Nazis and Countries That Back Them

After Canada, USA and Ukraine were the only countries that voted "No" in the UN General Assembly to a resolution proposed by Russia condemning the glorification of Nazis, Peter Lavelle had Alexander Mercouris, Dimitri Babich and I over to discuss the meaning of that on CrossTalk.


(or watch on YouTube)

As you can see, I agree with the other two guests on almost everything - except for their assertion that Washington has ever actually regretted the consequences of its misdeeds. From where I stand, the Empire is not only absolutely unrepentant, it declares its wrongdoing to be right and just!

I mean, the New York Times of all media recently published an admission that a thousand (at least!) actual German Nazis still receive Social Security. How many thousands were brought over after WW2, and how many were propped up in Europe to "fight Communism"? And that's not counting the seven decades of collaborating with Nazis from the so-called "captive nations" (the Baltics, Ukraine, Croatia, etc), documented in The Nation (again, of all places). So it's fine that Croatians are sieg-heiling at fooball games while Kyevite militias are flying swastikas, since that represents "democracy and European future" merely defending themselves against "Serbian and Russian aggression" (see here, for example).

Another thing we didn't get a chance to mention is that all of the EU - and its hangers-on - abstained from voting. The sole European country that supported the resolution was Serbia. Personally, I'm shocked the quisling regime in Belgrade dared oppose Brussels and Washington on this, considering their absolute willingness to cut Serbia's throat on every other issue. Perhaps even they draw the line at backing Nazis, for what it's worth.

The show aired on Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and was recorded the day prior. Thus there was no time to fix the error in the titles identifying me as director of the Reiss Institute (I resigned earlier this month. It was a personal decision - nothing against the Institute, and I wish it all the best in future endeavors.)

A Beam In Their Eye

Last Thursday evening, February 24, Canadian authorities denied entry to Dr. Srdja Trifkovic and prevented him from giving a scheduled lecture at UBC.

Claiming credit was the ecstatic Emir Ramic, of the aptly named "Institute for [the Research of] Genocide" (read their URL to understand the irony). Ramic's Institute doesn't actually research genocide as such; it is only interested in one specific "genocide" - the one alleged to have taken place in Srebrenica, in July 1995. The Institute denounces as "genocide deniers" anyone who dares discuss the facts of Srebrenica, rather than blindly accepting the myth they are pushing.

By insisting on qualifying those events as genocide, they are stretching the definition of the term to the point of absurdity, and effectively engaging in denial of the actual genocides, from the Turkish mass murder of Armenians in WW1 (which inspired Hitler to believe he could act with impunity) to the Croat butchery of Serbs in WW2, and the Nazi genocide of Jews, Slavs and Roma in the death camps of eastern Europe. In fact, the most aggressively outspoken proponent of the "Srebrenica genocide" thesis is also the outspoken denier of Croat Ustasha atrocities.

People in glass houses really oughtn't throw stones for a living. It turns out that Ramic is on the editorial board of a Bosnian Muslim war veterans' magazine, Korak - and the magazine's editor-in-chief is on the board of Ramic's Institute - which routinely publishes militant jihad propaganda. And in his spare time, Ramic also engages in libelous attacks on honorable Canadian soldiers. This, then, is the sort of person the Canadian government takes its cues from, when it comes to deciding who may and who may not enter the country?

Earlier today, the Edmonton Journal published a particularly facetious attack on Dr. Trifkovic by one Srdja Pavlovic, lecturer at the University of Alberta. Asserting that "denying genocide" should not be called freedom of speech, Pavlovic claims that "One should, of course, have the right to one's own opinion but not the right to one's own facts."

That's a brave thing to say for one whose sole claim to historical scholarship is a vile pamphlet equating the Serbs with Nazis.

Pavlovic also has the gall to claim that:

"Trifkovic and his supporters do not want to have a dialogue. As any nationalist would do, they see their version of the past as true and valid, and demand that others believe it, too. While calling for a dialogue they shout at their critics, rather than talk to them and then have the audacity to call such shouting the expression of the freedom of speech."

The hypocrisy is simply stunning. This is precisely what a legion of professional Srebrenica advocates, and Pavlovic himself, are doing - yet he accuses Trifkovic of it!

Proponents of the claim that Srebrenica was a genocide have engaged in much more than "shouting" : character assassination, libel, defamation, lawfare and now outright repression. They never even bother to present any actual facts in support of their claim, preferring instead to cite ICTY verdicts - a situation anyone acquainted with logic ought to recognize as the fallacy of Appeal to Authority.

That certain parties in Bosnia have by this point resorted to bringing up Srebrenica for the purpose of jockeying for political power indicates that they really don't give a damn about the people who lived and died there.

If they truly believed their claim was the objective truth, as they so shrilly insist, they would not be so afraid to debate it, or subject it to cross-examination. How dare those who have repeatedly shown they don't accept anything but unconditional obedience talk about discussion and debate?

All of this suggests that Srebrenica was declared a "genocide" for that very reason - to silence any discussion of the Bosnian War with the charge of "genocide denial."

Any society that allows them to do this cannot truly call itself free.

Pushing the Myth

A little while ago, several Liberal MPs in the Canadian Parliament proposed a resolution declaring July 11 "Srebrenica Remembrance Day." Fortunately, Prime Minister Harper would have none of it, so the proposal was taken off the table - for now.

The resolution was not a product of altruism and sheer goodness of the Liberals' hearts, but rather an initiative mounted by the Congress of North American Bosniaks, and something called the "Institute for the Research of Genocide" (whose URL identifies them as the "Institute for Genocide").

After Mr. Harper put the kibosh on the resolution, the CNAB and the Institute raised a ruckus. Their initial protest, on June 23, included a long list of people identified as an "international team of experts" and claiming illustrious academic titles. The post with the list, however, has since been taken down from the Institute website.

Here are just some of the names from the list:

• M. Cherif Bassiouni (former UN rapporteur on the events in Bosnia, who endorsed the ridiculously inflated casualty figures and the "mass rape" hoax)
• Francis A. Boyle (international ambulance-chaser and author of the "genocide" lawsuit by the Izetbegovic government against Serbia, rejected before an actual court)
• Florence Hartmann (once spokesperson for Carla Del Ponte at the ICTY)
• Marko Attila Hoare (a world-renowned Serbophobe-cum-historian)
  
• Daniel Toljaga (listed as member of the Board of Directors at the Congress of North American Bosniaks, but better known as proprietor of the Srebrenica Genocide Blog)
• Dzemaludin Latic and Fatmir Alispahic, champions of militant Islam and Serbophobia considered even in Bosnia to be the lunatic fringe.

Suffice to say that the list was a veritable who's who of professional victims, genocide entrepreneurs, and people who have built their careers on the myth of Bosnia. So, these folks have taken upon themselves to have the Canadian Parliament endorse their version of history by government fiat - i.e. by force, since they can't actually prove it in court. It is as if they don't believe their argument good enough to just persuade people, even though it has enjoyed almost uncontested dominance in the media for the past 15 years!

The much less organized Canadian Serbs have protested this proposal with letters. The response they got was pretty much a set of talking points reminiscent of the content found on the SGB, Hoare's blog, or the CNAB site.

The letter says that the "the genocidal nature of the particular incident at Srebrenica in the summer of 1995 has been internationally recognized." It specifically mentions the ICTY and ICJ verdicts, claiming they were "thoughtful results of fair and independent investigation and testimony."

Yet the ICJ verdict specifically said it had not considered the Srebrenica events itself, but simply accepted the ICTY rulings at face value. To call the ICTY's verdicts "thoughtful", their investigations "independent" and the testimonies of serial perjurers "fair" - that's just rich. Let's see: their crown witness, on which the entire case hangs, is a liar. They have conducted sloppy forensic work and later destroyed much of the evidence. They refuse to show the DNA evidence, then claim it proves something that is physically impossible for DNA evidence to prove (i.e. manner of death). And that's just the tip of the iceberg! The ICTY verdicts have more holes in them than a kitchen sieve.

Another argument in the response is that others have done this - the European Parliament, the US House and Senate, and hey, even the (quisling) government of Boris Tadic in Serbia! - so why not the Canadian legislature? Well, since when did "everyone is doing it" become a valid argument? Just because some lawmakers in Europe and the US have voted with their hearts for a well-prepared piece of propaganda does not have the magical power to transform that propaganda into fact. Truth is not a matter of majority vote - or even consensus.

From the first days of the Bosnian War, the Izetbegovic regime's weapon of choice was propaganda. They aimed to win the war by getting outside forces to do the fighting for them, based on heart-rending stories of massacres, mass rape, concentration camps and genocide. One after another, those stories have been exposed as fabrications and deliberate distortions of the already horrifying reality, while the full horrors of the war were never reported, so as not to interfere with the mythical narrative. The Srebrenica "genocide" is the last lie that remains, the one myth that was built up and reinforced more than any of the others. By now, Srebrenica has become a post facto justification for everything: the ethnic cleansing of Serbs, the foreign mujahedin, the rise of Wahhabism and terrorism, the re-Islamization of Bosnia's Muslims (a goal Izetbegovic set for himself in the 1970s, mind you), the ongoing refusal of Muslim politicians to abide by the country's Constitution, and the equally ongoing attempts to fulfill their wartime objectives politically, by overturning the Dayton Accords.

All of this rests on the foundation of a myth that what happened in July 1995 in Srebrenica was "genocide". Even though the women and children were safely evacuated. Even though the column that refused to surrender and set off across the mountains and minefields to Tuzla was a military formation. Even though the actual number of people who died on that march was never established (the "8,000" figure is equally arbitrary as the "300,000" we'd heard for a decade, before facts became impossible to ignore), and the actual evidence suggests that the number of people actually murdered (as in executed, which indeed is a war crime) is several hundred. Even though nothing was ever produced to demonstrate intent on part of the Bosnian Serbs to actually exterminate the Muslims as a people - apart from the very strong belief by the Muslims that this was the case.

Yet in a proper court of law, it doesn't matter what one believes - only what one can prove. Fully aware that the ICTY judgments are based on belief and conjecture rather than actual facts, the believers in the Srebrenica Genocide Myth are now trying to impose it by force, by getting governments to pass resolutions. Next up will probably be demands that anyone questioning their myth be prosecuted as a "holocaust denier." So, not only are they disparaging the actual Holocaust by declaring Srebrenica a "genocide," they are also exploiting and abusing the mechanisms established so no one could strive to rehabilitate the Nazis and deny the suffering of the Jews. When you consider the fact that the ancestors of many of those Muslims actually helped the Nazis in their ghastly "Endloesung", it becomes obvious that Srebrenica is not just about the present and the future, but also about whitewashing the past.

I understand why it is in the interest of the Bosnian Muslims' religious, political and propaganda leadership (and their associates, fellow-travelers and useful idiots in the West and elsewhere) to promote the Srebrenica Genocide Myth. How that would serve Canada's interests, however, is beyond me. Stephen Harper appears to have reached a similar conclusion - and for that he deserves thanks, not just of the Serbs living in Canada, but all Canadians who care about their own country.

Apples and Inflation

Why yes, it is cider season in Virginia, funny you should ask.

But no, this post isn't about them apples. It's about Apple computers and their price in Canada.

Wired magazine - which seems to have a grudge against Steve Jobs and Apple, for some reason - reports how Macs are still more expensive in Canada than in the U.S. (by $150 or so). Considering how the Canadian dollar is now actually stronger than its American counterpart, that's adding insult to injury.

However, they also mention a pretty credible speculation that Apple adjusts its international prices annually, sometimes winning and other times losing on currency fluctuations. And remember, the U.S. dollar is "doing a post-modernist impression of the last minutes of the Titanic" (as the GeekCulture forum poster put it so aptly). That's got to be the best visual description of inflation I've ever come across, by the way.

Canadians have a solution to this conundrum; they can head south of the border and load up on cheaper Apple stuff. If only Americans had a similarly simple way of compensating for the depredations of Empire...