Donald Trump should un-recognize 'Kosovo'

 (Originally published March 24, 2019, on Rt.com)

Here is one simple trick US President Donald Trump could pull right now to bolster the rules-based world order, decisively derail Russian criticism of US foreign policy, and stick it to his domestic critics in the process.

All Trump has to do is withdraw the US recognition of ‘Kosovo’, the fake state established as a result of an illegal occupation, following a war that began exactly 20 years ago.

Confused? Unaware? Let me explain. Claiming the government of what was then Yugoslavia was conducting a genocidal campaign against ethnic Albanians in its province of Kosovo (it wasn’t), President Bill Clinton launched what would become a 78-day NATO air campaign to “end human rights abuses” there. What it actually did was displace hundreds of thousands of people – including ethnic Albanians, who even got bombed by NATO on occasion – and turn the province into a NATO protectorate. In 2008, the “Kosovians” declared independence, and have been recognized by around half the UN since then. The other half includes Russia, China, India and – thus far, anyway – Serbia.

But wait, why un-recognize it, then? Wouldn’t that be siding with “adversaries”? Proof of “collusion” with the Kremlin? In a word, no. Correcting this historic mistake would actually disarm the critics of Washington, who currently – and rightly so – point out the US hypocrisy, double standards and selective reasoning.

(Wrong) Message to Russia

In the minds of the architects of the 1999 war, Serbia and Yugoslavia served as a proxy for Russia, a way to send a message to Moscow that “resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform” would not be tolerated by the West. That, by the way, was the argument laid out by John Norris, former aide to the State Department’s topmost Russia hand Strobe Talbott, in a 2005 book, complete with the quote from its preface.

Russia got the message all right: that the West was a duplicitous enemy that could not be trusted. Russian disillusionment with the West can be traced to 1999, and the anger at their government’s surrender to NATO in Yugoslavia, at least to some extent, paved the way for Yeltsin’s surprise resignation and the takeover by one Vladimir Putin.

Putin actually brings up 1999 and Yugoslavia almost every time when he talks about the West, using it as an example of arbitrary and lawless behavior by the US even as Washington talks the talk about the “rules-based world order” supposedly threatened by Russia and China. Speaking of which, Beijing is also nursing a grudge from that war, because its embassy in Belgrade was destroyed by a NATO strike in May 1999. By “mistake,” supposedly.

Fast-forward to 2014, when Crimea rebelled against a US-backed government in Kiev and voted to rejoin Russia. When the US howled in protest, Putin merely said that people who seized Kosovo from Serbia in an illegal war had no leg to stand on:

“It’s beyond double standards. It’s a kind of baffling, primitive and blatant cynicism. One can’t just twist things to fit his interests, to call something white on one day and black on the next one.”

In response, President Barack Obama invented a referendum in Kosovo to justify US actions. Eagle-eyed fact-checkers in the Western media gave him a pass. Don’t you hate when that happens?

Snubbing the Clintons

But wait, there’s more. Back in 2009, Bill Clinton personally unveiled a gilded statue to himself on the central square of the “Kosovian” capital. Three years later, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called independence of Kosovo a “personal” issue to her and her family. A city in Albania actually erected a monument to her in 2016, anticipating her presidential triumph. Emoluments much, anyone?

Senator Bernie Sanders supported the ‘99 war too, prompting one of his senior staffers to resign in protest. Former senator and VP Joe Biden was also a big Kosovo War backer. Meanwhile, Trump was actually critical of the war, if his 1999 interview to Larry King is anything to go by. He hasn’t said much about it since, though.

These days, when Trump talks about “sovereignty” and denounces globalism, Russia responds that maybe the US should respect the sovereignty of others – and brings up Kosovo. Awkward. 

Meanwhile, both liberal and conservative think-tanks in Washington constantly fret over “Russian malign influence” in the Balkans – specifically Serbia – which always amounts to Moscow simply voicing support for UNSCR 1244 and Serbia’s claim to Kosovo. Frustrating!

Values and principles

Critics of the Trump administration, who accuse him of failing to uphold American values abroad, would have to admit it’s virtuous to stop propping up a place that engages in “endemic government corruption; crimes involving violence or threats of violence against journalists; and attacks against members of ethnic minorities or other marginalized communities” per the State Department’s most recent human rights report.

With all that in mind, it becomes obvious that un-recognizing Kosovo would make US foreign policy great again. In one simple step, Trump can demolish Russia’s argument that Washington is cynically applying double standards, and show that no, the US does believe in rules – “and how about that Crimea now, Putin?”

Postscript: 

When I wrote this, five years ago, I accurately predicted such a development was not actually going to happen, because Trump had “turned over foreign policy to warmongers interested only in perpetuating the American Empire the Clintons established in the 1990s by any means necessary.”

But it's a new day. With new opportunities. 

Afghanistan: A narrative and military failure

(This was originally published on RT.com on August 16, 2021, under the title: America’s NARRATIVE failure in Afghanistan is worse than its military one – Now the entire world knows the emperor has no clothes. Reposting here for those in "free" countries where non-official viewpoints are censored)

Afghanistan may not be the actual ‘graveyard of empires,’ but it looks set to bury at least the American one, by imploding the major narratives on which it has rested: invincibility, inevitability, prosperity and competence.

2 Afghan fall from C-17 plane in Kabul, as they were clinging upon the wing of the airplane.#KabulHasFallen #kabulairport #Kabulfall #Afghanistan #Talibans pic.twitter.com/kfzwj2wwhQ

— Bikas Gurung (@bikas_gurung) August 16, 2021

It has to be an irony above all ironies that the same man who, back in 1992, celebrated the demise of the Soviet “puppet regime” in Kabul ended up leading a US puppet regime there. Except, whereas Dr. Najibullah ruled for three years after the last Soviet soldier crossed the Friendship Bridge into Uzbekistan, Ashraf Ghani resigned and fled even before the last American boot left Afghan soil – reportedly forgetting bags of cash on the tarmac, no less.

What made the sudden and total collapse of the Afghan National Army (ANA) so devastating, however, is the explicit insistence of US leadership – from President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley – as late as two weeks ago, that it would never happen.

“There's going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy in the – of the United States from Afghanistan,” Biden told reporters on July 8. Except that’s exactly what happened, and then some.

‘Saigon 1975’ is forever associated with the photo of desperate South Vietnamese mobbing a ‘Huey’ on the rooftop of the US embassy. There are several contenders for “Kabul 2021,” but so far the desperate Afghans clinging onto a US cargo plane – only to plummet to their deaths – seems a strong favorite.

“A thousand narratives collapsed in real-time,” as journalist and US Navy veteran Jack Posobiec put it. “DC theater gave way to reality.”

The USA had a color revolution after all

(Another article from the Vault, originally written for RT on February 5, 2021, shortly after TIME published its infamous "fortification" piece explaining how 2020 happened. Reposting here for the "I told you so.")

There WAS a color revolution in the US after all – and its architects now BOAST of how they ‘fortified’ the 2020 election

The 2020 US presidential elections wasn’t “rigged,” oh no, but “fortified” by a conspiracy of activists united in saving “Our Democracy” from the Bad Orange Man, now proud to share their story in a friendly tell-all piece in TIME.

“There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes,” writes Molly Ball – a biographer of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, by the way – in TIME magazine this week, describing it as a “vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election – an extraordinary shadow effort.”

Ball’s article reveals a lot, from why there were no street riots by Democrats either on November 4 or on January 6 – the organizers of this “conspiracy” stopped them – to who was behind the push to alter election rules in key states and set up mail-in voting, who organized “information” campaigns about the results of the election, and who even threatened election officials into making the “right” decision to certify the vote.

While everyone – myself included – was focused on the summer riots as a possible “color revolution,” they turned out to be misdirection. According to TIME, the real action was taking place behind the scenes, as Democrat activists and unions joined forces with NeverTrump Republicans, Chamber of Commerce, corporations, and Big Tech to make sure the 2020 election turns out the way they wanted. They call this a victory of democracy and the will of the people, of course, for no one is ever a villain in their own story.

“Their work touched every aspect of the election,” Ball writes, from getting states to “change voting system laws” and fending off “voter-suppression lawsuits,” to recruiting “armies” of poll workers and pressuring social media companies to “take a harder line against disinformation.” Then, after Election Day, “they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result.” 

Alarmed yet? Maybe you should be.

So who are these shadowy saviors of Our Democracy? One of them is union organizer Mike Podhorzer of AFL-CIO, a traditional Democrat powerhouse. Another is Ian Bassin, associate White House counsel in Barack Obama’s first administration. The roster of his “nonpartisan, rule-of-law” outfit called Protect Democracy includes a lot of Obama lawyers, a John McCain campaign aide, an editor from the defunct neocon Weekly Standard, and someone from SPLC, while among their advisers is the NeverTrump failed presidential candidate and ex-CIA spy Evan McMullin.

Bear that in mind when you read Bassin’s quote that “Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated,” (emphasis added) but “it’s massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.” Chilling words.

A leading member of this effort is Norm Eisen, another White House counsel under Obama. The pro-Trump Revolver News even raised the alarm about Eisen plotting a “color revolution” in September – but by then it was too late, even if anyone had been paying attention.

By then, the National Vote at Home Institute – an organization barely two years old, and part of the effort – had already instructed secretaries of state across the US with “technical advice on everything from which vendors to use to how to locate drop boxes,” and even provided them “communications tool kits,” i.e. talking points.

In November 2019 – a full year before the election! – Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg hosted “nine civil rights leaders” for dinner, one of whom was Vanita Gupta, Obama’s assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. It was part of this shadowy coalition’s campaign for “more rigorous rules and enforcement” on social media platforms – just in case you were wondering how Trump ended up deplatformed, or the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop got suppressed before the election.

Ironically, as part of their pressure on Big Tech, Democrats had whipped up a moral panic about super-targeted “Russian” internet memes that somehow “influenced” the 2016 election – yet Ball’s article says that two groups involved with the conspiracy “created state-specific memes and graphics, spread by email, text, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, urging that every vote be counted.”

Podhorzer’s messaging efforts were informed by Anat Shenker-Osorio, who “applies tools from cognitive science and linguistics in her work with progressive organizations globally,” according to her 2018 fellowship bio from George Soros’s Open Society Foundation.

Though Ball doesn’t mention it specifically, those Twitter and Facebook “pre-bunking” labels about safety of mail-in ballots and the winner not being known on Election Day are also the activists’ talking points.

Remember how Republican observers were thrown out of the ballot-counting facility in Detroit? Reports at the time said it was because of overcrowding, but the Time article reveals that a Democrat activist mobilized “dozens of reinforcements” to “provide a counterweight” to them, so eventually “racial-justice activists from Detroit Will Breathe worked alongside suburban women from Fems for Dems and local elected officials.” It was activists who came up with a strategy of denouncing any challenge to Detroit vote counts as racist, too.

When President Donald Trump asked Michigan’s Republican-majority legislators to challenge the results, Eisen called it “the scariest moment” of the election, and the “democracy defenders” sprung into action.

Eisen’s lawyers dug up dirt on the two lawmakers invited to Washington, activists hounded them at airports, NeverTrump Republicans made calls to party friends, and Bassin’s outfit commissioned an op-ed threatening criminal charges by Michigan’s Democrat AG – whose office then retweeted it. The two were even picketed at the Trump Hotel in DC. The brigading eventually worked, as Michigan Republicans agreed to certify the elections – and other contested states followed.

Perhaps the most intriguing part is buried towards the end. Ball reveals that she got a text from Podhorzer – the AFL-CIO organizer – on the morning of January 6, hours before what the Democrats would describe as “insurrection” by Trump supporters at the US Capitol, saying that the “activist left” was “strenuously discouraging counter activity” in order to “preserve safety and ensure they couldn’t be blamed for any mayhem.”

How did Podhorzer know there would be “mayhem,” hours before the “storming” of the Capitol that Democrats claim Trump “incited” at the rally outside the White House at noon? It’s a mystery.

What’s not a mystery is the result of the “conspiracy” Ball has revealed: a de facto one-party state in which Democrats hold absolute power at every level of government and seek to prosecute dissent and disenfranchise the opposition.

Last month, with no inkling of the behind-the-scenes operation just revealed in Time, I wrote of a non-kinetic “fifth-generation” civil war that had unfolded as “a battle for hearts and minds, a series of psychological operations that played out on the media, political and economic fronts.” I argued it had successfully swapped the American Republic for something called “Our Democracy,” which maintains the form but has a radically different content.

One of the “heroes” of Ball’s piece, NeverTrump Republican Jeff Timmer, has a quote in the article about how “Our democracy only survives if we all believe and don’t look down,” referring to the cartoon character Wile E. Coyote.

It’s an interesting admission, as the coyote is the villain of those cartoons – and the one actually immune to the effects of gravity is the roadrunner bird. But you’re not supposed to notice this – and besides, in Our Democracy, noticing will soon be a crime.

USA: From Republic to 'Our Democracy'

(This article was originally published on January 14, 2021, on a website since blocked in many jurisdictions of the Globalist American Empire. I'm reposting it in light of the current Emperor declaring he would abdicate in favor of his Grand Vizieress.) 

Fears that the current political situation in the US could spiral into a civil war are off the mark, because that war has already been fought – and the Democrats won. What’s playing out before our eyes now is the aftermath.

Just look at the glamour photos of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California), reviewing the National Guard troops at the Capitol on Wednesday. Does she look scared for her life – as the congressional Democrats have claimed in the aftermath of the “insurrection” last week – or like a leader of the winning faction relishing her triumph?

In voting to impeach President Donald Trump on Wednesday – even though he has but a week left of his term – the Democrats invoked the same language used to outlaw the defeated Confederates in 1865, insisting that those who engaged in “insurrection” and “rebellion” should be barred from public office forever. This doesn’t mean just Trump, but everyone who ever supported him, too.

This rhetoric makes zero sense coming from a political party that supposedly seeks to unite the country, cool the partisan passions and peacefully transfer power. Coming from the winners of a war, however, it’s a whole different story.

Meanwhile, the Republicans who opposed the impeachment – aside from the 10 members of the Liz Cheney caucus, who defected to the Democrats – kept invoking Lincoln, all about “malice towards none” and “charity for all.” Supposedly a plea for unity, it sounds unmistakably as a plea for mercy from the vanquished.

As to what kind of mercy the conquered can expect, it’s more likely to resemble that of Genghis Khan than of Lincoln. The Mongol conqueror was invoked by none other than Barack Obama, in another sycophantic Atlantic interview back in November. It seemed puzzling at the time, but obvious in retrospect: Obama knew there was a war on.

Instead of physical battlefields, this conflict took place in the narrative space. Violent “but mostly peaceful” protests are the closest it came to the ‘kinetic’ level. Mostly it was a battle for hearts and minds, a series of psychological operations that played out on the media, political and economic fronts, with the general population – and arguably, the Republicans – none the wiser until it was all over. Call it a ‘fifth generation’ (5G) battle, where the objective is to defeat the enemy before they even pick up a gun, convinced that the age of civil wars is over.

The starting point may have been the summer of 2016, when Hillary Clinton commissioned the ‘Steele Dossier’ to accuse Trump of “collusion” with Russia – and blame Moscow for the DNC’s dirty laundry getting aired all over the internet. While it failed to get Clinton elected or prevent Trump from taking office, it opened a battlefront that eventually delivered results.

‘Russiagate’ was used to spy on Trump’s campaign, through the fraudulent FISA warrants against Carter Page. It also served to throw the White House off balance, by ousting General Michael Flynn, and get the Mueller probe launched on behalf of fired FBI director Jim Comey. It was allowed to fizzle out only after the 2018 midterms delivered the House to Pelosi.

Determined to impeach Trump over something, the Democrats then latched on to the Ukraine phone call. That plan, too, hit a snag when only Mitt Romney turned out in the Senate to greet them as liberators. No matter. Within weeks, a novel respiratory virus that emerged in China would present a new opportunity. “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” as Barack Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel once proudly said.

Trump was blamed for both opposing the coronavirus lockdowns and the economic hardship inflicted by them, at the same time. Every single American death was somehow his fault, while governors who sent the infected into nursing homes and killed thousands were celebrated as heroes – so long as they were Democrats. Another hot summer of racial grievances, a replay of 2016, was used to endlessly repeat the tropes painting Trump as a racist, fascist, Nazi dictator.

There was one more thing Russiagate was used for – to neutralize social media, censoring legions of Trump supporters (and in the end, Trump himself) under the guise of fighting “Russian bots” and “misinformation.” In 2016, Trump had been able to leverage the platforms to bypass the mainstream media gatekeepers and communicate with millions of Americans directly. So the Democrats moved to deny him that – and Silicon Valley, already sympathetic to them politically, eagerly delivered.

By the time the New York Post was censored over the Hunter Biden laptop story – openly, brazenly, and without any fallout – the situation on that front should have been obvious. Both social and legacy media had declared, by fiat, that new rules for mass mail-in ballots were “safe and secure” and anyone saying otherwise was a “denier.” Trump and the Republicans protested this was unfair, but did nothing, still believing they were dealing with a political process within the system operating under the old rules.

With their total control of the media, it was trivially easy for the engineers of global ‘color revolutions’ to derail and spin a ‘people power’ event like Trump’s January 6 rally and present it as another Fort Sumter – or better yet, Pearl Harbor. Because, as you might have guessed by now, they believe what happens doesn’t matter, only the narrative they create about it.

The Capitol unrest was way too disorganized to be a coup d’état, but narrative management turned it into a coup de main. And though the Republican Party and Trump himself surrendered in its aftermath, the “impeachment” is supposed to be the coup de grace.

You may complain that it does little to unify the country, or calm the concerns of half the population. They don’t care. They believe might makes right and act as if they just fought and won a war, not against fellow Americans but a group totally illegitimate and irredeemable. Deplorable, if you will.

There is an odd phrase that Democrats and their media allies have used a lot over the past few years: “our democracy.” It’s never explained or defined, but has simply become a stand-in for the United States of America. On paper, the US remains a constitutional republic – just like on the surface, there never was a war. Yet there is no more talk about the Republic, only “Our Democracy,” the same way the US went from plural to singular after 1865.

History never actually repeats itself, but sometimes it does rhyme.

The first time I've ever disavowed myself

I tend to stand by what I have written as a matter of principle, and never delete things because that would be altering the record. As someone trained in history, that's unacceptable behavior. Yet today I find myself hovering over the "delete post" button when it comes to this September 2006 post, in which I praise Keith Olbermann's vitriolic rant about George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. 

I haven't changed a whole lot since then - I was a critic of Bush the Lesser and the Iraq War then, and I remain one now. As it turns out, neither has Olbermann: his rant did not come from principle, but from partisanship. He was a deranged Democrat then, and is one still. It just didn't become apparent until the Trump Derangement Syndrome hit and people like him openly lost their minds.

While I think I will keep that post, it will get a big fat asterisk from the future, as proof that even a hopelessly broken clock could be right twice a day. I hereby disavow any interpretation thereof that could be construed as an endorsement of Keith Olbermann, his positions or his character. I hope he gets the professional help he appears to need. 

The East Still Remembers

1999 - 2022

Evil then, evil now.

Unforgotten.

Unforgiven.

The East Remembers.

Goodbye 2021

...and good riddance.

I can't think of a single good thing that has come out of this nightmare of a year, filled with broken promises, bait-and-switch, gaslighting, deceit and outright lies that made hypocrisy look normal and virtuous by comparison. All this misery may yet give birth to something good in the days and months to come. Yet as the tally stands just minutes before midnight, there's none to be found in 2021.

Things could carry on as they have, and get worse. Normally, on New Year's Eve, we wish for it to be otherwise - and so I shall, now. For "oft evil will shall evil mar," as the old saying goes, and I do have faith that the almighty Lord will smile on us sinners sooner or later, if we but try to earn His grace.