The Essential Saker - now available on Amazon

One of my long-time readers, the Saker soared into prominence last year following the Maidan putsch in Kiev, cutting through the smokescreen of lies about Russia and the Ukraine with his incisive analysis. He has not always been right, but he has been consistently straightforward about his opinions, and that's a rare quality in a blogger these days.

He has also accomplished something that I have only thought about doing, and collected his most important articles into a book. "The essential Saker: From the trenches of the emerging multipolar world" came out yesterday, on Kindle and in hardcover. I would go so far as to describe it as an essential resource for understanding the conflict between the Atlantic Empire and Russia.

I'll strive to post a proper review once I've read through the 600+ pages of the volume, but I confess to skipping ahead to the latter chapters, when he puts the events of Yugoslavia's demise into the context of Empire's war on dissenters. If the Saker's explanation of how the Empire has used Islam and Muslims as a weapon (always to their detriment) is the only thing you take away from the book, it will make a big difference in your understanding of the world today. 

Bombing for Peace, and Other Hypocrisies

From Sputnik News, January 26, 2015:

Addressing reporters in New Delhi on Sunday, US President Obama has once again repeated his famous mantra "large countries shouldn't bully smaller countries," prompting the question: Wouldn't it be nice if the US President looked in the mirror before blaming others?

Trouble is, I think Nobel Peace Prize Winner Just For Showing Up has been looking in the mirror all these years - and seeing only the prettiest, cleverest, nicest, most righteous man in the world, who can literally do no wrong.

The race card has little to do with it, mind. His two predecessors acted the exact same way, even though - in the "social justice" narrative imposing itself on the American public today - they were steeped in "privilege." It's as if to ascend to the Throne of Saint Abraham, one has to recite the Creed: Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi.

That, by the way, is Latin for "What Jupiter is allowed, an ox is not" - fittingly enough, from the story of the Rape of Europa. So these self-appointed Jupiters declare themselves exempt from all rules and strictures, while using the very law they flout as a cudgel to clobber others with. Public declarations of their righteousness and others' (supposed) wickedness are just insult to injury.

Only in the demented minds of these reality-deniers can there exist such a thing as "humanitarian intervention" via "bombs for peace". I don't know whether the latter phrase was actually coined by the late, unlamented "Dick" Holbrooke, but he used it to argue for "humanitarian" intervention in Bosnia, in 1995.

The bombing was completely unnecessary; Holbrooke's vaunted peace treaty was little different from the 1992 treaty his client - jihadist fanatic Alija Izetbegović - rejected at Washington's urging. In another ironic twist, the bombs continued to kill the very people they were supposed to be "saving": the bombed-out areas were abandoned by the Bosnian Serbs after the treaty, and settled by Bosnian Muslims - dying in droves ever since from both unexploded ordnance and effects of the oh-so-"safe" depleted uranium.

That quote from Tacitus comes to mind: they make a desolation, and call it peace.

But don't take my word for it: read George Szamuely's excellent book, "Bombs for Peace: NATO's Humanitarian War on Yugoslavia". One of these days - soon, I promise! - I will give it a proper review; been meaning to do this for months, but life got in the way. Suffice to say that Szamuely meticulously documents the West's destruction of Yugoslavia, from its very beginning in the late 1980s, to the evil little war over Kosovo.

More and more people - the Russian leadership, for example - each day are coming to the realization that the Atlantic Empire rests largely on this false narrative of the noble knight riding to humanitarian rescue, and that the root of these lies can be found in Yugoslavia. Szamuely's book is a handy compendium of facts that can help you take apart that false narrative. So perhaps the next time whoever is Jupiter-in-Chief says something breathtakingly stupid and hypocritical, it will be easier to see it for what it is.

And Now For a Word

I wanted to title this "We interrupt this broadcast for a message from our sponsors," but a) it's too long, b) I don't have any sponsors, and c) posting here isn't on any sort of regular schedule anyway.

I do have a promotion, however. Back in 2012, an essay of mine appeared in a collection titled "Why Peace?" It isn't a case for pacifism, but rather for non-aggression. Yes, there is a difference, and no, it's not hair-splitting but rather precision in speech and thought. War may be a necessary evil sometimes, but we must remember it is evil nonetheless.

There are many other valuable essays in the book. You may like some more and others less. For what it's worth, mine is a rare firsthand glimpse into the Bosnian War, which I put into the broader context of Imperial white-knighting.

The book is available through a variety of channels; you can find out more here. 

Twisted Projections of Conjured Present

Just as I warned back in January, the race to blame the Great War on the Evil-Serbs-and-Russians (properly pronounced in the same breath) is on.

Austrian view of the Serbs in 1914, now the Anglo-American mainstream

In the New York Times' Sunday Book Review, Reuters editor Harold Evans gave a glowing review to Christopher Clark's "The Sleepwalkers", which blames Serbia for "expansionism" and "terrorism," and Russia for "creating a narrative to justify taking up arms", by "shift[ing] the moral onus from the perpetrator to the victim." Naive France and gullible Britain got suckered in, and thus the Great War began.

This is, of course, patent nonsense. The French wanted a war of revenge for 1871, and this seemed as good an occasion as any. Britain chose to go to war, and while Sir Edward Grey couldn't imagine the actual horrors the war unleashed, his famous comment about the "lamps going out all over Europe" more than suggests he was aware something horrible was about to happen. Does that sound like being suckered in by the wicked, wily Russians to you?

Barbara Tuchman began her "Guns of August" with the parade of European royalty at the 1910 funeral of  Edward VII of England - "on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again."

Clark, on the other hand, opens his book with the 1903 May Coup, which Evans gleefully cites in gory detail:

"King Alexandar and Queen Draga, betrayed and defenseless, huddle in a tiny closet where the maid irons the queen’s clothes. They are butchered, riddled with bullets, stabbed with a bayonet, hacked with an ax and partially disemboweled, their ­faces mutilated beyond recognition and the bloody half-naked remnants tossed from the royal balcony onto the grounds."

Those horrible Serbs, murdering their defenseless king that way! Such savages! Let's set aside the inconvenient fact that the squeamish Brits were busy at the time setting up concentration camps for Boer civilians. Clark doesn't explain why the Obrenovic king was killed, as such hatefacts would interfere with his precious narrative. So the reader doesn't get to understand the heavy-handed absolutism of the Obrenovics, their servitude to Austria at the expense of their country and people, and the long string of abuses and humiliations heaped on both the ordinary Serbs and the military. His marriage to Draga Masin, a rich merchant's divorced daughter who went so far as to invent a pregnancy to appear likeable, was just the last straw. While I can't in good conscience approve of the method of their dispatch, they well deserved to be overthrown.

But Clark needs to show that Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevic "Apis" was an evil, murderous conspirator who deliberately started WW1 out of his Serb nefariousness, so the context of the May Coup, Austria's abusive relationship with Serbia, and just about everything relevant to the situation gets shoved aside.

He does, however, cite "historians of gender" to argue that all of the politicians involved were men, and had masculinity issues. Such depth of analysis! Lest he be considered insufficiently postmodern, Clark also deems Austria's ultimatum to Serbia - long considered a standard of shamelessness and bad faith - as “a great deal milder” than the 1999 NATO ultimatum to Serbia. Considering that Rambouillet was patterned after the Austrian ultimatum, and that its purpose was to make the war inevitable, I'd say Clark missed the point by such a wide margin here, he ended up shooting himself.

This is technically supposed to be a review of two books, Clark's and Sean McMeekin's "July 1914", but Evans spends most of his time on Clark. I get the impression McMeekin was brought along to make the case against Russia. He had previously written a book called “The Russian Origins of the First World War,” and Evans relies on him to make the claim that "Russia’s crime was first in escalating a local quarrel by encouraging Serbia to stand up to Austria-Hungary and then accelerating the rush to war."

So, if only Austria had been given a carte blanche by the rest of Europe - as it had by Germany - to curb-stomp the "terrorist, expansionist" Serbian savages, there would have been no WW1 - and perhaps Britain would still bestride the world. What a load of hummus.

I can understand the lament over world empire lost. I can understand the desire to blame the perennial Other - the Orthodox Slavs - for the myriad of sins of the Catholic and Protestant West. I even understand the twisted projection of conjured present - with Serbs as the arch-villains the white-knighting humanitarian West needs to defeat to save the Muslim damsel in distress and win her affections - to a traumatic event a century prior; in both cases, facts are discarded or suppressed when they interfere with the narrative.

But when the modern Anglo-American historians and politicians end up sounding like Kaiser Wilhelm - whom Clark cites at one point as saying, "Stop this nonsense! It was high time a clean sweep was made of the Serbs,” - then one can only conclude they represent a civilization that has deeply lost its way.

Parallel Perspectives

The Cults of Bosnia and Palestine, by Richard Ziegler
Baico Publishing, Ottawa, 2012
136 pages (softcover)

Two years or so ago, the "Gaza flotilla" incident made me wonder whether Israel was getting "Serbed." It was just a brief glance at some patterns too eerily similar to be coincidental. Yet the whole subject of propaganda, manufactured consent and perception management simply begged for a more detailed study, by someone who could devote enough time, resources and scrutiny to it.

Canadian author Richard Ziegler's second book, "The Cults of Bosnia and Palestine" is one attempt at such a study. A self-identified leftist (his first book was titled "Reclaiming the Canadian Left"), Ziegler has chosen to examine the strange parallel thinking on the Western Left when it comes to the Bosnian and Palestinian conflicts.

Having spotted the same "invective" used to describe the Bosnian Serbs in use against Israel, Ziegler ventures to answer the question "whether some of the charges against [Israel] are made in good faith, or are merely an imitation of a proven strategy." (p.2 ) This comparative approach characterizes all four sections of the book.

In the short, introductory chapter Ziegler explains that the Left's obsession with Bosnia and Palestine most likely lies in its tendency to look for the "victims of oppression" and identify with them. The second chapter dwells on the concepts of "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing," both of which have been employed in crafting the narratives of Bosnia and Palestine. Ziegler notes the dubious emergence and questionable meaning of the term "ethnic cleansing", arguing it was used as a catch-all condemnation of Serbs. But he also tackles the thorny subject of genocide, first noting the absurd contortions applied to Rafael Lemkin's definition by war crimes prosecutors (p.29), then examining the implications of comparing Bosnia to the Holocaust (p.35). Of particular interest is Ziegler's argument that seeing genocide everywhere in effect tends to devalue the significance and distinctiveness of the Holocaust, thus indirectly amnestying its perpetrators.

Chapter 3 deals with Islam and history involved in both regions. Here Ziegler makes an important observation that the Left has not only adopted myths about peaceful coexistence of everyone under Islam, but generally dismissed history as a factor in both conflicts (p. 70-71). He explains the Leftist reluctance to criticize Islam as a result of perceiving the Muslims as the oppressed, and therefore being on the "good" side of identity politics.

Ziegler's venture into explaining the development of anti-Serbism on the Western Left in the final chapter is a very intriguing read. He may not be entirely right to dismiss the lack of prior anti-Serb sentiment on the Left - Engels wrote a scathing attack on the Slavs following the failure of the Hungarian Revolution in 1849, which is often mistakenly attributed to Marx and even excerpted out of context to sound worse - but certainly paints a detailed picture of the circumstances in which the modern anti-Serb thought in the West coalesced in the early 1990s. This is contrasted with prior anti-Semitism on the Left, and the many projections, false analogies and cognitive dissonance that characterize the Left's hostility to both Serbs and Jews. A good overview of the pattern that emerges in both instances is laid out at the very end (p. 118-119). Ziegler's conclusion is that leftist beliefs about Serbs and Jews are almost religious in nature, "and thus impregnable to argument, evidence or reason." (p. 120).

If anything, the book is too short. Documenting the instances of anti-Serbism in the Western press, both mainstream and alternative, over the past two decades would result in a multi-volume work by itself. Yet if Ziegler's conclusion is correct, and the quasi-religious conviction on the Left is impervious to reason, the quantity of evidence becomes somewhat irrelevant, and the quality of the argument more important than ever. To someone who has decided that Serbs and Jews must be evil, no amount of proof to the contrary will suffice to persuade them otherwise.

Nonetheless, Ziegler has done extensive research. Fully 54 pages of the volume's 136 are filled with  often explanatory footnotes. He doesn't cherry-pick favorable authors, either, but includes arguments from all over the spectrum (including myself at one point). Unlike many a scholar, however, he doesn't try to pad the volume with needlessly complex verbiage; Ziegler's prose is crisp, clean, and legible. One doesn't have to be a scholar to understand what he's arguing, or to appreciate the amount of time and effort that went into condensing what could have been a sprawling argument into such a compact volume.

Though plenty of targets of Imperial "liberation" have been softened up by propaganda, no one else has received the "full Serb" just yet. But with the demonization proving so effective, that may only be a matter of time. A great deal of its effectiveness is due to the involvement of the Left, which has successfully styled itself as standing for niceness and tolerance and against all name-calling. Except when it comes to those "disgusting Serbs" and Jews, of course.

The Cults of Bosnia and Palestine, by Richard Ziegler, will be presented on November 14, at Ottawa's Collected Works bookstore.

Two Days Till Peace

I have been traveling a bit, hence the light posting. Last week, I was in the Canadian capital, at the promotion of a book.

"Two Days Till Peace" is an extraordinary war memoir, based on the journal kept by Mile Jovicic, the last antebellum director of the Sarajevo Airport. He jotted down the events that unfolded around him as he struggled to keep the airport open and assist with the evacuation of almost 30,000 people from Sarajevo, as Bosnia descended into (un)civil warfare.

Given his duties, Jovicic actually met most of the civilian and some military leaders involved in the early days of the war, who passed through his airport on the way to doomed negotiations and botched prisoner exchanges. His book is a testimony of a chaotic time in early 1992, and the many missed opportunities to avoid the bloodshed that ensued. It is very much a forgotten tale, since it doesn't fit the official narrative, and I'm glad he saved it from oblivion with this memoir.

The headline presenters were Ambassador James Bissett, the last Canadian envoy to the old Yugoslavia, and Maj. Gen. Lewis MacKenzie (Ret.), commander of the UNPROFOR staff in Sarajevo at the time (and chiefly responsible for the airport re-opening eventually). The third speaker was yours truly. All three of us had reviewed the book, and our comments are on the back cover. It isn't often an author can round up three of his reviewers at a book launch!

The venue was pretty full, and the books in the lobby sold out quickly. If you are interested, you can order the book from the publisher website, or through Amazon.

New Book: The Krajina Chronicle

The Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan Studies has just published two new books: "Saving Peace in Bosnia" (PDF), earlier this month , and the just announced "The Krajina Chronicle: A History of Serbs in Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia", by Srdja Trifkovic.

It promises to be an interesting book, filling in a major gap in the Western understanding of the Balkans. I'm currently working on a review of "Saving Peace in Bosnia", and hope to have a review of the "Krajina Chronicle" here soon as well.

Questions You're Not Supposed to Ask

Readers often ask me about books that would help them get a better understanding of Balkans events, or libertarian thought. I eagerly direct them to writings about the latter, but sadly don't have much to recommend regarding the former. Today, however, I'm happy to do both.

Thomas E. Woods, a brilliant historian who has previously penned The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History and Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy, has a new book out: 33 Questions About American History You're Not Supposed to Ask.

I haven't read it yet, though I have ordered a copy. So, why do I recommend it? Because reviewer Kevin Gutzman wrote today on LewRockwell.com that "the two chapters on American intervention in the former Yugoslavia are among the book’s finest."

I haven't the slightest doubt that Professor Woods has put together a fine piece of myth-busting work here. I can't wait to read it!