TANJUG or TANK?

Starting off the new year is this interesting news item:

"The Ministry of Internal Affairs of Kosovo on Tuesday passed a regulation which prohibits the movement in the province of vehicles with new Serbian Interior Ministry (MUP) license plates inscribed with the first letters of the Kosovo cities on them.

The license plates are being issued by MUP since the beginning of 2011, and the regulation was issued by outgoing Interior Minister of Kosovo Bajram Redzepi."

If you thought this originated somewhere in the self-proclaimed "Republic of Kosovo," you would be wrong, however. The source of this story is the Serbian state news agency, Tanjug.

That, by the way, should be written TANJUG, as it stands for "Telegraphic Agency of the New JUGoslavia." With Yugoslavia gone the way of the telegraph, some may question the reason for Tanjug's continued existence. But how then, I ask you, would the Serbian public be brainwashed into accepting the "Republic of Kosovo" as an actual state?

Over the past 15 years or so, I've become intimately acquainted with the Western news media. There is nothing inherently evil about the inverted-pyramid structure of the news story; it does precisely what it was designed to do, leading with the important information and providing the details later. The real trick is choosing the words and phrases to plug into the template. Search engines are a wonderful thing. They can show us how many ostensibly independent and separate news outlets have used the exact same, or sufficiently similar, phrases to describe an event or persons involved, often indicating that the original phrasing came from the same source.

Words have power. Compare the effects of calling someone a "war criminal" or "war crimes indictee" with a more accurate (but oh-so-not-demonizing) "defendant" or "suspect." Designated victims are never "breakaways" or "rebels" - those terms are reserved for the designated enemies. By calling the Muslims of Bosnia "Bosnians" and the Albanians "Kosovars," the Anglophone media have deliberately endorsed these groups' claim to the territories in question. One famous example of how deep this deception went was the 1990s argument that the US should have bombed the Serbs "as soon as they crossed the border" of Bosnia. Given that the Serb presence in Bosnia dates back to the first mention of the word "Bosnia" in recorded history, the US would have needed a time machine for the task...

Long story short, by using the terms such as "Ministry of Internal Affairs of Kosovo" and recognizing Rexhepi as a government official, Tanjug is implicitly recognizing the legitimacy of the state declared by the Albanians in the occupied Serbian province. As is the Serbian Secretary for Kosovo-Metohija Oliver Ivanovic, whom the article quotes describing Rexhepi as an "outgoing minister who now holds his mandate only in technical terms.”

No, Oliver, he has no mandate, and no legitimacy, because he represents an illegal government, illegally proclaimed on Serbian territory. But, hey, I hear logic is hard...

I find it ironic that the Albanians often blast the handful of Westerners who dare question their claims as "Serb propagandists" who "repeat Tanjug lies". Yet here is Tanjug, taking their "Republic of Kosova" at face value, giving their "officials" respect and stature they in no way deserve. Some "Serbian propaganda," that. They ought to be called TANK ("Telegraph Agency of New Kosovia") instead.

As the old saying goes, the fish rots from the head. Not only is the Tanjug story unacceptable from the standpoint of its official mission - it is a state news agency, after all - it is also sloppy and poorly written. This sort of incompetence is merely a symptom of the general collapse of all standards of professionalism, ethics and decency under the quisling regimes installed in Serbia since the October 2000 coup, and this latest one in particular.

Merely overcoming the two decades of Western media demonization, or the consequences of blockade and war, is a gargantuan task. But the Serbs also have to deal with decades of destructive social engineering that have poisoned almost all aspects of their society. The idiotic behavior of Tanjug is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Bear in mind, however, that Serbia is not the Titanic...