Posted on 07/31/2008 7:02:12 PM PDT by Ravnagora
The United States, Britain, the European Union, the Vatican and a grossly perverse mass media machine will have a lot to answer for when the full extent of their anti-Serb bias is revealed. That’s not going to happen soon. The minds of a gullible public are being shaped to demonize one individual and the ethnic group he represents and, through him, to heap upon them the collective sins of opposing political forces still seeking their own selfish gain from the Balkan wars of the 1990s.
Believe it or not, it was the revival of the old German dream of European hegemony that started the fracture of Yugoslavia into its present independent nation states in a classic divide-and-conquer move. It occurred within a year of the unification of West and East Germany, and it was all legitimized under the European Union/nato nexus, with Serb “nationalists” marked down as the scapegoat.
In the words of British political economist Rodney Atkinson, “The grossest calumny in the continuing anti-Serb bias in the British press is the myth that it was the Serbs who were ‘nationalists.’ In fact, they (and many Croats, Bosnians and Kosovans) were the multi-ethnic federalists seeking to preserve Yugoslavia, and the extreme nationalists were those who now govern the statelets of Croatia, Muslim Bosnia and Albanian Kosovo. The EU supported and funded that nationalism which they condemn within the EU but which they exploit in order to undermine nation states outside the EU! Germany’s interest in destroying both Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia was to reverse the results of the First World War which established those states” (Freenations).
There you have in a nutshell an explanation of how Marshall Tito’s united Yugoslavian nation became a multi-state Balkan appendage to the European Union.
As to the present media furor surrounding the capture of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, foreign affairs editor for Chronicles magazine, Srdja Trifkovic, sums it up quite succinctly: “The spirit of the media frenzy surrounding the arrest of the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic on July 21 is based entirely on the doctrine of non-equivalence inaugurated in 1992: Serbs willed the war, Muslims wanted peace; Serb crimes are bad and justly exaggerated, Muslim crimes are understandable” (July 22, emphasis mine throughout).
That the U.S. was an all-too-willing pawn in supporting the combined aims of the German leadership under Chancellor Helmut Köhl, and the Vatican under the papacy of John Paul ii, in the breakup of Yugoslavia is a matter of documented history. With the ussr having imploded by 1991, the sole superpower left at the time was the U.S. The American administration fell into the trap of aiding in playing out—and largely paying for—Germany’s foreign policy for acquiring control of the strategic Balkan Peninsula under its European Union umbrella.
In his exposé, Trifkovic shows how the U.S. materially contributed to the instigation of the illegal Balkan wars by submitting to pressure from a combination of self-interest groups. “Washington’s motives were not rooted in the concern for the Muslims of Bosnia as such, or indeed any higher moral principle,” he wrote. “Their policy had no basis in the law of nations, or in the notions of truth or justice. It was the end result of the interaction of pressure groups within the American power structure.”
In addition to the strongest of Vatican and German lobbies, these pressure groups included, among others, the cashed-up Saudis and other Muslims with an agenda to extend Islamic political interests in Europe. The result was “a virulently anti-Serb agenda-driven form of realpolitik that was to dominate America’s Bosnian policy. Just as Germany sought to paint its Maastricht diktat on Croatia’s recognition in December 1991 as an expression of the ‘European consensus’ … Washington’s fait accomplis were straightfacedly labeled as ‘the will of the international community’” (ibid.). A gullible media took the bait and ran with it. The truth as to what actually triggered the Balkan wars was largely ignored.
The reality is that, in terms of Germany’s continuing drive for its domination of an imperialist union of European states (progress toward that goal being twice interrupted in the 20th century—by World Wars i and ii), we can hardly underestimate the importance of the first foreign-policy initiative of the unified German nation following the fall of the Berlin Wall in the autumn of 1989.
The unilateral recognition of Croatia and Slovenia by Germany, supported shortly after by the Vatican, was the spark that set off the Balkan powder keg. As Trifkovic explains, “The truth is that there was no internal, Bosnian threat to peace at the beginning of 1991 … yet once reunited Germany was committed to the recognition of Croatia and Slovenia, the Muslim leadership in Sarajevo knew both that the old Yugoslavia was dead and that historic opportunities beckoned” (ibid.). War, plus the carve-up of the Balkan nations into political entities slated for EU domination, was the result.
In the process, the Serbs were demonized.
Former Canadian Ambassador to Yugoslavia James Bisset, in a speech given in June 2003 to a group of Canadian Serbs on the anniversary of the historic battle of Kosovo, stated that during his tenure in Belgrade in the 1990s, he was “an eyewitness to the subsequent violence and breakup of the country. I also was a witness to the ‘historical amnesia’ suffered by the political leaders of France, Britain, the United States and my own country, Canada. These countries were Serbia’s old traditional allies in two world wars yet they shamefully stood by and joined in the betrayal of Yugoslavia.”
Ambassador Bisset was scathing in his remarks on the effects of this betrayal of the Serbian peoples by the leaders of those nations with whom they were previously allied. He declared that “The break up of Yugoslavia was a disaster for the Serbian people. Thousands killed and many more thousands forced to flee their ancestral homelands. … Yet the greatest tragedy of all is that the Serbs have been blamed for everything that has happened since the breakup. They have been blamed for the breakup itself. They have been blamed for starting the violence. They have been blamed for the ethnic cleansing that occurred. They have been blamed for the massacres. They have been blamed for genocide. Finally, they have been blamed for the nato bombing of their own country!”
Placing these falsehoods into their proper perspective, the ambassador declared, “These are lies! Lies! Lies! Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels said if you tell a monstrous lie people will believe you because they cannot imagine anyone making up such an outrageous falsehood. Then if evidence is shown to contradict the lie, you dismiss it as irrelevant or misguided. Finally, when the truth is disclosed it is too late. Nobody cares or wants to know.” That has undoubtedly been the case with the mass condemnation of the Serbs.
The extent to which many of today’s national leaders are prepared to sell any degree of honor or integrity down the drain for political gain is reflected in the resounding condemnation delivered by Ambassador Bisset against a number who were in office at the time of the Serbian sellout: “President Clinton and Tony Blair talked about genocide taking place in Kosovo. The U.S. secretary of defense, William Cohen, said there were over a hundred thousand young Albanian men missing in Kosovo. Robin Cook, the British foreign minister, and Clare Short, his cabinet colleague, both made outrageous charges against the Serbs about non-existent rape camps. Later it was reported by the unhcr and even the anti-Serb, (George Soros-financed) Human Rights Watch, that these stories had no foundation.”
Thus it was that Slobodan Milosevic was arraigned by the International Court of Justice at The Hague (a body not recognized by the U.S.) in an illegal trial, during which he eventually succumbed to prevailing illness and died, denying his accusers the opportunity to render their predetermined verdict of guilty.
Meanwhile, the chase for a Serbian scapegoat continued, consummating in the arrest of Radovan Karadzic last week, setting the scene for the next costly show trial at The Hague.
Well before the case is heard, as Srdja Trifkovic observes, “Karadzic personally and the Serbs collectively were severely damaged by the Western media handling of their mistreatment of Muslim prisoners and by their expulsion of non-Serb civilians in the summer of 1992. Similar atrocities by Croats and Muslims against Serbs and against each other, while no less common, were less conspicuous and deemed unworthy of attention. The Western elite class chose its sympathies at the start and kept up an agitation in favor of military intervention against the Serbs” (op. cit.).
With such overt manipulation of public opinion having been promulgated by the mass media, Karadzic is hung, drawn and quartered well before he sets foot in the dock. As Trifkovic writes, “The judgment against Karadzic at the U.S.-sponsored and largely U.S.-funded tribunal at The Hague will be built on this flawed foundation. It will be neither fair or just, and therefore it will be detrimental to what America should stand for in the world. It will also give further credence to the myth of Muslim blameless victimhood, Serb viciousness, and Western indifference, and therefore weaken our resolve in the global struggle euphemistically known as ‘war on terrorism.’ The former is a crime; the latter, a mistake” (op. cit.).
For centuries, the strategic Balkan Peninsula has featured as a slice of Europe over which wars have been fought, treaties made and broken. It became a vital pawn in the carve-up of nations after World War i, had the boundaries of its ethnic enclaves confused under Tito’s regime, then its various nationalist feelings taken advantage of and played against each other in the latest push for its colonization by the EU.
Now, as a post-Milosevic charade is about to be resumed at The Hague with the arraignment of Radovan Karadzic, one thing is for certain. The foremost casualty will be the truth, the most condemned will become the Serb per se. In the words of Srdja Trifkovic, “The strange truth is that … great powers pay a fee for entering the Balkan casino. They consent to someone’s story, not ‘the truth’” (ibid.).
The story that has set the tone for Karadzic’s trial was splashed across page A15 of the Washington Post last Wednesday under the headline, “The Face of Evil.” There, under the byline of former Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, unfolds as rounding condemnation of Karadzic as could ever be penned. This view of Holbrooke’s, that Karadzic is inherently evil, was further underlined by him in an interview on National Public Radio on the same day that his piece was published in the Washington Post.
The problem with giving such high-profile, pre-trial coverage to one man’s opinion—especially one who was so deeply involved in enacting EU/nato Balkan policy against Bosnian Serbs—is that it just feeds what Trifkovic termed (as quoted above) “the media frenzy surrounding the arrest of the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic … based entirely on the doctrine of non-equivalence inaugurated in 1992.”
Of Ratko Mladic (Bosnian Serb military leader) and Radovan Karadzic, Holbrooke wrote, “I hated these men for what they had done.” That being the case, should not an equal proportion of Holbrooke’s hatred be reserved for Croatian leader Franjo Tudjman’s thugs for the atrocities they perpetrated against the Serbs in Croatia? Well, no, for it does not fit his agenda, nor the agenda of those pressure groups that influenced the negotiations of Holbrooke and his cohorts in constructing the Dayton Accords that ended the Balkan wars.
In the penultimate paragraph of Holbrooke’s Washington Post article, he states, “Karadzic’s arrest … removes from the scene a man who was still undermining peace and progress in the Balkans [while he dispensed natural remedies at a health clinic in Belgrade?] and whose enthusiastic advocacy of ethnic cleansing merits a special place in history.”
So, what about Franjo Tudjman’s practice of ethnic cleansing during the Balkan wars? Does it not rate a special mention in history as but a resumption of similar practices carried out under Croatia’s puppet Nazi regime during World War ii? Why aren’t Tudjman’s henchmen—those still at large—subject to a similar manhunt as that mounted for Karadzic?
What about the Muslims who enacted atrocities against Serbs in those same Balkan wars? Where’s the condemnation of the U.S.- and German-backed Albanian terrorists, the kla, for atrocities committed by them against ethnic Serbs and especially their overt ethnic cleansing of Serbian Kosovars?
Why must Holbrooke single out Karadzic as one “whose enthusiastic advocacy of ethnic cleansing merits a special place in history”?
It’s simple. It all fits an overarching agenda to which the greater public remains oblivious. It’s revealed in one short sentence in Richard Holbrooke’s Washington Post article: “Karadzic’s arrest is no mere historical footnote …. It also moves Serbia closer to European Union membership.”
For the truth on the Balkans, read our booklet The Rising Beast—Germany’s Conquest of the Balkans. •
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btt
Short version.......
Pope John Paul was a Nazi.
No. Short version ... Pope John Paul wanted to establish new Catholic countries, Slovenia and Croatia, too quickly, and didn't think about how premature recognition (without negotiations) could have the effect of throwing a match into a tinderbox.
Shortest version. Germany want’s the gold mines in Kosovo. Richard Holbroke gets a piece of the action. HE’S the real face of EVIL!
Bump for later reading!
This article is pure crap, from the sentence onwards.
But hey, it's the Pope's fault!
It’s not about Germany. The Leftists have a particulae view of the world, where small “nations” are right and big ones are wrong. The traditionalists are wrong, and those destroying anything -— particularly Western -— are right.
Serbs REPRESENTED what Leftist Europe did not want any longer. They wanted a new world.
Serbs are hated for essentially the same reason as we Americans and Israelis are hated.
No, its your fault.
I’m struggling to understand why the breakup of Communist Yugoslavia was a bad thing.
Why are you "struggling?"
In my opinion, you're posing the wrong question.
That is, it's not so much a question as to "why", but rather, a question of the processes that were taken (i.e. political and economic reforms) - which go back to 1980 and subsequent to Tito's death.
For example, in the early 1980's, Yugoslavia's external balance began to destabilize as US policy toward Yugoslavia began to change. A key step in this process occurred in 1984, when the Reagan administration targeted the Yugoslav economy in a National Security Division Directive entitled "United States Policy Toward Yugoslavia", the objective of which included "expanded efforts to promote a quiet revolution to overthrow Communist governments and parties" while reintegrating the countries of eastern Europe into the orbit of the World market."
This of course led to liberal IMF involvement in macroeconomic affairs and the consequent deterioration of living standards, and so on....it gets complicated.
Then why are you whining about the dead Croats from the wars that were a result of that break up?
You aren't stupid, Dio. You know that Croatia couldn't just "pick up and leave" Yugoslavia with all those Serbs within its borders who were all of a sudden no longer considered a constituent people of Croatia (even though they had been in that region for four hundred years), but rather were now supposed to just swallow being second class citizens of a new Croatia! Serbs were going to fight back. It was predictable. Who wouldn't ?
Given what had happened 45 years before -- within living memory -- you knew that Serbs weren't going to just "trust Croats" again -- especially when Croats once again whipped out the old Ustashe regalia that had sent hundreds of thousands of them to their deaths! They were scared, they were pissed off and they didn't asked to be thrown into this whirlwind of war.
I'd also like to know why people in the Balkans who defy the system to establish new countries out of the old order -- be they man woman or child of that group -- are no longer considered "heroes to the cause", anymore. Instead everyone who dies in the wars that result from the founding of new "countries" is considered "a victim" now. They continue parading their "wounds" and "helplessness" before the cameras for how long has it been now? Seventeen years for Croatia? Good God, the post-WWII equivalent of that would have been 1962! I was a little kid but I am old enough to remember 1962, and no one was on the news whining about what happened to them during WWII in 1962 -- except perhaps the Jews, and the Croats are not the Jews and were never the Jews!
You can't be "a winner" and "a victim" at the same time, but the Croats, the Bosnian Muslims, and the Albanians are all trying for both. All it makes me want to do is scream. "Grow the hell up! Nothing in life is free!"
BOK...from my recent readings it seems clear that as the end of WWII approached, the heavily (communist)infested US State Dept...worked feverishly to insure that Soviet preferred allies prevailed in China, E. Europe and the Yugoslavia...do you know much about this?
Around '87, they were hoping that Slobo would be a "Yugoslav Gorbachev". Of course things didn't turn out that way, but recall James Baker III's words on June 21, 1991 when he stated that "Yugoslavia must stay together", thus giving Slobo a green light to bomb Croatia into submission (Kucan and Slobo were on the verge of a deal, so Slovenia was to be spared any real violence).
The USA was late to kick the carcass around as events passed them by while they were busy with Iraq....but the USA thru Zimmerman took the lead when it came to Bosnia.
"Second class" is laughable since Croatia has a lot of minorities who aren't second class: from the Magyars, Czechs, Slovaks, to the Italians and Ruthenes. The Serbs were upset because they weren't going to be given preferential treatment anymore like being allowed to compose upwards of 70% of the Milicija of SR Croatia (now Policija). Of course we knew that some of them would fight back because many of the Serbs of Croatia bore Greater Serbian positions. We also knew that some Serbs wouldn't fight, and those are the ones that stayed in Croatia on the Croatian side throughout the war. And lastly we were pretty sure that the Belgrade Serbs would sell out those that tried to cripple Croatia just like the Belgrade Serbs sold out the Precani Serbs during Royalist Yugoslavia.
Given what had happened 45 years before -- within living memory -- you knew that Serbs weren't going to just "trust Croats" again -- especially when Croats once again whipped out the old Ustashe regalia that had sent hundreds of thousands of them to their deaths! They were scared, they were pissed off and they didn't asked to be thrown into this whirlwind of war.
Jovan Raskovic, after he was sidelined by Milosevic and replaced by Babic to head the Croatian Serbs stated that he felt guilty for whipping up this hysterical hatred and paranoia amongst his community.
I'd also like to know why people in the Balkans who defy the system to establish new countries out of the old order -- be they man woman or child of that group -- are no longer considered "heroes to the cause", anymore. Instead everyone who dies in the wars that result from the founding of new "countries" is considered "a victim" now. They continue parading their "wounds" and "helplessness" before the cameras for how long has it been now? Seventeen years for Croatia? Good God, the post-WWII equivalent of that would have been 1962! I was a little kid but I am old enough to remember 1962, and no one was on the news whining about what happened to them during WWII in 1962 -- except perhaps the Jews, and the Croats are not the Jews and were never the Jews!
Look at how the Serbs whine about WW2.....they inflate the death toll at Jasenovac some 30 times over alone.
You can't be "a winner" and "a victim" at the same time, but the Croats, the Bosnian Muslims, and the Albanians are all trying for both. All it makes me want to do is scream. "Grow the hell up! Nothing in life is free!"
I'm not interested in victimology....I'm just interested in setting the record straight.
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