Blogiversary

I almost missed the big one!

It was on November 18, 20 years ago, that I launched this here endeavor, figuring I could have a place of my own besides Antiwar.com (they're still great, check them out!) to share ideas that don't merit a full column. 

Within mere weeks, I commented on the color revolution in Ukraine (and was proven right) and helped break a major story about the death toll of the Bosnian War, which ended up attracting the Eye of Sauron...

Obviously, 2014 was my banner year, when I had 114 posts here. Thing have not been the same since, mainly because the following year I began working in the media professionally. I sort of put away my columnist/blogger pen, reserving this space for thoughts that didn't fit elsewhere. In recent years, I began using it to preserve articles that have been censored, as the Empire spiraled down a dark path I could not have imagined back in 2004, or in 1999, when I first began writing.

I thank all of you who have visited these pages, read my thoughts and shared them with friends, family and perhaps even enemies. Without you, Gray Falcon would be just another unheard voice in the growing wilderness.

The world has changed a lot in the last 20 years. The web has gone from being a platform of free expression to a series of reservations guarded by censorious Big Tech giants. Unable to rule by the strength of argument, the Empire chose the argument of strength - and came up short. So I can't promise I will keep this thing going for another 20 years; the sword of censorship can come down any day.

But I will try to justify your loyalty and respect by continuing to post whenever I think I have something interesting to say.

Here's to a happier 2025 - onward and upward! 

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. 

Ignore the lessons of Yugoslavia at your peril

or, why 'Balkanization' isn't what you think and "retreat to hold" strategy is doomed to fail

On this day, 30 years ago, Slovenia and Croatia declared independence and the slow and violent death of Yugoslavia officially began. My American readers may not care about this quaint historical fact, except they should. As someone who lived through the demise of Yugoslavia, it's my duty to warn them there are entirely too many similarities between what happened there and what's afflicting their own country right about now. 

Yugoslavia, too, believed in diversity as strength (called "brotherhood and unity") and "equity" (equality of outcomes, achieved by elevating some and denigrating others). There, too, everyone was equal - but the ruling politicians were more equal than others. There, too, inflation and national debt were spiraling out of control.

The political system was a version of Communism adapted by Dear Leader Josip Broz Tito, who was 11 years dead by that point. The country was divided into six "republics" - and one of them was subdivided further , with two provinces carved out - and ruled by a Presidency, a council of eight. Things were already falling apart, but once Germany reunited and Communism failed across eastern Europe, all of a sudden ethnic nationalism flared up.

What I'm going to say next will probably go against what you've read in the news, seen on CNN or learned from "history" books. I don't care. I know what happened because I was there. My goal isn't to relitigate whose cause in Yugoslavia was just (the rest of this blog speaks to that) but to address the argument of some Americans along the lines of "Balkanization is the way! Get out of cities, move to the countryside, form communities with like-minded people, build our own society there, etc." Because I don't think that will work. Let me explain why. 

In June 1991, the republics of Slovenia and Croatia moved to secede. The Yugoslav presidency was deadlocked on how to react, with one of the key votes being the representative of Bosnia-Herzegovina, a weak-willed Serb whose mysterious and murky elevation to that position over a better qualified candidate suddenly became clear. In the power vacuum, the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) - where Marxist indoctrination trumped warfighting ability - decided to send a small, lightly armed force of fresh conscripts to "restore constitutional order" on the border between Slovenia and Austria. Due to their rules of engagement, they were ambushed and massacred by Slovenian militia.

At this point, the political leader of Serbia (Slobodan Milosevic) makes the biggest strategic mistake: he decides to let Slovenia go. On a moral level, that may have been the correct choice, as keeping the Slovenes in Yugoslavia by force seemed wrong. Yet by doing so, Yugoslavia's sovereignty and survival were effectively forfeit.

Yugoslav military intelligence actually managed to infiltrate the Croatian government and secretly film them buying weapons from Germany and preparing for war. The footage was aired on national television. But instead of sending a force to occupy Zagreb, arrest those involved as traitors and crush the rebellion in its infancy, Belgrade did... nothing.

When Croatia seceded, it was the local Serbs - who made up a majority on about a third of its territory, and had suffered a genocide during WW2 when Croatia was an ally of Nazi Germany - rose up and counter-seceded. This was not done on orders from Belgrade, and the Republic of Serbian Krajina (RSK) was never under Belgrade's direct command and control. This will prove important - and fatal - later on.

At this point, it's important to note that Croatia was not fighting a "war for independence," as Zagreb claimed. The Croats' right to secede from Yugoslavia was obviously not contested - not by the disintegrating federal government, not by Milosevic, not even by the local Serbs. While doing that might have given them the upper hand from the standpoint of international law, instead they chose to dispute only the amount of territory Croatia could claim as its own. Naturally, the Croats seized the vacated high ground and claimed they were victims of "Yugo-Serbian aggression."

The JNA actually got dragged into the conflict when Croat militias attacked their garrisons. When the JNA defended itself - de facto siding with local Serbs - the cries of "aggression" redoubled. The final ceasefire line, negotiated by the UN in late 1991, saw the Army and the Serbs in control of territories that mostly had a Serb majority.

By then, however, the Badinter commission - a bunch of European lawyers that appointed itself the arbiter of Yugoslavia's fate - had decided that the country was "in dissolution." Though the Yugoslav constitution said its PEOPLE had the right to self-determination, the commission said no, it was was the REPUBLICS, not people, and their borders were to be considered international ones.

In practice, this meant that the Serbs went from the legal and moral high ground (maintaining Yugoslavia as their homeland) to being minorities in Croatia and Bosnia - where its Muslim and Croat communities sought independence - and outlaws if they resisted. At the stroke of a foreign pen.

The Serbs in Bosnia agreed to independence (see the pattern?) but sought a power-sharing agreement by which the new country would be partitioned into ethnic cantons - like Switzerland - that would guarantee their rights. Croats agreed. Muslims, backed by the US, reneged on the deal after it had already been signed.

So what did the Serbs do? Instead of declaring the Muslim-dominated government illegitimate and its referendum illegal, they pulled back and basically abandoned several cities - most notably, the capital of Sarajevo. Their strategy was to stake out the territory where they were the majority and declared the Serb Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina (SRBiH, later known as Republika Srpska, RS). The idea was to leverage their military power to negotiate a political deal.

Belgrade had already implicitly recognized Bosnia's separation (again, perhaps the moral thing to do, but a strategic mistake), declaring the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, made up of Serbia and Montenegro. It didn't matter - foreign powers refused to recognize it as Yugoslavia's successor, and blamed Belgrade for "aggression" against Bosnia (!).

At this point, Muslims and Croats made a major tactical mistake: they attacked the JNA, which had been recalled and was retreating towards the FRY. Their officers later said this was in an attempt to capture the JNA's heavy weapons. In that, they mostly failed - but they radicalized the Serbs officers, NCOs and enlisted who might have otherwise stayed neutral to enlist in the Bosnian Serb military (VRS). One of those officers was Gen. Ratko Mladic, who took command from the ineffective JNA generals and proceeded to made quick work of Muslim commanders over the next three years. So it's not as if the Serbs were the only ones to make mistakes here.

As a consequence of Serbs giving up the moral and legal high ground, however, their situation was grim. Yugoslavia, built on some two million Serb lives over the two world wars, was gone. In less than a year, from June 1991 to May 1992, some two million Serbs went from being equal citizens of their own nation-state to being outlaws in their own homes. Their own RS and RSK were considered rogue states, while the separatists in Croatia and the Muslim government of Bosnia were internationally recognized as legitimate! That whole "let them go and hold our own in the countryside" worked out so well, didn't it?

It gets worse. By 1993, the US and NATO are openly involved, aiding Croatia and the Bosnian Muslims. Washington stops a war between Croats and Muslims - who had fallen out over territory - and forges them into an anti-Serb alliance. That's another example of their strategic error, as they thought it temporary but it's ended up poisoning their relations ever since. But for the US purposes, it worked perfectly.

UN peacekeepers were swept aside in May 1995, by US-trained Croatian troops, who overwhelmed the RSK enclave of Western Slavonia ("Operation Flash"). Then, in August, Croats launch a blitzkrieg against the rest of RSK. Neither the UN nor Yugoslavia lift a finger; it is said that Milosevic was either angry the RSK leadership was disobeying him, or was trying to disavow them to protect FRY proper. As we'll see later, it didn't work. With the RSK wiped out, the Croat troops move into Bosnia, while NATO launches airstrikes against the RS.

What happens then is an anomaly. The US sidelines the RS leadership by charging them with war crimes, so Milosevic would have to negotiate on behalf of all Serbs - thus validating the Narrative about the wars being "Serbian aggression." Yet by some miracle (if you read my review of Richard Holbrooke's memoir, you'll understand) he somehow manages to negotiate the Dayton Peace Agreement. The Muslims ended up being the reluctant ones in Dayton. They believed they could hold out and achieve "final victory" - i.e. destruction and expulsion of Serbs like in RSK - but the Clinton administration needed a peace deal right then and there, so it pressured them to sign.

Dayton pulled a partial victory from the jaws of defeat. While the RS leadership was angry that Milosevic gave up "too much" territory - including all of Sarajevo - they eventually realized that Dayton gave them recognition as a legitimate political entity within Bosnia.

Meanwhile, the RSK was a total loss. Even the eastern region bordering with FRY was eventually handed over to Zagreb, "reintegrated" into Croatia. Two thirds of the Serbs living there pre-war had been expelled, and any who thought of returning - mostly the very old - harassed and abused.

Being a "key factor of peace" in Dayton didn't save Milosevic, though. In March 1999, the US launches an attack on Serbia itself and occupies Kosovo, on behalf of ethnic Albanian separatists there. Because suddenly the Badinter opinion is irrelevant and the law is whatever NATO says it is.

The Serbs complain this is unfair and point to a UN resolution (1244) that says Kosovo is part of Yugoslavia. So the Americans organize a "color revolution" in Belgrade in October 2000, get rid of Milosevic, and have him put on trial for war crimes - where he dies under mysterious circumstances, without a verdict, in March 2006. Two months after his death, the US-backed regime in Montenegro rigs the independence referendum and the last vestige of Yugoslavia is officially abolished.

Macedonia (aka FYROM, now North Macedonia) got some UN peacekeepers in 1992 out of fear of "Serbian invasion" that never materialized. Instead, its service to the West was repaid by forcing it to federalize in 2001, after US-backed Albanian separatists claimed a third of its territory. Again, some rebellions are more legitimate than others. Might makes right, etc.

While the sordid history of Yugoslavia's demise is an object lesson in the perils of making deals with foreign empires to fight your wars - only to realize that you were used to fight theirs, and to hell with your goals - that's cold comfort to the Serbs, or the point I set out to make about the merits of the "retreat and Balkanize" strategy.

Remember, at no point did it occur to anyone in the Serb leadership to deny Slovenes, Croats, Bosnian Muslims or "Macedonians" their independence (Albanians were different; they had a nation-state next door, and were trying to claim historic Serbian lands). The prevailing thinking every step of the way was "we'll retreat and regroup and try to preserve our own and maybe they'll leave us alone, and if they don't we'll fight until they do."

How did that Grand Strategy work out? Objectively speaking, overwhelmingly poorly. Dayton was an outlier, obviously. And even Dayton didn't really end the war, but only its kinetic dimension. Since then, the Muslims have endeavored to dismantle the RS and create a centralized state by means ranging from lawfare and leveraging foreign support to tactical demographics (targeted resettling of internally displaced people) and even a rigged census.

Croats and Albanians did not stop until they claimed all the territory they could, and expelled or killed all the Serbs living there that could be a "disrupting factor." As I just described, the Bosnian Muslims are still working on it. The "let them go we'll protect the Serbs' minority rights" backfired spectacularly in Montenegro as well, where the NATO-backed regime embarked on a campaign of aggressive nation-building and historical revisionism intended to turn the once-proudest part of Serbdom into a new group identity that's rabidly anti-Serb.

THIS is why I am skeptical of Americans who believe some kind of peaceful separation and Balkanization of their own country is, or may, be possible. Once you cede legitimacy to the other side, especially an enemy that has no intent or incentive to leave you alone - but seeks to either subjugate or eliminate you outright - you lose the war even before the first bullet is fired.

Believe me. I was there.

Kosovo: Still an Evil Little War

March 24, 1999 is a date that rightly lives in infamy. On that day, NATO launched an unprovoked war of naked aggression, violating its own charter and international law, while claiming to be on a "humanitarian" mission.

For 78 days, the outnumbered and outgunned Yugoslavia (which would later be split into Serbia and Montenegro) resisted, turning back ground attacks from Albania, capturing a trio of US soldiers, and even shooting down a F-117 "stealth" bomber. In the end, abandoned by all and threatened with carpet bombing, the government in Belgrade accepted a compromise armistice - which NATO immediately tore up, letting the Albanian separatists terrorize the occupied Serbian province of Kosovo.

Thousands died in the war. Tens of thousands have died since, from cancers caused by depleted uranium dust. Most non-Albanians were ethnically cleansed from Kosovo, and the province turned over to warlords and organized crime. In 2008, the province illegally declared independence, which is not yet recognized by the UN.

Thanks to the shameless propaganda and spin, the Kosovo War is considered by most American politicians to be a great success and even a shining example of virtue in the "liberal world order" the US is upholding through its military might. Only one candidate in the 2016 election dared disagree with that conventional wisdom even a little; once elected, he ended up sticking with the inertia of US policy, delivering a pointless "normalization agreement" that did something Israel, a bit for the "personal project" of the Clintons, and nothing at all for the US. He was then replaced by an establishment warmonger.

 

Since the war, Serbia has served as the test bed for the first "color revolution" (October 5, 2000) and turned into a failed state ruled by a succession of servile slugs, each worse than the one before. The Atlantic Empire continued to enable Albanian aggression, in hopes of rekindling its romance with dar-al-Islam even as it bombed and invaded Iraq, Libya and Syria and fomented revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere that claimed even more Muslim lives.

Yet the Kosovo War served as a wake-up call for Russia, which had until then lionized the West even as it was being robbed blind and buried alive by Western "democratizers" and their domestic helpers. Within six months of NATO's land grab, Vladimir Putin was at the helm in the Kremlin. The rest, as they say, is history.

🔻#OTD in 1⃣9⃣9⃣9⃣ @NATO started bombing #Yugoslavia. For the first time since #WWII an aggression was committed against a sovereign European nation, an active participant in the anti-Hitler coalition, one of the @UN founders.
🔻https://t.co/EZqgWPmryq pic.twitter.com/fdPjy0eFz6

— Russian Embassy in USA 🇷🇺 (@RusEmbUSA) March 24, 2021

It is tempting to declare the saga of Kosovo over, 21 years after the war, as the quisling regime in Belgrade is busily recognizing the Albanian land grab. But the Atlantic Empire wouldn't be the first to write the Serbs off and declare them conquered and beaten, only to see them rise again. 

Next year in Prizren. The East Remembers.

(If this sounds familiar, it's because you may have read an earlier version here)

A tale of two civilizations, or why there is hope

Last month, after the coronavirus-delayed Victory Parade in Moscow marking the 75th anniversary of the triumph over Nazi Germany, Russian President Vladimir Putin traveled to nearby Rzhev to unveil a new monument.

The 25-meter memorial pays homage to uncounted Soviet soldiers who perished in the Rzhev salient between 1941 and 1943, in bitter fighting described as a "meat grinder." The monument was reportedly entirely crowdfunded, designed by young architects, and depicts a soldier turning into a flock of cranes.

Cranes have a powerful symbolism in Soviet and Russian memory of WW2. A 1957 film about the suffering of civilians is named "The cranes are flying," and the flock of birds seen in the sky bookends the plot. A decade later, Dagestani poet Rasul Gamzatov will write "Cranes," a heart-rending poem about fallen soldiers turning into white cranes. It was set to music in 1969, and recorded by actor and singer Mark Bernes shortly before he died of cancer. Hence the cranes, you see.

Shortly before the Rzhev monument opened, Putin also unveiled the grand cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces, at the heart of a new WW2 museum outside Moscow.

It's interesting to observe the contrast between the West and Russia recently. As the West has been dismantling its monuments, Russia has been erecting massive Orthodox churches, like the new Armed Forces Cathedral, and WWII memorials, like the one of Rzhev, in this month alone. pic.twitter.com/jNyNqCIuBK

— Nina ☦️ Byzantina (@NinaByzantina) June 30, 2020

Meanwhile, the "greatest country in the world" that is fond of deriding Russia as a "gas station with missiles" is undergoing a Cultural Revolution-style purge of monuments, revision of history and destruction of memory. 

It may have started with century-dead Confederate generals, but quickly escalated to Union generals, Catholic saints, Christopher Columbus, and even the founding fathers of the American republic. Absolutely nothing is sacred, and everything must be torn down in the name of intersectional social justice or something. 

This is what a dying civilization looks like. https://t.co/HQeeixN68z

— John Daniel Davidson (@johnddavidson) July 1, 2020

The irony is that, insofar as the monument-toppling revolutionaries have an articulated agenda beyond destruction, it's race-based Communism. Russia went through that starting a century ago, and though it took a while, it has obviously recovered rather well, as physical evidence shows. So, there is hope. Nothing is inevitable. One just has to be willing to learn from the mistakes of others, lest they be repeated. 

On 'historical grievances,' or how to ask the wrong questions

My latest commentary piece for RT (I have my own page there now, you should check it out) tries to explain why the rift between Poland and Russia over recent history is insurmountable. It's not about the history itself, but how the two countries approach it - from two completely different perspectives that are mutually exclusive.

‘While Russia has chosen to regard its #WWII experience in the traditional terms of heroism and sacrifice, Poland has opted for a very postmodern angle of victimhood’

- Nebojsa Malic (@NebojsaMalic)https://t.co/vSjcWu2JSE

— RT (@RT_com) May 23, 2020

I'd like to add some context to what I said there, not because it's necessary for the argument I made - because it stands just fine on its own - but because I know it will reflexively be denounced as "Russian propaganda" because of where it was published.

My own people, the Serbs, have grappled with both sides of this discussion. For instance, the argument how "May 1945 wasn't liberation but the beginning of Communist occupation" has been persuasively made by many a Serb. I explored the reasoning behind it here, back in 2012. But there are important distinctions to be made here.

First of all, the only people in Eastern Europe who can plausibly make the claim that they did not deserve "Communist occupation" are those who did not join the Axis or contribute volunteers to the SS - so basically, Czechs, Poles and Serbs. That said, those three may want to reassess to which extent their plight resulted from trusting Britain, and maybe readjust their blame scale accordingly.

Even the rabidly anti-Communist Serbs don't have the kind of visceral hostility towards Russia displayed today in Czechia or Poland, because they understand that a) Russia is not the Soviet Union, b) ethnic Russians were among the most numerous victims of Communism and c) the USSR had at best a marginal role in bringing Communists to power in Yugoslavia. That last point is obviously not applicable to Czechs and Poles, but it matters.

Much is being made of Soviet "brutality" during the Cold War. Tell me, however, did the Czechs or Poles end up converting the script in which they write, or butchering their languages? Were they partitioned into new and hostile nations, with cultures and values intrinsically opposite to their own? Because that's literally what happened to the Serbs. Did the Soviets cover up the Nazi atrocities against Poles or Czechs, the way Tito minimized the Croatian genocide of Serbs? Even Katyn, the mass execution of captured Polish officers by Stalin's secret police, is nowhere close to the absolute or relative numbers of Serbs killed in the process of imposing Communism on them.

As I hope I've made clear, we'd have a quite a bit of "victim points" in the metaphorical bank. But the postmodern Western narrative in which being a victim is the fountainhead of virtue is alien to us, so we haven't rewritten our history around it.

Meanwhile, the Czechs and Poles were so eager for "freedom" that they rushed into the arms of the EU and NATO. That's not freedom or independence, that's just switching masters. The great irony is that the EU and NATO actually practice nation-destroying cultural, societal and linguistic engineering, the scale and scope of which would make the Soviets blush.

Let's not even get into the sheer hypocrisy of joining NATO in March 1999, even as it had the Luftwaffe launch its first bombing raids since WW2. You really don't want to have that discussion with me.

As for the Russians, I keep hearing from them the same kind of talk that has bedeviled the Serbs for decades, which can be best summed up as "What do we need to do for Them to stop hating us?" To which I try to explain that there is no right answer to what amounts to being the wrong question.

Even if it were somehow conceivable for a self-respecting Russian state to renounces the Soviet heroes of WW2 - which it absolutely should not - it will gain nothing by doing so. The "West" has a problem not with Communism or the Soviet Union, but with Russia itself.

Oh sure, Washington and Brussels talk about democracy, rule of law, freedom of the press, human rights, etc. But one, they don't actually practice any of that at home (and that's an argument I'd enjoy explaining in detail), and two, none of those existed in Russia of the 1990s, when President Boris Yeltsin literally sent tanks to bomb the parliament. Yet Yeltsin was beloved in the West, as was the weak, lawless, subservient Russia of his time. If that doesn't tell you something, I'll just be wasting time drawing you a picture. 

Kosovo is Serbia

March 24 will mark the 21st anniversary of NATO’s occupation of Serbia’s Kosovo province, and so we reaffirm: Kosovo is Serbia. Serbia does not and will not ever recognize Kosovo’s claims of sovereignty. We call on NATO to end its occupation of Kosovo.

NATO’s occupation of Kosovo and its increasing militarization of the province is a threat to the world’s common security. Albanian occupation authorities continue their assault on human rights and fundamental freedoms, brutally silencing critics in civil society and the media, and curtailing religious freedom. Hundreds of individuals from Kosovo, including members of the Serb community, have been imprisoned by NATO-backed ethnic Albanian authorities – and some subjected to torture – for peaceful opposition to the occupation.

Members of the Serb community continue to experience unjustified raids on their homes and churches, surveillance and intimidation by occupation authorities, restrictions on cultural events, and the criminalization of their representatives. Occupation authorities severely limit religious freedom, target religious believers with bogus terrorism charges, and destroy Orthodox Church shrines. Serbia calls on the United States to free all Serbs wrongfully imprisoned in Kosovo in retaliation for their peaceful dissent and to end Albanian abuses of fundamental freedoms in Kosovo.

Twenty one years on, the US and NATO continue to rely on lies and disinformation in their failed attempt to legitimize the illegitimate. Their efforts are doomed to failure. The world will never forget NATO’s unprovoked invasion of Serbia. We condemn NATO’s illegal actions in Kosovo and its continued aggressive actions against Serbia, and will maintain sanctions against the US until NATO returns control of Kosovo to Serbia and fully implements its commitments under UN Security Council Resolution 1244.

(Inspired by this. Only the names were changed. See if you can spot the raging hypocrisy.)

Killing Soleimani

If you thought 2019 was suffering from a time-compression effect, where every day seemed like a month and every month a year, it looks like 2020 is going to be more of the same.

Last night, US helicopters or drones attacked a convoy outside the Baghdad airport in Iraq. The convoy was transporting several several leaders of the Iraqi Shia militia that Washington blamed for Tuesday's siege of the US embassy in Baghdad, but also Major-General Qassem Soleimani, head of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) of Iran. Later that evening, US President Donald Trump confirmed Soleimani was the target of the operation. Seems like several high-ranking militia leaders were just a bonus objective, so to speak.

I won't get into whether Soleimani was a terrorist - as the American Empire claims - or not. There is ample evidence that his forces contributed massively to the defeat of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, however, and among the people celebrating his death are some of the vilest neocon warmongers known to humanity, including the crew responsible for the 2003 invasion of Iraq that was a prima facie crime against peace.

There is no doubt, however, that the hit was a quintessentially imperial act. What else do you call assassinating someone who is traveling openly with diplomatic papers, in a country where the US is not at war and its troops only have a tenuous legal pretext for being present? States care about sovereignty, legality and legitimacy; empires do not.

What's especially ironic is that, while he acts like the God-Emperor of memes abroad, Trump is the polar opposite at home, either powerless or unwilling to do anything - aside from tweeting - about the media-Democrat-Deep State complex that is relentlessly persecuting his supporters, or anyone who dares step out of the ever-shifting line they keep redrawing.

One would think the domestic "Resistance" would be a lot more circumspect with an Emperor that is willing to be this ruthless abroad, but they're not. That should tell you a thing or three about the real character of the Empire, and the extent of Trump's actual power.

'Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal'

Since at least 1945, the US has treated people around the world like pawns on the grand chessboard (as Darth Zbigniew titled his magnum opus). Yet time and again, I see leaders and entire nations convince themselves that this time it will be different.

EU summit to discuss #Turkey sanctions next week – Paris

STORY: https://t.co/77Mph1vsCY
VIDEO: Civilians in northeastern #Syria flee Turkish #OperationPeaceSpring pic.twitter.com/Zs6BoK7DLc

— RT (@RT_com) October 11, 2019

That this time, they will get Washington to fight and win their wars for them, and then have their backs forever, because freedom and democracy and human rights, or whatever. That they are different, better, more deserving.

It may even seem like that's happening, for a while - a year, or four, or ten, or even twenty. But it never lasts. It can't. And each and every time, they curse Washington's sudden but inevitable betrayal, wondering why they had to suffer the sad fate of a used and discarded tool - not realizing that's exactly what they were to Washington, even as they thought it was the other way around.

Time and again, this happens. Because leaders and entire nations refuse to learn the simple truth that Empires have no friends, partners or allies - only vassals and victims. 

The Day (& 18 Years) After

From Intersections of Fate (Antiwar.com, September 13, 2001):

America is now emerging from the shock of Black Tuesday with an understandable desire to avenge its dead. Many suggestions on how to do that are outlandish, and some border on insanity. If the most vocal warmongers get their way, this country would become embroiled in an endless war against the entire world, destroying entire cities at a whim. Any effort to make the world safe for America while making the world less safe for everyone else is ultimately both futile and paradoxical.
Opposing all terrorism as a principle is a truly noble endeavor, one which the author of these lines would eagerly join. Experiences in the Balkans point to a different reality, though. One cannot fight terrorism and use it at the same time. (emphasis added)

From War Without End (September 27, 2001):

Far from the eyes of the American public, still intently focused on a scorched patch of mountains in central Asia, the first battle of "Operation Enduring Freedom" ("Supreme Irony" having been too obvious) has already been fought. No shots were fired. No lives were lost, not yet. But the battle – and with it, perhaps the entire war – was lost.
[...]
This week’s events in the Balkans clearly show that the war on terrorism is anything but, and that the only benefactor of Black Tuesday will be the apocalyptic vision of American Empire, now finally able to assert itself in a war without end.

From The Day Nothing Changed (September 12, 2002):

The time was right to re-examine America's Balkans policies of the past decade, and possibly even extricate itself from an Imperial commitment in the peninsula that seemed irrelevant and wasteful in the light of the new "War on Terror." Was this done? No.
[...]
The aftermath of Black Tuesday was a golden opportunity to redefine America as a Republic, not an Empire. It was missed.

From The Lost Terror War (September 11, 2003)

George [W.] Bush's claim that America was after terrorists everywhere was seriously undermined from the very beginning by its continued support for terrorists in the Balkans...

Those familiar with events in Kosovo and Macedonia, and certain personalities in Bosnia, were forced to conclude that terrorism was considered "evil" only when it targeted Americans. Others were fair game, especially when the terrorists were American "allies."

[...]

Americans desperately need to decide whether to support a policy that aims to create a global Balkans, where US power and hypocrisy rule supreme. They should know that in the real Balkans, where US power is unchallenged, terrorism thrives...

From Eppur si muove (Gray Falcon, September 11, 2014),

I've said everything I've cared to say over the past thirteen years - how one cannot fight terrorism and support it at the same time, how there are no "good" terrorists just because they currently serve one's agenda, how it's madness to appease jihadists in hopes of earning their gratitude, etc. etc. Go through the posts tagged 9/11 if you wish, and see for yourselves whether the questions I've posed are not just as relevant today as a year ago, or five, or ten.

And I stand by my contention that there was never any war on terror(ism): the grand crusade was all about power.

Memory eternal to those who perished on 9/11. Maybe some day we can actually make sure their deaths have not been in vain. 

Some thoughts on guns

(another collection of takes from Twitter, rearranged and slightly expanded for your convenience in this medium)

Before you endorse a ban on "assault weapons," take a deep breath. There is no such thing.

The term "assault rifle" is literally a translation of Sturmgewehr, a name bestowed by Adolf Hitler himself on a strange hybrid of a rifle and an automatic pistol that Nazi weaponmakers had developed behind his back.

The "AR" in AR-15 does not stand for "assault rifle" but for "ArmaLite Rifle," its maker.

Military - i.e. fully automatic - weapons in civilian hands have been illegal in the US since 1938. The so-called "assault weapons ban" of 1994 relied on arbitrary COSMETIC features of weapons. It was easily circumvented, and did nothing to prevent the massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado.

A ban on "semi-automatic" weapons would leave only revolvers, bolt-action rifles and some shotguns legal. Good luck with that.

American founders understood that "certain inalienable rights" made the difference between a citizen and a subject: freedom of speech, due process, and the "right to keep and bear arms." That is why they are in the Constitution, via the Bill of Rights. If you can't understand that this is fundamental to America, and why, then this might not be the country for you - whether you were born here or not.

Decoding US politics

(or, a collection of takes from Twitter, rearranged and slightly expanded for your convenience in this medium)

There are two "filters" that make it possible to accurately decode approximately 97% of US politics. One is projection - the tendency to project one's own misdeeds on someone else, preferably the designated evildoer. The other is "who/whom," named after V.I. Lenin's famous distillation of politics.

To the who/whom crowd, it doesn't matter what you say or do. It's all about WHO YOU ARE. If they've designated you as virtuous, you can do no wrong, and if they've designated you as villainous, you can do no right. And there is no persuading them otherwise.

"Everyone that disagrees with me is racist, everything I disagree with is a conspiracy theory, and anything that challenges my current feelings is dangerous hate speech that should be banned and its authors deplatformed. This is called liberal democracy."

If you are screaming about something when X does it to Y, but not when Y does it to X, you're not principled, you're a hypocrite.

Semantic word games and slaying straw men aren't "fact-checking," but gaslighting.

US President Donald Trump’s tactic has been the same all along: condemn something that's obviously deserving of condemnation, then watch his critics go nuts trying to defend the indefensible. It keeps working in his favor every time, yet his enemies keep taking the bait over and over. Remarkable.

Trump's "superpower" (whether you consider him a hero or a villain) is to reveal reality that has long been obfuscated by both pretty and ugly lies.

You're welcome.

RIP Justin Raimondo

I am old enough to remember the dawn of the now-bygone Blog Age, when the internet was new and full of promise. A time that offered a choice to ignore the mainstream media and its "facts" (or rather, fantasies) about the wars half the world away - or in my case, on my doorstep - because there were people posting their first-hand accounts online. 

One of those places was Antiwar.com, where I checked in daily during the Kosovo War of 1999 (a formative experience for me, in many ways), and kept returning to in the sordid aftermath. Justin Raimondo's "Behind the Headlines" column was a breath of fresh air in the fetid swamp or mainstream media garbage, which all followed the same talking points that I knew were lies from just a few years prior, when I lived all that and more in Bosnia.

I had poured my frustration with the lies, propaganda, fake news and atrocity porn out in "letters to the editor" format essays that ended up being posted on a couple of websites. Somehow - I don't remember exactly how - one of those texts made it to Antiwar.com. It was late 2000 by that point, and the "color revolution" was about to happen in Serbia. So imagine my shock when Justin himself reached out to me and asked if I would be the Balkans columnist for Antiwar.com.

Would I ever! And so I did. 

Over the next 14 years, I learned a lot from Justin - about writing, about liberty, about perseverance. I am what I am today in great part thanks to writing hundreds of essays and blog posts published by Antiwar.com.

When he announced he had cancer, but was responding well to treatment, I was hopeful. When he stopped writing and tweeting, I feared the worst. He passed away on June 27.

The cause of liberty - and of America's redemption from Empire to the republic it was meant to be - has lost one of its greatest champions. I have lost a dear colleague and a mentor. But Justin's legacy will endure so long as people remember him, and carry on the torch of freedom, non-aggression and peace that he held forth for so long. 

Now his watch has ended. May he rest in peace. But Antiwar.com is still around. And its current writers and editors - as well as alumni like me, who have moved on to other things but still believe in its mission - still have a war against war to fight, and win. 

Let's be about it.

Some recent writings

Just because I've neglected posting here for a while doesn't mean I haven't been busy at work. We live in interesting times, after all.

Of the things I'd like to point out here, I've written on the drumbeat of war with Iran, and the possibility Justin Raimondo's theory is correct and all this inept imperialism is a feature, not a bug.

I have also touched on the finale of 'Game of Thrones' and the very real lesson about the power of narratives, however poorly it was communicated in the show.

Closer to home, I touched on the embarrassing idolatry of "Kosovarianians" for their imperial overlords, and the self-serving lies they continue to tell to justify their crime.

I've also touched on the Culture War currently affecting the Empire itself, an ongoing conflict between the mainstream media and Big Tech, and the dissidents caught in the crossfire.

So if you're still hanging around these parts, give these a read. I promise I'll write more soon.