Five facts about Kosovo the #fakenews media is lying to you about

1. Kosovo is not ancient Albanian land. 

Its very name comes from the Serbian word "kos," meaning blackbird. Its Albanian name, "Kosova," means nothing whatsoever.

Kosovo was the heartland of medieval Serbian state and the site of the 1389 battle in which both the Serbian prince and the Ottoman sultan died, checking the Turkish expansion into the Balkans for almost 70 years. Ethnic Albanians were settled there by the Ottomans over the intervening centuries, and became a majority due to pogroms and persecution of Serbs - which began under Ottoman rule but continued under Austro-Hungarian occupation in WWI and German/Italian occupation in WWII.

Kosovo was never a political entity of any kind until 1945, when the Communist regime that reconstructed Yugoslavia after Axis occupation (with which Albanians overwhelmingly collaborated) created the "Autonomous Region of Kosovo & Metohija" - the latter being a Greek word describing church lands.

The Communists also forbid any Serbs expelled in WW2 to return to Kosovo, cementing its ethnic Albanian majority, which further grew through an influx of illegal immigrants from Enver Hoxha's Albania and the ethnic cleansing of non-Albanians since the NATO occupation began in 1999.

Aftermath of the March 2004 pogrom: burned-out Serbian church with "UCK" (KLA) graffitti

2. Operation Allied Force, the 1999 NATO bombing campaign, was not a legitimate humanitarian intervention approved by the UN.

It was a war of aggression, in violation of both the NATO and the UN charter. Contrary to what the mainstream Narrative says today, NATO's justification for the war was not Serbian "human rights violations" against the Albanians. No, the bombing began as a way to force Serbia to accept the ultimatum issued at the French chateau of Rambouillet, in which NATO demanded a 3-year occupation of the province and a NATO-organized referendum that would give the ethnic Albanians independence.

It was at Rambouillet that the US negotiated on behalf of the "Kosovo Liberation Army," a separatist group it had previously acknowledged as terrorists. As part of its terrorist campaign to separate Kosovo from Serbia, the KLA has engaged in murder, assassination, extortion, torture, and trafficking in drugs, guns, sex slaves and even human organs.

KLA commander Ramush Haradinaj was greeted as a hero after a NATO-backed war crimes court acquitted him of torturing Serb captives. Haradinaj was provisionally released, and witnesses against him were intimidated and killed.

3. Serbia did not kill 10,000 ethnic Albanian civilians during the 1999 war.

That figure is an estimate based on assertions by NATO, entirely unsupported by any facts whatsoever - same as the "up to 100,000 men" speculated by NATO propagandists during the war itself. Western media continue to repeat it the same way they repeated the claim of 300,000 dead in Bosnia, which was later revised down to under 100,000.

4. There was no Serbian plan to deport a million ethnic Albanians.

The so-called "Operation Horseshoe" was concocted by German and Bulgarian intelligence to provide justification for the illegal and illegitimate NATO war (see #2 above), to the point where they used the Croatian word for horseshoe. While there was a mass exodus of Albanians towards Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro (odd, since it was part of Yugoslavia same as Serbia), some evidence suggests that may have been orchestrated by NATO and the KLA.

5. Kosovo's "independence" is neither legal nor legitimate. 

UN Resolution 1244, which authorized a NATO-led peacekeeping mission after the June 1999 armistice, reaffirmed Kosovo's status as a part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Legally, it remained a province of Serbia, whose integrity was sacrosanct on the same grounds as Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia (and later Montenegro) were recognized in their Communist-drawn borders when the proto-European Union and the US decided to declare Yugoslavia nonexistent in 1992.

In February 2008, the provisional administration of Kosovo set up under the UN viceroy and NATO occupation, declared independence - based on a plan rejected by the UN Security Council, the final arbiter of Resolution 1244.

The International Court of Justice later tortured logic and language to rule that international law didn't say anything about random people making such declarations - but these were not random people. Their very legitimacy rested on the UN mandate, which their declaration violated.

President Barack Obama lied in March 2014 that there was internationally recognized and supervised referendum on the issue; there wasn't. No mainstream media outlet ever called him on it, though.

The next step in fighting "color revolutions"

Ростислав Ищенко: Девять тезисов о войне, которую мы ведемhttps://t.co/mrxM8N0Fa3 pic.twitter.com/5YZOhK6sIU

— Русский новостной (@ZaGraniu) April 29, 2016

I'm highlighting one of nine points from a presentation by political analyst Rostislav Ishchenko (Ростислав Ищенко) at the Russian Defense Ministry's conference on security, April 27-28, on the topic of "color revolutions" (via The Saker, Russian original here). The readers of this blog will quickly understand why.

"This leads us to thesis eight. Color coup can be stopped neither by consolidation of the national elite (it would simply progress to the next scenario), nor by preparedness of its military to fight (it will eventually be exhausted), nor by effective work of the national media (they will be overwhelmed by the technological capabilities of the aggressor).

The preparedness of the victim-state to resist is a necessary, but not sufficient condition to block the mechanisms of the color coup.

Only the support of the legitimate authorities of the victim-country by another superpower able to confront the aggressor-country with equal force in any way with any means can stop color aggression."

This is obviously based on the Syrian example, as Ishchenko himself notes earlier in his presentation. Now that it's clear that Moscow is aware of the key factor in resisting regime change via "color revolution" in the attempt, I'm curious whether Russian policymakers also have plans for rolling back color revolutions that have already taken place, with catastrophic consequences.

Does the superpower have a role to play in that, too, or would the near-impossible task of curing themselves of the Imperial plague be entirely up to the victims?

Challenging the Enduring Fallacies

Croats and Muslims called to join the
Waffen-SS (WW2 recruiting poster)

A book by Croatian-American economist Jozo Tomasevic, tellingly titled "War and Revolution," has served as the authoritative work of "history" on the matters of Yugoslavia in WW2. Published in 1975, it remains the foundation for numerous pseudo-histories written since, with the aim of somehow proving that it was really the "greaterserbian bourgeois oppressors" (actual Communist phrase) to blame for wartime slaughter and the interwar "oppression" of other groups.

In present-day Serbia, the cult of Serbian collective guilt has dominated politics, culture and academia since the 2000 astroturf revolution. That explains why few, if any, challenges to Tomasevic's myth have been put forth. Until now.

Miloslav Samardzic, another economist who turned historian, has researched archives, interviewed eyewitnesses, and written over a dozen books about WW2, focusing on the royalist resistance (aka the "Chetniks"). He is also one of the authors of a documentary series about Yugoslavia in WW2, mentioned here before - which will be shown in Washington DC on April 19 (see here for more information).

Samardzic has recently written a two-part essay addressing the numerous problems in Tomasevic's work, too lengthy to reproduce here. I do, however, commend them to the attention of anyone interested in WW2 history of Yugoslavia:

- “Chetniks” by Jozo Tomasevich: The Fallacy that Endures (Part 1)
- “Chetniks” by Jozo Tomasevich: The Fallacy that Endures (Part 2)

If it were just the Communists distorting the history of the war, to justify their takeover in 1945, that would be one thing. Quite another is to see Communist-invented history championed (example) by heirs of Nazi collaborators in present-day Croatia, Montenegro and Bosnia. Baffling as that might appear at first, once you realize that the common thread of these "histories" is the shared hatred of Serbs, things will begin to click into place.

Why Empire Needs a Conquered Serbia

Back in the summer of 2011, when most of the Western public still believed in the big lie of the "Arab Spring" - which ended up producing chaos in Libya, civil war in Syria, and the ISIS "caliphate" - I mentioned a great little documentary about Empire's revolution business. The filmmakers brought up the role an ostensibly private, non-violent, civil society NGO played in a string of "color revolutions," from Serbia to North Africa. In doing so, they committed the two cardinal sins in the modern West: Noticing, and Remembering.

CANVAS leader Srdja Popovic, with the logo of Empire's "color revolutions" (source) 

For you see, nobody is supposed to notice that "spontaneous peaceful activists" are in fact coached by an Empire-backed operation; that their slogans are always the same; that their graphics are always the same; and that, whatever their official claims may be, the outcome is always the same: self-destruction of the targeted society and state, often to the point of civil war. Nor is anyone supposed to remember seeing that same pattern anywhere else before.

After the October 2000 coup that replaced Slobodan Milosevic's government with a regime more or less loyal to the Empire (today, that loyalty is absolute), some of the "student activists" instrumental in duping the Serbian public became professional revolutionaries. They named their organization "CANVAS" - Center for Applied NonViolent Action and Strategies. In English. Please notice and remember that, it's important.

This morning I came across a Russian analysis of a suspicious explosion in Kharkov (reportedly involving one Aleksandar "Aca" Kazun, an Otpor/CANVAS operative), against the backdrop of a little-too-convenient murder of Boris Nemtsov. A marginal political figure polling in single digits while alive, once dead Nemtsov was made into a sacred martyr of the "progressive opposition."

Anyway, the analysis (seen here in the English translation) keeps talking about the "Serbian trail", the "Serbian organization," etc. when referring to CANVAS. I understand this might be shorthand. But if it isn't, if the authors genuinely believe that CANVAS is a Serbian outfit, then they are playing right into Empire's narrative.

To wit, as I pointed out in the 2011 article mentioned above:

Branding Otpor and CANVAS as Serbian is no accident. Few in the world would be inclined to suspect a Serb of working for the Empire, after everything that happened in the Balkans in the 1990s. Washington policymakers have just about admitted that American bombers flew over Belgrade because of "Yugoslavia’s resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform," rather than any reports of atrocities, exaggerated or fabricated on demand.

Merely defeating and conquering Serbia would not do. The Serbs had to be turned into the Empire’s most dedicated servants: when even a people like that can be so thoroughly crushed, resistance to the Empire must surely be futile.

This is why CANVAS has to be presented as a "Serbian" organization, when it is really a rabidly anti-Serb one. This is why the 2008-2012 government in Serbia was installed as puppets of Washington - because the junior partner in it were the Socialists once led by Milosevic, and demonstrating them broken was proving Empire's point. And this is why the current government, led by the former Radicals (now cynically rebranded as "Progressives") has plumbed the depths of submission and sycophancy like no other.

I may be personally invested in seeing Serbia throw off the yoke, but that last paragraph I quoted earlier is why Serbia ought to matter to everyone else.

Bus People

In the first six weeks of 2015, some 50,000 Albanians have reportedly left the "independent state of Kosovo", setting off in buses across Serbia towards Hungary and the EU. Their number may be even higher: some "Kosovian" media mention up to 120,000 migrants. And now there is word they are also crossing over into Albania proper. 

While the Western media reflexively blame the Serbs, nobody actually knows what is happening. Perhaps this account, from an ethnic Serb traveling from her enclave in Kosovo to Belgrade on a bus filled with Albanian migrants, may help shed some light on the phenomenon.

This Looks Like 1999
By Yanya Gachesha (Јања Гаћеша)
Novi Standard, February 9, 2015. (original)

When I set out for Belgrade with a group of friends, early in the morning, and saw a group of Albanians at the bus depot in Gračanica, I realized the trip would take at least three hours more - but that this was also the opportunity to get to know these migrants better.

More Albanians boarded the bus at Ajvalija, Priština, Podujevo, all the way to Merdare. Most of them were young men, and young couples with children. When a few Serbs came on board at Miloševo we cheered up - until then, it seemed we were the only ones not traveling to Subotica.

They are leaving en masse, literally disappearing overnight. None of the Serbs know what's gotten into them all of a sudden. What I saw on the bus only confirmed the doubts that I and many other Kosovo-Metohija Serbs share: they are up to no good again. Apart from one woman headed to Subotica with her husband and children, who came on board in tears, everyone else looked entirely carefree. Neither her, nor her family looked like they were suffering, impoverished, or starving. Nor did anyone else. Few had more luggage than a single backpack, even those with children in tow. They were completely relaxed, laughing and talking on their phones, couples necking and kissing, as if they were all going to a seaside holiday and were about to burst into song.

Trouble in Kosovo? Must be the Serbs' Fault

Something strange is going on in the "Independent state of Kosovia" these days - but only if you're a mainstream Western media reporter.

Voice of America is stumped by the fact that some ten thousand "Kosovianians" have fled for the EU since the beginning of the year. Their explanation? It's Serbia's fault (of course, always) for making it easy for the "Kosovistanis" to travel freely, which "coincided" with "political turmoil and street unrest in Kosovo fueled by poverty, high unemployment and economically debilitating corruption."

Now wait just a bloody, bombed-out minute. Aren't "poverty" and "high unemployment" trotted out every time to explain every riot in "Kosovia"? Remember the 2004 pogrom resulting in the expulsion of some 40,000 Serbs? Within days, the Albanians' Western apologists were spinning it as a natural consequence of unemployment, poverty, etc. Their proposed solution? Independence, independence, independence!

NATO soldiers inspect a destroyed Serbian church in Prizren, following the March 2004 pogrom; the graffiti (in gutter Albanian) reads "Death to Serbs" (photo: SrbijaDanas)

You see, at the time Kosovo was legally considered a province of Serbia, albeit under NATO and UN occupation since NATO's illegal war of 1999. After almost four years of pro-independence propaganda, in February 2008 the provisional government proclaimed the "Republic of Kosovo." Two years later, the International Court of Justice tortured logic into declaring that this wasn't necessarily illegal.

Fast-forward to 2015. "Kosovia" has been recognized by some 100 states, mostly vassals of the Atlantic Empire. Moreover, the quisling government in Serbia has de facto recognized the province's independence - government, flag, borders, customs, documents, etc. - and sold the remaining Serbs down the river, basically forcing them to participate in "Kosovarian" elections. Never mind that only a handful of Serbs vote, and that even fewer agree to be token symbols of "Kosovian" tolerance and multicultural democracy or whatnot. And there is still a problem?

Bombing for Peace, and Other Hypocrisies

From Sputnik News, January 26, 2015:

Addressing reporters in New Delhi on Sunday, US President Obama has once again repeated his famous mantra "large countries shouldn't bully smaller countries," prompting the question: Wouldn't it be nice if the US President looked in the mirror before blaming others?

Trouble is, I think Nobel Peace Prize Winner Just For Showing Up has been looking in the mirror all these years - and seeing only the prettiest, cleverest, nicest, most righteous man in the world, who can literally do no wrong.

The race card has little to do with it, mind. His two predecessors acted the exact same way, even though - in the "social justice" narrative imposing itself on the American public today - they were steeped in "privilege." It's as if to ascend to the Throne of Saint Abraham, one has to recite the Creed: Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi.

That, by the way, is Latin for "What Jupiter is allowed, an ox is not" - fittingly enough, from the story of the Rape of Europa. So these self-appointed Jupiters declare themselves exempt from all rules and strictures, while using the very law they flout as a cudgel to clobber others with. Public declarations of their righteousness and others' (supposed) wickedness are just insult to injury.

Only in the demented minds of these reality-deniers can there exist such a thing as "humanitarian intervention" via "bombs for peace". I don't know whether the latter phrase was actually coined by the late, unlamented "Dick" Holbrooke, but he used it to argue for "humanitarian" intervention in Bosnia, in 1995.

The bombing was completely unnecessary; Holbrooke's vaunted peace treaty was little different from the 1992 treaty his client - jihadist fanatic Alija Izetbegović - rejected at Washington's urging. In another ironic twist, the bombs continued to kill the very people they were supposed to be "saving": the bombed-out areas were abandoned by the Bosnian Serbs after the treaty, and settled by Bosnian Muslims - dying in droves ever since from both unexploded ordnance and effects of the oh-so-"safe" depleted uranium.

That quote from Tacitus comes to mind: they make a desolation, and call it peace.

But don't take my word for it: read George Szamuely's excellent book, "Bombs for Peace: NATO's Humanitarian War on Yugoslavia". One of these days - soon, I promise! - I will give it a proper review; been meaning to do this for months, but life got in the way. Suffice to say that Szamuely meticulously documents the West's destruction of Yugoslavia, from its very beginning in the late 1980s, to the evil little war over Kosovo.

More and more people - the Russian leadership, for example - each day are coming to the realization that the Atlantic Empire rests largely on this false narrative of the noble knight riding to humanitarian rescue, and that the root of these lies can be found in Yugoslavia. Szamuely's book is a handy compendium of facts that can help you take apart that false narrative. So perhaps the next time whoever is Jupiter-in-Chief says something breathtakingly stupid and hypocritical, it will be easier to see it for what it is.

Damned Lies and Donetsk Airport

Alexander Mercouris has an interesting article on Russia Insider today, pointing out that the Western media deliberately ignored the facts about the fighting at Donetsk airport:

"... whilst the Ukrainians were pretending to be still in control of the airport, conclusive evidence existed that this was untrue.
What is extraordinary about this affair is that the Western media nonetheless went along with the Ukrainian pretence they were still in control of the airport. Reports from the rebels, the Russians and Graham Phillips, clearly showing the airport controlled by the rebels, were largely ignored. Instead the Western media uncritically reproduced the Ukrainian claims they still controlled the airport."

And that's putting it politely. Mercouris is being too kind when he wonders that the Western media are choosing to tell only the story told by the Kiev junta - "despite the fact that what Kiev says is repeatedly shown to be untrue." Despite, or because?

I mean, if this happened once or twice, I would buy the idea that the media were somehow being deceived. But if it's happening on an everyday basis, the logical conclusion is that they are deliberately going along. Remember the piece by Phillip Butler I mentioned in Wednesday's post? He explains how it took five Reuters writers/editors to come up with a completely bogus story. Does that strike you as coincidental? Me neither.

Sure, the Kiev junta is spewing propaganda out of every orifice - but the Western media is lapping it up because they serve the Empire. And the Empire needs the Narrative of "democratic, free, etc. etc." Ukraine resisting the "evil Russian aggression". So that is what the media report. Case in the point: yesterday's Foreign Policy feature making sure to hit every single propaganda note in the Narrative, while bemoaning the death of Ukie "Cyborgs" at the hands of "Russian invaders."

Now come the reports that U.S. troops will deploy to Lvov (Lwow, Lviv, Lemberg...) "in the spring", supposedly to train the Ukie military in "rule of law." The same way MPRI taught "democracy and human rights" to Croatians in 1995, most likely. Now I'm imagining US Army officers trying to explain to "Right Sector" Nazis the importance of following the Geneva Conventions using the slides from Abu Ghraib...

The long and short of it is, mainstream Western reports out of Ukraine are worse than worthless: they are outright lies. Relying on them to understand what is happening is like relying on Newspeak to oppose IngSoc.

Want to know what's really happening? The rebels put almost everything up on YouTube. Feel free to take everything with a grain of salt, and judge for yourself. That's what you're supposed to do.

Serbia's PM: Puppet and Lackey

It didn't take very long for the terrorist rampage at the offices of Charlie Hebdo - a pretty obvious case of blowback from Western-promoted jihadism - to be re-framed by the Powers That Be as an issue of free speech. To believe that, however, one would have to purge all memory of the past several years of a West gone mad, in which free speech and those who accidentally practiced it were repeatedly burned at the stake of political correctness and "social justice" (e.g. "Shirtgate"). And they'd have gotten away with it, if not for us folks who notice and remember things.

This came to mind as I was reading reports from Serbia that the Prime Minister had thrown a tantrum over allegations made by an Imperial propaganda outfit. Apparently, BIRN had run a story last Thursday - overshadowed by the events in France - alleging that the government in Belgrade had acted "wastefully" by giving the contract to dredge a flooded mine to an "inexperienced" company. The PM responded by whining that the "EU paid BIRN to print lies" and that the contract was given to a lower domestic bidder because Serbia can't afford a 23-million-euro price tag from an EU conglomerate.

Trigger warning: Noticing and Remembering ahead. Also logic.

Uncivilized

Yesterday, three masked men - which the French government and media have identified as French-born Algerians - attacked the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and murdered 10 employees (deliberately targeting the magazine's cartoonists). They also killed two police officers on the scene, one of whom was reportedly named Ahmed - so, a French Muslim.

The bodies of the slain have hardly gone cold before the Narrative Wars began. For some, this was a vile act of Islamic terror, signaling the need to defend the West from jihad. Far enough - except that many of these very people have been allied with jihadists and terrorists for decades, in places like Afghanistan, Bosnia, Serbia ("Kosovo" and "Sanjak"), Russia (Chechnya, Dagestan) and more recently, Libya and Syria. The way they spun it, these were the "good" jihadists, attacking the "enemies" of the West - you know, those folks who refused to submit to demands for unconditional surrender of their independence, economies, values, societies, faiths and traditions to the bankers, market speculators and the false god of Multiculturalism.

In other words, I'll believe the West is fighting against the jihad when I see it.

"Serbian Music Promoters" and the Failed USAID Revolution in Cuba

Many Americans skeptical of the government give no second thought to USAID. The agency may be spending taxpayers' money overseas, they figure, but at least it's for the purpose of buying the world's goodwill with American kindness and generosity, right?

Little do they know that USAID also produces threatening political ads, and tries to subvert governments through pop culture. Recent reports by AP (see here) indicate the U.S. agency has tried to foment a coup in Cuba by infiltrating the Cuban hip-hop scene. This was part of a broader scheme involving a knockoff of Twitter, some details of which emerged earlier this year. Though some U.S. government officials (e.g. Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy) are blasting the venture as "reckless and stupid," USAID is claiming it was only "developing civil society."

It is certainly interesting that the original round of revelations about the project, supposedly discontinued in 2012, were leaked to the media as everyone was paying attention to the political meltdown in Ukraine this spring - and this story comes while everyone is focusing on the CIA torture report. The best time to "to take out the trash" is when the public's attention is elsewhere...

Notice also that only one person has been identified by name in the whole scandal: one Rajko Bozic, called "a Serbian contractor," though Western media indicate he wasn't the only Serbian "music promoter" working the gig. Turns out Bozic isn't an ordinary music promoter - Serbian papers reveal he was "involved in projects in Tunisia, Ukraine, Lebanon and Zimbabwe." So he is really one of those professional revolutionary types, who go around the world spreading the Imperial gospel of "democracy" and "human rights." This particular lot was chosen because of their role in the Exit Festival, a drugs-and-alcohol-addled extravaganza started in 2000 as part of the campaign to overthrow the government, and continued every year since, at Serbian taxpayers' expense.

But don't believe for a second their "outing" as Serbian is an accident, or an irrelevant detail. Back in 2011, when a damning documentary appeared linking these professional putschists to the so-called "Arab Spring" upheavals in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria, I wrote:

"Branding [them] as Serbian is no accident. Few in the world would be inclined to suspect a Serb of working for the Empire, after everything that happened in the Balkans in the 1990s... Merely defeating and conquering Serbia would not do. The Serbs had to be turned into the Empire’s most dedicated servants: when even a people like that can be so thoroughly crushed, resistance to the Empire must surely be futile."

And while every place that's been touched by these "activists" bears the scars of their involvement, Serbia is actually run by them, and has been for the past 14 years. So great has this "democratic democracy" been, ordinary Serbians are now worse off than during the era of sanctions and war. That ought to tell you everything about the kind of bliss these people - and their paymasters - truly stand for.

Tyranny of Ignorance and Manipulation

How did it come to this?

People riot in the streets not because the police are murdering citizens in cold blood while "just doing their jobs" (with all the banality of evil that phrase is meant to conjure), but because they've been told - and they believed - this was all about racism. Oh by all means, let's have people at each other's throats: that way they will never notice the government boot choking them to death.

I saw an essay today, written by a John W. Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute. commenting on both that and the Senate report about CIA torture. He says:

"We have relinquished control of our government to overlords who care nothing for our rights, our dignity or our humanity, and now we’re saddled with an authoritarian regime that is deaf to our cries, dumb to our troubles, blind to our needs, and accountable to no one."

He may as well be writing about Serbia under the "democratic progressives" (i.e. quislings of the Empire), but he's writing about a former republic still called the United States of America. A country that voted against a UN resolution condemning Nazism, and leads the "defensive alliance" (that has only ever waged wars of unprovoked aggression) now producing propaganda videos claiming there are no Nazis in Ukraine. Because they say so. Perhaps they need help looking?

How did it come to this?

A few years back, a columnist said this about the nature of political correctness, comparing it to Communist propaganda:

"...I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control." (source)

Think of this as you read the endless media promotion of manufactured scandal, from false rape stories to shrieks of outrage over a shirt worn by a scientist who just landed a probe on a comet. To hell with science, he sinned against political correctness! This cannot stand! 

As soon as the riled-up people begin thinking "Hey, wait a minute, this doesn't compute..." here comes another outrage, another assault on the amygdala, another crass emotional manipulation. The interval between the attacks is progressively shrinking, and soon may disappear altogether. 

How did it come to this?

Perhaps this gem, from Dmitri Orlov, will help you understand: "...there is a limit to how much you can know, but there is no limit at all to how much you don't know but think you do"!

Anglosphere Media Spin: "A Small Drone Stunt"

Three days after the drone incident at the Serbia-Albania game in Belgrade, the propaganda in the mainstream Anglosphere media is getting worse. That should not come as a surprise: for the Empire's lie machine, anything goes when dealing with the Serbs - from simple spin and subterfuge to outright making up one's own "facts."

screenshot of the NY Times article header, October 17, 1500 EDT

Here is the New York Times' Dan Bilefsky, blaming the Serbs for attacking, insulting and provoking the pure, innocent Albanians:

Video of the event showed some Serbian spectators — Albanian fans were barred from the stadium — shouting “Kill! Kill! Kill!” Others ran onto the field, attacking Albanian players, sometimes with chairs, and forcing the Albanian team to escape through a tunnel at the end of the field. 

Per Bilefsky (or his editors), it all started when "a small drone trailing a nationalist Albanian flag" flew into the stadium. At this point, I would like to refer you to an outright brilliant analysis by the good folks at eBritic, who not only surveyed the British media's distortions of Tuesday's incident, but set the facts of the case straight. I also refer you to the Serbian Football Association account, endorsed by the match officials. 

Just to be perfectly clear: the NYT - and other media - is busily spinning this as yet another manifestation of "Serb bigotry" against the poor innocent Albanians. Imagine, the Albanian fans were "barred from the stadium"! Serbian fans were likewise banned from the upcoming game in Albania - for the same reason, security fears - but there is no mention of that, of course. It would spoil the "Serbs bad" narrative.

The "nationalist Albanian flag" was in fact a banner depicting the so-called "Natural Albania," the objective of Albanian chauvinists since 1878 or so, for which they have repeatedly enlisted support of outside conquerors (Austria-Hungary, Nazi Germany, NATO). Of course, Albanians and their Western sponsors are shrugging this off as "Serbian propaganda" or paranoia - even as the US "diplomat" involved in staging NATO's 1999 casus belli openly endorses the project.

And let's by all means talk about that particular elephant in the room. Fifteen years ago, NATO attacked Serbia in support of an Albanian terrorist insurgency, occupied a part of Serbian territory (the province of Kosovo-Metohija) and had it declared an independent state (in 2008). Albania has backed the insurgency, the NATO war and the subsequent land grab all the way.

Even though the quisling government of Serbia has nonetheless bent over backwards to properly host the Albanian team in Belgrade, the Albanians launched a drone with an incredibly offensive banner - and not just to Serbs, but also to Greeks, Montenegrins and Macedonians (all Empire's vassals, but I guess beneath Albanians on the ladder so their interests don't matter?). They have tried to profit from the resulting interruption, bragged about it on social media (the US standard of truthiness, per J. Psaki), Albanian officials congratulated them for a "job well done" and called the whole thing a "splendid subtle provocation". And this is somehow Serbia's fault?

Nuts.

Skewering the Liars

A satirical German TV show "Die Anstalt" (The Institution) has aired a segment on September 25 mocking the Western coverage of the conflict in the Ukraine.

Someone was kind enough to post it with English subtitles. Watch and enjoy:

Bosnia 2014: The Recycled Election

General elections in Bosnia-Herzegovina will be held on October 12. The date was originally supposed to be October 5, but the whole thing was postponed by a week at the insistence of the Muslims, because October 4 is Eid-al-Adha.

In the Serb Republic (Република Српска), the contest will be between the ruling coalition - led by Milorad Dodik - and the opposition alliance slapped together by the Empire. Ironically, the opposition's mainstay is the Serb Democratic Party (SDS), once led by Radovan Karadžić (now before the Hague Inquisition on charges of "genocide") and demonized by both the Empire and its Muslim clients.

Is Washington hoping to replicate the 2012 Serbian scenario? If so, the effort is as lazy as it is transparent: the opposition calls itself the "Alliance for Change" - the same name as a contradictory coalition the US had created back in 2000, only in the Muslim-Croat Federacija.

The original "Alliance for Change" ended up being an abusive marriage of (in)convenience, in which the Social-Democrats were constantly undermined by the Party for Bosnia, a splinter of the Islamist SDA (Alija Izetbegović's Orwellian-named "Party of Democratic Action").

A decade later, the Social-Democrats got to try again; this time they chose to ally with the SDA and fringe Croat groups. After the SDA's sudden but inevitable betrayal, they tried a pact with another splinter party: Better Future Alliance (SBB), run by the shady media magnate and ex-SDA propaganda chief Fahrudin Radončić. That too ended badly, surprising precisely no one.

Properly explaining the dynamics of Bosnian Muslim politics would take years; suffice to say that the momentum currently seems to favor the SDA. Its chairman, Sulejman Tihić, died of cancer last week; the funeral rites were an occasion for much rhapsodizing and rallying around Tihić's longtime rival Bakir Izetbegović (yes, Son Of), who has now taken over the party and is running for re-election in the country's three-member Presidency. The SDA is also sure to get a last-minute boost from the Islamic clergy, during the Eid festivities.

After four years of ever-shifting mathematical coalitions, the SDA is running with a seductive message of "Strength in Unity" (U jedinstvu je snaga):

from the SDA campaign website, snagabih.ba

If that slogan sounds vaguely familiar, that's because it is. Here's a still from the 2005 movie "V for Vendetta", showing a poster of the Anglo-fascist ruling party "Norsefire":

"V for Vendetta"

It's a year for plagiarism in Bosnia, it seems. First the Empire "recycles" the name it used 14 years ago in the Federation for the political group it's now backing in the Serb Republic. Then the SDA runs on a fascist slogan from a Wachowski movie.

But wait, there's more: the former chief mufti, Мustafa Cerić - now a private citizen running for the Presidency - outright plagiarized not one, but two Western designs: the logo of a Las Vegas casino, and that of the Virginia Mennonite Conference (!).

Though I suppose even that is better than the aforementioned Fahrudin Radončić's party advertising itself as a "Tsunami of justice" - in a country that's just been hit by two major floods...

Meanwhile, the politics of hatred and mistrust remain unchanged.

A Tale of Two Letters

Who would know better about the lies and fabrications of spies than people who used to be spies themselves? A group of ex-intelligence officials, called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), has spoken out against Imperial madness for some time now. On August 30, they sent an open letter to German Kanzlerin Angela Merkel, warning her about falsified claims of "Russian invasion". From the letter:

Obama, however, has only tenuous control over the policymakers in his administration – who, sadly, lack much sense of history, know little of war, and substitute anti-Russian invective for a policy.
[...]
Largely because of the growing prominence of, and apparent reliance on, intelligence we believe to be spurious, we think the possibility of hostilities escalating beyond the borders of Ukraine has increased significantly over the past several days.
[...]
Photos can be worth a thousand words; they can also deceive. We have considerable experience collecting, analyzing, and reporting on all kinds of satellite and other imagery, as well as other kinds of intelligence.  Suffice it to say that the images released by NATO on Aug. 28 provide a very flimsy basis on which to charge Russia with invading Ukraine. Sadly, they bear a strong resemblance to the images shown by Colin Powell at the UN on Feb. 5, 2003, that, likewise, proved nothing.
[...]
the government army that was starting to take heavy casualties and lose ground, largely because of ineptitude and poor leadership. Ten days later, as they became encircled and/or retreated, a ready-made excuse for this was to be found in the “Russian invasion.” That is precisely when the fuzzy photos were released by NATO and reporters like the New York Times’ Michael Gordon were set loose to spread the word that “the Russians are coming.” (Michael Gordon was one of the most egregious propagandists promoting the war on Iraq.)

One doesn't have to be an intelligence professional, of course, to realize the timing of the "invasion" propaganda was conspicuously coincidental with Kiev's crushing defeat. In resorting to such transparent lies, the Empire and its mainstream media betray a belief that their citizenry are idiots.

Empire's "Fascist Freedom Fighters"

This is what madness of the West looks like:

(click image to enlarge)

This is a screenshot of an article that appeared in Foreign Policy, August 30, 2014. (h/t Mark Sleboda)

As to why they did not opt for the alliterative "fascist freedom fighters," the answer is simple: they had to put "defenders" in there somewhere, so as to reinforce the lie of "Russian aggression." 

Of Serbs and Symbolism

Having exhausted the excuse of "Russian invasion" to explain the setbacks in its "punitive expedition", the Kiev junta and its Western backers have seized upon another: it's the Serbs!

Balkan Insight, a propaganda outfit funded by the UK Foreign Office and the US State Department, reported last week on a group of Serb fighters bolstering the ranks of Novorussian militia - going on to praise the regime of Aleksandar Vučić for "neutrality" in Ukraine and commitment to obeying the orders from Brussels and Washington.

Serbian "Chetnik" volunteers in Novorussia (via Facebook)

While Vučić told BI that "dozens of Serbs can be seen fighting for both sides," those rumored to be fighting for Kiev junta (as no photos, names, or other evidence has ever been presented) are said to be mercenaries. Those who joined the Novorussian forces, however, have spoken out over social media - an accepted standard of evidence, according to the State Department - claiming that they fight out of principle, not for money.

Though the BI report mentions fourteen Serbs, social media sources claim the Serb fighters are numerous enough to have established their own unit, named "Yovan Shevich" (Јован Шевић), after a 18th-century Serbian cavalry officer from the Austrian Military Frontier who emigrated to Russia rather than convert to Catholicism. Officials of the government in Belgrade were apparently ignorant of Shevich, telling the local media they would issue a warrant for his arrest if he ever returned to Serbia (!).

Why such a fuss about these Serbs? Whether they number 14 or 140, there just isn't enough of them to turn the tide of battle - though the Novorussian forces seem to be doing just that right now - so it has to be something else. Could it be symbolism?

Serbia is supposed to be a conquered province, its "resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform" (Norris, 2005) crushed through an unprecedented UN blockade, NATO bombing and finally a prototype "color revolution" and electoral engineering, that have ensured the government in Belgrade always served its foreign masters first, and its people never.

Serbs are supposed to be a broken people, who see resistance and pointless and know they are conquered: at the end of July, U.S. Ambassador to Serbia Michael Kirby gave an interview to the local media demanding the Vučić government explicitly support Ukraine's unity, including the Crimea (which Vučić dutifully did a few days later). Kirby also mentioned the "problem" of Serb volunteers - while demanding an investigation into the deaths of several American Albanians who died as members of the "Kosovo Liberation Army" back in 1999. So, it's OK for Americans (of the Albanian kind) to volunteer for wars elsewhere, but not Serbs? Conquerors and conquered, you see - different rules.

Symbolism also helps explain why Brussels and Washington are so insistent on Serbia not exporting food to Russia at the moment. Hard-hit by the flooding this spring, Serbia is hardly in position to spare any food for export. Empire's demands, therefore, are intended to reinforce the established pattern of dominance and submission: Brussels and Washington order, Serbia obeys.

This would also have the benefit of giving the Empire's brute force a faux veneer of morality: see, if Serbia thinks sanctions against Russia are proper - the very Serbia that's Orthodox and harbors kinship with Russia, while it has been sanctioned, bombed and occupied by the West - then surely the West must be right and Russia is wrong.

And they would have gotten away with it, too, were it not for a handful of stubborn Serbs and the ghost of an 18th-century hussar.

Whatever Happened to MH17?

Notice how it's been two weeks since we've heard anything about the Malaysian Airlines plane?

For two weeks it was a media frenzy: "PUTIN DID IT", "PUTIN'S MISSILE", "PUTIN KILLED MY SON"? And then - nothing.

When MH370 disappeared, the families of those aboard were a constant fixture on the screens. With MH17, they've been kept away. Perhaps so they couldn't ask uncomfortable questions, such as, "Why are you lying?"

(hat tip: The Saker)

Oh, and here is another thing that flew under the radar:

"Ukrainian Attorney General's office spokesperson Yuri Bojchenko confirmed that a non-disclosure agreement was signed on August 8, 2014 between the Netherlands, Belgium, Australia and Ukraine regarding any results of Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 ‪#‎MH17‬ flight crash investigation." (source)

Can one even sign a non-disclosure agreement about evidence in a criminal investigation? And why would they - unless they were trying to hide it? As a reminder, all the data from the Air Traffic Control facilities that tracked MH17 was seized by the Kiev junta. The "black boxes" - flight data and voice recorders - recovered from the crash site were turned over to the Malaysians, who gave them to the Dutch, who promptly turned them over to the British! 

And while Washington claimed to have conclusive evidence the airliner was shot down by the Novorossians, it never produced any - aside from some Tweets and a couple faked YouTube videos.

The junta was the one with the means, motive and opportunity to shoot down the airliner. It is trying to hide the evidence. After the initial frenzy of blaming the Russians with absolutely no evidence whatsoever, the Western media have stopped talking about the plane entirely.

The truth points to itself.

MH17 and Some Basic Police Work

The U.S. government and media have accused Russia of being behind the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 (July 17, 2014), either directly (for which zero evidence has been offered) or indirectly, via "pro-Russian rebels", for which all the evidence offered has been outright falsified - from "audio intercepts" (here) to "videos" (here and here) to interviews doctored to sound as if the "rebels" had Buk launchers. All of it taken at face value by the Western media, and even amplified by misrepresentations of photos.

Conspicuously absent from any coverage has been the thought of the Kiev junta shooting the airplane down. Yet the junta fits the classic police trifecta of means, motive and opportunity perfectly.

Means: the Ukrainian armed forces possess multiple Buk launchers in working order, over a dozen of which were deployed in the region at the time.

Motive: Blame Russia and the "rebels", which Kiev has been doing for months anyway, but especially at the moment when four of their brigades had just been cut to pieces by the "rebels" in the Marinovka/Saur-Mogila "cauldron" along the southern border.

Opportunity: MH17 was diverted from the regular flight path, and directed to a lower altitude, by the Dnepropetrovsk Air Traffic Control (ATC), i.e. officials loyal to the Kiev regime. Its normal flight path would have taken it nowhere near the war zone.

Then there was the immediate attempt to pin this on Russia and the rebels, through doctored "audio intercepts" and YouTube videos.

Yet the U.S. government continues to insist that Russia is to blame, based on super-double-secret "intelligence" it refuses to show, or "social media" - and deliberately ignores the factual evidence pointing to its clients in Kiev.

On July 3, 1988 the missile cruiser USS Vincennes shot down IranAir Flight 655 over the Persian Gulf, killing 290 civilians on board. When denial didn't work, Washington shrugged it off and apologized... not.

The question now is, who do you think is credible here, and who is lying through their nose?