Gray Falcon

War Porn

2012-01-13T23:01:00.001-05:00

I've already addressed the dreary slog of Angelina Jolie's Bosnian War movie from the artistic standpoint; now that I've had a chance to observe the promotional efforts and official commentary, I'd like to address its political implications.

The film opens in Mordor-on-the-Potomac this weekend, and Jolie, Pitt and their brood were in town promoting it. Jolie even paid an emotional visit to the Holocaust Museum, and its Bosnia exhibit.

Critics mostly agree that the movie is a stinker. The fact that it's being shown in only a small number of art-house theaters suggests the producers are aware of this too. As Peter Brock (author of the outstanding "Media Cleansing") noted in his write-up, propaganda movies about the Balkans have never done well at the box office.

Then again, moneymaking never figured highly in Empire's motivations to intervene in the Balkans. Whether the goal was sticking it to the Russians, keeping Europeans in their place, enjoying the worshipful groveling of eager regional clients, seeking to impress jihadists worldwide - or any combination thereof - the Empire's white-knighting project in the Balkans has been about power.

Commercial films seek to make a profit. Art films want at least to break even while telling a story. Propaganda films aim to preach; for them, breaking even or profiting at the box office is useful, but not necessary. Jolie's film, a textbook example of "chetnixploitation", is intended to reinforce the official narrative by demonizing the designated villain. So, Serbs bad, Muslims (Croats, Albanians, etc.) good, and the Empire is the shining savior from aggression, rape and genocide. And if not, it should be - so says the Power Doctrine.

The title of the film was outright stolen from photographer Ron Haviv, a major source for Balkans imagery favoring the mainstream narrative. And Jolie herself has been a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (since 2007), a body behind much of Empire foreign policy.

Lo and behold, all the elements come together in a review in The Atlantic: Jolie "gets the war right", there is mention of the CFR and Power's work, all the memes and motifs are reinforced - and then Jolie is mildly criticized for being less than subtle (!) about hammering them home. Because the Empire is all about subtlety, after all...

To the Imperial establishment Jolie represents, it doesn't really matter that the film stinks. The story is hackneyed. Though the actors do their best (I've seen them in other productions), their lines are just terrible. Even the imagery itself is derivative, trying hard to present the Bosnian War as a re-run of the Holocaust - as seen in movies.

Why now, though? Could it be that, faced with a bleak economy at home and the inglorious end of two foreign wars, the Empire needs to trumpet a "success" to its populace (and oh so coincidentally, one that the Clintons can claim credit for)? Thing is, the Bosnian War ended 16 years ago. Few Americans cared about it at the time, and fewer still care about it now. Worse yet, Empire's white-knighting experiment turned out to be a complete and utter failure. The "rescued damsels" did not respond with gushing gratitude - quite the contrary. So all Jolie's film actually manages to do is underscore the Empire's pathetic disconnect from reality.

As for the whole knights-in-shining-armor rescuing-the-world myth, authentic war footage just exploded that. Professionally produced war porn, just like the actual kind, just cannot compete with amateurs anymore.

Chetnixploitation

2012-01-11T22:57:00.000-05:00

Two years ago, a group of film critics launched a blog dedicated to "Chetnixploitation" - a subgenre in modern cinema devoted to the demonization of Serbs. Though in recent years it appeared to have been a passing fad, Chetnixploitation recently made a comeback, from a couple of throwaway lines in the latest Mission: Impossible movie to Angelina Jolie's directorial debut.

So, in the interest of public edification, and having been unable to find an adequate English-language explanation of the term, I've decided to provide a translation of the definition, as offered by the authors:

Chetnixploitation, noun

A common name for primarily cinematic works depicting the wars in the former Yugoslavia in a naive, one-sided, and grotesquely simplified manner; whether out of laziness/stupidity/ignorance or malice, all or almost all the horrors and atrocities are blamed on the Serbs ("Chetniks") while the responsibility of other participants in the wars (Croats, Bosnian Muslims, etc.) is either minimized, dismissed or even denied outright.
Such movies pretend to be art, yet amount to more or less camouflaged propaganda, seeking to "affirm" the black-and-white narrative of the Western media concerning the wars, with rigid roles allocated thus:

- Serbs ("Chetniks") are the aggressors, war criminals, rapists, robbers, murderers, terrorists, sadists. Bearded, with bloodshot eyes, bloodthirsty werewolves.

- Serb enemies (Bosnian Muslims, Croats, Albanians) are the VICTIMS: passive, pitiful, powerless, unarmed, principally women (to be tortured and raped) and children (poor crying orphans), innocent, with tear-washed suffering faces, sheep.

These films exploit the ethnic bigotry and the established imagery of the Serbs as war criminals, seeking to show (or in more sophisticated examples, suggest) their primary or even exclusive culpability for all the horrors of the Balkans Wars.

Iowa

2012-01-03T19:50:00.001-05:00

The furor over the Iowa caucuses tonight is an illustration of the sad state of democracy in America. The mainstream media have done their best to create an atmosphere in which the whole process will be dismissed as a fluke if a particular candidate wins. Especially since that candidate is a man they have first ignored, then laughed at, then demonized... And yes, the quote attributed to Gandhi does come to mind here.

Much as it was decided in 2008 that the best heir to Bush the Lesser would be Barack the Blessed of Hopechange, the establishment has decided that the Republican candidate in November shall be Mitt Romney. Just look at the pattern in the GOP race so far: Romney gets treated as the front-runner, while every other candidate is built up and then torn down - a phenomenon Vox Day dubbed the "Romney-alternative-who-is-not-Ron-Paul wheel."

Trouble is, Paul isn't going away. He's a clear alternative to the establishment (as Vox puts it, to "Newt Romney O'Bama"), or to borrow what Phyllis Schlafly said about Barry Goldwater, "a choice, not an echo."

Predictably, the "smearbund" (Murray Rothbard's expression) tried hard to paint Paul as a racist. Unfortunately for them, that accusation has been the first resort of political scoundrels for so long, people have grown tired of it. It doesn't quite work anymore. It also happens to be a lie. So they accused Paul of being an anti-Semite instead. That, too, is untrue.

Today, Richard Cohen of the Washington Post almost called Paul a Nazi, while praising all the Imperial interventions that Paul has opposed. Cohen, by the way, argued passionately back in 2003 that "bagging Karadzic" would show the Muslim world all the white-knighting virtue and love of the United States, and win its never-ending gratitude. Well, Karadzic was "bagged" in 2008, Ratko Mladic last year, the US has created not one but two Islamic states in the Balkans (per Tom Lantos)... where's all the gratitude? Oh wait.

Daniel Greenfield really dislikes Ron Paul. He's convinced Paul's policy of dismantling the Empire is bad for the Jews and bad for Israel, suspects him of Islamophilia, even argues that Paul is working with George Soros. But it is Greenfield that wrote the best rebuttal of Cohen's idiotic rant, by pointing out that the U.S. never actually intervened to stop genocide. Not today, not in WW2, not ever.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I like Ron Paul. Back in 2004, I interviewed him for NIN - then a premier Serbian news magazine, later sold to a German consortium and thoroughly ruined - mostly about his principled opposition to America's illegal foreign wars. To prep for the interview, I did a fair bit of research on his voting record and where he stood on issues. And I have to say, even when I disagree with him (on immigration, for example), I respect him and his integrity. Assuming there is a way to save the United States of America from the consequences of imperialism - and forgive me if I'm not entirely convinced at this point that there is - Paul is the man who might be able to pull it off.

But even if I thought otherwise, even if I disliked the man and his ideas entirely, I'd still be objecting to the obvious problem of his treatment at the hands of the mainstream media and the political establishment. As should we all. Because what we're seeing here is what Philip Cunliffe noted about the 2008 Serbian elections: that democracy means whatever the Empire says it means.

So the Iowa caucuses will be declared legitimate, meaningful and proper only if the establishment's preferred candidate (i.e. Romney) wins. If Paul carries Iowa, it will be dismissed as a fluke, the whole caucus system will be derided as stupid and obsolete, and a host of other excuses will be enlisted to tell the general populace why what just happened didn't matter at all. Nothing to see here, move along, vote Romney O'Bama and the Bank Party in November, thankyouverymuch.

That sounds very much like a diabetic being forced to make a "choice" between Coca-Cola and Pepsi. It's not just that he doesn't get to choose water, it's that either of those will kill him.

A Dreary Slog

2011-12-26T14:26:00.004-05:00

I have not seen Angelina Jolie's directorial debut. As I mentioned the other week, the trailer was enough for me to dismiss it as derivative, and the strong opinions of those who have seen it have only fortified my determination not to actually pay Ms. Jolie for the privilege of being insulted.

For better or for worse, the Serbs don't have an ethnic lobby in the US - neither a political pressure group, nor an organization set up to be professionally offended. The only bit of public outcry so far has been on the social networks, as well as this review from the American Serb publisher William Dorich, deservedly taking the film to task for misrepresenting the Bosnian War.

The government in Serbia is so useless, it may well promote the movie to show its commitment to the Empire. Things are somewhat different in the Bosnian Serb Republic, where there have been calls for a boycott and even banning the movie. All things considered, though, a public campaign against Jolie - by the "evil Serbs" no less - could only give her publicity. What to do, then?

As with many problems, this one sort of solved itself. You see, in addition to wallowing in bigotry, the movie is actually rather terrible. It appears I wasn't the only one less than impressed with Jolie's film-making skills. Last week, the Onion's AV Club dismissed "In the Land of Blood and Honey" as "fevered good intentions gone awry, a dreary slog of a message movie with little but noble if unfulfilled aspirations to commend it," giving it a D+.

Writes critic Nathan Rabin:

"Serbian groups have justifiably complained about Jolie’s glib stereotyping of Serbs as racist heavies. Kostic, for example, emerges as the film’s hero almost exclusively by virtue of being somewhat less terrible than his contemporaries. Subtlety and understatement become collateral damage as Jolie drives her points home as forcefully as possible and the film devolves into a grubby melodrama that fails to edify or entertain."

While Jolie has successfully attracted the attention of the Western public to international atrocities, Rabin continues, "It’s possible, if not particularly likely, that someday she will get around to dramatizing atrocities compellingly as well, though her colorless work here suggests she’s a lot more likely to do that as an actress than as a filmmaker."

There you have it, then. For a much better story about the horrors of war, go see "War Horse" instead.

The German Fixation

2011-12-21T14:10:00.002-05:00

Angela Merkel may be an Ossie, but she was definitely channeling American emperors on Monday, telling the German occupation garrison in Kosovo that Germans "should always remember that our security and our peace back home are down to troops serving their country here."

Pray tell, Angie, how does re-enacting the Third Reich's Balkans adventure contribute to Germany's security and peace? It is intuitively obvious to the most casual observer that such an argument is nonsensical - and then there is proof, too.

Equally obvious is that Germany gets off on bludgeoning Serbia. This goes beyond realpolitik and eternal interests, too. German companies already own much of the Serbian media and the banking sector. If they wanted a client state, Serbia was theirs for the taking - Djindjic was a Germanophile, and the Tadic government literally took groveling to a whole new level. No, there is clearly more at work here than political and economic interests. It could be historical memory - blaming the Serbs for thwarting German designs in both world wars, for example - or, more likely, an attempt to exorcise Germany's own ghosts through transference: if the Serbs are genocidal aggressors, surely the world can stop going to the Nazi well for the standard of villainy, right? (Yeah, good luck with that.)

Part of the trouble is that the victorious Allies chose to impose victors' justice at the Nuremberg trials, rather than try to explain to the Germans why the Nazi ideology was evil. In effect, Germans were to consider the Nazis evil because the powers that defeated them said so - and that's been their ongoing frustration ever since. It wasn't until recently, with Oliver Hirschbiegel's Der Untergang (2004), that the Nazis were approached as three-dimensional human beings rather than cardboard cut-outs, their villainy actually shown and explained. I dare you to watch the part where Frau Goebbels murders her children and make apologies for National-Socialism afterwards. If you are somehow able to do so, then seek help.

Yet it does seem that the Germans have "learned nothing and forgotten nothing", to borrow a phrase from Talleyrand. How else to explain the fact that Berlin, no matter the party in charge, thinks nothing of overtly supporting Hitler's henchmen (see here, with photos, and also here)? Far more troubling is that the British, the French and especially the Americans not only don't object, but actively support such policy. The only ones to object are the Russians - but they are shrugged off as impotent Cold War losers. Indeed, the Soviet contribution to defeating Hitler (90% or so of the war effort in Europe) is routinely minimized, and the Eurocrats are now endeavoring to equate Nazism and Communism. Russian support for the Serbs is dismissed as irrational feelings of ethnic and religious kinship, while Western support for Serbenrein Croatia or Magna Albania is supposedly noble, pure, and the paragon of humanitarianism (!?)

Germans understandably want to avoid constantly being compared to the Nazis. Don't act like the Nazis, then. Bombing Belgrade, supporting a Serb-persecuting chauvinist regime in Croatia and the establishment of a greater Albanian state, occupying Serb territory with tanks and troops, and insisting that Serbia become a member of the "European family of nations" but only if it gives up much land and its own identity - those are all things Germany did not just back in 1941-45, but again from 1991 onwards.

Want greatness again? Remember Bismarck. He wanted friendship with Russia, thought the Balkans wasn't worth the "bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier", and (reportedly) died with "Serbia" on his last breath.

Speaking of grenadiers, I'd like to remind those German (and Austrian) troops in Kosovo that, before they act on any desires they may have to shoot those pesky Serbs refusing to roll over and die, they ought to remember their Bible:

Da sprach Jesus zu ihm; Stecke dein Schwert an seinen Ort! denn wer das Schwert nimmt, der soll durchs Schwert umkommen.(Matthaeus, 26:52, Martin Luther's translation)

And with that in mind, fröhliche Weihnachten!

Havel

2011-12-19T14:11:00.002-05:00

There is a particular group of politicians who emerged in central and eastern Europe (as well as the Balkans) in the late 1980s, who played a major role in the dismantling of Communism and bringing about "democracy". Along with Nelson Mandela of South Africa, NATOland has made these people into a fetish of sorts, epic heroes deserving of worship.

It is indicative, though, that in their own countries they are either shunned, or outright reviled (as is the case with Gorbachev, for example), rightfully regarded as people who made out well for themselves and their cronies, but brought widespread misery to everyone else, through the great robbery project known as "transition".

One of these men, Vaclav Havel, died yesterday. His opus as a writer is already pretty much forgotten. Likewise his tenure as Czech president. What Havel may well end up being remembered for is his enthusiastic support for the Imperial doctrine of "humanitarian intervention", which he preached in 1999 as bombs were raining on Serbia. As victims of the original Munich "agreement," the Czechs may also find it ironic that Havel supported its modern-day equivalent.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that the events of the past two decades were not some sort of "end of history," but rather a temporary distortion of world affairs due to the demise of the USSR and the ensuing vacuum the Atlantic Empire endeavored to fill. What order of affairs will end up replacing this age of transition, I do not know. However, I do hope it won't remember Havel and his ilk as heroes.

Hitchens

2011-12-16T14:39:00.000-05:00

Christopher Hitchens built his career on hating. That is why I never really dwelt on his Serbophobia in particular. He hated the Serbs because hating the Serbs was the fashionable thing to do in the circles he moved in, and it is pointless to debate one's tastes in fashion, however ghastly they might be.

Hitchens was perhaps best known for his obnoxious atheism, a hatred of [the Jewish and Christian] God. So I think it most appropriate to cite here the elegant epitaph penned by blogger Vox Day, author of The Irrational Atheist:

The conglomeration of atoms that were, for a very brief moment in history, collectively known by the name Christopher Hitchens, have begun to disperse. The universe continues as before, uncaring and unaware.

Thanks, Angie

2011-12-09T22:00:00.001-05:00

It just occurred to me that I haven't posted anything here since mid-November; I've been entirely too preoccupied with my other blog, Antiwar.com, and travel.

So, to recap: the Kosovo Serbs' citizenship gambit failed, when Moscow refused them on a technicality. The barricades remain, however, in spite of all the attempts to get them dismantled. Speaking of which, the German and Austrian complaints about the "violence" - when it was their fully armed and armored troops that initiated violence against the Serb civilians - has to be the pinnacle of cynicism.

It did Belgrade no good to make yet another set of capitulations to the KLA "state" Saturday night; the EU decided to put its candidacy on ice until the formal recognition of "Kosovia", and whatever new demands they come up with thereafter. In a way - and quite unintentionally I'm sure - the Austro-German axis running the show is actually doing the Serbs a favor: had the quisling regime's obsequiousness been rewarded by a candidacy, meaningless and symbolic as it is, they'd have smooth sailing till the April elections regardless of their manifest ineptitude, and the Serb resistance in Kosovo would have been undermined. As it is, the EUrocrats are sabotaging the very people working to please them. Well, no one said they were logical...

So, German Chancellor Angela Merkel deserves a thank-you note for what she did, however inadvertently, to keep Serbia out of EU bondage. I'm sure once the Serbs sort out their politics, that note will be forthcoming in some shape or form.

I'm not so sure about Angelina Jolie, though. Her directorial debut, "In the Land of Blood and Honey" is yet another take on a real-life romance between a Serb and a Muslim during the Bosnian War. Judging from the trailer and the few snippets of footage floating around, it's a derivative and disappointing bit of chetnixploitation, borrowing heavily from movies about the Holocaust. While Bosnia was a nasty (un)civil war, comparing it to the Holocaust is in horrifically poor taste at the very least, if not an outright insult to Holocaust victims.

There have been many films dealing with the Balkans wars in the past twenty years, but none of them have done any good financially. One would think Hollywood would have got the point by now.

In other news, the EU is coming apart at the seams, the Empire is trying to engineer a color revolution in Russia, the Iranians claim to have shot down a U.S. drone, and Pakistan is bolstering air defenses after "NATO" aircraft mauled two dozen of their troops last week. None of that is likely to turn out very well.

The Citizenship Gambit

2011-11-15T15:13:00.001-05:00

Pictures of Vladimir Putin have long been part of the Serbian patriotic iconography. But now some Serbs are going a step further, petitioning Moscow for citizenship. Several sources reported Monday that a group of Serbs in the occupied province of Kosovo (illegally declared independent in February 2008 by an ethnic Albanian "government" backed by the US, EU and NATO) sent a note to the Russian government asking to become Russian citizens.

According to RT, the letter was addressed to the legislature, which may not even be the right address for this sort of thing (as a footnote, it could not have possibly come through via the "Russian Embassy in Kosovo" - since such an embassy ought not exist, given that Moscow doesn't recognize the breakaway province). This suggests that the petition is really a publicity stunt. What are we to make of it, then?

First of all, it is clearly a protest against Belgrade. At its essence, any government is a protection racket, and protecting the lives and property of its subjects (or citizens) is its primary function. By this standard, the current regime in Belgrade is a failed government. Not only has it done nothing to help its citizens in the occupied province, it has actively collaborated with the occupation authorities and even the separatist Albanian "government" to surrender any claim to Kosovo (while publicly pretending otherwise).

The Serbs in Kosovo have successfully resisted both the Albanians and their KFOR/EULEX enforcers, and they aren't about to see their success invalidated by a quisling coterie in Belgrade.Now, perhaps these Serbs have an inaccurate understanding of Russia's military and political capabilities, but it is by no means a stretch to argue that any government could do a better job of safeguarding their lives, liberty and property than the current one. And as the American Founders explained in their own Declaration of Independence, when a government fails its people, it is only reasonable for those people to exchange it for another. So, the principle of the proposed arrangement isn't unusual, only the logistics.

It would be going too far, however, to argue that Russia has a "duty" to say yes. The only country that ought to have a duty towards the Serbs in Kosovo is Serbia. By giving citizenship to the Serb petitioners, Russia would take upon itself the obligation to protect them with more than just words. Perhaps that is what the Serbs had in mind - but then they ought to know it isn't a decision to be made lightly.

Caged

2011-11-09T13:25:00.001-05:00

Next week it will be two months since the Serbs in northern Kosovo erected roadblocks to oppose the Albanian government's attempted takeover of road crossings into the rest of Serbia. NATO's "peacekeeping" force and EU's "law and order mission" have both backed the Albanian takeover, and continue attempting to coerce the Serbs to submit to the self-proclaimed independent state.

On the rare occasion when Western mainstream media reports on the standoff, it uses terms such as "ethnic clashes". This not only suggests that the Serbs are being motivated by bigotry (following two decades of propaganda claiming that everything the Serbs did was based on bigotry), but also that the two communities are on some kind of equal footing. In actuality, the unarmed Serb civilians are squaring off against the well-armed Albanians, EULEX and KFOR, who in addition to teargas and pepper spray have even used live ammunition. It is very telling that "ethnic clashes" was the official euphemism for the March 2004 pogrom some 40,000 or more ethnic Albanians perpetrated against the remaining Serbs in the occupied province.

I say "remaining," because hundreds of thousands of Serbs (and others, such as Roma, Turks, etc.) were ethnically cleansed from Kosovo since it was occupied by NATO and handed over to the Albanian separatist KLA in 1999. Over 1000 Serbs have been murdered, countless homes burned, churches destroyed and desecrated, and cemeteries bulldozed. All in the presence of NATO "peacekeepers," all with absolute impunity. Under NATO's "peace," two new Albanian insurrections broke out, in Macedonia and in southern Serbia.

Several pockets of Serbs survive in the south of the province, in ghettos surrounded by barbed wire and "protected" by NATO troops. The great irony is that without those troops, the Albanians would have murdered them by now; yet it was those NATO troops that made the Albanian takeover possible.

In the north of the province, the local Serbs succeeded in halting the KLA takeover in 1999, and have kept a watch on the roads ever since. The writ of the KLA regime does not run there, much to the frustration of the self-proclaimed state. Yet though the areas ruled by the Albanians are almost entirely devoid of non-Albanian inhabitants, while other communities live in peace on Serb-controlled territory, the Western press continues to refer to "Serb-dominated" areas. How about the entire "Albanian-dominated" province? Ah, but they also avoid "Albanian," preferring to use the politically correct euphemism "Kosovar," designed to promote the lie that they are the original inhabitants and rightful owners of the territory.

Recently the Albanian "government" in Pristina and the Albanian government in Tirana signed a deal to share consulates around the world, bringing them a step closer to "Natural Albania" - a state encompassing all territories claimed by ethnic Albanians. Dismissed as "Serb propaganda" in the 1990s, the idea is now publicly promoted by a political party in "Kosovo," and even has the endorsement of a prominent Imperial figure.Yet Imperial propaganda still seeks to dismiss concerns over this as unduly paranoid.

What's disappointing, though, is hearing media that aren't part of the Imperial propaganda mill, such as RT, using the Empire's propaganda phrases. By way of example, in this clip today the presenter used "Serb-dominated" to refer to the north of Kosovo, and reporter Aleksey Yaroshevsky claimed that the Serbs were growing "accustomed to living in the cage they have built for themselves."

Kosovo itself is a cage, not just for Serbs but for everyone else. Even the Albanians who live there are captives of a criminal regime and a bigoted ideology. The Serbs set up the barricades not to seal themselves in, but to keep NATO, EULEX and the KLA "officials" out. Which is precisely what they've done so far, despite all efforts to coerce them into submission. It was a desperate act of a people resisting repression and plans for extinction. They deserve better than to be maligned for it, least of all by people trying to hack the of Empire's propaganda matrix.

I guess some people still need to realize there is no spoon.

Reeker's Switcheroo

2011-11-02T13:10:00.000-04:00

Most of my predictions about the aftermath of the incident in Sarajevo last Friday have, sadly, come to pass. The Bosnian Muslim media have indeed made an effort to describe the attacker as "Serbian", and even made claims that he was an agent of Serbian intelligence services (!) sent to stir up trouble. Ever expanding the horizons of self-delusion, I suppose.

Some agencies and papers in the West also seized upon the "Serbian" angle, but most were happy to explain away the presence of jihadists in Bosnia as "fighters for independence" that came to fight the (entirely fictitious) "Greater Serbia" plot by the evil Slobodan Milosevic (!). Once again, jihad becomes the Serbs' fault somehow.

Now, this morning, Serbia's official news agency (Tanjug) reported on a press conference given in Sarajevo by the unfortunately named Philip Reeker, deputy assistant Secretary of State. There has been no English-language coverage of it yet, so there is no way of ascertaining what Reeker precisely said and what may have been lost in translation or omitted. However, what is mentioned in Tanjug's report, which again relies on local media, tracks with what I've seen so far. Reportedly, Reeker qualified Mevlid Jasarevic's attack as an "individual act" to be treated accordingly.

If this meant it would be swept under the rug like every other jihadist attack that goes against the narrative, that would be tragic and stupid, but about par for the course. Except it gets worse.

According to Tanjug (again citing the Sarajevo media), Reeker actually argued that Bosnia should use the attention it garnered by the attack (!). Apparently, he thinks this is a wonderful opportunity for Bosnia to press on with reforms that the Empire wishes to see - changes to the Constitution and the peace agreement that would bring about a more powerful (and Muslim-dominated) central government. This is borne out by his remark about resolving the issues over military property, in order for Bosnia to join NATO.

How is that an appropriate subject for a press conference about a jihadist attack? Would Bosnia being a member of NATO have made the slightest bit of difference last Friday? As usual, there is more to this than meets the eye: at issue isn't just the property of the country's joint military forces, but what is and isn't the property of the central government. Again, nothing to do with jihadist attacks - but everything to do with Empire's fetishes and fantasies about Bosnia.

If this sounds absurd and nonsensical, do recall that when ethnic Albanians rampaged around Kosovo for three days in 2004, in a pogrom against the Serbs, this was used by the Empire as an argument to reward them with independence. So why not reward acts of jihad, especially at someone else's expense? Remember, the objective is to make jihadists love the Empire.

Yet that is about as likely as Imperial officials deciding that jhad is not a wonderful policy asset. Which is to say, not at all.

Is it Jihad Yet?

2011-10-28T12:24:00.004-04:00

This is Mevlid Jasarevic, age 23, follower of the Salafi sect of Islam, who this afternoon opened fire on the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo, Bosnia. Jasarevic was subsequently shot and reportedly killed.

Because Jasarevic is from Novi Pazar, a town in Serbia, odds are the mainstream Western media will describe this as a "Serbian attack", or at least identify him as "Serbian citizen." This would be horribly misleading, of course, but that hasn't stopped them before.

Here are some things to keep in mind here, before the spin distorts them:

Salafi missionaries came to Bosnia during the war, with tacit approval and even assistance of the U.S., to get the "wayward" Bosnian Muslims in line and wage jihad against the Serb and Croat "infidels."
There are 150,000 or so Muslims in the Raska region of southwestern Serbia (which they call "Sanjak", a term going back to Ottoman days). Their religious leader, mufti Muamer Zukorlic, was appointed by the top Islamic cleric of Bosnia and has been stirring up trouble and preaching violence and hate for several years. In this, he enjoys the support of many foreign governments ("Friends of Sanjak"), including the U.S.
Jasarevic may technically be a citizen of Serbia, but he is wanted there on charges of terrorism. He left Serbia last year, and settled in the Salafi commune of Gornja Maoca in northern Bosnia. Until it was ethnically cleansed during the Bosnian War, it used to be a Serb village called Karavlasi.

In addition to terrorizing any Christians (Serbs or Croats) they may come across, the Salafi frequently harass ordinary Bosnian Muslims, who by and large follow the Hanafi school of Islam. The Hanafi approach accepts local customs and is what made coexistence with Christians in the past possible in the first place. Salafists dismiss this as heresy and preach absolute intolerance of any who do not follow their ways.

Anyway, just watch: Jasarevic will be described as a lone lunatic, his motives will be "unknown", and there will be no mention of jihad or Islamic terrorism. The notion that the Salafists in Bosnia may be nurturing terrorists who threaten American lives runs counter to the mainstream narrative of innocent Muslims being victims of evil Serbs, and is therefore thoughtcrime.

Update (10/31/2011): Julia Gorin has a post up about this and other jihadist attacks, with links. Lots of links.

KFOR: drowning in own waste

2011-10-26T11:53:00.004-04:00

Kurir (The Courier), a government-suborned Serbian daily, published a story this morning claiming that KFOR troops at Jarinje are facing serious problems due to the Serb barricades.

Citing a reportedly well-informed anonymous source, Kurir claims that NATO troops are facing a shortage of firewood, as none of the locals want to sell it to them, and their generators lack power to heat all the tents. Another problem is the accumulation of garbage and human waste, neither of which has been removed for over a month.

People manning the barricades have also noted a reduction in flights of big KFOR supply helicopters to Jarinje and Brnjak, suggesting that the birds are down for maintenance.

The story doesn't say anything about the troops' food supply, but one has to assume it is pretty dire, consisting mostly of field rations (MRE). All these problems combined add up to a growing morale problem, and suggest that KFOR troops can't maintain this state of affairs much longer. On the other hand, the Serbs don't seem to have nearly as much trouble with their logistics. So, trying to wait them out isn't going to work.

That leaves General Drews with two unpalatable options: back off, withdraw from the checkpoints and abort the attempt to install "Kosovian" authorities in the north - or escalate and use force against peaceful, unarmed civilians. KFOR stands to lose face either way, but at least backing off can be explained as abandonment of a policy that was beyond KFOR's mandate anyway. Bonus points if the blame can be shifted to General Buehler - who did, after all, have a personal interest in supporting Thaci's "government".

The question now is whether those in charge of KFOR have enough horse sense to realize they can't win this one. Though the fact that they got themselves involved in this mess in the first place strongly suggests otherwise.

That Terrible Votive Candle

2011-10-20T14:56:00.002-04:00

Nooo, a votive candle! ATTACK!

What you see are the "brave" armored German troops (part of KFOR, NATO's "peacekeeping" mission in the occupied Serbian province of Kosovo), pepper-spraying an elderly Serb holding a votive candle. Well, how dare he?! In NATOworld, that's a clear act of aggression against the peace-loving NATO troops, whose mission is a purely humanitarian occupation. Clearly a case of "self-defense", isn't it?

In mid-September, KFOR deployed at two checkpoints on the roads between occupied Kosovo and the rest of Serbia. There, in a clear violation of its mandate, it installed ethnic Albanian police, who were charged with enforcing the blockade of the territory still inhabited by Serbs (and not under the control of the self-proclaimed ethnic Albanian "government").

The local Serbs responded by erecting makeshift roadblocks, trapping the occupiers. They have offered to remove the roadblocks, if Albanian officials and the illegal EU mission withdraw from the two checkpoints. KFOR refused, demanding unconditional surrender. Last night, it launched probing attacks on all barricades.

The occupiers' claim they want to create "freedom of movement" is cynical in the extreme. They are only interested in free movement of themselves, the EULEX, and the illegal ethnic Albanian government - but not the Serbs. No, the Serbs are supposed to accept living in ghettos surrounded by barbed wire, being blown up and shot at for target practice (only one Serb-killer has ever been convicted, and EULEX released him), and suffer beatings, abuse and imprisonment for simply existing (i.e. crossing the "border" with Serbian license plates, or carrying Serbian flags). That's "freedom," KFOR-style. Grandfathers of today's German "peacekeepers" would find it very familiar.

Does KFOR really think the Serbs will surrender? They aren't dealing with the spineless government in Belgrade here, but the people that have nothing to lose and value freedom and dignity more than life itself. Don't they watch their own movies? I haven't the slightest doubt as to who will ultimately triumph in this confrontation. It may take a bit longer for KFOR peacebreakers to figure it out, though.

UPDATE (10/21/2011, 9 AM): I just heard that KFOR commander, German General Drews, claimed that he had "documented" evidence the Serbs had attacked KFOR with teargas! I presume he is referring to the incident where his semi-trained troops gassed themselves while trying to gas the Serbs? (See video here).

Note that the troops in question were Austrian. German and Austrian soldiers occupying Serbia and gassing Serb civilians, 70 years to the day of German (and Austrian) troops shooting thousands of Serb civilians in Kragujevac as "reprisals" for resistance to Nazi occupation; now that's just sickening.

Two Days Till Peace

2011-10-14T22:00:00.000-04:00

I have been traveling a bit, hence the light posting. Last week, I was in the Canadian capital, at the promotion of a book.

"Two Days Till Peace" is an extraordinary war memoir, based on the journal kept by Mile Jovicic, the last antebellum director of the Sarajevo Airport. He jotted down the events that unfolded around him as he struggled to keep the airport open and assist with the evacuation of almost 30,000 people from Sarajevo, as Bosnia descended into (un)civil warfare.

Given his duties, Jovicic actually met most of the civilian and some military leaders involved in the early days of the war, who passed through his airport on the way to doomed negotiations and botched prisoner exchanges. His book is a testimony of a chaotic time in early 1992, and the many missed opportunities to avoid the bloodshed that ensued. It is very much a forgotten tale, since it doesn't fit the official narrative, and I'm glad he saved it from oblivion with this memoir.

The headline presenters were Ambassador James Bissett, the last Canadian envoy to the old Yugoslavia, and Maj. Gen. Lewis MacKenzie (Ret.), commander of the UNPROFOR staff in Sarajevo at the time (and chiefly responsible for the airport re-opening eventually). The third speaker was yours truly. All three of us had reviewed the book, and our comments are on the back cover. It isn't often an author can round up three of his reviewers at a book launch!

The venue was pretty full, and the books in the lobby sold out quickly. If you are interested, you can order the book from the publisher website, or through Amazon.

Why It Should Matter

2011-09-29T04:56:00.000-04:00

I have a new post up on Barely a Blog, run by the brilliant Ilana Mercer. (Ilana is a terrific writer, superb researcher and a classical liberal par excellence; if you're not a fan of hers, you should be.)

If you want to help others understand why what is happening in the Balkans matters in the grand scheme of things, I've laid it out there, in 700 words or less. I can expand upon just about anything in there, at great length - but that's the gist of it.

As for the why and wherefore, my theory is that it's all about power. As Robert Higgs has documented, the U.S. government has a history of claiming more powers for itself in times of emergency. Not surprisingly, that ends up resulting in a constant state of emergency, with government authority approaching infinity.

Now apply that to the international stage. The Cold War is over, the rules you once agreed upon to constrain your rival (who vanished almost overnight) are now constraining you, and you need to find a new cause to justify your dream of a "benevolent global hegemony". So you find (and just in case, instigate and stoke) a brutal civil war somewhere prominent, which gives you a pretext to posture at white-knighting, and get rid of those pesky laws and rules in the process.

If that happens to replicate the policies of Hitler 50 years prior - who's going to notice? Your people only know Hollywood history anyway. If you can declare your targets the Nazis Reborn, adding insult to injury, so much the better. All for the sake of bringing about the desired End of History...

People who dismiss American exceptionalism don't realize that it actually does exist - albeit not in the way its proponents would appreciate. This may well be the first hegemon in world history that self-destructs by dismantling the underlying principles of its own hegemony, because they are considered inconvenient. The proverbial cutting the branch one's posterior rests upon, as it were.

Humanitarian Intervention - Isn't

2011-09-28T13:16:00.000-04:00

The edition of RT's "Crosstalk" that was taped Monday morning was shown last night, and is up on RT's website today.

While I don't have much to say about Ian Williams' boilerplate interventionism, I found myself intrigued by some of the arguments of Isa Blumi. Of course I find the claim that the Empire was somehow in cahoots with Milosevic absolutely preposterous; if that was collaboration, what's hostility like?

Blumi also argued that dictators who can quash dissent quickly aren't picked as targets of "humanitarian" bombs. If true, this would greatly undermine the case for interventionism , since by implication, the Empire isn't noble and caring but rather coldly opportunistic, and only picks safe victims for its self-righteous knight-errantry.Which, of course, tracks with everything I've argued over the years.

However, Blumi's argument founders on the shoal of Kosovo. Milosevic actually had the KLA crushed, not once but twice - in 1997, and again in 1998. The first time it was resurrected by Germany's BND, and the second time the US intervened to save it, by sending Holbrooke to treat with the KLA. Holbrooke, Talbott, Norris, and others have outright confessed that this wasn't about the Albanians at all, or even about breaking Serbia (which did figure into the equation, mind you), but all about establishing dominion in the Balkans and keeping Russia out and down.

Interventionists would have us believe they are knights-errant riding around the world bombing "bad guys" and "liberating" their people from "tyranny." Spare me. They are in it for their own purposes - often for natural resources, but always for power.

And no one, not Williams, not Blumi, not any of the US and EU diplomats, not Blair's chief spin-doctor Alistair Campbell (currently on the blood-drenched payroll of Crime Minister Thaci) has ever managed to explain how "protecting and saving" people is accomplished by killing them.

"We had to destroy the village to save it," an American soldier famously quipped to a reporter in Vietnam.
Well, that's why you lost.

And There Was Blood

2011-09-27T16:30:00.003-04:00

On September 16, exactly forty days after their July fiasco, KFOR and EULEX confirmed their outlaw status by repeating the attempt to seize two "border crossings" between occupied Kosovo and the rest of Serbia. Tasked with peacekeeping under UN resolution 1244, the only document making their presence in the province even resemble something legal, both organizations chose to place themselves into the service of Hashim Thaci and his "independent state of Kosova".

As in 1999, they thought it would be easy: they show up with overwhelming force, string barbed wire across the road, install Thaci's "customs agents" and prevent any Serb traffic in or out of the province until they recognize the occupation government. They did not expect resistance. They did not expect the local Serbs, betrayed and abandoned by the government in Belgrade, to block the "peackepeers" in turn - with trucks, concrete blocks, earthen berms, and even their own bodies.

For eleven days, KFOR and the Serbs faced off. KFOR would tear down a Serb barricade, only to find a new one built to replace it. German and American troops - together in a mission of repressing Serbs, how ironic - threatened to shoot, but never dared. Until this morning, when they did.

They claim "self-defense." Sure they do. They claim it was the Serbs' fault. Sure they would. Isn't it always? Yes, by all means blame the local population for refusing to submit to an illegal occupation and its illegal blockade, harassment and repression. Keep in mind that those Serbs who use the Albanian checkpoints routinely get arrested, beaten, or have their vehicles impounded or destroyed - yet KFOR and EULEX do nothing. So much for the U.S. and NATO standing for "freedom". Yes, "freedom" is when you get the right to do as you're told, and nothing else. Dare refuse, and you become a "rogue."

Here is something the "repressive, lawless military occupation force" (in the words of former UNMIK official Gerard Gallucci, an American) doesn't seem to understand: they are up against the people who have nothing to lose but their lives. The fact that they decided to stay and defend their homes, facing down the Albanians, KFOR and even the betrayal of their own government - well, the quislings in Belgrade anyway - ought to indicate these people will not surrender. As did the barricades and the sit-ins.

Serbs passing a cabbage dish to a German soldier at Jarinje, September 18, 2011

Last week, the Serbs at that very barricade shared their food with the German occupiers, in an act of good will. Today, that was repaid with bullets.

KFOR claims it was targeted by "pipe bombs." Amateur Serbs, reporting from the area as they have for the past two months, say the locals used clumps of dirt, rocks and "cheerleader flares" (sparklers used at soccer games). Those are not "pipe bombs." And unarmed people facing off heavily armed troops is not a "clash," but a massacre waiting to happen. KFOR also lied about using rubber bullets. Video evidence clearly shows live ammo.

Apparently it was Americans who opened fire. How ironic. They've effectively changed sides from 70 years ago, assisting Germans and proud heirs of Hitler's allies against their own historical ally.

If you think my invocation of WW2 is improper, consider this: one of the Serbs detained this morning - prior to the shooting - protested (see source account here) his treatment to KFOR by saying that "it's beginning to look like Auschwitz around here" (referring, presumably, to thick barbed wire and armed German guards). KFOR's response was, "Not yet. We don't have gas chambers for you."

For shame, KFOR. If you still have any.

UPDATE (17:30 EDT): I just spoke to RT about the events. Not sure when the video will be available.
Again, these weren't "clashes". This wasn't KFOR acting in "self-defense." It was KFOR being the muscle for Hashim Thaci's illegal government, abusing the population that protested in a peaceful and civilized manner. In 1999, KFOR stood idly by as KLA rampaged across the province, driving hundreds of thousands out and burning their homes and churches. In 2004, KFOR stood by again, letting Thaci's followers expel and burn out thousands more. Now KFOR is assisting Thaci openly, and to what end? Hoping that these last Serbs either submit to Thaci's thug "state", or pack up and leave?

Some "democracy." Some "freedom." Some "law and order."

Odds and Ends

2011-09-22T13:50:00.000-04:00

I've been too busy to sit down and write a proper follow-up to Showdown, so this will have to suffice.

KFOR and EULEX found themselves outmaneuvered last weekend, as the local Serbs built roadblocks of logs, trucks, earth and even concrete, sealing them off at the two "customs posts" (Jarinje, Brnjak). They also sealed off the routes leading into the northern part of Kosovo from the Albanian-occupied south. While this has had the effect of seriously impeding their own supply, they've effectively disabled KFOR traffic. I can't imagine the occupiers are happy about this, but there's little they can do without appearing extremely heavy-handed. They may try, of course, and spin it as peacekeeping - but in the era of viral videos, can they really risk it?

It is worth noting that the Empire operates on the idiotic assumption that the Serbs in Kosovo are being directed from Belgrade somehow, or that the quisling government there can command them. Having become used to astroturf behavior of their Balkans allies and proxies, they can't imagine a genuine grassroots protest.

The truth, however, is that Belgrade has no control of the situation in north Kosovo, and may be rapidly losing control over the rest of Serbia as well. The reason the minister in charge of police is objecting to the October 2 "Belgrade Pride" is not that he hates homosexuals, but that he's mortally afraid of his police refusing orders and defecting. Once that happens, the government can kiss its quisling posterior goodbye.

In other news, Senator Marco Riubio (R-Fla.) said in a recent speech that the U.S. military has been "one of the greatest forces of good," because they "stopped Nazism and Communism and other evils such as Serbian ethnic cleansing.” I wanted to put together a rebuttal of this nonsense, but Julia Gorin beat me to it. I would like to add, though, that the lion's share of credit for stopping the Nazis should go to the Soviets; that the U.S. armed forces did precisely nothing to defeat Communism; and that putting "Serbian ethnic cleansing" on par with Nazism is a heinous insult for all the victims of Nazi aggression - which includes the Serbs.

Also, does that mean only Serbian "ethnic cleansing" is bad, while everyone else's is virtuous? For example, that committed by Croats, or Albanians, which the U.S. armed forces have actually sponsored? It certainly seems that way. Why else would the Wall Street Journal publish editorials by such luminaries of humanitarianism as Hashim "Snake" Thaci, leader of the terrorist KLA and the current prime minister of the so-called independent Kosovo, Julia Gorin asks.

Meanwhile, I did manage to write up a quick look at the Palestinian Authority campaign to declare statehood and request recognition by the UN, which was posted on Ilana Mercer's Barely a Blog. I've been reading Ilana's stuff for years; she's a fantastic writer and excellent researcher, who just published a very interesting book on South Africa and I am grateful to have the opportunity to guest-post on her blog

Right now I'm working on a column for Antiwar.com, and preparing to make an appearance on RT's Crosstalk. Sleep? What's that?

Showdown

2011-09-16T23:04:00.002-04:00

Forty days after being defeated by the local Serb community, the Empire and its KLA allies are at it again, seeking to set up "Kosovo customs" at two checkpoints facing inner Serbia. As in July, official Belgrade refuses to fight - but it won't do the spineless quislings any good. Having decided that the government set over them - I'm deliberately not saying "their government" - is in manifest dereliction of its most basic duty, the Serbs are organizing and defending themselves.

However much they prefer to live in a virtual reality constructed out of their own (and Imperial) propaganda, the quislingocracy in Belgrade cannot help but notice this development - and panic. That fear was stoked yesterday when Russia's ambassador, Alexander Konuzin, stood up at a pro-NATO conference in Belgrade (the fact that one was being held at all illustrates the depths of the government's depravity) and angrily rebuked the audience for fiddling while their country was being put to the torch. His exhortation, "Are there no Serbs here?" has already gone viral, and Konuzin Fan Clubs are popping up all over the social networks.

I spoke to RT this morning (video at the end) about the situation in Kosovo. These aren't "clashes", but an organized effort by the terrorist regime in Pristina to impose its writ on the last Serb enclave still holding out, with full knowledge, help and support of the NATO "peacekeepers" and the EU "law and order" mission. Though "terrorist" is a worn-out buzzword by now, it really fits here. The "government" in Pristina is basically the KLA, by any reasonable standard a terrorist organization, which has not only terrorized the province's Serbs and other non-Albanians, but also the very Albanians it purports to represent, both prior to the NATO invasion in 1999 and ever since. It also stands accused, by both a credible investigator and Empire's own Inquisitors, of trafficking in narcotics, weapons, slaves, sex slaves, and human organs (forcibly harvested from captives no less). How dare these people talk about "law and order"? How dare NATO, the foremost international outlaw?

The 78-day air terror campaign, intended to seize Kosovo from Serbia, ended when the Yugoslav government at the time signed an armistice with NATO (which the Alliance promptly violated). The UN Security Council approved the armistice and passed Resolution 1244, authorizing NATO occupation of Kosovo but guaranteeing the sovereignty of Serbia. That resolution has been systematically violated by NATO ever since, culminating in the 2008 "declaration of independence" by the KLA "government."

In March this year, almost twelve years to the date from NATO's attack on then-Yugoslavia, the Security Council passed Resolution 1973, authorizing the Alliance to set up a "no-fly zone" over Libya. NATO proceeded to bomb Libya instead, and offer direct support to the anti-government "rebels" there, in a reprise of 1999. If 1244 was a fig leaf for naked aggression, 1973 was a condom used in casual rape. Forgive me if I don't take the notion of "law" coming from these people very seriously.

For the third time in a hundred years, German troops are occupying Serbian soil. The first time they came in 1915, and were sent packing three years later. The second time, in 1941, they lingered for four. This time, it has been twelve and counting. Perhaps they think the Serbs have finally been broken. The quisling regime in Belgrade certainly does. They are both very much mistaken.

I wonder if the NATO troops facing the Serbs this evening realize their predicament. They aren't up against "illegal and criminal elements," but against an entire people, who value freedom - the actual thing, not Empire's buzzword - far more than their lives. There is exactly one Balkans nation that has faced down every invader and would-be conqueror over the centuries, and emerged from the struggle triumphant (however bloodied and bruised) every time. It is behind those barricades. KFOR is in front of them. If those assorted lackeys of Empire have any sense at all... they would be somewhere else.

Once More About the "Belgrade Pride"

2011-09-15T14:04:00.000-04:00

Last year, the corrupt, contemptible regime in Serbia sent six thousand police to occupy downtown Belgrade, so a handful of Imperial politicians, local quislings, professional activists and their foreign guests (including a prominent Dutch pedophile) could parade down the city's main avenue. One of the participants, Predrag Azdejkovic, boasted about taking Belgrade's "anal virginity".

The general citizenry reacted to the "Pride Parade" with cold contempt. Many who went forth to oppose it directly chose to do so peacefully, as part of Church processions, which were blocked and harassed by the police. Others chose to assault the police cordon directly. The government reveled in branding them "thugs and hooligans," conducting mass arrests and show trials, and arguing that Serbia needed more of its "reforms" in order to become "civilized."

Make no mistake, though: the riots of 10-10-10 were anti-government, not anti-gay.

In the past two decades, Serbia has been blockaded, bombed, and dismembered by the Empire, then lootedby the repressive and treacherous regime while being dismembered some more. Once an exporter of food, Serbia now has people rummaging through garbage for leftovers. The government callously disregards the Constitution and other laws, gerrymanders election results, mocks the democratic process and routinely insults its citizens' intelligence. It aids and abets ethnic and religious separatism within the country, while systematically suppressing or subverting any expression of Serbian identity, faith, culture or tradition. To ask for "gay rights" in such circumstances, when there are hardly any rights at all, is simply perverse.

We are told it isn't easy to be gay (or lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, whatnot - though these groups have very little overlap between themselves, and are only lumped together because they define themselves by their alternate sexuality) in Serbia. That is true. But it isn't easy to be anyone in Serbia, unless one is somehow associated with the government.

Therein's the problem: the "GLBT" activists - not the folks who wish to enjoy life with their sexual partners, but those people who get paid (by foreign foundations, as well as Serbian taxpayer money) to be victimized homo/trans/alt-sexuals - are in fact in bed with the government. The 2011 "Pride," scheduled for October 2, isn't about anyone's rights, human or otherwise - it's about privileges for these professional victims, and further empowerment of the government, at the expense of Serbia.

One cannot demand tolerance from others, while being intolerant. Acceptance needs to be earned. If the alt-sexuals spoke up against government abuses of the law and the citizenry, that would certainly advance the tolerance and acceptance of them among the general population. But no - instead, they align themselves with the government considerably responsible for the present reprehensible state of affairs. By doing this, and taking the government's coin, the professional alt-sexuals are doing their constituency a colossal disservice. So while the advocates get to keep getting money for fighting the problem they are themselves making worse, the ordinary alt-sexuals - who presumably just want to live in peace - are being manipulated to serve the corrupt regime, instead of joining forces with the oppressed Serbs and thus earning acceptance and tolerance.

In effect, the alt-sexuals are being set up as the lightning rod for the disaffected citizenry. The Pride is the government's way of telling the jobless, the hungry and the humiliated, "Eat cake." It's an insult, as much as anything this government has done for the past 3 years (and parts of it before then). There is a general understanding among the populace that the alt-sexuals aren't the real enemy, but only a cat's-paw of the government. That won't make it any easier to swallow the insult, however. It is very likely there will be violence come October 2, once again aimed against the government, once again manipulated by it to justify further repression, further abuses and further insults.

Now, in the struggle between the current government and the Serbian people, my money is on the latter. Furthermore, I am willing to wager that most alt-sexuals think the same way: last year, most of them wanted nothing to do with the parade. But that's not enough - they are still tolerating the hijacking of their interests by professional activists and the government. If alt-sexuals of Serbia want to earn acceptance, they will have to fight alongside the general populace, for the rights of all and not just their own.

(Updated to clarify a point in paragraph 7)

9/11

2011-09-11T03:39:00.001-04:00

I remember that Tuesday morning the way I remember much of the Bosnian War: in vivid detail. The confusion, the shock, the horror of the burning and crumbling towers, the pillar of black smoke coming from the Pentagon. But the world didn't stop turning. And nothing actually changed that day.

Within weeks, the man who got into the Oval Office on a promise of a "more humble foreign policy" had launched a war without end. Except that the "War on terror(ism)" was lost before it began. U.S. policymakers have persisted in believing their own myth about the "good" terrorists (i.e. ones they could control) versus the "bad" ones (the ones that would attack America), no matter how much the terrorists themselves blurred that line, repeatedly. They even begged jihadists to like them (again)!

Eventually, the "War on Terror" became a "Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism", a term signifying precisely nothing. Instead of fighting fear and terror, the Empire unleashed them upon the world. The discrepancies between reality and fantasy were discounted through perception management. The 2006 mockumentary "Borat" was supposed to have been a comedy. But when the title character enthuses about the "war of terror", it wasn't funny. It rang true.

Seven years after that fateful Tuesday, the American public knew it wasn't really involved in a war on terrorism any more, only in the protracted and pointless occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq (a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, but was nonetheless invaded). The man who promised Hope and Change promised to end those wars. He hasn't delivered.

In May this year, the alleged mastermind behind 9/11, Osama bin Laden, was killed in Pakistan. If the official version of events is to be believed (so many lies have been told about the wars, it's hard to believe anything any more), he was taken out by Seal Team Six, a special forces unit. The question that begs to be asked is, couldn't something like that have been done in the first place, without two full-scale invasions and a bunch of proxy wars? Instead, bin Laden's alleged purpose - to bleed America dry in the sands of the Muslim world - seems to have been achieved, all right.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist (I'm more interested in conspiracy facts). Nor do I believe for a second that everything would have been just fine had America not "provoked" the jihadists, as some well-meaning folks think. Jihad isn't some benevolent ideology of spiritual self-fulfillment, but a religious commandment to perpetrate violence upon the infidel. Many people who call themselves Christians may not take the commandments of their faith very seriously. Rest assured, many Muslims do. The real error was believing that jihad could be harnessed, controlled and directed to achieve a strategic purpose. That belief was wrong in 1978, it was wrong in 2001, it is wrong now, and it will be wrong tomorrow.

It isn't quite right to say that nothing has changed since that Tuesday, ten years ago. While the government, and the thinking behind it, has remained much the same (though a different faction is in power; that ought to suggest a few things, by itself), the United States of America isn't the same country any more. I have trouble recognizing it, and I've witnessed the transformation, gradual as it was.

Whether things keep getting worse, or some day take a turn for the better, there is no going back. Panta rei.

Against the Occupation of the Mind

2011-09-10T16:51:00.002-04:00

Three years ago, I wrote about a "mental occupation" that Serbia is under - a perfidious, soul-sucking cloud of self-hatred and contempt, generated by the ruling caste of Communist heirs, globalists, oligarchs and media magnates (often mistakenly called the "elite"). That was itself inspired by a 2007 post about cowardice, resulting from an essay by Julia Gorin (I wasn't the only one it inspired, either).

Since then, I've been trying to break those mental chains through persuasion, satire, contempt, mockery, and any number of other techniques available to a writer that I could think of. I honestly don't know to what extent this has been my doing, and to what extent it was simply people adding two and two and coming up with four instead of "European Union," but Serbia has since developed a significant intellectual resistance to "elite" oppression, and is well on the way to throw off the mental chains - as well as the physical chains of their quisling government, in a not too distant future. It hasn't been easy, or pleasant, or simple - but it was needful, and remains worth doing.

I recently came across the writings of Daniel Greenfield. I've just posted a translation of his essay concerning the demographic demise of both Cold War empires (h/t Mightiest of the Nine). Today, I discovered another, this time concerning the self-hating Jews. Therein, he gives the following description of mental occupation, which I consider particularly relevant:

"Being right isn't enough. the left is rapidly metastasizing into its final genocidal form. Its occupation of the minds of civilized men has become a disease that is consuming the host. And like a mosquito deadening the nerve endings of the skin of its victim, the first symptom of the disease is an inability to recognize the problem. Its final symptom is to state that the problem is not the mosquito drinking blood, but the amount of blood that hasn't been drunk yet.
This is the point of view of the mosquito, of the Israeli left, the American left and of every left. It is Code Pink, the ACLU, Not in Our Name, Women in Black, J Street, Jews Say No, Please Kill Us Because We Raped the Planet and Don't Deserve to Go On Living.
The optimist says that the glass is half empty [sic]. The pessimist says that it is half full [sic]. The left says that it should be completely empty and you should feel ashamed that there is any water in it at all. And that if you had any humanity and decency, you would pour out that water right now. If you don't, then you're fair game. And if you do, you're fair game, because you didn't do it quickly enough. And if you do it quickly, you're fair game because you are descended from people who didn't pour out their own water quickly enough.
This is the occupation of the mind. It has a surface logic over an utterly irrational mindset. Its goal is to convince you to kill yourself. Its goal is to convince you to say, No, or at least, Maybe."

Bear this in mind when next you hear an impassioned activist for something. Is he (or she, as it may be) trying to persuade you to fight for your survival, or trying to talk you into suicide? And once you've figured it out... what are you going to do about it?

Traitor's Reward

2011-09-06T13:26:00.004-04:00

The Hague Inquisition convicted Momcilo Perisic today, sentencing the former Yugoslav general to 27 years in prison for "aiding and abetting" alleged war crimes.

It is worth noting that Perisic was deemed guilty of nothing he actually did, but of what the Inquisition thinks he could or should have done to prevent the asserted atrocities from taking place. By that "standard", every single general officer is a war criminal - which is why it only gets applied to the Serbs.

What's ironic here is that Perisic was a CIA asset. He was caught in 2002 - by the bumbling DOS police, no less - conspiring with a U.S. embassy official, who turned out to be a CIA operative. Subsequent investigation revealed that Perisic had been working for the U.S. since 1997. Facing Serbian military justice, he surrendered to the Inquisition instead. Yet not even his service to the Empire could save him from being sacrificed at the altar of Collective Serbian Guilt.

This does nothing to change the fact that the ICTY is a false court, and that all its verdicts ought to by rights be null and void. But it does provide a fitting reward for treason, I suppose. Treason runs wide and deep in today's Serbia. Perhaps, now that they know what "rewards" await them in this world and the next, the other traitors might repent. I'm not holding my breath, but still.

Third Time A Charm?

2011-09-05T01:12:00.001-04:00

“Germany should now, as it has become peaceful and reasonable, get all that Europe and the whole world has refused in two gigantic wars, a sort of smooth hegemony over Europe.”
- Joschka Fischer, former German Foreign Secretary

It sure seems today, 72 years after its start, that it was Germany that had actually won World War Two. Overlay the map of the EU with that of the German Reich at the height of its power. Look how Yugoslavia was "wiped off the map" once again - this time by decree, and only then by bombs and boots on the ground. Behold, the same ethnic groups that once allied with Hitler find themselves the most enthusiastic "allies" of Berlin - or rather, its patron, the Atlantic Empire. That partnership probably goes a long way to explain the success of Germany's latest drive for European hegemony.

Julia Gorin just did a write-up about a presentation by Rodney Atkinson - former British Ministerial Adviser, author, and lecturer at University of Mainz in Germany - made in February 2008 (coincidentally, when German-supported Albanians declared the "Independent state of Kosova" in the occupied Serbian province) at the British House of Commons. The above quote is mentioned at the very end of Atkinson's presentation, the transcript of which can be found on Gorin's blog. The arguments presented there are culled from two books that Atkinson had written by then about the EU's roots in German designs for European hegemony.

Far-fetched? Not at all. Several years ago, one Serbian blogger tracked down several Nazi propaganda posters from the 1940s that extolled the virtues of National-Socialism and promised the Serbs an idyllic future in the "European family of nations" if only they'd just roll over and serve the Fuehrer. The similarity with pronouncements and promises from Brussels - often parroted by the sycophantic Serbian politicians - was uncanny. That is, until Atkinson pointed out the direct connection between Brussels and the 1940s Berlin. If the shoe fits...

The Germans certainly have perseverance. One would think that, failing to conquer Europe twice, in a spectacular and bloody fashion and at great cost to themselves (and others), they'd stop trying. It appears, however, they are still at it. Both times prior, their plans ran afoul of the Serbs and their stubborn resistance. That helps explain the present hostility for Belgrade and Berlin's support for its "legacy" allies in the region.

Thing is, Germans aren't the only people capable of holding a grudge, or soldiering on against the odds. I'm not sure about the Brits, or the rest of Europe, but somehow I don't quite think Serbia is as defeated as its enemies believe. And I doubt the third time will be a charm for Fritz.

Three Days in August

2011-08-19T14:33:00.004-04:00

There is an interesting documentary up on RT about the failed August 1991 coup.

It is ironic that the cabal that attempted to overthrow Gorbachev actually succeeded - just not in the way they intended. The real winner of the August 1991 drama was Boris Yeltsin, who proceeded to put Gorbachev out of work by dissolving the Soviet Union.

These days, the American press is waxing nostalgic for Boris Nikolayevich, pining for the days when Russia was a "democracy" (which in Empire-speak translates to "does what it's told"). Yet most Russians seem to remember Yeltsin as the fellow who ran Russia into the ground while drinking his troubles away, a buffoon propped up by the Americans.

Yeltsin was ousted in a palace coup at the end of 1999. He died in 2007, and was given a state funeral. Perhaps that was more out of respect for the symbolism - him being the first democratically elected president of the Russian republic and all - than for the man himself. Who knows?

Gorbachev is still around, making a living off the laurels of being the last Soviet leader. Though his word is eagerly quoted in the West, in Russia itself he commands very little respect. Simply put, nobody is nostalgic for the Yeltsin days, or even the last days of the USSR. Russians' support for the current government, warts and all, is almost plebiscitary.

I used to get angry seeing the rampant Russophobia on the pages of American papers. Now I find it amusing. It's all part of the world of fetish and fantasy the Atlantic Empire leadership prefers over actual reality. At the end of the Cold War, they had a choice: be a shining example for the world, or surrender to the temptation of unrestrained power. They chose power - and failed. If sneering at others makes them feel better about that failure, so be it.

The Russians have paid a steep price for their delusions, and seem to have learned something from their mistakes. Would that the Americans will be so fortunate, when it's their turn.

Storm, Kosovo and Empire

2011-08-05T12:36:00.003-04:00

I really don't have much to add to my 2005 essay about "Operation Storm," the Empire-sponsored ethnic cleansing operation by which Franjo Tudjman's government effected a final solution of its "Serb problem."

Though the Hague Inquisition has declared it part of a "joint criminal enterprise" when convicting two Croatian generals in April, it is unlikely this verdict will be allowed to stand for long. Zagreb maintains that this was a great and noble victory, celebrates the holiday as "Homeland Thanksgiving Day" and - most importantly - the sponsors of the operation still look upon Croatia with favor, even as it is no longer their "junkyard dog."

There is no doubt that "Storm" was cooked up in the Pentagon kitchen; the Empire doesn't deny its mercenary outfit MPRI was instrumental in turning Tudjman's army from rabble into something resembling a military. A decade later, the pattern was repeated in Georgia (which eventually attempted a similar-style operation, albeit with a very different outcome).

Of course, the conquest of Krajina was greatly helped by the fact that Croatians had the Serbs outnumbered, outgunned, surrounded, blinded (NATO airstrikes took out their communications) and - last, but not least - abandoned. Perhaps the calculation in Belgrade was that the sacrifice of Krajina might save Serbia from Imperial invasion; if so, they soon realized their mistake. But that's a topic I'll save for later.

Croatians and their Western advocates erroneously label the war a struggle for independence; no one - not Belgrade, nor the Krajina Serbs - actually sought to stop Croats from having their own state, as much as that would have been a perfectly legal course of action under the extant Yugoslav constitution. The only thing in dispute was whether a Croat government - moreover, one that has deliberately sought continuity with the WW2 Ustasha - had any right to rule over territories inhabited mostly by ethnic Serbs.

There is one aspect of that conflict that remains largely ignored: the involvement of Kosovo Albanians in the Croatian military. I am not aware of any research into the actual number of Albanians who joined Tudjman's forces. There is anecdotal evidence of Albanians fighting in both that war, and the subsequent/parallel war in Bosnia, where they supported the Muslim government of Alija Izetbegovic. But the plural of anecdote is not data. More research is needed.

Two names do come to mind, however. Rahim Ademi was a brigadier-general during the Medak Pocket operation, and was even put on trial for war crimes there, but was acquitted by a Croatian court - surprise! - along with General Norac, in 2008.

Somewhat more (in)famous is Agim Ceku, who also joined Tudjman's army in 1991, and took part in the Medak operation (where he was wounded). Ceku commanded Croatian army units during "Storm." After the war, Tudjman gave him command of the 5th Military District - but in 1998, he "retired" to join the KLA, which was being rebuilt in Albania (the Serbian law enforcement having successfully quashed the Jashari rebellion).

Neither Ceku nor his political superior, KLA supreme leader Hashim Thaci, have ever been charged with any atrocities, even though under the Inquisition's own doctrine of command responsibility they were ultimately responsible for every single act of terrorism their underlings (such as Fatmir Limaj or Ramush Haradinaj) had committed. Thaci is now "Prime Minister" of the self-proclaimed Kosovaristan, while Ceku simply changed insignia and continued to command the KLA under the name of "Kosovo Protection Corps" (which now passes for Thaci's military).

The Official Truth in Croatia (and Kosovia) is that their separatist rebellions were legitimate self-defense from "Serbian oppression" embodied in the evil Slobodan Milosevic. The problem with this theory is that it completely fails to explain the prior history of Albanian and Croat belligerence towards the Serbs, which predates Milosevic by a great deal.

What is one to make of Albanian separatism in Tito's Yugoslavia, which created Kosovo as a political entity in the first place, invested vast amounts of money into its modernization, and provided a welfare system that enabled Albanian families to have a dozen children or more? What is one to make of the 1973 "Maspok" (mass movement) events in Croatia, long before Milosevic was even on the political radar?

And for that matter, what about the Croat and Albanian alliance with Hitler in WW2, exemplified by the "Independent State of Croatia" and its Devil Division at Stalingrad, or the 21st Waffen-SS division "Skanderbeg", composed primarily of Albanians from Kosovo?

When one connects the dots, the pattern is there: Croats and Albanians, joined in pursuit of the same cause. Where Hitler failed to deliver, the Atlantic Empire succeeded (so far, anyway). It seems everything is in the choice of allies.

KLA Attacks

2011-07-27T14:10:00.002-04:00

For a long time now, the Empire has worked on a way to stamp out the last vestiges of Serb freedom in the occupied province of Kosovo (declared "independent" by its Albanian government in February 2008, with Imperial support). They put the plan into effect this week.

The pathetic quisling regime in Serbia - which has been doing everything in its power to implicitly recognize the "Kosovian" government without overtly doing so - responded by mewling about "diplomatic solutions" and "negotiations" with KFOR, EULEX and other Imperial institutions put into place to help the KLA regime carve out Kosovo. Not surprisingly, the Imperial envoy Peter Feith endorsed the Albanians' actions, saying that every sovereign state has a right to control its territory. Except Serbia, of course, because rules do not apply in her case.

According to reports from the province, Albanian special forces were beaten back from the two checkpoints at the "border", with one casualty. KFOR, commanded by a German general, is helping the Albanian "police" occupy the checkpoints. EULEX is silent. Russia is demanding an urgent, closed session of the UN Security Council.

Belgrade is rolling over and playing dead. But the Serbs in Kosovo don't give a rotten rodent's posterior for the regime currently running Serbia - they are fighting for their survival with everything they have. In the rest of Serbia, there are rumors of protest marches, which the government has banned. God forbid anyone resists the Empire! All the mainstream media are toeing the government line, so the public is rapidly turning to Facebook, Twitter and blogs to find out what is going on.

Yesterday evening Moscow time, I commented on the situation for RT. What puzzled me was the presenter's seeming belief that this was an issue that "Serbia and Kosovo" would have to resolve in order to get into the EU. Far as I know, Russia refuses to recognize the self-proclaimed Albanian state. And this is much more than a border dispute - it's an attempt to snuff out Serb presence in the province altogether, under the guise of "law and order."

What law? What order? By rights, it is Serbia that ought to be establishing its sovereignty over the occupied province, instead of Hashim Thaci's mafia clan posing as government.

Of course, President Tadic has already said his government would not fight. In any case, Serbia's military is busy taking part in NATO's exercises in Ukraine (and just who might those be aimed at? Venezuela?). Yet he and his regime are quickly being rendered irrelevant. The KLA/Imperial takeover was thwarted by the local Serbs, who seem to have preserved both their courage and their convictions.

Had the Albanians waited just a few months more, the spineless slugs in Belgrade would have given them their recognition. By launching this idiotic adventure, they may have ensured the fall of Tadic, and the end of Imperial control over Serbia.

Oft evil will shall evil mar...

Oh No, You Don't

2011-07-25T11:51:00.000-04:00

To say that something "isn't quite right" about Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian (allegedly) behind the Utøya massacre on Friday, would be an understatement. Yet it is true in more ways than one.

According to the police, Breivik detonated a car bomb in front of the government building in Oslo as a diversion, then infiltrated a summer camp for the ruling party's children on the island of Utøya, and opened fire. Initial reports put the combined death toll of the bombing and the shooting spree at 93, which have since been revised to around 70.

Much is being made of Breivik's Facebook, Twitter and blog posts - all very recent - and the manifesto (CNN) he allegedly worked from. They almost read as a list of talking points of the diversity-obsessed multi-culturalists, wishing to discredit their critics.

Charlie Booker rightly found it terrible that the media "experts" rushed to judgment and blamed the Muslims. Given the jihadist proclivity for terrorism, that wasn't an entirely outlandish conjecture; the problem was that it posed as certainty.

I'm not sure anyone will dare speak up in a similar manner against a rising tendency to smear all the traditionalists, conservatives, and opponents of totalitarian welfare-statism and unrestricted immigration as murderous fanatics. It will again be a conjecture, posing as certainty, only even less grounded in fact. Breivik is shocking precisely because he is a glaring exception to the rule. Surely, his fanaticism can hardly compare to that of people who believe the best way to ensure diversity of appearance (a goal asserted to be good without explanation) is the ironclad uniformity of thought?

Those looking for sympathy for Breivik will find none here. He's a murderer. How can fighting for the future of one's nation - Breivik's declared goal, if the papers are to be believed - mean murdering that nation's children? An absurdity, if ever there was one.

Nor do I want to get into arguments over which of his convictions were grounded in reality; I've been saying for years that actions and beliefs ought to be judged on their own inherent merits, or lack thereof, rather than on the basis of who claims association with them.

I do, however, wish to address one particular aspect of Breivik's alleged motivation, which is getting more and more play in the Western press. According to CNN, his manifesto suggests that he was driven to action by Norway's involvement in the 1999 Kosovo war, directed against "our Serbian brothers (who) wanted to drive Islam out by deporting the Albanian Muslims back to Albania." Next thing you know, the media will declare, "The Serbs made him do it." Worked for that kid in Salt Lake City, did it not?

Let me clarify, then. If Breivik saw the 1999 war in the way described above, he was factually wrong. While Islam is a powerful factor that has shaped and driven Albanian chauvinism for over a century (and certainly underpins the destructive rage against the Serbian Orthodox churches), the Albanian regime controlling Kosovo today systematically oppresses not only the remaining Serbs, but also the Gorani - Muslims by faith, Serbs by language - which indicates that its bigotry is ethno-cultural as well as religious.

If anything, it was NATO - and the U.S. - who saw the war in terms of helping the "good Muslims" against the evil Orthodox Serbs.

The Serbian government fought to defeat a terrorist insurgency seeking to make Kosovo part of an enlarged Albanian state. There was no plan of persecution and deportation - unless one believes the sordid German fiction called "Operation Horseshoe". Serbia is actually the most multi-ethnic Yugoslav successor state, and home to a substantial Muslim population. These days, Belgrade is entirely too tolerant of a militant Muslim cleric who seeks to foment a rebellion in its southwestern parts. To argue that Serbia sought to expel the Albanians in 1999 due to their Muslim faith is to accept NATO's excuse for the bombing. That claim was wrong then, and it is wrong now.

Furthermore, over the past two decades of vilest demonization in the Western media - worse by far than the cartoon depictions of Muslims over which there have been riots, death threats and even murders - as well as not one, but two bombing campaigns, there has not been a single Serbian terrorist attack in the West. Not one. As a result of Imperial meddling, Serb populations in today's Croatia, large parts of Bosnia and Kosovo have become extinct, yet no Serb has ever resorted to terrorism against NATO countries. Let alone shot up a summer camp full of children.

No cause can justify the murder of innocents, whether it is purportedly a struggle against the loss of national identity (as Breivik claims), or bringing democracy (as the Empire and its allies have claimed) to Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya - or for that matter, Kosovo. Sadly, neither Breivik nor those who will sit in his judgment seem to understand that simple fact.

Still in Denial

2011-06-06T23:12:00.002-04:00

*SEE UPDATE BELOW*

Pope Bendict XVI just wrapped up a visit to Croatia today. While Catholic reporters emphasized the pontiff's message about the importance of family, a few reporters here and there noted the controversial praising of Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac.

Roman Catholics may believe their pontiff is incapable of error on matters religious. He definitely can - and does - err on matters historical. Far from being "manipulated by Hitler for his own ends," the so-called Independent State of Croatia (1941-45) was considered at the time the crowning achievement of Croatians' legitimate aspirations to statehood. That very opinion has been shared by all the governments of modern Croatia, from its independence in 1991 onward.

Nor was Cardinal Stepinac a defender of Serbs and Jews, as the Pope alleged, but rather the vicar to Croatia's fuehrer, Ante Pavelic (see note below). The ideology of Pavelic's Ustasha was inseparable from Catholic chauvinism, and its persecution and genocide of Orthodox Serbs was entirely based on religion. One part of the program of pogrom was to coerce into conversion a third of the Serb population - including the children orphaned by Ustasha murders. Catholic clergy not only blessed the Ustasha, but many personally participated in the murdering. Unlike Hitler's murder machine, designed to be impersonal and efficient, the Ustasha took visceral pleasure in their killing - using mallets, knives, pistols and picks. Even the Nazis were disgusted.

At the end of the war, with the Communists taking power in Yugoslavia, top Ustasha officials - including Pavelic himself - escaped to Western Europe, the US and Latin America, thanks to the Catholic Church.

Stepinac was jailed for five years by the Communist authorities, then held under house arrest until his death in 1960. Given that many in Yugoslavia had been shot for much lesser crimes, Tito's regime was actually exceptionally lenient towards Pavelic's vicar and the Church of Rome. Which, by the way, never offered an apology for mass murder and forced conversions. Or the fact it supported precisely the same scenario for the Serbs in the 1990s.

Now comes the ironic twist. Right after the pontiff's visit, Zagreb announced that it will hold a Gay Pride Parade on June 18. The motto of the event is "Tomorrow belongs to us." If that sounds familiar, here's why.

UPDATE: (June 8, 2011) Srdja Trifkovic documents Stepinac's wartime record.

NOTE: I originally mis-identified Stepinac as Pavelic's personal vicar; he was actually the "Supreme Military Apostolic Vicar" to the Ustasha army, which is arguably even worse.

Lawrence Eagleburger and the Murder of Yugoslavia

2011-06-04T18:12:00.004-04:00

Lawrence Eagleburger passed away today at his estate in Virginia, at age 80.

He had been Washington's envoy to Yugoslavia twice, spending seven years in Belgrade altogether. After retiring in 1984, he returned to the State Department in 1989, as James Baker's right hand. Eagleburger was acting Secretary for a while, and actually held the post for just over a month, from December 1992 to January 1993.

Today's NY Times obituary claims Eagleburger "was unable to keep Yugoslavia from dissolving" in the early 1990s. Well, here's an interesting question: did he even try?

Conventional wisdom has it that the Bush I administration supported Yugoslavia's survival, and only reluctantly changed its mind after "Serbian atrocities". Warren Zimmerman, the last US ambassador to Yugoslavia, claims that Washington supported Yugoslav unity, but not "if it were maintained at the expense of democracy or by force." That was at best facetious (isn't that precisely what Lincoln did?), at worst disingenuous: in the paragraph preceding that claim, Zimmerman explained the influence of Croatian and Albanian ethnic lobbies, which very much worked towards dismembering Yugoslavia.

Washington's official position - paying lip service to Yugoslav unity, openly opposing the use of force to preserve it, and talking about democracy and human rights - amounted to tacit support for the separatists.

The NY Times obit quotes Eagleburger's warning to the Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, “You can’t hold Yugoslavia together by force.” But the claim that Milosevic tried to do just that is simply not true.

It was, in fact, Milosevic who supported the secession of Slovenia and Croatia -though not Croatia's claim to Serb-inhabited territories, at least not without rescinding the clause in Tudjman's new constitution disenfranchising the Serbs - and even tacitly recognized Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia, by creating the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (consisting of Serbia and Montenegro) in April 1992. None of that mattered to the policymakers in Washington and several European capitals, who by then had decided to designate the Serbs as the principal villain of the Balkans drama, the better to cast themselves as heroes.

In 2008, Eagleburger gave an interview to Voice of America, arguing that carving out Kosovo from Serbia set a bad precedent. It was too little, too late - the precedent was already set, back in 1992, when the Badinter Commission decided that Yugoslavia had "dissolved", and Washington went along with this. By 2008, as well, there was a new generation at the State Department, which believed they could shape the world with their willpower, disdaining the "reality-based community" and all that.

Still, I'll always wonder whether people like Eagleburger and Zimmerman, with their extensive Balkans experience, could have contributed to things unfolding differently, rather than being accessories to the murder of Yugoslavia. Perhaps some day American historians and media will honestly re-examine their country's role in this sordid episode, rather than dismissing it as "the fault of those evil Serbs" - but I'm not holding my breath.

Mladic

2011-06-02T12:06:00.006-04:00

It just occurred to me this morning that I haven't written anything here about last week's arrest of Gen. Ratko Mladic. I've been busy commenting elsewhere - appearing on RT twice so far, writing three articles for the audiences in Serbia, and putting together a column on Mladic for Antiwar.com - and between all that, this particular venue got neglected.

I don't think I've seen this kind of venom and hatred, in such amounts, in the media since the Karadzic arrest in 2008. What happened in Bosnia was tragic and horrible enough, it doesn't need embellishment. I understand perfectly why the Muslims, Croats or Albanians would exaggerate or invent Serb atrocities - it's all part of the war effort, and these days, the camera is mightier than the cannon. But what drives American, and especially British reporters to simply make stuff up? Could it be that, without a villain, they - and the governments they shill for - can't posture as heroes?

It is outlandish that Mladic is being painted as some sort of Nazi reborn, when his father was killed by the Ustasha (Croatian Nazis) back in WW2, and Mladic himself had been a Yugoslav officer, committed to "brotherhood and unity" and multi-ethnic coexistence, rather than some bigoted nationalist. But perhaps that is the point: by calling Mladic a Nazi, the attention is redirected from his enemies, who had actual Nazi histories and sympathies in the past (one PR flack doing precisely that admitted as much back in 1993).

It is also mind-boggling to see Mladic compared to the recently deceased Osama bin Laden, when Mladic actually fought against a government led by a man who wrote a treatise on political Islam and Islamic revolution, whose army actually incorporated several units of Bin Laden's "Afghans", and whose government reportedly issued a passport to Bin Laden himself. Yet even those who fight against militant Islam in Europe and the U.S. instinctively demonize the Serbs, so deep has the propaganda seeped into every pore of the public.

I could go on at length about my own wartime experiences (on the receiving end of Mladic's artillery, no less), the hypocrisy of treating the people buried as martyrs in the jihad as unarmed civilians for propaganda purposes, or the specific problems with the definition of genocide employed by the Hague Inquisition - but I've already written much about it all, and don't feel like repeating myself.

To me, the most important aspect of this entire affair is that Mladic isn't being put on trial as an individual. The Hague Inquisition seeks to "complete the set" and charge the entire military, political and police leadership of the Serbs, whether in Serbia or elsewhere, with a phantom conspiracy. It has never presented any evidence that this conspiracy existed - but facts and evidence are of no interest to a political court, focused only on creating a villain so its own sponsors can appear noble. For all the good it will do them.

This isn't just about Mladic, or the Serbs, or the Balkans Wars. There is a pattern of demonization at work here, with far-ranging implications. The Empire and its satellites are already invoking Mladic as justification for their war in Libya, just as they used Bosnia to justify Kosovo, and Kosovo to justify Iraq. God only knows who might be next.

Dodik's Gambit

2011-05-19T15:23:00.003-04:00

I just noticed an interesting piece that ran on Monday, in which former Imperial official Matthew Parish commented on what had taken place in Bosnia the week prior.

Per Parish, Dodik sought a confrontation with viceroy Inzko because he needed a political victory to bolster his domestic standing. He never intended to go through with the referendum, only to force the Empire's hand - as he did when Baroness Ashton came to visit him and negotiate a deal.

As I argue in this week's column at Antiwar.com, Ashton's actions directly torpedoed any remaining vestige of Inzko's authority, to the point where he might soon get "promoted" out of Bosnia. Parish acknowledges this in passing, but he's much more interested in Dodik and his goals. He posits that Dodik is seeking international attention because Bosnia has grown too small for him:

"...the Bosnian model of state-building has failed and Dodik already has most of what he wants. His sole remaining goal is to reposition international attitudes towards the Balkans and at the same time reinvent himself as a respected international statesman. [...]
We should remember one other thing. Dodik is only 52. One can only wonder what political office he may have in mind after the one he holds now."

This is honestly an angle I haven't given any thought so far. If Dodik is seeking a future beyond the RS and Bosnia, it is doubtful that means Belgrade. So would it be Brussels, then? Time will tell.

Either way, those who put their hopes in Imperial support and the viceroys' powers ought to be very concerned about the future of their own designs. It doesn't look particularly bright.

A Modest Proposal

2011-05-06T14:22:00.002-04:00

In 1999, British PM Tony Blair was the leading the calls for NATO bombing of Serbia and the subsequent occupation of its province of Kosovo. In 2008, the terrorists running Kosovo under NATO protection declared it an independent state, and were soon recognized by London. The British ambassador in Belgrade has a status of a proconsul, right after his American counterpart, routinely giving orders to the "democratic" (and unelected) government.

Now the word comes from Scotland that a pro-independence party has won the election there.

Well, sauce for the goose ought to be sauce for the gander, says I. Perhaps Belgrade ought to reciprocate London's steadfast friendship over the past two decades by recognizing Scotland as an independent state. Hey, it would help the oppressed English finally get their own country! Not to mention be a hilariously ironic application of historical justice, such as it may be.

Won't happen, sadly - not because the Scots and the English are undeserving, but because the pack of spineless quislings in Belgrade is too craven. Then again, they won't be in power forever...

Don't You Dare Call It a Victory

2011-05-02T16:47:00.005-04:00

So the Emperor announced breathlessly last night that Enemy of the State #1 has been hunted down and killed. Osama Bin Laden is no more. There was a jubilant crowd in front of the White House (I second Ilana Mercer's thoughts on how unseemly that was), and much rejoicing in the morning papers.

Whatever.

Don't get me wrong, I despise terrorists of any stripe, and oppose jihad on principle as well as in practice. But so many things about this takedown reek of stupidity, malice, or both, that I'm hard pressed to feel jubilant rather than contemptuous. First off, OBL was allegedly hiding in a compound right in the middle of a town housing the Pakistani high command and military academies - quite literally under the very nose of Empire's self-declared principal ally. Did the Pakistani military, intelligence and government know his whereabouts? If yes, that makes them liars; if not, hugely incompetent.

Then there is the whole circus of dumping his body into the sea, before any independent confirmation of his identity could be obtained. Supposedly, this was done to avoid making his grave a terrorist pilgrimage site (so why not bury him at the remote U.S. base of Diego Garcia, as Steve Sailer sensibly suggested?) and to honor Muslim religious sensibilities by giving Osama a quick burial. Except burials at sea offend those very sensibilities. Oops.

Anyway, Bin Laden is dead. That ought to mean that 9/11 is finally avenged. Outstanding news! But do you expect His Most Elevated Majesty Barack I the Blessed, Bringer of Hope and Change, to order the troops back from Afghanistan, and Iraq while at it, declare a victory and have a ticker-tape parade? Don't be silly.

Because, for all his demonstrable evil, Bin Laden was nothing more than a convenient excuse. The war was never about him, or his sad bunch of fanatical followers, or jihad, or terrorism in general. Bush the Lesser so much as admitted to it, years ago.

It has been about the Empire all along. About power. Which is why it cannot end. Not now. Not ever. Until the Empire self-destructs, anyway.

So don't you dare call this a victory. When this whole mess started, Bin Laden said exactly what he intended to do: involve America in numerous wars and make it bleed itself to death. He meant to win by losing. Well, didn't he?

I can almost hear him, cackling maniacally, all the way to Hell.

Good for the Windsors

2011-04-29T10:43:00.008-04:00

The extent to which the British royal wedding has provoked both gushing and loathing from the media and the public bears witness to the enduring power of royalty in human minds. These days, "democracy" is on everyone's lips as the universal shibboleth (though few could actually define it, if asked), but for the better part of history human societies have been governed by monarchs of some sort. Even Americans, who in the 1780s resuscitated Roman republicanism and later spread it throughout the world, tend to fawn over their leaders in a decidedly un-republican fashion. Remember the Obama inauguration?

Some of the hate for William and Kate is just humorous. I like Charles Stross as a writer, but his rabid anti-royalism is just outlandish. Yes, monarchies are "hereditary dictatorships", but that actually tends to make them less evil than the non-hereditary ones, and certainly more preferable to the revolving-door oligarchies that pass for republics these days.

I'm not so much a monarchist as someone who vastly prefers honest, organic statism to the totalitarian nanny-state democracies inevitably tend to produce. If you don't believe me, read Hoppe.

The philistines who complain about the cost of the royal wedding never seem to kvetch about the cost of killing people - be it in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya or elsewhere. I'm sure that, if they'd had a choice, the new Duke and Duchess of Cambridge would have preferred a small, private ceremony instead of a public performance. That's part of what most people don't bother thinking about: the life of a royal is circumscribed by duty and obligation.

In this particular case, a public ceremony may have been organized with more than just the newlyweds in mind. With Queen Elizabeth II close to matching Queen Victoria's record for the longest reign, and her son Charles so unpopular that crowning him might spell the end of British monarchy, odds are the Brits will be hailing King William V soon.

And who knows, maybe the Windsors' Serbian cousins might learn a lesson or three from the entire affair.

Injustice For All

2011-04-15T12:48:00.006-04:00

Something strange happened at the Hague Inquisition today. The faux court, styling itself the ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia) passed judgment on three Croatian generals, accused of atrocities during the 1995 campaign that obliterated the UN-guarded zones inhabited by ethnic Serbs. Two generals, Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markac, were sentenced to prison terms; the third, Ivan Cermak, was acquitted.

The strangeness was not in that the court more or less specifically established in order to persecute (not a typo) Serbs has actually convicted Serb-killers. That has happened a time or two before. Rather, Gotovina and Markac were convicted on grounds of belonging to a "joint criminal enterprise" (JCE) against the Serbs, led by Croatia's first president, the late Franjo Tudjman.

So far, that quasi-legal construction, developed specifically for the prosecution of Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, has been used solely to prosecute every Serb official that the Inquisition could get its hands on. While pointedly not interested in examining jus ad bellum questions, the Tribunal has nonetheless sought to delegitimize all Serb war efforts by blaming the Yugoslav wars on Milosevic's alleged - but never proven - conspiracy to create a "Greater Serbia." Meanwhile, other belligerents were put on trial infrequently, and then only for jus in bello infractions and always individually. So the use of the JCE against Croatians is a somewhat unexpected turn.

The generals' defense, like that of official Zagreb, has been two-pronged. On one hand there was the "logic" that Croatian troops could not have possible done anything illegal, since they were only acting in legitimate self-defense. (This is the sort of morality that runs rampant these days, where the deeds themselves do not matter, only the identity of the perpetrator.) On the other hand, faced with tapes and transcripts of Tudjman's orders to obliterate the Serbs, they argue that they were only doing Empire's bidding, and ought not be punished for it.

For it was Washington that coordinated the August 1995 operation (known as Oluja, or "Storm") with Tudjman and his generals, having trained and equipped the Croatian military through the "private contractor" MPRI. There are numerous testimonies about this, including one in Richard Holbrooke's memoir of his colleague Robert Frasure referring to the Croats as America's "junkyard dogs," about whose methods one ought not get "squeamish." Washington's Ambassador to Zagreb, Peter Galbraith, even said that the exodus of Serbs in 1995 could not be qualified as "ethnic cleansing," since ethnic cleansing was something only the Serbs committed!

Given that both ICTY and Croatia were instruments of Imperial policy, it was not unreasonable of Zagreb to expect never having to answer for its actions. The Empire is notorious for throwing its allies under the bus, though, once they've served their purpose...

It would be a mistake to believe that the Tribunal or the Empire have suddenly developed a case of caring about Serb suffering. At best, the judgment against the generals is a gambit to create the perception of impartiality, while continuing to pursue the "Greater Serbian conspiracy." Under the JCE, the accused is guilty of merely existing - i.e. holding a position of authority the Tribunal decides should have had control or even awareness of events - so the fact that one of the generals was acquitted strongly suggests the verdict was political. It is entirely possible that the other two will be acquitted in the appeals process (as was the case with Bosnian Muslim warlord Naser Oric).

None of this is helping the Croatians cope; they've been told for years that their side was virtuous, innocent and pure, their cause just and unimpeachable. This verdict plays havoc with their self-perception. It also threatens the current government, which has very little to show for two decades of independence, and prefers to hide behind the mask of patriotism (per Samuel Johnson).

Predictably, there has been very little solidarity among the Serbs for Croatia's situation (just as there never is any the other way 'round). But to cheer the Inquisition's persecution of someone else actually means validating its persecution of one's own, by recognizing the ICTY's dubious legitimacy. Namely, this ad hoc Tribunal is thoroughly illegal and illegitimate, having been established by the UN Security Council as an instrument of peacekeeping. The UNSC does not have judicial powers, and therefore cannot delegate any; the ICTY's legitimacy is a thinly stretched fiction, occasionally bolstered by displays of facetious even-handedness such as the Gotovina/Markac verdict.

Reaching for the Stars

2011-04-12T12:06:00.004-04:00

It was fifty years ago, on April 12, 1961, that Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin became the first human being to orbit the Earth.

Perhaps because the technology had reached its limits, or because what was found in space wasn't quite what we hoped, but for whatever reason, after the 1960s humanity turned inward. Can't say we're any better off for it.

For that one short stretch of time, we reached for the stars. Maybe we'll do so again some day.

On petards, and hoisting

2011-04-11T12:01:00.003-04:00

It was only a matter of time, really, before some other country responded to Washington's weaponization of human rights.

Yesterday, China issued its report on the "Human Rights Record of the United States in 2010" (full text in English). Some highlights:

"The United States reports the world's highest incidence of violent crimes, and its people's lives, properties and personal security are not duly protected.

... the violation of citizens' civil and political rights by the government is severe.

Wrongful conviction occurred quite often...

While advocating Internet freedom, the US in fact imposes fairly strict restriction on cyberspace.

...Americans' economic, social and cultural rights protection is going from bad to worse.

Racial discrimination, deep-seated in the United States, has permeated every aspect of social life.

Gender discrimination against women widely exists...

The United States has a notorious record of international human rights violations.

We hereby advise the US government to take concrete actions to improve its own human rights conditions, check and rectify its acts in the human rights field, and stop the hegemonistic deeds of using human rights issues to interfere in other countries' internal affairs."

Note that most of the data cited in the paper comes from the U.S. media. Ouch.

Empire's Favorite "Serb"

2011-03-25T10:51:00.004-04:00

One of the most polarizing politicians in Serbia today is the leader of the "Liberal Democratic Party" (which is neither liberal nor democratic) Cedomir Jovanovic (Chedomyr Yovanovich). He's never done a day of honest work, leaping from the ranks of student protesters in 1996 to spearhead the October 2000 coup, and then to serve Serbian PM Zoran Djindjic as liaison with mob bosses and warlords. Djindjic eventually threw him under the metaphorical bus, but Jovanovic resurfaced after Djindjic was shot, claiming to be the truest heir to his legacy. Other members of the Democratic Party thought otherwise, and Jovanovic left in a huff to form his own party.

The LDP has the support of about 6% of the electorate, but enjoys disproportionate influence in Serbia's mass media. He pretends to be a liberal democrat of the Obama kind, and his party supports multiculturalism, gay rights, "hate speech" laws - pretty much every "progressive" shibboleth instantly recognizable to most Americans. His party is also the most faithful supporter of every U.S. government policy directed against Serbia, from joining NATO to carving off an independent state of Kosovo.

So far, no one in the U.S. has cared that Jovanovic's mentor is Latinka Perovic, a former Communist culture commissar whom the Tito regime sacked back in the 1970s for an excess of zealotry in censorship. Or that his new-found best friend is Jovo Kapicic, a former executioner for the Communist secret police. Then again, the Empire loves old Communists, as long as they transfer their slavish devotion from the Marxist dialectic to the Imperial one.

But what is one to make of Jovanovic's most recent address in the Serbian parliament? At the March 22 session, while complaining that Foreign Minister Jeremic ought to immediately support the bombing of Libya (!), Jovanovic berated him for "having full understanding for meetings with some cannibals down in Africa" instead.

Jeremic had been meeting with the officials from Congo, part of his African campaign to counter Imperial pressure to recognize the "state of Kosovo". So does this mean everyone who dares disagree with the Empire on that is, in Jovanovic's mind, a "cannibal" and a worthless human being? Including, presumably, Emperor Obama's own kin in Kenya...

The worst thing about Jovanovic's racism is that it was so casual. He didn't think twice about it, busy as he was making the argument that Serbia, as a "victim of bombing itself," had a moral obligation to endorse the current bombing of Libya.

Back in 1999, however, neither Jovanovic nor his associates and backers in various "human rights" foundations and committees actually called the NATO bombing "victimhood" or "suffering". Oh no, they were busily applauding the attack on their own country and people, hoping that American bombs would propel them to power - as they ultimately did.

The Empire sure knows how to pick its favorites, doesn't it? At least he's not trafficking human organs, like some others .

History Repeated

2011-03-24T00:57:00.004-04:00

March 24, 1999 - March 24, 2011

Yesterday Yugoslavia.

Today Libya.

Tomorrow...?

Cracking the Poise

2011-03-19T13:14:00.004-04:00

Warren Christopher, former U.S. Secretary of State, passed away yesterday at the age of 85. According to the Washington Post obituary:

“Writers and commentators characterized him as dour, attentive to detail, patient, steady and poised, but rarely, if ever, charismatic. Clinton once joked that Mr. Christopher was “the only man ever to eat presidential M&Ms with a knife and fork.” No one was surprised when, on an official stopover in Ireland, he ordered Irish coffee, decaffeinated and without alcohol.”

Reading this, I thought I remembered something I'd read in Richard Holbrooke's memoirs, way back in 1999. So I dug through my ancient notes, and sure enough, there it was: the one time Christopher's poise cracked.

In Chapter 18 of “To End A War,” describing the 1995 peace talks in Dayton, Ohio, there is a point where the Americans' eagerness to help the “Bosnians" (Muslims) backfires. Having secured 55% percent of the territory for the Muslim-Croat Federation, they had to cede some land back to the Serbs, to conform to their own principle of splitting the country 51/49. In marathon talks lasting late into the night, Haris Silajdzic, Izetbegovic's foreign minister, ceded back some “worthless land” (Holbrooke's words) to the Serb Republic. It was 4 AM, and the deal seemed done. Except for one tiny little detail - all the land Silajdzic ceded was in Croat hands. When Tudjman's delegation saw the map, they went ballistic. Holbrooke describes the situation:

“Izetbegovic still had not said a word. I turned to him, fearing his response, ‘What do you think, Mr. President? Can we finish the negotiation right now?’
His answer sealed the long day. ‘I cannot accept this agreement,’ he said in a low voice, in English.
‘What did you say?’ Christopher asked, in astonishment.
More loudly: ‘I cannot accept this agreement.’”

The Americans were exasperated.

“'Do you think Izetbegovic even wants a deal? Carl [Bildt, Swedish diplomat] asked. It was a question that Warren Christopher had also been asking. ‘I’m never quite sure,’ I replied... Chris Hill, normally highly supportive of the Bosnians, exploded in momentary anger and frustration. ‘These people are impossible to help,’ he said. It was a telling statement from a man who had devoted years of his life to the search for ways to help create a Bosnian state.”(emphasis added)

The Serbs were willing to accept “rocks, swamps, hills – anything, as long as it gets us to 51-49.” Tudjman offered to contribute 75% of the retro-ceded land, but the Muslims had to give something.

“To our consternation, Izetbegovic refused to budge. While Silajdzic sat silent, Sacirbey argued that the Croat position was still unfair. And, to Christopher’s amazement, Izetbegovic began talking again about Brcko, Srebrenica and Zepa. We returned to my rooms, where Christopher expressed himself in unusually vivid terms on the performance we had just witnessed.”(emphasis added)

Stench of Hypocrisy

2011-03-17T22:56:00.001-04:00

On this day, seven years ago, Albanian mobs launched a pogrom throughout the occupied Serbian province of Kosovo - torching villages, destroying churches, and expelling tens of thousands of Serbs who had remained in the province following the NATO occupation in June 1999. With a few notable exceptions - the Czech contingent comes to mind - the NATO "peacekeepers" acted shamefully. Those that did not hide in their compounds "helped" by evacuating the Serbs from their villages, which were left to the Albanians for the torching.

Even as the pogrom raged, the Albanians' sponsors in Washington began a propaganda offensive in favor of making the occupied province an independent Albanian state. They created one four years later, after installing a pliant government in Belgrade, and even tortured language, logic and law to make it seem legitimate. When the Serbs were - falsely - accused of atrocities in Kosovo in 1999, NATO violated international law to intervene and occupy the province. When Albanians committed real atrocities, under NATO protection, in 2004 - they got rewarded with a state of their own.

Today, the UN Security Council authorized external involvement in the Libyan civil war - on the side of the anti-government rebels. Meanwhile, in Bahrain, the government has brought in foreign troops, banned all assembly, arrested all opposition leaders, and gunned down unarmed demonstrators demanding basic human rights. But Bahrain is a 5th Fleet base, and its government (as well as the Saudis who are doing the intervening) is an "ally". Once again, some people are more equal than others, and some atrocities are perfectly acceptable when done by "our friends."

Whatever moral high ground the Empire has claimed over the years, it is long gone. Only force from on high remains, and the rank stench of hypocrisy and murder.

Japan

2011-03-13T23:43:00.004-04:00

Please keep the people of Japan in your thoughts, as they strive to recover from Friday's devastating earthquake and the tidal wave that followed. If you are the praying kind, pray for those survivors lost at sea or under the rubble; those seeking to prevent the meltdown of nuclear power plants; and that the volcanic eruption on Kyushu island does not interfere with the rescue and salvage efforts.

The fragility of human accomplishment against the forces of nature should give us all a sense of perspective about our own lives, things that are really important, and things that may seem important - but are not.

Invictus

2011-03-11T12:37:00.003-05:00

"He was a statesman with a flaw. These people today, they are flaws without statesmanship."

- Brana Crncevic, poet, on Slobodan Milosevic (20 August 1941 – 11 March 2006)

The Short Victorious War

2011-03-09T11:55:00.001-05:00

More and more each day I think there might be something to Justin Raimondo's "bizarro world" theory - that this is actually a parallel universe, a parody of our own.

At moments it appears to be 1992 and not 2011, as John McCain and Joe Lieberman clamor for "arming the rebels" and call for sanctions and a no-fly zone. Only this time it is Libya, not Bosnia, in their sights.

As I argued last weekend, the creeping intervention in Bosnia in the 1990s was declared a brilliant success at the time, and that perception was trumpeted even more in the wake of fiascoes that were Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. The current Clinton Restoration government wants nothing more than to repair the Empire's shredded credibility, shaken not only by the futile wars but also the economic crisis and the "sandstorm" of revolts in northern Africa. So they are trying for a Bosnia scenario in Libya, with the usual suspects saying the usual things, while emotional Libyans go on CNN and beg for the Empire to "do something."

Much of modern warfare is perception management (though not all of it; at the end of the day it's still men with rifles that decide things, as the Empire had plenty of opportunities to learn, but somehow never did). The problem with the Empire being so good at it, though, is that after a while other people have begun to understand it as well. So, while a freelance reporter could spin Bosnia as seventeen different flavors of aggression and genocide before breakfast, today such a mission is a tad more difficult.

For example, RT reporters in Tripoli, who were trying to confirm CNN and Al-Jazeera reports of bombings and gunfire in Libya's capital, found none of it. Which begs the question how much of what we hear as "news" from Libya is actually accurate, and how much is the product of a Hearstian directive to furnish the pictures so the Empire could furnish the war?

RT had me as a guest on their evening news yesterday, talking about that particular topic. Even a casual observer can get a sense that everything that's being said and done about Libya these days has been said and done before, in other places, regarding other people. It sounds, reads and feels like a script. Probably because it is.

What business is that of the United States of America, or the European Union, that there seems to be a civil war in Libya? Egypt and Tunisia I could understand, on account of Ben Ali and Mubarak being recipients of American and European funding. Who rules Libya and how can be of concern to the EU only regarding the number of immigrant boatloads landing in Italy, and to the U.S. not at all. Unless having oil automatically makes a country an American "territory of interest"?

Another proof that we live in a bizarre universe is that Eric Margolis and I actually agree on something. When the Empire was targeting the Serbs, he was baying for blood. Only when those bombs and missiles were aimed at Muslims did he suddenly discover the virtues of non-interventionism. Whatever his reasons, though, he's right to argue against an intervention in Libya.

To most Americans, war is an abstraction. It is something that happens in faraway lands, and may require some people to sacrifice their children, but otherwise doesn't do a thing to interfere with anyone's everyday life. There hasn't really been a war on American soil since 1865. So the generals at the Pentagon move markers on maps, and the harpies at the State Department shriek about a military that needs to be used, and the kids that enlisted because McDonald's wasn't hiring push the buttons they are told to push, and foreigners die. Except when those foreigners fight back, and those very same kids end up without lives, arms, legs, or sanity. Not that the generals, the harpies and the vast majority of the country actually care.

For far too long, America's policymakers have lived in the parallel universe of managed perception, to the point where they've begun believing their own manufactured reality is the actual one. In their heads, there's nothing like a "short, victorious war" to cheer the country up, buoy the economy, and give the ruling party a boost at the polls. If they would bother to check the actual history, they would see that this scenario has never worked, for anyone who tried it. But they don't. And so they prepare to go to the shores of Tripoli, unaware that their own Empire is unraveling so quickly that all it needs to collapse completely is just a little push. Which going into Libya just might be.

The Bonfire of the Hypocrisies

2011-03-07T15:44:00.004-05:00

(with apologies to Tom Wolfe)

Many a time in the recent past have I thought to myself that we are living in the world mocked in the 1987 movie "The Running Man" (adapted from a Stephen King novel, no less). We're not quite at the point where executions have become game shows, but judging by the standards of "reality" programming, we're arguably not far off.

Another argument that we live in a world gone completely mad is the sight of the American public piling onto Mr. Carlos Estevez, a.k.a. Charlie Sheen, for daring to be himself.

Writes Anthony Gregory (LRC):

There is something rotten in our mass culture. It is the stench of an establishment that pushes a flavor of social progressivism upon the country while reserving the right to burn social heretics at the stake on even the most hypocritical of pretenses.

And it is against this establishment’s witchhunt and all its nefarious social consequences that a defense must be waged. Most certainly, it can be argued that Sheen has not acted virtuously. But the attacks on him have clearly been more distasteful, more pathetic, more indicative of a society in decline, than his own behavior. For the crimes of drug use, sexual deviance, and political incorrectness, a great talent has been thrown under the bus by a drug addled, sexually deviant, socially insensitive, politically clueless mass media and liberal culture. They have eaten one of their own. It has happened many times before, to Robert Downey, Jr., Britney Spears, Tiger Woods, and now Christina Aguilera. And it will happen again. And if even the most handsomely paid actor on TV is helpless against the official pop culture’s hypocritical lynch mob, what hope do any of us little people have should the mob decide we too deserve to be lynched?

And check out Ilana Mercer's great write-ups on the subject, here and here.

Meanwhile, Bradley Manning is stripped naked by his captors, while the government tormenting him thus preaches "human rights" to the world.

O tempora o mores.

Seeking the Death of Hope

2011-03-04T00:55:00.004-05:00

In April last year, I wrote about "Serbian Film" - a feature filled with such horrific violence that it merited the classification of "snuff." In that essay, I argued that the first-time director and producer Srdjan Spasojevic had made an intrinsically Serb-hating movie.

Now, I haven't actually seen the film myself; judging by the descriptions from critics, I don't particularly want to. One reader, however, offered a different reading on the film and wished to share it. Given that his comments ran a bit long, and I generally don't approve comments on posts that old, I've agreed to post them here, in their entirety (I've made only the minimal grammatical adjustments) So, let's follow our intrepid yet nameless reviewer into the dark underworld of "Serbian Film":

How are we sure what Spasojevic's message really is? See my analysis below. I would like to hear your thoughts.

Let's start with the contract at the beginning of the film:
Milos says "But I don't know what I am signing."
Vukmir says "You are not supposed to know. If you know you will not be so good."

The contract represents the deal made with the western powers, at that time 10 years ago, in exchange for promises of a better life, a better standard of living.

When Vukmir says "You are not supposed to know. If you know you will not be so good," the meaning is, "If you knew, you would not be obedient to your western masters."

Here Vukmir represents the western powers, the EU, the USA, the architects, the "Directors" of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia with the goal of economic exploitation of the region. This is not a viewpoint exclusive to Spasojevic .See for example the documentary "Weight of Chains." Milos represents the Serbian government.

Vukmir : "There is a serious script. We know it, you don't." i.e. the west's actions are not just an accident but a carefully planned script.

Vukmir shakes hands with Milos and says, "The right hand is the sex center in any man. It's a direct line between your brain and c***." [redaction in the original]
If you know the difference between Rightist and Leftist politics , you will see that this is a sarcastic jab against the Right.

"Only filmed here, but for the foreign market" is referencing that the Serbs are economic slaves of the western powers. For example, Serbian industry and assets are being sold off to foreign investors and corporations, in essence making Serbs employees of foreign corporations.

Vukmir says "You could always make your d*** stand up like a c*** at dawn" . This is making fun of all the sucking up to the west that the Serbian government is doing.

Laylah says to Milos, "The problem with that pension is that it's not lifelong. How much do you have stashed?" This is referring to mundane issues about low pensions and how the privileged have good pensions.

The white rabbit : this is just saying that the promises made to the Serbian government by the west is a fantasy, a fake. When the guy puts the rabbit to his crotch , the director is telling you what he thinks of those promises.

The thing about how Milos looks Swedish: This is trying to say that the Serbian government is not one of us, they are foreigners, in cahoots with foreign governments.

Vukmir says: "Do you know what is proof that there is art in pornography? You , Milos. Your sense of handling a woman, your rhythm of exhausting her, your talent to humiliate her, and then, when she is reduced to dog-s*** , to win her back."

More biting sarcasm. This is saying you exhausted NATO, humiliated NATO (shot down [F-117] stealth, minimal damage to Serbian equipment etc.) but later you just let her back in.

Milos says "I dunno, I'm a little tired of cameras and f******." This one is obviously about the civil wars. Cameras are referring to the world news cameras.

Vukmir : "You're also tired of h****** scum any time your family needs dough. Kissing some wretched c**** with the same lips you kiss your kid."

This one is about the Serbian government asking for monetary assistance from the foreign governments (the scum). What kind of h****** ? Western politician says to [the] Serbian politician, "Here is some money under the table. Now you arrange to sell us this company for cheap." You should be able to see now that pornography here is a metaphor for the relationship between the Serbian government and the western governments.

Milos to his wife: "No, he's some kind of artist with a grand plan ... seems like he desperately needs me since he's willing to offer such cash." Sarcasm about how the western governments are waving the carrot in front of the Serbian government .

Marko: "It's not a d*** , it's a police stick ... why isn't he ... limp , like all the normal people." Spasojevic considers the current government a fascist police state.

Vukmir: "Transmitted live to the world who has lost all that and now is paying to watch that from the comfort of an armchair ... Victim sells." Referring to world media manipulation of the wars.

Vukmir's rants. "This whole country is a bunch of kids discarded by their parents." The people have been abandoned by their government (hence the orphanage setting); the government is busy looking after their own privileges and wheeling and dealings. One frequent complaint you will hear in Serbia is that there is no law.

Let's agree, for the sake of argument, that this analysis is correct. That Spasojevic's snuff script really does work on the level our reviewer claims. First of all, if this is actually the case, then the meaning is buried so deep that very few will ever manage to get past the violence and depravity to see it. If he wanted to make an allegory, he could have done it much more openly. Serbia today may be ruled by a corrupt, quisling regime, but no one has banned allegories yet. For that matter, why not just adapt Kocic's "Trial of a Badger", since that would have been much cheaper and easier?

Secondly, the nihilistic framework in which Spasojevic operates is all too similar to most other films made in Serbia, often with state money. I can understand filmmakers who want a posh Hollywood life being frustrated by Serbia's current predicament. All too often, their bitterness comes out as wallowing in nihilism, caricatured violence and rants at the general populace for failing to be good enough to appreciate their greatness.

It doesn't take a genius to understand that such behavior may be therapeutic for the person in question at the moment, but is ultimately self-destructive for him, and everyone around him, in the longer term. One of the biggest blunders of current Serbian filmmakers, in my admittedly non-expert opinion, is the belief that their audience is worthless. Either they believe, like the yellowcrats and their NGO spear-carriers, that the people are primitive, stupid, uncouth and in need of "getting culture," or they think the populace is too passive, and needs to be exposed to an extreme version of misery in order to be goaded into action.

What they don't seem to understand is that the people have seen misery aplenty. Having lived through war, deprivation, demonization, depredation and despair, they are not easy to shock. Nor is causing shock the right approach, under the circumstances. What they crave, what they need to awaken the spirit of resistance that everyone has been trying to snuff out for years - what they thirst for, more than a dying man in the deep desert thirsts for water - is hope. They aren't looking for a superhero to save the day, or God's Hand of Justice to descend from the Heavens to smite the sinners; but they would like to see someone not reduced to evil by the cruelties of life, just once. Because seeing life grind people to dust got really old years ago. Somehow, though, the filmmakers never got that memo. Perhaps because there are few movie theaters left in Serbia, and there is no real connection between the filmmakers and their audience anymore?

Now, our movie-reviewing friend here has made a compelling argument that Spasojevic may have tried to represent the current situation through an extreme metaphor. If we accept this, though, if we say that that his snuff film is actually meant as a representation of Serbia's destruction at the hands of the Empire, there is one colossal problem with it: in the end, the Empire wins.

To say that "Serbian Film" doesn't promote hope is an understatement comparable only with the degree of hyperbole with which it allegedly represents Serbia's current situation. That film crushes hope, seeks to destroy any last shred of it, and leave nothing in its wake but the darkest despair. It doesn't seek to stir the viewer to resistance against the world it portrays, but to persuade the said viewer that any and all resistance is futile, to the point where even death does not bring relief. If "Serbian Film" is a metaphor, then it is not merely a Serb-hating movie, it is a movie that just hates all humanity in general.

So, really, it would be much better for Spasojevic if his film didn't work the way our reviewer described. That way, it could be considered merely a piece of nihilistic lartpourlartisme, a perverted dark fantasy that tries to ride the rear fender of the Serbophobic bandwagon and make its creator a buck or two. All that would be forgivable.

Trying to kill hope in a people that desperately need it, isn't.

Jihad in Frankfurt

2011-03-02T15:00:00.003-05:00

Time and again it happens. Someone opens fire on a bus of soldiers, or targets fellow soldiers on a military base, or shoots up a mall or a recruiting office. Yells "Allahu akbar!" as he does it. And then the Imperial propaganda apparatus musters all its considerable resources to not report the identity of the murderer, deny that his actions could have had anything to do with jihad or Islam, or even not report the event at all.

Why is this? Why is the Empire so hell-bent on denying the existence of jihad? They have no problem playing up the inept shoe bombers, baby-bottle bombers and underwear bombers, whose mad plots never come anywhere close to actually hurting anyone. But when jihadist gunmen actually kill Americans, whether in Salt Lake City, Arkansas or Frankfurt, the Empire goes to great lengths to direct the public's attention elsewhere.

Perhaps it's a power thing. News of airline threats can be used to empower the strip-searching government goons. There is nothing to be gained politically from the American people realizing they can be shot anytime, anyplace.

And then there is another consideration: the said jihadist gunmen may belong to the "wrong" group, designated by the propaganda apparatus as righteous victims that cannot possibly be blamed for anything, including terrorism. There is no way to explain how the U.S. "shares values" with organ-trafficking, drug-dealing slavers and terrorists. So it isn't explained. Facts don't fit the narrative, so if they can't be spun to make them fit, they are ignored or / worse yet - suppressed. No jihad here, move along.

Until next time.

A Beam In Their Eye

2011-02-28T20:07:00.006-05:00

Last Thursday evening, February 24, Canadian authorities denied entry to Dr. Srdja Trifkovic and prevented him from giving a scheduled lecture at UBC.

Claiming credit was the ecstatic Emir Ramic, of the aptly named "Institute for [the Research of] Genocide" (read their URL to understand the irony). Ramic's Institute doesn't actually research genocide as such; it is only interested in one specific "genocide" - the one alleged to have taken place in Srebrenica, in July 1995. The Institute denounces as "genocide deniers" anyone who dares discuss the facts of Srebrenica, rather than blindly accepting the myth they are pushing.

By insisting on qualifying those events as genocide, they are stretching the definition of the term to the point of absurdity, and effectively engaging in denial of the actual genocides, from the Turkish mass murder of Armenians in WW1 (which inspired Hitler to believe he could act with impunity) to the Croat butchery of Serbs in WW2, and the Nazi genocide of Jews, Slavs and Roma in the death camps of eastern Europe. In fact, the most aggressively outspoken proponent of the "Srebrenica genocide" thesis is also the outspoken denier of Croat Ustasha atrocities.

People in glass houses really oughtn't throw stones for a living. It turns out that Ramic is on the editorial board of a Bosnian Muslim war veterans' magazine, Korak - and the magazine's editor-in-chief is on the board of Ramic's Institute - which routinely publishes militant jihad propaganda. And in his spare time, Ramic also engages in libelous attacks on honorable Canadian soldiers. This, then, is the sort of person the Canadian government takes its cues from, when it comes to deciding who may and who may not enter the country?

Earlier today, the Edmonton Journal published a particularly facetious attack on Dr. Trifkovic by one Srdja Pavlovic, lecturer at the University of Alberta. Asserting that "denying genocide" should not be called freedom of speech, Pavlovic claims that "One should, of course, have the right to one's own opinion but not the right to one's own facts."

That's a brave thing to say for one whose sole claim to historical scholarship is a vile pamphlet equating the Serbs with Nazis.

Pavlovic also has the gall to claim that:

"Trifkovic and his supporters do not want to have a dialogue. As any nationalist would do, they see their version of the past as true and valid, and demand that others believe it, too. While calling for a dialogue they shout at their critics, rather than talk to them and then have the audacity to call such shouting the expression of the freedom of speech."

The hypocrisy is simply stunning. This is precisely what a legion of professional Srebrenica advocates, and Pavlovic himself, are doing - yet he accuses Trifkovic of it!

Proponents of the claim that Srebrenica was a genocide have engaged in much more than "shouting" : character assassination, libel, defamation, lawfare and now outright repression. They never even bother to present any actual facts in support of their claim, preferring instead to cite ICTY verdicts - a situation anyone acquainted with logic ought to recognize as the fallacy of Appeal to Authority.

That certain parties in Bosnia have by this point resorted to bringing up Srebrenica for the purpose of jockeying for political power indicates that they really don't give a damn about the people who lived and died there.

If they truly believed their claim was the objective truth, as they so shrilly insist, they would not be so afraid to debate it, or subject it to cross-examination. How dare those who have repeatedly shown they don't accept anything but unconditional obedience talk about discussion and debate?

All of this suggests that Srebrenica was declared a "genocide" for that very reason - to silence any discussion of the Bosnian War with the charge of "genocide denial."

Any society that allows them to do this cannot truly call itself free.

Character Assassination, Part 2

2011-02-23T14:20:00.004-05:00

Back in 2009, I first took notice of the "Srebrenica Genocide Blog," and later outed it as the outfit behind the propaganda project called "Palluxo." They responded with a vicious campaign of character assassination, using link farms and fake feeds to Google-bomb my name.

Their favorite "official academic", Marko Attilla Hoare chimed in, mocking me as a "romantic nationalist" (thank you for the compliment! - and no, I won't link to his blog, either). On his own blog, Hoare says that "some or all" of the labels used to describe him: "neoconservative, Trotskyite and Croat nationalist and a supporter of Islamism and Western imperialism", depending on definition, "may be accurate."
[edited for clarity: the labels are invoked by Hoare to describe himself, not me]

In March 2010, they tried again, declaring an essay I had written here to be an incendiary comment I'd left on SGB (as if!). I documented the lie.

Last year, the Congress of North American Bosniaks and something calling itself "Institute for Genocide Research" lobbied in Ottawa to get a Canadian parliamentary resolution recognizing the "Srebrenica genocide." I wrote against such a foolish decision, but it ended up passing on the sly in September. In December, the "Institute" re-published a libelous attack against Major-General (ret.) Lewis MacKenzie, accusing him of raping Muslim women during the war in Bosnia. And just last week, they launched an effort to prevent Srdja Trifkovic from speaking at UBC in Vancouver (British Columbia). For more about that sordid affair, I recommend the essay by Ambassador James Bissett, over at the Lord Byron Foundation.

Today, I got word that TV1, a TV station in Bosnia, ran a "news report" about my alleged "genocide denial" right after the headline news on the crisis in Libya. They used my clips from RT interviews, and images of my articles, but their accusations against me were taken straight from Hoare and the SGB. That leaves no doubt in my mind who was behind this character assassination. (TV1 is a relatively new station; set up last year by "Sanela Diane Jenkins" of the Ganic affair fame.)

Now, if it were just another attempt to libel and slander me, I'd be perfectly happy to denounce it here and expose its authors as liars and scoundrels. America still legally guarantees freedom of speech, and we're on equal footing here. However, the attackers were merely using me to get at my family, which still lives in Bosnia. My mother is an official of the Social Democratic Party, and currently chairs the parliament of Canton Sarajevo. It is the SDP, and my mother, that are the real targets of this smearbund.

Let me repeat here: They went after my family.

Think about this for a second. Even if my mother and I share the same politics (which we do not), how would she be responsible in the slightest for what I think or do, having lived nearly half my life halfway across the world? What sort of Dark Age values motivate TV1, that they impugn my mother's politics because of what a grown son of hers thinks or does?

They went after my family.

They didn't go after me, on the (still, relatively) level and fair playing field of the USA, where free speech is still in the Constitution and there are still certain rules of conduct and debate. They ran a hit piece on me on a TV channel in Bosnia, without ever calling for comment, without offering me any recourse or opportunity for rebuttal. If they take issue with things I've said or done, they ought to take that up with me. Instead, they went after my family.

Particularly disgusting is the fact that this is part of an intra-Muslim political conflict, between the SDP (whose membership is mostly Muslim) and former governing Muslim parties, or those that aspire to govern but - unlike the SDP - never got enough of those pesky votes in those pesky democratic elections. Yet who is the target of the anti-SDP campaign? An ethnic Serb.

Well, my American readers, this is the kind of Bosnia your government created and has nurtured for the past 15 years. This is the kind of "freedom of speech" that exists there, the kind of "tolerance" and "multiethnicity" and "democracy." I hope you're proud of it.

As for the smearbund, I have a simple message:

You went after my family. I will end you.

Still Smearing the Serbs

2011-02-10T13:06:00.005-05:00

As I predicted last month, the Hashim Thaci Defense League has come out swinging, trying to discredit the Marty report as "Serb propaganda" aimed at "smearing Kosova." One good example is Dennis McShane (a Serbophobic former Labour official), writing in the War Street Journal this Tuesday, but the full extent of Empire's efforts to cover up their KLA monster can be found in Julia Gorin's excellently researched expose.

Note that the common strand in all arguments in favor of Thaci, the KLA and their "independent state" is the call for "evidence" to back up Marty's report. This is very important. These very people telling you today that everyone is innocent until proven guilty, and that we shouldn't judge an entire nation based on allegations without evidence? They are the ones who have, for the past two decades, done precisely that: leveled outlandish allegations against an entire nation, without a shred of evidence - worse yet, with actual evidence running counter to their claims! But you see, the nation we should not judge are the Albanians (specifically, the made-up "Kosovars") and the nation we've become used to instinctively condemning against all the evidence to the contrary are the Serbs - so that's perfectly all right, then.

As if on cue, an example appears. There are many objectionable things in Newsweek's "Deposed Despots" feature, posted on Monday. I don't have time or inclination to go into all of them. Of the eleven "dictators" they list, only two were not clients of the Empire. Actually, I'm not so sure about Romania's Ceausescu. The one whose mention is the occasion for this post, of course, is Slobodan Milosevic.

Here's Newsweek's description:

This genocidaire brought horror to ’90s Europe and died while on trial for war crimes. After the fall of the “Butcher of the Balkans,” Serbia remains a hotbed of organized crime, and Kosovo’s independence sparked violent protests. But at least the mass ethnic slayings are gone.

Ah yes, the old Big Lie about the 1990s wars being Milosevic's fault. They weren't. There are confessions by Croat and Muslim leaders proving it, and memoirs of US officials who wanted to "give war a chance." That Milosevic is to blame for everything is an article of propaganda-induced faith; once you start looking for evidence for it, there simply isn't any. That is the problem the Hague Inquisition (a.k.a the ICTY) ran into when they put Milosevic in the dock. After almost 300 witnesses, they had no case. Milosevic's death, under suspicious circumstances, saved the ICTY the embarrassment of having to convict against facts - though that hasn't stopped them before, or since.

There was no genocide. The 2007 decision by the ICJ - an institution hardly biased towards the Serbs - rejected all the Bosnian Muslim claims to that extent, noting only that the events of July 1995 were categorized as genocide by the ICTY (a definition that insults elementary logic, as explained elsewhere).

It was the British tabloids that labeled Milosevic the "Butcher of the Balkans." With the details of KLA's butchery of captives to sell their body parts to rich Westerners beginning to emerge, it is becoming clear that Hashim Thaci is far more deserving of the moniker.

The declaration of independence by the Albanian provisional government in occupied Kosovo, three years ago, did actually spark protests. They were by and large peaceful - much more than the ones in Egypt, for example - but the propaganda machine seized on several smashed shop windows and an attempt to set the US embassy on fire. I actually do think that's the Serbs' own fault: they should have called it an "unfortunate accident," and claimed they really wanted to burn the Albanian embassy, but couldn't find it on the map. Hey, it worked for NATO when it bombed the Chinese embassy in 1999...

As a matter of fact, I agree that Serbia is a hotbed of organized crime: the current government, installed by Washington and Brussels, is the foremost criminal organization in the country. But I doubt that's what Newsweek had in mind. Conventional crime, then? Again, Serbia can't hold a candle to the "freedom fighters" in its occupied province of Kosovaristan.

"At least the mass ethnic slayings are gone"? Tell that to the Serbs remaining in today's independent Croatia, or the Bosnian Muslim-Croat Federation, or "independent" Kosovo (where you can also check on the Roma, Jews and Gorani). If you can find any.

Newsweek's treatment of Milosevic actually fits Thaci more. But we can't have that, oh no. That would be smearing, and might just offend Dennis McShane. Every single claim made in the one-paragraph, drive-by character assassination is either completely false, or true in a sense Newsweek's reporter absolutely did not intend it to be.

It is amazing that in this world, where "progressives" of all stripes have declared tolerance, diversity and inoffensiveness to be the highest virtues, it is not only allowed to be hateful, and offensive towards the Serbs, it is expected as proof of one's political correctness. The Newsweeks and McShanes of this world see nothing wrong with demanding evidence when their ox is being gored, but inventing or ignoring it when they wish to smear someone else.
That's actually a bigger problem for them, and their countries and societies, than it is for the Serbs, who are used to such treatment by now and don't give a damn.

For all the faults and flaws he had, Slobodan Milosevic was a democratically elected president, who has done more for peace in the Balkans than any of the "democrats" in the surrounding client-states of the Empire. However, his insistence that he, his country, and his people would not be anyone's servants earned him Empire's enmity and endless demonization of the kind described and dissected above.

At least he is still treated with more respect and dignity than Saddam Hussein - who, interestingly enough, didn't make Newsweek's list, even though he was supposedly so evil that the U.S. absolutely had to invade Iraq and have him executed. Go figure.

Democracy, Egypt and Empire

2011-02-01T13:41:00.006-05:00

As I pointed out in the most recent Antiwar.com piece, the West has been the principal nemesis of democracy in the XX century, even as the U.S. elevated it into a veritable religion. The EU doesn't mouth off about democracy as much, and prefers bureaucratic repression to military one, but at the end of the day. the distinction hardly matters to those "democratized" by either.

Then there is the matter of "color revolutions," starting with the October 2000 coup in Serbia that established the template for them. By now, every time there is a "democratic popular uprising" somewhere, the first question on many minds is whether the Empire is really behind it.

I've heard such a question raised about Tunisia and Egypt over the past couple weeks. While I've seen some flags inspired by the CIA-trained and NED-funded "Otpor"movement in Serbia, and heard that some of the protest organizers were similarly trained, I still doubt the Empire was behind this deliberately. Both Ben Ali and Mubarak have been Imperial stooges for years; what possible reason could there be for getting rid of them, and in such a fashion besides?

Therefore, I am inclined to believe that the Tunisian revolt at least was quite spontaneous, and if Egypt may have been given a little push, that doesn't make the revolution there any less authentic. One Serbian journalist described the protesters as "hungry for freedom but fed up with Empire." That might be a projection of his wishes for Serbia - but it sounds about right nonetheless.

H.L. Mencken once wrote that "democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." I think we're about to see this demonstrated firsthand.

The protesters in Tunisia and Egypt claim to want democracy and freedom. If the Empire truly wants to help them (ha!) it will stay away. But the Empire cannot go against its nature. For all that he proclaims that the "people of Egypt" will decide their future, the Emperor follows that with a list of what "must" happen. How very democratic of you, Mr. Hussein.

For all its verbal commitment to freedom and democracy (as long as they get to define what both those words mean in practice, anyway), the Imperial establishment is running scared. They know all too well that in turbulent times, those with determination and clarity of vision come out ahead. Right now, the revolutionaries know what they don't want - Ben Ali and Mubarak, and their cronies - but it is people like the Muslim Brotherhood and Rachid Ganouchi who know what they do want, and are waiting in the wings to seize it. And there isn't much the Empire can do to stop them.

What if Islamic regimes do take over? It will be a pity for those Egyptians and Tunisians who didn't want that to happen, for one, but will it really be a disaster for the Empire? I mean, it will free up all that foreign aid that went to Cairo and Tunis for decades. And hasn't the current Emperor, like his predecessor, gone on about how the Empire isn't at war with Islam or the Muslims? So what's the problem, exactly?

Well, there is the whole matter of the Muslim Brotherhood wanting to wipe Israel off the map. Honestly, though, the Israeli military has soundly beaten the Egyptians in conventional wars four times in the past 63 years. The fastest way for that expensive US hardware in Egyptian hands to turn into a heap of scrap metal is for a hypothetical Brotherhood regime to attempt an attack on Israel.

Camp David made Israelis believe that trading land for peace was a real possibility. It also shifted the Arab-Israeli conflict from the realm of interstate conventional warfare (in which Israel excelled) to that of a low-intensity insurrection conducted by sub-state actors (the intifada, Hamas, Hezbollah), where Israel has fared much worse. So the possibility of a hostile, Islamic Egypt shouldn't really induce histrionics among the partisans of Israel, the way it seems to be doing.

If anything, given the importance of the Suez route for its possibilities of trading with Europe (in light of the recent acquisitions of Greek ports), it is China that ought to be concerned about the future of Egypt and its relationship with Israel. Yet we don't hear much fretting from Beijing.

From a historical perspective, odds are the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt will propel to power a more radical and violent regime (see Cromwell in England, the Jacobins in France, the Bolsheviks in Russia...). The silver lining would be the demise of the pernicious illusion - promoted by the Empire - that democracy means freedom (it doesn't; they are just about mutually exclusive, actually), and that everyone around the world should aspire to it. That may well be too much to ask, though. And besides - we should be careful what we wish for. We might just get it, good and hard.

Blind Spot

2011-01-29T14:59:00.001-05:00

Reading James Bovard's review of Derek Leebaert's "Magic and Mayhem: The Delusions of American Foreign Policy From Korea to Afghanistan," I am struck by how persistently the Balkans shows up as a blind spot for critics of the U.S. foreign policy.

Leebaert puts together an interesting read about how arrogance and ignorance have led the policymakers down disastrous paths, yet he offers the 1999 Kosovo war as a contrasting example of success! Bovard disagrees, and it is worth quoting him at length:

Leebaert actually understates the U.S. debacle rate abroad. He hails the American-led NATO bombing of Serbia: “The 1999 eleven weeks’ war over Kosovo was undertaken by a coalition of Western governments, preceded by two months of negotiation that legitimized and clarified its objectives, then followed by a UN peacekeeping mission. The presence of overwhelming backup forces nearby as well as American military leadership resting on political good sense and seasoned diplomacy further increased the chances of success.”

What success? After NATO planes killed hundreds if not thousands of Serb and ethnic Albanian civilians, Bill Clinton could pirouette as a savior. Once the bombing ended, many of the Serbs remaining in Kosovo were slaughtered and their churches burned to the ground. NATO’s “peace” produced a quarter-million Serbian, Jewish, and Gypsy refugees. At least the Serbs were not murdering people for their body parts, as the Council of Europe recently accused the Kosovo Liberation Army of doing to Serb prisoners in recent years. (“When the transplant surgeons were confirmed to be in position and ready to operate, the [Serbian] captives were … summarily executed by a KLA gunman, and their corpses transported swiftly to the operating clinic,” where their kidneys were harvested for sale.)

Perhaps even worse, Clinton’s unprovoked attack on Serbia set a precedent for “humanitarian” warring that was invoked by supporters of Bush’s unprovoked attack on Iraq.

That the Serbs were vicious, genocidal fascist aggressors who could have only been stopped by an American intervention - details such as law and truth be damned - is an article of faith in the U.S. mainstream, and it is not often someone like Bovard dares to defy it. It takes a lot of courage to go against the self-appointed guardians of Official Truth.

Saakashvili's Agenda

2011-01-27T14:23:00.004-05:00

A suicide attack on a crowd at a public place, Monday's bombing of the Domodedovo airport had all the trademarks of a jihadist operation. Several comments on my essay about it, however, cautioned that one had to make a distinction between actual jihadists, and terrorists in the service of Empire.

Then Prime Minister Putin made a enigmatic statement yesterday that the attack was not connected to Chechnya. Were the terrorists, as the Russophobic Washington Post speculated, from Ingushetia or Dagestan instead? Could it have been, as Lilia Shevtsova of Carnegie's Moscow office speculated for the WaPo the other day, a "Russian nationalist"? (Shevtsova seems like a Russian analogue of Serbia's Sonja Biserko and Natasa Kandic, so I didn't take her seriously.)

Enter Mikhail Saakashvili, the tie-chewing American satrap of Georgia, gloating over the attack and calling it "payback" for the August 2008 humiliation Moscow's border garrison inflicted on his NATO-trained military.

Yet from his remarks to the The Independent, it seems Saakashvili was just enjoying the opportunity to stick it to Moscow, rather than claiming responsibility for the attack or knowing who was behind it. Crass, sure. But even a bumbling idiot such as Saakashvili ought to know that offering oneself up as a possible perpetrator of a terrorist attack against Russia - or cheering the terrorists on, for that matter - is pure idiocy. Especially since Putin told him that Moscow would "crush" the terrorists "like cockroaches."

So, what is he trying to accomplish, then?

Terrorism and Jihad

2011-01-25T12:33:00.006-05:00

As I was waiting in the RT studio this morning, to comment on the PACE considerations of the Marty report (which ended up being adopted, by an overwhelming majority vote), I heard about a poll they were conducting in the aftermath of the Domodedovo Airport bombing. Something like 60% of the respondents said they did not believe terrorism could be defeated.

They are right. Because, you see, terrorism can't be defeated. But terrorists can.

The purpose of terrorism is to effect coercion through instilling fear (Latin: terror). Governments routinely use coercion, and particularly bad ones believe that the only reason people obey laws is the fear of consequences (oderint dum metuant and all). How is that not terrorism? Well, there's an element of hypocrisy involved, to be sure. Just as printing money at home is a felony, but when the Federal Reserve does it it's called "quantitative easing."

There is one distinction, I suppose. Very few governments resort to arbitrary arrests and executions (and once they do, they usually aren't around for long thereafter). Terrorists kill randomly. By doing so, they don't just challenge government's monopoly of force, but strike at the very heart of a government's existence. The primary purpose of a state, you'll recall, is to provide security. This is why governments the world over have a rule not to negotiate with terrorists. If they do, they undermine their own raison d'etre.

Of course, if the terrorists are fighting for something that the government can afford to give up, accommodation eventually happens. And let's not forget that in today's world, you're only a terrorist if you dare attack the "good guys" (i.e. us). If you are bombing, killing or maiming "them" (i.e. others, the designated enemy), you become a "guerrilla" or "rebel" or "freedom fighter." If you secure support of a powerful state, you can even carve out a state of your own, declare yourself prime minister or president, and make quite a comfortable living practicing criminal activities with impunity.

Though nothing has been confirmed just yet, the prime suspects in the bombing of Domodedovo airport yesterday are members of a jihadist organization from the north Caucasus. Russophobes of all stripes will no doubt suggest that the best course for Moscow would be to withdraw from the area. These are the same people who would never contemplate, much less condone, American withdrawal from Iraq or Afghanistan - even though these are countries half the world away that Washington chose to invade, while Chechnya is part of Russia's own territory.

They also ignore the fact that Moscow actually did leave the Chechens alone. Russian troops retreated from the region in 1996, leaving it at the mercy of jihadists. Did they settle down and build a peaceful, prosperous nation? No - they made Chechnya into a black hole of jihadist banditry, and began invading the surrounding areas.

If the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing humanity he did not exist, then the greatest service Bush the Lesser ever did to the Prince of Lies was invading Iraq. By doing so, he helped create a perception that there was no such thing as jihad, and that the principal dynamo of Muslim grievance was the occupation. Yes, it plays a part. And so does the existence of Israel (the "occupation of Palestine" actually refers not to the territories taken in 1967 from Jordan and Egypt - but to the existence of Israel, period). But where was Israel in 1453, when Mehmet II sacked Constantinople? Where was "Crusader aggression" in 732, when Charles Martel stopped the Muslims at Tours? That, by the way, is in France - a long way from Arabia.

We're looking at two different things here, then. One is the imperial impulse in Washington (or London before that), which results in murderous overseas adventures and the backlash they inspire. The other is the commandment to the followers of Mohammed's teachings to spread the faith by fire and sword and slay the infidel wherever they find them. Many people ignore one of these aspects, trying to explain the world strictly through the prism of the other. That's a mistake.

This is why Afghanistan is not Kosovo, and why Chechnya is not Iraq. Picking a fight halfway around the world is not the same as having to defend your own life, at your own doorstep. Of course, in the world according to Emperors on the Potomac, the latter is a crime and the former is statesmanship.

In the ensuing confusion, jihad advances.

TANJUG or TANK?

2011-01-13T13:41:00.004-05:00

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...

A Year of Revelations

2010-12-31T08:00:00.003-05:00

It's become an annual tradition to reserve the last Antiwar.com article in December for a look back at the year that has passed. At least as far as the former Yugoslav lands are concerned, 2010 has not been a year of great upheavals - but it has been a year of revelations.

Many suspicions about the Empire have been confirmed by diplomatic dispatches published by Wikileaks. Those cables also confirmed many more suspicions - and introduced new ones - about the quisling regime in Belgrade. And of course, the mid-December Marty report to PACE exposed the mafia hellhole of Boss Snake, also known as the "Independent State of Kosovo" (ISK).

It is both entertaining and ghastly to watch as legions of Imperial and EU busybodies try to scrub off the stench of being "friends" with butchers. With even the Belgrade quislings helping, I would not be surprised if nothing much came of the entire affair. Being the Empire means never having to say you're sorry. Until it is far too late to do any good, anyway.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. In 2010, the world has gained a lot of knowledge about the way Imperial "reality" really works. And it's not pretty. The question now is what, if anything, will be done with that knowledge. That's where 2011 comes in.

Cheers!

Shared Values

2010-12-17T13:49:00.003-05:00

Russia Today has posted the clip from my live appearance on Wednesday morning, discussing the Council of Europe report about the organ-harvesting mafia in occupied Kosovo calling itself the government. Basically, Swiss rapporteur Dick Marty confirms the allegations first made by Carla Del Ponte (former Grand Inquisitor for Empire's faux war crimes court) two years ago. Worse yet, his report confirms that the Empire knew damn well what was going on, and who exactly they were dealing with - but chose to ignore that, in pursuit of crushing Serbia.

What has Serbia done to deserve such undying enmity, to the point of using a vicious gang of terrorist, gun-running, drug-dealing slavers and organ harvesters to occupy its ancient heartland and destroy all traces of Serb habitation therein? Nothing at all - save for existing.

Such imperial luminaries as Strobe Talbott openly admitted years ago that the 1999 Kosovo War was not about the Serbs, or the Albanians, but about Russia. Yes, the Empire is still fighting the Cold War, even as it chases the end of history.

One is know by the company one keeps. Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, John McCain, John Kerry, Joseph Lieberman, Eliot Engel, Tom Lantos, Mitch McConnell, James Rubin, Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, Richard Holbrooke - those are just some of the names of people who have praised Hashim Thaci and the KLA over the past decade.

Lieberman actually said that "United States of America and the Kosovo Liberation Army stand for the same human values and principles ... Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values." (The Washington Post, April 28, 1999) He never retracted that statement.

So, according to this Senator and onetime vice-presidential candidate, the values of the US government are identical to those of an organized crime syndicate dealing Afghan heroin throughout Europe, trafficking in weapons and sex slaves, and chopping people up for body parts to be sold on the black market.

Good to know.

Sic Transit Holbrooke

2010-12-14T11:07:00.006-05:00

It is an ancient Roman custom to speak no ill of the dead. Not being Roman, I don't feel bound by it. I shall speak truthfully instead.

Richard Holbrooke - who died yesterday, at age 69, of a ruptured aorta - was somewhat of a symbol of this age: a diplomat who took pride in his absence of tact. His job was to "lie for his country" - and did he ever! But he also enjoyed killing, cheating and stealing. This is the man who urged his superiors to "give us bombs for peace" (NATO intervention in Bosnia in 1995); who admitted in his own memoirs that he tried to swindle the president of Serbia during the Bosnia peace talks; and who took up investment banking when on sabbaticals from diplomacy (Credit Suisse, Lehman Brothers). Ironically, it was the latter that got him in the only spot of trouble in his career, when he had to settle charges of ethical violations before becoming Empire's ambassador to the UN.

Yes, he ended the Bosnian War - on America's terms, and only after Washington sabotaged every attempt to end it any other way. He then spent years on trying to undermine and destroy the very treaty he helped broker.

In 1998, he famously sat down with the KLA - shadowy militants his colleague Robert Gelbard had labeled a "terrorist organization". The photo of the shoeless Holbrooke sitting on the floor next to the bearded (and booted) KLA terrorist went around the world.

Later he told TIME magazine that he had been "furious". If he was, it never showed. He went to Belgrade as the Emperor's envoy again, and tried to repeat his 1995 performance. He bought the KLA three months to prepare for the coming NATO attack and set up the Racak "massacre," a pretext for it. But when the time came to try and bully Serbia into accepting the so-called Rambouillet Agreement, it was Holbrooke's boss, Madeleine Albright, who took over the limelight.

Holbrooke hitched his diplomatic career horse to John Kerry's wagon in 2004 and Hillary Clinton's in 2008. As a result, he never became the Secretary of State. He would eventually become Emperor Obama's special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Before that, he would pontificate once a month from the pages of the Washington Post, a newspaper that's never seen a Russian or a Serb it did not love to hate - unless the said Russian or Serb did Empire's bidding without a second thought; then he merely could not be trusted.

In one such column, in July 2008, gloating over the arrest of former Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic, (in a piece called "The Face of Evil" no less), Holbrooke put forth at least four verifiable lies:
- that the war "had already taken the lives of nearly 300,000 people";
- that his colleagues, Bob Frasure, Joe Kruzel and Nelson Drew traveled through "sniper-filled, Serbian-controlled territory" when their vehicle slid off the road into a mine-filled ravine;
- that his meeting with Karadzic in Belgrade "resulted in the lifting of the siege of Sarajevo," and
- that Serbian PM Zoran Djindjic was assassinated in 2003 "as a direct result of his courage in arresting Milosevic and sending him to The Hague in 2001."

When I challenged those lies, I called Holbrooke a "sanctimonious, uncouth, arrogant, corrupt slimebucket," and I stand by that assessment. Yet I've always had a measure of respect for him due to one thing, and one thing only. He was arrogant enough to eschew hiding what he thought and felt. This is why his 1998 memoir, "To End A War," is an invaluable source in understanding his mind, and the motives of Imperial diplomacy.

By way of example, he quoted a note Robert Frasure had slipped to him during a meeting in Zagreb:

Dick: We "hired" these guys to be our junkyard dogs because we were desperate. We need to try to "control" them. But it is no time to get squeamish about things.

Sure enough, Holbrooke was not squeamish at all. If it took the establishment of a fundamentalist Islamic regime, a Nazi revival and the expulsion of half a million people to re-establish American hegemony in Europe and in the Balkans, so be it. Arrogance of power, or power of arrogance? He lived long enough to see that hegemony begin to crumble, though.

As someone who helped bring the American Empire into being, Richard Charles Albert Holbrooke was a perfect embodiment of the vices it extolled as virtues. Ultimately, his brand of bullying "diplomacy" did America and Americans no favors. Oderint dum metuant didn't work even for Caligula. It absolutely debased the country that claimed to stand for values and principles, then went around the world violating them. Holbrooke either never realized this, or refused to let it stop him.

May God, whom he had forsaken to serve the earthly power instead, have mercy on his soul.

Angelina's Bosnian Adventure

2010-12-01T15:55:00.003-05:00

Angelina Jolie is being hoisted with her own petard. Having decided to make her directorial debut a love story set in the Bosnian War, she is now being besieged by professional war victims, who want input on the script, money, or both. Just yesterday, one of these "victim associations" petitioned the UN to revoke Jolie's status as "Goodwill Ambassador", since the plot of the film is causing them "mental suffering."

How now? Rumors of the film's plot have been circulating for months, and the most persistent is that it involves a love affair between a Muslim inmate in a Serb "concentration camp" and her Serb guard. Eventually, it is said, the Serb kills the Muslim and surrenders to peacekeepers as a war criminal. However, one version of the story is that this is a "rape camp", and that the love affair is between a victim and her rapist - something Jolie and her crew have vehemently denied. It is important to note that these are all rumors - neither the professional victims nor the government officials who banned Jolie from filming in the country (the film is being shot in Hungary instead) have actually read the script. I don't think it would have made a difference, though.

I am reasonably sure that Jolie is motivated by her own bleeding-heart feelings towards the "women victims of war," and therefore cannot understand how they ended up being her worst enemy. This is because she is ignorant of what actually happened in Bosnia, and doesn't know a damned thing about the people living there.

There's a whole sub-genre in modern cinematography that has been termed "Chetnixploitation" (from "Chetniks" - a Serbian word for guerrillas, used as an insult by Muslims and Croats). It relies on prejudices and stereotypes created by the Communist propaganda since 1945, then distilled and recycled in the 1990s wars, to portray the Serbs as drunken, bearded, bloodthirsty butchers of innocents. (For some examples, look at the blog linked above and an essay I wrote back in 2002.) Any film made about the Balkans wars is expected to fit into the genre - and if it doesn't, expect professional victims to complain about it.

Jolie's film does fit, however. Her cast and crew have repeatedly said it would be a story of Serbs abusing Muslims. Back in July, a Serbian media magnate made public that he refused to work with Jolie on the project, because it was "disgusting" and "Serb-bashing." So why are the Muslims targeting Jolie, then?

One of the reasons is money. What the "Association of women victims" is doing is pure extortion. Ironically, it is Jolie's own bleeding-heart humanitarianism that is preventing her from doing what is expected under the circumstances: pay them off so they shut up. She sympathizes with the "victims" so much, the idea they would be extorting her is inconceivable.

There could also be a fear that Jolie's highlighting of the Bosnian rapes may actually draw unwanted attention to the allegation - never documented or substantiated in any way - that the Serbs engaged in systematic mass rape of Muslim women, as a weapon of war. This propaganda concoction has been widely accepted, and any attempt to question its veracity or even ask for elementary evidence would run into condemnations of "defending rape" and "violence towards women." The very last thing professional war profiteers want is for someone to actually look into the factual background of their sacred cow.

Last, but probably most important, is the mentality of the people Jolie is dealing with. As many other foreigners have discovered over the past two decades, it isn't enough to support the Muslims (or Croats, or Albanians) 99.9% of the time. Oh no, even that .01 percent of criticism of anything they've done is enough to disqualify one as a "Greater Serbian propagandist" and "apologist for aggression and genocide." Only total, unconditional submission to their vision of the truth - a difficult thing to do, seeing as how that changes with circumstances, mind you - is tolerated. Even then, don't expect any gratitude for doing so.

I don't imagine Jolie had any idea trying to make a pro-Muslim movie would end up being so frustrating. She's not alone. In his memoirs, Richard Holbrooke recounted this scene from the final days of the Dayton talks:

"Chris Hill, normally highly supportive of the Bosnians, exploded in momentary anger and frustration. ‘These people are impossible to help,’ he said. It was a telling statement from a man who had devoted years of his life to the search for ways to help create a Bosnian state."

Now, I doubt Jolie would have canceled her project if someone had got in touch with her and explained all this. This kind of behavior is so utterly irrational, it beggars belief - until one is forced to actually contend with it. But I wonder if she would have scrapped her plans had someone told her that in 2004, the Sarajevo-born Serbian director Emir Kusturica filmed "Life is a Miracle," a love story between a Serb soldier and his Muslim captive. Kusturica's film wasn't a politically correct piece of Chetnixploitation, so few in the West have heard of it. Yet even a passing acquaintance with it would have saved Jolie a lot of trouble.

Some Call It Peace

2010-11-23T12:38:00.004-05:00

I remember it vividly, as if was just yesterday. It was a Tuesday, November 21. Just a day prior, we got word that the talks had collapsed - yet again - and that the war would go on. And then it was over.

It didn't seem over at the time. By the time I left Bosnia, two months later, the armies were still in position, the roads were still passable only to NATO peacekeepers, conscription was still in effect, and utilities were not yet restored. But the longer the ceasefire held, the less likely it seemed the shooting would restart. By the time the treaty was officially signed, in mid-December, it dawned upon us that it was peace at last.

Thus ended the Bosnian War.

There is still some contention as to when precisely it began. For me, it was April 5, 1992, when roadblocks appeared in Sarajevo. From that Sunday morning, until that Tuesday when the word came from Ohio, I had counted 1,376 days. Not the longest war in history, or the bloodiest, or the cruelest - but when it happens to you, that's hardly a consolation.

The day after the peace treaty was announced, my first ever article in English appeared, published by The Independent. The way I wrote it, it was a schmaltzy celebration of peace. The way it was headlined, it sounded like a one-cheer of a disappointed war victim. Unlike some folk, who were perhaps hoping for a "final victory" and a Bosnia remade according to their fantasies, I was not the least bit disappointed by the Dayton peace treaty. I didn't feel much like a victim, either. I just hoped it would last.

I was entirely too young to realize that the war would merely move back to the realm of politics. So, the headline - "At least there will be no more killing" - proved strangely prophetic.

Earlier this year, while visiting Bosnia, I wrote:

"In Bosnia, ethnic warfare was the direct result of the complete destruction of trust between the communities as the regime of Alija Izetbegovic pushed for independence at the expense of everything and everyone else. The Dayton settlement did not restore that trust, but offered a framework in which it could be re-forged if Bosnia’s peoples so chose. When the U.S. and the EU made Bosnia into a de facto protectorate shortly after the war, and began to impose their often conflicting but always confused visions of what Bosnia should be, they created a powerful disincentive for internal dialogue.

When Bosnian Serb PM Milorad Dodik said recently that it might be time to talk about a consensual separation, president Silajdzic angrily replied that this was impossible. "Those who dislike this country are free to leave, but they can’t take an inch of the land with them," Silajdzic said.

This very argument, that Bosnia belonged "100 percent" to Silajdzic and the Muslims, while everyone else is welcome to get out, is precisely what ignited the 1992-95 war and claimed 100,000 lives. After fifteen years of peace and "nation-building," Bosnia seems to be back at square one. And this is what the State Department describes as a great "success."

One shudders to think what failure would look like."

Whatever the Empire - or the Serb, Croat and Muslim leaders who signed it - intended to accomplish with the Dayton agreement, it did silence the guns. And it still offers hope, however fleeting, that the people who live in Bosnia may eventually sit down and figure out how to live together - or part ways - peacefully.

As for me, I will always remember that moment of unadulterated joy I felt when I heard the news that the war was over, when I realized that my family and I had made it through alive.

So many people take life for granted. I'm not one of them. And now you know why.

Revolutionary Acts

2010-11-20T11:16:00.004-05:00

It is said that the 1991 "Desert Storm" was the first war waged live on cable TV. Eight years later, NATO attacked Serbia (Operation "Allied Force") and the attendant media adhered to the same matrix of behavior. Only this time, there was the internet. However clunky and amateurish citizen-reporting was back then, in its infancy, it nonetheless provided an alternative to the relentless propaganda churned out by compliant reporters regurgitating Alliance spokesman Jamie Shea's infamous briefings. Bit by bit, the truth of NATO's atrocities came out, while the rumors of Serbian atrocities were shown to be greatly exaggerated.

Many of the news sites and proto-blogs that helped expose the truth about NATO's "humanitarian war" are no longer around. One, however, has persevered - and continued the struggle for truth ever since, through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And as George Orwell so aptly put, "speaking the truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act."

All too many people in the United States today still see things through the darkened lens of partisan politics. Democrats this, Republicans that, liberals this, conservatives that. Yet what Antiwar.com has demonstrated over and over is that both parties march in lockstep when it comes to waging wars, empowering the state and repressing the citizenry. It doesn't matter whether the Emperor is Slick Willie, Bush the Lesser, or Saint Barack of Hopechange: the policy of killing people and breaking things always remains the same.

I've had a small part in this endeavor since October 19, 2000, when Antiwar.com published my first column. "Balkan Express" ran weekly for many years, eventually becoming the biweekly "Moments of Transition." I would like to think that I've helped prove the point about the Empire in my coverage of the troubles in the Balkans and Europe in general. Both the fan mail and hate mail accumulated over the years suggest that I have, as do some figures of speech - "Empire" itself being a case in point - that have since made their way into foreign policy discourse in the Balkans itself.

The Imperial government has created this fantasy world in which it can move nations around the Grand Chessboard by sheer strength of willpower - and a few smart bombs here and there. It need not concern itself with the "reality-based community," or such mundane things as money and facts. If needed, facts are invented, and money is simply printed (oh, is it ever!). But the rest of us, we live in the real world, and deal with real facts. And when bills come in, we need to pay them with real money.

Now, you'll notice this blog doesn't have a donation box or anything like that. I work for a living, and what I do here and at Antiwar.com is something I can afford to do on my own time. But I am well aware that running a major news website, collating news, editing and posting articles - all that costs money. Thanks to the government and the likes of the giant vampire squid, none of us have much. But what we have ought to be put to good use.

So, if you want to hear what the mainstream media refuse to tell you - for example, understand why the TSA gets to grope you, or what is really happening in the Balkans (and why that is relevant) - consider making a donation to keep Antiwar.com going. Unlike with the Empire and its attendant media, you actually have a choice in the matter.

Clinton Does the Balkans

2010-10-12T13:02:00.005-04:00

I was on RT this morning (evening, if you're in Moscow), commenting on Hillary Clinton's Balkans trip. She won't say or do anything new, only deliver the same old demands. Centralize Bosnia, dismember Serbia, recognize the "Independent State of Kosovo," and maybe some day the Balkans "savages" might earn the right to clean NATO boots and fill NATO body bags. Or, if they really behave, wait tables in the EU.

But it is no longer 1999, and the Empire is destined for the fate of Ozymandias. Clinton's Potemkin promises aren't fooling anybody. Empire's clients will cheer at her words, but when she leaves they will realize that they made no difference. Perhaps only to bolster her own bid for the throne, two or six years from now - but that's another story...

Anti-Government, Not Anti-Gay

2010-10-11T22:43:00.005-04:00

In the minds of the quisling government in Serbia, its lapdog media, and the Western press (used over the past two decades to demonizing the Serbs without a second thought), what happened on Sunday were "anti-gay riots" by "right-wing extremists."

That is simply not true.

Ten years ago, the "Democratic Opposition of Serbia" came to power in the October 5 coup. Funded by NED and the CIA, it was the trial run for "color revolutions" later organized elsewhere. Back then, these very same "democrats" eagerly employed these very same "hooligans" when it came to storming the state TV, the party offices of President Milosevic and his wife, and the national Parliament, which was set on fire. But, you see, violence is "democratic" when it democratically serves the interests of democratic democrats. Employed against them, why, it's fascism!

Sunday's riots had very little to do with the "gay pride" parade. The parade itself was nothing but the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. The camel, in this instance, is the Serbian people, who were "rewarded" for their "democracy" with a decade of systematic pillaging, corruption and destruction of everything worth anything, and a never-ending series of humiliations.

The government has long since stopped pretending it had any democratic legitimacy, demonstrating in no uncertain terms that it held to Mao maxim that "power came from the barrel of the gun" - or in this case, the police baton. It envisioned the "Pride parade" as a show of dominance over the general populace, and a way to impress its masters in Brussels and Washington. At a time when almost half of Serbia lives in abject poverty, and rummaging through rubbish has become a major branch of agriculture, the government set aside twelve million dinars (about $160,000) to organize the "Pride parade."

This was not about the homosexuals. There were barely a thousand people who "marched" on Sunday. Among them were government officials and foreign ambassadors. The rest were professional homosexuals, "gay activists," people who have reduced their entire lives down to their "queerness" and the need to rub it into everyone else's face, so they can get pity and special treatment for being "victims of oppression" when people who aren't into face-rubbing react predictably. They didn't want rights, they wanted attention. The parade was first and foremost a political event, a message from the government that its will is the law, that some people are going to be "equaler" than others, that the opinion of ordinary folks isn't worth a dime.

On Saturday, October 9, some ten thousand people rallied in downtown Belgrade, and peacefully marched through the city, singing, walking with their children, sending a message to the government that this was, in fact, Serbia. The mainstream media either completely ignored this event or reported that "several hundred citizens" rallied "against the gays." Nor did the Western press make a peep.

Sunday, it was a different kind of Serbs on the streets. The young, the angry, the people with nothing left to lose. Yes, some of them hate homosexuals. Yes, some of them may fancy "far right" ideas. And yes, they let their fists and rocks and sticks do both the thinking and the talking. But their rage was directed principally against the government. Just look at their targets: a bus with the logo of B92, a hated propaganda network; the RTS building, the state TV that also broadcasts government propaganda; the HQ of the ruling Democratic party. According to the police, they also attacked "a mosque and some foreign embassies."

What do all these things have in common? They are all symbols of the quisling government and the foreign powers that have de facto occupied Serbia. (Why the mosque? Because a militant Islamic cleric has been fanning the flames of hatred and war in southwestern Serbia for the past six months; except the rioters were so incensed, they didn't stop to make a difference between his followers and those of the moderate Mufti of Belgrade, whose mosque they - allegedly - attacked).

It was the government that cynically manipulated and abused the homosexuals, setting them up for violence and bloodshed so it could assert power over the "hooligans" that responded. Now we're treated to proclamations by Brussels that the Belgrade regime is "protecting human rights." What rights?!

Sunday's events shattered what little was left of this government's legitimacy. It didn't have much to begin with, composed of two coalitions that ran against each other in 2008 (no one, not a soul, actually voted for the current regime). As of Sunday, it has none. It rules not by the will of the people, but by the will of the Empire. While it lasts.

10-10-10 may well turn out to be a turning point in modern Serbian history, a day when open revolt against the quislings finally began. Yes, it is ironic that it would start over a "pride parade" as opposed to countless acts of robbery and treason the regime is responsible for. But history tells of many major upheavals that started with the seemingly unlikeliest of events.

For the past decade, and especially the past two years, Serbia has been in the grip of a regime so abominable, that any attempt to restore normalcy appears extreme. It was only a matter of time before some people concluded that extremism in defense of virtue was no vice.

Madness? This is BOSNIA!

2010-09-29T12:32:00.003-04:00

To say that Bosnia-Herzegovina is a strange place would be an understatement. Little about that country makes sense. It is theoretically one state, comprised of two "entities" (a Republic and a Federation) and a District (which isn't the capital). It has three major ethnic groups, five Presidents and thirteen Prime Ministers. No one knows exactly how many people live in the country, because there hasn't been a census since the war - and some politicians are blocking a new census from being conducted. Though nominally independent and sovereign, the ultimate authority in the country is a viceroy (called "High Representative") acting on behalf of a self-appointed group of external powers (called the "Peace Implementation Council"). And there is no such thing as a "Bosnian," strictly speaking; one is either a Serb, Croat, "Bosniak" (Slavic convert to Islam) or "other." To keep the (uneasy) peace between them, ethnic quotas are enshrined in the Constitution.

In short, the place is a mess of epic proportions. But just as I think that it cannot possibly get any crazier, something happens along to prove me wrong.

The internet is a wonderful place insofar as it allows ordinary folk, like yours truly, to share their thoughts and ideas with the general public without dealing with governmental or big business gatekeepers. Whereas you can be reasonably certain that the governments and the official media will lie to you about any given issue any given time, with the internet you have to make your own decision about what is true and what is a howling blast of nonsense.

It isn't the fault of Blogger, or Wordpress, or the do-it-yourself PR portal "i-Newswire" that some of their users may be raving lunatics, or folks a few beers short of a six-pack. But when I saw a link to a release on i-Newswire two days ago announcing that the "Bosnian Royal Family" has reasserted sovereignty, my jaw came very close to hitting the floor.

Quoth the release:

Under international law and customs pertinent to monarchical reinstatements, the Bosnian Royal Family recently reclaimed their "divine right to sovereignty". The claim was met by 85% public approval, but also by insults from the media financed by NED, USAID, etc. The Bosnian medieval state thrived between 1153 and 1527, when the Ottomans committed regicide of the last Prince-pretend and established their first occupying administration. Bosnia has not had her own sovereign de jure (a monarch; a president) ever since.

While it is true enough that the Ottoman Turks killed the last king of Bosnia (also the last despot of Serbia), that was in 1463, not in 1527. But the real howler here is the line about "85% public approval." How could they possibly tell? What public? Bosnia is so fragmented, this kind of polling is just plain impossible.

At first I thought this was some kind of practical joke, like the pranks played by a group of Serbian linguists over the past few years, who would plant false news and then mock the gullible press for taking them at face value. But this "royal family" seems to be taking itself seriously. This is also indicated by the tone of their press release, which goes on to accuse the powers administering Bosnia of working "...in the interest of none other but the Anglo-Zionist geostrategy, apparently aimed at destabilizing the continental (mainly Catholic) Europe..."

Just the other day someone asked me why I never tried my hand at writing fiction. How can I, with stuff like this existing in actual reality? A fiction writer who imagined this "royal family" would be laughed out of any serious publishing house. Yet here they are, quite real.

In 2002, British peacekeepers found a man living in the mountains of Western Bosnia with only a bear for company. He didn't know the war had ended (well, sort of), but he seemed remarkably sane, all things considered. Perhaps he was on to something.

Capitulation, Not Compromise

2010-09-10T00:35:00.003-04:00

Though the terrorist bombing of a market in Vladikavkaz and the Yaroslavl summit have been top news on RT, the TV station did not neglect to note the tragedy at the UN General Assembly, where Serbia stood before the world, agreed to be violated and humiliated, and then spat on its allies while praising its violators.

Earlier in the day, RT interviewed Diana Johnstone (author of the excellent "Fools' Crusade"). I joined the late night newscast from the Washington DC studio, sometime after 2 AM Moscow time, and offered a few observations as well, along the lines of what I said yesterday.

To recap: the proposed resolution was not a compromise, but a capitulation. The original resolution, not very strong to begin with, was completely gutted by the EUrocrats. This was done with the full knowledge and approval of President Tadic and Foreign Minister Jeremic, who then openly lied to their people that the new resolution would not recognize the "Independent state of Kosova" in any form. In actuality, the revised resolution is an implicit recognition of the occupied and detached province, a public renunciation of international law, and a blanket endorsement of Empire's actions - past, present and future.

In exchange for this absolute abdication of sovereignty, Serbia got - nothing. Only a vague promise of possibly, some day, maybe, eventually being considered for possible annexation by the EU. This would happen whenever the EU decides, and to whatever is left of Serbia at that point; which may not be much.

Simply put, the EU has chosen to pursue the exact same Balkans policy as Austria-Hungary exactly a century ago. The Royal and Imperial court in Vienna saw Serbia as a direct threat to the Empire's existence, as its independence emboldened the disenfranchised Slavic majority. As a solution, Austria-Hungary envisioned not a weak Serbia, but no Serbia at all. A hundred years and two world wars - in which that concept seemed to have been defeated - later, Serbien muss sterben once again.

Such a policy would be ghastly enough by itself. But it is both enabled and embraced by the craven and corrupt quisling government in Belgrade, willing to sacrifice the entire country to stay in office (and keep to plunder accumulated while therein). At this moment, nowhere in the world is there so much treason per square meter per second. Meanwhile, the government, the media and the so-called civil society are force-feeding the Serbs a diet of lies, apathy and despair. Many suffer from cognitive dissonance as a result. But while there may not be limits to malice and stupidity, there are limits to gullibility and wishful thinking. In any other place in the world, the camel's back would have broken by now; perhaps this could be the proverbial last straw for Serbia.

God only knows what happens next.

EUssisted Suicide

2010-09-08T17:41:00.004-04:00

If there are people in Serbia still who wondered whether some residual patriotism remained in their government officials, as of today there should be none.

Serbia's proposed resolution before the UN General Assembly, scheduled to be presented tomorrow, was at the last moment sent for "consultations" with the government's "friends and allies" in Brussels. The result was entirely predictable. Of the original resolution, which one Serbian commentator described as "a possibility for the UN to shine for at least a moment and protest an injustice in a world without justice" and an undertaking "worthy of our ancestors and covenants", nothing remains.

Quite the opposite, in fact. Instead of even a verbal protest against the obvious sophistry and hypocrisy of the ICJ verdict, the new proposal calls for the UN to "take note" of the verdict and acknowledge its "careful consideration" of the question asked!

As a reminder, the ICJ never actually did answer Serbia's question, asked through the General Assembly back in 2008. The question was whether the declaration of independence by the PISG (an Albanian-run provisional government) was legal. Under the current international law, including the UNSCR 1244 that governed the status of the occupied Serbian province, there was no way that answer could have been "yes." So the ICJ resorted to redefining reality, by declaring that the Albanians who issued the declaration weren't really the provisional government (even though they clearly were) but "direct representatives of the Kosovo people" (sic)!

And now Serbia itself is proposing to the UN General Assembly to "take into account" this malicious misinterpretation as fact!

But wait - there's more! In addition to thanking the ICJ for its "careful consideration" of the question (!), Serbia does not ask the General Assembly to condemn the occupation and separation of Kosovo, and the sponsors thereof. Quite the contrary, it thanks them!

Section F of the proposed resolution reads as follows:

f) Welcomes the readiness of the EU to facilitate the process of dialogue between the parties. The process of dialogue by itself would be a factor of peace, security and stability in the region. This dialogue would be aimed to promote cooperation, make progress on the path towards the EU and improve people's lives.”

(source: Serbian government; emphasis added)

So, this "dialogue" facilitated by the EU - 22 of whose members already recognize the "Independent State of Kosova" (ISK), and whose EULEX mission has already usurped the UN presence in the occupied province, with Serbian quislings' approval - would by itself be good, regardless of what it achieves. It isn't hard to imagine what that "dialogue" would look like: Brussels says "Jump," Belgrade replies "How high?" Just as it happened with this resolution. And if the hypothetical dialogue ever involved the usurper regime in Pristina, they would be considered equal to Belgrade, and the only things on the table would be cooperation, path to the EU, and the phantom better life. What about the status of Kosovo? There is nothing about it in the resolution - explicitly.

Implicitly, however, the entire resolution - and Section F in particular - are nothing short of an outright recognition of the ISK. See for yourself: since the ICJ ruled that the declaration was not illegal, and Serbia itself is taking note of that decision, thanks them for all the deliberation, and asks the General Assembly to do the same; and since it doesn't even ask anything, but instead thanks the EU for its efforts to sponsor dialogue about cooperation and better life (but not status!) that is by itself good regardless of outcome, what do you get when you add that all up? An implicit recognition that the "Republic of Kosova" is, in fact, an independent state.

So much for President Tadic's claim that the proposed resolution "excludes recognition of Kosovo's independence."

If this proposal even makes it before the General Assembly, let alone gets adopted, it would be a tragedy for Serbia. Such an outcome would be an unprecedented capitulation - worse than the Kumanovo armistice in 1999, or the March 1941 treaty with Hitler, or the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum of 1914. It would also mean a crowning success in Empire's effort to commit a crime in full view of the world, and have the victim express gratitude for it.

By proposing this resolution, the Serbian government is renouncing not just a piece of territory, but Serbia's sovereignty, any claims to justice, and even the right to continued existence. This is nothing short of national suicide - assisted by its "friends" from the EU.

When, some day soon, Boris Tadic, Vuk Jeremic and all the other participants in their joint criminal enterprise find themselves facing judgment, this proposed resolution will be the crucial evidence that these people were traitors, crooks, liars and scoundrels. May God have mercy on their souls.

(Updated 9/10: The government of Serbia is so inept it uses dynamic links on its website, so the link to the text of the resolution was broken the very next day. It has been updated and should be functional.)

Remembering the Storm

2010-08-06T11:04:00.003-04:00

(This article originally appeared on Antiwar.com, on August 5, 2005)

In the early morning hours of Aug. 4, 1995, on the heels of an incessant artillery and air bombardment, some 200,000 Croatian troops moved in to “liberate” Krajina, a stretch of mountains inhabited by Serbs who had rejected Croatia’s secession from Yugoslavia four years prior. Overrunning the token UN observation posts, the U.S.-trained Croatian army quickly overwhelmed localized Serb resistance. President Franjo Tudjman declared Aug. 5, the day Croat troops entered the Serb capital of Knin, a national holiday: “Homeland Thanksgiving Day.” By Aug. 7, the “Republic of Serb Krajina” was no longer in existence.

A grand celebration is scheduled for tomorrow in Knin. Prime Minister Ivo Sanader, the late Tudjman’s political heir, will no doubt give a rousing patriotic speech, glorifying Croatia’s “defenders from Serbian aggression.” Some mainstream media will report that the offensive resulted in civilian casualties, and that one high-ranking Croatian general, Ante Gotovina, is a fugitive from war crimes charges at the Hague Inquisition. And that will be the end of it. Dwelling on “Operation Storm” (Oluja) serves no purpose in the official narrative of the Balkans wars. Its victims are that narrative’s principal villains, so their suffering must be suppressed. The victors, on the other hand, are no longer useful to the Empire. “Storm” is something Washington would like to forget. Serbs and Croats don’t have that luxury.

Frustrated Dreams

The area of Krajina was for several centuries the borderland between the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, a buffer zone that protected the inner Hapsburg lands from Turkish raids. It was populated largely by Orthodox Serbs, who had fled Ottoman persecution, and who became frontiersmen for the Hapsburgs in exchange for land and liberty. By the 19^th century, the Ottoman Turks were in retreat; the new danger to the Hapsburg Empire was Slavic nationalism. Vienna turned on its frontiersmen, encouraging conflict between the Orthodox Serbs and the Catholic Croats, who became its staunchest supporters. Vienna’s Serbophobia eventually led Austria-Hungary into a fatal conflict that destroyed much of European civilization.

It also nurtured the hatred that would explode in 1941 as the vicious Ustasha genocide. These homegrown Croatian Nazis, led by Ante Pavelic, set out to destroy the “race of slaves” (A. Starcevic) with ruthless abandon, but ran out of time. Still, by 1945 they had killed anywhere between half a million and 750,000 Serbs.

With the end of communism in 1990, Franjo Tudjman and his Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) brought a revival of Pavelic’s symbols and vocabulary. Some of the top supporters of the HDZ were Ustasha émigrés. Tudjman himself expressed relief that his wife was “neither Serb nor Jewish.” Tudjman’s constitutional reform redefined the republic as a nation-state of Croats, with Serbs as an ethnic minority. When Tudjman’s government declared independence from the Yugoslav federation in 1991, most Serbs saw 1941 all over again. This – and not some imaginary “aggression” from Serbia – was the root of their “rebellion,” and the genesis of the Krajina Republic. After several months of bitter fighting, marked by massacres, ambushes, and the most vitriolic propaganda, the UN brokered an armistice. The so-called Vance Plan envisioned four “protected areas,” with a Serb majority, whose eventual status would be resolved through negotiations.

Over the next three years, Tudjman’s government feverishly prepared for war, training its troops on the battlefields of Bosnia and staging quick, limited offensives at the strategic edges of UN-protected areas (most infamous being the Medak Pocket attack in 1993). Although enjoying political, diplomatic, and even military support from Vienna and Berlin since 1991, it was only when it got Washington’s support that Zagreb was ready – and able – to strike. “Retired” American officers, working for government contractor MPRI, claimed to teach Croat officers “democracy” and “human rights.” The events of May and August 1995 would demonstrate MPRI’s definitions of both.

Junkyard Dogs

"Dick: We ‘hired’ these guys to be our junkyard dogs because we were desperate. We need to try to ‘control’ them. But it is no time to get squeamish about things."
– To End a War, Chapter 6

US envoy to the Balkans Richard Holbrooke thus described the note slipped to him by Ambassador Robert Frasure, during a meeting with Croatian officials in 1995. Holbrooke’s own account of how the U.S. officially condemned Croatian attacks even as he was meeting with Tudjman and telling him which cities to take, suggests he was hardly “squeamish” about using Croats to fight what he – and hundreds of advocacy journalists, lobbyists, and policymakers – had termed “Serb aggression.”

On May 1, 1995, Croatian troops tested both their readiness and the UN’s will by staging a lightning strike at an exposed Serb enclave of Western Slavonia. The operation was code-named Bljesak – “flash,” or perhaps more appropriately, “Blitz.” The clear violation of the armistice went unpunished. The stage was set for Oluja.

According to Serb documentation, the three-day offensive in August 1995 resulted in the expulsion of 220,000 people. Some 1,943 people have been listed as missing/presumed dead, including 1199 civilians, 523 women, and 12 children. The death toll would have been greater had the Serbs not fled en masse before the advancing Croat tanks; all who stayed behind were killed. The Croats, and their American sponsors, were definitely not squeamish.

Ten years later, Krajina is still a wasteland, with “scattered ghost villages strewn with shell-scarred houses overgrown with ivy and tall grass” (Reuters). Only a tenth of some 400,000 Serbs who lived in Croatia before it seceded have returned, only to face bureaucratic abuse and frequent physical violence. Tudjman made Pavelic’s dream to rid Croatia of Serbs a reality. It seems everything is in the choice of allies.

Unpleasant Comparisons

After obliterating Krajina, the conquering Croatian army moved into western Bosnia, aiding the Izetbegovic government to crush a dissident faction led by Fikret Abdic and assisting in the major Muslim offensive that “coincided” with NATO’s massive bombing of Bosnian Serbs. But after the Dayton Agreement was signed and peace imposed on Bosnia, Empire’s junkyard dogs discovered the supply of Milk Bones had run out. They had served their purpose.

Today’s Croatia is frustrated that its ambitions to enter the EU and NATO hinge upon the capture of Ante Gotovina, a general involved in Oluja who is universally considered a war hero, but whom the Hague Inquisition accuses of war crimes. Some of the truth about atrocities against the Serbs is slowly coming to light, but interestingly enough, only after the prominent personalities accused have fallen out of political grace. The Zagreb leadership snaps back at any hint that Oluja might have been anything but just, right, and noble. When Serbian president Boris Tadic called it an “organized crime” in a statement Monday, President Mesic replied it could hardly compare to Serb crimes such as Srebrenica.

But by all means, let’s compare. In both cases, a UN “safe area” was targeted by the attack. In Srebrenica, the UN at least tried to protect Muslim civilians; in Krajina, it did no such thing. Serbs evacuated Muslim noncombatants from Srebrenica; Serbs who did not flee Krajina were killed. Yet Srebrenica is somehow “genocide,” while Oluja is a victory worth a national holiday?!

Another reason the Empire prefers to keep Oluja out of sight and out of mind is the push to establish an independent, Albanian-dominated Kosovo. If Croatia’s conquest of Krajina was legitimate, because Krajina’s existence violated its sacrosanct administrative borders, then why did Serbia not have the right to uphold its borders when it came to Kosovo? If obliterating the Serb population did not disqualify Croatia from keeping Krajina and Slavonia, how can the exodus of less than half of Kosovo’s Albanians disqualify Serbia from keeping Kosovo? If the Serbs, a constituent Yugoslav nation, did not have the right to ethnic self-determination in Krajina and Bosnia, how can the Kosovo Albanians (an ethnic minority) have one?

The “Abramowitz Doctrine”

This apparent paradox was “explained” by Morton Abramowitz, the eminence grise of U.S. foreign policy, in an interview last summer: “there is no entirely rational answer … you seek perfect reasoning, which does not correspond to reality on the ground.” Logic does not apply to the Empire, because it creates its own reality; where have we heard that before?

The “reality” Abramowitz and his like-minded policymakers have sought to establish, by force, has been one in which, whatever the circumstances, Serbs are in the wrong. Apologists for the Empire dismiss this observable, verifiable fact as a “conspiracy theory” and claim the Serbs have a “victim complex,” even as their entire Balkans “reality” rests on the claim that everyone else has been victimized by the Serbs.

What “perfect reasoning” is involved in recognizing the simple fact that the centuries-old Serb community in Krajina is practically extinct, and that the Serb community in Kosovo – from which most of their ancestors came – is facing the same prospect? Where the Nazis failed, the American Empire has succeeded. Is that really something to be thankful for?

Beyond the Law

2010-07-29T03:13:00.008-04:00

It really takes a great deal of arrogance - hubris, even - to assume that one's actions will not have consequences. Or better yet, that those consequences can be tightly controlled. For almost two decades now, the powers meddling in the Balkans (and by this I am referring to the U.S. and its European satellites) have flip-flopped between whichever "principles" suited their policy at the time, with the only constant being that the Serbs would always come out on the losing end.

First they advocated self-determination for the peoples of Yugoslavia - until the Serbs in what are today Bosnia and Croatia asserted that right. Then the principle suddenly changed to sanctity of borders (of Croatia and Bosnia - not Yugoslavia), only to go back to "self-determination" in 1999, so that the ethnic Albanians could claim Serbia's province of Kosovo. Sanctity of borders? Oh, that doesn't apply to Serbia, don't you know?

In effect, Serbia and the Serbs have been put outside the law. There is no punishment for killing Serbs. You want proof of that? Ask Naser Oric, Ramush Haradinaj, Ejup Ganic or Florim Ejupi. Ethnically cleansing Serbs isn't a crime, either. Franjo Tudjman, Alija Izetbegovic and Hashim Thaci became respected statesmen by doing so. Invading and occupying Serbia doesn't seem to be a crime, either - the ICJ ruled in 1999 that Yugoslavia (as the union of Serbia and Montenegro was then called) had no standing to sue NATO, which was at that time conducting a campaign of aggression with the purpose of occupying Kosovo.

But the Empire couldn't stop there. Oh no. It insisted, instead, that this is all a special case - even as it reserved the right to treat anyone, anywhere as it has treated the Serbs. Well of course it was a special case, comments former Imperial official Matthew Parish, more special than even the Empire itself knows:

The enormity of the legal precedent being set by Kosovo’s independence cannot be overlooked. In Kosovo a consortium of foreign powers, acting initially without a United Nations mandate, intervened using force in a sovereign state to resolve that country’s ethnic conflict. They then occupied part of the country and oversaw its secession over a nine-year period. It is not clear that the ICJ should have lent its imprimatur to such an exceptional event. Whatever one’s view of Kosovo’s independence, it must be conceded that the events that led to UNMIK’s occupation and separation of the province from the rest of Serbia were unique.

To have lent these events a cloak of legal support may be to suggest that other disputed territories have a similar 'right' to secede, potentially fuelling ethnic civil wars elsewhere in the world.

It is the very peril I pointed out in December 2009, as the process Serbia initiated before the ICJ began: "It is one thing to flout the law with impunity. It is quite another to call such behavior legal."

What I call the Empire, Parish dubs - perhaps more accurately - a "consortium of foreign powers." But the point remains: they imposed their will, by force, explicitly against the laws of nations, on another country. Where once they maintained their actions were "illegal but legitimate" (in the words of Goldstone's "Independent commission"), now they insist that it was all perfectly legal. Thuggery has become law, thus making the law pointless.

This goes beyond Serbia, or the Albanians, or the territory of Kosovo itself. It is a nuclear bomb detonated amidst the already crumbling world order - by the very people who style themselves its foremost guardians. Now we brace for the inevitable fallout.

(Hat tip to reader "Aleks" for the Parish essay)

More on the ICJ: a Column and Video

2010-07-23T01:02:00.005-04:00

Following my initial impressions about the ICJ verdict, I've now put together a more detailed analysis over at Antiwar.com.

Yesterday morning, when news of the verdict came, I was at the RT studio in Washington, DC. What I said in the following clip was literally at a moment's notice, without any prior knowledge of the questions:

They usually identify me as "Columnist, Antiwar.com"; not sure why this time they used the misnomer "journalist".

Update (July 28): Many thanks to Ilana Mercer, who re-posted the video and linked to my column on Barely A Blog.

The International Court of Injustice

2010-07-22T12:12:00.005-04:00

After much hemming and hawing, the International Court of Justice finally declared today that the "declaration of independence" by the Albanian provisional government in the occupied Serbian province of Kosovo did not violate international law, or UNSCR 1244.

Seriously?

Certainly there is no law against declaring independence. But that doesn't mean "Kosovo" had the right to do so. Under UNSCR 1244, it had to remain a part of Serbia - even if under temporary UN control - pending the outcome of status talks. But there were never any talks - there was just NATO messenger Martti Ahtisaari, declaring that Kosovo ought to become an independent, Albanian state. And Serbia was told to take it or leave it.

Technical details, you'll say. After all, the Albanians are such an overwhelming majority. But you never wonder how they got to be such a majority over the past century. Could it be because they sided with the Austrians, the Nazis, the Communists, and NATO - every time at the expense of the Serbs? Between the murder and expulsion of non-Albanians, and the highest birthrates in Europe (much higher than in the neighboring Albania, and unrelated to the level of education), no wonder the Albanians are a majority today. Yet they claim they have historically been the victims of oppression....

But weren't there Serb atrocities? Genocide, mass ethnic cleansing, tens of thousands killed? In short, no. Lies your friendly NATO spokesman fed you to go along with the program. The KLA was romanticized by the media as this idealistic, young, progressive freedom-fighting movement. KLA hats are New York chic. Surely these people have nothing to do with jihadism, and all the church-burning and throat-slitting and bus-bombing - if you've ever heard of them, to begin with - are just righteous revenge for whatever evils the Serbs must have committed to merit such treatment. But then, what of the Albanian behavior in the 1980s, before any of the alleged Serb atrocities had taken place?

This isn't about democracy. It isn't about liberty. There is no such thing as a "Kosovar" ; it is just a matter of time and convenience before the "independent" Kosovo merges into Greater Albania (or "ethnic Albania," as its advocates claim). Meanwhile, Kosovo still buys most of its power, even most of its bread, from the rest of Serbia. Its "government" is a collection of murderous mobsters; between them, they've killed more Albanians than the Serbs were ever accused of.

Oh sure, the U.S. government, much of the EU and many of their client states elsewhere recognize the "Republic of Kosovo." And I suppose more will jump on the bandwagon now, as the propaganda mill spins the ICJ verdict as "justice". But saying something exists doesn't make it so.

No, dear reader, it really isn't as simple as the mainstream media, the State Department, NATO, and now even the ICJ would have you believe.

I know many of you out there can't be bothered to care about this. What's it to you that some country out there got robbed of a piece of land, along with its dignity? But if fabricating and exaggerating atrocities to attack and occupy a country on behalf of a separatist, terrorist movement, isn't illegal... then what, pray tell, is?

You may not care about it now, because the people being bullied are the Serbs, a people you've been told was OK - nay, necessary even - to hate and despise. But tomorrow, it may happen to you. And then it will be too late.

Pushing the Myth

2010-07-01T11:19:00.004-04:00

A little while ago, several Liberal MPs in the Canadian Parliament proposed a resolution declaring July 11 "Srebrenica Remembrance Day." Fortunately, Prime Minister Harper would have none of it, so the proposal was taken off the table - for now.

The resolution was not a product of altruism and sheer goodness of the Liberals' hearts, but rather an initiative mounted by the Congress of North American Bosniaks, and something called the "Institute for the Research of Genocide" (whose URL identifies them as the "Institute for Genocide").

After Mr. Harper put the kibosh on the resolution, the CNAB and the Institute raised a ruckus. Their initial protest, on June 23, included a long list of people identified as an "international team of experts" and claiming illustrious academic titles. The post with the list, however, has since been taken down from the Institute website.

Here are just some of the names from the list:

M. Cherif Bassiouni (former UN rapporteur on the events in Bosnia, who endorsed the ridiculously inflated casualty figures and the "mass rape" hoax)
Francis A. Boyle (international ambulance-chaser and author of the "genocide" lawsuit by the Izetbegovic government against Serbia, rejected before an actual court)
Florence Hartmann (once spokesperson for Carla Del Ponte at the ICTY)
Marko Attila Hoare (a world-renowned Serbophobe-cum-historian)
Daniel Toljaga (listed as member of the Board of Directors at the Congress of North American Bosniaks, but better known as proprietor of the Srebrenica Genocide Blog)
Dzemaludin Latic and Fatmir Alispahic, champions of militant Islam and Serbophobia considered even in Bosnia to be the lunatic fringe.

Suffice to say that the list was a veritable who's who of professional victims, genocide entrepreneurs, and people who have built their careers on the myth of Bosnia. So, these folks have taken upon themselves to have the Canadian Parliament endorse their version of history by government fiat - i.e. by force, since they can't actually prove it in court. It is as if they don't believe their argument good enough to just persuade people, even though it has enjoyed almost uncontested dominance in the media for the past 15 years!

The much less organized Canadian Serbs have protested this proposal with letters. The response they got was pretty much a set of talking points reminiscent of the content found on the SGB, Hoare's blog, or the CNAB site.

The letter says that the "the genocidal nature of the particular incident at Srebrenica in the summer of 1995 has been internationally recognized." It specifically mentions the ICTY and ICJ verdicts, claiming they were "thoughtful results of fair and independent investigation and testimony."

Yet the ICJ verdict specifically said it had not considered the Srebrenica events itself, but simply accepted the ICTY rulings at face value. To call the ICTY's verdicts "thoughtful", their investigations "independent" and the testimonies of serial perjurers "fair" - that's just rich. Let's see: their crown witness, on which the entire case hangs, is a liar. They have conducted sloppy forensic work and later destroyed much of the evidence. They refuse to show the DNA evidence, then claim it proves something that is physically impossible for DNA evidence to prove (i.e. manner of death). And that's just the tip of the iceberg! The ICTY verdicts have more holes in them than a kitchen sieve.

Another argument in the response is that others have done this - the European Parliament, the US House and Senate, and hey, even the (quisling) government of Boris Tadic in Serbia! - so why not the Canadian legislature? Well, since when did "everyone is doing it" become a valid argument? Just because some lawmakers in Europe and the US have voted with their hearts for a well-prepared piece of propaganda does not have the magical power to transform that propaganda into fact. Truth is not a matter of majority vote - or even consensus.

From the first days of the Bosnian War, the Izetbegovic regime's weapon of choice was propaganda. They aimed to win the war by getting outside forces to do the fighting for them, based on heart-rending stories of massacres, mass rape, concentration camps and genocide. One after another, those stories have been exposed as fabrications and deliberate distortions of the already horrifying reality, while the full horrors of the war were never reported, so as not to interfere with the mythical narrative. The Srebrenica "genocide" is the last lie that remains, the one myth that was built up and reinforced more than any of the others. By now, Srebrenica has become a post facto justification for everything: the ethnic cleansing of Serbs, the foreign mujahedin, the rise of Wahhabism and terrorism, the re-Islamization of Bosnia's Muslims (a goal Izetbegovic set for himself in the 1970s, mind you), the ongoing refusal of Muslim politicians to abide by the country's Constitution, and the equally ongoing attempts to fulfill their wartime objectives politically, by overturning the Dayton Accords.

All of this rests on the foundation of a myth that what happened in July 1995 in Srebrenica was "genocide". Even though the women and children were safely evacuated. Even though the column that refused to surrender and set off across the mountains and minefields to Tuzla was a military formation. Even though the actual number of people who died on that march was never established (the "8,000" figure is equally arbitrary as the "300,000" we'd heard for a decade, before facts became impossible to ignore), and the actual evidence suggests that the number of people actually murdered (as in executed, which indeed is a war crime) is several hundred. Even though nothing was ever produced to demonstrate intent on part of the Bosnian Serbs to actually exterminate the Muslims as a people - apart from the very strong belief by the Muslims that this was the case.

Yet in a proper court of law, it doesn't matter what one believes - only what one can prove. Fully aware that the ICTY judgments are based on belief and conjecture rather than actual facts, the believers in the Srebrenica Genocide Myth are now trying to impose it by force, by getting governments to pass resolutions. Next up will probably be demands that anyone questioning their myth be prosecuted as a "holocaust denier." So, not only are they disparaging the actual Holocaust by declaring Srebrenica a "genocide," they are also exploiting and abusing the mechanisms established so no one could strive to rehabilitate the Nazis and deny the suffering of the Jews. When you consider the fact that the ancestors of many of those Muslims actually helped the Nazis in their ghastly "Endloesung", it becomes obvious that Srebrenica is not just about the present and the future, but also about whitewashing the past.

I understand why it is in the interest of the Bosnian Muslims' religious, political and propaganda leadership (and their associates, fellow-travelers and useful idiots in the West and elsewhere) to promote the Srebrenica Genocide Myth. How that would serve Canada's interests, however, is beyond me. Stephen Harper appears to have reached a similar conclusion - and for that he deserves thanks, not just of the Serbs living in Canada, but all Canadians who care about their own country.

Enemies of Truth and Justice

2010-06-15T11:30:00.004-04:00

Last Thursday (June 10), seven men were convicted by the Hague Inquisition (a.k.a. the ICTY) for "genocide" in Srebrenica. Naturally, the news made headlines all over the world, as yet another allegedly incontrovertible proof that Srebrenica was "the worst atrocity since WW2" in Europe, where the evil Serbs deliberately murdered 8,000 innocent civilians.

Fortunately for the cause of truth, there are people in this world who don't take ICTY press releases at face value, and actually bother to read what their verdicts contain: a bunch of nonsense, fabrications, unfounded assumptions and "logic" that would be expected of failed law school applicants, not these supposed paragons of international justice.

As the folks at Srebrenica Historical Project explain, the Tribunal once again based the entire process on the testimony of "crown witness" Drazen Erdemović, who claimed (among other things) to have seen a Lt. Colonel at the site where he claims to have executed 1200 people. Since anything Erdemović says must and shall be treated as gospel truth, the "judges" reasoned thus:

“There is no evidence before the Trial Chamber of any other Lieutenant Colonel in Pilica at this time. In light of this, the Trial Chamber is satisfied that there is no other reasonable conclusion available on the evidence but that the Lieutenant Colonel whom Erdemović saw at Branjevo Military Farm and in Pilica town on 16 July was Popović. (paragraph 1134)

Being as there had to have been a Lt. Colonel in the area (otherwise Erdemović would be lying, and we can't have that, right?), then there shall be one. See how easy it is to establish "facts" when you can just make them up? Of course, there was a tiny little problem of Erdemović actually not recognizing Col. Popović in a line-up, but worry not - the ICTY had that covered as well:

“The Trial Chamber has carefully considered the fact that Erdemović was unable to identify Popović in a photo line up … However, the Trial Chamber considers that given the traumatic circumstances in which Erdemović met Popović and the significant passage of time since then, Erdemović’s failure to identify Popović in a photo line up does not raise a reasonable doubt as to the Trial Chamber’s conclusion that the man whom Erdemović saw at Pilica on 16 July was, in fact, Popović”. (paragraph 1135)

Never mind the evidence, then, or the burden of proof, or reasonable doubt - the "judges" simply know what happened, because, well, they just do. Better than Erdemović himself, even!

There are other, no less significant, incongruities in the June 10 verdict, which you can read at the SHP site. What I want to address here, once again, is the ICTY itself.

The media often refer to the ICTY as the "UN War Crimes Tribunal." In the Balkans, the shorthand for it is "The Hague." This was done deliberately, as The Hague is actually home to the International Court of Justice, a legitimate UN court adjudicating disputes between states. The ICTY, however, was established by a body (the Security Council) that has no authority to establish courts - because it lacks judicial powers. It's elementary logic that one cannot delegate the powers one does not have in the first place. Of course, we live in a world where laws are creatively interpreted to serve the needs of the political class, so it's not surprising that the ICTY is considered legitimate simply because the people who established it say it is.

The ICTY's role isn't to punish the guilty, effect reconciliation or serve the course of justice. It is to write the history of the Yugoslav Succession Wars as one of "greater Serbian aggression", by accusing the entire political and military leadership of the Serbs (be it in Serbia or the territories of present-day Croatia and Bosnia) of a preposterous grand conspiracy. By doing so, it seeks to label the Serbs as perpetrators of "genocide" (which has been redefined to mean just about anything). This is also meant to absolve not only the other parties to the conflict, but also the European powers, the U.S. and NATO, of any wrongdoing. At the same time, imposing the genocidal label on the Serbs is meant to neutralize any investigation of the actual genocide committed between 1941 and 1945 by the Croatian Ustasha (whose primary victims were Serbs, Jews and Roma, in that order). It also helps whitewash the atrocities of Nazi Germany, e.g. the Holocaust.

To truly counter the Tribunal's lies, one must expose them for what they are. One has to have the courage to say the Emperor is wearing no clothes. For years now, the ICTY and its sponsors have been deceiving the world, claiming that this was an independent, legitimate court of law. It is not hard to expose this as the proverbial Big Lie - as you've seen above, it can be done simply by quoting the Tribunal's own verdicts and the idiocy contained therein. There is a limit to how many people they can lie to, and for how long.

This fight has only just begun.

A New Look

2010-06-11T01:56:00.003-04:00

Gray Falcon has been around a few years, and I figured it was time to update the look a bit.

This ought to be easier on the eyes a little - though the subject matter will remain the same.

Ceterum censeo census...

2010-06-05T12:13:00.005-04:00

Back in April, commenter Dejo asked about the census in Bosnia, or rather the fact that the Bosnian Muslims were adamantly against including ethnic or religious affiliation on the census forms:

The [Muslim] politicians have built their careers on the war and the myths surrounding that war. If there is a census then a lot of things about the war will come to light including how many Serbs and Croats are still left in central Bosnia, who of those which have been listed as missing or dead are actually alive and the radical changes in the religious dynamic among [Muslims] in Bosnia since they've started importing foreign Mudjahedin during the war. Not to mention how many babies were really born from rape during the war and how many battles were incorrectly listed as massacres. Among other things.

I daresay I have a pretty good understanding of Bosnia and the Balkans in general. Only a few things truly baffle me. The Muslim politicians' position on the census is one of them.

Now, some libertarians may regard opposition to the census in general, or disclosing ethnic or religious background in particular, to be a worthy cause on grounds of liberty, privacy, etc. Be that as it may, it isn't a factor in Bosnia. In most cases, it is easy to figure out one's ethnic or religious (as, by Ottoman legacy, ethnicity is based on religion) affiliation simply by their name. There are exceptions, of course, but they only confirm the rule. So trying to hide that data from census-takers is rather pointless, as it can be extrapolated (at great expense, mind, and somewhat inaccurately) later. Furthermore, in Bosnia ethnicity is a constitutional category; with public offices set aside for quotas of Serbs, Croats and Muslims, being "undeclared" is simply not an option if one desires government work. And there isn't much of another kind these days.

One explanation I've tended to credit for the past several years is that the Muslims simply fear no longer being the most numerous. But would it really fatally undermine their argument about Bosnia being their nation-state (with Serbs and Croats as interlopers or "aggressors") if they became outnumbered? Muslims weren't a majority in 1991, ether - Bosnia was over 55% Christian back then. Yet that didn't stop Izetbegovic from trying to create an Islamic government. The argument holds no water either way, census or no census.

Dejo's explanation above sounds a bit more plausible. The trouble I have with it is that the number of war dead has been pretty well established, at just under 100,000. It isn't really clear how a census would prove how any of those 100,000 perished. However, it stands to reason that official numbers showing precisely how many Serb and Croat villages have been obliterated and how many Serbs and Croats actually live in Muslim-controlled areas, would easily explode the claims of Muslim multi-ethnicity and tolerance.

Currently the lack of a census allows Muslim officials to maintain the fiction that the Muslim-Croat Federation has implemented Annex VII of the Dayton Accords, and that Serb refugees have returned to their homes. But if the census shows that all those Serbs (and in some cases, Croats) returned only nominally and claimed their ID cards so they could reclaim their property, sell it and leave again - as has overwhelmingly been the case - that would certainly deprive people like Haris Silajdzic of the ability to claim they represented progressive humanitarianism, rather than, say, radical Islam. The fact that Muslim lawmakers have tried to propose using ID card data in the census - knowing that it didn't reflect reality - indicates there might be something to this.

And yet... anyone who cares to spend a day researching can easily reach the same conclusion. But myths are myths precisely because they are immune to facts and reason. The Western media (and hence the public) persist in thinking Sarajevo is still a paragon of multi-ethnic tolerance. Yet there's nothing "multiethnic" about a city whose councilmen interpret "diversity" as giving representation to "Bosnians," "Bosniaks" and "Muslims."

Come to think of it, that may be another reason Muslim politicians fear the census. Back in 1991, they actually declared themselves as "Muslims" (Muslimani). It was a 1993 meeting of self-proclaimed national leaders that changed their name to "Bosniaks" (Bošnjaci), in an attempt to assert nation-statehood. What if some people are still confused, and put "Bosnian" or "Muslim-Bosnian" or just "Muslim" on the census form? Oh what a nightmare that will be for the statisticians...

The argument Bosnian lawmakers are currently chewing over - whether Eurostat regulations require ethnic or religious data - is pointless; they may not require it, but they certainly allow it. Besides, Bosnia has its own laws and regulations that must be followed, and the underlying principle of those may be called habeas ethnos. How do Muslim politicians imagine protecting "Bosniak rights" if, by the census, there are no "Bosniaks"?

It just doesn't add up. Such vociferous opposition has to be motivated by something. What are they trying to hide? What are they trying to achieve? Is this malice at work, or stupidity, or both?

As I said, few things about the Balkans baffle me, but this remains one of them.

Israel Gets Serbed

2010-06-04T12:51:00.001-04:00

I don't normally deal with Israel here, or the whole Middle East question (one emotionally charged intractable conflict is plenty, thank you), but what happened the other day does have a fair bit to do with things I've been writing about for the past decade or so.

It should be obvious by now that the "Gaza flotilla" was a trap. Israel walked right into it. Fortunately for the Israelis, they too were filming the whole thing, and knew how to use blogs and YouTube, so they may have even come out ahead in the propaganda skirmish that followed. But there is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that the whole flotilla operation was designed from the start to be a propaganda stunt. The "activists" (is that what they are called these days?) aboard those ships were armed and ready. They wanted to be stopped and boarded, so they could scream to high heaven about being abused by the Israeli "pirates" on the high seas. It almost worked, too.

As I said over on Ilana Mercer's blog earlier in the week, the entire strategy employed by Hamas seems to be a reprise of Sarajevo. So the Israeli presence on its borders becomes a "siege", the legitimate blockade of a hostile polity becomes "strangling", and Israeli raids in response to missiles fired from Gaza become "terror." Israel is dubbed an occupying power even though it unilaterally retreated from Gaza in 2005, leaving it as a de facto independent city-state. And Israeli inspections in international waters, though legal, become "piracy."

Hamas routinely fires missiles from Gaza at Israeli civilians across the border. They see nothing wrong with this - remember, to Hamas, Israel has no right to exist, and needs to be obliterated. But if Israel retaliates, whether by assassinating Hamas leaders or sending tanks into Gaza to destroy missile launchers, or by enforcing a perfectly legal blockade to deny Hamas weapons and ammunition, while allowing food and other civilian supplies in - ah, that's nothing short of "genocide," then!

Israel has a powerful conventional army, navy, air force, and most likely even nuclear weapons (though not officially acknowledged). It has defeated Arab armies on numerous occasions in open warfare, and has successfully fought terrorism and insurgency through special operations. So those who wish it destroyed came up with a way of turning that strength into a weakness: cast themselves as innocent, unarmed, helpless victims and howl as loud as possible about being abused by that very Israel whose strength no one can dispute.

There are two recent examples of this approach being enormously successful. In Bosnia, the government of Alija Izetbegovic (revered in the Muslim world as an ideologue of jihad and Islamic revolution, but still believed in the West to have been a multicultural democrat) provoked an armed confrontation with the Serb and Croat populations, then raised hell in the media about being a victim of "aggression" and "genocide." European and American public were steadily bombarded with the most outlandish claims of atrocities, courtesy of legions of "advocacy journalists" stationed in Sarajevo, who somehow never saw thousands of armed Muslim troops in the city, or their artillery, but only "helpless civilians." Likewise, they never saw any of the Serb civilians killed by Muslim fire on the other side of the line; oh no, every Serb in Bosnia was a drunken, bearded savage with a machine gun in one hand, a bottle of brandy in the other, and a bloody knife in his teeth.

This distortion of reality went so far as to actually exaggerate the military strength of the Serbs, in an effort to make them seem even more formidable (and their enemies that much more innocent/unarmed/endangered). In this kind of 4th-generation warfare, weakness was an asset, and strength became a liability.

Not only was the Muslim (and Croat) version of the war propagated as gospel truth in the West, the Serbs were prevented from saying anything in their own defense through the second-worst regime of UN sanctions in history (the worst being what was imposed on Iraq). By the time the sanctions were officially lifted, the Serbs had been so thoroughly demonized, few dared question the official story when NATO attacked Serbia itself and occupied one of its provinces in 1999. Once again, the world was told of the Evil Genocidal Serb Aggressors wantonly killing and abusing innocent "Kosovarian" civilians, which was obviously so egregious that it required NATO to violate its own charter and that of the UN to launch a "humanitarian" intervention.

Here was identity politics brought to its logical extreme: a situation in which the designated victim could literally get away with murder (Izetbegovic, the KLA) yet be seen as innocent and virtuous, while the designated culprit (the Serbs) could be slandered with impunity, and anything they did would be perceived as purely evil. It isn't just about delegitimizing one's means of defense, but delegitimizing one's right to exist at all.

The problem with trying to explain this to people is that this sort of demonization has so far been practiced only against the Serbs. Even Iraqis, who have suffered horrifically, were not singled out as a nation (rather, the hatred was focused on the persona of Saddam Hussein, and the odium largely dissipated after his execution). Only a few careful observers have seen it as a general trend, applied beyond the Balkans. As a result, no one in the world really believes they could one day get "Serbed" (for lack of a better term) themselves.

But as we see from the flotilla incident, some folks have taken the lessons of Bosnia and Kosovo to heart, even if no one else has. Not surprisingly, the organizer of the propaganda stunt is a Turkish "NGO" first formed to provide aid to the Bosnian Muslims. Among the "activists" detained on the ships were a Syrian with Bosnian citizenship and the "President of Muslim Forum of Kosova" (sic). There are Balkan connections all over - all but guaranteeing that the mainstream press in the West won't say a word about any of them. Because, as we know, the Balkans is a sacred cow and the pure, innocent victimhood of "Bosnians" and "Kosovars" must and shall not be brought into question. Ever.

Why, even the Israelis won't say anything about it, so as not to hurt their own cause. Can't allow oneself to be associated with those Evil Serbs, right? That's how thorough the demonization has been. But if it can happen to the Serbs, it can happen to anyone. The real question is, who is next?

Premature Jubilation

2010-05-14T15:49:00.005-04:00

I don't actually check the "Srebrenica Genocide Blog"; they are obsessed with me, not vice versa. But while doing some research on the attempted slaughter of General Krstic from the other day, I found this interesting result on Google:

(screen capture of a search done May 14, 2010; click to enlarge)

Up top is the new post, now merely supporting the attack and eagerly repeating the official line that it was "revenge" for the (alleged) genocide in Srebrenica. In fact, it is uncanny how the SGB post resembles the official reports in the British media on the Krstic near-slaying. Or is that the other way around?

Either way, the original, since-deleted post actually celebrated the murder of Gen. Krstic. It was deleted, and replaced by the new post so quickly, Google didn't even have time to cache it. But the old title remained. Just goes to show one can't hide anything on the Internet. Also, I suppose, the true extent of SGB's actual commitment to justice, human rights and whatnot.

I mean, you have to admit that, "When They kill Us, that is genocide and horrible, but when We kill Them it's a fantastic thing!" is simply a piss-poor excuse for morality.

The Easter Victory

2010-05-06T13:21:00.004-04:00

In the evening of May 6, 1945, General Alfred Jodl arrived at the Western Allies' headquarters in Reims. His mission: surrender to the Allies, ending what became known as World War Two. He eventually signed the surrender treaty in the early morning hours of the following day.

But the Soviet leader Iosif Stalin could under no circumstances accept this. He insisted that the Germans officially surrender to the Soviets as well, which General Wilhelm Keitel did in Berlin on May 8 - May 9, Moscow time.

Part of the reason for this was pride; the USSR had borne the brunt of Allied casualties in fighting the Nazis. Stalin took credit for the Soviet war effort, and wanted the credit he considered his due. Another consideration, though, was more symbolic.

May 6 in the old Julian calendar still followed by the Orthodox faithful (whom the Communists had cruelly repressed) was the feast of St. George, the fabled dragon-slayer. In 1945, it was also the date of Easter. One can certainly understand why Stalin, as an atheist and Communist, would absolutely refuse to give that particular date any more meaning.

After the end of the war, Stalin had hundreds of thousands of liberated Soviet POWs either executed or sent to the gulag, so they would not be witnesses to his bumbling incompetence in 1941. He also turned on the victorious generals like Zhukov, jealous of their popularity. There was no room on the victor's pedestal for anyone but him. Especially not for God.

And so, May 9 became Victory Day in the Soviet Union, while the fact that the Germans surrendered on Easter became obscured by the fog of war.

Be Very Afraid...

2010-04-19T02:47:00.003-04:00

A lot is being said and written today about the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. Professional panic-mongers and witch-hunters are once again screaming about "right-wing extremists" and warning that OKC could happen again. Yet the impression I get is that this noise has less (if anything) to do with the 168 dead and 600 injured in Oklahoma City 15 years ago, and more with the efforts of the government to deflect criticism by painting those who disagree with it as lunatics and potential terrorists.

Anthony Gregory of LRC puts it into perspective:

Seventeen years ago in 1993, the federal government did in fact murder dozens of Americans who were no threat to anyone. The same government has in fact violated the rights of American citizens, rounded people into concentration camps, silenced and infiltrated politically peaceful groups, conspired against the people in numerous ways, drugged, poisoned and withheld medicine from Americans without their knowing, lied repeatedly about war and serious law enforcement matters, jailed people without due process, imposed martial law on segments of the domestic population, seized guns from law-abiding gunowners, broken down American doors and held scared children at gunpoint, planned the creation of extralegal judicial institutions to process American citizens, targeted political enemies with the IRS and other police agencies, forced Americans to labor and even kill and die under threat of imprisonment, overseen the largest prison system in the world, shoveled trillions of borrowed dollars to corrupt financial institutions and killed millions of civilians abroad – all in the lifetime of many who are still alive. The U.S. police state has in fact been growing since 9/11 and even before – and Obama has done nothing to stem its growth. On the contrary, he has continued the mix of economic fascism, imperialism, surveillance and lawless detention policy that characterized the Bush years.

Indeed, the most dangerous rightwing extremist in my lifetime was George W. Bush. Obama is following in his footsteps. That so many Americans are more frightened of rightwingers out of power than in power – more bothered by conservatives who hate Washington than those who control or want to control it – and more offended by anti-government rhetoric than the Democratic president continuing the policies they claimed to hate under Republican rule – shows how little they have learned from Waco and all that has happened since.

Read the rest of the essay at LewRockwell.com.

The Art of Hate

2010-04-16T11:54:00.003-04:00

Harry Knowles, the premier movie geek of Ain't It Cool News, says "Serbian Film" (Srpski film) is "brilliant", "tremendous" and "extreme", and has to be seen to be believed.

It is also a story about the sickest, most depraved dark corners of the underground porn industry. We're talking things that are illegal for a reason. But, you see, what first-time director/producer Srdjan Spasojevic set out to do was not make just a snuff or exploitation movie (which this most assuredly is). Oh no, his intent was to make a metaphor for Serbia itself.

That is why it's called "Serbian Film" and not, for example, "Snuff". All the sick depravity in it is supposed to represent the country, the society, the people of Serbia. In the words of reviewer Todd Brown, "This is a film meant to punish, not to entertain, and it succeeds absolutely. It is genuinely sickening and that is entirely the point."

"Serbian Film" is actually an anti-Serbian film.

Spasojevic, the director, doesn't deny his film is meant to be a metaphorical representation of Serbia. He claims that the film was entirely financed "privately, with donations and contributions from friends." Donations from whom? What sort of "friends"? This kind of money doesn't grow on trees, least of all in Serbia - where the only people with money are crooks and politicians (or is that redundant?). And oh yes, foreigners. Could it be that the "Serbian Film" was funded by the same people who fund Natasa Kandic, Sonja Biserko and other "NGO" vampires, whose only job for the past two decades has been to denigrate, defame and destroy everything Serbian? This is mere speculation on my part, mind you, but I would not be shocked if it ends up being true.

At least we know that Spasojevic didn't get a penny from the government; that's sort of surprising, given that official Belgrade shares his Serbophobia and automasochism. In fact, Spasojevic complains about the lack of official support, arguing that "This is a matter of culture, that represents Serbia in the world." (see interview in Serbian, here)

He has a point, in a way; a horrific, self-hating botched WW1 epic ("St. George Slays the Dragon") got copious government funding, even though its levels of Serb-hate and defamation are child's play compared to "Serbian Film". If one can't get paid for Serb-hating in today's Serbia, what can one get paid for?

That even the government is drawing the line at Spasojevic's magnum opus speaks volumes about its depravity.

The damage is already done, of course. Spasojevic's cinematic equivalent of "Piss Christ" is already touring the festivals in the US and elsewhere, "representing Serbia" to people already all to willing to see it as demonic, depraved and deserving of destruction. In the words of one reviewer,

Never again will you be able to hear or read the innocent phrase "a Serbian film" without a reflexive awakening of the searing images that Aleksandar Radivojevic (screenplay) and Srdjan Spasojevic (co-writer and director) have put on screen.

I just hope Spasojevic gets the reward he so richly deserves for this immense contribution to his nation's culture and history.

Still a Believer

2010-04-10T11:27:00.001-04:00

After lengthy negotiations with his captors, Russian television channel RT successfully obtained a written interview with former Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadžić. (They also had me as a guest in their studio on Friday evening, to comment on the case; see YouTube clip here.)

To me, the issue of whether Richard Holbrooke and the Empire promised Karadžić immunity isn't all that interesting. Empire going back on deals? Um, that's what they do. Let's see here: the Vance Plan, the UN arms embargo, the Dayton agreement, the Kumanovo Military-Technical agreement, the UNSCR 1244... Not to mention the NATO Charter and the U.S. Constitution. There isn't an official piece of paper that the Empire hasn't violated in the Balkans, often with a contemptuous "So what?".

I am not entirely certain that Dr. Karadžić is fully aware of this, though. His RT interview has some worthwhile insights. He's entirely correct, for example - though way too polite - when he compares NATO to "an old tool that is more trouble to keep than it is worth to maintain."

And he is absolutely on target when he claims that:

Serbs and Serbia are not really an objective of Western imperial intentions and we should not over-estimate our own significance. But this crisis has served as preparation for the forthcoming events. Serbia and the Republika Srpska were a sort of voodoo doll for Russia.

Here is what I simply don't understand. Even though the EU has been one of Empire's principal tools in grinding the Serbs into dust, Karadžić still has a soft spot for "Europe". Even though at one point he describes the EU as "a dormitory of retired people, students, and unemployed," he still argues that "Serbia should join Europe immediately"!

"There are many contradictions in Serbia's relations with EU countries, but that has not hindered integration with Europe," he says, adding:

It would be great if we joined Europe without these kinds of humiliations, bombardments, blackmails and finally attempts to impose the unacceptable price of giving up Kosovo. Otherwise, we share all European values and it would not be difficult for us to get along with Europe. Serbian people living throughout Europe are very integrated without any cultural problems, and they are very prominent in their own professions.

What values are those? Omnipotent government, gay "rights", political correctness, Islamophilia, cultural Marxism? That's the Europe of today, the Europe Karadžić hasn't seen in the two decades he spent first fighting a war, then living as a faith healer in Belgrade. To say that it would be "great" if only Europe weren't the way it is... that's just naive. And kind of sad, too.

Even though he was a psychiatrist by training, Karadžić was also a poet. And he has always thought more like a poet. He never understood how the propaganda in the West cast the Serbs as the new Nazis and twisted all the facts to fit that predetermined perception. Nor did he understand the mind of Alija Izetbegović, who was willing to sacrifice as many lives as it took for his dream of a Muslim Bosnia.

Karadžić is a man that very "Europe" (and the US) has cast as the principal villain of the Balkans Wars (having been unable to do so to Slobodan Milošević), and he's still dreaming of a Europe that has not existed in years. He doesn't understand that the Europe he speaks of has been methodically dismantled, with malice aforethought, just like his former country (Yugoslavia) - and by the same people, too.

Milošević figured this out eventually - too late to make a difference in Serbia, but just in time to destroy the Inquisition's show trial. Only time will tell if Karadžić will manage to do the same.

War and Remembrance

2010-04-07T12:26:00.000-04:00

Arthur "Jibby" Jibilian, the last surviving member of the Halyard Mission, passed away on March 23. To his dying day, he fought for recognition of the people who helped him and his OSS colleagues rescue hundreds of Allied airmen shot down by the Nazis over what is today Serbia. They were given aid and shelter, in spite of both brutal German reprisals and Allied bombings of Serbian civilians in 1944. But this amazing escape remained secret and forgotten, because of the identity of their Serbian rescuers.

It was the royalists of Gen. Draža Mihailović who took part in the Halyard rescue. Meanwhile, however, the Western Allies switched their support to Tito and the Communists. Assisted by Soviet troops, they took power in Yugoslavia as the Nazis retreated. Mihailović was captured in 1946 and executed by the Communists for "treason." His grave is yet to be found.

In 1948, Mihailović was posthumously decorated by President Truman, for "organising and leading important resistance forces against the enemy which occupied Yugoslavia from December 1941 to December 1944". The citation stated that the royalists, "fighting under extreme hardships, contributed materially to the Allied cause and were materially instrumental in obtaining a final Allied Victory." It was never made public, though, for fears of alienating the Tito government. Meanwhile, Communist history books nurtured a narrative of Mihailović and his troops as Nazi collaborators, equating them with actual Nazi sympathizers, the Croatian Ustaša, and the Bosnian Muslim and Albanian Waffen-SS.

As Tito's Yugoslavia was torn apart in the 1990s, this rape of history went a step further: the pro-Nazi forces in 1940s Yugoslavia and their modern heirs were re-cast as "freedom fighters", while the modern-day Serbs as well as Mihailović were smeared as the actual "Nazis"! The ignorant Western public swallowed the story hook, line and sinker. One can only imagine how the few Americans that knew the truth, like Jibilian, must have felt.

In a March 30 letter to Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Mim Bizic explains the tragedy of it all:

Bill David, an Ohio pilot, was in the Boston airport when he learned of "Jibby's" passing. He wrote this in an e-mail to me: "Art and his fellow soldiers were honest-to-God real live American heroes, the kind that you would read about in comic books. Over 500 lives were saved during WWII and nobody knows about it. The guys they rescued went on to live their lives, father families, build careers, help make America great. Nobody knows of all of this.

"This is not the news of the day. We as a nation are worse off because of it. It disconnects us from our gallant values and what made us great as a country in the first place.

"Tiger Woods will take center stage for his indiscretions. That is the kind of stuff that is important to us now. Everybody knows who Tiger and Paris are, but nobody knows who Draza Mihailovich was and what he and the Serbian people did for our country, the sacrifices they made so that our boys could live."

Perhaps if Americans did know, this wouldn't have been written on the 11th anniversary of the illegal bombing of Serbia by NATO forces.

Rest in peace, "Jibby". And thank you.

Truth and Submission

2010-04-01T20:14:00.006-04:00

I've seen it happen over and over again. For years, the self-styled "international community" delivered food to the Bosnian Muslims (and looked the other way as the food was redirected to the ruling elite, then the troops, with what was left being sold for cold hard cash to the civilians it was intended for in the first place), looked the other way as weapons and jihadists came in, and tried to broker a peace agreement that the Bosnian Muslim regime would accept. But instead of gratitude, they would be accused of "appeasing the aggressors" and "not doing enough."

Eventually, the UN openly sided with the Muslims. In August 1995, UN "peacekeepers" put on their NATO hats and turned their guns on the Bosnian Serbs. Yet even today, the Bosnian Muslim media stoke the fires of propaganda that the UN and the West "favored the Serb aggressors" and "failed" Bosnia. There are monuments mocking international aid. And even the most outspoken pro-Muslim officials, such as Daniel Serwer of the U.S. Institute of Peace, are denounced as "Karadzic's propagandists" if they so much as suggest that the Muslims may not have been absolutely right about everything, always.

One of the people high up on this hate-list is Lewis MacKenzie, Canadian general and veteran of many peacekeeping missions, who commanded the UN in Sarajevo during the first several months of the war in 1992. As such, he brokered a deal to turn over the Sarajevo airport to the UN, enabling the humanitarian aid to reach the beleaguered civilians. This saved quite a few lives, but wrecked the Izetbegovic government's plans to provoke a Western military intervention on their behalf - plans that Alija Izetbegovic openly admitted to MacKenzie at the time.

So the Muslims turned on MacKenzie with the full force of propaganda at their disposal, intent on making his name mud in Canada and beyond. He was accused of patronizing a (fictitious) "rape camp," of being a Serb, of being paid by the Serbs... Such accusations, though blatantly false, easy to debunk and clearly designed with defamation in mind, always got reported in Canada without qualifications, sometimes costing MacKenzie dearly. And all because he dared to speak about what he actually saw in Sarajevo, as opposed to what the official propaganda wanted the West to see.

His name is back in the news this week, as Radovan Karadzic's lawyer recently visited Canada and interviewed him - among others - as a potential defense witness. Sarajevo papers, whose hate-o-meter is stuck on 11 lately, immediately commenced a game of "Let's Hate Lew MacKenzie."

Thing is, MacKenzie is no Serb apologist, or even some sort of Serb sympathizer. I mean, he still blames Karadzic for the bombing of Sarajevo (and rightly so). He's simply a man of honor - you know, the kind soldiers actually ought to be - who tries to do what's right. And for that, he gets smeared by crooks and jihadists. Meanwhile, his own country stands idly by - or worse yet, joins in on the calumny.

No doubt, Gen. MacKenzie has no great desire to stay involved in Bosnia. But so long as he insists on telling the truth, rather than the officially preferred lies, the Muslims won't stop slandering him. They don't care much that he puts a lion's share of the blame for the Bosnian tragedy on the Serbs. Whether he or any other Western official thinks the Serbs were 50% or 75% or 99% to blame is entirely irrelevant. "100% of Bosnia" is not just a party slogan of the ruling Muslim nationalist these days; it's a political dogma. One must buy into Sarajevo's official "truth" 100%, or risk the wrath of the smear brigades. They will tolerate nothing less than full submission. And even if one offers it, they still reserve the right to viciously attack anyone, anytime, for any reason. Gratitude? Forget about it.

There ought to be a lesson in there somewhere. I'll let you figure it out for yourselves.

Lies Liars Tell

2010-03-19T14:09:00.003-04:00

Some time last year, the professional victim and proprietor of the "Srebrenica Genocide Blog" (no, I'm not going to link it) seems to have made me an object of his personal little jihad. Time and again, he's been Google-bombing me with claims I'm a "discredited genocide denier" and so on.

Following my latest post, he went on a comment spree (guess what I did with those), and then finally put up a piece denouncing me on the SGB. Normally I wouldn't pay this much heed, but the way he did it amused me to no end, and I thought I'd share it here. Namely, he said that I had sent in a comment to the SGB - which he deleted - and then offered a response allegedly proving me wrong (by quoting the ICTY, the old fallacy of appeal to false authority again).

Except I did no such thing. My alleged "comment" was copy-pasted from the actual essay, "Bleiburg in Potocari." It wasn't deleted. It didn't violate his comments policy. It did not exist. But SGB spun a whole yarn about it nonetheless. Kind of like the whole "Srebrenica genocide," actually.

Here's a pro tip: if you are trying to paint someone as a liar, it helps to not be one.

The Bleiburg in Potocari

2010-03-16T12:00:00.006-04:00

(The Bleiburg memorial, with the Ustasha and Muslim symbols, dedicated "In memory of the innocent victims of the Bleiburg tragedy, May 1945")

At the end of February, Al-Jazeera showed an interview with Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, currently on trial before the ICTY in The Hague. It was done as part of a 40-minute report with Rageh Omaar. The report opened with the rows of green funeral shrouds, wailing Muslim women, and the rows of names on the Potocari monument, near Srebrenica. The images that follow suggest that the Serbs rounded up some eight thousand civilians, and shot them in broad daylight. This is what the Arab world thinks happened. It doesn't matter that it isn't true. This imaginary Srebrenica has become a symbol for the entire Bosnian War: evil Serbs, unprovoked and driven by hatred, killing innocent, unarmed, peaceful Muslims while the West watches the "genocide" and does nothing.

For years, the Western media took for granted the death toll of 250,000 people mostly Muslims. A report by ICTY-commissioned demographers (Tabeau/Bijak) from 2003, indicating a death toll of 102,000 remained hidden for a year. Its accidental revelation in late 2004 caused a firestorm of denial and declarations that the final, official report, compiled by Mirsad Tokaca, would establish the real number, closer to 150,000. That, however, did not happen. Tokaca's report, completed in late 2005, put the final number of war dead at 97,000. And yet despite these constant revisions, even it maintained that the number of dead in Srebrenica was 8,000!

ICTY's own investigations suggest otherwise. Of the 7,661 persons listed as missing after Srebrenica was taken by the Bosnian Serbs in July 1995, some 5,371 are members of the Bosnian Army. Remains of 3,837 have been identified. Of those, 3,602 were men age 15-65, 201 were men aged 65 and over, 9 were boys under 14, 11 were women, and 14 of age and sex unknown. Tribunal investigators also found 448 blindfolds and 423 ligatures, indicating executions. They determined that "1,785 individuals died of gunshot wounds, 169 died of probable or possible gunshot wounds, 67 died of Shrapnel wounds or blast injuries, 11 died of gunshot and blast injuries, 6 died of other causes (trauma, suffocation, etc.), and 1441 died of undetermined causes."

So, the "eight thousand civilians" turn first into 5,300 military men, 3,800 identified bodies, 1800 gunshot victims, and 450 executed. Keep in mind that the women and children abandoned by the "brave fighters" of the 28th Bosnian Army Division (from the "demilitarized safe area" no less) at the UN base in Potocari were safely evacuated by Bosnian Serb troops, using trucks and buses hastily requisitioned from Serb civilians. What kind of "genocide" leaves the women and children alive?

There are more problems with the mainstream narrative. Some 3,000 names from the list of the missing are shown as having voted in the 1996 elections. Either they were alive, or there was massive electoral fraud. Either way, someone lied. Serb researched Milivoje Ivanisevic (”Srebrenica ID Card”) accuses the Sarajevo government of burying people who died long before the war, as well as soldiers who died prior to July 1995, at the Potocari memorial cemetery. Bulgarian researcher Germinal Civikov questions the testimony of Drazen Erdemovic, the "crown witness" of the ICTY prosecution whose accounts were used in every Srebrenica-related case. In his book, Civikov shows that Erdemovic and his confederates could not have possibly killed 1,200 people in one night, as he claimed. Sure enough, only 127 bodies were found at the location.

Gen. Krstic, the first Serb officer convicted as "accessory to genocide" was nowhere near Srebrenica, having taken command on July 20, 1995 (five days after the town was taken). Momir Nikolic, another valuable witness for the prosecution, admitted to perjury - but his testimonies were kept! And the ICTY itself admitted that the actual facts of the case remain unknown, but the judges nonetheless believe some 8,000 men were killed. In a true court of law, it doesn't matter what one believes - only what one can prove. And there is simply no proof for the "genocide" in Srebrenica, because it did not happen.

In the summer of 1992, British reporters took a photo of an emaciated Muslim man and arranged it so it appeared behind barbed wire, like an inmate of Nazi death camps. Western media howled about "Belsen '92" and spoke of the Serbs as the new Nazis. A magazine that ran an analysis of the deception in Trnopolje was forced into bankruptcy by British libel laws, yet the truth of the analysis was never actually disputed. Deemed libelous was only the insinuation that the crew shot the photo with malicious intent. Because fabricating genocide photos is proof positive of humanitarianism, what? Anyway, the truth was out and the story of "Serb death camps" has mostly disappeared since. It was replaced by the constant invocation of Srebrenica as the "greatest atrocity in Europe since Hitler."

A massive memorial complex was built in Potocari, at the former UN peacekeeper compound where those women and children sought - and found! - refuge. Bill Clinton, that paragon of honesty and virtue, attended the grand opening. While the Bosnian Muslims are broke and without jobs, their government spent lavishly on the Potocari shrine. So that "vengeance could become justice" as the dedication in Arabic says. So that a lie could become true.

At the end of WW2, during the withdrawal from Yugoslavia before the advancing Communist troops, a number of Croat fascists (Ustasha) were captured in northern Slovenia and southern Austria. The British also turned over several thousand POWs to the Communists. The Communists shot a number of them at the town of Bleiburg, the same way they executed tens of thousands of "class enemies" in Serbia and elsewhere, since 1944. However, after the war, Bleiburg was turned into a shrine by the surviving Ustasha and the Catholic Church. Modern Croatian history claims that 60,000 people were killed in Bleiburg (!). British historian D.B. MacDonald explains:

Inflating the numbers of dead at Bleiburg had several layers of significance. Firstly, it gave the Croats their own massacre at the hands of Serbs and/or Communists, which allowed them to counter the Serbs' Jasenovac genocide with one of their own. Secondly, it allowed Croats to distance themselves from the Serbs and the Communist regime that had carried out the massacres. They could portray Croatia as an unwilling participant in the SFRY, more a prisoner than a constituent nation. Thirdly, by suffering such a massacre, the Croats underwent their own 'way of Cross', as it was frequently dubbed in Croatian writings.

(Balkan holocausts?: Serbian and Croatian victim-centered propaganda and the war in Yugoslavia, David Bruce MacDonald, Manchester University Press, April 19, 2003)

While inflating the number of dead in Bleiburg, the new Croatian government reduced the number of victims of Jasenovac, to establish the moral equivalence of the Ustasha and the "Serbo-Communists" (led by Tito, a Croat...), going so far as to declare the Ustasha the real victims, claiming that Jasenovac was a work camp in which the Jews killed each other and there were hardly any Serbs there anyway...

Even President Mesic, hardly a Serbophile, called Bleiburg an Ustasha festival at government expense. He also added that those buried at Jasenovac were innocents, while many of those buried at Bleiburg were their executioners. It didn't change a thing.

Just as the Ustasha created a shrine in Bleiburg to cast themselves as victims (committing a horrific blasphemy by comparing themselves to Jesus), the shrine to the false genocide in Potocari serves to mask an aggressive ideology - whose insistence on a Muslim-dominated, centralized Bosnian state led to the war in the first place - with a halo of victimhood. Mustafa Ceric, the Bosnian Muslim religious leader, even put this "genocide" on the same level as the Holocaust at an interfaith conference last year.

The Bleiburg in Potocari is a symbol of the Bosnian War, though not in the way its creators intended. It is a fitting representation of a war steeped in manipulation and lies - an insult not only to the victims of Hitler's "final solution," but to reason and decency as well.

Follow the Money

2010-03-12T10:34:00.000-05:00

In the latest installment of the saga of Ejup Ganic, we read he was bailed out by "Diane Jenkins," born Sanela Catic, "former Bosnian refugee who became the wife of Britain's highest paid banker." Forgive me if I doubt the account in the Daily Mail that gives her middle name as "Dijana"; Bosnians, whether Muslim or Christian, simply don't have middle names.

Seriously, you can't make this stuff up. A mystery bottle blonde bombshell bails out the war crimes suspect, only to be revealed as a poor little refuge girl who struck gold by becoming the bride of London's richest bankster? Hollywood, eat your heart out.

While we're on the subject of money, here's something I've been meaning to mention for almost a month now, but never got round to. You see, frantic clamoring by investors in the Bank of Collective Serbian Guilt (hat tip to Chris Deliso for this memorable phrase) to have the "international community" get involved in Bosnia again is always justified by the alleged necessity to impose reforms and create a "functional state". They won't deny that Bosnia has sucked in enormous amounts of foreign aid (though they won't mention it either, unless pressed), but their explanation is that all of it was wasted because those evil Serbs (who else?) are blocking the central government from functioning properly and making the best use of it.

The only problem with this is that in Bosnia itself, centralization is championed by people who have by far the most abysmal record of governing their own affairs. So when they demand they get to govern everyone else's, why the surprise when everyone else is not exactly inclined to agree?

Let's leave aside for the moment the question of values and principles, and the paradox of federated and subsidiary governments such as the UK, Germany and the United States of America (or should that be United State?), whose representatives want for Bosnia a degree of centralization unacceptable in their own countries. And let's not dwell at this point on the fact that the de facto international protectorate in place since 1996 has provided a powerful disincentive for Bosnian communities to actually work out the differences over which they waged a war and continued to bicker about after the armistice. The fundamental issue at stake is whether the communities can live together in peace, or if one would try to lord it over the others. When you have three communities deeply mistrustful of each other, the very last thing you want to do is give them a powerful central government to fight over. Yet that is precisely what the Empire is trying to do.

Of the three communities that live in Bosnia, only the Muslims desire a centralized government. In part, this is because they believe Bosnia ought to be a nation-state, with them as the "nation", while Serbs and Croats are simply interlopers with "spare homelands". They also believe their suffering during the war entitles them to things. But beneath the rhetoric and emotions, this agenda is also driven by a very real financial motive.

You see, the Muslim-Croat Federation is broke.

During the war, the Islamic world sent countless amounts of money to the regime of Alija Izetbegovic, to support the holy war against the alleged "genocide" of Muslims at the hands of Serbs and Croats. Very little of that money ever reached the Muslim civilians; some was spent to equip the military, but most was simply appropriated by Izetbegovic's cronies. After the war, a river of financial aid came from the West. It was calculated at one point that Bosnia had received more foreign aid per capita than all of Western Europe under the Marshall Plan. But while the Marshall Plan funds went into resurrecting the economy, the Bosnian aid was like pouring water into the desert. It simply vanished.

Oh, some of it went to rebuilding the war-torn housing and roads. Much went to a plethora of non-governmental organizations organizing seminars about tolerance and peace and whatever. A lot went to fund elections every year, then every two years, or support a gargantuan bureaucracy within the Muslim-Croat Federation (eleven sets of governments. ELEVEN!). Some surely ended up paying for a host of new mosques and their imams. The rest lined the pockets of government officials and "businessmen" who became tycoons thanks to government connections and support. But hardly anything went into producing anything of value. Bosnia had a lot of industry prior to the war. Now it has almost none.

As governments throughout the world are becoming aware, it is easy to come up with new welfare and entitlement programs when the money is flowing in. But what do you do when it dries up? Cutting the entitlements can often result in angry mobs in the streets.

The Federation government was reminded of that in October 2009, when a host of war veterans shut down the capital for a day, protesting the announced 10% cut to their benefits. Besieged, the government caved in to their demands, even though the cut was required by the IMF as one of the conditions for a new loan that would go towards servicing the budget obligations. Yes, you heard right - Bosnia is borrowing money to cover welfare bills.

This isn't to say that the Serb Republic is in a stellar shape. But it has a more sensible tax structure and isn't being dragged down by welfare payments. For years, Muslim politicians (Croats have very little say in the Federation) bribed their voters and lined their pockets with someone else's money. Now that the money spigot is drying up, they can't cut back on the bribes, or the masses will get nervous. So they want to punt the problem up to the central government. No doubt they plan to have it distribute tax revenue "fairly". And not surprisingly, the Serbs and Croats are having none of it. Their refusal is neither selfish nor spiteful, but rather a rejection of this scheme for plunder - robbing Peter and Paul to pay Mustafa, if you will.

May as well ask "Diane Jenkins" and her bankster husband to bail them out.

Lying to Defend Official Truth

2010-03-11T16:07:00.000-05:00

It was only a matter of time before the guardians of Official Truth embarked on a campaign to defend Ejup Ganić from charges of war crimes. Radio Free Europe, an official propaganda outfit of the US government nonetheless posing as a bastion of journalistic integrity, did so through an interview with Jovan Divjak, titled "What Really Happened During the Dobrovoljacka Attack?"

The intent of the story is obvious from the choice of Divjak as the principal witness. He is a Serbian-born former Yugoslav Army colonel, who in April 1992 joined the Izetbegovic regime and was expressly promoted to general rank. Along with Vehbija Karić and Stjepan Šiber he was part of the first (decorative) "multiethnic" staff of the Bosnian Territorial Defense, and therefore nominally in charge of the militia that undertook the Dobrovoljačka ambush.

Another indicator of the story's slant can be found early on, in the description of the retreating Army column, allegedly "loaded with ammunition and weapons that Serbian forces would use during their three-year siege of Sarajevo." Even if this were true, how could anyone have possibly known this at the time of the ambush?

But as I explained before, it isn't true. The Army troops in the city at the time were fresh recruits, in early stages of their basic training. What was being evacuated on May 3 was the HQ complex of the 2nd Army District, the contents of which consisted overwhelmingly of paperwork, not weaponry. Ganić apologists have already claimed that the haul from the ambushed convoy was "40 rifles". Well, what was it - a handful of rifles, or truckloads of ammo that bombed Sarajevo for three years? They can't have it both ways.

Divjak gives a fanciful account of the events of that day, claiming that the Army was actually attacking Sarajevo and that his militia was acting in self-defense. He says the "Yugoslav Army tried to take control of the city" on May 2. But his entire evidence for this is a couple of trucks driving along the river! To understand that Divjak's account is rubbish, you need go no further than his claim that a "special forces unit from Niš" was "holed up in the Dom Armije building."

I can testify, under oath if necessary, that there was no such unit in that building. How do I know? I lived across the street and was able to actually see what was going on with my very own eyes. The Dom Armije (Army House) used to be an officers' club back during the days of Austria-Hungary. The Yugoslav Army used it as a concert hall and movie theater. The recruits stationed there at the time were trying to salvage music instruments when they were charged by the Muslim militia. There were no "Niš special forces."

The 63rd Airborne Brigade, based in Niš, was used by the Muslim media as a general bogeyman throughout the war. Over and over again, every time the Muslim troops suffered a crushing defeat in battle (which happened often), they'd blame "special forces from Serbia" and in particular the 63rd. Yet it never took part in the Bosnian War - except in the imagination of the Sarajevo regime.

Divjak's story of what "really" happened is riddled with inconsistencies and paradoxes, and doesn't correspond to reality whatsoever. This isn't necessarily his fault; that's how Official Truth reads, and he's just following the script. The reason he was chosen as the spokesman was that he's an ethnic Serb. This is supposed to demonstrate that the "Bosnia-Herzegovina Territorial Defense" and the "Army" it later became were multi-ethnic, democratic, tolerant, a strictly defensive force for the innocents beset by evil genocidal Serbs, whom even their own "honest" people abhorred and fought.

Facts, of course, indicate otherwise. Divjak "left" the Yugoslav Army after a court-martial conviction for illegally distributing ammunition and equipment to renegade TD forces. He joined Izetbegovic's regime to avoid prison. For the first few months of the war he was one of the public faces of the "Bosnian" army, and then quietly shunted aside to "cooperate with civilian structures." He didn't actually command the militia that besieged the Army posts or ambushed the columns; those men took their orders directly from Izetbegović (through Ganić or otherwise). Even though he was used and discarded by the Muslim regime he helped legitimize, Divjak cannot admit this, or two decades of his life would become meaningless. So he lies, both to himself and to the rest of the world.

What really happened in Dobrovoljačka was that the militia loyal to the Izetbegović regime illegally besieged the Yugoslav Army, and then proceeded to attack the Army convoy that was under UN protection and whose safety was guaranteed by Izetbegović himself. The only thing realistically in dispute is whether that guarantee was violated by Ganić and the militia commanders with Izetbegović's approval, or without.

Either way, any sort of trial will reveal that this was no "heroic defense." Worse yet, it will become obvious that the war was no "aggression by Serbia and the Yugoslav Army," undermining the entire narrative that forms the foundation of Official Truth about Bosnia. This is why the Bosnian Muslim public so vocally demands Ganić's release.