Walking on the Dark Side

Perhaps it was a mistake to go see the Revenge of the Sith.

The film is not bad - no, it's actually quite good, if somewhat squeaky in places. No, the problem was that the films' tragic pathos, the depiction of the downfall of good and the triumph of evil, came at a time when this actually appears to be happening.

This isn't a dig at Bush II per se. I've seen some people offended by the ham-handed references to the swelling Bushian empire in the film ("You are either with me, or you are my enemy"? I mean, really...), but I don't think they - or even the filmmakers - understand that the message of Sith transcends this particular moment.

Emperor Palpatine is not just Bush II - he is also Abraham Lincoln ("Grand Army of the Republic"), and Woodrow Wilson ("I love democracy"), and FDR ("Justice, peace, security"), all rolled into one disfigured ghoul. He represents imperial power, which - despite moral-relativist arguments to the contrary - is Satanic in nature. The ghoulish Palpatine, disfigured by the evil he unleashes, is a metaphoric distillation of evil known to man for millennia, under many names and faces. It is an evil we seem to have forgotten, having replaced God with the State and abandoned reason in favor of relativistic logic.

For while Palpatine is the one plotting and scheming to take over the galaxy, it is his willing servants and unwilling pawns that make it possible. The special interests (Trade Federation, Banking Clan, Commerce Guild, Techno Union) and their greed, the Jedi whose arrogance and stupidity blind them to the truth, the Senators who keep on voting more and more power to the Chancellor and applaud even as he declares the Republic dead... all of them paving the road to Empire with good intentions.

And then, of course, there is Anakin/Vader: a tragic character in every respect, a boy who wanted to do good so much, he ended up being the very hand of evil. His desire to gain and use power to help the people he loved destroyed both him, and those people. While a lot of people don't desire power, all too many do. And of those who don't, how many would refuse it were it offered to them? Too few. There is a kernel of evil, a bit of Darth Vader, in every one of us. We should be mindful of this.

When I saw Der Untergang earlier this year, I stumbled out of the theater with a better understanding of the Nazis than I ever got from any history book. They were human beings, just like us, who in their worship of power and violence created a value system that encouraged the very worst in people. This is the "Dark Side" Lucas speaks of, an inseparable portion of human nature that, in order to become and stay civilized, we must keep under control. It is a source of great power, but that power can only destroy.

I've said it before, but I'll say it again: we are living the revenge of the Sith. George Lucas may have forgotten how to show and not tell, but that makes his clumsy allegory no less apt. This is how liberty dies; this is how things fall apart, civilization crumbles, and lights go out all over.

I don't regret seeing Sith. I just wish it had only happened a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...

Wages of Servitude

John Laughland's piece in yesterday's Guardian, quoted by Daniel McAdams on the LRC blog, warns that reports in Uzbekistan are to be taken with a grain of salt. After all, the chief source of "information" from the Ferghana valley is IWPR (enough said).

But he also shares another bit of wisdom that ought to be self-evident to anyone harboring delusions of "partnership" and "friendship" with the Empire:

"Washington is unforgiving towards people who think loyalty is a two-way street, and the Uzbek president is about to learn the lesson learned by Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, Eduard Shevardnadze and scores of others: that it is better to be an enemy of the Americans than their friend. If you are their enemy, they might try to buy you; but if you are their friend they will definitely sell you."

To which I would add, for the benefit of people in the testing-chamber of the first "people power" revolution: the next time a politician talks about "working together with the international community" or other such imperialist agitprop nonsense, remember: whether they are selling or being bought, you get stuck with the bill.

Empire Takes Charge

Daniel McAdams writes on the LRC blog:

At an address to the Vanguard of the Demintern, the International Republican Institute, George W. Bush announced a bold new initiative to expropriate another $100 million (out of a total of $1.3 billion to “promote democracy”) from the American taxpayer for a new “Conflict Response Fund” to help consolidate the people power revolutions...

No more can these glorious “people’s power” revolutions be trusted in the hands of US-funded locals—too risky. Now, as John Laughland writes, the US controls both the government and the opposition movements within these countries so as to assure that no matter what happens, Washington’s interests will come out on top.

It may just be the spirit of Star Wars coming out this week, but the first thought I had upon reading this is, "Why, that's precisely the way of the Sith." People think they are fighting for worthy causes, but they are being manipulated by a sinister power all along. So much for the old Republic...

Of course, the Sith are but a metaphor. Says McAdams:

"Of course all of this will fail. History teaches us this and history is no liar. But it is the lives that will be ruined in the process, the lives lost, the economies ruined, the sorrow sown, that colors the imposition of ideology by force a deep black. The color of Satan smiling and reveling in this playground of the damned."

The Slippery Slope of Police "Reform"

For some time now, the Imperial overlords of Bosnia have been trying to bypass the Dayton Peace Agreement and the constitutional order it established in the torn-up quasi-country. Every single "reform" since 1996 has been in the direction of centralization. The most recent push to reform Bosnia's police force is no exception.

According to a proposal drawn up by international commissars, Bosnia ought to be reorganized into nine regional police districts, ultimately responsible to the central government. And though everyone from the EU to viceroy Ashdown claims that this would not in any way threaten the existing entities, that is simply not the case. Writing in the Banja Luka magazine Patriot (issue 168, 9 May 2005) - a publication generally favoring the EU and the Empire - commentator Slobodan Vaskovic says:

"Serb Republic politicians will no doubt be singled out as prime culprits for the evident failure of this important reform, as they almost unanimously oppose the internationals' intentions to erase not just the entity police ministries, but the entity borders as well. The intent is to continue this process of erasure through further reforms that would become necessary after this one, since police regions would no longer match the judicial districts. After that, the road to abolishing both entities and regionalizing Bosnia-Herzegovina would be both wide open and inevitable; the restructuring of police and the judiciary would have to be accompanied by a radical reform of the administration as well."

Vaskovic mentions a crucial detail: There are now 12 existing police administrations (11 in the Federation, one in the Republic); under the new plan, there would be 10. While a reduction in bureaucracy is a welcome thing on principle, this is hardly a reduction worth all the trouble. Much like the "administrative rationalization" proposals to abolish the Republic but not the ten times more complex Federation, this "reform" is a centralization push disguised as cutting bureaucracy.


All the ethnic, religious and historical animosities between Bosnia's communities are but manifestations of a simple clash of two principles - centralized state vs. ethnic autonomy. The deal in Dayton found a way to end the war by creating a common context for the two existing entities, the Serb Republic and the Muslim-Croat Federation ("Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina"). Serb leaders thought this protected ethnic autonomy. Apparently, Muslim leaders saw it as a way of achieving centralization through subterfuge rather than the force of arms, as Croats have discovered to their detriment. The behavior of Imperial viceroys and various agencies and NGOs engaged in the country also supports the Muslim position. If Serbs or Croats object, they are beaten over the head with "war crimes" or "corruption" charges, and blamed for "Bosnia's failure" to move closer to the EU.

Though ethnic autonomy is not exactly libertarian, it does at least offer potential for re-establishing a free society - unlike the centralized state, which is its most bitter enemy. Attempts to centralize Bosnia against the wishes of the majority of its population can only lead to more conflict in a land that desperately needs not EU and NATO membership, not Imperial occupation, not more politics, but peace.

Kosovo Returns Pathetic

From beograd.com, Friday, 13 May 2005, 1500 hrs:

Between 2000 and December 2004, 12,218 people have returned to Kosovo-Metohija, according to the UNHCR office in Priština. As related by the chairman of the Kosovo-Metohija Coordination Center Nebojsa Čović at the regular weekly press conference, the UNHCR made a summary of "accomplished returns based on information from the field."

UNHCR has information about the municipalities of Dragaš, Prizren, Orahovac, Suva Reka, Gnjilane, Novo Brdo, Vitina, Kosovska Kamenica, Štrpce, Uroševac, Gnjilane, Leposavić, Vučitrn, Kosovska Mitrovica, Srbica, Dečani, Đakovica, Peć, Istok, Klina, Obilić, Lipljan, Podujevo, Priština and Kosovo Polje.

The spreadsheets provided indicate that the bulk of the returns - 9,916 - occurred between 2000 and 2003, while only 2,500 returns took place last year.

Let me get this straight: UNHCR has documented only 12,000 or so returns in four years, out of 200-something thousand who were forced out during and after the war? If we take 250,000 as the displaced total, than this is somewhat less than 5%. And that is assuming these people actually returned - that is, actually live in their homes, and haven't been either:

• burned out of them during the 2004 pogrom
• killed, or
• coerced into selling them to Albanians and leaving again.

In short, UNHCR's numbers - no doubt intended to show "progress" and provide another paper-thin excuse for the sham "standards" review about to take place - make it obvious that the expelled non-Albanians are not returning to the occupied territories. And why would they? To live in fear, risk injury and death, and - since they would be denied the right to self-defense - exist solely at the mercy of the KLA and the NATO occupiers? Please!

Serbs may be naive, gullible and even masochistic, but not that much.

BBC’s Propaganda Beat

Matt Prodger's most recent report from Kosovo for the BBC has to be read to be believed. In around 500 words, he spins, fudges and contradicts every bit of the ghastly reality of Albanian/NATO occupation, and smears the Serbian Orthodox Church in the process.

To Prodger and the BBC, there are no Serbian churches, only "heritage of Kosovo" and "Kosovo monuments." He blames the lack of reconstruction squarely on the Church, and Bishop Atremije in particular (the "biggest obstacle"):

"Raising the money for the Orthodox heritage is one thing, but getting the Serbian clergy to co-operate with the Kosovo government in the reconstruction has been much more difficult."

The clear insinuation is that the "Kosovo government" (provisional and Albanian) is falling all over itself to help, but the evil churchmen are sabotaging its goodwill. Prodger reinforces this by uncritically quoting "senior sources in the Kosovo government" (i.e. Albanians again), who have

"told the BBC that they believe the Serbian Orthodox Church has tried to keep the monuments in ruins for as long as possible - as a visual reminder to the international community of what Albanian extremists are capable of."

But the "international community" (as the Imperial occupiers of Kosovo and Bosnia pretentiously call themselves) already knows exactly what Albanians are capable of. Remember the 2004 pogrom? Actually, if you'd been enthralled by these presstitutes, you wouldn't; they've endeavored to cover it up and spin it away ever since.

In fact, Prodger's BBC was one of the media who lied shamelessly during the pogrom, repeating the Albanian blood libel that "Serbs drowned Albanian boys" even after being shown it was a lie. So it should not shock that Prodger still seeks to deny Serb suffering. This is how he describes the systematic destruction of Serbian culture after the Albanian occupation in 1999:

"The Serbian Orthodox Church says more than 80 of its monuments have been damaged since the war in 1999, but the figures are disputed."

Actually, the Church has documented almost 150 churches, chapels and monasteries – living temples, not “monuments” - destroyed, not “damaged” by Albanian terror since 1999. Only Albanian separatists dispute these numbers – well, they and people like Prodger, who serve as their useful idiots.

There have been many brazen lies launched by the Albanians to counter the reality of Kosovo since the NATO/KLA occupation began. They’ve claimed Serbs were destroying their own homes and churches, killing their own civilians, and even using “loyalist” Albanians to stage terrorist attacks against in Kosovo, simply to make Albanians look bad. These lies are as transparent as they are vicious. But the Prodgers of this world are either willfully blind, or too stupid to see them as such.

During the pogrom, distinguished Canadian peacekeeper in retirement, General Lewis McKenzie, famously commented, “The [Albanians] have played us like a Stradivarius.” Given the vulgar nature of KLA propaganda in Prodger’s piece, I’d rather compare the BBC with a worn-out drum capable of striking only one note: Serbs bad, Serbs bad, Serbs bad, Serbs bad…

Our Arrakis

A resource-rich desert, easily seized from its previous owner by a military operation that was the result of a devious scheme; but the expected flow of riches is being thwarted by the ignored and underestimated desert-dwelling religious fanatics, who strike at will and melt away into the shadows; efforts of the occupying force to subjugate the fanatics, despite overwhelming firepower, are futile.

Sounds like Iraq? It is. But I was actually walking about the setting of Frank Herbert's Dune. The parallels are eerie, aren't they?

Someone better get the White House and the Pentagon some copies of Herbert's masterpiece, before any more Sardaukar get slaughtered. Now that would be supporting the troops!

Victory Day

Abdulhakim Ismailov, planting the Soviet flag on the Reichstag
Photo: Yevgeny Khaldei, May 1945

Today is the 60th anniversary of the capitulation of Nazi Germany, which ended World War Two. Americans call it "V-E day" (Victory in Europe), because they don't consider the war ended till September, with the surrender of Japan; but it would be much more accurate to say that Europe and the Pacific were actually two separate wars, sharing the U.S. as one of the principal belligerents.

Anyway, there is a ceremony in Moscow today to mark the anniversary, given that the bulk of casualties against the Reich were sustained by the Red Army and Soviet civilians; I believe the figures featured recently were 150,000 Americans vs. 11 million Soviet soldiers alone. The Red Army lost tens of thousands of men street-fighting into Berlin, before its troops could hoist the hammer-and-sickle on the ruins of the Reichstag.

But sixty years after the defeat of Hitler, there ought to be some soul-searching as to whose victory it was. The USSR was devastated. The British Empire was shattered. And to the real detriment of its people, America stopped being a republic and became a full-fledged, big-government, military-industrial Empire.

After 45 years of fearing a nuclear holocaust, the collapse of Communism scrambled the map of Europe again, to the point where today's reach of EU and NATO resembles the reach of the Reich in 1942. Further, the collapse of the USSR left the American Empire without a counterweight, and gave the world the "benevolent global hegemony" of Uncle Sam's cruise missiles. Between the democide, nuclear madness and a comprehensive assault on human liberty and dignity, that's hardly a victory.

One could argue that defeat would have looked like a global Auschwitz, but that's hardly appropriate. First, because anything would be better (so that's hardly an argument in favor of the present condition), and second, because the war wasn't fought over the Holocaust, regardless what today's propaganda tends to say.

The 60th anniversary of Nazi surrender is marred by arrogant American pontification about modern Russia's lack of atonement for the sins of Communism. The Baltic republics, Poland, and other nations formerly annexed or allied with the USSR don't seem to regard 1945 as a moment of liberation. And that's their right - though it would be vastly less hypocritical if those same countries weren't staunch satellites of Washington now. Or if they hadn't been allied with the Nazis back then. Or if the "Atlantic Empire" wasn't so obsessed with establishing a hostile perimeter around Russia, which is hurting badly from 70 years of Communist misrule. As Justin Raimondo puts it:

"That Moscow now finds itself in a circle of steel, surrounded by enemies armed and brought to power by the West, should disabuse Putin of any notion that he can successfully appease the West and avoid being targeted as the latest "dictator" to fall. They will come for him, or they will come for his successor. They are already on the way."

Stalin's reasoning for invading eastern Poland and annexing the Baltic republics in 1939 was to create a buffer between him and the Nazis (they may have signed a non-aggression pact, but only a fool could not see that a war between them was inevitable). Those extra miles - along with Hitler's two-month delay to attack Yugoslavia - may well have meant the difference between Barbarossa succeeding, and its eventual miserable failure in the mud and ice just short of Moscow. Stalin employed the same reasoning when at the end of the war, he claimed everything east of the Oder-Neisse line as a buffer against the Western Allies. Now the Empire's investment of Russia appears to be vindicating Stalin. How's that for irony on Victory Day?

Vuk Draskovic's Private Politics

It wasn't enough for the maverick Foreign Minister of Serbia-Montenegro to attack Serbia's security service in a Financial Times interview back in April. Now he's gone and asked NATO to intervene and "overhaul" Serbian security. Here's the leader of a Reuters article from May 2:

Serbia and Montenegro called on NATO to help overhaul Belgrade’s security services on Monday, saying this would boost efforts to transfer top war crimes fugitives like Ratko Mladic to The Hague tribunal.

The agency presumes Draskovic is Serbia, since foreign ministers usually represent their countries in foreign media. But for a long time now, Draskovic has represented only himself. Driven by a pathological obsession with secret services, and convinced that a grand conspiracy of spies tried to kill him twice, he continued to focus on his personal agenda, rather than his job.

Remember, back in April he told told Financial Times that the Serbian security service (BIA) knew the whereabouts of Ratko Mladic:

"It is only logical that the security services know where Mladic is. They know if he is in Serbia, and they know if he is not. They are paid to know …"

The Hague Inquisition and its partisans rejoiced. BIA chief Rade Bulatovic rejected the insinuation, calling the FM irresponsible and his claim "not based on evidence." And that was that. In any other country in the world, Draskovic would have faced at least censure, and certainly a parliamentary inquiry. Government officials throughout the world have been forced to resign over far more innocuous remarks. Yet official Belgrade didn't even give him the proverbial slap on the wrist. Emboldened by this kind of impunity, Draskovic took it to the next level with this recent statement to Reuters.

Fortunately, an Alliance spokesman rightly dismissed Draskovic's logorrhea, saying that Serbia-Montenegro "already has a programme of cooperation which offers quite a lot of what PfP offers to partner nations." While this means NATO is far more involved in Serbia than it should be, it also means Draskovic's sycophantic rants are recognized as such.

It appears that Draskovic is following closely in the footsteps of his Dossie predecessor, the treacherous Goran Svilanovic, whose most recent initiative involved agitation for an independent, Albanian Kosovo as part of the "Independent commission on the Balkans." He, too, pursued private agendas as Belgrade's foreign minister, and never got called to account for it. In any case, Draskovic ought to be sacked. Even a Montenegrin separatist - something Podgorica proposed just recently - could hardly do worse as his replacement.

Horrifying and embarrassing as they are, Draskovic's antics are just the tip of the iceberg. At this point, one has to wonder what goes through the mind of Serbian PM Vojislav Kostunica, who was behind the appointments of both Svilanovic and Draskovic, and whose government currently survives thanks in no small part to support from Draskovic's party. His other major coalition partner, Miroljub Labus of the G-17 Plus, is also known for usurping government authority for the sake of personal agendas. As a matter of fact, it seems every two-bit politician associated with the current government has a greater role in policy-making than Kostunica, who is hardly ever heard from. A year later, it's come down to "meet the new DOS, same as the old DOS."

UPDATE: I remain convinced Draskovic is clinically insane, but if so, he must be bipolar. I just heard reports that on Sunday, he said that a good model for Kosovo would be South Tyrol (here's the interview in question). In that part of Italy, the "Austrian majority has practical sovereignty, while the Italian minority has special rights." Now, the Albanians have rejected this proposal (they say they won't accept anything short of independence), but it still makes a surprising amount of sense. This leads me to believe that when he isn't ranting about the secret police, Draskovic may have a thought or two worth listening to. And that makes all this so much more tragic, doesn't it?

Help fund Antiwar.com

I should have said something sooner, but I've just realized Antiwar.com seems to be falling short of its fundraising goal for the next quarter. Which comes as a surprise.

I thought people were sick of war and the Empire, of the arrogance, hubris, posturing, lies and deceit we are forced to listen to every day in the mainstream, "legacy" media that are dedicating to serving the Imperial idea. That if maybe half the people who visited Antiwar.com for news and commentary would part with the price of a couple of lattes (or a couple of beers) in exchange for continuing to read something meaningful. Maybe I've judged wrong.

But if I haven't, if I'm right about everyone who's been reading Balkan Express and liking it, then all of you out there will find a minute today to stop by Antiwar.com and donate. It will help keep alive not just Balkan Express, but an entire realm of alternative thought in a world that desperately needs it.

Remembering Tito

Twenty-five years ago, on May 4, 1980, Yugoslavia died.

Technically, it was Josip Broz "Tito," the Beloved Leader, who had passed away at the age of 88. But though few could see it back then, the country he created would not live much longer, either. There is a compelling argument to say it could not. Tito was Yugoslavia, an apotheosis of the Leader Cult that was in itself a logical extreme of the State-as-God idea that cut a bloody swath through the 20th century.

Tito died as Yugoslavia reached its zenith. Then the years of bad economics, foreign loans, repressed or deliberately engineered ethnic tensions came home to roost. Having purged everyone who could have threatened his grip on power, Tito left no successor; the bureaucrats and committees that took over after him could not cope with the Dear Leader's legacy. Only Slobodan Milosevic, who ascended the political stage seven years after Tito's demise, had anything similar to Old Man's flair.

But he was a Serb, and Tito's Yugoslavia was kept together in no small part through the constant harping about the "threat of Greater Serbian hegemonism." The bureaucrats used to power and privilege since 1974 (when Tito's right hand, Edvard Kardelj, redefined Yugoslavia into a de facto confederation) feared Milosevic both as a Serb, and as a potential centralizer. Having just buried Tito, they did not want another. So they either became nationalists, or allowed the nationalists to win. When the League of Yugoslav Communists began fracturing in 1990, Yugoslavia itself wasn't far behind.

Fifteen years of wars, blockades, ethnic cleansing, death, destruction and an ocean of lies have reduced the once-proud Yugoslavia to a patchwork of impoverished, semi-barbaric successor states under various degrees of domination by the Euro-Atlantic Empire. The tyranny of witless bureaucrats has been replaced by the tyranny of vicious thugs, kleptocrats and Imperial satraps; both have understandably spawned nostalgia for the days of Tito's "benign dictatorship," its harsher edges softened by the passage of time.

People now remember Tito as a "symbol of a better life, of social justice and freedom" (AFP). They don't really know what freedom is - they didn't have much under Tito, and they have even less now. Nor do they really understand the concept of "social justice," which is meaningless outside the self-referential, arbitrary Marxist logic. But at least they remember living better in Tito's times. Maybe because those were simpler times just about everywhere.

But those who have read beyond the grade-school textbooks, and even the supplemental volumes used in "Tito's Paths of Revolution" academic contests, can see that Tito's most important legacy surely is the creation of Yugoslavia, and sowing the seed of its destruction. Using the cult of personality developed around him (along the Stalinist pattern) during the 1941-45 war, Tito and his aides reinvented the country that had probably been erroneously established to begin with. Following the Soviet model, they carved up the country into "socialist republics," drawing borders any which way they pleased. Instead of a common Yugoslav identity, they nurtured particularism: republics were mostly ethnic; in addition to Serbs, Croats and Slovenes of the old kingdom, Macedonians, Montenegrins and Muslims were elevated to nationhood. Ethnic politics was also behind the subdivision of Serbia, with two "autonomous provinces" of Vojvodina and Kosovo. The reinvention of Muslims as "Bosniaks" and Albanians as "Kosovars" that took place in the 1990s owes much to Tito's ethnic politics.

Paradoxically, prior to World War Two the Yugoslav Communists advocated the destruction of Yugoslavia and its partition along ethnic lines, "freedom" for "captive nations" from the "Greater Serbian bourgeois imperialists." They backed a slew of ethnic separatist movements, from Croat Ustasha to Albanian kachaks in Kosovo and the pro-Bulgarian VMRO in what is today Macedonia. The Nazi invasion in April 1941 was a godsend: here was the ally of the Soviet Union, doing to the wicked Serbian hegemonists exactly what the Communist party always wanted. Only when the Reich turned on the Socialist Motherland three months later, Tito and the comrades changed the tune. And made damned sure no one ever brought that up. History began in July 1941; everything prior was the "darkness of oppression." Whoever disagreed was shot.

After the war, when Yugoslavia was all theirs, they were less willing to smash it up. Tito liked being a Beloved Leader himself, rather than a sock puppet of Comrade Dzhugashvili in Moscow. So he built a country - but never a nation - along the pre-war political blueprint for its destruction. The only thing that held it together was the Beloved Leader, Tito himself, whose word was law. Keeping the peace between the constantly frictious Yugoslav ethnics may seem like a praiseworthy deed, but for two things: Tito created the frictious system himself, and he had apprently given no thought whatsoever as to what would happen after his passing. Surely someone so politically astute would have at least tried to look ahead?

Unless he did. Unless what came to pass in the 1990s is precisely what he wanted to happen anyway. Could he have thought, like Madame de Pompadour, Apres moi, le deluge? It is not something the Tito- and Yugo-nostalgics want to hear. So in the dreary aftermath of Yugoslavia's death they remember Tito and his legacy fondly, oblivious to the fact that the Old Man from Kumrovec, the Sutla Boy who rose from a humble metalworker to incredible power, riches and fame, only cared for Yugoslavia as long as he was around to enjoy it. After all, Communists don't believe in Heaven.

Devil's Sacrament

In today's article, titled "The Glory of War," Lew Rockwell writes:

War is the devil's sacrament. It promises to bind us not with God but with the nation state. It grants not life but death. It provides not liberty but slavery. It lives not on truth but on lies, and these lies are themselves said to be worthy of defense. It exalts evil and puts down the good. It is promiscuous in encouraging an orgy of sin, not self-restraint and thought. It is irrational and bloody and vicious and appalling. And it claims to be the highest achievement of man.

It is worse than mass insanity. It is mass wallowing in evil.

And then it is over. People oddly forget what took place. The rose wilts and the thorns grow but people go on with their lives. War no longer inspires. War news becomes uninteresting. All those arguments with friends and family – what were they about anyway? All that killing and expense and death – let's just avert our eyes from it all. Maybe in a few years, once the war is out of the news forever and the country we smashed recovers some modicum of civilization, we can revisit the event and proclaim it glorious. But for now, let's just say it never happened.

Of course, being a country that fights wars exclusively overseas, Americans have the luxury of being able to forget. People who've fought at home, or close to it, have to live with the consequences of war every day. They can't forget, even if they want to. The only people who call war glorious are those who profited from it - or whose lives have been so shattered, they would have no meaning unless the war was good, just, and necessary. And this is what breeds new war, time and again.

Col. David Hackworth (1930-2005)

Yesterday, I lost a friend.

Col. David H. Hackworth passed away from cancer, at the age of 75. A legend within the U.S. military for his combat exploits, and later among the media for his intrepid reporting on every field of battle the U.S. troops saw since Vietnam, "Hack" journeyed to Bosnia in the winter of 1995, which is where we met.

I worked as his translator for several weeks, as NATO troops deployed to police the Dayton Peace Accords. He taught me many things about journalism, and not a few about life in general. And when I was leaving Sarajevo, it was Hack's military and press connections that got me safely out aboard a plane. That may have well saved my life.

I've kept in touch sporadically over the past nine years. I've read many of his columns, and I remember seeing him during the Kosovo War on Fox News, wearing a helmet in the studio after the bombing of Serbian Television. He was making a point: if NATO bombed the RTS because it challenged its propaganda, then Fox News could be a legitimate target as well.

And though later he endorsed the presidential candidacy of Wesley Clark, the Bomber of Belgrade, I chalked it up to a honest mistake of a man who has always cared for the well-being of his country and the honor of his troops.

My condolences go out to his family - but also to the American troops, for they have lost a great friend. There will never be another like him.

Goodbye, Hack. And thank you.

UNMIKistan

Chris Deliso over on Balkanalysis likes the new Balkan Express and points out a few more things:

"there are still other problems that emerge from the UN's failure to perform adequate passport checking from the start. Under UNMIK, Kosovo is where the war on terror went to die. [...] you have a situation whereby Osama himself could merrily motor into Kosovo without any problems. Sorry to say, this sort of thing has and does happen, if not with the big chief himself, at least with others of his ilk."

Deliso further argues that:

The UN in Kosovo has been playing 'I'm OK, you're OK' for far too long. It failed in the beginning to show a firm hand, and its cowardice has been noted and abused ever since. There's little chance that this belated attempt to bravely impose law and order will do anything of the sort. There may still be a golden future for UNMIKistan yet.

Could be because I'm a bit more cynical, but I've been skeptical of UNMIK and KFOR's bona fides from the start. They came into existence as a result of an illegla war of aggression and as agents of an illegal occupation. KFOR's job has been to "protect" Kosovo from Serbia, not anyone in Kosovo from the KLA and other terrorists. Similarly, UNMIK's job has never been to get the war-interrupted (Serbian) government up and running, but to build a new, Albanian government as a replacement. That in the midst of those perverted priorities they have paid as much attention to controlling the borders as to the KLA terror should not be surprising.

Patrick Moore's Putrid Fiction

The April 28 issue of Balkans Report by Radio Free Europe/Radio Libety (a US propaganda outfit with a HQ in Prague) features another piece by analyst Patrick Moore, Bota Sot's 2003 Person of the Year (notorious for his exclusive use of "Kosova" as the name for the occupied Serbian province). Moore is trying to describe the legacy of WW2 in what used to be Yugoslavia. But in attempting to describe the numerous crimes against humanity that had ravaged the region, he commits many crimes against reality.

One could raise many issues with Moore's history, but the most egregious has got to be his deliberate downplaying of the role, extent and atrocities of the Croatian Ustasha, first claiming the Pavelic regime was reluctantly accepted by the Germans "as the next best alternative" when Croat populist Vlatko Macek refused to become a quisling, then by claiming the Germans (i.e. not Pavelic) "lost little time in implementing their racial policies" in the NDH, and that German murders of Serbs "by the tens of thousands" were "assisted by Ustasha zealots." He also claims that Ustasha - an official government - had "command-and-control problems over their often widely scattered followers." This isn't history - it's pulp fiction!

The history of Yugoslavia is obscured by many dark shadows and deliberate distortions, and it is hard to distinguish between truth and fabrication. But I do think it is safe to say Moore's perspective is firmly tilted to the latter.

Christ is risen!

In the light of the Resurrection we comprehend our entire life and rejoice in it. This day of the Resurrection is a day to rejoice in life and Life Eternal. We must witness to this world and to this time the joy which the Resurrection of Christ brings us today, for this is a Joy which no one else can ever give us, and which cannot be taken away.

(Patriarch Pavle, Paschal Encyclical 2005)

"There can be no partition of Serbia"

Historian Dušan Bataković, author of the Kosovo Chronicles and currently Ambassador of Serbia-Montenegro in Athens, gave a very interesting interview to NIN magazine this week. I've taken the liberty of translating some highlights:

...what is bad for Kosovo is bad for Serbia. Taken together, they are an organic whole, and despite the differences in mentality, chronic violence and contrary political tendencies, they are bound by many unbreakable ties.
...
It is Serbia's duty, regardless of the seemingly intractable conflict, to protect in the long-term the interests of all its citizens in the province - Albanians, Serbs and others.
...
Any form of independence of Kosovo is absolutely unacceptable for Serbia, not just because that endangers Serbia's vital interests, but also because Serbia and Montenegro, as responsible members of the international community, cannot accept dangerous precedents with long-term catastrophic consequences... The independence of Kosovo would not only violate the UN Charter, the entire international order and the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, it would also set a dangerous precedent encouraging all other aggressive separatist movements in Europe and Eurasia. ... There is no separate "Kosovar" nation with a separate identity; there are only Albanians and Serbs.
...
The old notion of the Albanian lobbyists – to pay off Serbia for ceding Kosovo - de facto recognizes that Kosovo does not belong to them. They may not be aware of this, but the subconscious is at work here. If you want to buy something, that means you are conceding it belongs to someone else.
...
The independence of Kosovo would mean the partition of Serbia. Whenever it is said there can be no partition of Kosovo, I always agree, because there can be no partition of Serbia, either.
...
We are... at the crossroads of highways, railways, riverways, oil and gas pipelines, and in that context the issue of Kosovo - though threatening and incendiary - becomes only part of a geopolitical jigsaw. Which is why I always emphasize the following: you cannot satisfy the extremely particular interests and 19th-century ideological demands of 1.7 million Albanians in Kosovo, while permanently frustrating eight million Serbs, who are the key to the long-term stability of Western Balkans.

Bataković is a fan of "Euro-Atlantic integration," which I am not, but his positions on Kosovo are easily the best-articulated Serbian policy I've heard in a long time.

Also interesting is his answer to the question about "certain officials" (i.e. former FM Svilanović and others) who "privately" renounce Kosovo in talks with foreign officials:

If that is true... then it is an act of ultimate political irresponsibility. Part of the political elite that holds such opinions - and the foreigners need to be aware of this - does not represent the majority political opinion in Serbia. Those are private opinions of suck-ups, not positions reflecting official state policy. We have here a dangerous mix of provincialism and false cosmopolitanism, both reflections of a pathetic personal and political inferiority complex among the political class.

Bliar

No, that's not a typo, just a "term of endearment" for the current UK Prime Minister, who recently dared say he "never told a lie." Right. And I'm the reincarnation of Sultan Saladin.

I don't know who took this photo, on today's front page of Antiwar.com, but it's worth a ten thousand words...

Lots of Hot Air

AP quotes the latest bloviation of Serbia's deputy Prime Minister Miroljub Labus: “That is the task of our whole society... we must all work together to join the E.U.,” he said after the Brussels Leviathan approved the possibility of annexation talks (presumably refraining from licking its chops). Ah yes, nothing so refreshing as a blast of collectivist claptrap in the mid-afternoon... though to be fair to Labus, it was just around lunchtime in the States when the story hit the wires.

Showing it isn't only the Eurocrats and neo-imperialists who have a pathos for symbolism, the perpertually whiny Keynesian also "expressed hope that stabilization and association talks would start Oct. 5 - the fifth anniversary of Milosevic’s ouster from power."

Well, not much trumps getting rid of a tyrant at home (stipulating that's what Milošević was) except to replace him with thousands of tyrants abroad, now does it? Worked for the French, right?

Sickening. Just sickening.

Remember the Armenians!

When speaking of forgotten genocides, it would be a colossal oversight and horrible injustice to omit the suffering of the Armenians. In 1915, under the pretext of preventing "rebellion" in areas bordering tsarist Russia, the Ottoman Empire deported Armenians en masse from their historical homeland, killing anywhere from 800,000 to 1.5 million in the process.

This was the first real genocide of the 20th century, and its success - the Ottomans were never called to account, and the Ataturk government that replaced them finished the job by ethnically cleansing the Greeks - inspired others. Adolf Hitler reportedly quipped, "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of Armenians?" Thanks to Ankara's efforts to suppress any inquiry, and Turkey's strategic value as American ally during the Cold War, few speak of it even today.

For more information, see Gary North's excellent article today on LewRockwell.com. And remember the Armenians.

Hague Update: Muzzled no more?

Slobodan Milošević was back in court this morning, after witness Kosta Bulatović had refused to testify in his absence. It could be that Bulatović's refusal to testify - similar to another witness boycott last year, when the Inquisition tried to impose counsel on Milošević - showed the Inquisitors that any attempt to muzzle the defendant would only backfire.

Putin, Truth Irritate Empire

According to AP, Russian president Vladimir Putin lamented the demise of the USSR in his equivalent of the "state of the union" address:

"First and foremost it is worth acknowledging that the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century," Putin said. "As for the Russian people, it became a genuine tragedy. Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory. The epidemic of collapse has spilled over to Russia itself."

The agency immediately cast this statement in a sharply negative light, reminding of Putin's KGB past and his "resurrection" of communist symbols. Complaints of dictatorship, curtailing democracy, muzzling the media, cracking down on "businessmen" (i.e. oligarchs loyal to the Empire) followed, rounded off by criticism from the usual gaggle of Imperial sycophants - whose political following in Russia is nonexistent, but who can always be counted on to say something bad about Vladimir Vladimirovich.

Here's the thing: USSR's collapse wasn't tragic in principle, but it certainly was a tragedy in practice, and about that, Putin is absolutely right. Thanks to the witless American puppet in the Kremlin, the USSR fractured along the Stalinist borders, leaving tens of millions of ethnic Russians stranded in hostile territory. The successor states came under the rule of pro-Western (i.e. anti-Russian) nationalists, who have been trying their best to invent anti-Russian ethnic identities, suppress Russian language an heritage, and even celebrate their Nazi alliances.

Nor has the Soviet collapse been bad only for Russians. Central Asian republics are having jihad trouble. The Caucasus has been writhing in open or covert warfare since 1991 - from the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict to factional strife in Georgia and the southernmost regions of Russia (Chechnya, Ingushetia, Ossetia, Dagestan).

In fact, only a very small segment of society in the former USSR profited from its collapse: politicians and criminals (or do I repeat myself?). While the "new class" parties in glitzy night clubs with the best vodka, best cocaine and best whores, the normal, ordinary folk - clerks, workers, farmers, teachers, etc. - struggle to survive, while their sons turn to crime and their daughters to prostitution. Is this not a tragedy? If not, what would be?

Yet the American Weltreich has the nerve to accuse Russia of "imperialism" whenever it tries to get up from her knees and the mud she's been shoved into. Putin has been increasingly demonized - and no, that's not too harsh a term to describe it - in the western press, almost like Slobodan Milosevic. Indeed, the Empire has practiced many policies eventually used in the former USSR in the Balkans, from manipulating ethnic conflict to "democratic revolutions."

Kind of puts things into perspective, doesn't it?

Friedman Undone

I fulminated over the weekend when I saw that moronic blowhard Thomas Friedman had a new book out on how wonderful globalization was. This from a guy who once said, "the hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist—McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas," demonstrating an unfathomable capacity for economic ignorance. In line with this militaristic fetish, he has been a cheerleader of every Imperial war since at least Yugoslavia 1999 ("give war a chance" and "we can do 1389").

I'm not an anti-globalist; any sort of unimpeded exchange of goods, services and ideas promotes civilization and general well-being. But Friedman's "globalization" is an Imperial nightmare - and unfortunately, because of nitwits like him, too many people go sour on true market freedom and confuse it with evil democracy.

Fortunately, the intrepid Matt Taibbi of the New York Press reviews Friedman's claptrap in a fashion certain to dissuade anyone with a functioning forebrain from reading The World Is Flat - not even for laughs. Says Taibbi:

Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent passages invite feature-length essays.

And it just gest better from there.

PS: Ironically, I noticed Taibbi's review on EastEthnia, a blog by Eric Gordy; he authored a book on Serbia a little while ago - which I haven't read yet - but a perusal of the blog suggests he's a fan of people I tend to despise. For instance, he cites favorably a Jacobin Youth website Zamisli Srbiju and a specific contribution by professional Serb-baiter Petar Luković. Gordy actually says he's "happy to remmend just about anything" by Luković. So am I - as examples of damn-near-criminal hate speech. But hey, if he likes Taibbi, he can't be all that bad...

Trial in Absentia

According to the BBC, the Hague Inquisition physicians declared that Slobodan Milošević's blood pressure was "too high," and that he was at risk of a heart attack. So the "judges" banned him from the courtroom and tried to continue the "trial" without him.

This is precisely what Canadian attorney Tiphaine Dickson warned about, in February this year:

Elsewhere in the Appeals Chamber ruling, however, President Meron made a startlingly ominous claim: the right to be tried in one’s presence is not absolute (it, too, it seems, is but a "presumption") and can be obviated by "substantial disruption" of the proceedings. This disruption need not be deliberate or even intended by the accused, and can be caused merely by illness. The possibility of holding in absentia proceedings in the [Milošević] case as a result of illness... had just been approved ...

The British Helsinki Human Rights Group published a similar analysis the same day (February 20), making the following point:

no legal system in the world recognises a difference between a defendant being too ill to defend himself, and too ill to stand trial. If Mr. Milošević is too ill, the trial should come to an end immediately. The ICTY has invented this distinction for the purposes of imposing defence counsel on Mr. Milošević, just as soon as his defence got under way...

This sudden muzzling of Milošević comes as a shock only to those who haven't monitored the course of the "trial" over the past couple of months. While the Prosecution was presenting its case, mainstream media eagerly published trial updates, most often simply repeating prosecutors' claims as if they were established truth. Milošević's defense, by contrast, has been ignored almost completely.

If reports by a well-informed and knowledgeable supporter of Milošević are accurate - and they are based on official transcripts, so it's easy to check - the prosecution's case has been repeatedly exposed as a convoluted mess of lies, distortions, fabrications and conjecture. From the top EU observer, through Macedonian medical workers, to the CSI examiners of Racak dead, defense witnesses have been destroying the Prosecution's case. Prosecution's cross-examinations have consisted mainly of cheap, racist ad hominems and attempts to disprove evidence with pro-Imperial propaganda.

At a status conference on Thursday, April 14 - Milošević once again refused to introduce written testimonies in lieu of live witnesses, demanding the right to a public trial. He also demanded equal time to present his case; the "court" gave him only 150 days, while the Prosecutors had over 300 - not to mention years of time to prepare a case, millions of dollars in resources, and complete domination over the media, which Milošević is forbidden to contact.

In short, the "trial" has been going so badly for the Inquisition, it has decided to resort to trickery and have Milošević tried in absentia.

Whether the trial takes two more days or two more years, everyone knows what the verdict will be; the evidence to convict Milošević may be nonexistent, but to acquit him would destroy the ICTY, its backers, and the hordes of their sycophants. The entire justification for Washington and Brussels' meddling in the Balkans would be shot to pieces, the entire forged history of the 1990s exposed as a fraud that it is.

This is a show trial - it always has been - trying to create a perception of fairness (note that most ICTY supporters argue for just that - "perception" - not actual fairness). Milošević has already been convicted in the Empire-dominated court of public opinion; his "trial" at The Hague is only an effort to give the propaganda an official imprimatur. Everything the Prosecution has done - from issuing the indictment during NATO's war; adding to it retroactively Bosnia and Croatia; amending the indictment afterwards; calling 300 witnesses, none of which was worth a damn; and resorting to logical fallacies, creative reasoning and routine violations of common sense, not to mention jurisprudence - demonstrates that they just don't have a case. But Milošević isn't fighting their meaningless indictment, he is fighting the ICTY itself, and its paymasters - and apparently, too well. Like him or hate him, agree with his policies or not, one must respect the man's courage and tenacity.

After Milošević was prevented from attending his own lynching, defense witness Kosta Bulatović refused to testify. The Inquisition accused him of being "in contempt of the court." He wasn't, really - but he should be. Contempt is the only proper animus towards this malicious, fraudulent circus that defiles justice with every fiber of its being.

A Transparent Ploy

An Albanian blog calling itself "Balkan Update" (sic!) posted a particularly revolting bit of speculation Wednesday. Under the title "Serbia trying to stir chaos in Kosovo," the autor - someone named FeFe - speculates that the bombing attack on Rugova, the killing of Enver Haradinaj, and the bombing of Veton Surroi's offices are all to blame on Serbian intelligence.

Serbian spies have long been the phantoms of grim tales told to scare Albanians, Croats, or Muslims into obedience. Albanians and their partisans (such as the ICG, and even the US government) have long alleged the existence of "Serb paramilitaries" in Kosovo, going so far as to suggest the Mitrovica "bridge watchers" were actually Serbian plainclothes police. None of these stories have ever been substantiated.

Were Serbia an organized state with a strong, decisive government independent from foreign control and meddling, it would absolutely make sense for it to engage in covert operations in the occupied territories of Kosovo and Metohija [marked "Kosova" in bright green on the map FeFe features]. The occupation is all the motive it needs. However, Serbia is not the kind of state just described. It is weak, poor, controlled by a shaky, feeble-minded coalition government and riddled with Imperial "advisors" and "observers." Between the Hague Inquisition, DOS and the current NATO lobbyist as Defense Minister, its military has been gutted. Police, too. And thanks to the current foreign minister's jihad against security services, they aren't in good shape either. So while there may be a motive, there are no means. Not to mention no human resources to conduct such activity.

Ah, but the Albanian blogger has it all figured out. See,

The Serb Intelligence community has continued to maintain a relationship with those previous Albanians [sic] whom it calls “loyal citizens”.

This is nothing less than a call for a witch hunt among the Albanians who may not be vocal supporters of the independence cause. Many have been killed already on mere suspicion of "collaboration"; Haradinaj and his siblings in particular were known for killing "traitors."
But before there is an Albanian Inquisition, let's consider one other possibility, offered by Occam's razor as the simplest and most likely explanation: Hashim Taqi. No one from Taqi's party (DPK) was targeted in the attacks. They have attacked Rugova's and Haradinaj's people before. The DPK has been excluded from power - and thus cut off from access to outside funding - by Rugova and Haradinaj since last winter. Most KLA veterans are members of the DPK. The KLA is a terrorist movement, specializing in assasinations and bombings. And they sure have plenty of resources on the ground.

So there's the means, there's the opportunity, what about motive? Well, "FeFe" actually offers it up, when he accuses "Serb Intelligence." The attacks serve as a way for Taqi to pressure and intimidate his opponents, Albanians get angry and start purging "loyalists," and Serbs get the blame. As far as the KLA is concerned, this is a close to a perfect ploy as it gets.

Well, except for the pesky little fact that it's all so transparent, anyway.

Jasenovac? What Jasenovac?

Jasenovac Ustashe, taking a break from murder (From RS Archive) 

Chris Deliso of Balkanalysis points out the latest travesty of the Western media: 59,000 stories on Auschwitz, three on Jasenovac. As if the third-largest death camp in Nazi-occupied Europe simply never existed. Franjo Tudjman certainly thought so, and it appears the current Croatian leadership shares his "historical" perspective.

Contemporary German estimates of Serbs murdered by the Ustasha (in Jasenovac and elsewhere) ranged as high as 750,000. Wiesenthal center uses the number of 600,000. Serbian researchers have spoken of up to 700,000 victims. Modern revisionists, Croat and otherwise, talk of 30-100,000, at most. Among them is the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which has given far more press to "genocides" supposedly committed by Serbs the 1990s.

For genocide to happen, there must be a clear genocidal intent. There is no doubt whatsoever that the Ustasha "Independent State of Croatia" (NDH) had precisely such an intent. The policy of "Kill a third, expel a third, convert a third" targeted almost 2 million Serbs who in 1941 lived in the territory claimed by the NDH (most of today's Croatia and Bosnia). Jews and Romany ("gypsies") were exterminated alongside the Serbs, but the "Eastern schismatics" were clearly the Ustasha priority target. Parks and public transportation in Zagreb forbid entry, in very deliberate order, to "Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, and dogs."

The exact number of victims needs to be established not to argue whether the genocide happened - because it demonstrably has - but as a historical fact. Not knowing the exact number of victims only invites manipulation, whether from those who seek to minimize the crime or blow it out of proportion.

Manipulation is the key to understanding why Auschwitz was given so much coverage, and Jasenovac almost none. The mass murder of Jews at the hands of Hitler's Reich has been hijacked by the American Empire as an argument for "humanitarian intervention" worldwide (e.g. Bosnia, Kosovo). The mass murder of Serbs at the hands of the Ustasha, with the active involvement of the Catholic Church, does not fit into the carefully crafted and nurtured image of Serbs as evil murderers, and Croats, "Bosnians" and Albanians as their innocent victims.

This is why the commemoration of Auschwitz - while appropriate and necessary - has also been turned into a political spectacle, while the commemoration of Jasenovac has been shoved down the Memory Hole. This is why one should expect a media circus this July, on the 10th anniversary of the "genocide" in Srebrenica. In our Brave New World, it's only some genocides - and some victims - that matter.

The Forgotten Genocide

(Illustration: NIN magazine, issue 2833, 14 April 2005) 

A service and commemoration ceremony today in Donja Gradina, (Serb Republic, Bosnia) marked the sixtieth anniversary of the breakout from the Ustasha death camp of Jasenovac, the third largest concentration camp in Europe during WW2.

Much can be said and written about Jasenovac, because too much still remains unsaid. In the Jasenovac “factory of death,” the indescribable brutality of Croatian Ustasha often baffled even the monstrous imagination of their Nazi allies. Yet today, attempts to rationalize (and even deny) the Ustasha genocide of Serbs, Jews and Roma, have become more frequent and increasingly brazen.

Unlike other Holocaust-affected countries, neither the Serbian government, nor the Serbian public show the proper respect for the horrendous suffering of Serbs during the Nazi occupation, despite the warnings and appeals coming from genocide researchers like Dr. Milan Bulajić. Open attempts to minimize the horrors of Jasenovac and the Ustasha "Independent State of Croatia" (NDH) are met with indifference.

Most Serbs are familiar with the “theses” of former Croatian president and quasi-historian Franjo Tudjman about “thirty thousand dead in Jasenovac,“ and the entire libraries of similar “history” generated by the Ustasha émigrés. Recently, however, at the opening of the new Yad Vashem holocaust museum in Jerusalem, the current Croat president Stjepan Mesić scandalously insulted the victims of Ustasha genocide. During the speech of Bosnian president Borislav Paravac, who mentioned 700,000 Jasenovac dead – Mesić interrupted with a claim that the number stood for “all the dead in the former Yugoslavia.” Official Belgrade, of course, stayed silent.

Yad Vashem, however, took a clear stand; Avner Shalev, director of this respected Israeli institution and a leading Holocaust expert in the world, announced he would attend the service and the commemoration in Donja Gradina, along leading a seven-member delegation. He would ignore the commemoration in Jasenovac itself, scheduled by Croatia for the following week. [Update: Dr. Shalev could not attend the commemoration, due to illness.]

Especially shocking is the official "view" of Jasenovac in Croatia; in addition to the usual number games, the existence of Jasenovac victims is being erased through dubious redefinitions of modern Jasenovac. According to someone’s monstrous ideas, it is supposed to become a “place of tolerance,” a “symbol of diversity” or some other dubious entry in the dictionary of transitional political correctness. A one-time proposal by the Croatian authorities to turn Jasenovac into a “reconciliation park,” where the Ustasha executioners would be buried alongside their victims, simply beggars belief.

A more detailed account of the 60th Jasenovac commemoration can be found in the current issue of NIN magazine, by Branko Božić and hieromonk Jovan Ćulibrk, coordinator of the Jasenovac Council of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Hieromonk Ćulibrk reveals that the New York-based Jasenovac Research Institute (JRI) successfully lobbied Mayor Michael Bloomberg to declare 22 April – the anniversary of the breakout – as Jasenovac Day in New York City. Another result of JRI efforts will be the unveiling of a memorial plaque to Jasenovac victims in the Holocaust Park in Brooklyn.]

Another specter haunts Croatia today. During the funeral of Pope John Paul II, a CNN anchor mentioned the Pope’s “controversial beatification” of Alojzije Stepinac, the archbishop of Zagreb during NDH.(It must be a bizarre coincidence that the comment was made by the notorious Serbophobe Christianne Amanpour, of all people). This prompted heated reactions of the Croatian public and Catholic clergy, united in the defense of the name and legacy of "Pavelić's cardinal". Thus Vlado Košić, deputy Bishop of Zagreb and chairman of the ”Justitia et pax“ committee of the Croatian conference of Bishops, dubbed the linking of Stepinac with Pavelić's regime “crude untruths.” It would have been useful, though surprising, had the Croatian public expressed similar criticism towards the 64th anniversary of NDH’s establishment, on April 10…

In addition to beatifying Stepinac, the omission of Jasenovac from the late Pope's itinerary during his multiple visits to Croatia, and the Mass he held at the Petrićevac monastery – an Ustasha killing site – during his visit to Bosnia-Herzegovina, did not contribute in any way to helping the Serbs heal. Nor did it do anything to further the needed rapprochement and reconciliation of Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs. Also, Vatican's role in hiding and rescuing Ustasha war criminals after WW2 is well known and documented. Even after all these years, the Vatican has yet to offer an official apology.

It is not the intent of this reminder to nurture bad blood towards the Catholic Church, or to accuse the entire Croat people for horrible crimes committed in its name. Quite the contrary. After all, many Croat anti-fascists perished in Jasenovac alongside the Serbs, Jews and Roma. However, to quote George Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

The only way to avoid a new Jasenovac or a new Auschwitz is precisely to remember the Serb, Jewish, Russian, Polish, Roma and other victims of the madness that spawned Hitler, Himmler, Eichmann, Pavelić, Luburić… There is no statute of limitations on their crime, and the names of these murderers must remain in the minds of the coming generations, as both a memory and a warning.

Their victims must never be forgotten. We owe it to them.

Memory eternal.

(Translated from snp-miletic.org.yu; the original text uses the photos from the “Concentration camp Jasenovac” collection of the Serb Republic Archives, as well as from the collection of Mr. Carl Savich.)

Kosovo Explained

"If Kosovo does not belong to us, why do they demand we give it up? If it belongs to them, why are they taking it by force? And if they can take it by force, I don't know why they are so hesitant about it."

- Matija Bećković, poet and academic (NIN, issue 2831, 31. March 2005)

The Unbearable Smugness of Eurocrats

Three cheers for Chris Deliso, who takes to task Timothy Garton Ash over his empire-mongering op-ed in Thursday's Guardian. Here are just some choice passages:

This tired and all too common argument for empire posits that, left to its own devices, the Balkans will smolder in war and discord for all eternity. Therefore, it is up to the EU – altruistic and benevolent as always – to save the Balkanians from themselves: “...in the Balkans, the choice is Europe or war.”

No, this is the choice as presented by the EU and reverberated endlessly through its echo chamber in the Western media...

The overly simplistic (though entirely fitting for the task at hand) impression left by Ash is of a whole part of Europe ruined by one civilization. Further, the whole of the Balkans must be brought in to the fold by August 2014 – to create a majestic symbolic spectacle out of the one-hundred year anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the beginning of World War I...

Considering that the EU has always, politically at least, been characterized far more by symbolism than substance, it is not surprising that they would set such grandiose but in reality meaningless goals for themselves. With the pace of this remorseless expansion, and the increasing grumblings it’s causing in the established countries of the union, it can only be hoped that the great anniversary will also mark the death of the European Union itself.

This imperialistic mindset, Deliso says, is partly a product of imperialist legacy, and partly a solipsistic dream of Eurocrats; the ruling class in European capitals and their satellite principalities who have a vested interest in creating a continental über-state: money, power, prestige, perks - easy living at someone else's expense. As I've pointed out before, there is no need for Balkans countries to join the EU; the tyrannical kleptocratic future is already here, and how!

The entire piece is on balkanalysis.com. Enjoy!

Sic Semper Tyrannis

Sapienti sat.

Better off without Kosovo? Think again!

On March 26, the Jacobin daily Danas published an op-ed by one Ivan Ahel, "expert in systems and management theories," who offered arguments why Serbia would be better off without Kosovo. I initially dismissed Ahel as a state-supremacist who operated in the dreamworld of statistics and systems that had little connection to reality. The BBC thought otherwise, and posted a translation of Ahel's article through their Monitoring service. It was soon making rounds on pro-Albanian websites and forums.

I won't repost the article here; it is easily available at the two links above. However, shortly after BBC's translation was published, I read an interesting rebuttal of Ahel's remarks by John Bosnitch, a journalist in Japan. Originally posted in a closed email forum, Mr. Bosnitch's article is published here with his permission.

"Expert" Ahel selling a rotten apple
I remain totally unconvinced after reading Mr. Ivan Ahel's regurgitation of the standard Western diet of disinformation about why Serbs should give up what other nations would never even dream of losing. Will there never be an end to such new encouragements to surrender? Who is Mr. Ivan Ahel? And what is his background and training?

The threat he tells us of is that the Albanians would make up 20% of any joint state and 30% of the army and will start populating central Serbia... So what? In the European Union that Mr. Ahel wants Serbia to join, the Albanians will freely be able to move across borders and inhabit the exact same areas of central Serbia that he warns us that they might occupy now. Except, of course, in the EU, Serbia would no longer have the national sovereignty needed to respond to the situation. Mr. Ahel's report smacks of Orwellian propaganda: white is black and black is white, whenever he says so.

Mr. Ahel's report has been quoted by BBC under the title, "Expert argues why Serbia would be better off without Kosovo". What are they talking about? What "expert"? In what field, "nation-breaking"? The BBC will of course title responses like mine, "Extremist denies facts about Kosova."

My fellow Serb (?) Mr. Ahel, says, "Reason and not myths and emotions should decide the final status of Kosovo." If he were telling the truth, he should also have written an article titled, "Reason and not myths and emotions should decide whether Serbia joins the German-dominated EU." Does anyone really think that Mr. Ahel will ever write such an article? Does anyone think that Mr. Ahel is going to tell the Serbs, a nation that has lived at the exact center of Europe for over a thousand years, how stupid it sounds when they repeat silly EU-centric mantras like "Let's become Europeans!"

First, Ahel bases his "analysis" on an imaginary scenario that Serbs would never accept: that Kosovo, as an ethnic Albanian statelet, would be granted equal "republic" status in a union with Serbia and Montenegro. His argument, like a house built on sand, simply cannot stand. Not only would we never grant separate republic status to the historic core of Serbia, even if we did, the Albanians would then have a republic's right to secede and would surely destroy the state union the very next day. So, Mr. Ahel's premise of a Kosovo republic is a complete nonstarter. But like any confused traveler who sets out on the wrong road, Mr. Ahel then continues to write about all kinds of make-believe consequences.

To be honest, some of his purported consequences sound relatively good. Ahel writes: "Albanians would fill many ministerial positions." Fine, let's make one of them the minister for fighting smuggling and the Mafia drug and sex-slave trade. We might then finally get that situation under control. Ahel writes that an Albanian would be "head of state and foreign minister once in three or six years". Fine, if that right is reciprocal for Serbs, that would be a big improvement from Tito's Yugoslavia (about which some Serbs still reminisce) in which no Serb was ever head of state and "Serbs" (Serbs in name only) would at best get the premiership or foreign ministry only once every eight years. Ahel writes that Kosovo does "not have economically important resources." However, another Western-backed nongovernmental organization called the European Stability Initiative calls Kosovo a place that is "remarkably rich" in natural resources. Curiously, the ESI is financed by the same types of U.S. backers that finance Mr. Ahel's Forum of Ethnic Relations to urge Serbia to give up Kosovo.

Mr. Ahel is loose with his facts and even worse with statistics. Citing economic figures from soon after the 1993 Western-induced run on Yugoslavia's banks and wartime hyper-inflation, Mr. Ahel tries to convince us that the Serbs are performing poorly, and that the underproducing Albanians will pull our per capita average income even further down. He then makes comparisons directly against data for the ethnically pure states of Slovenia and Croatia, neither of which is under the pressures and sanctions that the U.S. is still putting on Serbia. Mr. Ahel's comparisons are obviously unbalanced. Instead of trying to convince Serbs to commit national-identity suicide, he would be better off trying to convince his economic mentors in the U.S. to give Serbia a fair chance in international trade and commerce.

Mr. Ahel writes, "In a [new] common state, central Serbia and Vojvodina would have to support 2m poor and production-wise non-productive Albanians and that kind of money flow would create big problems for Serbia. The four to five times poorer Kosovo would be an impediment to Serbia's development." There is no basis for these conclusions. The levels and rates of infrastructure development in Kosovo and the rest of Serbia do not necessarily have to be the same. Any reasonable form of autonomy would see the residents of Kosovo paying taxes mainly to their local institutions and having their regional infrastructure development being led and paid for by their locally elected and funded provincial institutions. There is no reason whatsoever to expect that the residents of the rest of Serbia, or of Montenegro, should pay for utilities, roads, administrative facilities, or even garbage collection in Kosovo. We are continually being fed a story that Kosovo cannot prosper unless it is independent, but no one talks too much about how Kosovo will suddenly get the money that it needs upon becoming independent. The honest truth is that all of these economic assessments are based on a development model centered on massive borrowing from Western financiers. The collateral for such loans is national sovereignty, which is lost as loan recipients turn their nations first into economic, then political and finally military colonies of the U.S. and German-led empires. As long as Kosovo is not independent, the Albanians in power there simply do not have the legal power to sell Kosovo's soul to international bankers. That is good, because the soul of Kosovo is not theirs to sell.

Mr. Ahel paints a picture of a Kosovo and a Serbia in which there is no hope for progress. If anyone is starting to believe that message it is only because the brainwashing by Mr. Ahel and other Western programmed "experts" is starting to work. God and fate have placed the Serbian nation at the ideal crossroads of trade and commerce, on land that is rich and productive both above and below the ground. Mr. Ahel is acting like just one of the many servants of foreign powers that hope to convince us to either give away or sell our birthright to foreigners for a few pennies, just like the Americans cheated their native peoples into selling them Manhattan Island for a handful of shiny pieces of glass.

Mr. Ahel writes as if there were no connection between the strategic infrastructure bombing conducted by NATO and the subsequent offers by Western financiers to lend us money to rebuilt the very same things that their bombers earlier destroyed. To take his advice of accepting the West's deal, would be like letting a thief steal your car every single morning, then going to work all day so that you could buy your car back from the thief in the evening, every day, forever. This is not a viable economic plan for Serbia.

Mr. Ahel refers to past demographic trends in Kosovo to try to scare the few remaining Serbs into running away. Without even mentioning that a great portion of the population expansion in Kosovo is the result of unrestricted illegal immigration during the Tito era and since the NATO bombing, he tells us that they are reproducing so fast that there will be 8 million Albanians in central Serbia within 40 years. Why does he not also admit the statistical truth that if they continue reproducing at that rate, Albanians would also be the single largest nation in Europe in 120 years? The mathematics is clear, but it bears no relationship to reality. Such projections are based on unfounded presumptions that we will continue along the defeatist road that we are being led on by the current Western-backed regime in Belgrade. The fact is that their mismanagement and general incompetence will bring a fundamental change of government in Serbia long before Mr. Ahel's fantasies could ever come true.

Central Serbia is being depopulated as a result of a self-destructive government policy of over-concentration in Belgrade. When the people of Serbia and Montenegro decide to make themselves happy and successful, they will have to start by building some joint institutions, including a new federal capital, in the Raska area that would bring together their peoples and resources in a state union built on trust and common ancestry. Even one such simple step could reverse the flight of people and investment from the rich heartland of the nation. What is lacking is not the resources, nor the people, nor even the will needed to succeed. What is lacking is a national leadership with the vision needed to find a viable solution and the courage needed to implement it. Kosovo has never "left the Serbs". Kosovo remains geographically exactly where it has always been. It is we, the Serbs, who have been leaving Kosovo. Until we realize that the current state of affairs is totally within our power to change, we cannot move forward. Adopting Mr. Ahel's medieval-style pseudo-medicine of self-amputation as our primary economic plan for the third millennium would be no less than the final coup de grace for the Serbian nation. No nation can survive the amputation of its heart.

Mr. Ahel suggests that, without independence, Kosovo Albanians would inevitably seek their version of Hitlerian "lebensraum" in central Serbia . Other than the time Mr. Ahel appears to have spent outside Serbia getting indoctrinated in Western voodoo economics, he has not yet traveled far enough from his home "village" to learn that a broader perspective can change everything. Here in Tokyo, we could fit the entire Albanian population of Kosovo into my local city ward (opština) and not even notice the difference. A more imaginative perspective is needed to save Kosovo and the rest of Serbia. Mr. Ahel's study misleadingly mistitled "Systemic Approach to the Kosovo Problem," merely represents defeatism, intellectual laziness and transparent illogic.

Good fruit does not grow from poor seed. Mr. Ahel's report is a product of the Forum for Ethnic Relations NGO, which is a branch of the U.S.-based NGO called the Project on Ethnic Relations. The U.S. group is marking out the ethnic fault lines along which the U.S. and Germany will seek to break apart the entire Slav world from the Balkans to Kamchatka through a policy of "divide and conquer". Growing from such poor seed, Mr. Ahel's "study" is a rotten apple that I, for one, am not biting.

A Missed Anniversary

Sunday was the 64th aniversary of the date when the "Indepedent state of Croatia" (NDH) was declared on the heels of the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia. Its leaders, the Ustashe, matched their Nazi sponsors in hatred and often exceeded them in brutality; and while they have killed tens of thousands of Jews and helped the Nazis kill even more, their preferred targets were Orthodox Serbs.

While allegations of Vatican's complicity in Nazi crimes have been raised but remain controversial and heavily disputed, there is no disputing the role of the Catholic Church in Ustasha crimes. The NDH was militantly Catholic, and the focus of its genocidal policy were the "Eastern Schismatics," as Catholics saw all Orthodox believers.

With the full knowledge and blessing of the Church, the Ustashe launched a policy of murder, expulsion and forced conversion of Serbs almost immediately after establishing the NDH - and long before Hitler's endloesung. The methods used by the Ustasha and the joy with which they murdered horrified even some German observers. In addition to massacring Serb civilians and hunting royalist and communist partisans, NDH units also fought for the Reich, mainly in the East.

After the war was lost, Croat clergy used its Vatican connections to smuggle notable Ustashe and Nazis out of Europe; the Allies did not interfere, as the same organization smuggled valuable Nazis into the West, where they would be enlisted for the looming standoff with the Soviets.

Alojzije Stepinac, the Archbishop of Zagreb and the vicar to Ustasha poglavnik Ante Pavelić, was arrested and imprisoned by the Communists for his complicity in Ustasha crimes. He died under house arrest in 1960. Pope John Paul II beatified him in 1998, setting off a storm of protests from Serbs and Jews.

After the war, thousands of NDH troops were captured and executed by the Yugoslav Communist forces, along with other non-Communist militias (many of which collaborated with the Germans). Their deaths are now referred to as the "Path of the Cross" (križni put).

In 1990, Franjo Tudjman's Croatian Democratic Union - funded in part by Ustasha emigres - won the general elections in Croatia, and proceeded to rehabilitate the NDH, sometimes in name but more often in fact. Most criticism has focused on Tudjman's reintroduction of the checkerboard flag, but a far worse offender has been the resurrection of NDH-era vocabulary. Tudjman even introduced the "new" currency, named after the NDH currency of 1941-45. Furthermore, Tudjman resurrected the anti-Serb rhetoric of Pavelić, setting off a civil war after Croatia's secession from Yugoslavia. The war resulted in almost-complete expulsion of Serbs who lived in territories claimed by Croatia, something even Pavelić failed to accomplish. The day Croatian armies entered the capital of the rebel Serb republic is now a national holiday, "Homeland Gratitude Day."

Tudjman died in 2000, and the successive governments visibly moderated their position on Serbs under the pressure of international public opinion. But Tudjman's NDH-inspired imagery, language and holidays remain. The Catholic Church is refusing to admit wrongdoing in the NDH, and is proud of its support for Tudjman. So one should not be surprised that small groups of open NDH sympathizers celebrated Sunday's anniversary, but that there weren't more of them.

State of Turbulence

Butler Shaffer has another insightful essay over on LewRockwell.com:

Our current American society has been in this state of turbulence for some time, without much focused intelligence guiding alternative courses of action. Because governments thrive on conflict – which they promise to "manage" – America is characterized by cross-currents of demands people make upon one another, a destructive force arising from endless divisions, confrontations, politically-enforced expectations, and discord. Such conflicts find expression in efforts to micromanage the personal and social lives of others; a disrespect for the inviolability of one another’s lives and property interests; quarrels over the role that "spiritual" versus "secular" values are to play in legal and political policies; disputes regarding the sanctity of life, and the social value of "wars" and "peace;" and the relative importance of the "individual" versus the "collective."

[...]I have long thought that the oppressive and destructive American political system will eventually reach a breaking point where the addition of one more intrusion upon the lives of people will produce a nonlinear reaction (i.e., a consequence out of all proportion to that singular factor). Like the Boston "tea party" or the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, some will mistake this single event for what may prove to be the "cause" of the collapse of the American nation-state. Something which, standing by itself, would seem to have little significance – like a woman refusing to move to the back of a bus – may become the focal point for the release of long-suppressed emotions and resentments.

[...] The current corporate-state system is beyond repair and should be abandoned. Trying to salvage its antiquated and life-destructive forms is as senseless as trying to rehabilitate a Jeffrey Dahmer. The time will come, and soon, when we shall be called upon to discover new social systems and new ways of thinking about what it means to be a human being living in society with others. Whether such fundamental changes are brought about through conscious effort on our part, or are thrust upon us by events that trigger a collapse of institutional viability, remains to be seen.