Poor Little Nazis

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

WW2 Ustasha poster

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

Let's learn some history, then.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh wait.

Blogiversary

Take my love.
Take my land.
Take me where I cannot stand.
I don't care,
I'm still free.
You can't take the sky from me.
(Ballad of Serenity)

The first post on this blog (then called "Black Lamb & Gray Falcon") appeared on November 18, 2004. Has it really been that long? Time flies, when you're having fun.

I've blogged at Antiwar.com prior to that, and have been writing for a lot longer - since 1999, to be precise - but always as a guest. Falcon was the first Web location truly my own.

By my count, there have been 520 posts here prior to this one. Back in 2004, I could give my full attention to columns (then still called "Balkan Express", now "Moments of Transition"). Things that didn't fit there, found a home here. Then in March 2005, I launched Falcon's Serbian sibling, which has flown higher and farther yet.

Designs, templates, links and fonts have changed, but the substance has remained consistent. More than the posting schedule, anyway. I won't apologize for it, though: throughout, my guiding notion has been that an essay has to be done right, or not at all. Even if quantity has a quality all its own.

It has been an amazing journey. The blog has made a difference right from the start and continues to attract both fans and haters, legitimate comments as well as trolls. And that's the thing: before the internet, the legacy media were the only game in town. Today, everyone has a soapbox. Sure, this includes the trolls, the sock-puppets and the mainstream propaganda machine - but at least they are now on equal footing with the rest of us. I'll take that over the old order, any day.

In the coming days, I may clean up some tags, sort the links, and tweak the template a bit. Those are all details, though. What matters most are the articles. And they will keep coming, because that's always been Falcon's mission.

Keep flying.

The Real Extremists

On November 3, local elections, called under the so-called laws of the so-called "Republic of Kosovo", were held in this occupied Serbian province. In the four counties in the north, inhabited and defended by Serbs who refuse to submit to the NATO-backed Albanian regime, the vote failed: less than 4% of people showed up, in spite of overwhelming propaganda from the treacherous Belgrade government.

The Empire's solution was appropriately Orwellian: they will vote again (and again), till they get it "right" - i.e. submit to "Kosovian" authorities. As the repeat vote - scheduled for November 17 - looms, I've taken the liberty of translating some thoughts by Aleksandar Pavic, published Wednesday by the Strategic Culture Foundation. As Imperial and quisling media dominate English-language coverage coming out of Serbia, I think this would be a valuable reminder to Balkans-watchers of what reality looks like.

- Gray Falcon

"This country is too small for traitors such as us"
posters mocking the Serbian Regressive Party, Nis, Serbia, 2013

The Real Extremists
by Aleksandar Pavic

We await - and may wait indefinitely - for someone from the most progressive circles of the most progressive Euro-Atlantic civilization to condemn the outright racist threats directed at the Serbs in North Mitrovica recently by the most progressive Euro-Atlanticists in Belgrade. As the repeat "elections" loom at three precincts in that city, the message from Belgrade is: vote, or get an Albanian mayor!

Where is the European Union? Where is the European Commission? OSCE? UNHCR? EULEX? Independent observers? The Commissioner for Protection of Equality? Where are the Liberal Democrats, the Other Serbia, the Center for Cultural Decontamination? Where is Boris Tadic, the new global defender of multiculturalism? Where the hell is the American Ambassador? Does their silence mean approval of this racist message from the government of Serbia, namely PM Dacic and Commissioner Vulin? If they truly want a "multiethnic Kosovo" as they say, why would the possibility of an Albanian mayor in a Serb community be objectionable?

By the way, you won't hear such shameful, extremist intimidation from those advocating the boycott. The only thing that truly appalls them is the thought that anyone in Kosovo and Metohia - but especially in the North - could get elected on the basis of "Kosovian" laws. Because, unlike their "progressive" EUropean fellows, they truly believe in the rule of law, and are prepared to fight for it.

I am willing to wager that the boycott crowd has nothing against an ethnic Albanian being elected mayor of North Mitrovica - so long as the election is conducted under Serbian law. Of course, in that case the Serbs of the North would turn out in great numbers. Still, in principle they have nothing against the notion of a loyal Albanian holding the office of mayor. Such a person would bother them far less than one of Thaci's "Serbs."

Generally, boycott advocates - who oppose Kosovo's separation from Serbia - have shown a far greater commitment to multiethnic coexistence than their "urbane" opponents. Note that those who preach "letting go of the Kosovo ballast" most often imply that the "amputation" of Kosovo is necessary in order to avoid being "swamped by two million Albanians" allegedly living in the province (In truth, there are far fewer - but that's a topic for another day). On the other hand, the alleged "nationalists" have zero objections to living alongside Albanians - on one condition: that this be within the framework of Serbia, the most ethnically diverse country in this region of Europe, rather than in a quasi-state led by former and current drug-runners and merchants of human flesh.

So, who are the real extremists, and the truly intolerant? Those who exchange handshakes with faces on wanted posters, or those who refuse to be governed by them? Isn't all this a bit upside-down? The newest government line that the Serbs of the North "would be solely responsible" if an Albanian is set over them is a monstrous projection. Rather, the responsibility would rest squarely on the present government of Serbia. Because it accepted an "election" held under the so-called "Kosovian" laws. Because it refuses to call an election under its own laws. Because it signed an agreement in Brussels that recognizes "Kosovian" writ in the entire territory of the occupied province.

Is a government anywhere else in the world voluntarily giving up a number of its citizens, and forcing those citizens with everything at its disposal - including the threat of military intervention - into the hands of the enemy? And then trying to wash its hands, like Pilate, of the whole thing and blaming those who just want to stay in their own country, and have the same rights as everyone else?

By the same token, is there a media more shameless than the media in Serbia? Is there a press anywhere that absolutely refuses the opportunity to speak to any defender of the Constitution and the laws of the land? Where else is there a pack of journalists so willing to ignore the elephant named "Constitution" in the room, eager to whitewash the government of any blame, and organize witch-hunts against anyone daring to defend the legal order?

At the top of the dung heap is the daily Kurir, engaging in systematic demonization of Dr. Marko Jaksic. Their libels seem calculated to strip him of all humanity, turning him into the modern Goldstein, fair game in the Wild West called "Kosovo." Just the other day (November 12, 2013, page 2-3), Kurir accused Jaksic - the same man who speaks out daily of the need to comply with the Constitution, the laws and the UNSCR 1244 - of "undermining the system"! This is accompanied by repeated accusations that Jaksic has "met with Thaci", that he owns valuable real estate in the country and abroad, and that his arrest is impending. All this is calculated to create a climate in which any violence against dr. Jaksic would be spun as acceptable to the general populace.

Only 3,8% of the Serbs in the North actually turned out at the "Kosovian" polls on November 3. So, if Thaci's followers - Serb or Albanian, it really doesn't matter - take over, or some misfortune befalls dr. Jaksic, the blame will not rest on the boycott advocates, or anyone else in the North, but rather squarely on the shoulders of the government in Serbia. The very men who once swore to defend Kosovo and Metohija are now trying to surrender and force their compatriots under the yoke of the Albanian mafia. The very people mounting a smear campaign against the man who made it possible to negotiate about North Mitrovica in the first place.

Last, but not least, it is worth mentioning the newest edition of "Odnako" (However), hosted by Russia's best-known and most popular political journalist, Mikhail Leontyev. Shown on November 12 on Channel 1 of the Russian public TV, it looked critically upon the so-called local elections in Kosovo, and the role of the Serbian government in them. Those in the government with eyes to see and ears to hear ought to at least try and see the messages coming from Moscow these days.

Yes, there were pompous proclamations of mutual appreciation surrounding the (unnecessarily complicated) start of construction on South Stream. However, there was also an interview with Marko Jaksic, with a clearly shown poster in the background of the two Progressive leaders and the caption: "This country is too small for traitors of our caliber". There were also images of the defaced government posters calling for participation in the "elections", as well as the "clean up the trash day" in North Mitrovica, where the people took down government propaganda material. Analysts agreed that by backing the separatist polls, Belgrade "recognized that Kosovo is not Serbia". Slavko Stevanovic was interviewed and introduced, without any hesitation, as the "Chairman of the recently constituted Assembly of the Autonomous Province of Kosovo-Metohija."

Of particular note is Leontyev's sign-off to his viewers:

"...it is too early to feel sympathy for Nikolic. However, God only knows how this will end. This is Serbia, after all, where his predecessor Djindjic was simply taken aside and shot. Well, goodbye!"

Trains to Nowhere

From AP:

They were seen as a shining example of Bosnia's rebirth from war: a fleet of high-speed trains built-to-order in the West. Eight years later, they haven't made a single ride.

The reason: They're just too fast for Bosnia's 60-year-old rails.

"It's as if you bought nine Ferraris and ... no roads to drive them on," said Samir Kadric, an official with the publicly-owned railway company that bought the trains.

Predictably, AP's Aida Cerkez prefers to insinuate the problem lies with Bosnia's division between the Serb ("dominated") Republic and the Muslim-Croat ("shared") Federation. And the article blames the "Bosnian-Croat railway company" (presumably Željeznice Herceg-Bosne, ŽHB) for the $90 million train flop.

Here's the thing, though: the train deal was supposedly made in 2005 (see "eight years later" above), but if Wikipedia is to be believed, ŽHB had merged with the Muslim-run BHŽ into the ŽFBH (i.e. Federation Railways) in 2001 - four years prior to the boondoggle.

I, for one, don't believe for a second that this was a product of simple stupidity. Remember, "Bosnia’s politicians have taken rent-seeking to the level of a dark art, systematically siphoning profits from public utilities and corporations to line party and personal pockets." (from Reality Bites Back) Someone made out like a bandit on this "deal", and - judging by the know-nothing attitude of people interviewed by AP - with impunity.

Perhaps the fact that the railroad execs intend to recoup the money by leasing the trains to Turkey might give us a clue as to who.

A Textbook Tyranny

From today's column on Antiwar.com, illustrated by anecdata from the Balkans:

The political class has a vested interest in keeping problems alive, so they can pretend to be the only solution. There is but a small step from governments never letting a crisis go to waste to creating a perpetual crisis, seen as a perpetual opportunity to do “good”, line pockets, or both.

[Throughout history] government has been treated [by power-lusty individuals and groups] as a way to privatize the benefits of state power, while socializing the costs that came with it. All governments everywhere have faced this temptation, and most of them have succumbed.

If with great power comes great responsibility, but those in power can shift that responsibility elsewhere – onto the electorate, the unelected bureaucracy, or a capricious deity – the result will always be a government that is too powerful and utterly irresponsible: a textbook tyranny.

Such arrangements are indeed cozy for tyrants – while they last. But they never last very long.

The Great Despoilment

Thirteen years have passed since the "democratic revolution" of October 5 in Serbia. It became clear almost right away that there was nothing democratic, or revolutionary, about it. Rather, it was a coup on par with the 1953 overthrow of Mohammed Mosadegh in Iran - and with similar consequences for the country.

National Assembly on fire, October 5, 2000

I've written much over the years about the political consequences of the "peaceful occupation" by the devotees of Empire's quisling cargo cult: the mockery of laws and elections, destruction of the country's military capability, corruption of its politics and society, complete abdication of sovereignty and statehood, appeasement and empowerment of separatists, etc. But all that was accompanied by old-fashioned looting as well.

According to one study, in the years since the 2000 coup, as much as $51 billion has been siphoned out of Serbia into various offshore accounts. This figure does not include whatever the quislings and their followers have managed to rob and stash inside the country, so the real extent of Serbia's economic rape is actually greater. Even if the promised EU donations and pie-in-the-sky stories of Arab investment turn out to be true - and they won't - they are utterly insignificant in comparison to how much of Serbia's actual wealth has been looted by various "democratic reformers", "moderates" and "pragmatists."

They have systematically looted, corrupted, and defiled everything they've touched, ensuring that no civilized means of contesting their vile reign remained available. Their reckoning, when it comes, will be nasty, brutish and short.

The Endpoint of Moral Relativism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gazing at the Abyss

The real error was believing that jihad could be harnessed, controlled and directed to achieve a strategic purpose. That belief was wrong in 1978, it was wrong in 2001, it is wrong now, and it will be wrong tomorrow.

(9/11, 2011)

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.

(From Beslan to Boston, 2013)

Draw your own conclusions.

Al-Qaeda's Air Force

All the talk coming out of Washington about "red lines" and "credibility" and chemical weapons is just smoke and mirrors.

This is what it comes down to, distilled by Karl Denninger:

Al Qaida is a sworn enemy of the United States. The United States has ratified their statement of being our enemy through more than 10 years of continual declaration of a "state of emergency" citing the so-called "war on terror."

It is an act of Treason according to our Constitution to provide material aid and comfort to a sworn enemy of our nation.

A military strike at Assad's government IS ACTING AS AL QAIDA'S AIR FORCE.

That's all there is to it. No amount of Congressional, White House, Foggy Bottom or media lipstick can make this anything but a pig.

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.