Hegemonic Maniacs

Sometimes the sheer absurdity of the world we live in, the wrongness of it, tends to overload my synapses and I just stop paying attention for a while. If I ever allow that condition to become permanent, I would of course become one of the docile drones the Empire counts on to support its continued existence.

Paul Craig Roberts keeps paying attention, though. Just the other day, he listened to two Imperial officials prattle about the need for hegemony on NPR (where else?). In discussing North Korea, Roberts says,

"Both Hill and Carter agreed that no country, with the exception of Israel, has a right to any interests of its own unless it is an interest that coincides with U.S. interests. No other interest is legitimate."

Roberts continues:

"Listening to the pair of hegemonic maniacs, I realized that the United States is the new Rome—there is no legitimate power but us. Any other power is a potential threat to our interests and must be eliminated before it gets any independent ideas."

Yet for all the Neocon prattle about the US being the sole superpower with the world at its mercy, there are billions of people who disagree - and many of them belligerently so. If the USA is the modern equivalent of the Roman Empire, this must be what the Empire looked like in its waning days, its power still considered supreme even as it was in practice nothing more than a cruel joke.

At Last We Understand

Ever since the "October revolution" of 2000, the majority of people in Serbia - and at the very least, the deafeningly vocal minority that controls the media-political space - has maintained the dangerous delusion about Serbia's "democratic partnership" with the Empire. Both Vojislav Kostunica (currently the prime minister) and Boris Tadic (currently the president) have on many occasions called for "partnership" and "reciprocity" in the treatment of Serbia by the soi-disant "international community."

But that delusion has grown more difficult to maintain with the ever-increasing onslaught of demands and threats from Washington and Brussels, which in their supreme arrogance the Imperialists haven't even bothered to disguise with so much as a pretense of propriety. Having established early on that Serbia was not only bending its knee, but prostrate, they've considered only natural to do with it as they wished.

Now that even the weak, sniveling protests of Serbia's "democratic" rulers have met with nothing but scorn in the Imperial capitals, perhaps the delusion will finally be broken beyond mending, and the Serbs will realize their "partnership" with the West was but a different name for slavery. Them as who have eyes can now see clearly.

Nova Srpska Politicka Misao, June 26, 2006

Nikola Malbaški

Complete Defeat!

That analogies between politics and sports are definitely becoming fashionable can be seen from the "football exchange" between Olli Rehn the Government. More important than figuring out whether the "EU is to blame for the loss against Argentina" or if "some countries didn't even qualify, after all" is that we've just suffered a coincidental humiliation in both politics and sports. It is finally clear that our ideas about being a "football nation" and "partners to EU and the U.S." have been delusions. No offense to football, but the defeat of Serbia's policy towards the West, and the West's policy towards Serbia, is the more significant of the two.

Whether speaking for himself or on behalf of the entire society, Prime Minister Koštunica has said what we more or less knew. The Fifth-Octobrist illusion about the West that "supported democratic processes in Serbia" has finally come to an end. That disappontment with the West that euphemistically terms its incessant demands a "partner relationship" is a source of apathy in the Serbian public, especially those in the "democratic forces." The dogma that "Europe has no alternative" is no longer valid, to the joy of some and the sorrow of others. Even the domestic supporters of the "international community" admit that we are being extorted, even if it is for "educational purposes." It's not that the small nations should have the same rights as the great powers, as that's never happened in history, but that even the small nations would have the right to a place under the sun. The incessant barrage of pressure reminds us that we are still on the "vanquished list," and nurtures the Weimar Syndrome.

After all the actual defeats of Serbia, as well as those perceived as such - independent Montenegro, pressure from The Hague and what seems to be in store regarding Kosovo - the least we need are unnecessary humiliations. One can only hope that we've hit rock bottom with the arrival of two U.S. F-16s from the same squadron that bombed Serbia in 1999, piloted by the same people. Between the symbolic football disaster and the "welcome to American heroes" who bombed us, our feelings and frustrations have been confirmed. We must admit to ourselves that we are a nation defeated, that our country is ruined, and tha we need renewal.

One could ask, with good reason, whether we had to lose 0:6 to Argentina, or if those very planes and those very pilots had to land on Serbian soil. Of course that it could have been different. Our defeats in both football and politics could have been more dignified. We could have scored a couple times against Argentina, and made a couple more saves, just as we could have asked not to be "visited" by those very "veterans of humanitarian intervention". They could have sent some other pilots, some other planes from another squadron, maybe even another NATO country that hadn't been so zealous in bombing us. The humiliation would have been lessened, the the taste of defeat less bitter.

Yet that indicates that someone, both here and in the West, does not care much for such "details," and sent whoever was sent to specifically remind us who won and who lost. Football-wise, the Argentines only did their job; we failed completely. But what about the "welcome to our American allies," besides the bitterness of the military so visible on the faces of our airmen and those who consider this an insult to the remnants of our national dignity? Were we fans of conspiracy theories, we'd say that someone is deliberately acting in the fashion calculated to bring the Radicals to power.

While everything looks bleak, however, we ought to consider if there is anything positive in all this. If there is, it would be the end of some illusions, first and foremost the "partnership with Europe," and the naive belief in "quick entry into the EU. " Once a man or a society finally understand the cruel reality surrounding them, they face a choice. Either they will fall into depressing defeatism, or they will snap back and try to improve their precarious position by doing better. Alas, the former now appears more likely.

I haven't been to Serbia in a while, so I don't really know the feeling there. From the media, one would conclude that indeed, defeatism is inevitable and resistance to the Empire is completely unlikely. But the media lie - it is both their job and their pleasure. And maybe those who have forgotten their history, their faith and their identity in order to become "progressive" postmodernists obsessed with material wealth, status and "rights" (i.e. entitlements) of the welfare state are at this point likely to despair that the masters whose boots they've faithfully licked for years are still kicking them. Perhaps they will rail in anger at those who protest the kicking, and advocate an even harder kicking, so the Great Unwashed would finally understand the glory of being Empire's whipping boy. After all, they could have chosen anyone out there, and they chose us! We are not worthy!

But there are those who know better, those who still remember, those who are not yet corrupted, or can be redeemed. Those who should stand up and declare that enough is enough - and has been enough for quite some time. Slavery is not freedom, humiliation is not partnership, occupation is not liberty, and entitlements are not rights. That obedience to the Empire and slavish following of orders are not values to live by. That the causes for which several million of our people have perished - liberty, independence, dignity, freedom, honor - are worth more than all the paper money thrown out of helicopters and stuffed in suitcases for the use of mercenary missionaries.

The world has lied about us enough. We should stop lying to ourselves as well. That alone will not solve our problems. But it's a start.

Peace at last!

UPI reports that, after over 100 years, Montenegro and Japan are about to conclude a peace treaty.

Back in 1904, the Principality of Montenegro declared war on Japan as an act of solidarity with Russia. The Russo-Japanese war ended in 1905 through the mediation of Theodore Roosevelt, but Montenegro never signed a peace treaty with the Japanese Empire. The most likely reason is that no one, including the Japanese, knew that Montenegro had declared war - and even if they did, would have thought it a joke.

I wonder if the Vujanovic-Djukanovic regime will now teach the children in Montenegro how their brave, absolutely non-Serb-related ancestors preemptively stood up to Japanese aggression decades before Pearl Harbor, and how the Japanese finally sued for peace out of fear of Montenegrin military might. Or something.

Voluntary Rape

The drama over Montenegro's separation from Serbia that has taken place over the past two weeks has been but an interlude in the much bigger play - or ploy? - by the Empire in the Balkans. Montenegro was a sideshow, albeit and important one, designed to further the main event: separation of Kosovo from Serbia. Just look at the names of those supporting the "independence" of Montenegro in Washington, and you'll see the same snouts promoting the independence of "Kosova."

In February, when former ICG board member Martti Ahtisaari opened the "negotiations" between Belgrade and the Albanian separatists in Vienna, Stanko Cerovic of the RFI ran a commentary which I've translated below. He described - with all too much sympathy for the poor little Powers That Be in the West - the quandary with Kosovo, and the likely thrust of Imperial policy. While I disagree with several of his assertions, as far as Imperial policy is concerned he has been right so far. That makes this commentary worth revisiting.

Concerning the Kosovo Negotiations

Stanko Cerovic, Radio France Internationale, 20 February 2006

Such as they are, the talks between Pristina and Belgrade that began in Vienna today have no real importance for the future of Kosovo. Even so, they indicate the difficulty of the problem facing not only the Serbs and the Albanians, but also the international diplomacy

This problem is so difficult, complicated and important, that literally nothing can be left up to the Serbs and the Albanians themselves. It is said they would negotiate only the internal arrangements in Kosovo, i.e. the rights of the remaining Serbs, but even those technical details are meaningless until there is a decision on Kosovo's actual official status.

Obviously, there is no point discussing internal arrangements of a state before it is actually a state. International diplomats sponsoring these so-called talks know this very well. The talks are needed to create an impression the Serbs and the Albanians are talking, so the Contact Group could then step in and cut the Gordian knot between them, since they are unable to reach an agreement. That way the Contact Group can feign neutrality and claim it was forced to step in because the Serbs and the Albanians could not find the solution themselves. The “solution” imposed by the Contact Group, after what it would claim was long and neutral deliberation, would be independence.

Arguments for such a decision are familiar already. As Kosovo governor Jessen-Petersen has said, “After all, you have to heed the will of the majority.” This is a sort of a democratic argument. Another is the economic argument, mentioned in every report from Kosovo: that the province is backwards, with over 60% unemployment, and that only independence could fix that. There’s also the strategic argument: so long as there is no security in Kosovo, this would feed Albanian extremism that destabilizes the region – Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro. Resolving the status of Kosovo is the key to regional stability – this is suggested by today’s Financial Times.

There is even a security argument, albeit unrelated to moral and human concerns. According to this, Albanians will be violent towards the Serbs for as long as their desire for independence goes unmet – but would be open to tolerance once independence is achieved. This argument appeared after the great anti-Serb pogrom of March 2004. The pogrom was condemned by the international community, which then promptly concluded it was grounds for fulfilling Albanian demands...

This sort of logic – showcasing just about all the corruption and hypocrisy politics is capable of – isn’t actually as rotten as it appears to its victims, in this case the Serbs and Serbia. International diplomacy is no longer especially partial to the Albanians; unofficially, many admit that NATO’s war was probably a mistake – but such is reality right now that none of those diplomats sees any other choice. Western troops in Kosovo can’t fight the Albanians, and why would they? Even if everyone wanted it, it’s unrealistic to imagine Kosovo in Serbia.

It is obvious that the diplomats are also aware that giving Kosovo independence would create tremendous problems not only in Serbia, but elsewhere in the region and in international relations in general. However much one twists the diplomatic tongue, the brutal truth is that Kosovo is an ancient Serb territory occupied by foreign troops, and if that is how one achieves independence, then any borders of any country are not subject to revision, as it only depends on who does the revising. However, when they weigh the negative consequences of their plan to Kosovo, Western diplomats still think it’s a little easier to impose independence on Belgrade than enter a permanent war with Kosovo Albanians. And they may not be wrong.

The trouble is that only one people and only one state are being violated here: the Serbs and Serbia. Belgrade has the grounds to wonder “Why us?” The answer is, because it is easy. Western diplomacy is trying to soften this injustice through various incentives. The recent visit of the European Commission chairman Barroso to Belgrade was intended to communicate that while taking away Kosovo, Europe is opening a door to integration. There is hope this could assuage the bitterness of Serbs that could bring the Radical Party to power, although no one knows how. The Radicals claim they would defend Kosovo better than the current government.

Concerning this policy, Le Figaro quotes one high UN official, who said:

Serbia will be “voluntarily raped”– namely, Belgrade will be required to declare the rape consensual after the fact, and then be given hush money by the rich playboy responsible for the act, in this case the EU.

Unpleasant, yes, and certainly not even the Western diplomats enjoy such open injustice and brutality, but no one sees another way of untangling the Kosovo knot.

An additional problem is that the various incentives the diplomats offer are far from convincing. Opening the perspective of European integrations to Serbia in return for its acceptance of independence is hardly credible. The Union is not open to further enlargement, and even if it were, only the entire region from Bosnia to Macedonia would be considered as a bloc. No one could even begin to guess when the entire region could satisfy even the minimal criteria for entry. Furthermore, none of the supposed conditions of Kosovo’s independence sound convincing, either. No conditional independence could restrain the Albanian extremiss. For, if the international community could not force them into moderation so far, it’s hard to see how it could do so in the future. The proposed ban on unification of Kosovo and Albania does not sound convincing either. Who could deny the Albanians the right to abolish the border separating them, and why would anyone try?

Under such circumstances, hardly any government in Serbia could accept the Western scenario of voluntary rape, even if it wanted to. But if Belgrade rejects this imposition and declares Kosovo occupied, as has been rumored, the consequences would be harsh and impossible to predict. Both for the Serbian people, in Kosovo and elsewhere, who would need tremendous strength to resist their own extremism as well as international political and economic pressure, and for the entire Balkans – as well as the international community, which would then have to face the consequences of its violation of basic rules governing the affairs between nations.

Together Longer

A joke I heard this morning:

A Montenegrin asks a Serb, "So, where are you going this summer?"
"Turkey," answers the Serb.
"Why?!" asks the Montenegrin in surprise, and a little insulted.
"The sea is cleaner, the beaches are nicer, the prices are better - and we had been in the same country a lot longer..." comes the response.

(thanks to Jelena)

Pots and Kettles

Lew Rockwell raises a valid question concerning the "trial" of Saddam Hussein: on what grounds, exactly, does one put a government on trial?

The essence of government is the right to obey a different set of laws from that which prevails in the rest of society. What we call the rule of law is really the rule of two laws: one for the state and one for everyone else.

Theft is illegal but taxation is not. Kidnapping is illegal but stop-loss orders are not. Counterfeiting is illegal but inflating the money supply is not. Lying about its budget is all in a day's work for the government, but the business that does that is shut down.

So this raises many questions. Under what law should the heads of governments be tried? If they are tried according to everyday moral law, they would all be in big trouble. Did you plot to steal the property of millions of people in the name of "taxing" them? Oh sure! Did you send people to kill and be killed in an aggressive war? Thousands! Did you mislead people about your spending? Every day! Did you water down the value of the money stock by electronically printing new money that you passed out to your friends? Hey, it's called central banking!

Judged by this standard, all states are guilty. And all heads of state are guilty of criminal wrongdoing if we are using a normal, everyday kind of moral standard to judge them. Thus are they all vulnerable.

To be clear, I'm not talking about states in our age, or just particular gangster states. I'm speaking of all states in all times, since by definition the state is permitted to engage in activities that if pursued privately would be considered egregious and intolerable.

So on what basis can one state put another state on trial? Yes, some regimes are worse than other regimes, but who is to decide and on what grounds?

Rockwell isn't a moral relativist - quite the contrary. He isn't advocating letting the government off the hook, but rather arguing against the hypocrisy of one government putting another on trial. "Pot, meet kettle," and all that.

When people like me raised that issue concerning the NATO-sponsored ICTY putting Slobodan Milosevic on trial, we got slammed for "defending the monster Milosevic," as if his misdeeds (both real and imagined) were somehow an excuse for outright war crimes committed by Clinton, Albright, Clark, Solana and the rest of that particular "joint criminal enterprise." When Rockwell and others criticize the show trial of Saddam Hussein and the occupation of Iraq, they are "countered" by "arguments" that Saddam was evil. Evil enough to justify starting an aggressive war, murdering tens of thousands, occupying a country, unleashing a jihad...?

I don't think so, and I wonder how anyone, in good conscience, can.

"Montenegrin" Victory

I don't suppose it will really matter if the 55.4% of votes supposedly giving Montenegro independence in this weekend's referendum are confirmed to be fair and square - the separatists have already declared victory, and the imperial media have already joined them in congratulations. I guess the world is safe, the global peril of Yugoslavia won't bother anyone any more.

Then again, even the New York Times notes that the "diaspora" from Brooklyn (i.e. Gusinje) may have been the deciding factor. It is buried down towards the bottom of the article, but it is there nonetheless. Something the NYT did not mention, however, is that while every pro-separatist "Montenegrin" was registered as a voter in the run-up to the referendum, tens of thousands who lived in Serbia were excluded from voting.

Three photographs came to me today (I have no idea who took them, when and where, so if anyone does, let me know). They show, beyond any doubt, that in addition to Serbs from Montenegro who backed secession for whatever reason, separatist voters were also Croats and Albanians.

Separatists carrying new flags of Montenegro are joined by a supporter sporting the Croatian flag.

Ethnic Albanians (a large bloc of pro-independence voters) wave Montenegrin and Albanian flags, celebrating secession.


Croat and Montenegrin flags, tied together, at an outdoor pro-independence event. Bosnian Muslim SDA party and the Croat HDZ had tied their flags together like this back in 1991...

I've got nothing against Croats, or Albanians, or Muslims (I won't call them "Bosniaks," that's just silly). But there is something wrong with their votes deciding the fate of Serbs in Montenegro. You see, "Montenegrin," like "Bosnian," is a territorial identity; until it was invented by the Communists, there was no "Montenegrin nation." (See here.) However, in the separatist drive to split from Serbia over the past 8-9 years, they've tried to assert a different language, church, even a completely separate ethnogenesis from the Serbs. The government of Milo Djukanovic has done everything in its power to deny its people their Serb identity.

As former Communists who pragmatically switched allegiances to first become "nationalists," then vassals of the Empire, denying their own ethnic identity did not come hard - they never had it to begin with. And now they are in charge of Montenegro, including the 300-odd thousand people who consider themselves ethnic Serbs, and still remember that Njegos, King Nikola and all the other great Montenegrins in history shared that sentiment.

One can only hope that their character and faith will be strong enough to withstand the systematic de-Serbification the separatists are about to begin. If they keep the faith, then perhaps those misguided "Montenegrins" will realize the value of their scorned heritage once their new "independent" state is taken over by folks who'd like to see Albania extend to Dubrovnik, or Croatia to Skadar, or Bosnia to the sea...

"We've already torched them all"

According to Belgrade daily Vecernje Novosti, Italian police released transcripts of wiretapped conversations between Albanian crime lords, boasting to each other of the "brave deeds" from the March 2004 pogrom:

Hazer: Why don't you ask your brother where he is?
Muharem: Why, you're in Mitrovica, right?
Hazer: No, I'm not in Mitrovica... We've torched all the churches in Prizren.
Muharem: Hell, torch them all!
Hazer: We've already torched them all, turn on the television so you can see them burning!
Muharem: I just turned it on.
Hazer: They're showing Prizren right now... All the church have been torched, not one is left.

(Serbian original here.)

Yes, obviously, such "humanitarian" acts and sentiments should absolutely be rewarded by an ethnically cleansed independent state.

How much is truth worth?

I know Balkan Express has been on-and-off lately, but if you'd like to keep reading it, you may want to consider sending a contribution to Antiwar.com. Think about it - you fund Imperial propaganda every time you buy a mainstream newspaper. How much do you value the ability to read something different? Perhaps we don't know the true value of things till they are gone - but by then it is too late.

http://antiwar.com/donate

"Undertakers of Bosnia"

After the narrow defeat of the proposed constitutional amendments in the Bosnian legislature last week, the Social-democratic Party of Bosnia plastered the country with posters showing the "undertakers of European Bosnia" - the faces of 16 delegates whose votes defeated the proposal (see photo below).

Legislators who voted against the "April package" constitutional reforms. Source: SDP BiH

Now to see whether the choice of these men and women will have any effect on their candidacies in the general elections this fall. If not, then perhaps Bosnians have the exact kind of government they deserve...

Sovietization of America

The problem with being jaded is that few things surprise and outrage any more. For instance, when I saw what Dick Cheney said in Vilnius last week, I thought "How typical," rather than "Dear God, who does this man think he is!?"

But then, that's precisely what the advocates of Empire and its nefarious workings desire: that we should become weary and complacent - and always, always fearful of the world, from which only the Empire can protect us.

So I'm grateful Justin Raimondo is still capable of crying "bullshit" and letting slip the words of criticism. In his Friday column, "Comrade Cheney vs. President Putin : The Sovietization of American foreign policy," there's nothing I would not have written myself. And I should have.

Democratic Censorship

Last night (April 25), Serbian authorities forcibly closed BK Television. According to the ANEM (Independent Electronic Media Association), this was done on the orders of the Broadcast Council, following BK's criticism of the council's allocation of public frequencies.

There's so much wrong with this picture, it's hard to pick a place to start. First of all, the existence of the Broadcast Council, modeled after the FCC, is an abomination. How can any country have media that are free and independent of government pressure if a government regulatory agency can yank their license or levy fines on them if their content is deemed "inappropriate"? Long and short of it is - it can't.

Second, there's such a thing as due process - or at least there should be. The government should not have the power to simply send over the cops and shut down a TV station, or a newspaper - or anything, really - without properly filed warrants that could be contested in court. Something all too many people aren't aware of is that laws (starting from the Constitution onward) exist to protect them from the government, not the other way around.

This isn't about BKTV - I've hardly ever seen their programming, and its content is frankly irrelevant; if content were grounds for government censorship, B92 would have been eligible for shutdown ages ago (as if that will ever happen to the flagship of Imperial/Jacobin propaganda...). Making its protest a "Yes, but" criticism, ANEM says that the Broadcast Council "is faced with the difficult task of bringing order to the chaotic situation in the Serbian media sector and will have to make many difficult and unpopular decisions..." But what is so chaotic about the Serbian media sector that requires government "ordering," with police batons no less? How is that morally different from the Milosevic-era Media Law that was held up as the paragon of oppression?

I thank God and human ingenuity that with the advent of the Internet age, the whole mainstream-media model is becoming rapidly obsolete, and that soon enough people will be able to generate and distribute information and entertainment content directly to consumers, without government licensing, censorship or "ordering." Yes, this will require readers/viewers to actually think for themselves and decide whether their sources of information are credible or not. But considering how many people buy into outright lies at worst and negligent stupidity at best, only because it comes from the mainstream newspapers and TV, that can only be a good thing.

Absence explained

I've been in Bosnia for the past three weeks, and deprived of reliable internet access, so I haven't been able to post anything about the funeral of Slobodan Milosevic, the elections in Belarus, the Montenegro vote-buying scandal, or even the Bosnian constitutional reform (boring though it may sound, it was actually quite an interesting topic).

Now that I am back Stateside, I'll post some thoughts in the days to come.

Les pieds d'argile

While in Bosnia-Herzegovina this past month, I saw reports of student riots in France over the new employment law, and thought: "Wait a minute... they object to the possibility of being fired, even though they haven't been allowed to work at all before?" Reading up on the French labor laws confirmed my original snap judgment: the minds of the French seem to have been permanently addled by the welfare-state intoxication.

I've nothing to add to Alan Bock's excellent analysis of the situation, except perhaps to recall a post from last year, invoking a Sci-fi analogy to describe the EUSSR. The "People's Republic of Haven," much like France - and its brainchild, the EU - is a giant with the feet of clay.

Chasing a Non-Story

A strange story appeared in the New York Times on March 5. (A version of the story also ran in Australia's The Age the following day. However, The Age's version leaves out the most interesting part, so it's somewhat less useful here.)

Nicholas Wood, writing from Novi Sad, tells of a bizarre incident in which a family was told its father had passed away, only to find representatives of a private funeral home at their doorstep minutes after the hospital's call. Only trouble was, the patriarch was not dead - merely transferred to another ward, and the nurse, seeing the empty bed, jumped to conclusion. She also, allegedly, called the funeral home with the tip, so she could get a "finder's fee." The funeral home director denies the existence of such an arrangement, but Wood's sources in Serbian healthcare testify it is commonplace.

So far, it's a relatively harmless exercise in scorn ("OMG, Serbia's healthcare is so corrupt, nurses call funeral homes to get paid for dead people! Such savages!"), the kind of which wafts from every NYT article about Serbs and Serbia. But then Wood decides to take it to the next level:

"The collusion between health workers and funeral homes echoes a scandal that emerged in Zodz, Poland, in 2002. Prosecutors there investigated a similar trade and found that ambulance workers were deliberately arriving late at emergencies to increase their chances of finding business for funeral homes.

Prosecutors also discovered the widespread use of a muscle relaxant, which they believe was used to kill patients. Two doctors and two ambulance workers are on trial charged in the deaths of 18 people.

No evidence of such practices has come to light in Serbia..."

So, an ethically dubious practice of alerting funeral homes of deaths in hospitals has, in Nick Wood's mind, a lot in common with a criminal affair in Poland, where healthcare workers actually murdered their patients or deliberately allowed them to die. What exactly is the correlation? There isn't any. Oh, but Wood's choice of phrase ("No evidence... has come to light") implies that something like that may have happened in Serbia, it's just that no evidence has been found, yet. A false analogy, garnished with slick verbiage, leaving the impression that Serbian health workers are so corrupt, they are killing their own patients for a payout from funeral homes. Of course, Wood's story claims no such thing; but if it didn't mean to suggest it, why in the heavens did he mention the completely different, unrelated affair in Poland?

This reeks of the same technique used when mentioning "Srebrenica" in the mainstream press, where the (inaccurate) mention of "8000 unarmed men and boys" is inevitably followed with the qualifier, "the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II." And since it's part of the world's collective consciousness that WWII = the Holocaust, there is the Srebrenica = Holocaust (hence Serbs = Nazis) parallel the figure of speech is meant to invoke.

I have no idea how NYT decides on headlines; those choices are probably made in a New York newsroom, not by field reporters like Wood. This one was, "In Serbia, Deaths Set Off a Lucrative Race for Profit." It is by no means an ode to free enterprise (funeral homes), but a piece of filthy propaganda aimed to suggest that Serbs profit from death. The original non-story (nurses tip off funeral directors; amusing, but not criminal) is thus transformed into a vessel for demonization.

Think I'm reading too much into it? If you replaced "Serb" and "Serbian" with, say, "Kenya" or "Kenyan", there'd be an outcry that NYT engaged in racism. But Serbs, man, them you are allowed to hate. Doesn't everybody?

Our Man Agim

Prologue: Tuesday afternoon I received a phone call from a friend in Washington, who told me of information from a trusted source that Bajram Kosumi, "Prime minister" of the provisional Albanian government of occupied Kosovo, will be forced to resign and replaced by than Agim Ceku. 
"Can they do that?" my friend asked. 
"Sure they can, " I replied. "They are the Empire, and Kosumi is a client; they can do anything in Kosovo." 
Well, except protect non-Albanians, their property and culture, anyway - but why belabor the obvious?

On Wednesday, Reuters reported that Kosovo PM Bajram Kosumi resigned from office, "under pressure" from "Western mentor states shepherding the U.N.-run Serbian province through talks that could lead to its independence." UN's viceroy and steadfast partisan of the Albanian cause, Soeren Jessen-Petersen, commented: "...we want to support Kosovo, but at the same time we want the leaders and the people to work very, very hard to earn that which they want to see in Kosovo."

(Handy translation: We = Empire; Kosovo = Albanians. Carry on.)

And sure enough, Kosumi's successor is Agim Ceku, the butcher of Krajina and the highest-ranking "military" commander of the terrorist KLA (Hashim "Snake" Thaci was its political leader). He is a natural choice to fill the shoes of Ramush "Golden Boy" Haradinaj, another KLA veteran who resigned as Prime Minister last March to face charges before the Hague Inqusition - which promptly released him and sent him back to Kosovo. Writes Chris Deliso of Balkanalysis.com:

"There's certainly no one as good as Ceku at removing 'unnecessary delays,' especially if it involves removing unnecessary populations."

So let's review here. First Bush II adopts a Balkans policy strategy written by the Clintonites, which amounts to secession of Kosovo, secession of Montenegro, a Muslim-dominated centralized Bosnia and preferably the smallest, weakest Serbia imaginable. Then Kai Eide, the Whitewasher of March, green-lights the final-status talks despite the UN standards (from "standards before status") manifestly nowhere near being met. Then Martti Ahtisaari, who was instrumental in tricking Belgrade to sign a truce in 1999 that NATO interpreted as unconditional surrender of Kosovo, and who then joined the Serbophobic and pro-Albanian ICG, is chosen to chair the negotiations. Then, following the death and beatification of Ibrahim Rugova, American and UK diplomats openly declare that independence of "Kosova" is inevitable, and Belgrade should deal with it. Now the "international community" shows the precise extent to which it controls the Kosovo Albanians, by forcing their top officials (Nexhat Daci, speaker of the Albanian parliament, was also forced to resign) out to make way for their KLA pets.

Despite his involvement in the deliberate slaughter of Serb civilians in present-day Croatia (for which the Inquisition has hounded his immediate superior, Ante Gotovina), Ceku not only didn't get indicted, he was put on UN payroll as commander of the "Kosovo Protection Corps," a sinecure for KLA veterans established after the occupation. When Ceku was arrested on a stopover in Slovenia, on a perfectly valid and legal Interpol warrant based on criminal charges in Serbia, he was bailed out by Viceroy Harri Holkeri who declared that "Serbia-Montenegro no longer had jurisdiction over the citizens [sic] of Kosovo." Holkeri displayed no such decisiveness during the Albanian Kristallnacht a few months later, hiding instead with the best of the rabbits.

After all this, can anyone in Belgrade who still has even a single functioning brain cell honestly believe that the "international community" (i.e. Washington, Brussels and satellites) has anything but an Albanian "Kosova" in mind? There is no doubt about it any more.

The plot to separate Kosovo from Serbia de jure as well as de facto should be the primary concern of whoever heads the government in Belgrade. Not chasing Ratko Mladic, or negotiating the possibility of a theoretical consideration of a promise to maybe negotiate the notion of eventually entering the EU - the preservation of Serbia's territorial integrity, here and now. Acquiescing to the "independence" of "Kosova" is treason. Trouble is, these days treason is trendy in Belgrade. It's progressive, civilized, "democratic" even...

Left, Right and Liberty

From an essay by Anthony Gregory, today at LRC:

To love liberty is to oppose the state’s timeless assault on it, whether wearing the cloak of tradition and cheered on by bloodthirsty generals, corporate suits and social conservatives, or donning the mask of humanitarianism and equality and trailed by a parade of social workers, bureaucrats, unionists, humanities professors and multilateral warmongers. [...] But the ugly thing about politics is, no matter how unsavory one side gets as it is exercising and vying for power, the power itself can always corrupt the other side. Left and right can turn on a dime, but the potential of the state itself to grow and worsen is ultimately constrained only by the laws of economics, by human nature, and by a public opinion inclined to resist the state’s advances, regardless of the garb it wears.

Cartoon Controversy

So, a Danish newspaper prints cartoons of Islam's prophet Muhammad several months ago, and the issue flares up two weeks ago into mass protests, flag-burnings, death threats, boycotts, attacks on embassies and missions...

One of the common misconceptions in mainstream reports about the "cartoon row" is that Muslims in the Middle East and elsewhere did not riot because some of the cartoons depicted Muhammad in an unflattering manner, but because they depicted Muhammad at all. Visual depiction of Muhammad is strictly forbidden under Islamic law.

Fair enough - but Denmark, Europe, and the US for that matter, don't live under Islamic law, do they? In fact, they follow a set of laws protecting the freedom of expression (at least on paper). So in these countries, depiction of Muhammad - while some may consider it sinful - is not illegal.

This is where ignorance comes in. See, the cartoons were commissioned as commentary on self-censorship by illustrators who balked at drawing Muhammad for a children's book, fearful of provoking just this sort of reaction. Ironically, the book was supposed to teach Danish children tolerance towards Islam. But whoever was behind it obviously had no clue whatsoever that Muslims consider visual representations of their prophet a sin. Nor were they aware that in Islam, sin and crime and pretty much one and the same, because it is not just a faith, it is a social order. And not just that - it is a universal faith and social order, considered by its followers to be the ultimate divine revelation. Islam respects Judaism and Christianity's right to exist insofar as they are considered previous, "flawed" revelations of the divine message. As such, they get special, second-class status in Islamic societies, while all other faiths are deemed idolatrous and condemned to extermination. But they are not, under any circumstances, ever considered equal to Islam.

And because Islam considers itself universal and ultimate, it does not allow for coexistence with other social, religious or political systems: the dar-al-Islam is in constant conflict with dar-al-harb, the dark world of infidels who dare not accept the final revelation of god. To tell a Muslim that he should tolerate the freedom of a Dane to draw a picture of Muhammad is absurd; the injunction against it is at the heart of Islam, and thus applies everywhere, to everyone, especially the infidels. To deny the universal and ultimate character of Islam is to become apostate - and Islamic law says apostasy is punishable by death.

That is not to say that burning Danish embassies is the only response available to Muslims. Though violence in the name of the faith is considered a sacred charge, Muslims had many choices in how to react to the publication. Someone might have written to the editor and said, "Look, you are infidels and you do not understand. Any depiction of the Prophet is sacrilege to us, and we ask you to respect that." In today's West, obsessed with political correctness and "human rights," do you think anyone would deny this request?

But those who chose to make the cartoons into a focal point of mob violence did so on purpose. They wanted the riots, craved the outrage, desired violence, as it promoted their position within Islam as advocates of jihad against the West. The violence also played up old racist animosities; it should not surprise that Iranian papers thought a fitting response would be a cartoon depicting Anne Frank in bed with Hitler.

In a battle between free speech and "multi-culturalism," in today's Europe, free speech is bound to lose. The post-modern, post-Christian West simply cannot comprehend a religion like Islam, whose followers resort to aggression and murder at the smallest slight. Christians don't burn embassies when someone exhibits a crucifix soaked in urine, do they? Which goes to explain why Christianity is under constant attack by the secular state, and Islam is appeased at every step.

Again, the post-modern, post-Christian society running the West has only one religion - power - and only one saint, violence. Force is the only thing they worship, and the only thing they respect. When Christians are offended by something, they protest with words, and are answered with mockery. When Muslims are offended, people die - and Muslims are answered with apologies and claptrap about sensitivity, respect and tolerance: words they see in a completely different context, one the post-religious West doesn't understand.

Something you can do

It's a twisted, crazy, surreal world we live in, where guardians of Official Truth are telling us things are exactly the opposite of what they appear to be. Oppression is celebrated as liberty and liberty denigrated as treason. Patriotism is labeled criminal, and nihilistic globalism celebrated as progress. What you see, hear and read in the media often contradicts itself, let alone independent observation.

What can one do against such vile corruption? Refuse to accept it, of course. Seek out the truth, wherever it may still survive, and challenge the lies. One way to do this is to support those who challenge the Official Truth: Antiwar.com and LewRockwell.com, to name just two.

Ask youself: how much is liberty worth to you? How much should the truth cost? What is the price of sanity? Then reach into your wallet, or don't. It's up to you - and it should be. You fund the omnipotent state, the perpetual war and perpetual inflation because you have to; the government takes your money no matter what. But you can choose to fight it. This is one way.

Decide.

A Glaring Omission

There is an excellent piece by H. Arthur Scott Trask on LRC today, dealing with the state of perpetual war so beloved of the Imperial government these days. It makes a lot of good points about the Cold War, the imperial mentality and the current "war" on terrorism or whatnot. But it makes one glaring omission: the Balkans.

In Trask's piece, 9-11 follows the 1991 Gulf War, drawing on the continuity between the Bushes. I beg to differ. It was Clinton who ran on an interventionist platform in 1992, and presided over the transformation of NATO into an aggressive alliance, first in Bosnia (1995) then Serbia (1999). It was Clinton who sent troops into Somalia and Haiti, and waged a lengthy air war on Iraq from 1998-99 (stopping only to switch to Serbia). British historian Kate Hudson saw this in 2003, when she called attention to a "pattern of aggression" characterizing the US foreign policy.

Another important aspect of Balkans interventions is that they were gradual. Involvement in Bosnia began as one demilitarized zone for humanitarian aid delivery (Sarajevo airport), then expanded to the no-fly zone, "safe havens," punitive air strikes, and finally a joint military operation with local proxy forces on the ground. Then that precedent was used in 1998 to threaten Serbia over Kosovo, and ratcheted up to full conventional war in March 1999, without even a fig leaf of UN authorization. "Desert Storm" was grounded in international law and authorized by the UN; "Allied Force" was emphatically neither. Can anyone seriously argue that without all those precedents, it would have been possible for Bush II to invade Iraq in the manner he did?

It isn't just the "neocons" that are the problem. Clinton's wars were engineered by "neoliberals," while the neocons cheered on. Both are united in the cause of American Empire, which is the problem. Much as I agree with Trask's article, and the points it's making, I don't see how anyone can fully understand how the Empire came about after the end of the Cold War if the ground-work done in the 1990s isn't at least mentioned. That, rather than personal attachments to the region, is the primary reason I still write about the Balkans.

Better to lose

From an excellent post by Chris Deliso over on Balkanalysis:

"Today we live in an imperial moment like any other. And when it becomes necessary to grovel at the feet of empire to curry favor, those who have neither self-respect nor an interest in self-reliance always win. Sometimes it's better to lose."

Perhaps it is worth noting that people who habitually grovel before empires are triumphant only temporarily; as soon as their patrons are defeated, so is their cause - and they seek out another sponsor (usually ending up doing their bidding in the process; it's how it works). Any sort of lasting achievement comes from those who stand with honor and dignity.

Something to think about.

AI, UPI and "job cleansing"

Amnesty International warned this week that ethnic discrimination in employment is still a problem in Bosnia. Specifically, the advocacy group said, the issue of unlawful terminations in 1992 prevents many people from returning to their homes and resuming their lives.

AI names both the Serb Republic and the Muslim-Croat Federation as culprits, saying that neither have done much to resolve the problem. But to hear United Press International (UPI) tell the story, AI has placed the blame squarely on the Serbs, who "block Muslims" from returning home and to work (see here).

I can see how it happened. The UPI story quotes this part of the AI statement: "Discriminatory dismissals were in many cases the first step in aggressive campaigns of 'ethnic cleansing'....which included killings, forcible transfers and deportations." So, since everybody knows that only Serbs engaged in "ethnic cleansing" and that Muslims were solely their innocent victims...

The truth, of course, is rather different. I know it from personal experience. In those chaotic early months of the war, every side was systematically purging "undesirables" from all public posts. The Muslim regime in Sarajevo kept some Serbs and Croats around for propaganda purposes, but they had no actual authority. After establishing the perception of "multi-cultural, tolerant" Muslims being victimized by "racist, genocidal" Serbs, Izetbegovic purged even those token infidels from his government.

While the media and "human rights" groups often cry crocodile tears about the refugee returns in the Serb Republic, the fact that Muslim and Croat parts of Bosnia are conspicuously devoid of Serbs even now, ten years after the war's end, is often ignored completely. After all, everybody knows...

Boris Tadic just doesn't get it

Serbian president Boris Tadic really doesn't know when to sit down and shut up. True enough, few politicians do - but this one makes choking on his own foot a veritable art form.

It's bad enough that he wanted to go to Kosovo to attend the funeral of Albanian separatist leader Ibrahim Rugova (who is being buried today at the KLA "martyrs' cemetery" in a ceremony celebrating not so much the man, but the idea of Greater Albania), and that he "requested permission" to do so from the UN occupation authorities. Now that the UN hasn't responded one way or another, but the Albanians have erupted in howls of protest about how Tadic - or any other filthy, criminal, disgusting, evil Serb - is not welcome to Rugova's funeral, or to their precious "Kosova" for that matter, Tadic "deeply regrets" it. Not asking permission to visit his own territory, or wishing to support Albanian separatism, but the fact that Albanians have snubbed him so.

According to the AP, Tadic issued a statement Wednesday saying that he "respected the stand of the Rugova family to whom the 'presence of a Serbian president was unacceptable',” and that his "desire was to pay respects to a man who was of a different political persuasion than myself, but who campaigned peacefully for his ideas and who was the legitimate representative of the Kosovo Albanians.”

Where to begin...? I do hope that Tadic is "of a different political persuasion" than Rugova - that is, that the current president of Serbia doesn't share Rugova's ideal of forcible separation of Kosovo from Serbia, involving by necessity the disposal of non-Albanians (Serbs, first and foremost) from the territory. And though many people - including the mainstream Serbian media and politicians - persist in the misconception that Rugova was a pacifist, it is worth noting that the crux of Rugova's strategy was never to negotiate, deal or otherwise engage the Serbs, but to get someone else (specifically, the American Empire) to achieve Albanian goals for them. It is worth noting that the "pacifist" Rugova also had an "army" (FARK) that was eventually absorbed by the KLA simply because the KLA had stronger foreign backing.

Tadic went on to say that, "Unfortunately neither political representatives of the Kosovo Albanians nor the international community realized what a chance this was for us to start changing relations between Serbs and (ethnic) Albanians.”

Let's face it, between the shameless cheer-leading for the separatist cause by viceroy Jessen-Petersen, and the ever-present fear of UNMIK that rampaging Albanians mobs might go medieval on them at the next perceived slight (much as they did to Serbs in 2004 and before), it should be obvious to a blind man that UNMIK doesn't give a rotting roadkill's posterior for Serb-Albanian relations. And neither do the Albanians, if the vitriolic response to Tadic's offer is anything to judge by.

Tadic himself, however, doesn't get it. “If the presence of a Serbian president at a funeral in Pristina is unacceptable, the begging question is whether we are acceptable to one another and whether we shall ever be so in the future,” he said (AP).

Judging by a lengthy history of Albanian violence against the Serbs in Kosovo; the establishment of "Greater Albania" including that territory in 1941-45; the periodic riots demanding independence since 1945; the emergence of the KLA and the NATO aggression in 1999; and the subsequent ethnic cleansing of Serbs ever since - should there be any doubt in anyone's mind that the majority of Kosovo Albanians have decided that no, Serbs are not acceptable to them in any way, shape or form? Not even when they come to validate their separatist agenda, making a complete mockery of themselves (as Tadic would have done)?

That's some powerful hatred there, folks. And Boris Tadic is either too naive, or unbelievably stupid not to see it. Neither of which is exactly a desirable characteristic in a president, however ceremonial his post might be.

Albanians 1, Tadic 0

The not-unexpected death of Ibrahim Rugova last weekend may have delayed the sham talks about the separation of occupied Kosovo, but is, predictably, being used to make that separation just about inevitable. It has also offered yet another opportunity for Serbian president Boris Tadic to humiliate himself and the nation he supposedly represents.

As Reuters reports, Tadic "made a request" to attend Rugova's funeral, and was rejected by the outraged Albanians, who saw this as an insult and provocation. After all, Reuters continues, "the Albanian majority rejects any return to Serb rule after years of discrimination and often violent repression."

First of all, if Tadic really believed Kosovo was Serbian territory, he would not be asking permission to visit - not of KFOR or UNMIK, but especially not of the separatist, Albanian "provisional government." Secondly, why would he, or any other Serbian official, want to attend the funeral of a separatist leader like Rugova, especially when it will be taking place at a KLA cemetery?! Last time I checked, Serbia was still classifying the KLA as a terrorist organization. So how does the president going to a terrorist monument (KLA cemetery) to pay homage to a terrorist ally (Rugova) represent anything remotely legal, legitimate, constitutional or proper?

Oh, some may quibble that Rugova was really opposed to the KLA, a pacifist, a democrat and whatnot. Did he fight for an independent "Kosova"? Yes. Does the KLA? It does. Did Rugova ally himself with the KLA as "president" of the occupation government? He sure did (Ramush Haradinaj's AAK is part of the "government" with Rugova's LDK). QED.

Which brings us back to Tadic. A man who has shown himself to be a sycophant of the Empire, with a penchant for posturing in just the wrong way, in the wrong place, at the wrong time (Srebrenica commemoration, anyone?), has gone and done it again. I don't much care that he's embarrassing himself - stupidity like that deserves a comeuppance - but that, through the misfortune of being the president of Serbia, he gets to project that embarrassment onto an entire nation.

Blackened by the vilest propaganda as the intellectual heirs of the Third Reich, blockaded, bombed and put on show trials by kangaroo courts and two-bit hack journalists, displaced from homes, stripped of rights and land - all over the past 15 years of "democracy" and "liberation" by the Empire - the Serbs at least had some remaining dignity in their tragedy. Boris Tadic and others like him are working real hard to destroy that dignity. Makes me wonder if they are doing it on purpose.

Without A Doubt

The choice of Martti Ahtisaari to lead the "negotiations" over the fate of occupied Kosovo should have been yet another warning sign to anyone in Serbia still in possession of a shred of sanity. The Finn was not only instrumental in "negotiating" a ceasefire in 1999 that NATO proceeded to treat as unconditional surrender, he proceeded to serve on the board of the International Crisis Group along with Gen. Wesley Clark. Even without Clark, the ICG has established itself as a violently Serbophobic supporter of Imperial intervention in the Balkans, and its platform of independence for (Albanian) Kosovo, separatist Montenegro and centralized Bosnia has been adopted as official US policy back in May.

Given all that, there should be absolutely no doubt as to what "status" he - or more accurately, the interests he represents - will work towards when the "talks" start next year. After Rambouillet, the bombing, and the occupation (with its ethnic cleansing and plunder), can anyone still seriously believe the "international community" (i.e. the Empire) will not award Kosovo to the Albanians? Of course, since the Empire wants to keep Albanians in its thrall, the process won't be quick, straightforward or simple; there will be many strings attached. But the intent is clear, beyond reasonable doubt.

Ahtisaari himself dropped another clue yesterday, telling reporters in Pristina how he could envision Kosovo as self-sufficient. "I think there is in the future the possibility for sustainable economic development," he's quoted by Reuters. Kosovo has abundant natural resources, and "(e)veryone wants to create conditions in which these can be properly exploited."

This is so self-explanatory, it doesn't need further comment. What does, however, is the idiotic "logic" of the witless quislings in Belgrade, who instead of making their case for Kosovo on grounds of law, sovereignty and principle prattle on about "preserving stability" and "endangering democracy" and how and independent Kosovo would not be self-sufficient.

Ahtisaari has just done a hatchet job on that last "argument," while the previous two are entirely vacuous to begin with. "Stability" and "democracy" are whatever the Empire says they are. Why would every report on Kosovo mention the "90% Albanian majority" if not to create the impression their desire for independence is democratic? (democracy = majority rule) As for stability... who is it that threatens violence and bloodshed if they don't get their way, Serbs or Albanians? Right. So, keeping the Albanians from getting medieval serves the interests of stability far better than not sticking it to the Serbs. They aren't likely to go on a rampage, set roadside and suicide bombs, or assassinate people, after all.

Ahtisaari's slip - or was it? - about Kosovo's abundant resources should be the final tip-off to everyone with even a single functioning brain cell as to what the "international community" intends to do. The real question now is how to stop it.

Freedom, Real and Imagined

From an article by Joseph Sobran, titled National Socialism Comes to America:

"Americans are still permitted to do a great many things, though not as many things as their ancestors could take for granted. Fine. But permission isn’t freedom. The privilege of a subject isn’t the right of a free man. If you can own only what the government permits you to own, then in essence the government owns you. We no longer tell the state what our rights are; it tells us.

Such is the servitude Americans are now accustomed to under an increasingly bureaucratic state. Permission, often in the form of legal licensing, is the residue of the old freedom; but we’re supposed to think that this is still “the land of the free,” and that we owe our freedom to the state, its laws, and especially its wars. The more the state grows — that is, the more it fulfills the character of national socialism — the freer we’re told we are."

These past several weeks, while I wasn't posting on the blog, I've been thinking about the American bureaucratic state and comparing it to the Socialist Yugoslavia of my youth. Back then, people had a distrust of government born out of many failed promises, and decades of experience with "gaming" the bureaucratic system to provide themselves and their relatives the services (monopolized by the state, and therefore both unreliable and shabby) they needed. We understood we were better of than Soviet client-states and even the USSR itself, but few fully realized the reason for that was a higher degree of economic liberty. To further complicate things, much of our "prosperity" was a result of easy credit, fueled by IMF and World Bank loans.

Now I look at the country where I've lived for almost 10 years, and I see the same state-supremacist thinking I grew up with in Socialism, the same credit boondoggles that preceded my country's downfall, the same bureaucratic incompetence that we used to joke about, then circumvent (something not easily achieved here). Add to that the gargantuan military, the National Security state, and a dictatorial Emperor - um, President, yes - and a population 10 times that of Yugoslavia in 1991, and the problems that killed my country are that much more amplified in this one.

But hey, people believe they are free - even though that word has lost all its meaning for them long ago. If you're completely oblivious to something, you can't really miss it when it disappears, right?

Extortion's New Name

According to Financial Times, it's "incentive."

Reporting on the Congressional hearing in which the State Department's Balkans point-man Nicholas Burns first overtly mentioned that Serbia's entry into EU and NATO would depend on the "successful outcome" of Kosovo talks, FT explained Burns's threat as "incentive" to Belgrade. Their headline declared: "US backs Kosovo incentives for Serbs."

Even Reuters was more honest, calling it a "new U.S. demand on Belgrade."

I don't doubt in the least that the sycophantic lowlives running Serbia will point to this "incentive" as a "necessary precondition for entering Euro-Atlantic integration and creating a normal, democratic state" or some such fatuous nonsense.

Let's review the situation:

• The UN abandoned its own policy of "Standards before status," though it only required a pretense of tolerance on part of the Kosovo Albanians, and they refused to show even that. The same envoy who whitewashed the 2004 pogrom now recommended the final status talks;
  
• Kosovo viceroy and OSCE have been coaching Albanian negotiators;
• the government of Bush II has adopted a Balkans policy crafted by Clinton-era officials, notably Nicholas Burns and Richard Holbrooke (who was once again in the Balkans recently as official US envoy);
• The UN envoy charged with Kosovo talks is Martti Ahtisaari, the former president of Finland who was instrumental in deceiving the Milosevic government into surrendering Kosovo to NATO in 1999, and has since served on the ICG board with Wesley Clark and other interventionists;
  
• The ICG, created in the heyday of Clinton interventionism, has consistently advocated the independence of Kosovo, centralization of Bosnia and secession of Montenegro - all of which have now become part of the official U.S. policy;
• Serbia's membership in EU and NATO - a remote prospect at best, and on careful analysis actually undesirable - is now being conditioned by the separation of Kosovo and Montenegro, just as Holbrooke and the ICG have been saying for years.
  

Coincidence? There is no such thing in politics.

It should be intuitively obvious to even the most casual observer what the Empire's intentions are concerning the Balkans, and specifically the Serbs. If the unelected rulers of Serbia refuse to see it, perhaps it is time for Serbia to get new rulers. While there is still any Serbia left.

A Birthday Gift

A month from now, Antiwar.com will be 10 years old. It was set up as a protest against Bill Clinton's interventionism in the Balkans, and has continued to oppose the military (and political) violence by the emergent American Empire ever since.

Unlike many situational opponents of particular foreign adventures, Antiwar.com opposes foreign intervention on principle, arguing that it goes not only against the Constitution and other laws, but against the true American values. They have opposed Emperor Clinton as well as Emperor Dubya, the war in Kosovo as well as that in Iraq; and will, no doubt, oppose any future emperor and his or her wars.

I've been a columnist there since late 2000, and my 231st piece ran yesterday.

Antiwar.com is running their quarterly Pledge Drive this week. They are counting on their readers, freedom-lovers and opponents of aggression to put their money where their values are. Don't think of it as a donation - think of it as a subscription, a payment for the value you are receiving from reading news, commentary and blog posts that tell you what the mainstream media tries to omit, reveal what the powers that be want hidden, and spread the word about things the Empire would rather be kept silent.

If you value the service Antiwar.com provides, you'll go over to the site and make your contribution. You pay a lot more to get "news" from the mainstream, and you know well enough how truthful and honest those are. So go ahead, vote with your wallet. Whatever the Empire may say or do, that right, that choice, is still yours.

Recycled Lies

Here is the current mandatory propaganda meme in stories by Reuters, tracked across several articles:

"Kosovo has been run by the United Nations since 1999, when NATO bombing forced then-President Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw his forces. Some 10,000 civilians were killed during his two-year crackdown on an Albanian guerrilla insurgency.

Kosovo’s 90-percent Albanian majority has been clamoring for independence ever since."

There are at least four things here that, mildly put, do not correspond with reality. First, the phrase "his forces," referring to Slobodan Milosevic, as if the Serbian police and the Yugoslav Army were his private institutions. Nobody calls the U.S. troops in Iraq "George Bush's forces," especially not Reuters.

Second, the "factoid" that "10,000 civilians were killed" in Kosovo is an absolute, unvarnished lie. Not only has the number of dead associated in any manner with the terrorist campaign of the KLA and the NATO bombing never exceeded 3,000, a substantial portion of that were KLA bandits. Are they to be counted as "civilians"? What about the actual civilians, Serb and Albanian, murdered by the KLA, or killed by NATO? Reuters here clearly misrepresents both the number of dead and their identity.

As for the last sentence, which often stands as a paragraph of its own, it is both inaccurate and deceptive. Kosovo only became 90% Albanian through the ethnic cleansing of Serbs and birth rates far exceeding those in Albania or Macedonia, and only in the latter part of the 20th century, specifically during the period when the province was under control of ethnic Albanians (whether of the Communist or fascist variety). It is specious to posit Albanian numerical superiority as the basis of their claim for independence, without noting how it came into being.

Finally, the Albanians of Kosovo have not been "clamoring for independence" since 1999, but since 1981, or even earlier. This claim is completely fabricated.

Now look at the meme in its entirety: It is geared to insinuate (and none too subtly) that Milosevic personally oppressed and mass-murdered the Albanians of Kosovo, the majority in the region, until NATO and the UN came to their rescue in 1999. On that basis, the Albanians are asking for independence. Presented with such an argument, who wouldn't be sympathetic to their claim? And that is precisely the purpose of this confabulation.

Why Governments Torture

Charles Featherstone is fast becoming one of my favorite LRC writers. Here's an excerpt from his piece on government and torture, published today:

"[Governments] don't torture because of need. Governments torture to humiliate and destroy. They torture to strip a person of his humanity, to make him or her face unrestrained state power alone, unaided and helpless. States torture and kill because they can, because even if the state isn't really God, it can play God by taking life when it pleases and how it chooses. Because it is a way to annihilate a human being, slowly, one atom at a time."

Returning the "favor"

A friend directed to my attention this afternoon to a new blog, Balkans Without Borders, billed as "Helping to make the world into what the world is making of the Balkans." I'm guessing it grew out of frustration with the Imperial policy in the peninsula - towards the Serbs in particular - and was inspired by the ongoing riots in France.

Today's "Protest to Mr. Jacques Chirac, President of the French Republic..." turns the Imperial rhetoric back against its authors, claiming that if Serbia has lost its right to Kosovo because of alleged excessive force against its Albanian immigrants, surely the French have relinquished their right to Paris for the same exact reason.

Of course, the wonderful send-up of imperial "logic" won't make an impression on the policymakers, who seem to universally believe in the "Abramowitz doctrine" of arbitrary principle. Nonetheless, it might shake awake at least some of the people - both in the Balkans and in the West - who still believe the nonsensical drivel that is the Official Truth.

Because the Empire really is bent on creating a global Balkans, with or without this witty blogger's help.

Tragedies in the Lives of Nations

Fans of Hoppean history should rejoice, says Jørn K. Baltzersen today on LRC, over the new book by Dr. Matthew Raphael Johnson, "The Third Rome: Holy Russia, Tsarism and Orthodoxy," published by the Foundation for Economic Liberty.

On this anniversary of Red October, Dr. Johnson's book mourns for the world that was lost when the Russian tsarist government was destroyed by Communism. His book examines and explodes the myths about Russia in the West, some generated by Communists and others engendered by prejudice towards Orthodoxy, and reveals the Romanov empire as far more liberal than Western Europe at the time (the tax rate comparison in particular is very instructive).

It is doubtful that the Romanov Russia can be restored. Communism and "transition" have left their marks, and the future generations of Russians (provided there are any) will have to cope with them. But they - and other nations whose histories were altered by this destructive creed - would do well to seek clues to this healing process in their own history, tradition, culture and faith, rather than aping the present-day imperial West.

As Worthless as Dollars

Here is what James Grant wrote in the New York Times on October 26 this year, commenting on the choice of Ben Bernanke as the new Fed Chairman:

"...the post-1971 dollar is purely faith-based. Not since the Nixon years has a holder of dollars had the privilege of exchanging them for a statutory weight of gold. Rather, the dollar is a piece of paper, or electronic impulse, of no intrinsic value. It is legal tender whose value is ultimately determined by the confidence of the people who hold it."

If faith can make dollars valuable, it stands to reason that lack of faith can make them worthless. Something to ponder.

The Heart of the Matter

Today on LRC, Anthony Gregory admonishes those who avoid seeing the forest from the trees:

The state is not about laws on pieces of paper. It is about looting and violence. Its principal methods of funding are theft and counterfeiting, its regular modus operandi is extortion and its most conspicuous projects are assault and murder.

[...]

The state is an organization of coercion, a monopoly on aggression, falsely legitimized by its own fiat and sanctified in idolatrous mythology and through lying propaganda. There is no technicality that can curb its inherent conflict with the natural law and individual liberty. It draws actual blood, bankrupts actual companies, bombs actual cities and taxes actual wealth. Its soldiers shoot to kill, its taxmen are equally ruthless. In principle, it is no more bound by a subsection of its tax code than a mobster is bound by his vague promise to protect you. It is for all these reasons that the state must be understood and eventually dismantled wherever and whenever possible. Don’t get too distracted by the fine print and neglect the big picture.

Gregory doesn't deal here with the Empire (the state writ global), but his argument applies to it as well. Those people who still believe international law serves to restrain the Empire from visiting its whims upon whomever it chooses, or that the Empire has any intention of respecting the treaties it signed, are just as deluded as those who seek loopholes in the US tax code.

I want to retch every time I hear some two-bit wannabe diplomat from Belgrade "defend" Serbia's territorial integrity by invoking Resolution 1244, for example. Quibbling about details in Empire's arbitrary proclamations is futile - after all, it can simply make another, and move along on its merry pillaging way.

Tom Friedman and Imperial Hypocrisy

I've considered Thomas Friedman scum since way back in the spring of 1999, when he was baying for Serbian blood as NATO bombers pounded Belgrade and KLA set Kosovo on fire. Nothing he has written since has made me change my mind.

But after the relentless repetition of the "NATO took control of Kosovo to stop evil Serbs from slaughtering innocent Albanians" lie by just about every print and broadcast medium in the US for the past six years, I thought no one remembered Friedman's bloodlust anymore. Turns out I was mistaken. Someone named Drew Hamre wrote an op-ed in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune this Saturday, attacking Friedman for demonizing the Sunnis of Iraq (see text here); to underline the sheer hypocrisy of Friedman calling the Sunnis terrorists and murderers, Hamre used the following examples:

"Friedman has urged terror bombing to force regime change in Serbia ("Let's see what 12 weeks of less than surgical bombing does," April 6, 1999)... Friedman has advocated bombing electrical grids, knowing full well the mortal damage that results when refrigerators and filtration pumps die ("It should be lights out in Belgrade," April 23, 1999)... Friedman has previously argued for war on a people, not just its government ("Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation").

All of this is in the context of Friedman's comments on Iraq, which have run in the same vein. "He appears intent on caricaturing a people, and then demonizing them," Hamre says, describing 9perhaps unwittingly) the US media coverage of the Balkans - and Iraq - over the past 15 years.

Of course, the advocates of Empire - be they social-democratic "liberals" or national-socialist "conservatives" - will at this point argue that there is nothing hypocritical about Friedman's rants against either Serbs or Sunnis. They are, after all, evil, and Americans who bomb them are good; "everyone knows" that. But what makes one good or evil, if not their deeds? If something is considered a heinous crime when attributed to Serbs, should it not be considered a crime when perpetrated by Americans? Quod liced Iovi non licet bovi is such a Roman sentiment. If the Imperialists are saying they are to the rest of the world as gods unto cattle, then we are indeed cattle for not shoving that opinion down their arrogant gullets, so they may choke on it.

Someone has already done something like that for Friedman; earlier this year, Matt Taibbi penned a superb takedown of the pompous blowhard, worth referencing every time some ignorant idiot in your environs mentions that columnist as worthy of anything but contempt:

"Friedman is... a genius of literary incompetence... It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that's guaranteed, every single time. He never misses."

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the kind of writer the Imperialists consider a "sage." Says a lot about them, doesn't it?

Loving the Emperor

Gene Healy wrote an interesting piece in Reason online, concerning Americans' love affair with the Imperial Presidency, as manifested in a current television show starring Geena Davis.

"what's interesting about the show isn't the idea of a woman president, and it certainly isn't the hackneyed dialogue. If C in C is worth watching at all, it's for what it tells us about modern, popular views of the presidency. Judging by the first three episodes, and the show's popularity, the romance of presidential power transcends left and right.
[...]
"Geena Davis' Mac Allen is an independent, and if her politics are thus far difficult to discern, it may be because they consist of convictions shared by both parties, such as dedication to a militarized drug war and a hyper-Wilsonianism that sees all the world's quarrels as our own.
[...]
"there can be no doubt that the Imperial Presidency is alive and well. And most Americans, liberal or conservative, can't imagine it any other way. The public is no longer content to accept a mere chief magistrate, charged with faithful execution of the laws; instead, over the 20th century, the president has been transformed into a national Father-Protector, who is supposed to keep us safe from everything from economic dislocation to bad weather."

Though the facts of the American Empire should seem crystal clear to just about everyone who cares to look, all too many people are still convinced that this country is a constitutional republic. To steal the line from a movie, the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled is convincing people he did not exist. So long as the illusion of a republic persists, Americans will not challenge the American Empire, and keep thinking it's the measure of being "presidential" when Geena Davis - or Martin Sheen, for that matter - order other countries blown up.

Onward and Upward

After almost five years of Thursdays, Balkan Express (est. October 19, 2000) is moving - by a day. From this week onward, it will appear on Wednesdays. It may be five years since the 'revolution' in Serbia, and ten since the Bosnian War ended, but the Empire is still knee-deep in the Balkans mud, and getting deeper.

Will the illegal occupation of Kosovo end in an ethnically-cleansed Albanian statelet? Will the efforts to create a centralized Bosnia-Herzegovina lead to peace and harmony, or another war? Will the EU devour the region, and either solve its problems or create new ones? That, and a lot more, as Balkan Express enters its sixth year - now on Wednesdays.

(reposted from the Antiwar.com blog)

Birds of a Feather

Natasa Kandic, the foremost peddler of atrocity porn in Serbia, is to become a honorary citizen of Sarajevo. So says her "Humanitarian Law Centre" in a triumphant post on the globalist web portal, Oneworld.net.

The "honor" was awarded by the Sarajevo City Council, which apparently considers Kandic someone who has "made extraordinary contributions to the development and promotion of Sarajevo, as well as the field of improvement of international and human relations, based on the principles of solidarity, democracy, humanity and tolerance among peoples of various creeds."

There is, of course, nothing in Kandic's work that resembles anything close to solidarity, democracy, humanity and especially tolerance. Then again, the current Sarajevo City Council is notorious for asserting it was being multi-ethnic and tolerant when it appointed a "Bosniak," a "Bosnian" and a "Muslim" to its offices because it could not round up enough Serbs or Croats to fill the sham multi-ethnic quotas. From the pages of Sarajevo dailies and weeklies pour out the messages of such vitriolic hatred (mostly for Serbs, but Croats are targeted every so often as well) to make Kandic's Serbophobic ravings seem mild by comparison. My hometown has become an abomination, indeed.

I suppose this council and Kandic deserve each other, kindred spirits as they are. But Sarajevo deserves better than either of them.

Finding Serenity

"Once you've been to Serenity, you never leave."

Television is often seen as mind-numbing poison - and in most cases, that's precisely what it is. But every once in a while, something truly brilliant appears on the telescreens: something different, unique, unusual. Such was Firefly, in the fall of 2002. And because it was so different, it was smothered quickly by the suits at the network that has made lowering the lowest common denominator a profitable mission.

Something happened then the suits did not expect. When it came out on DVD, Firefly became a runaway hit. We wanted to know what happened to Captain Mal and his raggedy bunch of misfits in their struggle to "find a job, any job," and "keep flying," always a step ahead of the tyrannical Alliance. And tomorrow we will.

"Serenity," the long-anticipated feature film sequel to the 13 episodes of "Firefly," opens Friday across the US. If you value liberty, despise tyranny and hanker for an old-fashioned adventure, see this movie. You won't regret it.

This is why...

Since the news, rumors and images started coming in from the lost city of New Orleans, I've seen many interesting opinions about the man-made disaster that followed the natural one. I have yet to see a better take than this piece by Butler Shaffer, on LewRockwell.com today:

"Once again, the Events in New Orleans have brought into focus the long-standing question that we have heretofore preferred not to face: is society to be organized by and for the benefit of individuals or of institutions? Does life belong to the living, or to the organizational machinery that the living so unwisely created? We are confronted – as was Dr. Frankenstein – by a monster of our own creation, which must control and dominate us if it is to survive. We continue to feed this destructive creature, not simply with our material wealth, but with our very souls and the lives of our children. [...]

In the outpouring of individual compassion and cooperation following the disaster in New Orleans, the state discovered a threat to its existence. Political systems thrive only through division and conflict; by getting people to organize themselves into mutually-exclusive groups which then fight with one another. This is why “war is the health of the state.” But if people can discover a sense of love and mutuality amongst them, how is the state to maintain the sense of continuing conflict upon which it depends?

This is why the state must prevent the private shipment of truckload after truckload of private aid to victims; this is why flood victims – including those who want nothing more than to remain in their homes – must be turned into a criminal class, against whom state functionaries will “lock and load” their weapons and “shoot and kill... if necessary.” The state is fighting for its life, and must exaggerate its inhumane, life-destroying capacities in order to terrify the rest of us into structured obedience.

Forcibly tossing people out of their homes, seizing their weapons and depriving them of their property is obviously not about "helping" them - it's about helping the state. It's not about compassion, but control. This is the true face of government - not just this government, here and now, but government in general! - and it sure is ugly.

Imaginary Outlets

It isn't often that I can laugh uproariously upon reading what is supposed to be a serious quote from the legacy media. Usually, their stuff is so out of touch with reality, it's painful, frustrating, or both.

In today's New York Times there is an article (warning: they may require you to register) on the runaway success of "World of Warcraft." It's a massive multi-player online game that appeals to both player-vs-player and role-player crowds, and has over 4 million subscribers worldwide - a phenomenon in the industry that used to be proud of half a million. Anyway, the Gray Lady quotes a skeptic thusly:

"I don't think there are four million people in the world who really want to play online games every month," said Michael Pachter, a research analyst for Wedbush Morgan, a securities firm. "World of Warcraft is such an exception. I frankly think it's the buzz factor, and eventually it will come back to the mean, maybe a million subscribers."

"It may continue to grow in China," Mr. Pachter added, "but not in Europe or the U.S. We don't need the imaginary outlet to feel a sense of accomplishment here. It just doesn't work in the U.S. It just doesn't make any sense." (emphasis added)

No need for imaginary outlets? Why, then, are millions of Americans investing money they don't have into plywood palaces at obscenely inflated prices, courtesy of Boss Greenspan's cheap credit and fiat currency? Why are thousands of bureaucrats intent on reshaping the world against the wishes of its "reality-based" community? The world would be a better place if they all paid $15 a month to stay at home and play "American Empire" or "The Sims." Or "World of Warcraft," come to think of it; having to earn money the hard way - fighting monsters and crafting products people can use - might teach people a thing or two they appear to have forgotten.