Faith, Force and Freedom

Looking back over 2012, it's been one of my leaner blogging years. Not because nothing was happening worth mentioning - quite the contrary - but because I saw little point in addressing people who just didn't care to listen.

When ideology or prejudice trump reality in the minds of men, discussing reality with them becomes an exercise in pointless frustration. Thinking stops, and everything becomes a conditioned response. The campaign for Emperor demonstrated this on a daily basis. So did the horrific massacre at Sandy Hook elementary. Before the victims were even buried, the usual suspects began with the usual arguments: ban guns, register the mentally ill, whatever. Control, control, control, it's always about control.

Part of that is the corruption of reasoning I did write about. Another part of it is solipsism. In America especially, countless people live their lives entirely obsessed with themselves, to the point where other people simply aren't real to them. They are like NPCs in a video game. And since one doesn't empathize with NPCs, having zero empathy for other people has become the norm. When these NPCs are seen as obstacles to one's happiness - the paramount purpose of life robbed of all other meaning - the next step is actively hating those other people, and finding ways of hurting them. The pathology has a scale, of course: from forum trolling, via committing suicide by jumping in front of a train at rush hour, to picking up a rifle and shooting up a mall, school or movie theater.

That is not to say that video games are to blame. Quite the opposite. Games offer an escape from a reality that has long since become virtual. Remember the Bushians' disdain for the "reality-based community"? The notion that they were creating reality by the sheer force of their willpower, while the pesky realists were merely observing and analyzing it? Well, they aren't the only ones to believe it, just arrogant enough to admit it openly.

Modern omnipotent government has made treating people as things into an art form. Look at the militarized police, or the callous disregard for the lives of people in invaded - oops, liberated - countries. Look at the drones and their pilots. Being a sociopath is almost a recommendation for the job.

If we're looking at a "culture of" anything to blame for the rotten mess we're living in, it's got to be this culture of narcissism, as Brendan O'Neill describes it. Guns? Serbia has the second-highest concentration of guns per capita, after the U.S., but there are no rampage murders there. The Orthodox Church, which is most definitely not concerned with an individual's feelings, might have something to do with it as well.

Of course, the Serbs have gone to the other extreme, refusing to use their weapons even for legitimate self-defense. 

Yet I've been unable to put into words the conclusion that simply leaps out from all this, for several days now. Until I saw this article. So I'll borrow Daniel Greenfield's turn of phrase, and say that what both the Serbs and the Americans need to learn is that "when you give up faith to force, then you also abandon any further reason to resist that force. Without faith, it is easier to let force win."

Ahtisaari's Real "Rubbish"

Following a report in the Bosnian magazine Fokus, Serbian officials have requested an investigation into allegations that UN envoy Martti Ahtisaari had taken bribes from the Albanian mafia.

According to the magazine, surveillance carried out by the German intelligence (BND) produced evidence of Ahtisaari accepting cash and bank transfer payments from Albanian mafia figures.

The former president of Finland was appointed in 2005 to oversee negotiations between Serbian authorities and the provisional Albanian government set up by the UN in the occupied province, following the 1999 NATO invasion. In February this year, he unveiled his "proposal" for the province that would see it detached from Serbia but functioning as an EU protectorate.

Ahtisaari's spokesman, Remi Dourlot, dismissed the magazine's allegations: "This is a rubbish story, which is actually from a Republica Srpska magazine."

Fokus is indeed published in the Bosnian Serb Republic (RS), but what is Dourlot's point, exactly? That allegations are preposterous simply because they come from a Serb magazine?

Dourlot's dismissal of the story isn't news in itself. But the reasoning he gave - or lack thereof - may just be another important piece towards completing the Ahtisaari puzzle. There is plenty of speculation about Ahtisaari's past and his motives in being at the forefront of carving up Serbia, but it is futile to argue he is not hostile to Serbs.

Prior to his appointment as the UN envoy for Kosovo, Ahtisaari was NATO's envoy to Belgrade during the 1999 war. Afterwards, he became a board member of the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based NGO openly supporting Albanian and Montenegrin separatists and Bosnian Muslim centralizers. During the sham "talks" he conducted in Vienna in 2006, he told the Serbian delegation that Serbs bore collective responsibility for what happened in the Balkans during the 1990s. And earlier this year, after his "proposal" was snarled up in Russian objections, Ahtisaari was quoted by Simon Tisdall of the Guardian (in an article supporting the Albanian agenda, no less):

"If the EU cannot do this, it can forget about its role in international affairs. If we can't do this during the German presidency, we should give up and admit we can't do anything."

One can understand the desire to have the EU assert itself diplomatically - however misguided - but what do the Germans have to do with it? Could Ahtisaari's vision of European unity be closer to Quisling's than DeGaulle's?

But then there is the issue of cold, hard cash. The Fokus story named names, listed numbers of bank accounts. In this day and age, it is entirely too easy to verify a story and prove it right or wrong - provided that people want to hear the truth in the first place.

Given that the Empire's case for Kosovo independence is built on violence and lies and that everything concerning the Albanian organized crime is swept under the rug, Dourlot's dismissal of the Fokus story as "rubbish from a Serb magazine" calls forth a phrase well-known to political reporters: "Believe nothing until it's been officially denied."