Criminal Thanksgiving Day

It has been nineteen years since the Empire's "junkyard dogs" committed the biggest act of ethnic cleansing to date: Operation Storm.

What the Catholic Nazis of the 1941-45 Independent State of Croatia could not achieve with Hitler's help, their heirs of 1991-95 did with the funding, training, propaganda and material support of the Atlantic Empire. Of the Orthodox Serbs that have lived in Dalmatia and along the old Hapsburg Military Frontier for centuries, only traces remain - and even they are being destroyed on a daily basis.

Shameless in their bigotry and projection, the Croatian authorities celebrate "Homeland Thanksgiving Day" every August. But it is no victory, only a crime.

And the East remembers.

FIFA Upholds Sieg-heiling Conviction

In November last year, when Croatia's soccer team managed to win passage to the 2014 World Cup by the skin of their teeth, one of the players sieg-heiled with the crowd in triumph. While Nazi displays in Croatia - from soccer stadiums to symbols of state - have been ignored for over two decades, FIFA couldn't let this one go. "Crazy Joe" Šimunić was fined and suspended for 10 games - starting with the World Cup.

At the end of April, a Croatian web magazine (billing itself as "one of the world’s leading portals") quoted Šimunić's lawyer Davor Prtenjača, who was optimistic that the decision would be overturned on appeal. Citing the speed of the hearing - just a month after the appeal was filed - as cause for hope, Prtenjača added that "FIFA had given up on the assertion that “Za dom – spremni” was purely a fascist salute, but still claim Šimunić had provoked racial hated at Maksimir stadium."

Both the salute and the shield have been symbols of the Croatian Nazis (Ustasha), who committed genocidal atrocities against Serbs and Jews and Roma so vicious, even some Nazis were appalled. Yet the defense is now that the salute - the Croatian equivalent of the German sieg-heil - was "not purely fascist"? Same with the checkerboard shield, which the Croats claim is an ancient symbol of their people. So? The swastika is an ancient Hindu symbol, yet it's been banned throughout much of the world because of its association with Hitler.

But even allowing for all that, for the sake of argument, what explains this?

Široki Brijeg, Herzegovina, November 2010 (source)

This photo is from a November 2010 game in the overwhelmingly Croat Široki Brijeg, in Herzegovina, where fans of the local team waved around both the actual Nazi flag and that of the Vatican - because the Church of Rome was a major backer of the Croatian Nazis, in WW2 and thereafter.

In any case, the "not solely fascist" defense didn't work. Šimunić lost his appeal on May 13, and the only way he will be involved with the World Cup - which begins this afternoon - is as a spectator. 

Remembering the "Blitz"

At 0530 hours on May 1, 1995, some 16,000 Croatian troops attacked the Serb-inhabited portion of Western Slavonia known as Sector West (a UN Protected Area, UNPA).

Following the failure of Croatian militias to conquer this and other Serb-inhabited areas (later united in the Republic of Serbian Krajina - RSK) that rejected Croatia's anti-Serb, neo-Nazi regime in Zagreb. In January 1992, an armistice was signed ("Vance Plan") and a UN force deployed to safeguard the Serb-inhabited areas following the withdrawal of the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA).

Operation "Blitz", May 1-2, 1995 (source: CIA, via Wikipedia)

Backed by the United States government, Zagreb launched the May 1 operation as a trial balloon. Within 36 hours, the Croats had expelled the area's 15,000 Serbs, and killed 283 (including 57 women and 9 children). The UN troops charged with protecting the zone did nothing. The so-called "international community" (the Atlantic Empire and its vassals, in practice) did nothing.

Three months later, Croatia launched an all-out assault against the Serb-inhabited areas, with full diplomatic and political support of the United States government, killing 930 (with another 922 missing and presumed dead), while expelling almost all the remaining Serbs from the territories claimed by the Croatian state. By 2001, there were 380,032 fewer Serbs living in Croatia than in 1991, when Zagreb declared independence.

Both "police actions" were named in the true tradition of WW2 Croatia: "Flash" (Blitz, in German) and "Storm" (Sturm).

Croatian map of the "liberation" of Western Slavonia;
Serb-inhabited territories in blue were "liberated" in 1991,
in operation "Hurricane" (Orkan)  

Because Croatia was a proxy of the Atlantic Empire, it got away with this murder. Now the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev, which seized power in the illegal coup of February 22, is expecting to do the same, launching a military attack against the Ukrainians refusing to submit to them. But while they expect May 2014 will be like May 1995, they should remember what happened when someone else tried to replicate August 1995 in August 2008.

God is just, and His justice does not sleep forever.

The East remembers.

Shameless

The great Serb poet Jovan Dučić, who sought refuge in 1941 from the atrocities of Nazi Croatia, once called the Croats the bravest people in the world, "not because they are fearless, but because they are shameless." Just to be clear, it was not meant as a compliment.

Almost every day brings new proof of Dučić's accuracy, from sieg-heiling on football pitches and smashing Cyrillic signs, to street "art" about hanging Serbs on willow trees.

Downtown Zagreb last week (photo: BN TV)

But while the EU and its quisling cult constantly insist the Serbs apologize for the unforgivable crime of continuing to exist, there are no calls on Croats to apologize for their overt Nazism. Nor do Croats feel any urge to do so. Quite the contrary!

"Joe" Simunic is "proud to be a patriot." The sign-smashers and "artists" believe they are honoring the legacy of the "Homeland War." Because Croatia has been a loyal client of the Atlantic Empire and even more so of Berlin (being "rewarded" earlier this year with EU membership), there is little criticism of such behavior in the mainstream Western press. What there is, usually contains an attempt at moral equivalence, such as "Croatia fought a war with Serbia [sic] in the 1990s". So I guess that makes hating the Serbs OK?

A simple litmus test would go like this: Read anything in the mainstream Croatian press about the Serbs. Replace the word "Serb" with "Jew." See how that reads.

Now a Croatian grievance group in France has sued Bob Dylan and Rolling Stone magazine, claiming he "incited hatred" with a 2012 (!) interview, in which he said - among other things - this:

“Blacks know that some whites didn't want to give up slavery - that if they had their way, they would still be under the yoke, and they can't pretend they don't know that. If you got a slave master or Klan in your blood, blacks can sense that. That stuff lingers to this day. Just like Jews can sense Nazi blood and the Serbs can sense Croatian blood.”

Supposedly, the CRICCF was horribly offended because Dylan dared "compare Croatian criminals to all Croats." This is baffling. On one hand, isn't official Croatdom proud of their hatred of Serbs and service to the Reich? Also, doesn't phrasing it this way mean they agree the Ustasha - and their present-day heirs - are criminals? These, however, are hatefacts, and all you are supposed to do is focus on how horribly offended they are because Dylan - who, by the way, is an actual participant of the U.S. civil rights struggle - made a comparison that hit a little too close to home.

The timing of the lawsuit ought to be a clue: right as Nazi incidents in Croatia are out in the open, and Dylan has just been given a Legion of Honor. This is a PR stunt, pure and simple. Unfortunately, under EU's most-progressive-and-democratic "hate speech" laws, there is a more-than-zero chance a Parisian judge may decide the horrifying anguish of Croats in France upon being compared to Nazis and the Klan is entitled to financial compensation.

The ironic part about Dylan's statement is that it's the Croats usually sniffing around for "Serb blood" in people they dislike - an obsession even more absurd because the vast majority of Croats are genetically indistinguishable from Serbs. It's just that they were ruled by Catholic kings for over a thousand years, and their national identity was eventually formulated in the late 1800s (under the influence of Austro-Hungarian expansionism) as militantly Catholic, Serbophobic and anti-Semitic. Driven by that hatred, entirely unprovoked, they committed barbaric atrocities against the Serbs in both world wars, and again in the 1990s (having murdered most of the Jews in 1941-45). Call it a triumph of monstrous nurture over nature, if you will.

It would be interesting to see if any Serbs in France will file an amicus brief in Dylan's case, detailing all the Croat "contributions to civilization," such as Jastrebarsko, the only death camp for children in WW2. Not so much for Dylan's sake - I'm sure he can defend himself - but for their own. Because the untold numbers of their kin, "civilized" to death by the "bravest people in the world", cry out for justice - in this world or the next.

Poor Little Nazis

Yesterday, after Croatia's victory over Iceland qualified them for the 2014 Soccer World Cup, one player led the home crowd in a victorious chant. AP (via HuffPost) has a video of it, noting that it caused a bit of furor on account of being, well, Nazi. 

WW2 Ustasha poster

AP quotes "Joe" Simunic - born in Australia, to Croatian emigre parents - saying, "I did nothing wrong. I'm supporting my Croatia, my homeland," and "some people have to learn some history."

Let's learn some history, then.

Ustasha (усташа, pl. усташе) - is an old Serbian word for "insurgent", appropriated (like everything else) by Croats. Specifically, a violent chauvinist movement sponsored by Fascist Italy after WW1, seeking to establish an independent Croatian state.

They were given the opportunity in 1941, when Axis powers invaded the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. An "Independent State of Croatia" was proclaimed on April 10. Mass murder of Serbs, Jews and Roma (in that order) began within days.

Ustasha Croatia opened an extermination camp in Jasenovac (with adjacent camps for women and children - the only such facility in Nazi Europe) almost a year before Germany's Nazi leadership decided to seek the "final solution to the Jewish problem" through mass murder. Their atrocities were so visceral, even the SS were appalled. But Hitler and the Roman Catholic Church had their back, so the genocide continued.

Ironically, it was the Italians who managed to rein in the Ustasha and provide some sanctuary to Serbs and Jews in their occupation zone - at least until Italy's surrender to the Allies in September 1943. From then onward, to the end of the war, Croats and Germans were able to murder with impunity.

The Communist Partisans, who later claimed to have liberated Yugoslavia single-handedly, did absolutely nothing to stop the slaughter. Oh no - after the war they resurrected Croatia as a "republic" within the Yugoslav "federation" reanimated from the kingdom's corpse, and rewarded it with territories ethnically cleansed of Italians, Germans and Hungarians. All in the name of "social justice", of course, because everything before and during WW2 had really been the fault of the "Greater Serbian bourgeois imperialism." No joke.

When a Holocaust-denying Ustasha fan became the first "democratic" president of that Croatia in 1990, his revival of Ustasha language, symbols and values was cheered in the West as "anti-Communist" (and again, got the Roman Catholic Church's blessing). Thousands of Ustasha Croats returned from exile in the U.S., Canada, Australia (Simunic, for example). Meanwhile, Serbs living in Croatia were first disenfranchised, then subjected to state abuse, property destruction and outright murder. But when they took up arms in self-defense, that was dubbed "aggression."

So obviously, in this twisted world, the Ustasha Croatians are "good guys" and their victims - the Serbs - are evil incarnate. And "Joe" Simunic is just a misunderstood patriot.

Sure, technically his words were innocent. All he said was, "For the home," and the crowd howled back, "Ready!" And it's not like they haven't done so before. So,  should we mind if, say, Germans give a salute to victory?

Oh wait.

The Endpoint of Moral Relativism

Last week, when it looked like the Atlantic Empire might launch yet another evil little war, Brendan O'Neill commented on the sanctimonious hypocrites weeping crocodile tears over the Syrian dead.

Not only is the West engaging in reductio ad Hitlerum while behaving like Hitler for a while now, but the eagerness of interventionists to see “genocide” everywhere represents what O'Neill terms “Holocaust relativism”: “All sorts of campaigners now use Holocaust imagery to whip up support for their crusade against some modern moral scourge.”

O'Neill proceeds to list several entirely inappropriate Holocaust comparisons, including the one most often overlooked by critics of Empire:

During the Bosnian War in the 1990s, the Serbs were frequently referred to by liberal observers as Nazis – or as the “tinpot Nazis of the Balkans”, in the Guardian’s words – and their bloody attacks and assaults were often compared to the Holocaust. 

Yet during the 1941-45 occupation of Yugoslavia, Serbs were the principal victims of actual Nazis, while the people libeling them supported Hitler! Accusing the Serbs of Nazism was a deliberate insult to injury. In a 1993 interview, an executive of Ruder Finn - a PR company hired by Croatian and Bosnian Muslim interests - boasted how the objective of the campaign was to “reverse” the attitude of Jewish organizations towards Croats and “Bosnians”, due to the “real and cruel anti-Semitism” in their history - and that his firm “succeeded masterfully.”

Seeking to de-legitimize the existence of Serbs in the territory they claimed, the regimes in Zagreb and Sarajevo howled to any Western reported who would listen that they were victims of “Greater Serbian aggression and genocide.” Evidence? Who needs evidence, when there are Pulitzers, glory, sinecures and power to be gained from making up stuff the Imperial establishment wants to hear?

The absurd charges of “genocide” in Bosnia have not only prevented any sort of peace in that broken country, they've propelled to power a cabal of “humanitarian interventionists” who see no problem in murdering people in order to “save” them. They do this because they have convinced themselves - and portions of the general public - that “humanitarian” imperialism is magical: anyone belonging to the designated victim faction (combatant or not) who gets killed, automatically becomes an “unarmed innocent civilian”, while any actual unarmed, innocent civilians hit by “liberating” bombs, missiles and drones are transformed into “enemy combatants” and “legitimate military targets.” Or to simplify it even further, “it's not murder if we do it.” All one has to do is say the magic word: genocide. And according to the “humanitarians”, genocide is everywhere.

The few who dare question this insanity are smeared as “genocide deniers.”

O'Neill argues the “only real beneficiaries of such relativism are the Nazis themselves, whose wickedness is implicitly diluted and diminished if we accept the idea that Holocausts like theirs happen all the time.”

Sure enough, as a result of interventions to “stop Serb genocide”, the German military is once again deployed around the world, the Luftwaffe is bombing again, and Nazi allies from WW2 are enjoying a renaissance - if only in Eastern Europe, for now.

I entirely concur with his conclusion: Those who honestly believe that Syria is like the Holocaust “on any level whatsoever,” that Putin is Hitler, that the Serbs are Nazis, Gaza is a Warsaw-style Ghetto, and the farming of chickens is like the extermination of the Jews, “have sunk so far into the mulch of moral relativism... that there is probably little hope for you.”

The Big Lie

Two months ago, I wrote about a horrifying feature of Yugoslavia II (1945-1991): the moral equivalence the regime of Josip Broz Tito imposed between the royalist Serbs and the Nazi Croats (both Catholic and Muslim).

The very real genocide (entirely fitting Lemkin's definition) of Serbs in the "Independent State of Croatia" (NDH) was thus systematically minimized and suppressed, while the royalists ("Chetniks") were accused of massacring Croat and Muslim civilians and open collaboration with the Nazis. The West participated in this cover-up, partly to prop Tito's regime as a wedge in the Eastern Bloc, but also to protect the Roman Catholic Church, whose clergy backed the NDH.

Thanks to the suppression of truth about the NDH, Croat exiles were able to impose the myth of their own suffering at Communist hands (e.g. Bleiburg, Cardinal Stepinac) as a foundation of an independent Croatia proclaimed in 1991 (and forcibly "cleansed" of Serbs by 1995, with Empire's help). Part and parcel of this was a media operation in the early 1990s, by which the heirs of NDH were presented as victims, and their intended victims as executioners:

"...the Croatian and Bosnian past was marked by a real and cruel anti-semitism. Tens of thousands of Jews perished in Croatian camps. So there was every reason for intellectuals and Jewish organizations to be hostile towards the Croats and Bosnians. Our challenge was to reverse this attitude. And we succeeded masterfully." (James Harff or Ruder Finn, 1993 interview) 

This went beyond "reversing the attitude" of Jewish organizations; through the legerdemain of perception management, the very real Nazi connections of Croats, "Bosnians" (i.e. Bosnian Muslims) and later Albanians - during the 1999 attack on Serbia - transformed into the entirely fabricated "Serb fascism" in the Western public opinion. Vile screeds such as "Serbia's Secret War" and "Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide" were just the tip of the propaganda iceberg.

What you see vs. what happens (source unknown)

Not only did this whitewash the Holocaust, it manufactured a cover for its continuation, this time under Imperial sanction. The outcome of NATO's "Deliberate Force" (1995) and "Allied Force" (1999) was arguably worse than of Hitler's "Strafgericht" (1941): there are hardly any Serbs left in today's Croatia, while those that survived 14 years of ethnic cleansing, pogroms, murder, rape and worse in Albanian-occupied Kosovo are now being forced to submit to KLA rule. Serbia itself has a quisling government far worse than the puppet regime of General Nedić. Only in Bosnia did the Serbs manage to defend their rights, though the political assault on them shows no sign of abating.

Part of that assault have been the "war crimes" trials of the entire political and military leadership of the Bosnian Serbs. The ICTY, a "court" conjured by the Empire for the purpose of legitimizing its Balkans meddling, is insisting that the Bosnian Serbs committed "genocide" against the Muslims. Not in a general sense, mind you, but in seven or so municipalities, cherry-picked by the prosecutors. Both this, and classifying what happened in (or rather, outside) Srebrenica in 1995 as genocide are patently absurd.

The actually legitimate ICJ ruled in 2007 against the claim of "municipal genocide". Last year, the ICTY "judges" dropped that particular charge against wartime Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadžić. This week, an appeals panel led by ICTY president Theodor Meron, reinstated the charge - on July 11 no less, the date Muslims mark as the anniversary of "genocide" in Srebrenica.

Political symbolism? Marlise Simons (see here) of the New York Times thinks so:

"By scheduling the hearing on what has become a sacred date for Bosnian Muslims, the presiding judge, Theodor Meron, seemed to want to send a message to the war’s survivors as he recited an usually long and gruesome list of atrocities committed against Muslim civilians and prisoners of war." (emphasis added)

However, among the "evidence" cited by Meron is the following:

"...there was evidence from meetings attended by Karadzic in the early 1990s 'that it had been decided that one third Muslims would be killed, one third would be converted to the Orthodox religion and a third will leave on their own'."

Lest you think this is Al-Jazeera editorializing, Simons cites the same passage in her NYT article. So does Carol Williams of the LA Times. And here it is, in the official ICTY press release:

"For example, the Appeals Chamber observed that the Trial Chamber received evidence that in meetings with Karadžić “it had been decided that one third of Muslims would be killed, one third would be converted to the Orthodox religion and a third will leave on their own” and thus all Muslims would disappear from Bosnia." 

If this is what it considers "evidence," the ICTY ought to disband itself immediately, disbar all its judges and prosecutors, and sentence itself to whatever is appropriate for contempt of court and obstruction of justice. Because this particular claim is a word-for-word plagiarism (with names changed) of a statement made by Mile Budak, Nazi Croatia's minister of culture, in a 1941 speech about Croatian plans for the Serbs. 

Nor can ICTY "judges" claim ignorance of this fact, because the original statement by Budak was quoted in the Karadžić "trial" not two months ago, by Nenad Kecmanović (testifying on May 31 this year, official transcript, end of p. 7133).

Take a minute for this to sink in. Not only is a political court, acting on political instructions, fabricating a political accusation for political purposes, the false evidence it cites to accuse the Serbs of genocide is based on a Croatian Nazi plan to commit a genocide of Serbs. This isn't just blaming the victim, this is blaming the victim in order to absolve the actual culprit.

And not a single Western journalist covering the "trial" has noticed this.

Still think the media have anything to do with the truth? That ICTY has anything to do with either truth or justice? Why?

"Twice the Winners" of WW2

In April 1945, with the Soviets and their Yugoslav Communist allies approaching, the Ustasha (Croatian Nazis) tried to exterminate the surviving inmates of their principal death camp complex. The 760 women at the adjacent camp of Stara Gradiska had already been massacred. Of the 1,000-plus men in Jasenovac, 700 chose to risk a breakout on April 22. Only 90 of them succeeded.

Communist authorities were happy enough to declare the Ustasha enemies of the state, but made every effort to suppress the exact extent of their atrocities, for the sake of "brotherhood and unity" in the new Yugoslavia. Yet there is no question that a genocide happened. There was clear intent, manifested in speeches, official proclamations and laws of the "Independent State of Croatia" (NDH) There were the countless pits in Herzegovina and Dalmatia, where butchered Serb civilians were disposed of until Italian outrage put a stop to it. By then, the Jasenovac complex had become operational, with death camps not just for men, but for women and even children. German sources suggest anywhere between 750,000 and one million dead, between the pits and the camps.

In 1941, there were 2 million Serbs in territories claimed by the NDH. In 1991, there were almost as many in the same territories - now claimed by Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Yet the overall population of Yugoslavia had grown from just over 15 million in 1948 (after the war and genocide) to 23.5 million in 1991. You do the math. 

Today the Croatian leadership - President Josipović, Prime Minister Milanović and speaker of the parliament Šprem - visited the Jasenovac memorial and swore that "fascist, Nazi and Ustasha ideas will never again" hold sway in Croatia. Well, why should they, having served their purpose?

The few Serbs remaining in Croatia live in fear and face constant abuse and discrimination. Yet when they tried to rebel against Franjo Tuđman's Ustasha revival in 1990, they were branded "aggressors" and the Empire funded, trained and supported their destruction - specifically, "Operation Storm," the mass ethnic cleansing campaign of August 1995. Since the anniversary of "Storm" is a national holiday in Croatia ("Homeland Thanksgiving Day"), the very same officials who were in Jasenovac today will see nothing wrong in celebrating come August. 

It brings to mind the words of Josipović's predecessor, Stjepan Mesić, who once said: 

"in the Second World War, the Croats won twice and we have no reason to apologize to anyone... We won on 10 April [1941] when the Axis Powers recognized Croatia as a state, and we won because we sat after the war, again with the winners, at the winning table." (BBC Monitoring; December 10, 2006)

Sure enough, in 1945, the Communist leader Tito "punished" Croatian atrocities by creating a large Croatian republic in the federated Yugoslavia. In 1991, with the backing of Berlin, Vienna and the Vatican, Franjo Tuđman declared this republic an independent state. Croatia was admitted to NATO in 2009. Next year it will be joining the European Union. American weapons, propaganda and diplomacy served the same Croatian agenda in 1991-95 as Hitler's had half a century prior. 

Lest there be any doubt as to the character of that "Croatia as a state," here are just three wartime posters (more can be found here) testifying to the relationship between Zagreb and Berlin:  

"United Europe fights in the East", poster for the 1942 exhibit in Zagreb. Nazi eagle, center; Croatian checkerboard over to the right 

"Great Leaders Adolf Hitler and poglavnik Dr. Ante Pavelić call on you to defend your homes - join the volunteer Croatian SS!" And yes, that's a mosque over on the right, and one of the SS is wearing a fez.

"A German victory is a victory for Europe: the German-Croatian brotherhood in arms"

All this ought to make you wonder who really won WW2.

Still in Denial

*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.

A Beam In Their Eye

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.

Pushing the Myth

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

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.

Lies Liars Tell

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

(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 Karadžić, 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 Potočari 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 Tokača, would establish the real number, closer to 150,000. That, however, did not happen. Tokača'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 (ARBiH). 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 Potočari 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 Ivanišević(”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 Potočari memorial cemetery. Bulgarian researcher Germinal Civikov questions the testimony of Dražen Erdemović, the "crown witness" of the ICTY prosecution whose accounts were used in every Srebrenica-related case. In his book, Civikov shows that Erdemović 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. Krstić, 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 Nikolić, 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 Potočari, 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 Potočari 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 Mesić, 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 Potočari 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 Cerić, 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 Potočari 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.

Ghosts of 1939

Seventy years ago today, German armies crossed into Poland, introducing the world to "Blitzkrieg." The British and French declarations of war turned a local conflict into a continental one. Soon another war was on in the Pacific, and by 1941 both the USSR and the U.S. had become involved as well.

The physical consequences of the war were horrific: up to seventy million dead; Europe, China and Japan in ruins; many Jewish communities completely extinct as a result of Nazi genocide (a word coined after the war to describe the systematic murder of an entire people); atomic weapons unleashed.

I would argue the ideological consequences were just as bad. On one hand, there is no denying that national-socialism was evil; it was oppressive at home and aggressive abroad. On the other hand, the war against Nazism was a shot in the arm for both Communism and "progressivism."

By 1939, Lenin and Stalin's revolutionary executioners had already killed far more people than Hitler, with a song in their hearts. Stalin ignored the warnings of the impending Nazi invasion, and when it finally came bungled the war so badly that millions of people died as a result. Faced with a life-and-death struggle, a "holy war" against an enemy bent on their annihilation, the Soviet people (Russians as well as others, it needs be said) put in a superhuman effort to win the war. And what thanks did they get? None. Stalin took all the credit for victory, and none of the blame for the mistakes. Victorious generals were sacked or purged. POWs liberated from German camps were sent to the Gulag, to cover up the embarrassing fact that they got captured thanks to Stalin's own orders. And the people in what was once Russia got to "enjoy" another 45 years of Workers' Paradise. Only this time they "shared" their "joy" with the Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Romanians, Bulgarians, the Baltic nations, and even some Germans.

Something similar happened in the West. For all the talk of "democracy" triumphing over "fascism", the war cemented FDR's social revolution that created an American brand of fascism in all but name. Big government, business cartels, a military-industrial complex, income tax withholding - all these are legacies of the war. The British fought to save their Empire, and ended up losing it. They also turned to "war socialism" that became socialism in peacetime as well. Politicians who brought about these changes have resisted criticism because hey, they "defeated Hitler and freed the world," right? Britain today is a surveillance state to a degree worse than anything Orwell imagined in 1984, while Americans shout that they are "free" but have no idea what freedom means anymore.

My own country was occupied by the Nazis and their allies, partitioned, and subjected to terror and genocide. Resistance drew brutal reprisals (100 civilians shot for every German soldier killed, 50 for every injured). The royalist resistance trusted the Western Allies, only to be betrayed and sold out to the Communists. The Yugoslavia established in 1945 was free of Nazi occupation (and ethnically cleansed of Germans, I might add), but all it had in common with its predecessor was the name. And for the next 45 years, we all had to share the "joy" of Communism as well.

None of this is to dispute the evil of national-socialism, or excuse anything the Nazis and their servants have done. But I'm sick of the whole "We defeated Hitler, therefore everything we do, everything we've done, and everything we intend to do still is right and beyond reproach" nonsense. This kind of "logic" is at the root of modern morality: when we do it, that's heroic, but when they do it, it's reprehensible. Let me point out the inconvenient fact that this is precisely the way the Nazis used to "reason"!

Since 1945, both the American and the Soviet empires used this "mythic authority" of war victors to do as they pleased around the globe. In the 1990s, when Communism collapsed and Yugoslavia imploded in a series of ethnic wars, the Western interventionists invoked the imagery of WW2 and imagined new Hitlers that had to be defeated at all costs. Hitler was invoked both times the Americans invaded Iraq. The disingenuous "war on terror" was helped along by the invocation of "Islamofascism."

Yet the map of Europe today looks suspiciously like the one from 1942, and it is Hitler's former allies that are the staunchest supporters of the American Empire. German troops are back in the Balkans (to show that they've gotten over the original Hitler, right?) and the Luftwaffe has bombed civilians again. The world whose foundations were laid down in the Atlantic Charter, and at the conferences in Bretton Woods, Tehran and Yalta, is no more. That order was ultimately dismantled by its own creators and guardians, who found it too inconvenient and restrictive. So, continuing to invoke Hitler as a justification is cynical at best.

It is time to give up the myth of the Great Good War and let it become proper history, in which defeating the Nazis did not give the victors the right to act like them, or be exempt from rules of civilization. Only then will Hitler truly be defeated.

Most Outlandish Charges

Wow, this is rich.

The New York Times ran a story yesterday about last year's Russo-Georgian spat, titled "How Russia Defines Genocide Down." Here is how NYT's Clifford Levy characterizes Moscow's charges of genocide in Ossetia:

"It was as if senior Russian officials pulled out a dog-eared Soviet propaganda playbook that called for hurling the most outlandish charge, without recognizing that in the modern global media climate, their credibility would quickly suffer if the facts proved otherwise."

If this weren't coming from the newspaper of Walter Duranty, Jayson Blair and Judith Miller, I'd be less inclined to laugh hysterically. Not to mention that I find it comical in the extreme that any American newspaper dares criticize anyone else for outlandish propaganda, after the "WMDs in Iraq" or the "genocides" in Bosnia and Kosovo. Why, it was the war crimes "tribunal" established by the American Empire that defined "genocide" so it could mean anything at all! Would the NYT say its own credibility, or that of the White House or the ICTY, has been in any way impugned when facts got in the way of these ridiculous claims?

No, because when Imperial propaganda is exposed as lies, those doing the exposing are branded kooks, deniers, conspiracy theorists, delusional ultra-mega-super-hyper-nationalists, people with a victim complex, etc. Mistakes were made, nothing to see here, pay no attention to the naked Emperor, move along.

Levy even drags Kosovo into the discussion. You see, Russians were just peeved the NATO-occupied province "won its freedom" (his words) from those dastardly Serbs, so they decided to retaliate. But of course, Kosovo was an entirely legitimate, legal, proper and praiseworthy intervention-occupation-separation, a completely unique case and nothing like anything the Russians did, because it was supported by America, you see. Now where have we heard that before?

Ahh, yes. Fourteen years ago, the Croatian government launched a "police action" aimed to "re-establish the legal and constitutional order." Croatian troops were trained and equipped by the U.S., in direct contravention of the UN arms embargo. Their "policing" involved the displacement of 15o,000 people, complete destruction of their towns, villages and farms, and the murder of some 2,000 people who did not manage to get out in time. At the end of the operation, the Serb population resident in the area since the XVII century had ceased to exist. The American ambassador in Zagreb defended Croatia's actions, saying they could not be classified as "ethnic cleansing" since that is something only the Serbs do!

Fast-forward to 2008. Georgian troops, trained and equipped by Washington, launch an attack on South Ossetia for the purpose of "re-establishing the constitutional order." They attack peacekeepers and civilians and leave behind a trail of destruction. The parallels are uncanny, really.

There is no way of knowing for sure what would have happened had the Russians not reacted, but odds are it would not have been much different than the Croatian "police action" 13 years prior: Ossetians displaced, their homes and farms destroyed, and Saakashvili declaring a public holiday of thanksgiving. And the New York Times would not have considered it genocide, just as didn't qualify the destruction of the Krajina Serbs as such.

So much for the Gray Lady's "credibility," then.

Linguistic Idiocy

Not being a follower of the Daily Kos, I didn't notice a post that appeared on that site on July 8 until very recently. Apparently, someone named Robert Ullmann (an American who lives in Kenya; see here) flew into self-righteous rage over the "linguistic genocide" allegedly perpetrated by "a small number of Serbian nationalists."

You see, there's a debate on Wiktionary whether to consider Serbian, Croatian and "Bosnian" as separate languages, or to keep the old Serbo-Croatian listing. And to Ullmann, the fact that some people are advocating keeping the old listing is a surefire sign of intent to create a "Greater Serbia"!

To call this a steaming pile of excrement is probably too charitable. Ullmann himself notes that, under this proposal, Serbian would not be recognized as a proper language. I'm not sure which universe he lives in, but in this one, denying one's own language is hardly a sign of "nationalism" - let alone "genocide."

Ironically enough, Serbo-Croatian is the farthest thing possible from some "Greater Serbian language" Ullmann is hallucinating about. Rather, it was a social experiment aiming to further undermine the inconvenient Serb national identity (which, as I explained elsewhere, was considered dangerous to the survival of Communist Yugoslavia). That way no one would have to actually speak Serbian - not even the Serbs themselves.

In fact, this went so far that in today's Serbia, 20 years after Yugoslavia's demise, the adapted Latin alphabet used in Serbo-Croatian has almost entirely displaced the native Cyrillic in public life. Spoken Serbian, meanwhile, abounds in imported Croatian phrases, both new and those dating to the "happy days of brotherhood and unity." If anything, this can be classified as Croat linguistic colonialism (though to be fair, not by modern Croatia). It's certainly the polar opposite of "linguistic genocide" that Ullmann alleges.

One commenter to Ullmann's post called it a "load of rubbish", and said he'd contacted the instigator of the Wiktionary vote: "he told me that he isn't even a Serb let alone a Serb Nationalist and is in fact a Croat."

Oops!

As the old adage goes, better to keep one's mouth shut and be thought a fool, than to open it and remove all doubt. There are so many people, telling so many lies, inaccuracies and myths about the Serbs, Yugoslavia, and the Balkans wars of the 1990s that trying to refute, correct or condemn all of them would be a full-time job. Not being a "professional Serb," I try to catch the most egregious, when I can. So the reason I singled out this particular demonstration of idiocy is its inexcusable abuse of the term "genocide."

It is an insult to the victims of actual genocides (Armenians and Greeks in the Ottoman Empire, Serbs in the "Independent State of Croatia", Jews in the Nazi death camps) when this word is used so lightly. There is a whole industry dedicated to the claim that what happened in Srebrenica in 1995 was genocide on par with the Holocaust - a claim that defies logic as well as piety. And now there are idiots seeing "linguistic genocide" in online polls. What's next?

Character Assassination

I'm a firm believer in freedom of speech. But there's freedom of speech, and then there is calumny. A debate, however heated, is one thing - an anonymous, ad hominem screed, quite another.

Back in April I wrote a couple pieces about a surprise spike in propaganda appearing on an otherwise innocuous-looking website named Palluxo. For all its claims to be a news portal, it turned out that every single article in Palluxo's "International" and "Special Reports" sections was unrestrained Serbophobic propaganda. From pronouncements by Bosnia's top Islamic cleric about the "joint experience" of genocide with the Jews (even though it was Muslims who helped the Croat Ustasha exterminate the Bosnian Jewry in WW2) to the latest article titled "Albanian Kosovo Marks Another Victory Over Serbia". Well, at least they are straightforward, right?

Having eventually tracked down these uncredited pieces to the "Srebrenica Genocide Blog," the "Congress of North American Bosniaks" and professional Serbophobe Marko Attilla Hoare, I dismissed Palluxo as an attempt to smuggle crass propaganda as news, and paid them no mind since. That is, until someone sent me a link today to an article calling me a "disgraced Srebrenica genocide denier."

The entire piece is an ad hominem attack on yours truly. But it gets better. Apparently, I'm not to be trusted not only because I'm a Serb, but because I do "not have any PhD qualification in history, [have] never held an academic post, published his work in an academic journal, or even visited an archive."

This here leads me to believe the author of the invective in question is Hoare, since he routinely boasts about his academic background and links to respectable government institutions.

So I don't have a PhD. Many people who do have embraced the worst kind of lies about the Balkans, and some - like Hoare, for example - are peddling them enthusiastically. I happen to have a Bachelor's in history, an analytical mind, and a lot of experience in the region (and the Empire) that various hacks championing Official Truth could only dream of. I have even visited archives - but they must not count, because Hoare wasn't there to check?

The mystery author claims his "sources in Sarajevo" could not confirm my diplomatic and media connections. He should find better sources. Should I list the ambassadors, charges d'affaires, political officers and other officials I've met during the Bosnian War? Or the journalists who hired me to translate for them? I could, but I won't. Because unlike certain people, who draw their legitimacy and credibility from their names and people they know, I let my arguments speak for themselves. It's much easier to ignore the arguments and focus on the person making them, dismissing him or her because they don't belong to the ranks of those allowed to have an opinion.

The Palluxo piece doesn't attack just me. It goes after John Laughland, Germinal Civikov, and pretty much anyone who dares challenge the Official Truth as handed down by the Hague Inquisition and its willing executioners. Anonymous appeals to the authority of ICTY verdicts, and dismisses those who challenge them on purely ad hominem grounds. Oh, this guy is a Milosevic supporter. This one's "obscure." That one's a Marxist, did you know? And this Nebojsa character, why he's a Serb!

Ultimately, the worst Anonymous could come up with was that a "long time Jewish friend of ours described Nebojsa Malic as 'insensitive pig'."

Oh wow. Anonymous has a Jewish friend. And he called me insensitive! I am crushed! My life is over!

Or not. Honestly, I couldn't care less. Whoever wrote this garbage - and given the source of Palluxo's features, I've got a couple of decent guesses - deserves pity and contempt. Maybe not in that order. After all, they don't even dare sign their words with a fake name. By contrast, everything I've written over the past decade has my actual name on it. I don't even hide it on this blog, though I don't throw it into my readers' faces either.

In today's world, information is cheap. It's credibility that's expensive. And it takes a lot more to impugn my credibility than the anonymous rant of a character assassin.

Nice try, dirtbag.

Nazis then, Nazis now

I wrote about the "Srebrenica Genocide Blog" just yesterday, as a bastion of Muslim propaganda. Looking more closely at the site, however, I've realized it is also the nexus of the most recent propaganda surge, coinciding with the Holocaust Remembrance Day.

As it turns out, the SGB was the source of articles appearing at Palluxo.com, a news portal otherwise dedicated to "all things Apple." It wasn't a case of "iJihad", after all.

The outrageous statement of Mustafa Ceric I blogged about last weekend, claiming that Bosnian Muslims and Jews had a "joint experience of persecution," was posted on the SGB on March 28. Another article that appeared on Palluxo, about the "victims of Serb terror" is on SGB as well, with pictures.

Why would the SGB try and feed its propaganda through a third-party portal? Well, Palluxo promises: "Your press release will appear in Google News immediately" (emphasis added). And so they do! Yet Palluxo's contact page explicitly states that "All submissions will be manually reviewed. Submissions without contact details will not be published." Granted, though they say anything "Apple-centric" will be published for free, they don't explicitly exclude other topics - yet there is nothing else on that site that is not actually related Apple products, except for the "Srebrenica genocide" propaganda. Interesting.

But the hows and whys of Muslim propaganda getting published on an Apple-related news portal are less interesting than the content of that propaganda. Not only is it seeking to equate the Serbs with Nazis by imagining parallels between the Bosnian War and the Holocaust, it also claims that the Serbs were the real thing - actual allies of the Nazis in WW2, who persecuted Jews with enthusiasm.

To someone wholly ignorant of the Balkans, such as the bulk of the Western public, this twisted argument might make sense. People don't just turn into Nazis overnight, there has to be a background to it, right? And if one proceeds from a premise that the Serbs committed genocide in recent years, then the claim they had committed genocide before seems all the more plausible. Except the premise is completely wrong - and the very people advancing this propaganda are doing it to hide their own Nazi connections!

In the early 1990s, the Croatian government and the Izetbegovic regime in Bosnia sought help from American PR agencies in order to not just demonize their Serb adversaries, but cover up their own links to the events of WW2. Croatian president Franjo Tudjman was a Holocaust revisionist and an apologist for the Ustasha regime, which began the mass slaughter of Serbs and Jews in April 1941 and whose brutality horrified even Hitler's envoys in the Balkans (Neubacher, von Horstenau). Alija Izetbegovic, the supposedly "multiethnic democrat," was an active member of Muslim Youth, an organization that during WW2 supported the Ustasha regime. (At the time, Muslims were considered "Croatian brothers.")

With all this in mind, the PR companies proceeded to actively target the Jewish public opinion:

"...the Croatian and Bosnian past was marked by a real and cruel anti-semitism. Tens of thousands of Jews perished in Croatian camps. So there was every reason for intellectuals and Jewish organizations to be hostile towards the Croats and Bosnians. Our challenge was to reverse this attitude. And we succeded masterfully." (James Harff or Ruder Finn, 1993 interview)

A transference took place: the real Nazi connections of Muslims and Croats (and later Albanians) became the fabricated Nazi connections of the Serbs. It was the Jews and Serbs who found themselves targeted by the Nazis and the Ustasha, while Muslims and Croats (and Albanians) did the persecuting. But the mass murder of Serbs in WW2 was kept under wraps by Yugoslav authorities after 1945, as it would have unraveled the fictitious history of "brotherhood and unity" which they used to run the country. As a result, the mass extermination, displacement and forced conversion of Serbs under the Ustasha regime remains virtually unknown in the West.

On May 1, the SGB published an excerpt from "Serbia's Secret War," a 1997 propaganda pamphlet allegedly written by "Dr. Philip J. Cohen," accusing the Serbs of being Nazi allies in WW2, persecuting the Jews, and then covering all of it up with a massive propaganda effort. One doesn't have to be a psychologist to recognize projection here.

Advertised as relying on sources "previously unknown in the West," the book received a lot of attention. There is just one small problem (in addition to it being completely false, that is): Cohen, a dermatologist, is not a historian, and speaks not a shred of Serbian, Croatian, or "Bosnian." How could he have written this book?

The obvious answer is, he couldn't. Serbian-American historian Carl Savich argues that the real author of "Serbia's Secret War" was Croatian propagandist Ljubica Stefan, and that Cohen (as well as David Riesman, who wrote the prologue) were recruited to give the Croatian propaganda a Jewish face. Not only was this supposed to be more effective in targeting the Jewish public opinion, but any criticism of the book could be dismissed as anti-Semitism.

Savich's argument is compelling. Compare, for example, the claims made here (site run by a Croatian propagandist), crediting Ms. Stefan, with those made on the SGB and quoted from "Cohen's" book. Identical!

It is revolting enough that propaganda has distorted the reality of recent Balkans events to suit today's political agendas. But the fact that propagandists, PR specialists and hack "historians" have twisted Balkans history from WW2 to portray the actual victims of genocide (the Serbs) as perpetrators thereof... now that's just plain horrifying.

Update (May 6, 2009): As if on cue, Marko Attila Hoare appears on (the new, redesigned) Palluxo to defend Official Truth (as established by him and his family). All of the things he cavalierly dismisses as fabrications are either true, or he's phrased them as to be straw men. But hey, don't listen to me: read his defense of Franjo Tudjman! I won't waste my breath debating this lowlife, except to point out that his academic credentials tell more about the pathetic state of higher education in the West than about his "expertise" as a historian or anything else.

Update 2 (May 7, 2009): And here's another "Hot Topic" feature promoting "Serbia's Secret War" by Ljubica Stefan - erm, Philip Cohen. I think it can be safely assumed that Palluxo is fully in service of propaganda interests represented by Hoare and the SGB.