Our Syria

Commentary by Željko Cvijanović, Novi Standard (Belgrade), August 30, 2013.
Translated by GrayFalcon. Original here.

When the first missiles strike Syria and we are shown the first horrific images - carefully selected to scare us enough without riling us up too much - it would be nothing we haven't seen before, in the case of some of us, lived through ourselves. "There is nothing new under the sun," one could say. Except our eyes are less reliable than ever before. Because there are many new things here, and drawing on analogies can only help us see the heart of the matter - while missing everything else.

1.
America is being led into a new war by a president who got elected claiming to be the antithesis of his belligerent predecessor; who promised Americans hope through changes that would bring the country back from the pitfalls of Bush the Younger's "wars on terror." Today, the man who received a Nobel Peace Prize not so long ago as an advance payment for expected greatness, is declaring that it is not a question whether Syria will be bombed, but when.

Meanwhile, heading the Department of Defense into the conflict is Chuck Hagel - one of the staunchest critics of Bush's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a rare member of the Washington establishment who dared criticize Israel, and almost the lone advocate of dialogue with Iran - in other words, one of the most peaceful Pentagon principals since America began waging war beyond its borders.

Providing the diplomatic cover for missiles and bombers would be Vietnam veteran and anti-interventionist John Kerry, whose arrival at the head of the State Department this winter promised hope for a peaceful resolution of the Syrian conflict, due to his cordial relationship with Bashar al-Assad.

Last, but not least, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in this war will be four-star General Martin Dempsey, who opposed a direct intervention by offering a worrying estimate that such an adventure would require "hundreds of scenarios, thousand of soldiers, and billions of dollars."

There have never been more doves at the top, never less support for a war in the American public, yet America has never been more belligerent. What gives?

2.
The answer could cheer up only someone like [current Serbian Prime Minister] Ivica Dačić, who is in charge of Serbia just about as much as Obama and his cabinet run the United States. America is not being dragged into another war and another crime by its political leadership - though they are willing participants in the endeavor, and should not be absolved of responsibility. It is clearer than ever before that America is being dragged into war by its "deep state," the shadowy decision-makers working without the mandate of the American people.

This is nothing new, one might say, adding that such shadowy structures - named by some as the "military-industrial complex," although that is a somewhat reductionist perspective - have led America into wars in the past. And that is true. Just as it is true that we knew about American atrocities in Afghanistan and Iraq before Julian Assange and Wikileaks revealed them to us. Just as we guessed the extent of surveillance and control before Edward Snowden, who merely confirmed it. In a similar manner, the American "one percent" who start wars while robbing their compatriots blind are being exposed by the Syrian War - and not just to us, but to the American "99 percent," now reviled around the world through little fault of their own.

This exposure is an important aspect of the deepening crisis in the West, which Syria brings into focus even before the first missile strikes the unfortunate country. It is made clear by today's revolt in the House of Commons, who rejected David Cameron's proposal for UK's participation in the war. Since the 1990s at least, the UK has led the U.S. into wars around the world more often than not, and has never deserted like this. Though I am not sure that London won't change its mind, and though Hollande has managed to out-Sarkozy Sarkozy, America still stands at Syria's gates more alone than ever.

In Libya, Obama found the magic formula to appear both peaceful and warlike, by letting other countries take point on the drive to war. He will, of course, attempt to find a "middle path" by planning limited strikes, intended to help tip the balance in favor of the Syrian rebels. But Obama cannot know how things will go after the first missile aimed at Damascus. He can know even less as to what might be going on by missile #5000. And once the first American jet is shot down, that's simply dark territory.

All of this makes for a completely new situation, indicating that internal resistance in the West to the aggression against Syria might have potential to be the strongest yet after the Vietnam War, with unpredictable political upheavals, consequences and outcomes.

3.
Another new moment is that all the previous American wars - from Desert Storm to Libya - were waged by the American "deep state" with a clear feeling of superiority, translated on the ground as an emphatic missionary complex. There will be manifestations of this in the Syrian War as well, but tainted for the first time by the self-realization of America's weakness, or more precisely, dwindling strength.

As Obama is pressured to light the fuse over Syria, the Senate will vote on a law once again raising the ceiling for the enormous U.S. debt. This paradox is limiting American options, at the very least by imposing awareness on Washington that if it doesn't strike now, it may not be able to strike tomorrow, as the pendulum of American power is swinging back more every day.

Why is this new? Why is it important? Because those who enter a conflict convinced of their own superiority can be reasonable and see the limits of possibility. Conflicts entered with an awareness that tomorrow one will be weaker, however, make one desperate. Think of it as Cinderella: aware that her spell will wear off at midnight, and that she has to woo the prince by then, or lose him forever. The discrepancy between the two perceptions acts to induce a sense of panic, further reducing actual superiority and distorting plans beyond reason or possibility. The superpower becomes a jug that goes to the well till it breaks.

This paradox limits even the basic American options. There is no going back, only going forward to the bitter end - attacking Syria, Iran, China, Russia... Those unable to halt or retreat have closed off all avenues to victory; even at their mightiest, they will live in fear of defeat, becoming their own worst enemy. And this is why Syria is something new, a point of no return.

4.
A power set on the path of no return by the fear of defeat, rather than rational analysis, sends a clear message to everyone else: submission is futile.

It was easy to persuade the bombed-out and beaten Serbs that they could live better by submitting. Even the Libyans, almost genetically poor before Gadhafi brought them reasonable standards of living, could be persuaded they would be better off without him. But who can persuade the Syrians today? Who can promise them anything more than red slaughter, if they lay down their arms before the "Free Syrian Army" thugs? Is there a voice of Allah that would persuade the Iranians they won't be next? Is there anyone in China not aware that the American deficit can be fixed only if they keep enough of their earnings for a cup of rice, and hand everything else over to JP Morgan? Is there a Russian - besides Navalny - unaware that the hole of American debt is so deep, it can only be filled with the resources of Siberia?

Though it will depend on the strategic understanding and tactical plans of each country finding itself on America's road of no return as to how they may get involved in the Syrian War, there is no doubt that they will get involved. And that is another new development.

If it lasts long enough, Syria could become a comic-book war, between the forces of Sublime Evil, arising for the first time since the defeat of Nazism, and the forces of Good joining together in self-defense. And if it lasts even longer, it may reduce the many identities of Western civilization down to just one: totalitarian plunderers. That, in turn, will ensure that the resistance to imperial America, though less visible than some would wish, will become more organized than ever. The lessons of Syria, and the threat of the long, cold global night, will make cats and dogs lie together in harmony. If you know what I mean.

5.
What will Syria mean for Serbia? Much more than one can read in the Serbian media. Incomparably more than one can infer from the silence of Serbian politicians. Perhaps more of Serbia's destiny will be decided before Damascus than before Constantinople in 1453.

What can we do about it? Only pray for the forces of Good to triumph over Evil, knowing all the while that the line between them runs right through us.

Watching the World Burn

Since the beginning of the (un)civil war in Syria, back in the heady days of the faux "Arab Spring", I've been convinced that Imperial intervention was a matter of when, not if.

Media vs. Syria (seen on Facebook, source unknown)

Tunisian and Egyptian revolts - aided by Otpor training - successfully overthrew their respective governments, but the Libyan stooges failed abysmally, and had to be rescued by an intervention. This was done using the Kosovo Scenario on the accelerated Bosnia schedule: establish a flimsy pretext for NATO involvement through the UN, go in bombs blazing, establish "peace" through occupation. Sure, that hasn't worked out so well - just ask the families of the Benghazi dead - but in the immortal words of the (likely) future Empress, "what difference does it make?"

The Syrian war began as one of those Otpor-like "civil revolts," but when the government in Damascus refused to crumble, it escalated into armed rebellion. The Empire and its clients have been supplying weapons to the rebels. Rebel "fighters" have also received "training" from the KLA - which, knowing the KLA, consisted primarily of advanced courses on "how to stage a massacre and blame the enemy for it, in order to create a pretext for intervention." Meanwhile, several Imperial clients have been enlisted to bolster the atrocity porn narrative in the mainstream media.

Conditioned by the endless stream of celebrity gossip to have the attention span of a spastic squirrel, the general public may have forgotten the attempt to stage a chemical attack in June this year. Yet the intervention machine had not kicked into gear then, the way it is now. What has changed? Either the Empire is now more prepared for war than it was two months ago - which I doubt - or the powers that be decided that fallout of Ed Snowden's NSA leaks, and economic and social problems at home, demanded an urgent distraction: a short, victorious war.

So now the media is deploying the heavy verbiage, trying to sell the general public on the notion that the only country to have ever used nuclear weapons somehow has the right, or even the moral obligation, to murder people in another country, supposedly to protect them from (allegedly) being killed by chemical weapons. Which were in all likelihood used by the rebels in a false flag op (see KLA training, above).

Moon of Alabama thinks the Empire lacks the wherewithal to attack, and that it's unwilling to risk a confrontation with Russia and China. He might be right about the former, but I'm not so sure about the latter. Remember that Washington lives in a virtual reality bubble, believing only the "facts" it chooses to believe (or those it invents, same difference). Note also the evolving confrontation with Moscow over "gay rights", which isn't about homosexuals or civil rights at all, but about power.

I still don't know how the Empire intends to attack, but it is abundantly clear that it has decided to. The current Emperor seems to share the outlook of his predecessor, who once spoke of wanting to "set a fire in the minds of men." So they set the world on fire instead.

The East Remembers

In the early morning hours of Aug. 4, 1995, on the heels of an incessant artillery and air bombardment, some 200,000 Croatian troops moved in to “liberate” Krajina, a stretch of mountains inhabited by Serbs who had rejected Croatia’s secession from Yugoslavia four years prior.

This is how I began "Remembering the Storm", published on the 10th anniversary of that atrocity. Croatia has since joined NATO and the EU. General Ante Gotovina was captured, extradited, convicted - and released. Yet that essay remains as true today as it was eight years ago.

"United Europe fights in the East"-
Nazi Croatian poster from 1942

Documentary evidence publicized during the trial of Gotovina et. al clearly confirms that Franjo Tuđman and his government wanted the Serbs gone. They wanted to finish the job begun in 1941, by their political progenitors, who aimed to "kill a third, expel a third, and convert a third." Of the two million Serbs in the "Independent State of Croatia," German sources estimated anywhere between 500,000 and 750,000 perished.

When Germany lost the war, the Ustasha - Croatian Nazis - had to flee. However, the cause of Croatian statehood was rescued by the Communists, who spun a myth of moral equivalence between the genocidal Ustasha and the Serb royalists. Croat nationalists could thus say they had "won WW2 twice". And in 1991, when Yugoslavia was weak and Germany strong once again, they came back for a rematch.

Just like in 1941, the Serbs fought back. Just like in 1941, Croatia had outside backers. Not ready to intervene in 1991, they arranged an armistice, deploying UN peacekeepers to disarm the Serbs. Meanwhile, American "advisors" trained Tuđman's troops in "human rights and democracy," while American diplomats exchanged notes calling Croatians their "junkyard dogs", cultivated for the purpose of fighting "Serb aggression".

The all-out attack on the Republic of Serb Krajina was launched on August 4, 1995. The following day, Croatian troops entered the Krajina capital of Knin. Tuđman declared it "Homeland thanksgiving day," cribbing from Americans the same way he cribbed from the Soviets in dubbing his extermination campaign the "Homeland war."

Krajina's defenders were surrounded and outnumbered. The Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina were dealing with a series of offensives by NATO-armed Muslim and Croat troops. Belgrade had refused to help, hoping to avoid a war with NATO (it didn't work; appeasement never does). Krajina's population chose exile over death. The 2001 census showed 380,000 fewer Serbs in Croatia than in 1991. Tuđman succeeded where the Ustasha had not. But then, he had better sponsors.

Croatia is American Empire's "junkyard dog" even today, though the Croats in Bosnia got the worst of that bargain. Empire's favor extends to other Nazi allies - be they militant Muslims in Bosnia, or Albanians occupying Kosovo and claiming more territories besides. A real 1940s reunion, today's Balkans.

To add insult to injury, the "war crimes" kangaroo court is now claiming the Ustasha plans for extermination of Serbs are really Serb plans for genocide of Muslims!

Tuđman died in 1999, and his party is no longer in power, but Croatia continues to celebrate August 5 as a national holiday. Montenegro's corrupt government separated from Serbia in 2006 and is trying to impose a rabidly anti-Serb (and pro-Croatian) national identity on its populace. Albanian-occupied Kosovo was declared an independent state in 2008, the same year an openly quisling regime was installed in Serbia.

Not everything has gone Empire's way, though. There are Serbs who still resist. The insane plan to woo jihadists "of all color and hue" isn't working out so well. And when another client tried to replicate the Krajina scenario, in August 2008, all the Imperial training and tech didn't last a day against a Russian frontier army.

The West may think it has won. But the East remembers.

Decline

Daniel Greenfield writes, apropos yesterday's anniversary of the Moon landing:

"Forty-four years ago, a nation that we now know was racist, didn't care about the environment and drank too much soda, landed on the moon.
[...]
We were going to go the moon and then to the planets beyond. We could find new frontiers, plant our flags, build colonies, jump from world to world, star to star, and turn our civilization into something more than another archeological dig. Maybe it was all just a crazy dream, but looking at the eyes of the men who did it and who died and die seeing it undone, there is that sense that they believed that it could be done.

Going to the moon was a crazy idea of course. Going beyond it would have been even crazier. Instead we settled down to the important things, like race relations, the importance of listening to music, breaking up the family, importing huge numbers of people with little use for our way of life and all the other stupid suicidal things that dying civilizations do to pass the time.
[...]
We could have gone to the stars, but we took another road instead. Maybe we can still turn back to a time when we could do great things before it's too late."

But wouldn't that be "turning back the clock" on all the wonderful "progress" that's been made since, uh, erm...? Well, yes. Progress in deconstructing society, certainly. Can it be done? I don't know. Should it at least be attempted? Certainly.

Space colonization may be impractical, as Charles Stross has argued, but then again, it might not. But practicality is less of a concern than the loss of drive. After everything has been deconstructed, people are wondering if anything has a point - to the point where reality offends them. So instead of doing great things, they turn inward and embrace the ennui. Retreat from space is just a symptom. Every health chart of a dying civilization shows some form of this.  The story of Buzz Aldrin's secret Communion suggests that the rot was already setting in, even then.  Fred might be right.

Note, however, that this applies to one civilization in particular. And while influential and powerful, it forgets it alone is not humanity. There is a world elsewhere.

Enough with the NYTimesians

I was going to dissect here an op-ed that appeared in today's New York Times, penned by one of the usual suspects.

I wanted to explain how half the stuff in the piece is outright made up, and the rest is twisted half-truths, combined with the author's self-serving projections. Such as when he called the Bosnian Serb Republic a "crucible of imagined victimhood" - on par with other big lies that have just kept coming for the past 22-plus years.

I felt an urge to try and correct idiotic assertions such as that "young people" emigrate so "they could be plain 'Bosnians,' not some ethnic subgroup", or that "young people" (again) who supposedly protested supposed Serb racism last month "wanted to to be Bosnians — not Bosniaks, or Serbs or Croats." Because no actual people, young or otherwise, said that. Ever. And because, whether one likes it or not, there is no such thing as a "Bosnian" identity, divorced from group identities defined by religious legacies of foreign conquest.

I also wanted to challenge the moronic attempt to blame a 2011 jihadist attack on the U.S. Embassy on the lack of centralized police command. It wouldn't be the first political abuse of that incident, after all.

Most of all, I wanted to vent my disgust at a shill who pretends to care about phantasmal "Bosnians" while in actuality shilling for one particular "subgroup" (hint: change one letter), as he has for the past two decades.

But then I realized something. People who complain about articles in the New York Times are under the mistaken impression that the New York Times still matters.

So I wrote this post instead.

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?

A Covenant, Not a Defeat

It is an accepted fact today that the Serbs lost the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. From folk poetry to smarmy pundits, everyone knows and agrees that the Turks and their vassals annihilated the army of Prince Lazar and conquered Serbia. Likewise, everyone knows and accepts that ever since, that Vidovdan, the date of the battle - June 28 (June 15 in the Julian calendar) - has been cursed, a day of tragedy for the Serbs.

Well, as with so many other things, everyone who "knows" this is wrong.

Battle of Kosovo

Just the other day, one of Serbia's quisling triumvirate quipped that this would be the "first victorious Vidovdan ever" - referring to the anticipated treat from Brussels in return for Serbia's ongoing debasement. Not surprisingly, there was no treat; just another promise of one, as usual. But how depraved, how divorced from one's own history and culture, must one be to make such a preposterous claim?

Would Serbia's enemies have repeatedly chosen Vidovdan for their symbolic acts of insult or injury, had this been a day of defeat? It was the date on which the Obrenović prince signed a secret treaty subjugating Serbia to Austria in 1881, and on which Archduke Franz Ferdinand visited the Serb-majority province of Bosnia, occupied in 1878 and annexed in 1908.

On that date in 1948, the Soviet Union chose to break off relations with Tito's Yugoslavia - which, ironically, was about as anti-Serb as a country could get. It was also the date on which Franjo Tuđman's regime in Croatia disenfranchised that republic's Serbs, in 1990, firmly embracing the path of Pavelić. And it was the date, that the quisling regime of Zoran Đinđić in Belgrade picked in 2001 for its illegal rendition of Slobodan Milošević to the Hague Inquisition.

The purpose, every time, was to break the Serbs' spirit. Yet were they successful? Ask Austria-Hungary, or the Soviet Union. Croatia did fulfill Pavelić's dream, but doesn't seem any happier for it. And Milošević never broke, even if many of his countrymen did.

Part of the reason for the confusion about Vidovdan is the myth - or rather, the epic poetry that served as the oral history of the Serbs during the dark ages of Turkish "vibrant cultural enrichment" (1459-1804). Historians ought to know better than to take epic poetry at face value. Take, for example, the songs of Prince Marko - son of King Vukašin - who after the death of his father in 1371 became a Turkish vassal. He certainly wasn't a "fearless and powerful protector of the weak, who fought against injustice and confronted the Turks", yet he is remembered as such in Serb and even Bulgar folklore.

So when the bards sing of "Tsar Lazar" choosing the Kingdom of Heaven and setting out to die, they aren't being literal about it. This is the story of Christ, played out by the princes of Serbdom. There is even a Judas, in the figure of Vuk Branković (though history suggests this analogy isn't entirely fair). That the slandered captain Obilić proves his worth by slaying the Turkish sultan is a particular Serbian twist. Nonetheless, it is very important that the poem concludes: "all was holy, all was honorable, and fitting in the eyes of God."

However difficult this may be for a modern secular humanist to understand, Lazar did not forsake his family, people and land for some insane dream of personal glory. Quite the opposite. He went to battle against a mighty Turkish host secure in the knowledge that whatever happens, win or lose, his sacrifice would seal a covenant between the Serbs and God, and thus preserve his people forever. And so it did.

No one can contest the fact that Kosovo was the first and last time a Turkish sultan was killed in battle. Or that it took another 70 years for the Turks to finally conquer the last of Serbia. Or that the Serbs continued to resist, revolt and raid the Turkish-held lands from borderlands claimed by Venice, Hungary and Austria, even as their ancient heartlands were depopulated, despoiled and delivered to Turks, their clients, or converts. Or that the Serbian Uprising of 1804 began a century of struggle that would eventually see all Balkans Christians freed, and the Turks almost driven out of Europe.  None of this would have happened without the gallantry of Lazar and his knights on that day in 1389.

Those who look upon that battle as a defeat are missing the point. They are seduced by the promise of "all the kingdoms of this world, and the glory of them" (Matthew, 4:8) - a promise Lazar rejected. Mindful of their covenant, most Serbs continue to reject that false promise even today. For though it comes from the mouths of Imperial ambassadors and commissars from Brussels, its source is still the same.

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

When I heard of the death of Marc Rich the other day, I shrugged it off. Just another Clinton crony, time catches up to us all, etc. But as Steve Sailer notes, Rich was one of the key players in the great Rape of Russia in the 1990s.

Between "business partners" like Rich and "reformers" like Jeffrey Sachs, the former Soviet Union was flayed to the bone, with billions in profits accruing to Western banks and in the hands of hand-picked oligarchs like Boris Berezovsky. In the mainstream Western press, this was (wrongly) referred to as "free market." Perhaps this explains why Americans can't recognize socialism even as it's punching them in the face.

Then came 1999, and NATO's bombing of then-Yugoslavia. It was a wake-up call for Russians: they realized they were being had, changed leadership, and purged the Yeltsin kleptocracy from power.

But just as few in early 1991 could have imagined the USSR disappearing, even fewer in 1999 envisioned a resurgent Russia and the crumbling American Imperium.

Perhaps there is a lesson here. Something about things not staying a certain way forever, especially if they are built on lies and deceit. I doubt the Riches and Clintons and Yeltsins of the world would pay it any heed - but the rest of us might.

A Game of Robes

Sometime last week, a letter by a Danish judge at the "International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia" (ICTY, aka the Hague Inquisition) was leaked to the media. In the letter, Frederik Harhoff complained about heavy-handed American influence at the Tribunal, and went on to suggest that American and Israeli (?!) officials were trying to influence certain trials so as to protect themselves from future prosecution.

That the ICTY has been little more than a tool of the Empire has been obvious for years. Harhoff's letter and wikileaked cables only confirm it. The Inquisition indicts, tries and convicts - or releases - only those the Empire has fingered. Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic were charged with war crimes when Washington wanted them cut out of the peace talks in 1995. Slobodan Milosevic was charged at the point when NATO's air war had stalled and needed a legitimacy boost. Proceedings against Vojislav Seselj have dragged on for a decade now, on spurious charges of "hate speech", because removing him from Serbian politics served the needs of Empire's puppet government.

And while the trials of any and all Serb officials sought to criminalize the Serbs' existence (let alone the cause and conduct of the war), the trial of Croatian generals released on appeal was a farce. Admittedly, not a very competent one - the Tribunal could have tried to legitimize both itself and the Croatian narrative of the war without playing fast and loose with the doctrine of "joint criminal enterprise" - but one gets the impression the ICTY is a sinecure for second-rate jurists in the same way the "peace missions" in Bosnia and occupied Kosovo have provided jobs for otherwise unemployable Eurocrats and Washington backbenchers. (Exceptions such as Prisca Nyambe of Zambia only prove the rule.)

Not surprisingly, it was Harhoff's conspiracy theory about the U.S. and Israel that attracted the most media attention. Few actually dare question the Imperial narrative of the Yugoslav Wars that the ICTY has helped establish. According to the Danish jurist, the acquittals of Croatian generals and Serbian security chiefs were supposed to weaken the doctrine of command responsibility, because it could land U.S. and Israeli leaders in hot water somewhere down the line.

Erm, no.

The conviction and release of the Croatian generals was a simple ICTY farce, one seen before in the case of Naser Oric and later Ramush Haradinaj. The indictment and conviction are supposed to create the impression the ICTY is a real, impartial, legitimate court of law - which is then followed by a release on appeal. Of actual law and justice, there is nary a trace.

Furthermore, as a fellow blogger pointed out, the ICTY has a habit of prosecuting only the alleged crimes against the designated victim groups. Hence, Serbs and (Bosnian) Croats get the (ICTY-written) book thrown at them for killing (Bosnian) Muslims, the few KLA are punished only for killing fellow Albanians, while no one ever gets punished for killing Serbs.

As for the recently acquitted Serbs, both Gen. Perisic and security chief Stanisic (and presumably his underling, Simatovic) actually worked for the CIA. Perisic had been an asset since 1997, and was caught red-handed in 2002; during his trial, Stanisic had confessed to working with the CIA since 1992. And since at this point Washington is convinced that Serbia has been conquered and irreversibly broken, releasing used-up assets instead of throwing them under the proverbial bus was probably judged to serve imperial purposes better.

What has any of this to do with American or Israeli officials covering their behinds? Nothing. Precisely. Neither the ICTY, nor its more permanent successor, the ICC, have any jurisdiction over Americans - the Empire has made sure it remains above the law, even as it uses it as a truncheon to break any resistance to its designs. The Imperial establishment not only doesn't fear prosecution, the thought of ever being taken to account for their deeds - abroad or at home - hardly ever crosses their minds. I've said as much in an interview for RT's Truth Seeker, airing tonight.

Israel similarly refused to submit to ICC jurisdiction - and moreover, has zero interaction with the ICTY.  So why did Harhoff mention it at all? Perhaps, as one Russian commentator noted (link in Serbian), because Harhoff's "leak" was a deliberate ploy in an internal Inquisition conflict: though in the past the leadership of the Tribunal rotated between America and the EU, the Empire now seeks to re-appoint Theodor Meron (American and Jewish) out of turn, in order to retain control. If this is true, it explains Harhoff's seemingly baffling conspiracy theory: dragging Israel into the mix is aimed at discrediting Meron personally. Sounds like something Littlefinger would do.

Aren't you glad that the Hague Inquisition is such an altruistic, professional, law-abiding and justice-seeking institution, completely devoid of the taint of politics?

Stella Jatras, RIP

Stella Jatras reposed in the Lord on Saturday, June 15.

For the past two decades, even as many Serbs stayed silent in the face of a bigoted campaign of lies and libel - or worse, joined in the persecution of their own, hoping to gain favor with the persecutors - Stella and her family took a courageous stand for truth and justice, never wavering, never losing faith.

Stella was quite literally a daughter of Sparta - and her father's name was Leonidas, no less. As Julia Gorin noted, she was Sparta, truly worthy of that heroic heritage. Axia!

Knowing her was a honor and privilege. With her passing, Serbs and Greeks lose a great advocate on Earth, but gain one in Heaven.

May the Lord give her peace, and her memory be eternal.

There They Go Again

Just two days ago, Leon Hadar wondered if Samantha Power's appointment to the UN meant war in Syria.

Sure enough, the Emperor announced today that the Empire would intervene in Syria, because the government had (allegedly) used chemical weapons against the rebels, thus crossing Washington's arbitrary "red line."

This presumably has nothing to do with the Assad government winning the war, or Obama being taunted by Bill Clinton. Or the IRS and NSA scandals. Nothing to see here, move along. Right?

According to the mainstream media, Washington is considering "arming the rebels" and establishing a "no-fly zone." Except there has already been a massive gunrunning effort, via Croatia and Jordan, earlier this year.

Furthermore, after Libya, the odds of the "no-fly zone" back door to intervention getting through the UN are zero. Can the Empire bypass the UN, the way it did 14 years ago, when it occupied Kosovo? The Washington establishment, trapped in perpetual 1999, may think so; but Syria has learned the lessons of Serbia (even if Serbia hasn't), and Russia - which has a naval presence in Syria and friendly relations with Damascus - is extremely unlikely to stand idly by.

Then there is the question of who exactly would intervene, and where from. The Empire's bases in Iraq are on the wrong side of a massive desert, and at the tail end of a vulnerable supply line. Turkey is a bit preoccupied with internal problems at the moment; its military is yet untried in open battle with a conventional enemy, while its top brass have been purged over the past decade for opposing Islamization.

That leaves what, Israel? Invading Syria on behalf of a jihadist insurgency? Really?

Washington is reusing the Balkans playbook again: atrocity porn, inflated death tolls, smuggling weapons, no-fly zones... expect claims of mass rape and genocide to follow soon. Not because those might actually be happening, but because they are needed to bolster the narrative of the Imperial White Knight riding to the rescue of "Syrian people" (i.e. the jihadist rebel clients of Washington).

Will Syria be the place where this outlandish narrative will run into the reality wall? We'll find out soon enough.

Twisted Projections of Conjured Present

Just as I warned back in January, the race to blame the Great War on the Evil-Serbs-and-Russians (properly pronounced in the same breath) is on.

Austrian view of the Serbs in 1914, now the Anglo-American mainstream

In the New York Times' Sunday Book Review, Reuters editor Harold Evans gave a glowing review to Christopher Clark's "The Sleepwalkers", which blames Serbia for "expansionism" and "terrorism," and Russia for "creating a narrative to justify taking up arms", by "shift[ing] the moral onus from the perpetrator to the victim." Naive France and gullible Britain got suckered in, and thus the Great War began.

This is, of course, patent nonsense. The French wanted a war of revenge for 1871, and this seemed as good an occasion as any. Britain chose to go to war, and while Sir Edward Grey couldn't imagine the actual horrors the war unleashed, his famous comment about the "lamps going out all over Europe" more than suggests he was aware something horrible was about to happen. Does that sound like being suckered in by the wicked, wily Russians to you?

Barbara Tuchman began her "Guns of August" with the parade of European royalty at the 1910 funeral of  Edward VII of England - "on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again."

Clark, on the other hand, opens his book with the 1903 May Coup, which Evans gleefully cites in gory detail:

"King Alexandar and Queen Draga, betrayed and defenseless, huddle in a tiny closet where the maid irons the queen’s clothes. They are butchered, riddled with bullets, stabbed with a bayonet, hacked with an ax and partially disemboweled, their ­faces mutilated beyond recognition and the bloody half-naked remnants tossed from the royal balcony onto the grounds."

Those horrible Serbs, murdering their defenseless king that way! Such savages! Let's set aside the inconvenient fact that the squeamish Brits were busy at the time setting up concentration camps for Boer civilians. Clark doesn't explain why the Obrenovic king was killed, as such hatefacts would interfere with his precious narrative. So the reader doesn't get to understand the heavy-handed absolutism of the Obrenovics, their servitude to Austria at the expense of their country and people, and the long string of abuses and humiliations heaped on both the ordinary Serbs and the military. His marriage to Draga Masin, a rich merchant's divorced daughter who went so far as to invent a pregnancy to appear likeable, was just the last straw. While I can't in good conscience approve of the method of their dispatch, they well deserved to be overthrown.

But Clark needs to show that Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevic "Apis" was an evil, murderous conspirator who deliberately started WW1 out of his Serb nefariousness, so the context of the May Coup, Austria's abusive relationship with Serbia, and just about everything relevant to the situation gets shoved aside.

He does, however, cite "historians of gender" to argue that all of the politicians involved were men, and had masculinity issues. Such depth of analysis! Lest he be considered insufficiently postmodern, Clark also deems Austria's ultimatum to Serbia - long considered a standard of shamelessness and bad faith - as “a great deal milder” than the 1999 NATO ultimatum to Serbia. Considering that Rambouillet was patterned after the Austrian ultimatum, and that its purpose was to make the war inevitable, I'd say Clark missed the point by such a wide margin here, he ended up shooting himself.

This is technically supposed to be a review of two books, Clark's and Sean McMeekin's "July 1914", but Evans spends most of his time on Clark. I get the impression McMeekin was brought along to make the case against Russia. He had previously written a book called “The Russian Origins of the First World War,” and Evans relies on him to make the claim that "Russia’s crime was first in escalating a local quarrel by encouraging Serbia to stand up to Austria-Hungary and then accelerating the rush to war."

So, if only Austria had been given a carte blanche by the rest of Europe - as it had by Germany - to curb-stomp the "terrorist, expansionist" Serbian savages, there would have been no WW1 - and perhaps Britain would still bestride the world. What a load of hummus.

I can understand the lament over world empire lost. I can understand the desire to blame the perennial Other - the Orthodox Slavs - for the myriad of sins of the Catholic and Protestant West. I even understand the twisted projection of conjured present - with Serbs as the arch-villains the white-knighting humanitarian West needs to defeat to save the Muslim damsel in distress and win her affections - to a traumatic event a century prior; in both cases, facts are discarded or suppressed when they interfere with the narrative.

But when the modern Anglo-American historians and politicians end up sounding like Kaiser Wilhelm - whom Clark cites at one point as saying, "Stop this nonsense! It was high time a clean sweep was made of the Serbs,” - then one can only conclude they represent a civilization that has deeply lost its way.

Truth, not Absolution

In this week's column over on Antiwar.com, I wrote of eerie similarities - too many to be coincidental - between the policies of the EU and the Atlantic Empire and those of the Third Reich. Specifically, I underlined the parallels between the dismemberment of Yugoslavia between 1941-45 and the one of 1991-95, as well as the hostility towards Russia.

via Wallpapers Online

Mind you, there is a distinction between arguing that the West today is implementing specific National-Socialist policies and simply calling them Nazis, which would be both facetious and inaccurate. To focus on labels and not the substance is a mark of postmodern who/whom-ism, which is not my thing.

One of the readers, however, made a comment I want to expand on here:

Guest, May 11:
"...The only thing that held Yugoslavia together for 35 years was its supreme leader, Marshal Josip Broz “Tito”...."
This, I think, is both a wrong conclusion and harmful to Mr. Malic's argument itself. It is a convenient myth in the West that Yugoslavia was a low hanging fruit, ready to be picked, after Tito's passing away. That is not so.
West has vested interest in promothing that falacy and thereby absolving itself of the horrendous crimes perpetrated on the people of Yugoslavia and of any responsibility for attacking and dismantling a sovereign state.
A handful people with an ax to grind (Tudjman, Izetbegovic, Jansha,) and other anti-Yugoslav elements were supported by the West and assisted in bringing about what is now where Yugoslavia once was.
I do not understand Mr.Malic gifting these criminals an absolution by repeating the myth created in the West, that Yugoslavia existed only because of Tito. Mr. Malic is a good analyst, but, for some unknown reason, naively promotes this myth.

Where to begin? Perhaps with this 2005 essay about Tito, which contains the same argument as I've laid out, albeit much condensed, in the column.

Pointing out facts about the Communist approach to Yugoslavia, the internal boundaries, ethnic engineering and the 1974 Constitution does not, and never shall, absolve the murderers of Yugoslavia, internal or external. Just as pointing out the problems of the first Yugoslavia doesn't validate the Axis invasion and dismemberment of it. Though the Communists certainly did just that, arguing that the "rotten" old Yugoslavia deserved to be destroyed and then reborn in a "revolution".

As I've noted in another essay, the Serbs have paid with millions of lives for believing the lie that those who identified as Croats and Muslims considered the Serbs their kin. Some have, and perhaps given enough time and peace, that could have become the belief of the majority. But time and peace were not to be had. The bitter truth is that becoming Catholic (in Austrian-held lands) or Muslim (in Turkish-held lands) meant escaping the life of oppression and contempt in which the Orthodox Serbs were held by both empires. These converts did not see the Serbs as their kin, but as their inferiors. And in some cases, officially sanctioned victims.

This was the problem with the first Yugoslavia, which King Aleksandar tried to fix by promoting the idea of "one nation, three faiths." After Aleksandar was assassinated in 1934, Regent Prince Pavle tried appeasing the Croats, a policy culminating in 1939 with the unprecedented creation of their own ethnic province (Aleksandar's provinces were geographical, named after rivers). Not two years later, Croat officers sabotaged Yugoslav Army units, Croat civilians greeted the Nazi tanks with flowers, and the Ustasha regime of Ante Pavelić found plenty of those willing to slaughter Serbs with knives, pickaxes, mallets and whatever else was handy.

To argue that Croat atrocities were somehow caused by "Serb oppression" is to ignore the rabid Serbophobia of the Croat identity as articulated by Starčević and Frank, and adopted by Radić and Pavelić. Or the fact that similar atrocities were perpetrated during WW1 in Serbia by the Austro-Hungarian occupation forces. Among them were many that would later welcome the "Independent State of Croatia," including a metalworker from Zagorje called Josip Broz.

Broz supposedly became a Communist during the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, survived the purges of the 1930s and became leader of the Yugoslav Communist Party (KPJ) in 1937. Almost a decade prior, at the 1928 congress in Dresden, the KPJ had decided that Yugoslavia needed to be destroyed, and that the "captive nations" such as Croats, Macedonians, Albanians and Slovenes needed to be "liberated" from "Greater Serbian tyranny."

During the war, the priority of Tito's partisans was establishing pro-Communist institutions, preparing for the inevitable Axis defeat. Their primary target was not the Germans, but the royalist resistance of General Mihailović, which tried to help the Allied war effort by sabotaging roads, railways, and communications and harassing German garrisons. Both sides were aware that they could not defeat the Germans alone; Tito waited for the Soviets, Mihailović waited for the British. In the end, the Soviets showed up, and the British sold out Mihailović.

Triumphant, Tito executed Mihailović, declared the monarchy abolished and the exiled king undesirable, and proceeded to reinvent Yugoslavia. The result was a compromise between the vision from 1928 and practicalities of the time. Why break up a country, when you can rule it as pharaoh? Under Tito, Slovenia exploited the rest of the country for raw materials, Croatia had the entire coastline, and Serbia was cut up into "autonomous provinces" and reduced to WW2 occupation borders (more or less). But the worst part was the imposed doctrine of moral equivalence, in which the royalists were just as evil as the Ustasha, or the Waffen-SS recruited from Muslim populations. Serb guilt for "Chetnik atrocities" (real and imagined) and "oppression" of others in the old kingdom was supposed to balance out the Croatian genocide of Serbs.

Still the Croats were not happy. Even Tito's Yugoslavia was too stifling for them. As Communists in Serbia  (e.g. the so-called "liberals" like the book-banning Latinka Perović, today the gray eminence of the most rabidly pro-Empire "liberal democrats") plumbed the depths of self-hatred, in Croatia they demanded more Croatian pride! Though Tito purged both party leaderships, he gave the Croats most of what they wanted: the 1974 Constitution empowered the republics at the expense of the federal government. Serbia, however, was paralyzed by the requirement that both provinces approve every single decision of the republic legislature, effectively giving the Albanian-dominated Kosovo and a pro-Croat establishment in Vojvodina veto power over Belgrade's affairs.

Such was the situation that Slobodan Milošević sought to repair in 1987-89, only to be accused of "nationalism" and "greater Serbian hegemonism" - both by the self-hating Communists in Serbia that he'd purged, and the leadership of Croatia and Slovenia, who felt their privileged position within Yugoslavia would be endangered. I am not sure Milošević ever understood that the second-rate status of Serbs in Tito's Yugoslavia was never a bug, but a very deliberate feature - he never spoke of it that way, and kept defending Yugoslavia till his dying day. But the party leaderships in other republics understood Tito's setup entirely too well.

This was no "handful of malcontents" as Guest implies in his commentary - Kučan received overwhelming support for his separatist policies in 1990. Tuđman's plan to separate Croatia and expel the Serbs was never challenged by the Croatian opposition. Albanians have laid claim to certain territories since at least 1878, long before there was ever a Yugoslavia, or Tito, or Milošević. Only in the case of Bosnia was there a handful of zealots that ended up running things.
Izetbegović, however, did manage to set himself up as the leader of Muslims - with American help, and the war played no small part in the process - and the parameters he set remain the framework of Bosnian Muslim politics even today, no matter which party nominally runs things.

If you read the mainstream Western propaganda about Yugoslavia's demise, you'll notice very quickly that it rejects the notion of internal conflict between Yugoslavia's inhabitants. Rather, it sings paeans to Yugoslavia's multiethnic diversity and peaceful cohabitation, disturbed only by the periodic eruptions of "Greater Serbian ultranationalism." So to save Yugoslavia, they had to destroy it:

"The consequences of this campaign are extraordinary. In view of the fact that a small set of conspirators in Belgrade again were able to foment trouble... the radical elimination of this danger means the removal of an element of tension for the whole of Europe."

Does this not sound like something an EU commissar or State Department errand boy would say? Was it written by Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Wesley Clark, Richard Holbrooke, Madeleine Albright, or any of the "judges" or prosecutors at the ICTY? Though it could have come from any of them, the quote in question is actually from Adolf Hitler's address to the Reichstag, on May 4, 1941, following the conquest of Yugoslavia and Greece.

Again, pointing out Yugoslavia's flawed premises doesn't absolve those who destroyed it, be that the West in the 1990s, or Hitler fifty years prior. It does, however, explode the premise that Yugoslavia was some sort of "Greater Serbian" project, or that those who destroyed it from within not once but twice were somehow oppressed or terrorized.

Once the Serbs themselves realize this, as well as the disturbing fact that Hitler and the Atlantic Empire apparently share the same view of them, they may rebel against the doctrine of "Serb guilt" and end the policy of capitulation to Imperial demands. Which probably explains why these issues remain a taboo topic, even today.

Exaggerated Rumors of Demise

I'm trying to decide whether one of the commentators on my recent Antiwar.com column is a troll, a "Kosovian" trying to reframe the issue, or a self-defeating Serb. See for yourselves; "Brian" says:

"The Serbian government is not quisling. Serbs are quisling. Serbs have become as an ethnic groups quislings. Forget "Serbs" they "quislings" Where are the protests in Belgrade? Few people can protest more than Serbs!! Where are any 1996 or 2000 protest size rallies!! Serbs are quislings. Serbs now all say Kosova and say Kosova is an independent nation- if they live in Serbia!! It's true about the diaspora being more opposed to kosova independence than serbs that livein Serbia. This is why the government can be so quisling. Because serbs in Serbia are just so tired and exhausted there is now no patriotism. Forget nationalist. Patriotism is dead in Serbia. It is now a quisling nation and that is the new ethnicity.
[...]
serbs want to be popular. They want to have money. They don't want to be thought of as caring about kosova land over money. EU is symbolic of being popular and liked.
[...]
No there are not Serbs anymore! The Russian ambassador was going down the right road. Serbs have been replaced by quislings. Forget "Serbs" existing."

Though using "Kosova" (only Albanians and their sponsors call it that), and incessantly repeating propaganda tropes point to an Albanian partisan, the argument that "Serbs are just so tired and exhausted" to go on existing actually sounds like the incoherent drivel of the Quisling Cult, the self-hating Serbs who wish to be something else. Not surprisingly, the Cult are vocal supporters of Thacistan.

So, is "Brian" right? Are the Serbs finished, their cause lost? Hardly. Because if that truly were the case, would he (but also the "Kosovian", cultist, and Imperial media) be trying so hard to make it sound so? The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

Unlike "Brian," I am not about to make blanket statements about what all Serbs think or feel. Having observed the place for over a decade, however, I can make a case for three major groups of them.

The Quisling Cult
The government, most political parties, banks and finance, and the media are run by what I call the "Quisling Cult," whose adherents range from opportunistic to True Believers. Whether they are motivated by virulent self-hatred (nurtured by the Communists, and the Hapsburgs before them) or simply money and power, they seek to ape the Empire and the EU, whom they see as their betters, in hopes of joining them.

In the past, pressure to join with invaders and "rise up" from the tormented crowd produced converts that went on to became Croats, Albanians, or "Bosniaks". The Cult is merely an extension of this phenomenon.

Due to the uncanny resemblance with the cargo cults of New Guinea, the "Quisling Cult" seemed like a logical name. This group is not very numerous. It is, however, both loud and in charge. If this sounds familiar, bear in mind it was copied from a template, after all.

The Confused Patriots
Those opposed to Serbia's occupation and ongoing degradation are more numerous than the Cult, but lack cohesion. They know what they don't want - giving up Kosovo, being forced into the EU - but aren't entirely sure what they do want, or how to go about fighting for it. "Calculated neutrality" isn't exactly an idea people would be willing to kill or die for. Even if they managed to formulate a message, they would still be barred from the media - but that's a far smaller problem, and easier to solve when they get to it.

The Serb identity was first thrown into confusion almost a century ago with the creation of "brotherly" Yugoslavia, then systematically suppressed, undermined, falsified and obliterated by the Communist Yugoslavia, leaving it open as to what exactly it means to be a Serb these days - the situation the Cult and the Empire have exploited, while the patriots seem more unable than unwilling to address.

Serbian politics over the past two decades have been characterized by betrayal that makes "Game of Thrones" an exercise in trust. Anyone even remotely on the side of the patriots has been overthrown, murdered, co-opted or suborned, until the Cult dominated almost all politics. The die-hard remnant is fractious. They remind me a lot of the Whites after the Bolshevik revolution- with the Tsar gone, they have no common cause, and hatred of the Reds just isn't enough. About the only issue uniting them is Kosovo, but even then they have no strategic vision as to how to fight for it. So they fight tactically, on issues such as the "gay pride parade" or GMO. That, I think, goes a long way to explain their failure to thwart the Quisling Cult.

The Sedated Majority
And then there is the vast majority, desperate for leadership and not finding any. These are the people numbed by Communism, shocked by its collapse, still in a fog as to why and how Yugoslavia's demise happened, and hurt by a decade of UN blockade, NATO bombs and the kleptocracy that followed. They try to live their lives the best they can, in a system designed around robbing them blind.

Some of them, mainly the younger generation, are nihilists, seeking only pleasures of the flesh - they tend to be sympathizers of the Quisling Cult but too lazy to actually join it. Others still follow traditional values, but more out of inertia than any actual awareness of principles behind them. To win, the patriots need to energize and inspire this group, while the Cult only needs to keep them in a passive, lotus-eating funk. This is accomplished through a diet of tabloid newspapers and trash TV: "reality" shows like "Big Brother", soaps, celebrity and other scandals, and mendacious "news."

This is where the Serbs' fabled resilience has been turned against them, as they tolerate government abuses out of fear (constantly reinforced by the media) of war, starvation, even worse poverty and international isolation, but also out of faint hope (again, reinforced by the media) of "living like everyone else" once they enter the Promised Land of the EU. They don't realize they already live like many EU subjects - e.g. Romanians, Bulgarians, Greeks, Cypriots, Spaniards, the Irish...

The polls cited in the media to show alleged Serb support for the EU, or "Kosovian" independence, or anything else, are misleading. At best, they are inaccurate - at worst, deliberately so. Pollsters are paid to provide the desired statistics, so they do. And even if the majority clearly opposed the Cult policies, the Cult would do it anyway. Remember, they hate the people they administer (on behalf of the Empire), and consider them lesser beings.

Lack of massive street protests does not imply consent to government policies. Marching in the streets rarely works, and only if the government is susceptible to popular pressure. The Cult isn't - its power base is not in Serbia, but in Brussels and Washington. If anything, they have been adept at diverting the street to their own ends, from the coup in 2000 to the Kosovo protest in 2008. Last, but not least, when demonstrations do take place - such as the rally in Kosovska Mitrovica, for example - they get downplayed in the media, both foreign and Cult-dominated domestic. When Reuters says "more than 5,000" that's technically true - 30,000 is more than 5,000 - but is rather deliberately missing the point.

Now, believing that Serbia's patriots will get their act together sufficiently to derail the Cult, set their country free and figure out a way of curing the century-long corruption in their midst may sound like wishful thinking at this point in time. But then, I'm sure the Janissaries lording over the Belgrade Pashalik in 1804 didn't really believe their rule was at a risk of ending. Nor did the court in Vienna believe invading Serbia in 1914 could result in a disaster. 

If the Empire and the Cult think their story has a happy ending... they haven't been paying attention.

Treason

After a ten-round circus in Brussels, on April 19 the quisling regime administering Serbia on behalf of the Empire said it was ready to declare Serbia's rape consensual.

To hear them say it, they did this to "save" the Serbs who remain in the occupied territories (recognized by the Empire as the "Republic of Kosovo") from another pogrom. This is cynicism at its worst, because the "deal" turns those very Serbs over to the tender mercies of the Albanians and NATO - the very parties responsible for the peril of pogrom to begin with.

NATO is supposed to "protect" the Serbs, much as it has "protected" their brethren living in the ghettos elsewhere in the occupied province. Much as it has "protected" them during the actual 2004 pogrom. No, the tanks and bullets of the barricades showdown are more likely to be the NATO response.

Treaties with the Empire aren't worth the paper they are printed on. Whatever "guarantees", safeguards and privileges this "agreement" offers the Serbs on paper will vanish with the first KLA boot on the ground, or the first NATO tank. Just as it happened in 1999, and has been happening ever since.

In recognizing the statehood of "Kosovia," submitting to the EU and Imperial demands, selling out its citizens - both in the occupied territories and the rest of Serbia - the quisling government in Belgrade has trampled the Serbian constitution, and committed high treason.

Whatever legitimacy it could claim to have, it has now lost. Entirely.

As of April 19, 2013, the President and government of Serbia stepped outside the law. On Friday, April 26, the parliament of Serbia did the same.

Make of that what you will.

From Beslan to Boston

Some of my readers may remember an essay from several years ago in which I explained why I refuse to be called a journalist. Seeing the coverage of the Boston Marathon massacre only fortified me in that conviction. I hope the mainstream media that fingered the wrong suspects, even going so far as to publish their names and photos, enjoys the libel suits they so richly deserve.

There were even some who hoped (!) the suspect would be "a white American", because that would better serve their political agenda. The irony of their wish-fulfillment, after a fashion, is why I believe the universe isn't random: the suspected terrorists really were "white Americans", though only in the most technical sense. The brothers Tsarnaev came to the U.S. from Chechnya.

For those who can't tell Chechnya apart from the Czech Republic, the latter is a mostly Catholic country in central Europe, while the former is a region of Russia in the north Caucasus. A tribal society with a tradition of mountain banditry, the Chechens launched a war of independence against Yeltsin's Russia in 1991. They successfully defeated the crumbling Soviet army and established an "Islamic Republic of Ichkeria", proceeding to engage in abductions for ransom, sex slavery, drug running and terrorism. In this, they had the support of a veritable who's who of Imperial policymakers.

Following NATO's 1999 attack on Serbia, however, the mood in Moscow changed. After the Chechens tried invading the neighboring region of Dagestan, Russian troops crushed the rebellion. The jihad, however, continued.

And that's the problem. What happened in Boston was horrifying, absolutely. But it's been happening to Russians for years, and there has been not a shred of sympathy from the American political class, the media, or the (admittedly ignorant) general public. To mention just a few examples:

- October 2002, Chechen terrorists hold hostage a Moscow theater, during a popular stage play. 130 hostages die during the rescue.

- September 2004, Chechen terrorists seize and hold hostage 1100 children, teachers and parents in an elementary school in Beslan, North Ossetia. After two days of horror, most of the terrorists are killed in a rescue, but not before murdering 334 civilians, 156 of them children.

- January 2011, a jihadist belonging to the Chechen terrorist movement blows himself up at Moscow's busy Domodedovo airport, killing 37 and injuring 173.

Yet all that came from Washington were condemnations of Moscow's "human rights violations" in the Caucasus. Terrorists? Surely you jest: terrorists are only those who attack Americans.

As I commented on Ilana Mercer's blog, the Chechen identity of the bombing suspects threatens to mess with the Narrative of evil Russians (or Serbs) oppressing the good, innocent Chechens, "Bosnians" or "Kosovars." In that Narrative, Islam is a "religion of peace", and if America continues to champion Islamic causes, Muslims will be grateful and embrace democracy. Or not.

To this end, terrorism perpetrated by the "designated victims" is habitually swept under the rug. Bosnian Muslim Sulejman Talovic shoots up a Salt Lake City mall and is given a jihadist funeral, but the official investigation declares "motive unknown." Albanian Arid Uka attacks a bus of U.S. soldiers at the Frankfurt airport? Albanians "love America", the mainstream media declare. Move along, nothing to see here. A Bosnian Muslim jihadist attacks the U.S. embassy in downtown Sarajevo, and the senior State Department official brushes it off. Right on cue, I hear this morning (h/t Steve Sailer) that the New York Times ran a story pitying the poor Chechens.

Terrorism cannot be defeated. But terrorists can. The first step towards doing so is to stop enabling them, supporting them, cultivating them as a weapon against enemies real or imagined, and harboring the delusion that they can be controlled.

Tall order, I know.

"Human rights and American values"

"[The] United States of America and the Kosovo Liberation Army stand for the same human values and principles ... Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values." (Senator Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn, quoted in the Washington Post, April 28, 1999)

Kosovska Mitrovica, March 2004

Almost fourteen years ago, the United States (via NATO) launched a war of aggression in support of the KLA, which resulted in the occupation of the Serbian province of Kosovo-Metohija. Some 40,000 NATO "peacekeepers" stood by while more than 200,000 non-Albanians were burned out of their homes, and the NATO cheerleader media dismissed the atrocities as "revenge attacks".

On March 17, 2004, some 50,000 Albanians rampaged through the occupied province, terrorizing Serbs, burning their villages, destroying their churches and cemeteries, even killing their livestock. It was a classical pogrom, described by one UN official as a "Kristallnacht," and by one American officer as "ethnic cleansing."

"Death to Serbs" they spray-painted on the charred ruins:


and gloried in desecrating them:


Not a single perpetrator of any of these acts was ever held accountable. Instead, the United States and its allies, calling themselves the "international community," rewarded the pogrom by establishing the "Republic of Kosovo."

You want to know what "The West" stands for? This is it.

Invictus

The morning of March 11, 2006, Slobodan Milošević, former president of Serbia and Yugoslavia, was found dead in his cell at the Scheveningen detention facility near The Hague.  It was the second death in Scheveningen in a week; on March 5, Milan Babić, once a leader of the Serbs in what is today Croatia, had allegedly committed suicide while waiting to testify in another trial. Babić had plea-bargained with the ICTY, the Hague Inquisition, and received a sentence of “only” 13 years.

Slobodan Milošević (1941-2006)

In the West, Milošević was blamed for everything that had happened in the Balkans over the prior 15 years; not only has it been politically correct to hate him, but dangerous for one’s political credentials not to. News of his death prompted an outpouring of vitriol in the mainstream media, a race to see who could malign the man more. In producing this stream of abuse, they were guided by the assumption that all the charges against Milošević had been proven, if not in the court of law, then in the “court of public opinion” – in which they, of course, had been the judge, jury, and executioner.

Malicious Myths

One representative example is this editorial from the Washington Post:

“Ethnic and sectarian rivalry was real in a cobbled-together state, but few people expected, much less wanted, a civil war. Mr. Milosevic, a Communist Party apparatchik in Serbia, deliberately and methodically nursed this latent tension from a flicker to a conflagration and used it to consolidate a criminal regime in Belgrade. He bombarded Serbs with lies and hateful demagoguery about their supposed victimization at the hands of Croats, Bosnian Muslims, and Kosovo Albanians, and he convinced them that the only solution was a Greater Serbia created through war and ethnic cleansing. …

“More than is generally recognized, at least in his own country, he was personally responsible for the most destructive conflict, and most terrible atrocities, recorded in Europe since World War II. There were other protagonists and other criminals, some of them Croatian, Bosnian, and Albanian. But without Mr. Milosevic the Yugoslav wars wouldn’t have happened.”

Just about everything here is wrong. Worse yet, it accuses Milošević of things his enemies were doing. For one thing, he never called for war. His 1989 speech in Kosovo, often said to be a call for conflict, actually called for coexistence. That is why it is never actually quoted, only paraphrased, and wrongly.

By describing the very real atrocities of Croats, Muslims, and Albanians allied with Hitler as the fruit of Milošević's malicious imagination, the Post simply engaged in Holocaust denial. The claim that Milošević desired and pursued a “Greater Serbia” was likewise pure propaganda. As for his “personal responsibility”… well, the Hague Inquisition had spent years trying to prove it, with thousands of investigators, paid experts, and Imperial troops at its call, and managed to produce… nothing.

The House of Cards

Milošević rose to power in the late 1980s against the crumbling backdrop of the post-Tito Yugoslavia. The original Yugoslav kingdom, established in 1918, was destroyed by a 1941 Nazi invasion. Parts of it were annexed by Axis powers, a territory designated “Serbia” was occupied by the Germans, while an “Independent State of Croatia” run by a fascist Ustasha regime encompassed present-day Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. While the Serb-led royalist resistance (Chetniks) fought the Axis occupation, the Communist resistance (Partisans) saw the war as an opportunity for revolution. Having secured Allied support, the Communist leader Tito took over the country in 1945, banned the monarchy, and re-forged Yugoslavia as a Communist federation.

Tito's velvet dictatorship provided a high standard of living through foreign debt, and his diplomacy balanced Yugoslavia between the Soviet bloc and the West. Instead of promoting a Yugoslav identity, however, Tito exploited ethnic rivalries to secure his power. Expressions of ethnic identity were allowed only if they served the Party agenda. The horrific atrocities of WW2 were selectively suppressed or trumped up, in an effort to establish moral equivalence between all non-Communist factions, to the point of equating the Serb royalists with the murderous Ustasha.

In 1974, the ailing Tito signed off on a new Constitution transferring more power to the republics and  making Yugoslavia a de facto confederacy. So great was his personal power, though, that after his death in 1980, the Party was unable to choose a successor. For the next decade, Yugoslavia would be ruled by committee - and it showed. Decades of mismanagement, debt, and corruption came to a head in the 1980s, with all Yugoslavs becoming increasingly frustrated. Serbia in particular suffered from a peculiar arrangement under which its two provinces, Vojvodina and Kosovo - the only such entities in Yugoslavia - had veto power over Serbian laws. Adding to the troubles was an Albanian rebellion in Kosovo, which began in 1981, and by 1987 required the deployment of federal riot police.

Heretic

His given name, Slobodan, means “a free man”. His surname, Milošević, is derived from an ancestor named Miloš, most likely after the knight who killed the Turkish sultan Murat at the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, forever remembered in song. Yet for most of his life Milošević had been an ordinary apparatchik, a banker who spent time in the United States and dutifully followed Serbia's Communist leader Ivan Stambolić. Then, in 1987, Stambolić sent him to Kosovo, to calm down the agitated Serbs protesting Albanian repression. When the overwhelmingly Albanian police started clubbing the Serbs gathered to air their grievances, Milošević bellowed, “No one is allowed to beat you!”

Disgusted by the cowardice and ineptitude of the Serbian Communist leadership, Milošević went back to Belgrade and began cleaning house. By the end of 1987, most of the old guard had been purged, including his former patron Stambolić. The following year, Milošević  launched a program of reforms, purging the provincial leaderships as well and amending Serbia's constitution to bring it in line with other Yugoslav republics. He became a hero to millions of Serbs, repressed for decades through politics of guilt.

Milošević's reforms alarmed the leadership of other republics, which benefited from Yugoslavia's schizophrenic setup. It was the purged Communists, however, who led the attacks on him. To them, he was a dangerous heretic for daring to challenge Tito's dogma of “Serbian bourgeois nationalism” as the greatest threat to Yugoslavia. Reinventing themselves as democrats, they began demonizing Milošević as someone who “abolished autonomy” of the provinces, and even accused him of harboring a desire for “Greater Serbia”- an Austro-Hungarian canard conjured prior to 1914 to justify Vienna's planned war of conquest. This invective fell on receptive ears in the rest of Yugoslavia, as the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany created a historical opportunity to revise the outcome of WW2.

Yugoslavia's End

Official History paints the dismemberment of Yugoslavia as a response of Slovenians, Croats, “Bosnians ”(Muslims), Albanians and Macedonians to Milošević's “nationalism.” To believe this, however, one would have to deny actual history - from Communism, via both world wars, all the way back to the Ottoman conquest.

There is no question some Yugoslav republics profited much more than others from Tito's arrangement. Though the leader of Slovenia, for example, was a Communist official, he had no trouble reinventing himself as a democrat and denouncing “Serbian Communist oppression”, once he received German and Austrian support. Franjo Tuđman, elected president of Croatia in 1990, harbored sympathies for the Ustasha and engaged in open Holocaust denial. Alija Izetbegović, an unrepentant political Islamist who emerged as the leader of Muslims in Bosnia, had been jailed in the 1980s for a manifesto written in 1971 that called for “Islamic revolution” throughout the world. Albanians have claimed Kosovo and other lands since 1878, and sought their union with Albania proper ever since its founding in 1912. They allied with Germany and Austria for that purpose in WW1, and again in WW2.

To secure independence, the separatists all claimed to be victims of “aggression” by the Federal Army and/or Serbia. Slovenia had pioneered that approach in June 1991, when the Yugoslav Army sent lightly armed recruits to secure border crossings. When Tuđman'a government tried to assert control over Serb-inhabited territories, their residents rebelled, calling on the Yugoslav Army to protect the country's constitutional order. Tuđman's militia, armed from Germany, responded by attacking Army garrisons while claiming “aggression from Serbia”.

In April 1992, when Izetbegović's government declared independence and Bosnia slid into full-scale civil war, the claim of “Serbian aggression” was used once again, to the point of outright falsifying the history of WW2 and the Holocaust. But the greatest absurdity was NATO's claim, in March 1999, that Milošević was the “aggressor” in Kosovo, when NATO itself had launched a textbook case of aggression against Serbia.

Yet Milošević never disputed the right of Croats, Slovenes, Bosnian Muslims or Macedonians to leave Yugoslavia; he supported the right of two million Serbs living in Croatia and Bosnia (the “Transdrina Serbs”, for lack of a better term) to stay. Milošević was the driving force behind the creation of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in April 1992, a union of Serbia and Montenegro that implicitly recognized the secession of all other republics. The EU used the Soviet precedent to argue that Yugoslavia had ceased to exist; but while Yeltsin's Russia was recognized as the legal heir of the USSR, the FR Yugoslavia was denied that right.

Milošević wanted to negotiate Yugoslavia's future, and even invited the European Community to mediate - to the Serbs' detriment, as it turned out. Tuđman (“There would not have been a war had Croatia not wanted it.” ) and Izetbegović (“For a sovereign Bosnia, I would sacrifice peace.”) chose otherwise.

It wasn't Milošević who “started four wars”, but his enemies, backed by the West.

Peacemaker

Throughout the 1991-95 conflict, the West acted as if Milošević were the true power behind the Transdrina Serbs. From April 1992 to 1996, Serbia was under a crippling UN blockade, imposed as punishment for the massacre of a breadline in Sarajevo, blamed on the Bosnian Serbs. Milošević got no credit from the West when he set up a blockade on the Drina in 1994, after the Bosnian Serb leadership refused an unfavorable peace; nor for standing by while U.S.-backed Croatian forces ethnically cleansed hundreds of thousands of Serbs from zones officially under UN protection.

At that point, however, he must have realized that the policy of protecting Serbia by not becoming officially involved in Bosnia and Croatia not only hadn't worked, but came close to jeopardizing the very survival of the Transdrina Serbs. For four years they had kept the numerically superior Muslim and Croat forces at bay, but now NATO had stepped in with a bombing campaign (“Operation Deliberate Force”) backing the combined Croat-Muslim offensive.

Washington also had the (U.S.-sponsored) ICTY accuse the Bosnian Serb leaders of war crimes, deliberately making it so Milošević was the only politician who could go to the Dayton peace conference and represent Serb interests. Those who hatched this plan later probably wished they hadn't.

Dayton was not a typical peace conference, but rather one where the U.S. “mediators” represented Croat and Muslim interests - often getting frustrated by Muslim and Croat delegations, in fact - in talks with Milošević. In his memoirs, U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke proudly described how he tried to cheat Milošević in Dayton, and only regretted getting caught. Yet Milošević managed to secure a good deal for at least some Transdrina Serbs, which endures to this day in spite of efforts by the U.S. and the Bosnian Muslims to dismantle the Dayton order. Holbrooke himself credited Milošević with saving the talks, after Izetbegović almost wrecked them. Milošević's claim to the mantle of “Balkans peacemaker” may sound pretentious, but it was actually earned.

Three years later, however, it was the very same Holbrooke spearheading Washington’s effort to force Milošević into a war over Kosovo, where the terrorist “Kosovo Liberation Army” was fighting for secession with Washington’s support.

Betrayed and Demonized

Holbrooke later claimed Milošević had broken every deal he’d signed. That is a lie. It was Holbrooke’s employer who has done so, from Dayton to Kumanovo. Washington was responsible for the 1999 Rambouillet “agreement” – a travesty of diplomacy not seen since the 1914 Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to Belgrade. The Empire accused Milošević of starting the 1999 war over Kosovo by “negotiating in bad faith,” but it is hard to imagine diplomacy in worse faith than the “peace effort” in Rambouillet, the frame job in Račak, and the subsequent naked aggression disguised as “humanitarian intervention.”

In May 1999, Milošević was charged with war crimes by the ICTY, a move that “coincided” with the crisis of morale in NATO headquarters, as Serbia refused to surrender and images of NATO’s civilian victims became increasingly available to the Western public. NATO's media cheerleaders used the indictment to further demonize Milošević, routinely comparing him to Hitler and the Serbs in general to Nazis. He had become the Emmanuel Goldstein of the new world order, bellyfelt as evil.

Fall and Rise

Though NATO later claimed it that Milošević had capitulated in June 1999, this was not the case. Where Rambouillet would have allowed a purely NATO occupation of Kosovo and guaranteed separation within three years - not to mention the Annex B, giving NATO free reign in Serbia itself - the armistice signed at Kumanovo put NATO on a UN leash, kept it out of the rest of Serbia, and retained sovereignty over Kosovo on paper. Though NATO violated it almost right away, the very fact that there was an armistice after 78 days, instead of a surrender after a week as envisioned in Washington, was a victory. Moreover, damage to the Yugoslav military from the bombing was minimal.

Having failed to oust Milošević by force, the Empire changed tactics. Washington bought the government of Montenegro, and set it on course for separation. In Serbia, the NED cobbled together, trained and funded a coalition of opposition parties. Milošević tried to warn the public about what was coming, but his warning fell on deaf ears. The propaganda had taken its toll. On October 5, 2000, the mob organized by the “Democratic Opposition of Serbia” sacked the federal parliament, stormed the state TV and claimed election fraud. Ballots documenting the alleged DOS victory conveniently perished in the fires set by protesters. This would later become a pattern for “color revolutions” elsewhere.

Unwilling to plunge the country into civil war, Milošević stepped down as president of Yugoslavia. The DOS soon established a new government, under the leadership of Zoran Đinđić. In April 2001, Đinđić had Milošević arrested; in June, he broke half a dozen Serbian and Yugoslav laws and handed Milošević over to the ICTY.

At The Hague, however, there was no trace of the once-accommodating, compromising Milošević. That man had probably perished in 1999, with the first NATO bombs. Instead, the inquisitors faced a proud and defiant man, who threw the accusations back into their faces and insisted not only on his innocence, but on the illegitimacy of the ICTY and the culpability of NATO and Washington for the bloodshed in Yugoslavia. The prosecutors took over two years to present their “kitchen sink” indictment, charging him for war crimes in Croatia and Kosovo and genocide (!) in Bosnia. Milošević systematically demolished their witnesses in cross-examinations and successfully challenged their “evidence,” despite the hostility of the judges, who would often cut him off. In September 2004, Milošević began his defense, after defeating the efforts of the “tribunal” to impose counsel on him without consent.

But the trial had taken a toll on his health, and he would complain of high blood pressure, headaches, and heart problems. Prosecutors and the media derisively claimed he was “faking it.” In February 2006, the “Tribunal” refused his request for medical treatment at a Russian hospital, despite Moscow’s guarantees that he would return. Three days after he wrote to the Russian government, claiming he was being poisoned, Milošević was found dead in his cell.

A Free Man

Although the Western media had already declared him Hitler Reborn, Slobodan Milošević was never convicted of any crime, in any court, even the kangaroo “tribunal” in The Hague. His show trial was officially adjourned on Mach 14, 2006, without reaching a verdict.

At the time of his death, Milošević was a prisoner. Unlike the quisling regime installed in his country, however, he refused to accept his captivity and fought against it any way he could. Rather than save his body by denouncing the country and people that turned on him, he saved his soul by defending them. Whatever one may think of the way he lived or governed, in his final four years he stood alone against the Empire, embodied in the Inquisition: an overwhelming force seeking to dominate all of humanity, willing and able to twist history, facts, and logic into a sinister fiction. Milošević did not have to resist it; he chose to. For years, the greatest coercive force in the world tried to break him, and failed.

He died true to his name.