Hidden in Plain View in Belgrade
by Vladimir Golstein, August 3, 2018, via Consortium News
The two churches, photo by Vladimir Golstein
Right across the street from my hotel, tucked behind tall office buildings, is the rather large Church of St. Mark. Hidden in St. Mark’s shadows is a tiny Russian Orthodox church. The Church of the Holy Trinity, known simply as the Russian Church, is famous for holding the remains of Baron Pyotr Nikolayevich Wrangel, the Russian Civil War leader of the Whites. It is hard to find, but luckily, a friend took me there.
As we were looking around the church, not particularly interested in Wrangel, a couple of Russians asked me to take their picture in front of his tomb. Trying to find a proper angle for the picture, I noticed a small plaque on a wall nearby. It listed the names of Russians who died fighting for Yugoslav Serbs during the conflict with separatist Albanians in Kosovo and the subsequent NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999.
As we left the church, we took a small path toward the top of the park. There we observed another brutal sign of that war: a destroyed building next to the TV center. It too had a plaque. It screamed, “Zashto” (For What? Why?). Below it were the names of all the TV people NATO killed during that attack. In all, as many as 2,500 civilians may have been killed by NATO, according to the then Yugoslav government, though the real number may never be known.
On the one hand, the question Zashto is both idle and provocative. It implies a laceration of wounds, a refusal to forget and to start anew. On the other, there is an obvious need to find an answer to this question simply to prevent future destruction and senseless murders.
We won’t find answers to this question in the official narratives, which tell us that the noble Clinton administration decided to stop flagrant violations of human rights in the extremely complex situation in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo by bombing the Serbs into respecting minorities both on its own and on neighboring territories. (In fact the large exodus of Kosovo Albanians to Albania proper only began after NATO bombs started to fall.)
Testing the Limits
Behind these official stories, a much sadder picture emerges. Why did these people die? Why did this NATO operation go ahead without UN Security Council authorization nor proof of self-defense, requirements of the UN Charter? Was it to satisfy the lust for power of U.S. and NATO leaders, of liberal interventionists like Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton, and Susan Rice? To assuage the Clinton administration’s guilt over its failure to respond to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda? Was it to set up America’s largest military base in Europe since the Vietnam War, Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo? For American access to Kosovo’s vast mineral wealth and other business opportunities, including for Ms. Albright? Or was it to finally kill off a rather successful Yugoslav experiment in the “third way” between the West and the Soviet Union?
It seems these people had to die for all those reasons and to put into practice the doctrines of responsibility to protect (R2P) and full spectrum dominance, doctrines cooked up by liberal interventionists and neocons in Washington. Those who died were essentially guinea pigs of a New World Order experiment to see how far the world could be pushed to implement R2P, a policy that could be used to mask imperial ambitions.
And it worked. Yugoslavia was unable to stand up to the power of NATO operating outside the mandate of its obsolete charter: namely to defend Western Europe against an alleged Soviet threat. Indeed one could argue that with the Cold War over, another motive for the attack on Yugoslavia was to provide NATO with a justification to exist. (It would later go even further afield outside its legal theater of operation, into Afghanistan and then Libya.)
Russia could do little to help the Serbs. Then the Chinese Embassy was hit as well, as a test it seems, though The New York Times said it was a mistake. The Chinese did nothing.
Thus was R2P implemented—with no protection for Yugoslav Serbs. They had to die in the experiment to explore the limits of U.S. power and the limits of its resistance.
Vladimir Golstein, a former associate professor at Yale University, manages the Department of Slavic Studies at Brown University and is a commentator on Russian affairs.
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Don’t forget that this period also brought us the movie “Wag the Dog”. Its supposed to be a comedy but I think its closer to being a documentary.
I’ll bet you, you wouldn’t trade places with any of them!Who are you to judge who is suffernig more, and who would trade places?
Get your information from the Graun?
For frankly shilling
If globalism is successful our lives will be the same as the Palestinians.
We’re all Palestinians already, at least as far as our Masters are concerned. Particularly in the UK, at present witnessing the Zionists ‘mowing the grass’ in UK Labour.
Complete nonsense, but you might be surprised that ~~1/2 of South Asians or Africans would be happy to switch with those “poor” Palestinians. They don’t even own the micro plot on which their hut is build, no multistory apartments for them. Minimum health care far away, poor education too expensive and far away.
Massive funds rolling in from the Gulf, the EU & North America for decades for Gaza etc. The real poor would spend that money on businesses or education though, not on tunnels and rockets. They would also take less kids.
And you Zionazis whinge about bewng compared to your German role models. The vicious, racist, contempt for your defenceless victims is EXACTLY me. I thought you Zionazis like lots of children in Gaza-more ‘targets of opportunity’ and mitzvot aren’t they.
Sorry, that is a really dumb exceptionalist view of “White Man’s Burden”. Communities across the world, including the Palestinians, lived for millennia with a near sacred encultured and embodied reverence for Place, Ancestry, Community, and Connection through the part to the Whole. We came along, objectified and commodified this as “Primitive”: invoked cultural imperialism to steal, destroy and dislocate in the name of first religion …now the new quasi-religious ideology of “Progess”. Many diverse indigenous people do not want to be industrialized or monetised …where the ancestral habitat has not been destroyed: they would only want to be granted their inherent humanitarian right to “Return” – to the encultured Connection that bore them.
The second paragraph is pure race hate. The Palestinians have tried to do everything you said …only, every time they do, the IDF destroy the infrastructure and kill the kids. The copious aid is a distributed contingent control mechanism administered by the quisling PA. They haven’t even distributed the funds from the last mini-genocidal episode …thanks, at first, to somebody called Tony Blair.
If you need an object to hate: try the imperialised oppression of indigenous people who were perfectly happy – much happier than the dislocated deformed consciousness of the oppressors allows – before we came along. Most Palestinians – certainly the ones I’ve talked to – want nothing more that the basic universal humanitarian right to autonomy and a degree of self-sovereignty – that comes with the right to Return. To dispossess dehumanises oppressor and oppressed: and delegitimates Israel as an apartheid state.
The Palestinians got Gaza back in 2005 with 500 acres of glass houses and what did they do apart from plunder? Elect the extreme Hamas a year later and started firing missiles on Israel.
The Egyptians did better with the Sinai they got back – including a border with Gaza.
Race hate? Nonsense. Palestinians are Semitic, just like the Jcws.
Population statistics don’t lie: the Palestinians multiplied enormous thus adding vastly to their own woes.
Filthy, racist, Zionazi lies and hatred. You’re really shewing us your true nature, Antonyl. The very essence of Talmudic Judaism is hatred of the Other, and that hatred CLEARLY infects Zionism as well. The sheer, racist, barbarity of Zionist thuggery inflicted on the defenceless Palestinians is, of course, not unique in the sorry history of humanity, but has there ever been a group of racist barbarians as arrogant, powerful and proud of their brutality as the Zionazis. And has there ever been an irony more bitter and pronounced than that which sees the victims of the Nazis butchering Palestinian children in the Nakbah, but two years after Auschwitz, and continuing that barbarism until today? Indeed growing ever more murderous, cruel and arrogant as the years go by.
So by your logic. Israelis are antisemitic.
Some plainly are. Judeofascists and Zionazis of the Likudnik type freely abuse non-racist Jews and Jews that oppose Israel’s racist barbarity, as ‘self-hating Jews’, or even ‘antisemites’. That is REAL Judeophobia. And the Talmudic Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox despise non-fundamentalist Jews, and do not even recognise their Judaism. Even worse, scarcely believable unless you have some idea of the depth of Talmudic hatefulness, is the declaration by some Orthodox that the Jews of Europe ‘deserved’ their fate in the Nazi Judeocide because that was God’s punishment for their turn to a secular way of life. When they hate their own people that much, is it any wonder they are capable of the barbarity that they inflict on the Palestinians, day after day?
Race is a cultural construct, and a potentially weaponised exceptionalist cultural construct at that. Both Palestinian Arabs and Israelis are commonly thought of as semitic peoples: so the word ‘antisemitic’ is itself is a loaded term used exclusively to violently discriminate between them and denigrate one group only. The term is an oppression by definition. Without carrying this pre-loaded charge: the word is actually meaningless (it is not representational and has no real world referent: being equally applicable to either group). Note that it does not have a true binary: it is a monovalent attack vector and therefore uniquely racist. The word itself constitutes a hate-speech-act. We are culturally made aware of which ‘Chosen’ semitic group the word protects.
Further deconstruction of the racist hate term would have to contend with Dr Shlomo Sand’s assertion that the Israeli’s are not a distinct racial entity: but are themselves trying to construct a unique historiography as though they were. To confer exceptionalist status on a cultural construct: that is being leveraged toward an ethno-religious racist and apartheid entity is to perpetuate racism and race hate and concretise it in the 21st century. Did we not learn the lessons of the 20th century as to the unspeakable evil this brings with it?
Progress would be to break down discrimination by the historiography of race (and gender, sex, religion, etc) to reveal a common universal humanism: allowing a dialogical process toward universal emancipation. Positive discrimination or inversion of discriminatory binaries (Arab over Jew; black over white; female over male; etc) are still oppressions. A community of equality beyond – and ending – all hateful and hurtful discriminations does not need to be created. It will emerge naturally when the psycholinguistic cultural constructions of hate and violence are uncreated. The atomisation of sectarian indentitarianism and culturally acquired roles and discriminatory categorisations (race, gender, religious, etc …born of cultural prototyping, archetyping, and stereotyping) is, quite literally, all that is keeping us apart. Without these essentially violent discriminations: we are already free; we are already equal.
The false boundaries and barriers to a common experiential and embodied humanism are objectified and reified linguistic fictions – pseudo-sentence confinements that exist only in our heads. Why continue to make them relatively real?
@Antonyl. Gaza is the only port in the world to be continuously blockaded by heavily armed Israeli Pirates ever since it was cleared of heavily armed Israeli Land Thieves. And occasionally bombed by U$ armed Israeli Luftwaffe, with thousands dead. And the only walled city in the world where the wall exists to keep in the inhabitants for the annual Israeli Turkey Shoot.
“There be Land Thieves and Water Thieves, I mean Pirates” — Shylock, The Merchanm Of Venice
The eventual solution will be for Israel to actually pay for all the land they have taken, just like everyone else in the word has to. How come they can just invade someone else’s country because they used to live there 2000 years ago?
Well said.
You make some valid points about the use of money, but completely ignore the collective punishment of Palestinians especially Gazans and thousands of innocents the IDF have wiped out. Do you expect them just to sit back and turn the other cheek?
Frankly, I must apologise for being so rude, re. your unfortunate comments concerning Yugoslavia. I still think them quite incorrect and hopelessly biased, but I really went too far. Perusing the filth posted by Antonyl reminded me that you are certainly not that type of creature, at least in my opinion, for what it’s worth. The problem for me is that encounters with the likes of Antonyl, with their lies, hypocrisy, arrogance and all-round malevolence, put me in very bad temper, and it often is rather uncontrollable. The destruction of Yugoslavia was, like the abominations committed by the Zionazi regime against the imprisoned Palestinians, one of those atrocities that makes me see red, and rage at apologists for it. There’s my inadequate self-exculpation, for what it’s worth. Accept it as an apology, if you like. Living at the end of the human sojourn in the cosmos, as my country and much of the planet is overrun by the likes of Antonyl et al, has me very angry and mired in hopelessness, and that makes me very uninhibited in my vehemence.
The Antonyl’s of this world are an extremely tiny psychopathic minority that because they temporarily have power through control of the USA wrongly believe they will have power forever. They forget that they lost it soon enough in the USSR, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland etc. etc. and will definitely lose it again. Because their aim is anti-life pro-death it will not ultimately survive this round.
Unfortunately, for everyone, themselves and their co-religionists included, the Zionazis TOTALLY control all Western states through straight money power, facilitated by fakestream media dominance that allows brutal exercises in intimidation and vilification like the current lynch-mob attack on Corbyn and UK Labour. The simplest truths about the Zionazi apartheid state are simply banned throughout the West, and soon their expression will be criminalised. Nothing like it has occurred in recent history, as far as I am aware.
I have disappoint quite a few here: I am neither a Jcw ,nor religious nor secular. I don’t control the US alas – neither does its president Trump (or Obama) alas. The more projections about me the more silly you sound.
Simply I see the whole world, not only those few hundred km2 around Jerusalem. My brain is not fried by mono Palestinian vs Jcw thoughts.
I saw the wicked destruction of Yugoslavia by NATO, the mess up of Irak, Libya, Syria and now Yemen by the Saudi-US-UK trio. I see the mess Pakistan makes around. I see Xi’s China as expansionist. Of course I saw the US clamping down on South and Central America. This is why I appreciate articles like this one and the next about Venezuela etc.
I recommend a whole series about Pakistan, the world’s scariest place.
So, you get some things right, and others totally wrong. But, even if you are not a ‘Jew’ by racial, cultural or social conviction, you definitely are a Zionist, as your comments shew. Non-Judaic Zionists are often the worst of the type, and I think you prove that proposition. Your comments re. the imprisoned Gazans are purely poisonous, racist, xenophobic Likudnik hate propaganda, so not much else needs be said, really.
Apology accepted Mulga, thanks.
I get annoyed too at the sheer evil being perpetrated in this world and NWO apologists defending it or even propagating it. However, we’ve also got to respect that whilst most of us here will agree on most things, we may also disagree on some things, due to personal knowledge or experience. No point in us ripping ourselves apart and doing the NWO work for them!
Let’s move on…
Thanks for that. I do get worryingly agitated, but, living in the moronic inferno of Austfailure, where our tin-pot, bunyip Fuhrer, Turnbull, is proposing wasting public money on subsidising coal-fired power stations, to placate the genocidal climate destabilisation denialists in his Party and the Murdoch cancer, and STILL mendaciously asserting that we will reach our ludicrous ‘Paris targets’ on emissions, I often imagine myself to be living in some sort of Hell. It makes me quite unstable. Once again-my apologies.
It’s the racist Muslim hater.
Seen your other nasty posts on the Craig Murray site.
I first saw it at Craig Murray, latterly making some foul, racist, comments re. the Chinese being determined to dominate the world using ‘Mongol maps’ to plot their ambitions. The crudest projection, and yet more proof of the Zionazis’ fear and hatred of the Chinese, who dare to not worship Jews as ‘Gods Upon the Earth’, as Begin and all good Likudniks et al see themselves, but just as fellow human beings. One almost feels sympathy for the Zionazis, living under the burden of 3500 years of hatred of the Other.
Why do you hate them? You protest as if you’re in denial about feeling guilt.
@ A Benge
You talking to me?
NO! Sorry if you thought that, it all seems to have got a bit too seperated.
I was replying to Antonyl
@ Antonyl
There is no need to set up false choices – Palestinians or South Africans. Both suffer, but at least the South Africans are not illegally trapped in a fish bowl and used for IDF daily target practise: something that didn’t even happen in the concentration camps of WW2. The world can spot the difference despite the apparent blindness of USA and Israel.
Antonyl: “1/2 of South Asians or Africans would be happy to switch with those “poor” Palestinians. ”
Even if things were equal in your patently false choice, ALL South Asians and Africans thank their lucky stars that they are not trapped in an Israeli goldfish bowl for use as daily target practise by an exterminationist IDF. Even in the WW2 concentration camps, hidden away from the world’s eyes, this did not happen.
At least three men responsible for the breakup of socialist Yugoslavia were rewarded by Rothschild companies. Tony B.Liar got a job at Goldman Sachs, then directorships in Carlyle Corp and House of Rothschild. John Major (Bosnia; remember Bosnia?) and George Brown both of them directorships in Carlyle Finance. Bill Clinton is now Grandpa Goldman Sachs. I did not follow the German politicians who first swung the Breaker Ball by recognition of Croatia. Neither did I dig into the financiers who engineered the run on YugoSlav currency the way George Soros engineered the run on Sterling during our Socialist govt. But all these things taken together point to a long laid capitalist plan to dismember socialist Yugoslavia ‘s a whole, and Serbia in particular.
I read somewhere that the amputation of Kosovo from Serbia, and the replacement of ethnic Serbs by ethnic Albanians was the price demanded for permission to build a Pipe Line across Albania. I do not know who owns that Pipe Line; but I do know who owns Great Britain.
Kosovo removed by force from Serbia! That was a NATO action. Today the same organization opposes the Removal of Crimea from Ukraine, not by force, but by vote of the Crimean people! How grossly hypocritical is that?
Another article written from the insular perspective of the Serbs.
Talk to anyone from any other Yugoslavian country and you’ll get the real story of a post-Tito power grab by the already dominant Serbians replacing the other nationalities in key government and military positions.
Even more power and money was being centralised into Belgrade over the next decade post-Tito. Corruption got even worse. Eventually, despite numerous attempts to rectify this situation in the Yugoslav parliament the other countries realised that they could only break away and have self determination.
I agree that Kosovo was different and unjust, as was the appalling bombing of innocent Serb civilians. But the causes and reasons for the whole war starting are different to the Serb nationalistic narrative and which is happily and uncritically accepted by others.
Sure, the US and NATO were presented with an opportunity they didn’t want to refuse, but they were not the cause ot the conflict. Serbia and their Russian friends still need an awful lot of self reflection and avoid re-writing history, blaming someone else for their power grab and inevitable consequences of others wanting freedom from their grip.
Sorry but don’t agree. NATO needed a new reason for being and this Yugoslavian matter was just too perfect to ignore!
Yes, but the internal divisions and war was already brewing in the 80’s while the Soviet Union still existed and therefore NATO’s raison d’être had nothing to do with Yugoslavia at that point in history.
Once the war was was already blazing and the Soviet Union had disintegrated, the war hawks then seized another opportunity and post Gulf War 1 to keep NATO alive and kicking and reshape Europe together with their progressive encroachment towards the Russian border.
This is my reading of the conflict: a golden opportunity for NATO to exploit the region but only made by possible by the reemergence of deeply rooted enmities, post Tito.
Few of the Balkan leaders are especially sympathetic but as bad as they were the level of cynicism and violence they inflicted almost pales into insignificance when the supposed ‘forces for good’, NATO, ramped up pretexts for heavy handed interventions.
The case against NATO spelt out here
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1999/05/stat-m24.html
On previous threads I ploughed a lonely furrow asking the Off-G readership to look more closely at precipitants which ultimately handed the divided Balkans on a plate to NATO.
https://off-guardian.org/2017/12/09/hague-tribunal-exonerates-slobodan-milosevic-again/#comments
Utter, utter, filthy, mendacious, garbage, down to your usual standard. The vivisection of Yugoslavia by the West, led by the USA through its organs, the IMF and World Bank, and West Germany and the Vatican to reward their WW2 fascist allies in Bosnia, Croatia and Slovenia was accompanied by a vicious campaign of propaganda lying to blame Serbia, a campaign still being prosecuted by Imperial stooges to today.
Where they the same Kosovar ‘organs’ Clinton buddy Hashim Thaci traded on the black market?
Sorry, Frankly. Your ‘usual standard’ isn’t ‘down’, in my opinion. I seem to have confused you with someone else, in my incontinent anger at your (forgive me) crap. I’ll grovel a bit more, later, but that’ll do for now.
Can you give some relevant links?
One only needs to go back in time by a couple of centuries to understand we have not had anything but ‘engineered and controlled conflicts’ in the world for a good while now… the Globalist Deep State – which now stands pretty much exposed – has long commanded the ‘fine art’ of creating wars – each move is measured and calculated & unintended consequences handled with improvisation – Yugoslavia definitely offered fertile soil for conflicts to catch – and the Globalists’ did not hesitate when the time was right for them to make mega profits in terms of cash and territories ruled by their puppets… As long as Serbia stands its ground, the West will not let off… but Serbia needs to stop trying to become a part of Europe… it must not ever compromise on its long running ties with Russia.
You sound exactly like Chris Hedges reporting on the ‘Yugoslav war’ back in the day. Congratulations for swallowing the Clinton-Blair line whole.
”As we left the church, we took a small path toward the top of the park. There we observed another brutal sign of that war: a destroyed building next to the TV center. It too had a plaque. It screamed, “Zashto” (For What? Why?). Below it were the names of all the TV people NATO killed during that attack. In all, as many as 2,500 civilians may have been killed by NATO, according to the then Yugoslav government, though the real number may never be known”.
In Alistair Campbell’s diaries ‘The Blair Years’, there is mention of a discussion Blair had with him when
trying to decide, knowing that civilians would be killed, whether the TV station should be bombed.
When I read it, I was amazed that the admission that they knew what would happen has never
been recognised as the war crime it really must be.
What NATO did here was appalling, unjustified, indeed a war crime. I recall very hazily reading a while ago that, I think, a Russian minister was shortly going to be appearing there in the studio, but he got delayed, otherwise he would have been killed too. It may have been intended to wipe him out. Does anyone have any facts on this?
And this TV center in fact stands right in the middle of tightly knitted streets, lined with houses, not to mention nearby schools and parks… only those in Belgrade know how indiscriminate NATO’s bombardment of Belgrade was… they did not care what they hit and what became their target… they just bombed… for 78 days straight.
@Zara Ali: “… they just bombed… for 78 days straight.”
I used to paste a new sticker on my wall for each day. I couldn’t believe what we were doing: the first bombs in our supposedly peaceful EU since Hitler. That was when I flipped, dropped my own work and started digging for the truth. Like your plaque at the TV centre I screamed, For What? Why?. (“Zashto”)
After 20 years of digging, “I have contacted the enemy, and he is us”: the City of London, in particular the entity which I call Rothschild because it controls our currency and through our currency those of our politicians who are bribable. Among venal Prime Ministers responsible for NATZO’s atrocities in YugoSlavia I have named above: Major, Brown and TB.Liar, but no doubt there are others. Camoron (of NATZO in Libya infamy) is an exception; not bribable because he already belongs to a London Banking family).
I just wish there were more like you… who would drop everything just to seek the truth… and yes cannot agree with you more… the world is ruled by the ‘City of London’ indeed… Colonialism did not come to an end… it just changed the garb… now it is called Globalism .. common man everywhere will be at their mercy… until enough common men around the world come to see the truth and muster the courage to rise against a psychopath ruling elite.
“Colonialism”…”Globalism”….You can also add “Western democracy”.
That is ALWAYS the US modus operandi-kill as many as possible, then lie about your ‘Moral Values’. Panama City, where thousands of poor slum dwellers were obliterated to test new weapons and to arrest ONE CIA asset gone rogue, was perhaps the perfect example. It’s just like the Zionazis-they murder thousands, including hundreds of children, in Gaza, then DEMAND the world fall on their knees (like US politicians) and worship them, and any who dare criticise the Holy Bloodletting are vilified as ‘antisemites’. Then creatures like Antonyl gloat over the killing, and smear the victims for having had the children that the Zionazis murdered.
So typical isn’t it.Once one recognizes it one wonders why did it take so long to understand the methods.
They cry when they hit you .
don’t forget Germany’s Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher who was very happy with the beak up of Yugoslavia: https://www.nytimes.com/1992/01/16/world/europe-backing-germans-accepts-yugoslav-breakup.html
Germany messed the area up during WWII. Under Tito the various communities of Yugoslavia lived peacefully together and even after. This was not to the liking of some. Early regime change and even hauling NATO in an offence role!
I don’t know if people have seen this. Sorry if i am duplicating.
Sorry, but this is revisionist claptrap.
The Bosnians Muslims and Catholics were being slaughtered by the ethnic Serbian Bosnians and ‘real’ Serbians. Sarajavo was under siege and mortars and other armaments were being merrily lobbed into civilian areas from the Serb army in the surrounding hills. Snipers decimated loads of civilians too.
Out of Sarajavo, whole villages were being razed to the ground. Some of you lot need to get out into the real world and go visit this areas physically. The damage done, house by house, village by village by the Serbs was appalling and remains exist even now.
What the Serbs did in Yugoslavia is actually very similar to what the Ukrainian fascists are doing to cleanse the ethnic Russians in the East and elsewhere. Of course the politics and religions are different, but evil is not restricted to one side or another.
After the slaughter went on unabated, that’s when the Islamic nutters from the Middle East and elsewhere started to get involved, to protect their fellow Muslims. Traditionally there was no cultural nor ethnic commonality between these nutters and the placid and civilised Bosnian Serbs, but either they felt obliged to help them as fellow Muslims, or else they saw and opportunity to get established in Europe and spread their terror from there. They would not have come had the Serbs not been destroying the Bosnian Muslims.
As I posted earlier, try actually speaking to anyone from the former Yugoslavia who actually lived there before the war broke out and is not a Serb, you have several nationalities / countries to choose from, and you’ll very likely get a very different picture as to how and why it all started.
Correct an error…
I wrote: Traditionally there was no cultural nor ethnic commonality between these nutters and the placid and civilised Bosnian Serbs
The last word should, of coursse, be Bosnian Muslims, not Serbs.
Mods, can we please have an edit function, even just for 5 minutes post-commenting?
I’d like a blocker, so I can do without seeing Imperial trolls disinforming.
I agree with you on many topics here, I’ve commented accordingly, so if I’m now somehow an “imperialist troll” then so are you! LOL
One topic I KNOW a lot about is Yugoslavia because I have physically been there many times pre and post war as well as knowing many people on BOTH sides of the war involved and affected directly.
Therefore I can state with a clear conscience that you and others can believe if you prefer the post-war revisionism that has been constructed.
Sure, Yugoslavia was wished by NATO and others not to exist, but you cannot suddenly forget that the Soviets wanted their hands on it too for decades an Tito did a great job to keep them at bay, that’s why it was a major non-aligned country.
The death of Tito and the fall of the Soviets unleashed pent up internal Yugoslav divisions which were then taken advantage of by others, but the carnage was already long underway.
I speak from a position of direct knowledge, not Youtube videos and revisionism. I know this comment won’t stop you from foaming at the mouth, but I’m writing it for the hope that others might reflect a bit and not merrily accept the Serb ultra nationalist perspective on Yugoslavia.
For the avoidance of doubt, I am nevertheless appalled about the NATO indiscriminate bombing of civilians including the TV station and dismantling the infrastructure. Similarly the separation of Kosovo from Serbia is an illegal action. However I am able to separate these from the specific causes of the internal Yugoslav issues and start of the war.
I know what happened in Yugoslavia because I saw it unfold, from the first Western intrusions through the World Bank and WTO, through to the final vivisection of Kosovo, using the jihadist drug-runners, the KLA, then the removal of Montenegro. I know that your anti-Serbian tripe is pure Imperial propaganda, like the phony Srebrenica ‘genocide’, so I’m afraid it makes me angry to see what I know are anti-Serb, Imperial, lies, presented as the facts. If I wanted that, I’d rely on the Fraudian or the NYT.
Not revisionism. It is exposing a fraud. You are one of those. Or are you a shill of some kind?
Just to add, the war was internally brewing in the 80s and broke out fully in 1991. It had generally petered out by 1996 although the Serbian and Kosovan situation continued as well as some Bosnian areas. NATO then illegally bombed Belgrade, but that was in 1999 and indeed needed a raison d’être a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Timelines and specific facts are vital to understanding this conflict.
The film speaks for itself. As in saving Syria’s children. It was faked.
More dirty lying. I recommend Edward Herman and Petersen for anyone wanting to see these filthy untruths firmly exposed. These Imperial propaganda trolls are nothing if not consistent in their despicable actions.
Succinct article.
I agree with Eric. I was looking forward to the rest of the article, once Vladimir had set the scene. He asks the pertinent questions: then, rather too abruptly, he’s gone. I was left wondering: where is the rest of what would have been a very interesting read?
My point was to highlight the experimental nature of it. Let’s see how far can we push it. That was the strategic purpose. all other tactical goals are widely discussed and had been covered by numerous studies. Why repeat them.
Vladimir: I guess I just formed my own expectation: the central question was so beautifully framed. It is a heightened time to pose the question: with the last major battle of WW1 – at Amiens – being 100 years ago …why: why did they have to die?
I remember sitting in a History class thinking: so some bloke died in Sarajevo; he was related to some people (aren’t we all?) …and 17mn people had to die as a consequence: Zashto: for what?
The real questions about war never get asked: the causes, the tactics, the propaganda, the strategic purpose are all covered; as you say …but Zashto: why?
The real reasons remain a mystery. Why would a Moslem kill his Christian neighbour (or vice versa): because of propaganda? How do ethnic tensions resurface after remaining dormant for 50 years?
Why did the US, UK, and the recently re-unified Germany have to kill so many to legitimate their presence and purpose? Yugoslavia was no enemy to the people of the UK, no clear and present danger, so why did we manufacture a fictive purpose to destroy a sovereign nation and kill its people: to protect them? Then surely, the only people they needed protecting from was us?
The piece was poignant, and stimulated my thinking. Thank you.
Any country, particularly a multi-ethnic or sectarian state, can be driven to civil war if a sufficiently Evil power sets out to destroy it. In Yugoslavia that Evil, the USA, began the process by getting its organs, the IMF and World Bank, to insist on dealing with the different Federal regions, ie Croatia, Serbia etc, after Tito’s death. No doubt in the process Quislings were recruited, and the large fascist emigre’ populations of hereditary racialist butchers from Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Serbia, who had been awaiting this day since their defeat in WW2, in communities in the West, particularly the Anglosphere, were mobilised to return, and, as the country fractured, driven by German, Vatican and US assistance, these vermin, aided by al-Qaeda killers flown in by the USA, and US contractors (particularly in Croatia’s gigantic ethnic cleansing in Krajina)began slaughtering their neighbours.
It is the same ancient process recommended in the prime Zionazi planning document, the Oded Yinon Plan of 1982, designed to destroy all Israel’s neighbours by fomenting civil hatred and war between Shia, Sunni, and various ethnic and tribal groups. Israel used this strategy in Lebanon, before, during and after the Civil War, and with its KSA and US allies, has also inflicted it on Iraq and Syria. It’s a gigantically Evil project.
I agree: as Vladimir said, the tactical goals (the ends) have been uncovered – but the means. The IMF conditionalities destroyed the currency and the coherence of the culture – which fragmented along ethno-religious fault lines …but Zashto: why? Hunger and oppression destroy democracy and community: and pit neighbour against neighbour in a miasma of self-preservation. There can be no condemning of this: if we do not know what we will do to survive – it is because we have not been there. Ordinary people kill ordinary people: not because of ideology – but to survive. Hannah Arendt made this clear.
And in the face of Oric and Thaci and their Jihadi brethren: what would I do to survive? We will never understand the endogenous visceral trauma: there were atrocities from all sides (though the Srebrenican ‘genocide’ is a vile propagandist lie).
So what of the exogenous manipulators: they must take the blame. Before the tactical goals are set: there is the conception and construction of plans built on exceptionalist ideas and imperial ideology. That is the real enemy. The means are pre-conceptual, pre-disposiotional, and pre-determined. War is the modus operandi of a certain kind of extremised instrumental domination of thought. To conceive of the Other as means, is to objectify and deny, denigrate and dehumanise. When the imperium is in the mind: then you can do anything you want to the objectified Unpeople; to further the tactical goals of the ends …which is in itself a further extension of the collective imperial mindset.
I call this the imperial ‘Empire State of Mind’; and it is culturally hegemonic and the globally endemic statist groupthink …and not at all confined to the Ruling Class. Domination hierarchies are borderless and classless, in fact. That is why I see all state architectures and superstructures as imperial or sub-imperial. Capitalism as a world system is ‘genetically’ determined global imperialism: it is in the DNA of ad infinitum valorisational expansionism. There will always be wars and imperial domination unless a universal humanity prevails as the transformative supervenience of the current neoliberal world system. For that to happen, the mindset has to change from the base up.
Maybe, starting on this page! 😉
And the use of a total propaganda campaign of blatant lying, outright fabrication and vicious, racist, xenophobic demonisation of the Serbs, a type of campaign now being mobilised against Russia, China, Iran, and even people like Jeremy Corbyn. A lying, impudent, arrogant campaign still being prosecuted by trolls like ‘Frankly’. And, of course, there was the use of al-Qaeda to commit atrocities in Bosnia, their US masters flying them in (including Osama) then using them in Kosovo, as the nucleus of the KLA terror, drug, sex and human organ trafficking death-squad-probably heroes of ‘Frankly’, I don’t doubt.
I’m not a troll you idiot, just look at my posting history and indeed my comments in agreement with yourself.
You clearly cannot accept anyone else’s point of view if it’s different from yours. Quit foaming at the mouth and lashing out aggressively at people whom you disagree with or you’ll do yourself an injury. You also destroy your own good arguments by such a dirty temper and utterances.
Look, Frankly. I’m undoubtedly very bad tempered,. made so by years of watching lying, hypocritical, imbeciles, and worse, spreading death and destruction worldwide, in service to the Real Evil Empire, the USA and its stooges. The destruction of Yugoslavia was an Evil of gigantic proportions, ENTIRELY the fault of the Empire, and the vilification of the Serbs was intrinsic to that project. Like the fact the Milosevic was framed, then murdered as he made fools of the NATO thugs persecuting him, then found innocent, post-mortem. Lies upon lies upon lies, by knowing liars or brainwashed dupes. I’m worn down by the realisation that my species has been taken over by Evil and that Evil is on the very cusp of finishing its ambition to exterminate Life on Earth-it makes me very cranky indeed.
…and there’s my Guardian commenting history as evidence too. You really are bizarre.
Good luck to you, but i won’t be standing up for your comments on other topics again after such unfounded scurrilous accusations against me, you lost me.
You’ve no doubt also dissuaded others from commenting on this fine website, but i know you don’t give a damn anyway, it’s all about your viewpoint, and f**k all others.
Indeed Mulga’s extreme language is discrediting this whole website, not only his own view. An admin’s nightmare. His comments are also quite predictable: 50% of the world population are Zionists, the rest racists, making these words meaningless. The Graun went to the dogs like that for a part.
Israel / the Jcws are behind everything under the Sun and my oh my if you disagree with his view!
A waste of talent, time and passion, all of which he has plenty.
No, Antonyl-your Zionazi racism is discrediting this site, you and all your ilk. As a number of others have noted, you are a vile, but typical, Zionazi racist and hypocrite, so you fully deserve all the criticism you attract. And a liar, like all Zionazis-I have ceaselessly stressed that all Jews are not responsible for the perfidy of the worst of their collective, creatures like YOU, or the swine destroying UK Labour, or your heroes obliterating Gazan children etc. Every community has good and bad members, and you, Antonyl, are a very poor advertisement for yours.
Mulga, I don’t think FranklySpeaking is a troll. He is trying honestly to make sense of something very ugly that he has been through, a resurgence of primitive ethnic vendette such as one reads about in the Old Testament but which postWar2 Europeans had forgotten. Ethnic divisiveness is very difficult to disentangle; sometimes the Locals are the ones who know what is really going on, and sometimes it is the Onlooker who sees the more of the game. In this case, although I deplore your vehemence toward Frankly, I agree with your insight: the slow, systematic destabilization of YugoSlavia by playing on ethnic rivalries, and the eventual dismemberment of Serbia to make way for a PipeLine through Albania, is a clear case of Divide et Impere et Divide et Impere…. per Libya…. ad Syria.
vexarb, “sometimes the locals are the ones who know what is really going on”. This reminded me of an RT report two or three years ago from the Russian/Latvian border where an elderly local Latvian woman was interviewed about the presence of Russian troops near the border – a so-called “threat to the West” according to NATO. She commented that the locals didn’t feel at all threatened and didn’t know what the fuss was about. When I made this point on the DM website – in the days before I was barred – someone retorted that I was a fool to think that a “local peasant” would be more aware of the situation than NATO. If I could have been bothered to counter-reply it would have been along the lines of me being happy to continue being a fool!
Thank you Vexarb for your thoughtful and balanced words, much appreciated.
I don’t know Mulga’s background, perhaps he may have been impacted directly by this conflict too and might potentially be a Serb immigrant from Krajina now in Australia, i know some people like that too. If so, he has my empathy for what happened and it could explain his strong feelings on the subject. I’ve been in Krajina, the hollowed out houses and deserted hamlets still exist today two decades later.
Regardless, he’s flown off the handle elsewhere and i won’t allow him to drag my name through the mud accusing me of being an “imperialist troll” across this topic and associating me with those utterly evil psychopaths.
Unfortunately what Frankly said is pure Imperial lying agit-prop. Blaming the Serbs for the crimes of the Evil Empire makes me see red. His reasons for acting as an Imperial apologist and anti-Serb hate-monger are irrelevant, I’m afraid.
No, I’m speaking from personal knowledge, my own boots on the ground there, friends on both sides. I understand the global games very well too and despite those same evil forces as you.
My conclusion is different to yours. The world is not as simple and black and white as your worldview I’m sorry to inform you.
Yes, Vexarb-I was in an even more than usually vile mood the other day and mistook Frankly for someone else, I think, in my delirium. I, naturally, reject his description of Serb responsibility for the collapse of Yugoslavia completely, but, of course, once the USA, Germany and The Vatican under that fascist paedophile protector, Wojtyla, has gotten the civil conflict going, some Serbs did act abominably. But the Evil Empire specialises in the fomenting of internecine hatred and civil war, and has done it over and over again, which makes its vicious lying over non-existent ‘Russian meddling’ in its ‘elections’ charade even more than usually filthy.
a badly written article, but it asks the right questions. It should have dispensed with the opening chat about himself and that church, and spent that space instead providing links to the best evidence that answers those questions he raised.
There are numerous ways to get one’s point across, Eric. So spare me your editorial suggestions. I guess it is very hard for Americans to control their bullying instincts. Which they fully demonstrated trying to edit Serbia.
Another person here losing credibility by resorting to personal insults, zašto?
I read and understood the important message easily and I also thought the “chat about himself and that church” added a human touch and context often missing from much of today’s writing. We don’t always need reams of often difficult to follow or absorb referenced writing to get an important point across. Variety is the spice of life as they say.