As the Latin saying goes, De mortuis nil nisi bonum. Fair enough, and for most deceased a modest effort would probably suffice to act in the spirit of this sentiment and find something decent to say. However, in the case of the recently departed Madeleine Albright, one is genuinely hard put to find even a minimum of virtue to balance the wickedness.

For all we know she may indeed be remembered as a “loving mother, grandmother, sister, aunt, and friend” in her private circle, as claimed by her family when they announced her death. But outside of that circle, one suspects that few will remember her that way.

Her passing, which occurred on precisely the day which marked the 23^rd anniversary of the decision to commit one of the most infamous acts with which her name is associated, the savage and illegal bombing in 1999 of Yugoslavia, must impress everyone capable of perceiving meaning in human events as a mighty portent. Assuredly, Albright had committed in her public life other acts of malfeasance and moral turpitude which in terms of destruction and victim count may exceed the devastation which her policies inflicted on the people of Serbia and Montenegro. But ensconced in her relationship with the Serbian nation there is an important and telling detail, and it lays bare the depravity.

In the years preceding the outbreak of World War II, Madeleine Albright, known then as Jana Korbelova, and her family took refuge in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia to escape from the ethnic persecution and almost certain death in a Nazi concentration camp as Germany occupied Czechoslovakia. The Korbel refugee family were amicably welcomed and generously accommodated in the Serbian resort town of Vrnjačka Banja, where Jana attended school and reportedly learned the Serbian language. Later in life, after the war, when Jana landed in America, becoming Madeleine, and ambition for personal advancement began to direct her life, not a trace of gratitude or empathy for the people who saved her life could be detected. If on some of her “diplomatic missions” the objects of her contempt rewarded her with stones, who could really blame them? Throughout the nineties, she championed the vilification of the very people who most likely shielded her from a gruesome death in Auschwitz, slanderously denouncing them as reincarnated Nazis and hailing with glee the mayhem and destruction wrought by NATO upon them. Her intemperate calumnies speak volumes about her character.

As a public figure, Albright never gave an inkling of the noble attributes which now fill the official eulogies. Her casual remark during an interview in 1996 with Leslie Stahl of “60 Minutes”, that in her opinion sanctions laid on Iraq which cost the lives of half a million children (more than died in Hiroshima, Stahl reminded her) were “worth it,” was shocking beyond words. But that was just a “loving grandmother” in charge of superpower foreign policy sharing her most cherished values with a global audience.

Her academic output was rather thin, compared to her father’s, who had a successful career as a political science professor on his own merits and without agreeing to any moral compromises to get ahead after the family immigrated to America in the post-war period. One has the distinct impression that in order to get ahead Madeleine relied less on her scholarship and more on who she hung around with. In her rise to prominence she tended always to keep in lockstep with political heavyweights such as Zbigniew Brzezinski and the Clintons. It was a career strategy that paid off. In the topsy-turvy Beltway world, a person with her flimsy professional and moral qualifications could indeed scale unimaginable heights, as long as she toed the party line and in her diatribes publicly spouted all the right opinions. It is thus that Madeleine Albright became not just a “diplomat” representing her adopted country in the United Nations and later even Secretary of State. As allegedly “one of the world’s most respected diplomats [so goes one of establishment puff pieces dedicated to her] Dr. Madeleine K. Albright, continues to advocate for democracy and human rights across the world, while also championing the important impact international relations and educational exchanges have on the United States today,” as the fawning blurb disingenuously put it, but there is more than that. The grateful and admiring establishment, whose obsequious servant she had been, in the final stages of her career made her professor, of all things, in the practice of diplomacy at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service.

Thus, the bogus diplomat, who in 1999 orchestrated multiple violations of international law by using her position to destroy and dismember a European country by using the most egregious force and violence, was put in charge of training future diplomats.

That was rather akin to appointing Dr. Mengele professor of medicine so that he could apply his accumulated professional experience to the training of future doctors.

In Orthodox teaching, for forty days after death the soul passes through a series of toll-houses where the record of sins committed during its past life is put before it by jeering demons who, of course, have it all written down. Perhaps this scenario should be modified slightly just for the passage of Madeleine Albright, nee Korbelova, so that in her descent to the netherworld she might be met at the toll-houses by the reproachful gaze of her numberless child victims, whose innocent deaths she engineered and proclaimed to be “worth it.” Naturally, the demons will still be there at the end of the journey, waiting for her arrival and for the pleasure of her company.

Twenty-two years ago today the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was subjected to the 55th straight day of bombardment from the then 19-member North Atlantic Treaty Organization, with 23 days more to go. Many families in Belgrade, Novi Sad and Niš daily fled to bomb shelters during the aerial onslaught. The permanent trauma inflicted on millions of civilians, especially children, is perhaps impossible to calculate. And it has been denied or ignored by Europe and the world. As forgotten as the cluster bomb fragments and depleted uranium left behind by NATO’s “humanitarian intervention.”

The air war was justified by U.S. President Bill Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and NATO Secretary General Javier Solana as a noble crusade to stop, to employ an expression not uncommon at the time, the “worst genocide since Hitler” in the Serbian province of Kosovo. The operation, Operation Allied Force for NATO, Operation Noble Anvil for the U.S., began with a barrage of Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from ships and submarines in the Adriatic Sea. In all over 1,000 NATO military aircraft flew 30,000 combat sorties over a nation of slightly more than 10 million people, two million of those in Kosovo; a military bloc whose combined population at the time was some 850 million and which included three of the world’s nuclear powers.

During the war, arguably the most lopsided since the U.S.’s invasion of Grenada in 1983, American and other Western officials maintained a steady drumbeat of increasingly hyperbolic, and criminally unconscionable, claims of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo killed by Yugoslav forces. On May 16 Defense Secretary William Cohen appeared on Face the Nation and said: “We’ve now seen about 100,000 military-aged men missing….They may have been murdered.” Almost immediately afterward another American official raised that number to 200,000.

The scare tactics worked, as NATO’s top military commander, General Wesley Clark, was able to continue daily bombing missions over the small nation months after all targets of military value had been hit and hit repeatedly. A passenger train, a religious procession, a refugee column, Radio Television of Serbia headquarters. a vacuum cleaner factory, bridges, marketplaces, apartment courtyards, the Swiss embassy in Belgrade and the Chinese embassy as well, with three journalists killed and 27 other Chinese injured. Cluster bombs, graphite bombs and depleted uranium ordnance were used widely. No one, not a single individual, has been held accountable for those war crimes. Nor for what should be a war crime and one of the most grave at that: intentionally fabricating and exaggerating atrocity stories to agitate for and escalate a war. Few Western politicians and journalists would have escaped that charge over their roles in 1999.

When the Yugoslav government of President Slobodan Milosevic was compelled to accede to NATO diktat on June 10, over 200,000 ethnic Serbs, Roma and other minorities left Kosovo with Yugoslav troops, and NATO and its so-called Kosovo Liberation Army cutthroats – for whom and with whom it waged the war – marched into Kosovo. After the latter arrived even more, perhaps a hundred thousand or more, Serbs, Roma, Turks, Jews, Egyptians, Ashkali and members of other ethnic minority communities, along with no few Albanians, fled the province. Numerous Serbs, Roma and Albanian “collaborators” were murdered in what the Western press invariably described as revenge killings. (During the air war Britain’s Daily Telegraph reported 100,000 ethnic Albanians fled Kosovo to other parts of Serbia.)

The permanent displacement of hundreds of thousands of non-ethnic Albanians from Kosovo and the expulsion of over a quarter of a million Serbs from Croatia in the early 1990s are the two largest cases of irreversible ethnic cleansing in Europe since World War II. Decades later no one has been held accountable for those crimes either.

Most all of the above has been forgotten if it was ever known. That’s how it was planned. While NATO was celebrating its fiftieth-anniversary jubilee in Washington, D.C. and inducting the first new members since Spain in 1986, and former members of the Warsaw Pact at that – the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland – a high-profile, low-risk war was just the thing to launch new global NATO on the world.

The victim, Yugoslavia, had been mortally wounded; four years later it no longer existed, even on the map. The corpse was expected to rest silently.

But its ghost refuses to disappear. On May 14 Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, responding to a comment by his Slovenian counterpart, Borut Pahor, to the effect that there should be no redrawing of borders in Europe, said:

“We have a differing view on Kosovo’s independence. When I hear that, as Pahor says, there are no border changes without conflict, I agree, and that should be clear to all who have been generating conflicts and wanted to change Serbia’s borders.” That is a reference to the West – the U.S., European Union and NATO – successfully wrenching Kosovo from Serbia in 2008, in violation of the 1999 Kumanovo Agreement. Vucic backed up his contention that national borders should not be arbitrarily or unilaterally changed by stating that only borders recognized by the United Nations are legitimate. However, he said that a contrary practice had been at work since 1999, the result of “the brutal hypocrisy of Western powers that have no principles, or have principles as needed.”

President Vucic was in Prague, the Czech Republic on May 18 and met there with President Miloš Zeman. Zeman was prime minister of the Czech Republic in 1999 when his country joined NATO and the war against Yugoslavia was launched.

The Czech leader’s spokesman, Jiri Ovcacec, confirmed that “President Miloš Zeman presented public apologies to President Aleksandar Vucic for the [NATO] bombardments of Yugoslavia in 1999,” and that he “personally asked the Serbian people for forgiveness.”

During the war Prague refused NATO’s warplanes the right to land in Czech territory. Today Zeman himself told the press after his meeting with Serbia’s president:

“We were hopelessly looking for at least one more [NATO] country that would join us and come out against [the bombardments of Yugoslavia]. We remained all alone.” Displaying that rarest of virtues for a politician, penitence, he also said his government should have exercised more resolve in demanding the end of the bombing once it had commenced.

When the Czech Republic joined NATO in 1999 it was accompanied by Hungary and Poland, fellow members of the Visegrad Four group in Central Europe. The fourth member, Slovakia, was not invited because the party of three-time prime minister Vladimír Mečiar was not to the liking of the U.S., NATO and the EU. The following year Mečiar dropped out of politics, with his Movement for a Democratic Slovakia party colleague Augustín Marián Húska disclosing: “The NATO war against Yugoslavia in 1999 was also a signal to us, to not pursue any vision of political independence anymore. We have seen what will happen to forces that want to be independent.”

On May 7 the governments of Serbia and China commemorated the NATO bombing of China’s embassy in Serbia in 1999. Serbian Minister of Labor, Employment, Veteran and Social Affairs Dr. Darija Kisic Tepavcevic, head of the Association of Journalists of Serbia Vladimir Radomirovic, Chinese ambassador to Serbia Chen Bo and others laid wreaths in honor of three Chinese journalists killed in the attack.

The Chinese ambassador thanked the Serbian people for keeping alive the memory of the victims who, she said, “paid the price of truth, justice, and righteousness with their lives.

“We will never forget the crime conducted by the aggressor, who most brutally violated human rights, in the name of the so-called protection of human rights.”

If most of the rest of the world has forgotten NATO’s first war and its bloody emergence on the world stage, China and Serbia have not.

On March 26, to mark the beginning of NATO’s air war against Yugoslavia and Serbia’s Remembrance Day for the Victims of the NATO Aggression, Hua Chunying, spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, stated:

“China would like to remind NATO that they still owe a debt of blood to the Chinese people….The dead have passed away, but the living need more vigilance and reflection.”

It’s worth quoting him further as a reminder that the crime of 1999 has indeed haunted not only Europe but the world ever since it was perpetrated; that what is seemingly past is really both prologue and precedent.

“Whether in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya or Syria, we should never forget the lives of ordinary people lost to repeated bombardment, the crumbling walls under the shells, the glorious historical sites consumed by the flames.

“The US and some Western countries have kept their mouths open about human rights and kept their mouths shut about their responsibilities….When they blatantly launched a war against a sovereign country without the Security Council’s authorization, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths and the dispersal of millions of people, did they ever care about the human rights of the people in those countries? Is this what they mean by international rules? Shouldn’t they be held accountable for their war actions?”

Those questions, which had they been asked twenty-two years ago might have spared millions of lives in the nations the Chinese diplomat enumerated and others, need to be asked now and with a passion and insistence hitherto absent.

Anti-Bellum

The weekend of March 27-28, thousands of vehicles from neighboring countries formed lines waiting to enter Serbia. The reason? Vaccines. For free. Lots of them, from both East and West. Sputnik V, Sinopharm, AstraZeneca, Pfizer. More than the rest of the ex-Yugoslav republics combined. And Serbia decided to open its doors to those among its former compatriots who have lost all hope that their Western-approved “democracies” would obtain them in respectable quantities any time soon.

So, does this humane gesture make Serbia a white hat in Western eyes? Of course not. Silly question. Did the saintly Western democracies spend all those years and millions in demonizing the region’s largest and most influential country only to blithely give up the divide et impera policy so successfully applied during the dismantling of ex-Yugoslavia? Just because lives are at stake? Another silly question. Come on, this is the zero-sum West we’re talking about. The world is divided into winners and losers. Those that obey, even at their own expense, are the “good guys,” and those that don’t – are not. “Win-win” is not an option.

In fact, the collective West is busy showing this spring just what it thinks of Serbia’s determination to conduct an independent, multilateral and – egads! – pro-multipolar policy through an old-fashioned show of force. In a rare journalistic display of directness, the EU-related EURACTIV news site ran the following headline announcing the entire enterprise: “NATO, U.S. to stage large-scale military exercises around Serbia until summer.” The accompanying map of the Defender-Europe 21 operation, as it is officially called, is even more to the point, eerily recalling the encirclement of Yugoslavia by Axis forces in April 1941. Hard to find clearer messaging that that.

Imagine if the 30,000 or so soldiers slated to participate in the event were instead deployed to deliver vaccines and mobile field hospitals to the virus-stricken region. But it seems that the Serbian pro-multipolar “virus” is raising more alarm in Western capitals than the actual pandemic. And it needs to be contained, or at least isolated. Can’t have the entire region weaning itself off the neoliberal, er… democratic teat and start looking collectively in any other direction but due West, can we?

Consider the recently adopted European Parliament resolution on Serbia, especially its “concerns” regarding the country’s efforts to pursue balanced external relations:

“77. [The EP] Expresses concern about China’s increasing influence in Serbia and across the Western Balkans and the lack of transparency and environmental and social impact assessment of Chinese investments and loans; calls on Serbia to strengthen its legal compliance standards for Chinese business activities;

“87. Reiterates the importance of alignment with the EU common foreign and security policy (CFSP), which must progressively become an integral part of Serbia’s foreign policy as a condition for the accession process; expresses concern about Serbia’s alignment rate, which is the lowest in the region; notes that some government officials and some politicians continue to make occasional statements that call into question Serbia’s foreign policy orientation; is concerned by Serbia’s repeated support for Russia in the UN General Assembly over the annexation of Crimea;

“88. Welcomes the fact that Serbia aligned with the EU’s position on the presidential elections in Belarus; remains concerned, however, that Serbia has failed to align with the sanctioning of Belarusian officials and with the EU’s position on the new security law in China; calls on Serbia to increase its level of alignment with the declarations of the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy on behalf of the EU, and with Council decisions;

“98. Expresses concern over Serbia’s increasing dependence on defence and security  equipment and technologies from the People’s Republic of China, including a mass surveillance system in Belgrade and mass personal data collection without appropriate safeguards, and the insufficient transparency of the security sector’s public procurement practices; continues to be concerned about Serbia’s close political and military cooperation with Russia, including the continued presence of Russian air facilities in Niš; calls on Serbia to align with the CSDP and its instruments…”

Add to this the periodic calls for NATO to wrap up its “unfinished business” in the Balkans, or the constant stream of “concern” with Russian or Chinese “malign influence” in the region, and the picture of the never-ending Western obsession with Serbia and its stubborn independent streak becomes complete.

Recently, the country marked the 22^nd anniversary of the beginning of NATO’s illegal “humanitarian” intervention against ex-Yugoslavia, which took an untold human(itarian) and, yes, ecological, toll on Serbia’s population. Unlike the totally unrepentant West, both Russia and China made sure to call this Western campaign by its real name – “aggression” – and made a public show of solidarity with Serbia. This was especially the case with the Chinese defense minister Wei Fenghe, whose three-day visit to Serbia, fortuitously coinciding with the anniversary, also provided the opportunity for China to send some unequivocal messages of its own.

As he laid wreaths at the site of the Chinese embassy “accidentally” bombed by a U.S. B-2 “stealth” bomber on May 7, 1999, when three Chinese journalists were killed and 20 people injured, Wei stated that “the Chinese military will never allow history to repeat itself as China is capable and determined to defend its national interests.” For her part, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying added that NATO “still owes blood debt” to the Chinese people and that “it shall not be forgotten that the U.S.-led NATO blatantly bombed Yugoslavia in 1999 in a severe violation of relevant international conventions and basic norms of international relations.”

In fact, there is ample proof that NATO’s 78-day attack on Serbia and Montenegro was not the least bit “humanitarian” in its purpose but had an ice-cold geopolitical raison. Perhaps the key public proof of this was provided by Willy Wimmer, former member of the German Bundestag and Vice President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the OSCE, in a letter written to then German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder on May 2, 2000, or less than a year after NATO’s illegal operation.

Wimmer’s 11-point brief of what was said at a closed security conference organized in Bratislava by the U.S. State Department included the following key points:

“4. The war against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was waged in order to rectify General Eisenhower’s erroneous decision during World War II. Therefore, for strategic reasons, American troops must be stationed there, in order to compensate for the missed opportunity from 1945.

“7. It would be good, during NATO’s current enlargement, to restore the territorial situation in the area between the Baltic Sea and Anatolia such as existed during the Roman Empire, at the time of its greatest power and greatest territorial expansion.

“8. For this reason, Poland must be flanked to the north and to the south with democratic neighbor states, while Romania and Bulgaria are to secure a land connection with Turkey. Serbia (probably for the purposes of securing an unhindered U.S. military presence) must be permanently excluded from European development.

“11. The claim that, during its attack on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, NATO violated all international rules, and especially all the relevant provisions of international law – was not disputed.”

No less devastating was the experienced German diplomat’s own conclusion:

“It seems that the American side, for the sake of its own goals, is willing and ready to undermine, on a global scale, the international legal order, which came about as a result of the two world wars in the previous century. Force is to stand above law. Wherever international law stands in the way, it is to be removed.

“When the League of Nations experienced a similar fate, World War II was not far off. The manner of thought that takes into regard solely its own interests can only be referred to as totalitarian.”

This is the stuff for some future iteration of the Nuremberg trials, where the crime of aggression was identified as “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” For now, it can at least serve as a handy tool in the current global info war, another reminder of the foreign policy roots of some of the self-styled moral crusaders staffing the Biden Administration, such as Anthony Blinken, who openly invokes the reprehensible Madeleine Albright as a “role model.”

So, if having a war of aggression named after you and causing the death of half a million Iraqi children was “worth it” in Albright’s mind, the untold millions being spent in efforts at eradicating all traces of multipolarity from European soil, instead of helping alleviate the region’s health crisis, are most certainly “worth it” in the minds of her political and spiritual successors in the White House and across the Atlantic.

In any case, the situation in and around Serbia, Europe’s most stubborn multipolar outpost, is bound to heat up in the near future.

While March 24 passed largely unnoticed in the West, where it should have evoked enormous outpourings of shame and repentance, in Moscow it was remembered by Maria Zakharova who correctly called it “a forever stain on NATO’s reputation.” On that day in 1999, invoking as its the pretext the urgent need to protect from persecution Kosovo’s Albanian minority, the NATO alliance, under the coordinated leadership  of major Western countries, began its Blitzkrieg against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

Initially modelled after Hitler’s rapid war-winning strategy, the NATO offensive was not expected to last more than three or four days before Yugoslavia folded. In the event, it lasted more than seventy days, with a military and political ending in the field that was not among the brightest moments in NATO’s annals. In the final days of the unequal struggle to subdue a brave nation which had only a fraction of the aggressor’s resources to fight with, it was practically as if Hitler had been compelled to sue for peace from one of his intended victims. Other than being mindlessly destructive of civilian infrastructure, schools, hospitals, post offices, and bridges, and after killing several thousand civilians, the NATO offensive was getting precisely nowhere. Chastened by their full spectrum failure to dent Serbian ground defences, NATO generals repeatedly postponed and finally discarded the option of a ground invasion that in their probably correct estimate would have led to a politically unacceptable carnage of their troops.

What remained was to redouble the effort to vindictively and systematically, from the safe altitude of 30,000 feet, raze the victim country’s wherewithal for any semblance of civilized life. It was a practical application in the heart of Europe (not that it would have been justified anywhere else) of the neanderthal refrain of “free world” military planners that this or that country must either obey or be “bombed back to the stone age.” The neanderthals were, of course, safely ensconced in their Pentagon and Brussels offices while their acolytes were conducting murderous raids from heights that were largely unreachable for Yugoslavia’s air defences. The steady obliteration of Yugoslavia’s assets was taking its toll while the immense popular mobilization against barbarism that was taking place on the streets of Europe and America posed a severe political challenge to vassal European governments and began to strain the very fabric the NATO alliance.

In the end, NATO was ready for almost any sort of face-saving peace. Parallel to the intensification of bombing raids, it played its last card in the person of a corrupt Finnish politician, Martti Ahtisaari, who blustered President Slobodan Milosevic into adopting a more “flexible” stance by threatening to carpet bomb Belgrade, a clear war crime even if not actually enacted and used only as a tool of perverse neanderthal diplomacy. President Milosevic made the judgment call, rightly or wrongly, and decided in return for a badly needed respite to give the wicked alliance the face saver it needed by bringing its aggression to a close on something akin to “honourable” terms.

The political price for the cease fire that Yugoslavia exacted was formidable, at least in purely theoretical terms. It was UN Security Council Resolution 1244, which stipulated that the provinces of Kosovo and Metohija were inalienably Yugoslav (and with the subsequent dissolution of Yugoslavia, successor-state Serbia’s) territory and that under UN auspices NATO troops would be allowed to enter it only for the purpose of policing the peace and ensuring the safety of all ethnic groups residing there, pending a negotiated resolution of outstanding issues. Considering the gross disproportion in strength between the parties, for the Serbs that was on its face an epic moral and political victory even though NATO had not the slightest intention of honouring the terms of the agreement it signed. To rub it in, in plain view of the entire world the Serbian army withdrew from Kosovo virtually intact and in perfect order after over two months of bombardment which had almost entirely missed its target.

What remained, however, were tons of illegal toxic uranium munitions with a half-life of several million years to contaminate the soil and ruin the health of generations to come. But that was the predictable price of NATO “liberation.”

By far the most world-historical and plainly unintended consequence of NATO’s Kosovo adventure is what happened next, something that the Alliance and the Western political leadership will rue until their dying day. As noted in the Tweet of the Russian Embassy in Washington, “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.” The implications of these sombre facts did not pass without being thoroughly grasped in Moscow. In fact, they were firmly grasped and in real time by Prime Minister Evgeny Primakov who was on his way to Washington when the aggression started and immediately ordered his aeroplane, without further ado, to make a mid-Atlantic U-turn and return home. That sobering experience inaugurated a new era in geopolitics, further elaboration of this point being entirely unnecessary.

This writer, who in 2004 was seeing Mr. Primakov on another matter, upon the specific request of his mother and on behalf of the Serbian people, had the extraordinary honour of thanking the Russian statesman for his courageous and inspiring gesture which – now in retrospect we can confidently conclude – truly changed the world.

Elitist mind-moulder Edward Bernays’ generous concession to the common man, “People are entitled to the choices we give them,” was played out dramatically during America’s recent electoral season. The multitude gobbled up the meagre choices, and did so voraciously. The distinction between theatre and reality was plainly lost on most of them. They became impassioned actors in a self-destructive play minutely choreographed by forces unseen, for ends suspected by some but completely understood by none.

Students of the controlled demolitions of the USSR and Yugoslavia may also see the ultimate game plan “through a glass, darkly” (1 Cor. 13:12), much like everyone else, but they will at least enjoy a significant heads-up. The rumblings of impending disintegration that even in the initial stages were audible to keen minds back then, are again unmistakably perceptible today.

The first and most overpowering impression upon seeing a great state suddenly plunged into agony and disarray is sheer disbelief at “how the mighty have fallen” (see 2 Samuel 1:19 or 1:27, as the reader may prefer, for both are spot on). The magnitude of the disaster overwhelms both literally and metaphorically. In the latter sense it is particularly striking. A formerly dynamic and agile commonwealth, as in a fiendish practical joke, now in its doddering phase is being put in the charge of an embarrassing senile dotard whose decrepit condition exactly matches the demise of the once imposing entity that he is being installed to nominally govern.

But to shift from broad generalities to banal particulars, it is doubtful that after these outrages America will still be able to represent itself to the outside world as the lofty paragon of the Biblical “city on the hill.” Far more importantly, however, the internal consensus that has held it together as “one nation, under God” (to use another biblical allusion) is now irredeemably broken. The indoctrinated nation that over two centuries was meekly contented, in Bernays’ terms, to settle for the choices it was given, has now fully realized the systemic scandal of that cynical arrangement, and it no longer feels comfortable with it. Still not all, but certainly a good half, and then some. Their overwhelming electoral preference for the “losing” Presidential candidate, regardless of the ruinous economic and health situation of unparalleled severity, is a telling sign. Since, as all pundits know, Americans always “vote their pocketbook,” even if the incompetent incumbent’s opponent happens to be an impaired dotard, such electoral behaviour is a game changer that the Bernays-inspired ruling elite disregard at their peril. In the short-term, after January 20^th, the complete gutting of the Second Amendment will undoubtedly be their emergency reflex response; but whether that will be sufficient to restore obedience remains to be seen.

But more fundamentally, beyond mere discontent, and in spite of the greatest coordinated news blackout ever seen, the unhappy masses, some intuitively and some empirically, through the still unrepressed alternative sources, have now grasped the shocking magnitude of the fraud played on them. One of the basic props of the engineered consent upon which public order and social stability have rested for decades, the naïve belief in the democratic essence of the system, was foolishly overturned on November 3^rd, and it was done precisely by those who should have been the most interested in keeping it intact. The schism that shattered faith will engender is bound to have incalculable consequences.

But the sacrilegious mob incursion into the hallowed precincts of the Congress definitely was not one of those consequences, the carefully contrived appearances notwithstanding. It was a classical false flag operation, an American adaptation of the standard color revolution playbook that previously had been successfully applied elsewhere in numerous regime change situations. The incessantly battered and largely demoralized regime, headed by a political illiterate whose grasp and cunning do not go far beyond routine prevarications required for New York real estate deals, apparently was thoroughly infiltrated as well, exactly like its third world homologues. Violent Antifa shock troops, now the elite’s Brown Shirts, were bussed into Washington in white vans, under police escort.  Capitol Hill guards facilitated the storming of the Congress  by removing barricades and letting the mob through. Nor did the choreographers forget to make sure that there would also be the obligatory sacrificial victim. From an operational standpoint, Gene Sharp would have been pleased, though it is unlikely that in his day the domestic application of his technology had actually been envisaged.

The expectation of millions of Americans of all political persuasions and from all walks of life that after repeated court challenges, rejected on flimsy procedural grounds, on January 6^th Congress would at last exercise its constitutional authority to order a thorough review of the disputed issues on their merits, came to nought. The officer of the government who had the legal authority to act, Vice President Mike Pence, pointedly failed to do so. Pence practically mirrored the behaviour in 1992 of Yugoslav Presidency member Bogić Bogićević. At a critical moment leading up to the break-up of Yugoslavia, Bogićević refused to vote for proposed solutions that might have defused the crisis, thus ensuring that the measures would not be adopted and laying the groundwork for the country’s ensuing collapse and bloodshed.

The curious fact that in the end establishment figures of both parties and from all major institutions of formal and informal governance were aligned on the same page, certifying a totally implausible electoral outcome, is perhaps the ultimate proof of attorney Lin Wood’s otherwise shocking explanation of how the system works.

Personalizing the issues underlying this crisis, as many outside the United States are wont to do, is mistaken. Both principals are strawmen devoid of substance. In his whimsical quest for the Presidency four years ago, engaged in as a rich man’s ego trip rather than with a serious intention of winning, probably accidentally the incumbent articulated the brooding masses’ deepest concerns and frustrations. They, in turn, projected their exasperation, bitterness, and illusions back onto him, turning him by default into their standard-bearer. The fact that after four years in office their symbolic champion has nothing to show, yet in the midst of economic collapse he was still able to garner about eighty million votes, is a huge sign. It is a sobering warning to the ruling elite that blatant electoral manipulation and ruthless information censorship may serve as Band-Aid solutions, but are losing their effectiveness.

You can pull the tiger’s tail only so much before it pounces.

Beyond the cant about lofty humanistic motives, it became evident to perspicuous observers soon after the Tribunal started its sessions that in fact ICTY was brazenly fulfilling a political task on behalf of the states that organized and financed it. Its principal political directive was to wipe clean the nasty role of the Western powers, including Germany, in the violent destruction and dismemberment of Yugoslavia and to cast the defiant Serbs as the designated fall guy for the externally instigated carnage. It was in addition given the task, plainly awkward for an allegedly judicial body, to shape its judgments so as to rewrite history, not just of the Yugoslav conflict in the 1990s but, more ambitiously, to recast the history of the entire region, often going back centuries, to suit its sponsors’ current geopolitical designs and narratives.

Like the shabby B-movie that it is, the ICTY pseudo-judicial theatre also had to have its cut-out, cartoon character “good and bad guys”. One of its best known cut-out villains is Dr Radovan Karadzic, the war-time leader of the Bosnian Serbs. Media magic, buttressed by a generously garnished indictment relying on prosecutor-friendly tools such as Joint Criminal Enterprise, charged Dr Karadzic with every heinous crime in the book, up to genocide and beyond if possible. The soft-spoken Sarajevo psychiatrist and poet was handily turned into a model villain, perfect for the Tribunal’s publicity gallery.

Eventually, Dr Karadzic was sentenced to forty years in prison, but on appeal that severely lengthy sentence based on dubious and circumstantial evidence was malevolently enhanced to life imprisonment, no doubt just to rub it in, because either way it made no difference to a man of seventy-five. Incidentally, Dr Karadzic was not the only ICTY defendant who after making the mistake of filing an appeal ended up with an increased sentence, a practice that – to put it charitably – is most untypical for civilized jurisprudence. (Albania under Enver Hoxha had it, thus making the Tribunal not entirely unique in this regard.)

Assiduous ICTY watcher and our valued U.S.-based associate Andy Wilcoxson (and here) miraculously managed to arrange with prison authorities for a wide-ranging interview with Dr Karadzic. The interview yielded a number of insightful observations about the Yugoslav conflict and its background, some of which are shared here.

Speaking of the preparations for the bloody Yugoslav denouement, Dr Karadzic points out that “all the relevant governments and their services knew for decades in advance that it might happen after Tito’s death, but in spite of that, they instigated the war and carnage. Now, they are pretending to be innocent and searching for a causes in personal psychologies of leaders, as if it was irrational, imagined, unreal and exaggerated event. There was nothing like that in the Yugoslav, nor Bosnian crisis. In addition to that, all of our opponents in this crisis didn’t differ racially from us a bit. As a matter of fact, almost the entire Muslim community previously had been Serbs, but converted to Islam, mainly unwillingly and under duress, during the long Ottoman occupation. Many Croats also had been Serbs of Catholic faith, but after the Austro-Hungarian occupation, after the Berlin Congress in 1878, had declared their Croatian affiliation. (A Russian imperial diplomat Alexander Gilferding wrote a book about it in 19th century.)”

Dr Karadzic continues trenchantly that “since we are living in a ‘post-truth era’, facts are not relevant any more. Simply speaking, the international media, under governmental direction (not the other way around) create an image needed for their purposes, and the process goes on unhindered. All the technological advancement of human kind is (ab)used for the worse. So, the ‘Serbian cause’ was the last defense of a nation’s very survival, not the killing innocent and anonymous people in mosques or on beaches. One may observe what happened to the Serbs in Kosovo, in Croatia, in the Bosnia-Herzegovina Federation (the Muslim-Croat part of Bosnia) and what is happening to them now in Montenegro. There are almost no Serbs left in Croatia, because out of more than 600,000 now there is about 100,000 left. There are almost no Serbs in Kosovo, or in the Muslim-Croat part of Bosnia. By September 1992 there wasn’t a Serbian settlement on Muslim/Croat territory that was safe, they had already been destroyed, while nothing of the sort happened on the Republic of Srpska territory, where many Muslim or Croat settled places, villages or towns, were untouched. Serbs had never attacked any Muslim or Croat village unless they had previously been attacked from it, and if attacked, the Serbs demanded perpetrators to be handed over to the security forces. If there was a skirmish, civilians might have been hurt only accidentally, and after such a skirmish the rest of civilians would help the Serb forces to collect killed and wounded terrorists, who anyway were not a proper army, but acted deep within Serb territory as terrorists. On the other side, the Muslims, and to a lesser degree Croats, attacked every Serbian village they could reach, killing everyone, even animals, and burning everything. This is all well documented, and there can’t be any doubts about it.”

About his “media image”: “Pertaining to me, Radovan Karadzic, the media had been even more harsh and deceitful than with the denigration of the Serbs. All the negotiators had very correct relations with me, some were even friendly and understanding, and they all certainly realized that it was a civil war with many rogue elements. Even the main European powers were saying the same. Many of the mediators and ‘peace keepers’, including generals Nambiar, Morillon, Rose, McKenzie and others, had seen for themselves what was going on. Many of them reported that media were mistaken and biased, that all the sides are committing atrocities, but only the Serbs admit it, while others deny.”

On the important subject of Richard Holbrooke’s role in the final stages of the Bosnian war: “Most astonishing of all was Holbrooke’s transformation: together we created the Dayton Agreement, in Belgrade, in the presence of Presidents Milosevic and Bulatovic, and our associates…We cooperated well, with mutual understanding, and parted amicably. In June 1996 Mr. Holbrooke led a campaign for my stepping down from office, promising immunity, telling that there will be some rhetoric against me, but no trial. The main concern of the internationals was whether I would run for another term in Presidency in the forthcoming elections. I kept my word. However, he didn’t deliver, maybe he couldn’t, his part of the agreement, while I did deliver my part. This included my absence from public life and media… By keeping me far from the media, they insulated themselves from any of my reactions, comments or denial, and could continue to denigrate me without any risk. Finally, Mr. Holbrooke called me a ‘European Bin Laden’, and said that he regretted that there was no death penalty. Meanwhile, I was informed that many his friends, some obscure individuals, were instigating through NATO to eliminate me by killing me.”

And a very instructive insight into how easily provincial leaders with an inferiority complex fall into the trap of misjudging Western colleagues based on the latter’s proclaimed standards of integrity, instead of relying on their own objective experience and common sense: “When we concluded this agreement of my stepping down, President Milosevic told me that it would be improper and impolite to expect that such a big power’s representative should not be trusted, and to demand from him to sign what was agreed to. ‘If they are not to be trusted’, President Milosevic told me, ‘then they wouldn’t be a great power anymore.’” Did Milosevic remember that conversation as he was being hauled off to the Hague? One wonders.

Concerning the imputation of genocidal enmity toward Muslims and Croats: “The vast majority of [my business associates] had been Muslims, one of them a Croat, and none of them Serb. My internist was a Croat, while my optician, my dentist, both of my lawyers, my tailor, shoemaker, hairdresser, barber, and all other suppliers had been Muslims. (I have published this information, with their initials, and nobody denied it!) Even during the war, I had people of Muslim and Croatian ethnicities as close associates, many of them serving in our Army, where there was even a completely Muslim unit (The ‘Mesa Selimovic’ brigade).”

About the coming world realignment: “Nations that may be targeted by NATO and its member states are looking for new alliances, and seeking new ‘mentors’ that are less dangerous and more useful and reliable. I already said in some interviews than in many cultures there are two main archetypes of female figures: a mother and step mother, a good aunt or fairy and evil witch. Immediately after World War II we in the Balkans perceived the U.S. as a good aunt, while now small nations see China and Russia as good aunts, while the U.S. they see as an evil witch. So, intimidating the entire world is not fruitful strategy and tactics, and it will fail very soon.”

Why were the Serbs selected for exemplary punishment as the “bad guys”?: “First, because of ethnic and cultural closeness with Russia, it is envisaged in the West that they wouldn’t join any action against Russia. Furthermore, President Milosevic was seen by the West as the last Communist dictator, which he really wasn’t. He was a leftist, and he was an autocrat, but he was considered to be very close to America. He was convinced that Clinton would be a great President, and that nothing would spoil traditionally good relations between the two nations. Also… the Balkans had always been of the greatest interest to powers which wanted to keep Russia far from the ‘warm seas’ and to deny it free access to Middle East resources.”

What interests predominated in the decision to attack Yugoslavia in 1999?: “Germany wanted revenge for the two World Wars and to take the region back to the ‘status quo ante’; different circles in the U.S. had an interest to destroy the Yugoslav military industry, since Yugoslavia had 7% to 10% of the world market, particularly in the third world and non-aligned countries; others didn’t want to be out of this affair, or couldn’t resist the pressure of the mentioned powers. The middle range officials in these countries, our allies in all the wars in the 20th century, neglected this long lasting friendship and devotion of the Serbs to the Anglo-Saxon nations (Great Britain and U.S.) and France, smashing Serbia to smithereens, which may be forgiven, but not forgotten, ever. And that is an enormous loss for them, much higher than any benefit. Therefore, this was not in their national interest, but in the interest of small groups and lobbies within these countries… Still it puzzles me – why the U.S. and other Western powers didn’t support some of the secular Muslim parties instead of the fundamentalist SDA.”

But there were, by all accounts, personal pecuniary motives as well: “What makes this ‘business’ even more disgusting is a sort of private interest of the high officials, like the mentioned lady [Madeleine Albright], particularly in Kosovo. Some of them, after playing a disgraceful role in the war, went on to establish their private businesses there, participating in the privatization of resources and assets. Finally, they knew exactly the nature of the conflict in Bosnia, they knew who was doing what, but they did something unimaginable, by forging facts and influencing the media, covering up exculpatory evidence, exerting pressure on judicial institutions… Mr. Holbrooke himself confessed that the main benefit of the Indictment against me was to prevent me from going to Dayton, allowing them to alter the Agreement that was previously reached by the two of us with the assistance of our respective teams.”

Asked how it feels to be perceived as a “war criminal”: “What crosses my mind when they label me a war criminal? As when Mr. Izetbegovic, a friend of Al-Husseini and Hitler, labels his Serb colleagues in the Presidency as “Nazis”? I am not surprised by what the architects of this crisis say about me, because it is inherent to everything they had done. I can hardly believe how many serious, intelligent and educated people are so lazy, sluggish and ready to accept the media presentation of a contemporaneous event. Reading some of them I sometimes think they may be drugged, because they write about the Bosnian crisis as if they had been there all the time, while the majority of them had never been there.”

And, finally, turning with respect to the interviewer, Andy Wilcoxson: “We can see how extraordinary are alert, curious and responsible persons like yourself, who do not take the media truth for granted.”

President Bill Clinton’s favorite freedom fighter just got indicted for mass murder, torture, kidnapping, and other crimes against humanity. In 1999, the Clinton administration launched a 78-day bombing campaign that killed up to 1500 civilians in Serbia and Kosovo in what the American media proudly portrayed as a crusade against ethnic bias. That war, like most of the pretenses of U.S. foreign policy, was always a sham.

Kosovo president Hashim Thaci was charged with ten counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity by an international tribunal in The Hague in the Netherlands charged Thaci and nine other men with a “war crimes, including murder, enforced disappearance of persons, persecution, and torture.” Thaci and the other charged suspects were accused of being “criminally responsible for nearly 100 murders” and the indictment involved “hundreds of known victims of Kosovo Albanian, Serb, Roma, and other ethnicities and include political opponents.” But the American media’s ludicrous bias and/or incompetence on that war continues. The New York Times responded to Thaci’s indictment with a tweet declaring that “Serbia’s leader was indicted for war crimes.”

Hashim Thaci’s tawdry career illustrates how anti-terrorism is a flag of convenience for Washington policymakers. Prior to becoming Kosovo’s president, Thaci was the head of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), fighting to force Serbs out of the Kosovo. In 1999, the Clinton administration designated the KLA s “freedom fighters” despite their horrific past and gave them massive aid. The previous year, the State Department condemned “terrorist action by the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army.” The KLA was heavily involved in drug trafficking and had close to ties to Osama bin Laden.

But arming the KLA and bombing Serbia helped Clinton portray himself as a crusader against injustice and shift public attention after his impeachment trial. Clinton was aided by many shameless members of Congress anxious to sanctify U.S. killing. Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CN) whooped that the United States and the KLA “stand for the same values and principles. Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values.” And since Clinton administration officials publicly compared Serb leader Slobodan Milošević to Hitler, every decent person was obliged to applaud the bombing campaign. (Alexander Cockburn was one of the few journalists who condemned the unjust war at the time; this 1999 Los Angeles Times column set the gold standard for calling out Clinton’s BS on Serbia.)

Both the Serbs and ethnic Albanians committed atrocities in the bitter strife in Kosovo. But to sanctify its bombing campaign, the Clinton administration waved a magic wand and made the KLA’s atrocities disappear. British professor Philip Hammond noted that the 78-day bombing campaign “was not a purely military operation: NATO also destroyed what it called ‘dual-use’ targets, such as factories, city bridges, and even the main television building in downtown Belgrade, in an attempt to terrorize the country into surrender.” NATO repeatedly dropped cluster bombs into marketplaces, hospitals, and other civilian areas. Cluster bombs are anti-personnel devices designed to be scattered across enemy troop formations. NATO dropped more than 1,300 cluster bombs on Serbia and Kosovo and each bomb contained 208 separate bomblets that floated to earth by parachute. Bomb experts estimated that more than 10,000 unexploded bomblets were scattered around the landscape when the bombing ended and maimed children long after the ceasefire.

In the final days of the bombing campaign, the Washington Post reported that “some presidential aides and friends are describing Kosovo in Churchillian tones, as Clinton’s ‘finest hour.’” The Post also reported that according to one Clinton friend “what Clinton believes were the unambiguously moral motives for NATO’s intervention represented a chance to soothe regrets harbored in Clinton’s own conscience…. The friend said Clinton has at times lamented that the generation before him was able to serve in a war with a plainly noble purpose, and he feels ‘almost cheated’ that ‘when it was his turn he didn’t have the chance to be part of a moral cause.’” By Clinton’s standard, slaughtering Serbs was “close enough for government work” to a “moral cause.”

Shortly after the end of the 1999 bombing campaign, Clinton enunciated what his aides labeled the Clinton doctrine: “Whether within or beyond the borders of a country, if the world community has the power to stop it, we ought to stop genocide and ethnic cleansing.” In reality, the Clinton doctrine was that presidents are entitled to commence bombing foreign lands based on any brazen lie that the American media will regurgitate. In reality, the lesson from bombing Serbia is that American politicians merely need to publicly recite the word “genocide” to get a license to kill.

After the bombing ended, Clinton assured the Serbian people that the United States and NATO agreed to be peacekeepers only “with the understanding that they would protect Serbs as well as ethnic Albanians and that they would leave when peace took hold.” In the subsequent months and years, American and NATO forces stood by as the KLA resumed its ethnic cleansing, slaughtering Serb civilians, bombing Serbian churches and oppressing any non-Muslims. Almost a quarter-million Serbs, Gypsies, Jews, and other minorities fled Kosovo after Mr. Clinton promised to protect them. By 2003, almost 70 percent of the Serbs living in Kosovo in 1999 had fled, and Kosovo was 95 percent ethnic Albanian.

But Thaci remained useful for U.S. policymakers. Even though he was widely condemned for oppression and corruption after taking power in Kosovo, Vice President Joe Biden hailed Thaci in 2010 as the “George Washington of Kosovo.” A few months later, a Council of Europe report accused Thaci and KLA operatives of human organ trafficking. The Guardian noted that the report alleged that Thaci’s inner circle “took captives across the border into Albania after the war, where a number of Serbs are said to have been murdered for their kidneys, which were sold on the black market.” The report stated that when “transplant surgeons” were “ready to operate, the [Serbian] captives were brought out of the ‘safe house’ individually, summarily executed by a KLA gunman, and their corpses transported swiftly to the operating clinic.”

Despite the body trafficking charge, Thaci was a star attendee at the annual Global Initiative conference by the Clinton Foundation in 2011, 2012, and 2013, where he posed for photos with Bill Clinton. Maybe that was a perk from the $50,000 a month lobbying contract that Thaci’s regime signed with The Podesta Group, co-managed by future Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta, as the Daily Caller reported.

Clinton remains a hero in Kosovo where a statue of him was erected in the capital, Pristina. The Guardian newspaper noted that the statue showed Clinton “with a left hand raised, a typical gesture of a leader greeting the masses. In his right hand he is holding documents engraved with the date when NATO started the bombardment of Serbia, 24 March 1999.” It would have been a more accurate representation to depict Clinton standing on a pile of corpses of the women, children, and others killed in the U.S. bombing campaign.

In 2019, Bill Clinton and his fanatically pro-bombing former Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, visited Pristina, where they were “treated like rock stars” as they posed for photos with Thaci. Clinton declared, “I love this country and it will always be one of the greatest honors of my life to have stood with you against ethnic cleansing (by Serbian forces) and for freedom.” Thaci awarded Clinton and Albright medals of freedom “for the liberty he brought to us and the peace to entire region.” Albright has reinvented herself as a visionary warning against fascism in the Trump era. Actually, the only honorific that Albright deserves is “Butcher of Belgrade.”

Clinton’s war on Serbia was a Pandora’s box from which the world still suffers. Because politicians and most of the media portrayed the war against Serbia as a moral triumph, it was easier for the Bush administration to justify attacking Iraq, for the Obama administration to bomb Libya, and for the Trump administration to repeatedly bomb Syria. All of those interventions sowed chaos that continues cursing the purported beneficiaries.

Bill Clinton’s 1999 bombing of Serbia was as big a fraud as George W. Bush’s conning this nation into attacking Iraq. The fact that Clinton and other top U.S. government officials continued to glorify Hashim Thaci despite accusations of mass murder, torture, and body trafficking is another reminder of the venality of much of America’s political elite. Will Americans again be gullible the next time that Washington policymakers and their media allies concoct bullshit pretexts to blow the hell out of some hapless foreign land?

counterpunch.org

We can delegate to specialists debate over the ultimate nature and causes of the current unrest in the United States. The focus here is not on that but on one of the more ominous characteristics of the crisis, whatever its origins might be judged to be. In the Capitol Hill neighbourhood of Seattle two weeks ago, for the first time since the Civil War in the 1860s, something purporting to be a competing government was established on U.S. territory. So far, the organized forces of society, the legitimate (should we say condescendingly, the “internationally recognized”?) government, have not reacted to that challenge in any way, other than to meekly submit to some of the usurpers’ most outrageous demands. Those demands have so far centered mainly on preliminary issues such as “defunding” local law and order forces and restricting the range of tools available to them to deal with lawlessness. The resulting demoralization and disorientation of the police force, engendered by the cowardly and politically short-sighted capitulation of city of Seattle and state of Washington political leaders, is bound to have grave consequences later on. At some time in the near future, the foolishly emboldened terrorists will have to be suppressed by those same policemen (perhaps even assisted by regular army troops) once the evils released from Pandora’s box multiply and the civil breakdown becomes extensive and intolerable.

The gift of prophecy would have been unnecessary, historical perspective being enough, to accurately foresee the gangrenous spread of the Capitol Hill model elsewhere in the country, once goon squads who were trained, poised, and waiting for the authorities to demonstrate their fecklessness got the message that they could engage in repercussion-free rampages. Predictably, new “liberated zones,” run by elements that would not be described inaccurately as terrorists, are now emerging elsewhere, in Portland, Atlanta, and Minneapolis. To drive the point home, the local Seattle warlord and his henchmen have put up highly provocative signs at exit points from their illegally seized domain: “You are entering the United States of America.”

This still is not an American replay of 1917 Russia, but it might be approaching Russia’s 1905. Or, to suggest a contemporary and perhaps more meaningful analogy, it may be a re-enactment of the initial stages of the Yugoslav dissolution process detonated in the early 1990s.

Minor technical differences being duly acknowledged (the Yugoslav collapse was induced with ethnic tensions as the principal driver, while in the U.S. that role is assigned to racial tensions), there still remain impressive broad analogies. In early 90s Yugoslavia, the federal government also was disunited in purpose and political program. Latent separatisms that had kept a low profile while the economy was good and, mostly by inertia, the centralist idea still enjoyed a measure of prestige, suddenly emerged as respectable options and began to attract adherents. Violence broke out at selected points in Yugoslavia (it is still unclear who selected them and according to what criteria), as if to test the will and capacity of bewildered government structures to protect citizens and impose order. Demands to reconfigure the Yugoslav federation, rather than to deal directly with the rising tide of disorder, were put forward by demagogic local leaders who seized the attention of a divided and confused public. It soon became clear that the demagogues’ goal was not to improve the federation but to seize parts of it and turn them into their own “independent” fiefdoms. With the growing irrelevance of the central authorities, international mediation, unmistakably favouring the centripetal forces, was imposed. The “death of Yugoslavia” (as someone famously put it) was assured, and those who directed the process were obviously keen that the decedent’s rigour mortis be as uncontrollably violent as possible.

Yugoslavia scarcely would have died if influential elements within the governing apparatus had not seen advantages for themselves in helping to undermine its vitality and cohesion. Whether or not they precisely envisaged the ultimate consequences of their conduct is an intriguing question, but for the moment it can be set aside. The destroyers from outside the system and their enablers from within the system worked in tandem because they saw their separate agendas converging at certain key points. Ultimately the enablers from within the system set in motion forces that undermined their own authority, and when the smoke had cleared they were unceremoniously swept aside.

Only someone cognitively dissonant or wilfully blind will fail to sense a disturbingly similar pattern playing itself out in post-corona America.

Here is an example that should ring alarm bells. In the already entrenched “autonomous zone” of Seattle a few days ago a murder occurred and another citizen was wounded in the shootout. But here’s the rub: “The shooting happened at about 3 am in the area near downtown known as the Chaz, short for ‘Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone’, police said in a statement on Twitter. Seattle’s police department claimed in a press release on Saturday morning that when officers responded to reports of gunshots inside the protest zone, they ‘were met by a violent crowd that prevented officers safe access to the victims’.”

The police were successfully prevented from performing one of their basic functions, in this case not mob control, but simply investigating a crime scene and assisting victims.

The hooligans then sent a clear message who is in charge: “Police were later informed that the protesters’ own medics transported the two gunshot wound victims to a hospital, the department said.”

City authorities put their tail between their legs and did nothing about it. Inhabitants of the former Yugoslavia would have no difficulty interpreting the portentous significance of this comparatively minor incident and drawing proper conclusions from it.

Should it come as a surprise, then, that police in Atlanta are now inventing pretexts not to come to work and that they are increasingly refusing to respond to emergency 911 calls? Their stated rationale, that they are acting in solidarity with one of their colleagues who is being criminally prosecuted for shooting a black man to death under controversial circumstances, sounds rather indeed. But their underlying concern is serious enough, and it is a symptom of the slow disintegration of the system. Policemen see the writing on the wall and know that standard rules for dealing with lawlessness have been suspended. They do not want to risk being exposed to criminal charges for making a politically incorrect decision in a tense situation. Quite sensibly, they prefer not to be cannon fodder in confrontational games between the various warring factions of the political elite.

The process of controlled demolition has started and it is in its initial stages. Unless firm and decisive steps are taken now to counteract it using methods more civilized and professional, and less inflammatory, than those applied to the Branch Davidians, the emerging trends will at every turn become more difficult to control and reverse. Police forces are by definition the first line of defense of a cohesive and orderly society. Their demoralization and withdrawal of social support for the proper execution of their task augurs ill for the body politic in question.

All that may be music for the ears of Professor Panarin, of course strictly in his capacity as a scholarly predictor of political trends (and here). Panarin, however, has the privilege of watching the unfolding of his increasingly fashionable ideas from a safe distance. The show is less fun to watch from ground zero.

Since 1990, there have been some sixty referenda by regions or territories wishing to become independent or autonomous from their parent nation. Of these, only about twenty have been successful in a change of status. Forty have either failed to pass, some in dubiously close votes amid charges of election fraudor were not recognized by the governing authority.

Successful independence or autonomy referenda have only been successful if a combination of the neo-colonial foreign affairs infrastructures of Foggy Bottom in Washington, Whitehall in London, and the Quai d’Orsay in Paris gave them their blessings or arranged for predetermined outcomes.

From 1990 to 1991, particularly with the collapse of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, there was a rash of independence referenda held in Slovenia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Croatia, Estonia, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia (now North Macedonia), Nagorno-Karabakh, Ukraine, Transnistria, Gagauzia, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. All of the plebiscites resulted in independence, except for Kosovo, Nagorno-Karabakh, Transnistria, and Gagauzia.

On September 7, 1990, the ethnic Albanian members of the dissolved Kosovo Assembly in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo met in secret in Kačanik and declared the “Republic of Kosova.” The independence was rejected by Yugoslavia, but, more importantly, by the United States, Britain, France, and Germany. “Kosova” was only recognized by Albania. The neo-colonialists in Washington, London, and Paris, as well as the recently unified Germany, had plans for an independent Kosovo but 1990 was too early. The West had to demolish Yugoslavia completely before Kosovo was recognized as independent. That time would come in 2008, when the Kosovo Assembly, backed up by NATO and the European Union, declared the independence of the Republic of Kosovo.

The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), once deemed a terrorist group by NATO and the EU, was welcomed in Washington, London, Brussels, Paris, Berlin, and the International Court of Justice as the new government of the ethnic Albanian-ruled nation. For the ethnic Serbs of the former Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija, as well as Serbia, the move was rejected outright. Hypocritically, neither NATO nor the EU required an independence referendum. The 1990 referendum, which was never recognized by the West as legitimate, was, all of a sudden, seen as representing the will of the people of Kosovo. That is, of course, except for the Serbs of North Kosovo. Kosovo’s membership applicationwas rejected for United Nations. Russia, China, Spain, Hungary, and other nations rejected the former province’s declaration of independence.

It is noteworthy that the thorny issue of Macedonia, the name of which Greece rejected because Athens felt it represented territorial designs on parts of northern Greece, was settled when Macedonia became “North Macedonia.” However, when there was a vote by the Assembly of the Community of Municipalities of the Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohijain Kosovska Mitrovica in northern Kosovo that called for the Serbs, Gorani, Bosniaks, and Romani of North Kosovo to be recognized as autonomous under the name of North Kosovo, the idea was rejected without consideration by the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, and Brussels. Some democratic votes carry more weight than others among the status quo enthusiasts of Foggy Bottom, Whitehall, and the Q’uai d’Orsay.

A February/March 1992 referendum on independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina, boycotted by Bosnian Serbs, resulted in 99 percent for independence. Bosnia-Herzegovina, which began its existence as a nearly-failed state, was recognized by the EU, NATO, and UN.

On the other hand, Nagorno-Karabakh, Transnistria, South Ossetia, Gagauzia, and Abkhazia all held referenda on their respective status. None of the referenda results were accepted by the EU and the UN. In the March 17, 1990 All-Union referendum designed by President Mikhail Gorbachev to continue the Soviet Union in some semblance, 52.3 percent of Abkhazia, an autonomous republic in Georgia, voted to retain their union with the Soviet Union, while Georgia boycotted the referendum.

Abkhazia’s vote resulted in a de facto separation from Georgia. Two successive referenda on independence held in 1992 and 2006 in South Ossetia, formerly a part of Georgia, were rejected by the UN, NATO, EU, and Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe (OSCE). Transnistria’s referendum on independence from Moldova was 97.2 in favor of statehood. In 1991, the “Congress of People’s Deputies of the Steppe South of the Moldavian SSR” declared the Gagauz Republic. Although a majority of the people in the autonomous republic favored independence, it was rejected by Moldova and EU and NATO. 1991 and 2006 referenda on the independence of Nagorno-Karabakh as the Republic of Artsakh passed overwhelmingly but were rejected by the EU, OSCE, and UN. Rejected by the status quo enthusiasts of the UN and EU, Artsakh, Transnistria, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia have formed their own international organization, the Commonwealth of Unrecognized States.

The 1990s were turbulent times for would-be nation states. An April 1993 referendum on Eritrea’s independence from Ethiopia passed with 99.83 percent in favor of statehood. Unlike some of the aspirant nations of the former USSR and Yugoslavia, Eritrea was warmly accepted into the international community of nations. In some territories, attempts to change official status were met with chicanery on the part of territorial and metropolitan governments. That was the case in 1993 with a status referendum in the U.S. Virgin Islands. A mere 31.4 percent turnout in the referendum, which opted for the status quo in any event, saw the referendum rejected as null and void. The manipulation of the referendum ensured a mere 4.96 favoring independence. Similar manipulative contrivances in political status referenda in Puerto Rico in 1993, 1998,2012, and 2017resulted in the independence option receiving paltry 4.4 percent, 2.2 percent, 5.5 percent, and 1.5 percent, respectively. President Donald Trump has repeatedly shown his racist and xenophobic disdain for Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, often failing to recognize either territory as part of the United States or their residents as U.S. citizens.

The Netherlands has also cleverly manipulated status referenda in its Caribbean colonies of Curacao, Aruba, Bonaire, Sint Maarten, Saba, and Saint Eustatius to maintain its colonial foothold in the region. A 1995 independence referendum in the British territory of Bermuda required independence to be approved by 40 percent of those eligible to vote and at least 50 percent of those who voted. The independence option failed with only 25.88 percent supporting nationhood. The Caribbean island of Nevis saw independence stymied in a 1998 referendum. Although 62 percent of voters opted for independence, it was rejected because a two-thirds majority was not achieved. The same machination was used by colonial power New Zealand in back-to-back referenda for the Tokelau islands to become an associated state, with de facto independence, in 2006 and 2007. Both times, 60 percent voted for associated state status, but a two-thirds majority wasrequired. In the world of aspirant nations, the game is changed and the math is negotiable in order to suit the desires of the neo-colonialists and transnational interests.

Quebec independence failed by less than 1 percent of the vote in a 1995 referendum. Turnout was massive, over 93 percent. There was evidence that the 1995 independence referendum, like that of 1980, was manipulated by outside forces, including the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

In 1997, Anjouan, an island of the Comoros, voted 99 percent for independence in a referendum. Anjouan separatism was ultimately quelled by an African Union military invasion in 2008. The AU has a policy of not accepting any changes to colonial borders imposed by European colonial powers. Only Eritrea and South Sudan, the latter voting for independence with 98.83 percent in a 2011 referendum, were exceptions.

A 2014 independence referendum in Scotland received 44.7 percent in favor and 55.3 percent opposed. There were later indications of social media manipulation affecting the outcome. U.S. President Barack Obama also took the unusual step of interfering in the vote by calling for a rejectionof independence. That same year, Catalonia’s independence referendum, which received 80.76 percent of the vote. It was rejected by Spain. A 2017 independence referendum received 92.01 percent in favor of nationhood. In reaction, Spain ordered the arrest and imprisonment of the Catalonian government, the suspension of the regional government, and the imposition of direct rule by Madrid.

Kurdistan held a non-binding independence referendum in 2017. Independence from Iraq was favored by 92.73 percent of voters with a 72.12 percent turnout in a region marked by a jihadist insurgency and open warfare. However, the referendum was rejected by Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Syria, the United States, and Britain.

A 2018 independence vote in New Caledonia resulted in 43.3 percent in favor, with 56.67 percent opposed. On September 6, 2020, New Caledonia will hold another referendum. Independence for the French territory in the Pacific is prejudiced by the number of wealthy French Europeans who reside in the territory and outside political and intelligence influence by Australia. A similar independence referendum for the island chain of Chuuk in Micronesia is scheduled for March 2020. In August 2019, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made the first visit by a Secretary of State to Micronesia, a former U.S. Trust Territory. On the agenda was U.S. militarization of the region, as well as firm opposition to the impending Chuukese independence referendum. That same bellicose attitude by the Pompeo State Department has resulted in postponed status referenda in the Danish territories of the Faroes and Greenland, where U.S. militarization of the Arctic is high on the Trump administration’s agenda.

Breaking up is hard to do, especially if the political divorce is not sanctioned by the marriage counselors of Washington, London, Paris, and Brussels.

To arrive at such a harsh judgment, the Kosovo court must surely have dug up startling new evidence about what actually happened in Račak that even ICTY failed to produce. In 1999, ICTY amended its initial indictments of Serbian military and political leaders to include the slaughter of Albanian civilians in Račak. The incident was said to be a cold-blooded, genocidal murder of forty-five helpless Albanian peasants, executed by a unit of the Yugoslav army after it had besieged and captured their village. All well and good, while the NATO attack was in progress and public support needed to be drummed up by publicizing shocking atrocity stories. Later however, when things had calmed down and prosecutors would have been obliged to present some semblance of credible evidence to support their claim, the Račak episode was quietly dropped by ICTY, due to lack of evidence to support the accusation.

The reason Račak is so important to the construction of the mythological narrative in which recent Kosovo history under NATO occupation is enveloped is precisely because it served as a conveniently arranged “humanitarian catastrophe” to justify unleashing the military campaign against Yugoslavia that had already been decided on before that. The principal actor in that operation was a certain William Walker, officially billed as a “US diplomat,” at the time head of the Kosovo Verification Mission. His dramatic arrival in Račak and public asseveration that he was shocked by the horror of the crime scene he found there set the propaganda stage for what was to follow. Ironically, Walker had plenty of experience earlier in his career arranging genuine massacres of El Salvadorean peasants during their rebellion against the pro-Western, neo-colonial regime that had been imposed in that country. However, he was quite sloppy and turned a dismal failure when it came to staging the phony massacre in Račak. Since the alleged victims were members of the KLA terrorist outfit killed in a legitimate police operation, they quickly had to be refurbished for public display, while covering up as much tell-tale forensic information as possible. In the process, some mix-ups occurred that gave the game away. In the gully where the victims’ bodies were laid out to be photographed by the foreign media, there curiously was no evidence of blood around the corpses (watch 00:25 – 00:41 seconds). The suspicion that the bodies were hastily dressed up in a different set of civilian clothes not their own, to mask the fact that they were soldiers, was also corroborated by the fact that holes in the victims’ clothing generally did not correspond to the entry wounds of the bullets that killed them.

But none of these details apparently bothered the Kosovo court when it issued its stern judgment against Todosijević for “incitement to ethnic, racial, and religious hate, disorder and intolerance,” just for pointing out some of these incongruities.

Both the court’s procedural swiftness and the categorical nature of its conclusions are understandable in light of the importance of Račak in the historical mythology earlier referred to. The ultimate objective was not to just sentence some poor chap for a thought crime, but something much larger than that. Račak is symbolically the corner-stone of the Kosovo Albanians’ own emerging “genocide” narrative. Never mind that this vacuous charge, raised during the NATO assault on Yugoslavia in 1999, was discarded shortly after peace was restored. It has recently been boldly reinstated, thus successfully questioning Račak would further undermine whatever scant credibility the protected narrative may have.

As the perennial source and model – at least in recent times – of the Balkan “genocide” epidemic, Srebrenica predictably could not long remain outside this picture. Professor Raphael Lemkin may be turning in his grave, but the Bosnia-Herzegovina High Representative Valentin Inzko seems determined not to be outdone by Kosovo Albanians. Just as in Pristina the hapless Todosijević was being court martialed for his incautious remark, in Sarajevo this month Inzko solemnly announced that he would at long last use his mythical “Bonn Powers” to impose a Srebrenica genocide denial law in that unlucky country. The reason such a measure was not enacted long ago was a quirk in the Dayton Agreement requiring consensus on vital interest issues and the Serb entity Republika Srpska’s adamant refusal to be a willing party in the suppression of scholarly research and public discussion of the dubious grounds for the “Srebrenica genocide” accusation leveled against it.

Interestingly, the “Bonn Powers” to override and impose laws and procedures in Bosnia, which Inzko invoked in order to circumvent the legal deadlock which prevents the passage of genocide denial legislation, are just as spurious as the “Srebrenica genocide” itself. The self-serving charade was utterly demolished by Dr. John Laughland several years ago. Such powers are not mentioned anywhere in the Dayton Agreement which ended the war in Bosnia and set up the current constitutional arrangements in that country. Nevertheless, these puzzling powers, whose origins remain unexplained on the website of the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia, were successfully invoked several times in the past by Inzko’s predecessors to punish and dismiss elected officials who refused to toe the line prescribed by NATO powers, greatly raising tensions and often causing havoc in the country’s political system.

The claim of genocide in July of 1995 in Srebrenica is just as vacuous as the assertion of “Bonn Powers” which may soon be used in Bosnia to prohibit questioning it. The Srebrenica narrative would have collapsed long ago but for the respectability conferred upon it by its corrupt enabler, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), whose dishonorable role in perpetuating the fraud has been conclusively unmasked by a team of international scholars. Oddly for a “genocide,” in Srebrenica there is no evidence whatsoever of dolus specialis, or prior intent to annihilate a group protected under the Genocide Convention (also here). As for the physical evidence, even the heavily manipulated ICTY autopsy reports support a finding of just under 2,000 deaths in Srebrenica, far short of 8,000, as officially claimed. But even those deaths were from a variety of causes, execution accounting for several hundred of the aggregate total.

And as if that were not enough to make Prof. Lemkin’s stomach churn, in 2012 ICTY formally ruled that in the Bosnian village of Zepa another, hitherto unnoticed “genocide” had occurred and that the grand total of just three victims (mayor, military commander, and local religious leader) was quite sufficient to prove it. The feature which, in the Chamber’s preposterous opinion, raised the matter to the coveted status of genocide was that the three individuals were key leaders without whom the local community would collapse and become unsustainable. Unsustainability equals extinction, and extinction equals – genocide. (See also Tolimir Judgment Summary, p. 7.) In a scathing dissenting opinion, Judge Prisca Nyambe, a member of the trial panel, protested vigorously against this absurdity, but to no avail.

With childlike simplicity, most Balkan contenders seemingly would love to be “genocided” by their local enemies provided, however, that they survived to tell the tale to the tabloid media. It is a pity that there appear to be no adults in the room to restrain their exuberance.