Khan", states Gouillon.

By demonizing the Serbian people as a whole and claiming that they are evil by nature, institutional racism was being revived, which was not seen in Europe after the Second World War, he stated and added that on the radio, as he says, you could also hear Bernard Henry Levy's claims that "the Serbian people should be freed from Milosevic and himself".

"Several French intellectuals tried to express a different opinion, but they were immediately silenced. If they were from the left, they were declared Stalinists, and those on the right were called fascists," he stated.

The famous French professor  Régis Debray spent a week in Kosovo during the bombing. After returning to France, he wrote two articles, wanting to explain how much the bombing worsened the situation there and incited unrestrained violence. He expressed the view that calling the Serbian people "collectively criminal" is not worthy of a democrat, and the very next day, Gouillon writes, he was expelled from public life, considered to be someone who denies genocide.

"They dragged him through the mud, called him a traitor and forced him to keep quiet. There was no room for discussion and dissident thought anywhere. Even though I was too young, I got a message from that war and the way it was portrayed in the media," Arnaud Gouillon concludes.

He says breaking through the media darkness was a painstaking process.

"I remember the first documentary we showed on French television about the life of Serbs in Kosovo. That was the moment when many French people heard the other side of the story for the first time. Some were shocked because they realized that they had been deceived for years," said Gouillon.