Obsession, hubris and downfall: Austria-Hungary and the Great War

Folly and Malice: The Hapsburg Empire, the Balkans, and the Start of World War One by John Zametica
Shepheard-Walwyn, London, 2017

The centenary of the Great War has occasioned many historical retrospectives of the event that fundamentally changed the world, with not a few historians attempting to retroactively reshape the narrative to suit the current political and ideological climate.

Simply put, the 21st-century revisionists are seeking to project the blame for the war onto their once and future favorite bogeymen, Russia - and Serbia, on whose behalf Nicholas II entered the war - going so far as describing the 1903 May Coup as the root cause of all ills that befell European empires in 1914-18.

I've referred to this phenomenon before, and written not a few essays about WW1 myself, before work diverted my time and resources from further dwelling on the matter. The short answer is that the above-referenced argument is entirely bogus. For the long answer, I urge you all to read an exhaustively researched tome by John Zametica, "Folly and Malice."

And I do mean exhaustively: of the book's 766 pages, over 100 are taken up by endnotes and bibliographical references. The hardcover edition is a doorstop, no getting around it. My running criticism of Serbian historians is that they tend to produce hefty academic volumes, suitable for scholars and university libraries but at best impractical for the masses - leaving them at the mercy of fake pulp "histories" penned by the ilk of Noel Malcolm instead. Yet to level the same criticism of Zametica's book would be both folly and malice; he had to go into great detail in order to not only rebut the modern mainstream "scholarship," but also show the extent to which Austria-Hungary and its obsession with the Serbs are at the root of the Great War.

The title itself pays homage to a quote from Anton Mayr-Harting's 1988 tome "Der Untergang: Österreich-Ungarn, 1848-1922" (Downfall: Austria-Hungary, 1848-1922), which actually clocks in at a whopping 932 pages and as far as I can tell is only available in German. Zametica's bibliography includes many German sources, as well as English, French and Serbian (or Serbo-Croatian, if you prefer), to paint a comprehensive picture of relations between Vienna and Belgrade that led to the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the subsequent declaration of war.

Rather than the centenary revisionist narrative blaming post-1903 Serbia for supposedly provoking Austria-Hungary, in the 18 chapters of 'Folly and Malice' Zametica walks us through the Hapsburg monarchy's crisis of identity and existence that led Vienna to regard Serbia as an existential threat.

Zametica looks not just at the Viennese court, but at the politics behind the occupation and annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Austrian-backed Croat nationalism seen as a counterweight to the allure of a free Serbia, the Austro-German relations that led Vienna to believe it had a carte blanche in the Balkans, and the "red herring" of blaming the June 28 Sarajevo assassination on the Serbian secret society "Black Hand" - among other things. It would be doing his volume an immense injustice to try and distill those chapters here.

If you consider yourself a scholar of history, or if your heritage goes back to these troubled lands, or if you merely wish to learn more about a region systematically and deliberately misrepresented for the past century, this book is for you. And while Zametica did not set out to create a parable about the madness of empires, the clear takeaway from 'Folly and Malice' is that obsession with a perceived adversary can quickly turn into self-fulfilling prophecy, and that the war seen as the only way to salvation can instead become the instrument of one's demise.

Stench Along The Trail

What can I say about 2014?

At best, that it wasn't another 1914 - though not by much. And who knows what future historians might say about that, provided there are any.

It was a year of anniversaries: 15 years ago this March, NATO attacked Serbia (which occasioned a gut-wrenching documentary and a war of images on Twitter and Facebook). A hundred years ago this July, Austria-Hungary had attacked Serbia and set off the Great War.

Vienna had claimed it was a victim of "Serbian terrorism" and was conducting a "punishment expedition" against "bandits." It was a monstrous lie. Austria-Hungary perished in the ensuing cataclysm, though its specter continues to haunt Europe to the present day. It is hardly a coincidence that today's flashpoint - the Ukraine - was also the site of Austro-Hungarian ethnic engineering over a century ago. Or that there is an unbroken line between 1914 and today, running straight through Hitler...

To me personally, the events in the Ukraine were an uncanny re-run of the early 1990s and the demise of Yugoslavia. Even the instigators were the same: NATO, United States, the Atlantic Empire - as was the pattern of fomenting dissent, double standards, and backing Nazis.

There was also the incessant propaganda, as brazen as it was stupid. And yet, the sheer amount of it has generated enough poison that even the critics have not been able to resist the toxic residue. Perhaps the best example of how the media operate has been the "PUTIN KILLED MY SON" hysteria over the Malaysian airliner, which abruptly stopped once the Russians offered evidence to the contrary. Without any acknowledgment of the lies, of course.

You won't hear many challenges to the mainstream media reporting in the supposedly "free and democratic" West. At most you will laugh at the skewering of lies and lying liars in a German comedy show. Yet it should tell you much about the times we live in that only comedians are allowed to challenge the powerful...

Meanwhile, Bosnia and Serbia were hit by some of the worst flooding in a century. Western media only began noticing once tennis champion Novak Djokovic called them out on it - and donated his entire winnings from a tournament for the relief effort. Months later, USAID tried to influence the Bosnian elections by producing TV ads accusing the local governments of embezzling Western flood aid - though such aid never actually came. That election, by the way, was a veritable parade of plagiarism and absurdity.

In 2014, the Islamic State arose in Iraq and Syria, to the great joy of the Empire. Albanians were able to disrupt a soccer game with a drone - the first such attack in history - with impunity. And the U.S. government tried to use "Serbian music promoters" in a failed bid to conquer Cuba - only to abruptly abandon the decades-long blockade in December (while keeping the goal of regime change in Havana).

It was the year Falcon got a graphical update, but I ended up being too busy to wish it a happy 10th anniversary.

The oddest thing is, while I obviously couldn't predict the details of what would come to pass, a month before the Empire-backed coup in Kiev unleashed Hell I wrote this:

"[A]s the great Serbian poet Njegos once wrote, "He whose law lies only in the cudgel, has a trail that reeks of inhumanity."
This isn't about Ukraine, or about democracy, or human rights, or "freedom" - it's about having only the cudgel, and the entire world looking like something to beat with it.
It's about crushing any thought of there being an alternative to the "end-of-history" West.
It's about power.
Just follow the stench along the trail.

So, while I am grateful this wasn't another 1914, I am really glad 2014 is over. And I wish us all a better 2015, with all the help from the Almighty we can hope for. I have a feeling we'll need it.

Waiting for Stalingrad

I have a long tradition of year-in-review articles for Antiwar.com (the most recent is "Moments of Revelation."), though not so much here. Nonetheless, it seems like a good idea to recap the year that was.

"By their fruits you shall know them," I began the year, quoting Matthew. And sure enough, the fruits of the Empire and its servants have been poison throughout.

KLA supporters in Washington DC famously said the "Kosovian" bandits fought for "human rights and American values;" I offered a glimpse into what that looked like in practice. Meanwhile, the spineless quisling regime in Belgrade committed outright treason by recognizing "Kosovia" in all but name. Even so, Serbia is not dead and buried, much as the Empire would like it to be so.

This was the year in which Great War revisionism gained more steam. Not only have there been efforts to blame everything on the Orthodox Other, but - as this item from February showed - to actually explain the war as the legitimate reaction of the Central Powers to being "threatened"! In such a climate, it was easy for Christopher Clark to argue that the war originated with the 1903 May Coup in Serbia. I mean, if the Serbs had only stayed Austrian vassals...

Such a climate of calumny made it possible for "Bosniak" activists to slander a WW1 Serbian march performed at the UN, with the help of the mainstream Western media.

Not that internet journalism has done better this year; after 14 years of online work, I've shared a few insights, inspired by another blogger's year-in-review posting. But the tendency to print unverified rumor, or even deliberated disinformation - case in point being a faux story about Tom Hanks supporting the Serbs - was inherited from the mainstream media. The Internet may be the media version of the AK-17 (whose inventor passed away in December, at age 94), but whether it's bullets or words, proper use and precision do matter.

A good friend and great fighter for the cause of truth, Stella Jatras, reposed in the Lord this June. Many of her Serb friends gave her a fitting tribute. When the history of these dark days is written, her name will shine brightly in it.

For my part, I've taken aim at many mistakenly beloved illusions this year: I took issue with Daniel Greenfield's drone worship in February; and challenged the perceptions that 1389 was a defeat, or that October 5, 2000 was a triumph.

Likewise, on the 70th anniversary of the Communist revolutionaries declaring a rebirth of Yugoslavia, I questioned their proclamation, and addressed the problematic features of their creation. And then there were unanswered questions about the Great Leader...

Chechen bombers of the Boston Marathon did not cause a re-evaluation of Empire's support for the Caucasus jihad. Instead, it backed the jihadists in Syria. In fact, by the summer, everything seemed set for yet another evil little war. As if on cue (because it was on cue) war talk was everywhere, the Imperial media eager to watch the world burn. Croatia actually bragged about being a conduit for weapons to the Syrian "rebels."  Had the attack actually gone forward, it would have been a defining moment for the Empire, marking it unmistakably as the greatest danger of our time. And then... nothing. Whether it was the Russian fleet off the Syrian coast, or Vladimir Putin's words of caution, but the Syrian campaign ended up stillborn.

Just the other day, Chechen bombers attacked public transportation in a city that, for six days every year, still bears the name Stalingrad. Their sponsors would do well to remember what happened to the "invincible" Wehrmacht there, seventy years ago.

Is it really a coincidence that Nazi revival is all the rage in the European Union? Seven years after murdering Slobodan Milosevic, the faux-Tribunal overtly promoted a Big Lie, presenting the Croatian Nazi plan to exterminate the Serbs as a Serb plan to exterminate the Bosnian Muslims. Meanwhile, Croatians reveled in their "heritage" after qualifying for the 2014 soccer World Cup - and then shamelessly tried to silence the few voices daring to protest.

Open Nazism was on display in Ukraine as well, where the Empire tried to stage another "Orange revolution" in December. It failed. Because the East remembers.

A Long, Twilight Struggle

2012 began with Angelina Jolie's war porn, and just got worse from there.

Guess who's the Balrog. 

April marked the 20th anniversary of Bosnia's recognition as an independent state - and the outbreak of the (un)civil war that ensued. It's somewhat of a mystery as to why the war, which ended in late 1995, had not restarted by 1997. Though the fact that it never ended for some people, but merely continues by other means, may harbor a clue.

Speaking of never-ending wars,WW2 is apparently still on. Did you know that someone "won" it not once, but twice? The answer may surprise you. Or maybe not. Either way, 50 years later the roles had been rearranged, with the once-and-present Nazi allies becoming the Atlantic Empire's new best friends, while Hitler's enemies are smeared as Nazis reborn.

No doubt that was the intent of an "artistic prank" wherein two NGO drones got a bunch of Serbian political parties to endorse a program originally written by Joseph Goebbels. Left out of the reports was the insignificant detail that all the parties involved were pro-Empire. When facts get in the way of a good story, too bad for the facts.

Prior to the May elections in Serbia, I put together a quick guide to political parties involved. The distinctions between them were smaller than it appeared, though. On St. George's Day, the Dragon won. Sure, it seemed like a small victory when the sycophantic Boris Tadic lost the presidency to Tomislav "Undertaker" Nikolic. Soon, however, the darkest suspicions about the "progressives" and their partners in crime began to seem downright benign compared to the actual betrayal in the works.

While as late as October is still seemed as if the new-old government in Belgrade was playing stupid, they soon demonstrated they weren't playing at all. Even as the Empire proclaimed an amnesty for murderers of Serbs, Belgrade signed "agreements" and promised "platforms" to recognize the Empire's monument to evil in fact, if not in name.

The besieged Serbs in Kosovo appealed to Moscow for protection, and organized a transparent, democratic plebiscite where they overwhelmingly voted against becoming "Kosovians". While Moscow offered moral support - but not much more - Belgrade responded with betrayal, and the Empire with violence.

Adding insult to injury, throughout the year, the Empire that no one could supposedly resist was revealed as a bumbling bully. Its contempt of decency was openly on display - not just when the Serbs were concerned, but also in other places it had occupied. Its propaganda has been having less effect. The invincibility it asserted was a result of self-deception and deliberate misunderstanding. How could such hubris and stupidity in service of twisted values continue to dominate? Not because the Empire itself is strong, I think, but because its victims are weak, infested by Empire's death cult.

The hostility and downright bigotry towards the Serbs can be explained in part by money, but more so by a lust for power, and a fair bit of historical baggage. Forcing a "gay pride parade" on places like Belgrade had nothing to do with actual homosexuals, or human rights and values, but everything to do with a display of power.

Why the Serbian politicians decided to outdo their predecessors in groveling is still a riddle; perhaps because they are spineless cowards, perhaps because they really believe the Empire means them well - even though it manifestly does not. Either way, at the end of 2012, treason in Serbia is still a profitable endeavor. How long that shall remain the case, I do not know.

Back in April, as I profiled the Serbian political scene, I wrote:

"The Serbs have displayed remarkable resilience. After a century of fighting horrific wars; surviving several attempts to obliterate them physically and culturally; social engineering seeking to obliterate their identity, language, culture and history; demonization designed to crush their spirit; communism and banksterism nearly wiping out their economy and enterprise - they are still hanging on. Many others would have broken long ago."

It may appear right now that this Empire will succeed where others have repeatedly failed.

But I think not.

Parallel Perspectives

The Cults of Bosnia and Palestine, by Richard Ziegler
Baico Publishing, Ottawa, 2012
136 pages (softcover)

Two years or so ago, the "Gaza flotilla" incident made me wonder whether Israel was getting "Serbed." It was just a brief glance at some patterns too eerily similar to be coincidental. Yet the whole subject of propaganda, manufactured consent and perception management simply begged for a more detailed study, by someone who could devote enough time, resources and scrutiny to it.

Canadian author Richard Ziegler's second book, "The Cults of Bosnia and Palestine" is one attempt at such a study. A self-identified leftist (his first book was titled "Reclaiming the Canadian Left"), Ziegler has chosen to examine the strange parallel thinking on the Western Left when it comes to the Bosnian and Palestinian conflicts.

Having spotted the same "invective" used to describe the Bosnian Serbs in use against Israel, Ziegler ventures to answer the question "whether some of the charges against [Israel] are made in good faith, or are merely an imitation of a proven strategy." (p.2 ) This comparative approach characterizes all four sections of the book.

In the short, introductory chapter Ziegler explains that the Left's obsession with Bosnia and Palestine most likely lies in its tendency to look for the "victims of oppression" and identify with them. The second chapter dwells on the concepts of "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing," both of which have been employed in crafting the narratives of Bosnia and Palestine. Ziegler notes the dubious emergence and questionable meaning of the term "ethnic cleansing", arguing it was used as a catch-all condemnation of Serbs. But he also tackles the thorny subject of genocide, first noting the absurd contortions applied to Rafael Lemkin's definition by war crimes prosecutors (p.29), then examining the implications of comparing Bosnia to the Holocaust (p.35). Of particular interest is Ziegler's argument that seeing genocide everywhere in effect tends to devalue the significance and distinctiveness of the Holocaust, thus indirectly amnestying its perpetrators.

Chapter 3 deals with Islam and history involved in both regions. Here Ziegler makes an important observation that the Left has not only adopted myths about peaceful coexistence of everyone under Islam, but generally dismissed history as a factor in both conflicts (p. 70-71). He explains the Leftist reluctance to criticize Islam as a result of perceiving the Muslims as the oppressed, and therefore being on the "good" side of identity politics.

Ziegler's venture into explaining the development of anti-Serbism on the Western Left in the final chapter is a very intriguing read. He may not be entirely right to dismiss the lack of prior anti-Serb sentiment on the Left - Engels wrote a scathing attack on the Slavs following the failure of the Hungarian Revolution in 1849, which is often mistakenly attributed to Marx and even excerpted out of context to sound worse - but certainly paints a detailed picture of the circumstances in which the modern anti-Serb thought in the West coalesced in the early 1990s. This is contrasted with prior anti-Semitism on the Left, and the many projections, false analogies and cognitive dissonance that characterize the Left's hostility to both Serbs and Jews. A good overview of the pattern that emerges in both instances is laid out at the very end (p. 118-119). Ziegler's conclusion is that leftist beliefs about Serbs and Jews are almost religious in nature, "and thus impregnable to argument, evidence or reason." (p. 120).

If anything, the book is too short. Documenting the instances of anti-Serbism in the Western press, both mainstream and alternative, over the past two decades would result in a multi-volume work by itself. Yet if Ziegler's conclusion is correct, and the quasi-religious conviction on the Left is impervious to reason, the quantity of evidence becomes somewhat irrelevant, and the quality of the argument more important than ever. To someone who has decided that Serbs and Jews must be evil, no amount of proof to the contrary will suffice to persuade them otherwise.

Nonetheless, Ziegler has done extensive research. Fully 54 pages of the volume's 136 are filled with  often explanatory footnotes. He doesn't cherry-pick favorable authors, either, but includes arguments from all over the spectrum (including myself at one point). Unlike many a scholar, however, he doesn't try to pad the volume with needlessly complex verbiage; Ziegler's prose is crisp, clean, and legible. One doesn't have to be a scholar to understand what he's arguing, or to appreciate the amount of time and effort that went into condensing what could have been a sprawling argument into such a compact volume.

Though plenty of targets of Imperial "liberation" have been softened up by propaganda, no one else has received the "full Serb" just yet. But with the demonization proving so effective, that may only be a matter of time. A great deal of its effectiveness is due to the involvement of the Left, which has successfully styled itself as standing for niceness and tolerance and against all name-calling. Except when it comes to those "disgusting Serbs" and Jews, of course.

The Cults of Bosnia and Palestine, by Richard Ziegler, will be presented on November 14, at Ottawa's Collected Works bookstore.

Blind Spot

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

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

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

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

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

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

The American Jihad

I've been meaning to go see Charlie Wilson's War, mostly because I'm a big fan of Aaron Sorkin's writing style (our politics differ substantially, but the man is a writing genius). I had no illusions about the veracity of the film; unlike most folks, I actually knew that President Carter authorized the arming of jihadists six months before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, on advice of Zbigniew Brzezinski, with the goal of provoking Moscow. And from my own experiences in the Balkans (and in Washington, DC) I know that many policymakers in the Imperial establishment even now see militant Islam as a potential ally, or at least something that can be used as a weapon.

But it took reading an excellent review by Chalmers Johnson (author of Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire and Nemesis) to really connect the dots.

Furthermore, in his introduction to Johnson's review, Tom Englehardt mentions an important detail about former CIA director William Casey:

...William Casey, the "Catholic Knight of Malta educated by Jesuits," who "believed fervently that by spreading the Catholic Church's reach and power he could contain Communism's advance, or reverse it." And, if you couldn't have the Church do it, as in Afghanistan in the 1980s, then second best, Casey believed, were the Islamic warriors of jihad, the more extreme the better, with whom, in his religio-anticommunism, he believed himself to have much in common. (The enemy of my enemy is my friend, after all.) Casey was, in fact, an American jihadi, eager in the 1980s not just to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan, but to push "the Afghan jihad into the Soviet Union itself."

I still want to see Charlie Wilson's War, but I think I may wait for the DVD.