Serbian WWII film smeared by war propagandists in Western media
Max Parry
Eighty years ago last month, the Axis powers invaded the former Yugoslavia during the Second World War. A new Serbian film, Dara of Jasenovac, depicts the systematic extermination of Serbs which followed under the Nazi-puppet government of the Independent State of Croatia.
Despite consultation with reputable historians during production and a screenplay based upon witness testimony, its release has generated controversy among international film critics.
An examination of the English-speaking reception to the Serbian entry for the 93rd Academy Awards shows a boilerplate negative response and pseudo-journalistic pile-on that is part of an anti-Serb bias in Western media ever since the NATO war on Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
Despite recent attempts at closer relations with the West, Serbophobia remains a fixture in corporate media on account of Belgrade’s strong historical ties with Moscow amid the New Cold War between the US and Russia.
One such example was a recent article featured in the arts and culture website Hyperallergic contrasting Dara of Jasenovac with Quo Vadis, Aida? (“Where are you going, Aida?”), a recent Bosnian film recounting the infamous 1995 Srebrenica massacre. It is no accident that the Bosnian drama was nominated for Best International Feature Film at the Oscars and is widely promoted by popular streaming services while its Serbian competitor has not been as fortunate.
Although the Hyperallergic piece (by a Bosnian writer) is slightly more sympathetic than previous scathing indictments in the Los Angeles Times and Variety magazine where the former smeared Dara of Jasenovac as “Serbian nationalist propaganda” and the latter even dared question the historical accuracy of its portrayal of the Ustaša regime, it follows the same lockstep formula.
In fact, even the most favorable write-ups include qualifications that as a Serbian state production, although the film may be historically accurate, there must be a hidden agenda behind it.
What none of these yellow journalists bother to explain is how any Serbian film can faithfully portray WWII history, during which Serbs were disproportionate victims at the hands of their fellow countrymen in collaboration with the Axis invaders, without provoking such accusations of nativism.
The trumped-up charge is that the filmic representation of atrocities committed by the Ustaša during WWII is to somehow excuse or legitimate war crimes carried out five decades later during the Yugoslav Wars (of which Serbs were assigned excessive blame), when this too proceeds from a false historical premise. The breakup of the former Yugoslavia resulted in ethnic cleansing on all sides, but killings perpetrated by Serbs were given inordinate attention just as comparable massacres by Croats, Bosniaks and Kosovar Albanians were minimized and underreported.
Moreover, the socialist government in Belgrade singled out for regime change by NATO wasn’t responsible for the acts of Serbs within Bosnia and Croatia. More than twenty years later, the censure of Dara of Jasenovac is still cherry-picking worthy from unworthy victims in the Balkans.
The hypocrisy of Western presstitutes could not be more clear than in their coverage of two films depicting two different historical conflicts in the same region where genocide is said to have been committed.
Perhaps it is the fact that the vast majority of victims in Jasenovac happened to be four times as many Eastern Orthodox Serbs as Jews that this lesser known chapter of Axis war crimes is rarely shown on the silver screen. Or maybe the reason World War II in Yugoslavia is seldom depicted in Hollywood is the complicity of the Croatian Catholic clergy in the Ustaša regime’s crimes against humanity which Dara of Jasenovac details from the perspective of a ten-year old Serb girl.
Even though the film is explicitly clear that it was Ustaše ultra-nationalists who committed barbaric killings of which many Croatians were also victims, Variety’s Jay Weissberg still smeared the film as “anti-Croatian and anti-Catholic.” Nevertheless, it should be noted such Anglophone bias against Serbian cinema is nothing new, as similar criticism was previously leveled against Emir Kusturica’s Underground, despite the epic comedy-drama taking home the Palme D’Or at Cannes Film Festival in 1995.
Meanwhile, Variety had nothing but praise for Quo Vadis, Aida? and its narrative of a Bosnian United Nations translator whose family perishes in the Srebrenica enclave at the hands of Bosnian Serbs, much less any scrutiny toward its historical veracity.
In reality, what happened in Srebrenica was a retaliatory slaughter after equivalent war crimes by Bosniak Muslims against Serbs in neighboring villages. Nevermind that the slanderous claim of implicit nativism hurled at Dara of Jasenovac is much more applicable to its Bosnian cinematic counterpart where Serbs as a nationality are relentlessly demonized.
But what can you expect from the yellow press of a country which just elected Joe Biden? The then-Senator from Delaware not only supported the NATO assault on Serbia but was previously quoted as saying, “We should go to Belgrade and have a Japanese-German style occupation of that country”, “Serbs are illiterate degenerates, baby killers, butchers and rapists” and “all Serbs should be placed in Nazi-style concentration camps.” The highway in Kosovo which leads to Camp Bondsteel, the US army base occupying the NATO protectorate, is even named after the American president’s late son, Beau.
Anti-Serb racism is normalized from the top down.
If ethnic cleansing was committed on every side in the Yugoslav Wars, then by definition what occurred was a civil war, not genocide. Coincidentally, another new release, the HBO docuseries Exterminate All the Brutes by Haitian director Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro, The Young Karl Marx), explores the history of European colonialism where various large-scale destructions of entire peoples occurred long before the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin devised the term and the United Nations adopted the Genocide Convention in 1948.
Peck’s ambitious project starts strong with a brilliant rethinking of Nazi Germany as a settler colonial state, a refreshing antithesis to the conventional historical narrative established by theorists like Karl Popper and Hannah Arendt which typically equate the Third Reich with the Soviet Union and truncates fascism from the timeline of European colonialism. Or as Frantz Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth:
what is fascism if not colonialism when rooted in a traditionally colonialist country?”
Unfortunately, Peck later undermines his own attempt at heterodoxy by toeing the line on the Rwandan genocide, citing a personal friend in American historian Alison Des Forges, a senior advisor at the highly politicized and Western-biased Human Rights Watch. The same NGO also played a key role in building the anti-Belgrade partiality during the Yugoslav Wars and is a perfect example of how so-called ‘non-governmental organizations’ often paradoxically enjoy close connections with Washington.
Meanwhile, according to the late Edward S. Herman in his book Enduring Lies, Alison Des Forges was one of the leading spin doctors shaping the popular discourse on the Rwandan conflict and creating support for actual génocidaire Paul Kagame, now a widely acknowledged war criminal.
Mr Peck should know better, having previously made two films about Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically-elected Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo overthrown in a 1961 CIA-backed coup, the same country which Kagame’s regime subsequently invaded and continued atrocities in the late 90s.
Peck then makes a race reductionist argument in determining the hypocritical reasons for the US failure to prevent the bloody civil war where as many as a million Rwandans were killed while simultaneously launching a “humanitarian intervention” to ostensibly stop the same in Bosnia and Kosovo.
While that may be partly true, would an incursion in Rwanda have been at all justifiable or desirable either?
Nevermind that the US did intervene in covert operations aiding the assassination of Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana whose plane was shot down in a probable ‘false flag’ operation by Kagame’s CIA-backed Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), the very catalyst for the interethnic violence in the small African country.
Like the disinformation during the Yugoslav Wars, the designation of the ethnic majority Hutus as sole aggressors and the Tutsi minority as pure victims was established in advance, even though both sides conducted pogroms.
Peck does not fully comprehend that ‘genocide’ itself has become a tool to justify the use of military force abroad on the basis of ending alleged human rights violations in countries targeted for regime change.
On the one hand, the Haitian director does correctly observe that the invention of the phrase came a considerable time after the extermination of Native American indigenous peoples and the Atlantic slave trade where it is seldom applied. However, from its very inception following World War II there was an agenda behind its ratification and not just to give special status to Jewish victims of the Nazis above their inferior slavic and Romani fellow-sufferers so as to give grounds for genocidal Zionism in Palestine. Raphael Lemkin was also a Cold War hawk and peddled the Ukrainian nationalist propaganda and Hitlerite myth of the Holodomor (the real ‘holo-haux’) in order to slander the Soviets as genociders.
From the get-go, the g-word was a political football for empire.
Sadly, the world recently lost one man who did understand the way the notion of “genocide” has become an instrument of war and emptied of its meaning.
Last month, former US Attorney General during the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, Ramsey Clark, died at 93 years of age after a long and storied career from Washington insider to fierce critic of American foreign policy. While most know Clark for his role in the civil rights movement and the Great Society, the human rights lawyer spent his controversial later life as a peace activist and opponent of imperialism.
In particular, he was one of the select few on the Western left (along with Michael Parenti, Edward S. Herman, John Pilger, Diana Johnstone, Harold Pinter, Peter Handke and others) brave enough to tell the truth about the war in Yugoslavia while also famously providing legal counsel to former Serbian President Slobodan Milošević during his kangaroo trial in the Hague.
At a time when most of the traditional anti-war “left” fell for the anti-Serb newspeak, Clark saw through the distortions used by NATO to justify its own carnage in Belgrade. With any luck, the left will follow his legacy and not gatekeepers who dress up war propaganda under the guise of championing human rights.
Max Parry is an independent journalist and geopolitical analyst. His writing has appeared widely in alternative media. Max may be reached at [email protected]
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Carrot follows stick:
https://twitter.com/vonderleyen/status/1396878494882275337
Even the same figure. In autumn 1991 a likewise figure from the EU came to Yugoslavia with the exactly same story and what’s funnier, even the same figure.
Excerpted from: The Kalergi Plan – ENGLISH NEWS
“The first major effort to promote the Pan-European idea to destroy the European races followed after the ‘Pan-Europa’ Congress of Vienna in 1926. By September of 1929 the Honorary President of the Pan-European Congress at the time (Aristide Briand) was giving speeches at the League of Nations openly advocating for the creation of “a federation of European Nations” after lobbying from the allies of Coudenhove-Kalergi, who were termed the ‘Coudenhove-Kalergis’ (PEU History PDF, “Pan-Europa – The parent idea of a united Europe”, PEU publishing, retrieved 31/03/2019, pp.1).”
https://englishnews.org/2020/01/31/the-kalergi-plan/
The “New World Order” is simply a repackaging of old world order elitist dreams. The banking and market crashes of 1929 were promoted by the same idealists and money changers listed in other historical eposes’. It is (perhaps) instructive to read the entire document…
Whatever crimes were done by Croats against Serbs in WWII, Serbs did much worse against Bosniaks (who suffered most in former Yugoslavia in relative deaths, just after the Jews). Vladimir Dedijer wrote a book in, 1990 on genocide against Muslims (as Bosniaks were called at the time). Dedijer, himself a Serb also wrote about Croatian crimes against Serbs.
Serbs did another genocide against Bosniaks in 1992-1995 when 100.000 were killed, mostly Bosniak civilians. Whole towns where Bosniaks lived are now Serbian only. Ethnic cleansing is an euphemism for genocide. They are still working on Greater Serbia, hoping to secede that ethnically cleansed part of Bosnia-Herzegovina and join Serbia.
With such a recent memory and current actions, Dara is a pure Serbian propaganda. Their greatest writer and Milosevic supporter Cosic said “lie is in the essence of Serbian being”. And this film is meant for a biggest lie of Serbs being a victims, when in reality they are genocidal people, killers and rapists.
Not sure how you ended up here pal. Your site is called The Guardian and can be found here: https://www.theguardian.com/uk
So shallow. As a result, you would support genocides done by Serbs just because US Empire was against them… But it was US interest at the moment, to get into the region and build bases in Bosnia and Kosovo. Bosnians, like me, are still the good guys, just between genocidal Serbs and Croats.
The good guys according to one of your favourite msms – BBC:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-33345618
“Langley Land drivel”
“Get off the planet dirtbags. To Hell with War!”
You may want to check out the casualty figures by nations in Bosnian war. And then again you may find the numbers to be quite close to one another.
After all, you may ask yourself, where did all the Serbs from Sarajevo go? Or other counties and towns now predominantly, as you call them, Bosniak. As for the term Bosniak, formerly known as Muslims in former Yugoslavia, bravo. Getting the name and country at the dawn of 21st century is quite an achievement. Courtesy of the US.
As for the piece of commie shit Dobrica Cosic and the quote you use – the communists were by definition anti Serbs. From the persecution of the Orthodox christian church to the Constitution of 1971 giving the Kosovo Albanians the legitimate right to secede from Serbia.
Last and by your standards – the least, the theme of the text is the Jasenovac concentration camp for Serbs. You mentioned it vaguely at the end of your inspired soliloquy and claimed it was a lie. Now prithee, share with us your newly acquired knowledge of what nationality the victims in the camp were, if not Serbs. And tell us in what humane ways their lives ended. Or better yet, disclose to us on what historical grounds your denial of this genocide is founded.
Yours truly,
a genocidal man, killer and a rapist.
The German invasion of Yugolslavia in 1941 to reinstate the overthrown government, and the invasion by Germany to tidy up Greece after Mussolini’s fiasco, caused the delay of Barbarossa, scheduled for 15 May, to be delayed until 22 June 1941.
That 5 weeks probably would have made the difference between winning and losing against Russia. Because of the late start, the Russian winter arrived and stopped the German army in its tracks.
The ‘what-ifs’ of history, sometimes forgotten.
My Greek father never watched movies but for a couple of weeks he would take me to the bioscope just to watch a 2 minute newsreel on Greeks resisting invasion.
Some time ago a Russian lady posted on Saker a tribute to the Serbs who “fought them [the German army] tooth and nail”.
Thank you, Roberto, for remembering this hopeless but determined resistance by two small nations, and the pivotal role it played in the fate of large nations.
This is an excellent moment to brush up on the history of worldwide resistance movements during the First Fascist Period. Tremendously inspiring …
As usual, the U.S. quickly put an end to the aspirations and hopes of those who courageously contrasted Nazis, Fascists, and Asiatic Warlords.
However, an Empire’s hubris always blinds it to the fact that one cannot kill The Idea.
Muslims rarely “do” peaceful invasions”- or migrate amicably, but instead resort to violent conquest. Jihad is always understood in terms of a holy war – for example in their 6 century occupation of Spain, Christians and Jews were treated as inferiors and had nowhere near equal rights to Muslims. It was not an enlightened civilization taking over a backward civilization: quite the opposite. The progress of civilization was severely hampered, not helped. Christian churches were demolished and the superior materials used to build mosques, with severe restrictions imposed on Christian worship. It was subjugation, not tolerance. Women, including Muslims, were not better off, they were worse off.
Tey:- “The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise” -by Dario Fernández-Morera
compared to what? the crusades? the inquisitions? the witch hunts? Protestantism and European internal religious wars? european maritime empires? i am no islamophile, and concur that militant Islam waged jihad for centuries (still does), but stop pointing the finger. The Levant truly saw integrated societies of many religions back in the day, and the Ottomans demanded public displays of conversion, but often left indigenous folks to get on with their own lives as long as the facade was kept and taxes paid.
“Yet again with the War Racketeer Corporate Fascist Langley-Land sales pitch to justify all its War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity.”
“Get off the planet, dirtbags. To Hell with War!”
needing a love bomb for the dirtbags and they can be at peace here too.
Hello Maria Johnson: There are many sides to the story of history. I discovered this documentary many years ago. It is an insightful documentary into the prosperity Islam engendered in Europe during its 700 year reign. After the Catholic Monarchs took control of Granada in 1492 AD, they began to destroy all evidence that the Moors had been in Spain since 711 AD. Over the following century, the Spanish authorities persecuted and expelled 300,000 Muslims and burned as many as one million Arabic books. However, the Catholics could not bring themselves to destroy the amazing Al Hambra castle.
Modern archeologists are today rediscovering the role of the Moors in preserving important works of Classical Greek, Roman and Renaissance literature and others. The photography and quality of presentation are remarkable.
When the Moors Ruled in Europe | Bettany Hughes |
Released November 5, 2005
When the Moors Ruled in Europe | Bettany Hughes | When The Muslims Ruled in Europe – YouTube
only one group one tribe one religion has been victim in histry
in meme in mime in acts in casting in spell craft in plato cave shadow
projection
that gang bomb gaza
call them dan
call them khazar
call them phoeniciian
call them satan s friends
whatever way you spell it
cast lead it
blood let ritual it
it is emotion it is story it is a tale a tale a tale
horror horror
a tale told
in museum in new museums growing everywhere
tv show and cinema
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by eternal actor bankers full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
theft death power and money
civil slavery
Nothing joins friends and enemies like wealth… >
Excerpted from: Paneuropean Movement – Wikipedia
“The International Paneuropean Union, also referred to as the Paneuropean Movement and the Pan-Europa Movement, is the oldest European unification movement. It began with the publishing of Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi’s manifesto Paneuropa (1923), which presented the idea of a unified European State. Coudenhove-Kalergi, a member of the Bohemian Coudenhove-Kalergi family and the son of an Austro-Hungarian diplomat and a Japanese mother, was the organisation’s central figure and President until his death in 1972.”
History
“The organisation was prohibited by Nazi Germany in 1933, and was founded again after the Second World War.[citation needed] Otto von Habsburg, the head of the Habsburg dynasty and former Crown Prince of Austria-Hungary, became involved with the Paneuropean Union in the 1930s, was elected its Vice President in 1957 and became its International President in 1973, after Coudenhove’s death.
The President of the Union since 2004 is Alain Terrenoire, former Member of Parliament in France and MEP and Director of the French Paneuropa-Union. Otto Habsburg became the International Honorary President of the International Paneuropean Union in 2004. Its Vice President is Walburga Habsburg Douglas, a member of the Swedish Parliament.”
Complete text: Paneuropean Union – Wikipedia
A word on ‘cultural Marxism’.
‘’With every session of Parliament the working class gains ground, and the interests of the middle class diminish in importance; and in spite of the fact that the middle class is the chief, in fact, the only power in Parliament, the last session of 1844 was continuous debate upon subjects affecting the working class, the Poor Law Bill, the Factory Acts, the Masters and Servants Acts; and Thomas Duncombe the representative of the working men in the House of Commons, was the great man of the session; while the Liberal middle class was its motion for repealing the Corn Laws, the Radical Middle Class was its resolution for refusing the taxes, played pitiable roles. Even the debates about Ireland were at bottom debates about the Irish proletariat, and the means of coming to its assistance. It is high time, too, for the English middle-class to make concessions to the working class who no longer plead but threaten … In spite of all this, the English middle-class, especially the manufacturing class, which is enriched directly by means of the poverty of the workers, persists in ignoring this poverty… Hence the deep wrath of the whole of the working class from London to Glasgow against the rich by whom they are systematically plundered and mercilessly left to their fate, a wrath which before too long as time goes by, a time almost without the power of a man to predict, must break out into Revolution, in comparison with which the French Revolution, and the year of 1794, will prove to have been child’s play.’’
Friedrich Engels – The Condition of the Working Class in England 1844.
Sounds a bit like liberal reformer John Stuart Mill
Although it goes without saying of course that both were the dreaded ‘Cultural Marxists’
I think of “Cultural Marxism” as that neutered form of Marxism (or pseudo-Marxism) that came via the Frankfurt School. But then the covid crap has made me think that all of what we call “Marxism” (even – especially? – that anti-Frankfurt stuff in the WSWS) is just part of the Western ruling class propaganda bullshit.
And if you don’t believe me, consider the output of Architects for Social Housing man Simon Elmer who tentatively introduced the blasphemous notion that covid was a con into the Marxist fold. He did this with much waffling, sprinking of the dialectical historical analytical spiel and protecting himself by exorcising the taint of “conspiracy” through the usual mea culpas. It did him no good whatsoever. Philip Roddis merely took the dialectical materialist bit and expunged the “intellectualy disreputable” remainder.
The first thing about the propaganda of the west is how it arms and supports the murderous regimes in the middle east, Israel and Saudi Arabia, and yet goes into an apoplectic seizure about a nonentity like Navlany and the latest individual – whoever he may be – retained by the Belarus authority. The Belarus authorities may or may not have committed and illegal act and the western media goes beserk, but the zionist regime is always indulged. The latest pogrom is simply one in a series going back to Operation Cast Lead, and Operation Protective Edge. Just routine ‘mowing the grass’ but when it comes to Navalny and this latest episode there’s no stopping the orchestrated cacophony. Of course nothing will happen. The West’s little pit-bull will be indulged as usual.
We have to turn to Orwell once again. As follows:
”All nationalists (and by Nationalists Orwell means anyone who holds stereotypical and fanatical views) have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination for Europe but oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and of course there is no kind of outrage – torture, assasinations, use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, the bombing of civilians – which does not change its colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side.”
George Orwell – Notes on Nationalism – 1945
The deaths & ‘cases’ of flu in May 2019 cased around this number of deaths & hospitalisations.
The deaths & ‘cases’ of flu (covid) in May 2020 cased around this number of deaths & hospitalisations
The deaths & ‘cases’ of flu (covid) in May 2021 cased around the same number of deaths & hospitalisation.
There is no virus, there is no vaccine. They have weaponized the flu. QED.
The first thing to wake me up to how we are mind-controlled was the viewing of the film, JFK to 9/11 Everything is a Rich Man’s Trick by British film-maker, Francis Richard Conolly. In the film he memorably says:
All terror is fake.
When I first heard this I thought it was a big call but more and more I realise how true it is – not that terrible things don’t happen but what is presented to us in the media as “terror” is – as far as I’m aware – always a produced show. We don’t see real maiming, we don’t see real deaths – they’re done discreetly off-screen. Everything we’re shown and told is all to control our minds and press our buttons. It’s all complete BS. And we need to wake up to it. In a comment on the Israeli Mass Murder article I point out the fakery of a story on a Palestinian man whose family were allegedly killed. A commenter put in response, “Jesus christ. You’ll pop up at your own funeral claiming that your death was a psyop.” Highly amusing but my question is: why am I mostly the one pointing out the fakery? It’s not as if it’s not obvious. You simply apply the Psyop Lens any time some kind of “terror” is being pushed at you by the media and the fakery will appear. The story doesn’t add up, the text doesn’t match the visuals, the images contain strange anomalies – it’s all laid bare. People know they fake terror, they know that it’s done “hidden in plain sight” style but still they persist in not applying some rigour to examination of media stories to rule out fakery. They know Israel’s the bad guy so, of course, they’ll be killing Palestinians … and one way or another I’m sure they are but it’s not necessarily in the way they show us. You might ask “Does it matter?” but I think it does. We have to ask the question: why show us fakery if they’re doing it for real anyway? Why not show us the real stuff? Is it because the real stuff is so bad we’d really go to town and start some real action but because it’s fake and therefore doesn’t have quite the same psychological effect we’re not goaded into action? I don’t know why they don’t show us the real stuff but show us fakery instead but I think the difference is significant.
All they do is fake stuff and push our buttons, they just do it all the bloody time. I’m sure divide and conquer plays a massive role in it.
Serge Schmemann
It’s interesting that Max says:
because the Srebrenica massacre looks very much like a fake event and we can also see fakery leading up to this event.
My page on Srebrenica: https://occamsrazorterrorevents.weebly.com/srebrenica-massacre.html
Can you believe:
From the UN investigation:
“Some surviving members of the Srebrenica delegation have stated that President Izetbegovic also told them that he had learned that a NATO intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina was possible, but could only occur if the Serbs were to break into Srebrenica, killing at least 5,000 of its people.”
This is reminiscent of the document released by right-wing think tank Project for a New American Century (PNAC) in September 2000 stating that what was needed for America to dominate much of humanity and the world’s resources was “some catastrophic and catalysing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.” The document was propaganda targeted at the anticipated disbelievers of the 9/11 story to make them believe that the US government was so dedicated to its agenda to dominate the world it would sacrifice its own people as is understood by many to have occurred in Pearl Harbour – the US government knew the attack was coming but seemingly sacrificed its soldiers in order to have a good pretext to enter the war. Ironically, however, both Pearl Harbour and 9/11 were completely staged with regard to death and injury. Why would the US government sacrifice its soldiers or its people when it only wanted people to BELIEVE in death and injury, it didn’t want it for real and it’s the easiest thing in the world for them to make us believe in “terror”. Please don’t – terror occurs but it’s not what they package to us.
I’m glad you found my comment amusing Petra, for that was my intention. I do find some of the routes that you take to your conclusions a little convoluted. However, an anecdote for you:
When I was 18 I was sat in my parents’ front room tripping on LSD and watching TV and in one moment, it dawned on me. If it’s on TV, it’s fake. It’s all fake. News, sport, soap operas, reality TV, pop music, adverts, you name it, it’s fake and it’s bad for you, and it’s all to keep us under control, fearful, mesmerised and subservient and to line the pockets of rich psychopaths. That was in 1998 and I’ve stuck by this ever since. I’ve rejected the lot of it. I don’t need tortured reasoning because I’ve stood back and seen the bigger picture and nothing I’ve witnessed since has given me a scintilla of doubt that I may be wrong about the whole edifice of Western Consumerist Capitalism and everything that it entails being a psychological operation and a con trick. I went down the route of severe addiction because when you see the fakery it can be a very depressing thing indeed and it made me want nothing more than oblivion. I’m now 14 years sober and it’s the greatest gift that I’ve ever given to myself because the clarity lets me see more detail.
I think we’re largely on the same page anyway, so excuse my barbed “witticism” and keep on pointing out the fakery. What is seen cannot be unseen.
I don’t watch TV often and haven’t for years. never do i go to the main channels if i do… just TCM is all. old black & whites. but tonight was a silent film and i wasn’t in the mood for this… so i just pressed the arrow and glanced as each channel popped up. my god. it was like a sci-fi movie… or maybe a cut scene out of Idiocracy. i’d describe it but it might make me dumber to do so. however, it dawned on me that if this is your daily diet, of course you believe CNN, BBC and the rest. of course you do! this is where they get to show they are informed… because they ‘watched’ something and can now show verification (like a vax passport) of having simply gotten the information. all they need is enough to shut down an argument with a slur or smear and onto the next. pathetic.
Yes, I did find your comment amusing … and I didn’t mind that it was slightly barbed because funniness always makes everything OK. Very interesting epiphany you had, Bob. A shame that more people don’t have similar epiphanies under the effects of hallucinogens, other drugs – or no drugs at all! I’m sorry that it meant going down the route of severe addiction but I totally understand how it made you depressed and seeking oblivion … but good you overcame it.
I’m curious to know how you find the routes I take to my conclusions convoluted – next time you perceive that I’d appreciate some feedback.
No, worries, and glad you see the funny side. If you’re from where I’m from and you do what I do for a living then you’ll sink like a stone if you can’t take the piss and have the piss ripped out of you and laugh it all off so it’s just second nature to me. I’m kind of glad I’ve lived the life I’ve lived. I’ve been at the bottom and I’ve stared long and hard into the abyss. I know anybody can end up there but I also know that anybody can pull themselves out of it too, just like anybody can see behind the veil of bullshit that we get presented with should they choose to take a closer look for a moment.
It’s not neccesarily your conclusions that I find convoluted, although I don’t agree with all of them, it’s the routes that you take to get to them, but then I’ve always been more interested in end results and the bigger picture than in processes and fine details, so that’s just me, maybe it’s just my inherent intellectual laziness showing through.
Hi Bob,
What you see as “convoluted” boils down to this:
Fakery/hoax = no deaths = mischief, at worst. How can one really despise a prankster, after all?
So, all you have to do is recognize “terror” as a fake and let these jolly folks have their fun. If there was any murder involved, well, that would be compelling wouldn’t it? One would have to take an honest stand.
You misinterpret what I say, Victor. Seriously? Can you really be so wrongly simplistic in your evaluation? I don’t say “mischief”. Absurd. I know that people are killed and maimed by bombs and live miserable lives because of despotic regimes and war tearing their country apart. I know all this happens. I’ve spoken with people whose lives have been affected in this way.
I know there’s a lot of misery in the world Victor but what I also know is:
The REAL misery is not what’s shown to us. What’s shown to us by the bucketload is fakery.
If they showed us the REAL stuff we might get off our behinds and actually do something but because they show us fake stuff which doesn’t have the same psychological effect we just sit back and go “How terrible”.
You need to up the sophistication level of your thinking, Victor. The power elite have been ruling us for millennia using the same techniques. You need to wise up – it’s not rocket science. Misery happens but it’s not what’s shown to us, what is shown to us is what the people at the top WANT to show us and they don’t want to show us reality, they want to show us what suits them to keep us in our place.
And your reasoning is not “convoluted” (Bob’s word)?
I guess I must be using a different “Razor” than you are …
How about you bring down the sophistry of your reasoning, dear?
Sophistry of my reasoning? It’s very straightforward as outlined, Victor.
They divide and conquer by pressing our buttons. They fabricate stories to suit their agendas.
Guiding principle:
Vet media stories very carefully, especially “terror” stories.
Does the story add up? Do text and image match? Are photos convincing?
Expect stories that feed our biases, that seemingly counterintuitively make them look bad because “looking bad” works for them. Power doesn’t rule by being predictable … but actually it is predictable when you know the MO.
It’s not really so complicated. You’re so easily led by their stories, Victor. The Big Bad US government cold-bloodedly and callously murdering 3,000 of its citizens, the Italian neo-fascists cold-bloodedly murdering and maiming 285 people in Bologna.
They’re just STORIES. Sure, all sorts of horrible stuff really goes on but the horrible stuff isn’t what they beam at you 24/7.
The Narrative is Rapidly Changing, particularly in most States in the USA.
Instead of being told to wear a mask, the State Governors are saying do not wear a mask, and do not take the death shot.
And in the UK The Indian Narrative, is rapidly falling apart…because it is a complete load of bollocks, so I reckon they probably will let us out in England, and we can go to Festivals Again
Can’t Wait
Met my Ex here (who’s Family are from Serbia – about 32 years later, and she still looks the same now 42 years later) Been living parallel lives – 2 Grandchildren each, and we still get on. She gets on Brilliantly with my wife, can’t get a word in. I have no plans to sit in the middle between them. I try to protect my ears.
Dunno if Cambridge Rock Festival is back on this year – probably is
“Buster James Band “Hold on” – CRF 2016″
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DIIKG7rQ5Y
Tony
Agree every one locked in many of the 256 nation states is beginning to fight back..no more top down Oligarch owned, dictator run nation state control freaks expressings dooms day fears and demanding in dictatorial words and rule of law commands to be obeyed by the nation state governed masses. In Occupied Palestine its called the resistance and that too developed after the nuisance exceeded the safety level suggested by the induction of fearful threat levels.
Need more on the bollocks in India, what do you mean.. ? Can you describe the falsity of the situation of the “lay down, wait for Covid and die narrative” privately owned MSM is expressing in each nation state, in your case India.. the world has been occupied by the Covid-19 propaganda?
The condition in the hospitals, in the pharmacies, in price inflation, in small company bankruptcies, in employment, in restaurants, food stores, trucking, air travel, automobile on the street traffic, and so on. . and most of all the words and printed matter showing how officials are interacting to make matters more chaotic?
We need a place where spokes persons for each nation can posts the situation and the others from that nation state came come and challenge, add to ir, or otherwise help to make it factual.. No longer can humanity depend on paid journalism for its information. We are all victims of the Oligarchy.
‘On 24 March 1999 the first bombs fell on Belgrade’s power plants and water supply, knocking out the city’s electricity and destroying vital infrastructure, factories, railways, bridges. The German Luftwaffe was back in the Balkans, 58 years almost to the day after the last bombardment of the Yugoslav capital in 1941….
‘The Green Party leader Joschka Fischer…Was Foreign Minister and Vice-Chancellor of Germany’s first Red-Green Federal government. (He) saw it as Germany’s moral obligation, if not to storm across Yugoslavia once more, then to drop bombs on its territory from a safe height – and, naturally, for humanitarian ends.’ (What’s become of the German Greens. New Left Review MayJune 2013)
There’s mention in the corporate propaganda media that the German Greens, having had a neo-liberal make-over, may once again become partners in government, where they’ll do the Americans bidding – “Look Out Russia !”
The mention in this posting ‘”genocide” itself has become a tool to justify the use of military force abroad on the basis of ending human rights violations in countries targeted for regime change.’ – “You better start treating the Uyghurs better, or, “Look out China !”
‘it was a stroke of genius of Atlantic alliance diplomacy to choose the field of “democracy” for their offensive, which was aimed, from the beginning at the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the reconquest of the countries of Eastern Europe. This decision goes back to the 1970s and gradually became crystallised in the Conference of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE)… Jacques Andreani in ‘The Trap: Helsinki and the Fall of Communism’, explains how the Soviets, who were expecting an agreement on the disarmament of NATO and a genuine detente, were quite simply deceived by their Western partners.’
‘Choosing to concentrate the battle around the “democracy” discourse made it possible (for the West) to opt for the “implacability” of systems and to offer the eastern countries only the prospect of capitulation by returning to capitalism (the market), which should then produce, naturally, the conditions for democratisation. The fact that this has not been the case (for post-Soviet Russia), or has taken place in highly caricatural forms (for ethnic groups here and there in Eastern Europe) is another matter.’
‘The United Nations ( with the tacit agreement of the powers of the two worlds) changed the terms of “capitalism” and “socialism” to the “market economies” and the “centrally planned economies” – or, to be mischievous, the “administered economies”‘… (Samir Amin – The Implosion of Capitalism.)
I have encountered some political opportunist riff-raff in my time – and that covers every ex social-democratic party in Europe – but the German Greens really take the cake for me. I can’t really go on at this point, quite simply because words fail me.
I didn’t think Dara was a bad film, and I’m sure it was accurate, in that the atrocities portrayed were drawn from witness accounts. I remember hearing similar stories from child survivors of Jasenovac in Belgrade in ’90-92. These un-redressed grievances were very important in the radicalisation of the villages in Licka/Krajina in the early 1990s, and they simmer on to this day, augmented now with the stories of the two hundred thousand odd Serbs who were ethnically cleansed from the region under US air cover in 1995. I understand and share the Serbian resentment at the fact that their case has never been properly heard – glossed over by Tito in ’45 and the Bill and Tony show in ’99. But the ‘my genocide is bigger than your genocide’ competition is a dead end as far as truth and reconciliation go. The only way to deal with war is to tell the stories as honestly as possible, live the pain and shame in the imagination, and maybe learn to hate THEM, more than we hate our enemies.
The Balkans are where Islam and Christianity faced off during the Clinton era , with Islam gaining the advantage. Meanwhile Russia was eating its own guts in a successful attempt the restructure using the American model. CIA was the big winner there providing arms and dope to all comers for a price.
Actually, christianity and islam already had faced off when the Turks got to Vienna. There is no better way to understand the differences between the East and the West – by looking at the reign of the Moors in Iberia and the Turks in the Balkan.
Indeed! Read the excellent :- “The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise” -by Dario Fernández-Morera
There was no “peaceful invasion”, as if it were a migration, but instead a violent and bloody conquest. Jihad was at the time always understood in terms of holy war by the Muslims themselves. Christians and Jews were not treated well: they were treated as inferior. They had nowhere near equal rights to Muslims. It was not an enlightened civilisation taking over a backward civilisation: quite the opposite. The progress of civilisation was severely hampered, not helped. Christian churches were demolished and the superior materials used to build mosques, with severe restrictions imposed on Christian worship. It was subjugation, not tolerance. Women, including Muslims, were not better off, they were worse off.
The article focuses on the Serbian-Crotian conflict but the subsequent Serbian-Bosnian one is in many ways the more important. The Bosnians were painted as the saintly good guys by the Western media. We now know that jihadis turned up among the Bosnian forces – and where there are jihadis then Anglo-American intelligence isn’t usually far away.
Croatia and Serbia reflect to split in Christianity and the ongoing animus between the the Eastern and Western branches since the Roman church split . The Serbs being in the main Greek Orthodox and the Croats Roman Catholics. As I indicated in my initial post on this article, having neutralized Clinton and with Russia out of the game, CIA was along with Islam the big winner in this debacle. Guns , dope, and slaves managed by CIA now flow freely through the Balkans !
Indeed. Although the description Bosnians v Serbian might imply it was a war between Serbs from Serbia proper and ‘Bosnians’. Bosnians actually included Serbs in Bosnia, Croats in Bosnia and Muslims (Serbs and Croats who had converted to Islam and recognised as a separate entity from ethnic Serbs and Croats in Bosnia) A three way fight within Bosnia.
The Western media unable or unwilling to properly distinguish so presented confusingly in reports. Although I didn’t follow the Milosevic trial I think some of the charges related to alleged involvement of Serbia in directing that conflict, which I believe was Milosevic was cleared of after his death in prison.
Michael Parenti’s To Kill a Nation is a great corrective to the bogus mainstream narrative that all but a very few buy into. The US role started in the early 1990’s when the IMF (a tool of US imperialism) manufactured (and/or exacerbated existing) ethnic conflict by granting generous loans to non-Serbian ethnic groups to fracture the relationship of the very diverse country to the central (mildly socialist) government who would not bow to Western takeover. Later US would actively aid certain groups of Croats and ethnic Albanians who sided with the Nazi’s during WWII. The destruction of Yugoslavia was a continuation of Cold War policies that have never stopped to this day even though the Soviet block has been gone for 30 years.
It looks to me like the USA is under IMF global imperialism, they run the treasury. The banking cabal have bankrupted most nations and control their governments which are in name only and not legally legitimate, being bankrupt. This gives the financial power the ability to dissolve them at any time they wish, should they feel the need. No wonder none of them act in the national interest
The IMF was created as part of the Bretton Woods agreement in 1944 which laid out how the US (and of course US Federal Reserve) ) was going to control the post-war international monetary system. The IMF was and is under control of predominantly US elites, not other way around.
Much of what’s happening has a certain ‘Janissary Coup’ feeling to it, so who knows exactly at this point.
Things are definitely in flux.
The same old story told many times it would seem….anything to gain and the money elites via the banking system can create disarray at their needs…be it various ethnic wars, religious wars or divide and conquer via covid…capacity to bankrupt most govts is clearly now in their hands and exercised at will for their benefit…govts are so very easy to entice into unrepayable loans
Certainly the US elite are involved in the Fed. through their involvement with the European based banking dynasties that own the Fed. Obviously the ownership of the world money creating machine is the key to unlimited power and would be protected with every resource which that infinite self created supply of money could buy. All “countries” are bought and payed for corporations and to point a finger at any of them is a waste of time. The US is the military pawn used by its owners at present to bludgeon the rest of the world into one financial system which will control the entire world. The Royal Institute of International Affairs meeting in Australia in the 1930s discussed this matter and considered China as next world policeman when the US was used up. I have not seen the minutes of this meeting but it was published by the RIIA. The information comes from a resource that I have never been able to refute,but must be regarded as hearsay.
To get a policy passed the IMF must count on 85% of the members. The US has 16% of a blocking vote so that any internal policy vote the US gets it way. In short the US runs the IMF.
The IMF is run by PEOPLE, who are they, how were they chosen and who pays their salary? What about the head, do you think she is as honest as the day is long? Employees are immune from any prosecution by anyone for anything, the organisation is audited by no one but itself. What you say is true but what goes on in that privately owned institution behind those steel doors one can only conjecture.
Good point Tom. I’d also recommend Diana Johnstone’s brilliant book Fool’s Crusade, which I’ve read years ago. Here are some facts about Croation Ustaše who perpetrated the genocide against the Serbs depicted in this film which the Western media propagandists are trying to smear.
Some should watch “it started with a lie”.
Schröder and Fischer the war criminals never had to answer for their crimes. Nasty stains on an already filthy German flag.
I saw a film in, of all places, the chamber music hall of the Cleveland Museum of Art (a small venue where Albert Schweitzer used to play Bach on its organ over a century ago). It certainly re-opened a wound made by that viewing in 1999. No doubt most of the readers here who have a vivid interest in these controversies have seen it, called “Savior”.
I give the link to the wiki (shudder) entry for the film, since the plot summary is quite serviceable. It is noteworthy that it includes the “56% fresh” rating at Rotten Tomatoes since films this well done would typically score much higher, it had to be of some real value to make the cut at the Arts Film Festival at the Museum, where we saw only stunning films (I saw the film there around that time, “Regeneration” about the convalescence during WW I of the Brit soldier poets Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon, and was very moved, by both films).
Around that time I had chauffered from the airport to the museum the curator of a Boston consortium of museums, and had asked him about the Cleveland Museum, and he had answered indicating, “Well, it’s not in the very top tier of world museums, such as Louvre, not the top 10, but close, certainly in the next tier, top 20, maybe 15.”
Although like Severance Hall a couple hundred yards across the pond there, and home to the Cleveland Orchestra, it is all presided over by the heavy industry plutocrats of NorthEastern Ohio: Timken, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Crocker and their ilk, mostly purveyors and profiteers of wars. As one prelate wrote me 40 years ago, “I am in Cleveland for a week, the only hole I can recall above ground.”
That soul is the epitome of discernment, discretion, and diplomacy, and thus offered a description that was and is literally accurate and true: the city springs from the landing point of Moses Cleaveland, who first set foot on the banks of the Cuyahoga River in 1795 where it flows from Lake Erie and is abutted on both sides by small hills that rise to city street level, in an area of nightclubs known as The Flats. So, indeed, we have the curiosity of a 100 foot “above ground”. So, simply accurate. Nobody needed to tell me, though my first visit was a dozen years in the future then, that he may have meant that as a synecdoche of other things. We just don’t know.
We do know that a young Antonin Scalia (the late “Nino” who put the kebosh on the Bush/Gore “recount” 2000) got his start a few blocks up the hill and down the street at the law firm Jones, Day, Reavis, and Pogue on the corner of Euclid and 9th.
Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe ! (An imaginary law firm only, seen on The Simpsons).
“SAVIOR”:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savior_(film)
Regeneration is a great story, though it was Wilfred Owen who was at Craiglockhart with Sassoon, not Brooke, and very much the junior poet. Sassoon’s suggestions for changes are on some of the drafts of Anthem for Doomed Youth. Pat Barker understands war trauma and she’s very clear sighted and non-judgemental about male sexuality too. The whole Regeneration trilogy is excellent. If you haven’t read it do.
Yes, I was hedging, I was not in a position when I wrote to fact check it, I had almost put Wilfred Owen but got a brain cramp and stuck on Brooke. I knew it was one of the two. Thanks for the correction, I’ll check out the texts. The film was impressive.
The lies about the destruction of Yugoslavia are the glue that holds the media, the political and the neoliberal mafia together.
They defend this narrative like no other, with greater application and determination than the false narratives of Ground Zero and Baghdad.
The compromised stenographers of the foreign press corps will go to the wire for this story, for it destroys their credibility on all others.
This was the military unIntelligent organ’s great experiment in manipulating middle class minds. If they could get away with this abomination, nothing would stop them.
Even before 9/11 there was a constructed war, premeditated with an evil machination that matched WW1. Born of lies and the demonization of a people, this was different to the first Gulf war and to the second that post-dated the destruction of Yugoslavia. This was a war on our own soil, not the torching of a far-off land.
People who had fought valiantly against fascism and who had proceeded to expose the lies at the heart of Wall Street’s Bolshevik project, were burned at the stake.
It was also the first of the multifaith, diverse, secular states to be burned as an affront to the model of Israel’s ethnic-cleansing, supremacist apartheid.
We don’t yet understand the implications of Yugoslavia’s destruction. It was implemented at a speed calculated to confuse… Soon after the implosion off the Soviet Union, soon after Mandela’s release..
Mandela, Mendelssohn…
It’s ironic that Yugoslavia’s practical proof of diversity was immediately replaced by a verbal commitment to diversity as theory. A woke cultural Marxism at ease with neoliberal hegemony, which danced on Belgrade’s graves.
Just for the record, the practical diversity in Yugoslavia wasn’t as rosy as it might appear from a distance. I spent some time in a refugee camp in Austria, and got to know people from former Yugoslavian nations. Albanians from Kosovo were the worst, they hated everybody else with a passion. The others a notch better. There were constant wars, fights. A friend of mine once got his ear cut off (true story).
I have no rosy delusions, either.
So it didn’t work. We should all put up or shut up.
I worked with Kosovans. Fascinating to get into their worldview.
Modern politics has no problem with tribalism. Wokes with their safe spaces give practical support to apartheid.
Yugoslavia pretended to make it work.
What works in the Final Analysis — what ultimately, really delivers that sense of finality and satisfaction of logical completion: death jabs and oblivion?
Can you see, now, why so many sign up to the Covid project? It Just Works.
Such people can keep their tidy minds and their neatness. I like mine disorderly and humane.
Well, I remember Kosovans as prolific smugglers and highly adept backstabbers. Their worldview, insofar as I was able to get to know it, consisted of considering themselves the center of the Universe and fucking over everybody else.
Then again, I got to sort of befriend one of them, insofar as they would let an outsider get anywhere close. And I have to say that they introduced me to roasted peppers, something I’ve enjoyed ever since.
Did they show you how to turn the roasted peppers into Ajvar?
It’s true what you say about tensions within. This article touches a little on those from the time. Mind you, I think the outside interference was significant. I sometimes think without this Yugoslavia, with some changes could have remained together. The 6 leaders of the republic’s were holding TV talks negotiating, I think around 1989.
http://oneworld.press/?module=articles&action=view&id=1678
To draw a parallel with Czechoslovakia and the split thereof, wherewith I’m much more familiar, they’re probably better off the way they are now.
Although Czech and Slovaks are as similar, if not more, than some of the former Yugoslavian nations, but much less hotheaded, the Czechoslovak federation was plagued by constant tensions. In my view, the more sophisticated Czechs were suitably complemented by the more passionate Slovaks, but that’s not how most people on both sides saw it, and the separation was certainly for the better.
Why have a federation where authority is imposed centrally on an incongruous population? Smaller cooperating units work better. Right down to individual people.
Federations, large organizations, such as the EU, are a vehicle to control large populations from a central spot under the guise of alleged freedom.
You wrote: “We don’t yet understand the implications of Yugoslavia’s destruction. It was implemented at a speed calculated to confuse… Soon after the implosion off the Soviet Union, soon after Mandela’s release..”
I spent a lot time on the “Depleted” Uranium issue 15 years ago and many atrocities from that period and the Clinton-led program of DU bombing stuck in my mind.
Lord Robertson was then the Supreme Commander of NATO and divulged at some point that every projectile and missile used there was saturated with DU (owing to its ability to superheat and penetrate steel). Lt. Col. Doug Rokke, head medical officer then for DoD (before his DU contamination and retirement when he was exposed to it) wrote me that its use is a violation of Geneva Conventions and a war crime. I had contacted him after I had received a 5″ thick package from the USNRC (U.S Nuclear Regulatory Commission at my private PO Box, July 2005, with two volumes of “Proposed Nuclear Facility in Lea County, NM”, and 700 pgs.)
All this came after I had written one of my shortest pieces, about 500 words, suggesting more coverage be given to DU, in groups where I posted. I ran that up the flagpole to see who would salute, since I had concluded that it was a hot topic to certain “influential” individuals.
Sure enough, almost as proof, only mere minutes later, maybe a half hour, I got an email in my inbox from a “Roger Helbig” whose name sounded familiar but that’s about all.
It was not very long, from someone who said he was a vet and a Kerry supporter, and started right in with, “Who the (‘F’) are you, and what the (F) do you know about DU?”
Well, fair enough I guess, on its face, but I responded asking for bona fides and some decorum, or I’d block his F bombs before they were even incoming in my inbox.
He kept at it, by this time veiled threats really, in succession, on a Sunday.
I blocked his emails and moved on. That was February 2005. About 5 months later I got the huge mailer that was rerouted to a big PO bin with a key, on Independence Day weekend, in the giant deserted main USPS office in Irvine, since everyone around but me was at the CA beaches celebrating the red white and blue, including all the postal workers.
It was then, through my friend “activist” Tom Cahill (spr.org), that I was put in touch with Leuren Moret, Doug Rokke (on permanent lifetime DU disability), and others, Moret told me just to throw out the USNRC books. Rokke congratulated me “on making Helbig’s list, we’re all on it.”
Turns out, Helbig is Lt. Col. Roger Helbig and, as Rokke and others apprised me, “chief attack dog for the DoD against anyone who questions DU use.”
I saw the next year above the fold a headlined coverage at “American Free Press” (a national free rag filled with crosscurrents of intrigue) of a public debate between Rokke and Helbig on the issues of DU.
All this added a lot of color to that long hot summer, but I was curious as to how they would have put me in their crosshairs.
But it had happened before, fertile fields for all kinds of private and intimate conspiracy theories.
It strikes me now as strange that I did not then make the connection to my late father’s tenure as president of the U.N. Association, L.A. chapter. Perhaps because we were so estranged that we had not spoken aloud the last 8 years before he passed.
But when he was found dead in his car in April 1982, I flew out from Dallas, Texas, to his memorial service in L.A. and was approached by the director of two films he had just produced on nuclear disarmament, after the service at the reception buffet table.
“Do you know any reason why your father would have committed suicide, he seemed so upbeat and excited all week that we were about to release these two films of his on nuclear disarmament?”
Well, as an attorney to very prominent Freemasons and (apparent) West Coast Dulles’ clone for “Intel interests”, he may or may not have given his director and clue all of the concurrent backstory on his “status” since I found out years later that he had dismissed his mistress of longstanding weeks before, telling her, as she later told one of our inquisitive relatives, “He said it was too dangerous for me to be around him any more.”
I knew about none of these things, since we only wrote a few times his last dozen years, but I made a call one day to Bob Nichols, back in 06, after he had won the Project Censored Award for his reporting on DU. (A favorite topic of Robert Fisk as well.)
After we traded notes for an hour by phone, and I had told Nichols the contradictory and conflated history of my dad’s career, he suggested, “He was most likely assassinated by the Nuclear Mafia”.
Probably the same people behind the assault against me 6 years later when I was, by a striking a very unrelated, fortuitous coincidence, I was circulating a petition to permanently decommission S.O.N.G.S. (San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station: “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!” ) when 3 OC Sheriff deputies accosted me and ruptured (only) my biceps tendon (where it now abides rolled up into my left shoulder). No doubt my efforts on behalf of San Clemente Green, who had approached me first with the petition, had ruffled some nuclear feathers, since I also had access to underground but well-received radio and tv and other outlets, and many of the interested parties lived nearby, near the plant (I was assaulted, arrested and threatened in jail in several very cute ways).
Anyways, I leave this smattering of dots, since ultimately many lead to Kosovo and, well, everywhere else these days. It was amazing to me how, diverse and unrelated as they were at the time, they all interconnected.
But then, what of these stories doesn’t, these days? That has grown to be both a curse and a cover.
But also it provides many dots that may well enough feed into connections others have made, especially here.
Even Jesus was “only” given His one thread.
But He called that thread The Vine.
And us, its branches. Thus, each “one” of us is given ‘only’ her or his own one single ‘thread’.
Seems suddenly somehow fit, and made to fit, this Pentecost Sunday noon, when on the first one, one flame fit atop the head of each one of his disciples.
In the Schemata of Sacred Numbers, it appears there is at times no room for more.
But room enough for a plenty of dots.
What a story. Sounds like you’ve been through the wars and back.
It’s been an adventure, being born as an Ervin.
The good news is that The Vine is big enough to even make room for some of us.
That’s DAMMED good!
They’ve been at this with me since the cradle, and I’ve been told by some they’ll never stop, but I always consider the source.
The only source really worth believing tells me it all comes to an end at last.
Not complaining, any more, everything is everything and life is an exhilarating experience.
**********
My Main Man, the wizard of words, in wise words and word2wise, quoting here:
“An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered. An adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered.” — GKC
£4£&$4$…..
[Covert Action Magazine, published by Chris Agee, torch-bearing son of Phil Agee (CIA DIARY and ON THE RUN) has a great article today substantively proving by way of a new spook bio about him, that he was no traitor, but a prophet and true patriot. Ironically, the author wrote t to prove rather the opposite. There are so-called USA whistleblowers who still shun Agee, like Ray McGovern, since he responded to me about other things, but not that. Not my defense of Agee. Not a word. Ear shattering silence, like most everywhere. The new book is “A Drop of Treason”.]
A year ago I would have challenged you on the bit about Cultural Marxism but I now realise that, whatever Marxism may have meant in the past (and whatever it may have meant to Marx himself – who famously declared himself NOT to be a Marxist), it has now (irony of ironies!) been absorbed into the “hegemony” of Western propaganda. It got a big boost in this from the CIA’s funding and advertising of the Frankfurt School as a cold war raspberry to the Soviets in the cultural and intellectual arena. It is sobering to think of how much our Western view of the world is still shaped by that time i.e. the post WW2 years and the solidifying of that cold war. This is the ideology of the American Empire and therefore of the West itself.
Speaking of which, I was reading a book of interviews with the Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau in which his interviewer, Joseph Horowitz, made this observation about that elevation of “Western superiority” via another prop, conductor Toscanini:
And then there was composer Richard Strauss’s bitterly ironic comment:
All of which suggests that there is, to say the least, another side to this story.
Having been a student and sat in the British Library and painstakingly read the three volumes of Capital and then the Grundrisse, and then to the Critique of political economy I can assure you that BLM, ANTIFA and other so-called ‘cultural marxists’ are anything but; more like anarcho-fascists. – ‘Marxists’ indeed!. Most of the writing is on political economy, history and philosophy all pretty much unread by those who spout on about ‘Marxism’ including those who claim to be. I also forgot to add that Marxism is, believe or not, the same as communism or even worse – Stalinism.
Then there is the fact that Orwell fought alongside and was a member of the ‘Workers Party of Marxist Unity’ (POUM) during the Spanish civil war and got a bullet through his neck for his troubles. Was he, or they ‘Marxists’?
Consider also the armed anti-nazi partisan movements in Italy, France, Yugoslavia, Albania during world war 2. Were they Marxists or something else – do tell. There was and still is a distinction to be made between Stalinism and Marxism. Consider that intellectuals Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin as well as leftist intellectual economists such as Nikolali Kondratieff, Isaac Rubin and Rosa Luxemburg, All Marxists who were systematically, to use a Stalinist term ‘liquidated’
And BTW has any of the above critics of ‘Marxism’ cultural or otherwise, actually read any of the dastardly Marxist literature? I seriously doubt it. If they they might be singing a different.
If you read the subtitle of ”Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production.” you might gain some insight of what ‘Marxism’ is about.
It seems that anyone can have an opinion on anything without knowing the first thing about it. So maybe I can have an opinion on surrealist poetry or nuclear physics without have the slightest idea of what is involved.
I have read Capital vol 1, the economic and philosophical manuscripts, the German Ideology, bits of Capital 2, Theories of Surplus Value, the 18th Brumaire and am currently reading the Grundrisse. I have the highest respect for Marx. Also a fair respect for Trotsky and Lenin and E Meiksins Wood, Chris Harman and various other Marxists.
I have no respect at all for what Marxism has become and has revealed itself to be in the wake of covid (i.e. absorbed into the “hegemony” of Western propaganda as I stated above). Nor do I care for “Cultural Marxism”, “Identity Politics”, “Political Correctness” or any of the other mutations of pseudo-Marxism.
Identity politics has got eff all to do with Marxism. It’s the antithesis of it. The constant degradation of Marxism is troubling and behoves the capitalist cunts killing us.
Yugoslavia finds its follow up in Syria. They share a lot in common – be it multi-ethnic, or multi-denominational under strong leadership. Tito held Yugoslavia together, the Assads Syria. It is for that reason that the rabid West wants Syria to follow Yugoslavias fate.
By one of those amazing coincidences, Radovan Karadzic has been transferred to the tender mercies of the UK’s penal system. Will he suffer an ‘unfortunate accident’ at the hands of fellow inmates? The man ran rings around the ICTY prosecutors and knows too much.
http://thesaker.is/transfer-of-dr-radovan-karadzic-to-a-british-prison-raises-many-questions/
“Peck’s ambitious project starts strong with a brilliant rethinking of Nazi Germany as a settler colonial state, a refreshing antithesis to the conventional historical narrative”.
There’s nothing really that new with this approach. The BBC’s ‘The Nazis: a Warning from History’ is a quarter of a century old and Part 4 was entitled ‘The Wild East’ which clearly equates Nazi policies in Eastern Europe with US expansion in ‘the Wild West’. Both attempted to subjugate (and in large numbers exterminate) peoples that both regarded as subhuman. Hitler’s favourite reading was Karl May and his novels of the Wild West. Of course, as everyone reading here well knows by now, Nazi eugenics very much came from the USA and the Western intellectual tradition as well with some minor adjustments.
The Nazi plan was to establish settler colonies peopled by a racial elite of warrior-farmers. The Slavs (the similarity to the word slaves is not coincidental, by the way) were to be the uneducated serf labour (I think Himmler said he wanted them educated just enough that they could read autobahn signs to stay off the roads so they wouldn’t keep getting run over). The economic system Western elites prefer cannot seem to function without a reservoir of ultra-cheap, captive labour – or perhaps they just don’t it to.
i have often thought that the real problem so often is our supposed developed nations only get there on the backs of the grindingly poor and only stay there by finding, creating another lot to continually exploit…so yes totally agree with you..,
in aust we imported them and then when they wanted a bit better we’re happy to join US in moving all manufacturing to China…dept of trade Canberra was instrumental in encouraging same under the guise of wanting free trade….that total bullshit concept…we could from time to time then allow in some migration, backpacker, student population to keep a poor and exploited wage level for what wasn’t easy to get cheaply elsewhere….seems we always have to look after the ultra rich class by keeping the middle class thinking they benefit…guess that is one reason they got a shock with the covid narrative….they even ditched the middle class to keep hold of their billions…
economic theory taught in uni is basically bullshit propaganda to keep everyone lulled….like all the other stories…
‘Marx-ism’ abandoned the barricades decades ago, and found a nice nest for itself in University Economics departments… Over recent decades Anarchism has been subject to much ‘research’ in academia – most books ‘On Anarchism’ ,now, contain such ‘research’… Like Marxism, Anarchism is being drained of its lifeblood…There’s nothing Intellectuals like better than to theorise ideas to death…
I feel like ‘Marx-ism’ as it is now holds no relation whatsoever to Marxism as it was.
Marxism was totally destroyed and what we have now is entirely a product of generations of counter intelligence operations.
Hear bloody hear. And to hear those of a former genuinely leftist bent decry Marxism sounds the death knell of any viable socialism.
Just a sidenote. In most Slavonic languages, there is a word “slava” meaning “glory”.
How many wars have taken place in Europe as a direct result of “Kingdom”? The long and winding road of the Hapsburg Crown lands: >
Excerpted from: House of Habsburg – Wikipedia
“The House of Habsburg (/ˈhæpsbɜːrɡ/; German pronunciation: [ˈhaːpsbʊʁk], traditionally spelled Hapsburg in English), also called House of Austria was one of the most influential and outstanding royal houses of Europe.
The throne of the Holy Roman Empire was continuously occupied by the Habsburgs between 1438 and 1740. The house also produced emperors and kings of the Kingdom of Bohemia, Kingdom of England (Jure uxoris King), Kingdom of Germany, Kingdom of Hungary, Kingdom of Croatia, Kingdom of Illyria, Second Mexican Empire, Kingdom of Ireland (Jure uxoris King), Kingdom of Portugal, and Kingdom of Spain, as well as rulers of several Dutch and Italian principalities.
From the 16th century, following the reign of Charles V, the dynasty was split between its Austrian and Spanish branches. Although they ruled distinct territories, they nevertheless maintained close relations and frequently intermarried.”
Full text – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Habsburg
Did financial assets and political influence simply fade away? I think not…
Otto Von Hapsburg and and the WestGerman BND and Genscher were up to very sleazy activity in the 80s…..
Bravo! Otto, Genscher, Kinkel, Kohl and Waldheim – the Nazi Papist cabal at the heart of Europe – directly responsible for the break-up of Yugoslavia.
It was when we — the European Union chaired by Tony B.Liar — started dropping more bombs on Belgrade than Hitler had done, that I began digging to find the source of the cesspool that is 20th century history. I found that pullulating source of global infection in the financial City of London. BLiar is now Non-voting Director in House of Rothschild — the highest honour ever bestowed on a British Prime Minister, “For Military Services Rendered” in using the British Army as mercenaries for Anglo Zio Capitalist resource wars against Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya.
Heh…. I was just watching this film last night. I do no doubt the veracity of the film. Films about the Croatian Fascists in WWII are rare, and for that alone I’d recommend the film to anyone interested in history. However, I do not think the film fully succeeded in creative terms.
Given their grim subject matter, films about concentration camps require a certain approach, lest they not fall into the trap of becoming exploitation, even when the film makers have the most sincere intentions. The prime example of outright concentration camp exploitation films are the notorious mid-seventies “Ilsa” type films (Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS, and its spin offs). When a film is reduced to one atrocity after another, the individual acts start to lose their impact on the viewer.
In order to not go down that path as a film maker, in a way you have to tone down the explicit depiction of the atrocities through some creative narrative device. The 2015 Hungarian film Son of Saul does this by focusing for most of the film on the back of the main protagonist. The atrocities are thus only seen in brief moments when the protagonist is aligned in a certain way. A more common way is by depicting concentration camp life through the naive perspective of a child, such as The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas from 2008.
For Dara of Jasenovac, director Predrag Antonijevic and screen writer Natasa Drakulic chose not employ such a creative device. And although I do believe that their intentions are sincere, the film does fall into the trap described above. This is exacerbated by the slightly sentimental score, the very last thing a concentration camp film needs.
I would no go so far as to write off Dara of Jasenovac as a complete failure. And I understand that Serbs will rate it highly, simply for the fact that this part of history is finally, and deservedly, being brought to a wider audience. But in purely cinematic terms, it is somewhat middle-brow, no masterpiece.
In purely cinematic terms, 99% of what is created about this topic is opinionating garbage. This however, might have everything to do with what gets the required financing. Another movie about collaborateurs and camps with a high dose of romanticism is the Italian film “Life is beautiful”. It shows an approach to the serious subject by employing humor and for those having experienced the horrors of it, humor was not really easy to come by.
For what it’s worth, a book might have been a better approach, but this is the age of motion pictures and reading has taken a distant place over watching.
Thanks for this wonderful article. Not only does it help set history aright, it illuminates how politics reaches its tentacles into the arts to influence the portrayal of historical events.
When that process is obvious, as with so many Hollywood films, no analysis is needed. But when it’s more subtle, as with critical reaction to the Serbian film(s), the kind of analysis Mr Parry provides is absolutely essential.
I also liked the article. A lot of interesting subjects are mentioned very briefly, and I would like to read more. Can anyone here recommend similarly insightful books on the Yugoslav wars or the history of the term ‘genocide’?
To Kill A Nation by Michael Parenti and Fools Crusade by Diana Johnstone
I would also add “Travesty: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic” by John Laughland and “Strange Liberators” by Gregory Elich. The latter is not exclusively about Yugoslavia, but dedicates substantial space to it.
The five-part series by Ed Herman, called “The Dismantling of Yugoslavia” (on Monthly Review) is also essential. Here is the first part:
https://monthlyreview.org/2007/10/01/the-dismantling-of-yugoslavia/
I was recently wading through the noxious waters of the designated Left gatekeeper network and I stumbled on another of those interminable mind policing sites, Centre For The Analysis of the Radical Right. If you have a strong stomach, try this:
https://www.radicalrightanalysis.com/2021/04/13/on-the-comparative-study-of-denialism-and-conspiracy-theories/
The title tells you everything you need to know:
“(Part I)”?! The mind shudders!
“Denialism” and “conspiracy theories” are terms in the arsenal of the pseudo-Left church and, on seeing these verbal crucifixes to ward off mental sacrilege, anyone with any sense and self-respect would just click off. But hold on a minute and look here:
“The study of Holocaust denial involves a careful understanding of the analytical frameworks deployed by scholars of the Holocaust in addressing denial. One thing that jumps out to me in particular is the way that scholars view tendencies among deniers as generalizable not just to Holocaust studies but other forms of what Deborah Lipstadt calls the “growing assault on truth and memory.” While it would be disingenuous to compare this or that denier to Holocaust denial out of spite, reckoning with Holocaust denial can help contextualize other forms of denial—for instance, denial of the Bosnian genocide and denial of the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons in Syria. Helpfully, scholars of Holocaust denial explicitly make the connection between Holocaust denial and other conspiracy theory groups.”
Disingenuous? Oh, the irony! After putting in a disclaimer that effectively bans comparing “Holocaust denial” with any other “denial”, this article goes on to precisely indulge in such comparisons!
Oops! By throwing Syrian chemical weapons in with Holocaust denial, the author of the piece you quote inadvertently throws a vial of acid at the Holocaust. This, because it’s been proven beyond dispute that the White Helmets did the dirty work in Syria – not Mr Assad’s government.
I am aware of the double edged nature of compulsively bringing in the Holocaust with all these other “denialist” claims i.e. that you may not so much be “confirming” the later cases but dragging the Holocaust into the same dubious territory.
The 6 Million (6 by 6-figure number) from WW2 has been in dubious territory ever since the EU made it a criminal offense to research the actual evidence. By not-so-coincidence, well before WW1 the MSM ran headlines about the need save the lives of 6 Million Russian Jews all their lives in danger from the Czar.
The number 6 is the magic Babylonian number; the mark of the beast is 666; the name of Roman Emperor Domitian, who persecuted Jews, adds up to 666. — (Robert Graves, The White Goddess).
And you’ve posted 333 comments! Coincidence? I think not.
Sam, many thanks for the warning! A reminder to stop before I mark up 666.
In reality the US bombed Belgrade because Slick Willy Clinton got caught with his dick in Mónica’s mouth ! A far greater “sin” in America than the killing of thousands of women and children in Yugoslavia. .
That whole Clinton-Lewinsky story is extremely dubious – it looks manufactured to me.
Honey pot entrapment. Ask Mordechai Vanunu about that.
Do correct me if i am wrong but did the Clinton Lewinsky thing came out the same week/period as Gary webb exposes of the CIA selling coke and crack story if so isnt that a coincidence !
I suggest screening “Snowfall” a series about CIA’s involvement in the Heroine/Cocaine trade , the profits used to finance small wars , during the Reagan/Bush1 era. More truth than fiction ? Gary Webb was simply a loose end by the time of his alleged suicide circa the late 1990s when the Clinton Whitehouse was under strong CIA influence
In America’s political circus “Wag The Dog” moments , a form of diversionary trick are the rule not the exception . A steady diet of small patriotic wars supposedly in defense of some nebulous view of freedom keeps American exceptionalism attractive to the masses.
One of the few good things Bill Clinton did was support the Defense of Marriage Act. The Lewinsky false flag was his punishment.
“Sometimes I think war is God’s way of teaching us geography.”
– Paul Rodriguez, Sr. –
Well then, we can console ourselves knowing that truth’s loss is,at least, geography’s gain
I wouldn’t feel too left out, all ‘western democracies®’ are going to get very familiar and intimate with old ‘uncle genocide’, one could say they are going to ‘experience’ ‘him’ first hand…
in many ways they already are and have been for some time…
by the way, one could argue that all war is genocide…
many familial lines have been brought to an abrupt and bloody end all throughout history… yet it is always useful for the ‘hollow men’ to define such terms and groupings of people.. whilst overlooking obviously pre-existing tribal and religious affiliations (particularly in the balkans, hint: educate yourself) which could more easily be ‘solved’ …in favour of contradictory sensationalism with which they push geo-political agendas for ‘financialist’ ‘chess’ players…
obviously ‘film’ is a perfect medium of mind control for the hollow miscreants and their armies of ahem, ‘artists’, by entrancing the imbecilic and hijacking their ‘alpha waves’ thus bypassing all reason with emotional stimuli… there the ‘injected’ message resides until ‘activation’….
Thank You. A most important account of how up became down, right became left and the truth a lie.
It is easier to comprehend what has and is happening, when one important aspect of history is understood.
Germany lost the war – not the Nazis. Minus a few show trials, Nazis spread throughout the Western hemisphere and became instrumental in the cold war, segregation, coups d’etat (especially in South America, were colonialism and catholic church were in control) and most felt in the influence they had on Western bureaucracy.
No time machine is necessary to figure out that humanity has never been freed from the same policies and actions the Nazis came up with first. Cops shooting unarmed people, brutal suppresson of dissent, war crimes sold as humanitarian aid, and last but not to the very least a Western society that is stuck at the most primitive level of consciousness.
These are the prerequisites for all the war crimes and crimes against humanity after Germany had surrendered. The Nazis never did.
They were absorbed into the CIA. (Operation Paperclip)
“Operation Paperclip” is what was revealed to the public. You are surely aware of the rule about ‘government’ ‘revelations’ always coming a long time after the event? When was Kennedy offed? And the truth is still not available in one concise fashion. No documentary laying out all the facts exist. A motion picture with some handsome actors is all the public ever got. The truth never got beyond being alleged. No trials, no verdicts – nothing. Same for military secrets. Those are – if at all – only revealed long after the weapons were used first.
The missing part of “Paper Clip” is the correlation to the real paper clips. Who uses paper clips? Bureaucrats use paper clips. Nazi bureaucrats used paper clips in a never before experienced volume. They were the first to have files about most everyone in the Reich. From the top Nazi supporters down to the last dissidents. The files were held together by paper clips. After all, it was Fritz the so called Great, that developed a thorough bureaucracy in order to control people.
“Paper clip” brought this version of control to the US and obviously to Latin America. At times I am painfully reminded of that fact – when I observe how the obedient many here are willingly succumbing to the iron grip of bureaucracy.
Fela Kuti would have said “Bureaucrazy” – because that’s what bureaucrats really are. Some of them to the degree of psychopathy. Employees of the sovereign that treat their real bosses with utter contempt. Nazi style.
Talking of the late great Fela I’ve had his excellent “Zombie” as an earworm for the last 10 friggin years. The volume has increased during the last year and a half.
Zombie, oh Zombie! Zombie no go unless you tell him to go!
No other musician has ever captivated my mind like Fela. It is now 40 years for me that his music serves as my daily soundtrack. I have collected everything I could get my hands on – even driving to the Netherlands frequently to buy African records that could not be found in Germoney.
It may uplift You that I can tell You to have spent time with Fela and his brilliant musicians after his concerts in Germoney. For many years I had a PRESS pass and could just walk backstage. It was never necessary to use the pass to see Fela, King Sunny Ade, Mory Kante, Youssou Ndour, Hugh Masekela, Ray Lema, or Manu Dibango. They were always ntrigued by someone who just wanted to talk to them.
There was always more than talking with Fela, though. I don’t think Bob Marley, or any other Jamaikan could have ever smoked Fela out. Fela had various joint rollers, making sure that he would never, ever be without a smoke. Glorious days. So many times I wish Fela could write a song about what is happening now – although all of his music was quite predictive. What better term than “Zombie” for the Covidians?
His son Femi continues to carry the torch – and is denounced, badmouthed and declared insane by the same ilk of people that threw his grandmother out of the second floor. What a beautiful world this could be for all without fascists.
Wow. I’m jealous.
RIP Tony Allen too whose “homecooking” I was listening to just this morning..
Knowing that recent history is so false, I have no doubt that all history is. It makes the saying-“those who ignore history are liable to repeat it” somewhat redundant.
“History is written by the victors.” That’s why post war Germans had to grapple with thier history and the Americans did not. We are taught the history as seen by the ruling classes. If you want to learn your own history, the history of the working people, you have to do that on your own, it isn’t taught in school.
Yes, but I’d change one word- We Are taught history as ORDERED by the rulers
Yes, there lies the caveat. Because the real revelation must then be, that if history repeats itself – the lies repeat themselves, too. Therefore in the end, what remains is nothing but lies. At least when it comes to the big lies.
That makes for an interesting revision of what we accept as the past, doesn’t it?
Yes.i had further thoughts and of course the saying is true with the caveat that it’s your own interpretation of history you should follow and if you find yourself repeating the mistakes you must reinterpret until you get it right
Plus, I have spent a lot of time pondering about “mis-takes”. That there is a difference between “being mistaken” and “making a mistake”. Only when I added the hyphen, it started to make sense.
One could also see “history” as nothing else but a part of an uninterrupted timeline. With “history” at the past’s end and the future at the other – it is one time line though and therefore, “history” is also always part of the future. Maybe it is this paradox that makes “learning from the past” so difficult?
That’s made me ponder the difference between the past and history. The past is what actually happened and history is what someone says happened, which as we know is often adulterated.
buffing the past to a high gloss
avoided by those who seek not change
Rubbish.
Says the paid troll.
Excellent article.
FYI
https://jasenovac.org/
FYI
https://www.timesofisrael.com/memorial-in-jerusalem-for-alleged-wwii-fascist-collaborator-stirs-controversy/