The Baby Doth Protest Too Much

Last week, a Brit named Ed Alexander posted on his blog ("Balkan Baby") an account of his 2006 visit to a Mitrovica cafe, owned by an Albanian who impersonated Hitler. Within a couple hours the link had made its rounds, and feedback started coming. Julia Gorin, a conservative commentator who has raised some excellent questions about the Balkans, gave full credit to Alexander for documenting this monstrosity. I mentioned it on Sivi Soko, as part of a story on Nazis and their sympathizers in the Balkans. I also included information from a Slovakian paper, Format, which covered that very same cafe some months before Alexander and his friends paid "Hitler" a visit. All of this stuff was scrupulously credited (though I probably should have explicitly noted that Alexander took the photo of the bill featuring the swastika).

Seems like Alexander is "a bit put out," though. He resents the fact that Serbianna.com and Julia Gorin "were very selective in the way they quoted" him. He describes Serbianna as a "Serbian nationalist website which tries to incite hatred and fear towards Bosnians, Croats, Kosova Albanians and anybody else that they choose to take a swipe at," while Julia is a "perennial right-wing commentator" (what's wrong with that?) he tars by association as "crony" of George Bush, "Islamophobe" and "warmonger." Well, now, who's being unfair here? Who is being racist, bigoted, intolerant or unprincipled?

What did Mr. Alexander expect, that such a bombshell of a story would remain private? He posted it - so obviously he wanted it to become public. He was given credit. So, he "wrote very favourably about the Serbian residents." Pardon me if I don't care, especially since he very graphically sympathizes with the "Republic of Kosova" (sic!) which has done its utmost to eradicate those very Serbs. If he had been quoted out of context, or misrepresented, then I would be sympathetic. But he was not - not by Julia, not by Serbianna, and not by me. Maybe by Kurir - I actually agree a great deal with his assessment of what passes for their investigative journalism - but the photo they used was from the Slovakian paper, and I'd wager the stuff he could not recognize in their coverage came from the same source.

Is anything any of us noted about his story factually untrue? Did we make anything up?

Mr. Alexander has a sizable chip on his shoulder, believing himself to be a member of some vast righteous majority - or, in his terms, "those of us who want the Balkans to progress, to admit its wrongs as to display its wonderful culture in the best possible way," while painting those who disagree with him as "nationalist Serbs, Serbs who had been duped by what they read in Kurir and a handful of American Bushites."

Seems to me like he suffers from myopia, an exaggerated sense of self-importance, and a dangerous set of delusions such as the belief in blooming bombs.

I see it almost every day. Westerners come to the Balkans and fall in love with its authenticity, but then wish to remake it into suburban Des Moines or Birmingham, so they can feel more comfortable. What they can't seem to understand is that it's the very authenticity they seek to destroy that endeared the place to them to begin with - and that both the hospitality and hatred are part of it. They desire "progress" of the same kind that made their own homelands such cultural voids, quagmires of welfare statism and political correctness. They see the world as a series of theme parks. Not their fault, I suppose; it's all they know. But it irks me when they try to forcibly remake my corner of this earth (yes, I live in the U.S. at the moment - that in itself is a long story, and one I intend to address at some point) into their distopian horror. We have enough imported delusions as it is.

Ed Alexander is entitled to his opinions, of course. But methinks he doth protest too much.

Humanitarian bombs, again

I've seen many terrible things since the outbreak of Yugoslav Succession Wars in 1991, whether live or on television screens, in newspapers or online. But this image, accompanying a Seattle Times opinion piece this weekend, filled me with revulsion such as I haven't experienced at least since 2004, and the photos of the March pogrom in Kosovo.

The op-ed itself is fluff. Written by Deborah Senn, in places it seems copied out of ICG's handbook: Serbia's people, she says, "have the intellectual skills, determination and know-how to create a prosperous future, as long as their nation can leave behind the nationalism and ethnic divisions of the past."

Senn gushes over "well-educated and eager young people" who can make a "giant leap" and "[write] a new chapter in its colorful history — this time as a tolerant, pluralistic country"...

Never mind any of this naive, liberal-imperialist bovine excrement. Look at the picture the Seattle Times editors ran next to the article.

LOOK AT IT.

Flowers in blue, white and red - the national colors of Serbia - are blooming from the ground seeded with bombs. This is the message: (American) bombs bring democracy, prosperity, tolerance.

Well, Ms. Insurance Inspector, you can take your bright shining future and shove it. Serbia is not latte-sipping lumpen-studentariat gushing over the newest Western celebrity craze and blaming the "evil old regime" for every ill sent its way by the Empire in the past decade. That Serbia which you envision is never going to exist, save in the demented imaginations of western imperialists and domestic sycophants. If it gets its act together, Serbia will bloom and grow - not out of those "humanitarian" bombs of yours, but despite them. In defiance to them.

And you better hope and pray that some time down the line, when the American Empire is no longer the most powerful military force in the world (which may be sooner than you think), someone else doesn't decide to "humanitarianize" Seattle the way Americans "brought democracy" to Belgrade.

For shame.

A compliment, of sorts

So I'm a little behind the times (which is ironic; it'll be self-explanatory in a second), but I just saw Bruce Sterling's op-ed in last weekend's Washington Post. Most of the piece is talking about the "dot-green" revolution sweeping the globe, as more and more people get on the "global warming" bandwagon, but at one point he mentions this:

Serbia may be the world's single-greatest locale for a professional futurist. Awful things happen there faster than awful things happen anywhere else. The Balkans is a tragic region that denied stark reality, broke its economy, started multiple unnecessary wars, and basically finger-pointed and squabbled its way into a comprehensive train wreck. It suffered all kinds of pig-headed mayhem, all unnecessary.
...
So what's the good part? They never gave up around here. On the contrary: There's a certain vivid liveliness in the way they're scrambling and clawing their way out of yawning abyss. The food is great, the women dress to kill, and sometimes they even laugh and dance.

You don't have to predict the future when you live in it.

See, Sterling now lives in Belgrade. He is married to Jasmina Tešanović (of the "Women in Black," B92 and such crowd), which helps explain the scornful analysis of "unnecessary mayhem," but he is still capable of seeing the essence of the people: the "vivid liveliness" and determination. His wife's colleagues in the "human rights" industry lament and harangue on a daily basis the "primitive backwardness" of Serbia, and desire to drag it into "modernity" at all costs (preferably without Serbs)... but if Sterling is to be believed, Serbia is already living in the future.

It's a compliment, of sorts.

Jacobins in Serbia

Here's a Photoshop parody I received from a friend, via email. It's the cover of a faux-magazine called Les Jacobins, with a tagline "Your source of demagoguery."

That is Čedomir Jovanović, leader of the "Liberal Democrats" on the cover, powdered up like a French revolutionary.

Some of the topics from the front cover:

• "Serbia without Serbs"
• "A thousand questions... one answer."
• "Democracy, that's me!"
• "Global warming caused by... Serbs?"

Whoever did this... I like his sense of humor. The most appropriate response to the neo-Jacobin nonsense of Chedists and their ilk is indeed ridicule.

"Not enough"

My commentary on Monday's ICJ verdict clearing Serbia of genocide charges will be up on Antiwar.com tomorrow; in the meantime, there is a lot of good coverage up on the Byzantine Sacred Art blog.

I did want to share a memory from the war in Sarajevo, concerning some reactions to the verdict coming from Bosnian Muslims. For years, they've been convinced of the righteousness of their cause and their claim before the ICJ. Now that the court has said their "evidence" failed to prove their point, they reject the court itself and once again wallow in the wronged victim mentality.

Well, back in the early 1990s, after Alija Izetbegovic rejected yet another peace plan because it didn't give his regime enough land, a joke appeared in Sarajevo that went something like this:

Mujo and Suljo are sitting down, drinking coffee and smoking in proper silence. At some point, Mujo asks, "Suljo, what do you get when you add one and one?"
Suljo ponders for a moment, sips his coffee, shakes the ashes off the cigarette, and replies,"Two."
Mujo sighs, shakes his head, and says, "Not enough."

"Modern" Morality

Slobodan Antonić writes in Politika (Serbian original here):

... My "favorite" is the argument that says, "This isn't evil; the sooner we realize it's actually appropriate, the better off we will be!" Because, you see, "that's not ours anyway," and "who has ever actually been there," and "only priests and romantics care" and "queues in front of foreign embassies are a much bigger problem" and "they are actually doing us a favor," etc.

But when a NGO elitist says these words, he is really talking about himself. His mouth says "that's not ours anyway," but his eyes are betraying his thoughts: "that's not mine, so I don't care." His mouth says "who has ever actually been there?" but his eyes are going "I have never been there, so why would I care?" His mouth says "only priests and romantics care," his eyes are saying "I hate priests anyway, one church more or less, all the same to me." While his mouth says "queues in front of foreign embassies are a much bigger problem," his eyes are saying "why should I have to wait in those queues because of that damn Kosovo?" He considers it one and the same to "be modern" and "think only of oneself and money," and is now trying to persuade the rest of us that we should also be "modern," so we would feel as good as he does.

The hypocrisy of NGO "modernists," says Antonić, is best tested by the following hypothetical scenario: would they be as willing to give up one of the parking spots reserved for their SUVs, as they are willing to cede Kosovo? Ah, well, that's different, you see...

This is quotable enough, but Antonić offers another great passage in the same article:

Someone once compared the seizure of Kosovo with rape. The rapists are big and strong, the poor girl could get a beating if she resists too much, and maybe it is really better for her to give in. But for crying out loud, how can anyone say on top of that, "Oh be smart! Maybe they are rapists, but they are rich, powerful, you can't risk ruining your future relations with the, so don't dare complain. Think of your future, think of becoming a part of their rich and beautiful society tomorrow. Cry a little, then come back and smile as if nothing happened."

Can it really be like that? As if nothing had happened? Are you serious about the smiling? What if the boys get a desire to have a little bit of fun again? And what could one possibly say about those who jeer at the unfortunate woman, "Come on, sister, don't be conservative, the boys are doing you a favor, you need to be modern, enjoy the sex, and especially when the Big Boss goes on top of you. Then you have to be particularly enthusiastic, groan and sigh and scream - Yes! Yes! More!"

Yes, Big Boss likes to be the ladies' man. But dear Serbia, you don't have to put on an act for him. Cry freely. And most importantly, remember them all, both those who took their turns with you and those who jeered and cheered. Because one day...

Howling Mad

I've been writing columns about the Balkans for almost eight years now, and have always made the utmost effort to document every claim included there. If I recall correctly, my detractors have found only two factual errors in any of my columns. I once wrote that the indictment against Milosevic had been filed by Carla del Ponte (it was Louise Arbour). The other one was when I asserted that modern Croatian arms (chequy gules et argent) were the same as the World War Two arms of the Nazi-allied "Independent State of Croatia" - and an intriguingly well-informed Croat said this was patently false, because the WW2 arms were chequy argent et gules.

Alright, so that second case is more comical than truly illustrative - but the point I was trying to make is that I do my homework. If I am making a claim in any of my articles, I am doing my damnedest to provide some backing to it, preferably a source that can hold up to serious scrutiny, rather than assertions of the "everyone knows" variety. And it is such "history," often quoted in shrill tones by professional [insert ethnicity here] at events and in letters, that annoys me to no end. Worse yet, people spouting such pseudo-historical drivel are deeply convinced of its accuracy and allow that sentiment to pervade their, um, presentation.

Perfectly illustrating the point are letters and responses from Croats following the publication of Julia Gorin's article "When will world confront the undead of Croatia?" in the Baltimore Sun two weeks ago or so. Croats worldwide wrote to the Sun denouncing her piece as "Serbian propaganda" (right, because everything in the world is the fault of Serbs - the sentiment itself proving Julia's point that hatred of Serbs is not a thing of the past). Many wrote to Julia personally, using language so vile I admire her for having the fortitude to preserve the messages and post them online (latest post here, see her blog for more).

Julia Gorin's researched, documented article, could not be challenged factually. Therefore it became the subject of a firestorm of spitting and howling by people who "knew" the "actual truth" and spouted it free of Serbodiabolical constraints of proper English and decency. Even the polite letters were based on premises so ridiculously false, even I had a hard time believing there were folks who actually thought that way. And I'm supposed to be used to all manners of Balkans oddities, having lived there for almost 20 years and written about them since 1999.

Some years ago I would have been tempted to say "Well obviously their problem is ignorance... once they realize their beliefs are false, they would stop hating." Now I know better. Ignorance is the consequence of hatred, not its source. Those Croats who spat on Julia over the Internet, much as those Croats, Muslims, Albanians, or Serbs who have railed at me for years, don't just disagree with the message - they hate the messenger. Just look at the sheer number of hate-mail pointing out Julia is Jewish (thus proving her point even more...).

And it's not just the "uninformed" private citizens doing this. A couple years back, when I published on this blog the results of an ICTY-sponsored inquiry into Bosnian War deaths, a Reuters correspondent tried to discredit the scoop by calling it "reports circulating on Serbian weblogs" and "internet rumours."

Last week I was at the University of Michigan, at a conference about Europe and globalization. One of the panels was dedicated to the future of Kosovo, and it happened to be on the very day Martti Ahtisaari presented his plan to Belgrade and Pristina. I had the dubious pleasure of sitting on the panel with two top Albanian lobbyists in the U.S., who turned the session into their political rally (most of the audience were ethnic Albanians). Nothing I could say to that crowd would have made the slightest difference. All they wanted to know was what the world owed the Albanians for their centuries of suffering under the brutal, fascist, genocidal Serbs, and how dare anyone suggest any of the "history" presented by the lobbyists (or the people from the audience, which was often even more "flavorful") was anything but absolutely accurate?!

And then people wonder why there's hatred and war.

The Sum of Empire

I've read (and written) many pieces about the American Empire, but this one, today at LewRockwell.com, strikes me as possibly the very best:

"Bush the Empire Slayer," by Bernard Chazelle

Informative, analytical, and poetic at the same time. Somewhat of a rarity in this day and age.

Plus qu'un crime, c'est une faute

No doubt, those who suffered under Saddam Hussein's regime welcomed his hanging earlier today. As did those who masterminded the Imperial invasion of Iraq in 2003, some of the very same people who gave Hussein weapons and support back in the 1980s, and a carte blanche for the atrocities he was hanged for.

Debating the fairness of his trial or the legitimacy of the court is a moot point now. Let me dwell for a moment on the timing of Hussein's execution, though. You see, today is the first day of Eid al-Adha, the Feast of Sacrifice that marks the end of the hajj. It is a holiday marked by ritual slaughter of lambs - sacrifices - to celebrate the fulfillment of Muslims' religious duty to make pilgrimage to Mecca.

Because he was executed on this day, and his last words (reportedly) called for jihad, Saddam Hussein may well become a martyr for millions of Muslims. That's a long way from being a secular dictator who waged war on the Islamic Republic of Iran in the 1980s. And it was American intervention that created "Saddam the martyr," of that there is no question.

Napoleon's foreign minister, Talleyrand, once commented on a politically motivated murder: "Worse than a crime, it was a blunder." ("C'est plus qu'un crime, c'est une faute." - Lucien Bonaparte Mem. an. 1804 (1882) I. 432, quoted here)

While I consider the 2003 invasion and the subsequent occupation of Iraq clearly evil, the execution of Saddam Hussein, and on a major Islamic holiday no less, is seriously stupid.

The Last Christmas

Antiwar.com today has a whole section dedicated to the Christmas Truce of 1914. Four months into the Great War, German, British and French troops in the trenches spontaneously ceased killing each other and spent a day exchanging gifts, playing football and caroling. Afraid that the truce might end the war altogether, generals on both sides ordered the resumption of hostilities and threatened punishment against anyone who even contemplated a truce again. The war went on for three more years, killing millions and mortally wounding European civilization.

Out of its ashes arose the Versailles system, a conflicted Middle East, a vengeful (soon to be Nazi) Germany, and the Soviet Union. Twenty years later, Europe was finished. What exists today is the pale shadow of a once-great civilization, a decadent, nihilistic, post-modernist mess. The mere mention of Christmas has become forbidden in the "tolerance"-obsessed statist anti-culture that is the West today.

The Communist experiment has nearly destroyed eastern Europe. Conflicts created by the post-1918 partition of the Middle East are fueling a global resurgence of Islamic jihad. The American Empire, which arose from World War Two and scored a Pyrrhic victory in the Cold War, is now bleeding itself to death all over the world.

In some ways, that day in 1914 was perhaps the last true Christmas in the West.

There is no going back to that time, of course. And, given that the men who stopped the truce and willingly took their countries to war were a product of that time as much as the soldiers who caroled together after four months of trying to kill each other... I would say that's a good thing. But if there is to be a future for European civilization, we must come to a realization that the past 92 years have not been "progress," but rather a tragedy of some magnitude.

Dying for nothing

A brilliant, heartfelt and altogether too true piece by Fred Reed:

"It’s all but official: The war in Iraq is lost... The troops from now on will die for a war that they already know is over. They are dying for politicians. They are dying for nothing. By now they must know it."

I won't quote more. Wouldn't do it justice. Go read it yourself.

Oh, but the Democrats are in charge now, and everything will be different, right? And as soon as Barack Obama replaces Dubya on the White Marble Throne, things will change, right?

Wrong.

Random Airport Thoughts

I'm on my way to Bosnia again, on family business - though, being a workaholic, I fully intend to do some investigative analysis once there.

Right this moment, I'm sitting on the floor in the corner of the departure lounge of the Vienna Airport, the only place where one can find a free electrical outlet. Most people toting laptops keep them on for an hour or so at most. I have a three-hour layover. I'll be damned if I spend it watching the battery indicator.

I would have been outraged at this obvious oversight on part of the airport management, had I not learned better on my frequent trips to the Old Continent; thanks to their advanced cell phone networks, Europeans tend to use their mobile phones the way Americans use laptops. Besides, at least they do have free Wi-Fi. At the Dulles Airport in Washington, I was barely able to register a signal - for a pay-per-use T-Mobile network, ironically operated by Germans.

Flying in this day and age includes a set of humiliating "security" rituals one has to subject himself to in order to enter a departure concourse. Ever since the idiotic Richard Reed tried to set his shoes on fire, people are made to pad through the security checkpoints barefoot. We never did find out whether Reed's shoes were actually explosive or not. The shoeless requirement has recently been joined by the liquids restriction (3 oz. in the U.S., 100 ml in the E.U.), resulting from an alleged terror plot from this summer.

A thought occurred to me, seeing all the signs and warnings about the danger of toiletries. In order to keep winning, the jihadists don't have to carry out a single successful terrorist attack. Or even bother to try. All it takes is to feed some misinformation about theoretical plots using far-fetched and, frankly, ludicrous methods. Obsessed with "security," the Empire would obligingly react in the predictably paranoid fashion.

I can just imagine some two-bit jihadist "confessing" under torture the existence of "underwear bombs," and the resulting strip-searches of air travelers. Maybe the government "security" bureaucracies would start requiring all passengers to change into hospital gowns and disposable slippers, duly stocked at specialized concessions stores at airports (provided by Halliburton on a no-bid contract, perhaps?). Opportunities for humiliation are endless. The jihadist scum can just sit back and cackle at the stupid, gullible kuffar. Which they probably do already, come to think of it.

I'm all for actual security, but government bureaucracies are institutionally incapable of providing it. The sorry sight of shoeless travelers and baggies filled with toothpaste, lotions and perfume is demonstration enough.

The Germans are coming!

Germany is about to turn Bundeswehr into an international intervention force, writes Financial Times. Great. In the words of another blogger, "that's the real problem with the European Union, isn't it... not enough armed Germans with a mandate for international intervention."

On one hand, more German involvement in "peacekeeping" makes me nervous. One of the first things the reunified Germany did was browbeat the nascent EU into dismembering Yugoslavia, back in 1991. Berlin used the Bosnian war to deploy the Luftwaffe outside of Germany for the first time since 1945. The Kosovo Albanian terrorists ("KLA") were originally trained by BND, the German intelligence. The 1999 NATO aggression was actually the first time German troops went to war since 1945, against a country and a people their Nazi predecessors had targeted for destruction with particular malice.

On the other hand, once German troops occupied Kosovo (again), they acted more like caricatures of Nazis from BBC comedies, fleeing in panic before Albanian mobs when even the French showed more spine.

There isn't much anyone can to do stop the Bundestag and Frau Kanzler Merkel from sending German boys to kill and die in foreign lands for the "greater glory of humanitarian imperialism." That is, until those occupied by the "humanitarians" let their displeasure show through bombs and bullets, just as those occupied by the Nazis once did.

27 years for....?

Momcilo Krajisnik, former Speaker of the Bosnian parliament and that of the Bosnian Serbs, was sentenced yesterday by the Hague Inquisition to 27 years in prison (for a man his age, that's a de facto life sentence).

According to Andy Wilcoxson of Slobodan-Milosevic.org, the Inquisition could not find a direct link between Krajisnik and any of the crimes committed (allegedly or demonstrably) by the Bosnian Serbs in the course of the war. So they convicted him of supposedly belonging to a "joint criminal enterprise" to establish a "Greater Serbia" - a fictitious, quasi-legal category developed for the Inquisition by an American lawyer in order to justify blanket indictments of Serb political and military leaders.

As an example of the Inquisition's deliberate duplicity, Wilcoxson cites that "proof" of Krajisnik's alleged participation in a Serb criminal conspiracy was a statement he made in March 1992 that supposedly set off a Serb "expulsion programme." Wilcoxson demonstrates the statement directly referred to the Cutilheiro peace plan (the one Alija Izetbegovic's illegitimate government rejected). To the best of my knowledge, no one at the Inquisition has ever bothered to present evidence that a "Serb expulsion programme" was more than a figment of the prosecutors' imagination; its existence was treated as an established fact.

Naser Oric, who boasted of his atrocities and even filmed them, got two years for "failing to stop human rights abuses" or some such nonsense. Krajisnik gets 27 years for alleged participation (based on deliberately misinterpreted evidence) in a fictitious conspiracy.

Let's call this what it is: "Walking while Serb."

Ahtisaari: Patron of the SS?

I've long considered Martti Ahtisaari of Finland a Serbophobe simply because he was an agent of the Empire in 1999 and subsequently a Board member of the International Crisis Group. His statement that Serbs bore collective guilt for what (allegedly) happened in 1999 - and, by obvious implication, that Albanians bore no guilt whatsoever, collective or individual, for what has happened since - did not surprise me much.

According to Carl Savich of Serbianna.com, however, there's another reason Ahtisaari is a Serbophobe: during his presidency, the Finnish government wanted to sponsor a monument to Nazis! Savich writes that Ahtisaari's government wanted to bankroll a monument to the Finnish Waffen-SS volunteers, some 1400 members of the Waffen-SS division "Wiking." (This is in addition to the Finnish troops who fought against the Soviet Union between 1940 and 1945, as allies of Nazi Germany.)

Retired NY Times reporter David Binder wrote that Ahtisaari was one of the Finns displaced by the Soviet invasion of Karelia during the 1940 Winter War. So, it stands to reason he would have anti-Soviet (and anti-Russian, by extension) sentiments. A lot of the early 1990s Serbophobic propaganda played on leftover Cold War stereotypes, endeavoring to portray the Serbs as "Communists" and "Russians lite." Ahtisaari would have absorbed this propaganda when he was involved in the early EU efforts to mediate the conflict between Yugoslav republics - efforts that failed miserably when Germany strong-armed the rest of EU countries into recognizing the unilateral secession of Slovenia and Croatia.

So, Ahtisaari has a family history of being displaced by Russians; his country was allied with Hitler in WW2; he sponsored a monument to the Waffen-SS during his presidency, and he was in position to acquire anti-Serb bias as a diplomat involved in Yugoslav affairs in the early 1990s. I'm no psychologist, but I can see how all that would predispose him towards, say, Kosovo Albanians - who were actually allied with Hitler themselves, but claimed they were victims of "Serb Nazis," and came up with horror stories accusing the Serbian authorities of Hitleresque crimes. Although these stories have never been substantiated, they served as the propaganda justification for NATO's invasion, so anyone involved in that enterprise cannot afford to disavow them. And Ahtisaari was very much involved.

But the issue here isn't whether Ahtisaari is biased. That's been obvious even without these background details that have recently emerged. The issue is what to do about him? Would his inclination towards the Waffen-SS be enough of a political tarnish to have him removed? Or are charges of sympathy for the Nazis taken seriously only when their target is an enemy of the Empire, not its agent?

(Edited on September 18 for clarity)

Koco Danaj and Internet Weasels

Who is Koco Danaj?

According to Italian news agency AKI, relying presumably on Pristina daily Epoka e Re, Danaj is a "political adviser to Albania's prime minister, Sali Berisha."

Days after I described Danaj thusly in my column, Antiwar.com started getting angry emails from Albanians. Koco Danaj, they all claimed, is no adviser to Berisha, but a marginal political figure; I manufactured falsehoods, and should retract his qualification at once; even Danaj himself wrote eventually - albeit in Albanian, so I could not understand a word of what he was trying to say.

So, who is Koco Danaj? I don't know - and honestly, I don't much care. Neither the Albanian government, which denied ties to Danaj, nor my numerous Albanian detractors to Antiwar.com, have at any one point taken exception to the content of Danaj's comments to Epoka e Re: namely, the need for a "natural Albania" in the Balkans. It's these comments, rather than Mr. Danaj's identity, that interested me in the first place. Given that no one made a point of disagreeing with him, he may as well be a political adviser to Mr. Berisha, or the KLA "government" of "Kosova" for that matter.

One of my favorite bloggers often resorts to seeding his writings with "weasel traps" - details deliberately askew, so that the typical internet critic (who enjoys taking potshots at people but flees an actual debate like the devil from a cross) would latch onto them instead of challenging the actual points of the argument.

I wish I were clever enough to do this, but apparently, I don't need to; as the story of Koco Danaj goes to show, my critics are good at making their own weasel traps and springing them without any help on my part.

Voice in the Wilderness

I'm several days late with this, but I just saw a video of Keith Olbermann's newscast last Wednesday night. Finally, someone had the intestinal fortitude to stand up - in the mainstream media, no less! - and call His Exalted Imperial Majesty's government, and Herr Reichsmarschall, on the years of arrogant lies they've peddled for the sake of their power and others' death.

I won't quote Olbermann. His speech - for a speech it was - is much too good to be robbed of tone, timbre and context. A transcript is here.

In his supreme arrogance, Herr Reichsmarschall dared actually say that America faced a new kind of fascism. He was right, though not in the sense he wanted to be. And he was wrong as well; for the fascism - or, rather, national-socialism - that America faces today is not new. It is the same old kind, reawakened from the dustbins of history by people who are just as engrossed by the concept of Will to Power as a mustachioed Austrian painter seventy-odd years ago.

Nations who allow themselves to forget their history, principles and identity are liable to fall prey to false prophets and phoney ideologies. As anyone who has seen Der Untergang should have realized, the evil of totalitarianism was not peculiar to the Germans, just as Communism was not peculiar to the Russians. They suffered nonetheless. The arrogant imperialism of Herr Rumsfeld and His Most Elevated Majesty God-Emperor George W is not peculiar to the Americans; but it is up to the Americans to recognize it for what it is, and make a choice: follow the course of Empire, or oppose it.

Both choices have consequences. Accepting the Empire will be far more dangerous and dire. Keith Olbermann dared oppose it, where so many have stood idly by. It will be tragic if his voice remains alone in the wilderness.

"Bosniaks" vs. Bosnia

The recent flurry of nationalist rhetoric in Bosnia brought to mind something I read a couple of months ago. In March this year, former Bosnian politician - now an analyst - Nenad Kecmanovic gave an extensive interview to Nova Srpska Politicka Misao. Excerpts from it have since appeared elsewhere, but the full article is not available in English.

I've taken the liberty of translating the passages most relevant to the current situation:

[NSPM] Contrary to the widespread thesis that Serbs and Croats are the main opponents of Bosnia-Herzegovina, your opinion is that Bosniaks [Bosnian Muslims] are the destroyers of B-H. What is the basis of your judgment?

Kecmanović: If you have a project you care about, but you cannot implement it without voluntary cooperation of two partners who are not interested, the only reasonable way is to try to persuade them, win them over. Bosniaks, who are precisely in such a situation regarding their desired integration of B-H and the position of Serbs and Croats towards it, are doing precisely the opposite. They label their partners - Serbs, but Croats as well - incessantly as genocidal, fascist war criminals and push them even farther from their project. [...] They simply do not want voluntary, equitable integration that would be achieved through democratic dialog, mutual concessions, compromises and consensus. What they want is a unitary, centralized state, dominated by them, that would be forcibly imposed on Serbs and Croats by the international community.

NSPM: How much room to maneuver do Serbs and Croats have within that concept?

Kecmanović: The right of their neighbors, as constituent people, not to accept their project the Bosniaks don't see as a right to self-determination up through secession, but only as the right to submit or simply leave Bosnia [emphasis added]. So that Serbs and Croats wouldn't have any illusions that this project might actually be beneficial to them, Bosniaks are already declaring themselves the "fundamental people," meaning the other two are not fundamental, but minorities, interlopers, afterthoughts. Their language, invented like the name of their ethnicity, is called not "Bosniak," but Bosnian, in an effort to impose it as the only official language simply by its name. Their historiographers and publicists glorify Ottoman occupation as a Golden Age and a period of tolerance towards Christians, and invent their aristocratic genealogy. Naturally, this provokes in their Christian neighbors the collective memory of centuries of occupation and Turkish atrocities.

On top of all this, they still live in a conviction that, unlike Serbs and Croats, they bear no responsibility for the war, that they were solely the innocent victims, that they killed their neighbors only in self-defense, that only their national movement was not chauvinistic, that Izetbegović was the leader of all Bosnians, that with him they were building a civil society and defended multiethnic tolerance, that the mujahedeen came from somewhere out there, that their connections with Islamic terrorism are malicious fiction, that they embody the values of democracy... and that for all of this, of course, the West simply idolizes them.

Remembering the Storm

I got a blast from the past this afternoon, when someone re-posted a column I wrote last year, on the eve of "Homeland Thanksgiving Day" in Croatia.

The original piece, Remembering the Storm, is available on Antiwar.com. One year later, there's nothing to add, or subtract.

I've just got word that B92, a media house known for its promotion of the globalist, Serbophobic agenda, has actually shown a video clip of Croat and Muslim troops killing Serb soldiers and civilians. (Links: RealVideo, or Avi) It's a surprise, to be sure.

Still, I doubt much will come of it. As a result of over a decade of Serbophobic hysteria, murder of Serbs has just about been absolved as a crime - and in case of people like Ramush Haradinaj or Agim Ceku is actually considered a virtue.

Banned Solitude

Ananova.com reported on 24 July that a Belgrade cafe was forced (presumably by local authorities) to change its name, after U.S. Embassy officials complained it offended them.

Milomir Jeftic's establishment was called "Osama" which in Serbian means "solitude" or "seclusion." The Imperial bureaucrats must have thought it was a paean to Osama bin Laden, a onetime ally of Washington who now leads the Al-Qaeda terrorist organization dedicated to global jihad.

Instead of explaining to the ignorant Americans that:

a) no self-respecting Serb could name an establishment after an Islamic fundamentalist, not after 500 years of Islamic oppression, or after the 1990s wars where Islamic fanatics perpetrated horrendous crimes against Serbs;

b) the man has a right to name his cafe as he damn well pleases, and that's none of the government's damn business, be it Serbian or American,

the quislings in Belgrade leaned on the cafe-owner, rather than risk offending the almighty Empire.

This kind of spineless kowtowing is precisely what's led to the present situation, in which Serbia's about to be raped yet again, and told to enjoy it or risk another beating. If the government's job is to protect its citizens, then whoever was supposed to protect Jeftic from arrogant Americans' whining failed miserably, and should be sent back to under whatever rock he crawled up from.