Posted on 01/16/2010 3:41:23 PM PST by Bokababe
THE public face of Serbia for years has been that of a wizened war criminal in the dock in The Hague. Now, as the once-outcast country presses for membership in the European Union, it is increasingly represented by the gap-toothed grin of its energetic young foreign minister, Vuk Jeremic, all of 34 and a graduate of Cambridge and Harvard.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Regardless of anything else, if he is a graduate of Harvard he is a trained Marxist.
(Note: The preceding comment was not about anything or anyone other than the institution of Harvard.)
No doubt, just like John Roberts and Antonin Scalia.
Not everyone drinks the Kool Aid even when it is served.
He may well be -- but he also speaks the language of those in power in the US and Europe. He ought to -- we put him (his teacher, Tadic) in power. Thank John McCain, who chairs the IRI.
The EU has no need at all for new members for the next three to ten generations, if ever - the foolishness of the last ten all-at-once new (all eastern European) member states has to be absorbed and dealt with first.
Call again in 2300 or so, thank you.
Hey, I'm American, so it's no skin off my nose.
But, I don't think that Serbia ought to join the EU -- neither Serbia nor the EU has anything to really offer each other.
I've talked to people in Italy and Greece who thought that EU membership would be a remedy for all their ills and in fact all it did was make life more unaffordable for ordinary people and force ridiculous bureaucratic regulations on them.
I am not averse to Europe 'growing together' - whatever 'Europe' and 'growing together' might mean in that context on closer analysis.
But dozens of (sorry, sub-standard) countries joining the EU by fiat of some EU big-wig commissars (barf...) in just a few years is a recipy for chaos and a crime. It is NOT what Europeans want. In fact, they are sick and tired of the EU impositions.
The pressure is building...
Gas chambers? Excuse me? Are you crazy?
I have no particular information what the EU plans were/are as regards Serbia/Kosovo (why should this be a EU concern at this time anyway?), but the idea that Germany has influenced any EU decisions because of a ‘lack of gas chambers’ is beyond stupid and decidedly offensive.
Eff off you perverted troll.
You missed the goofy face at the end. It was dark humor.
But, Germany has been messing with the Balkans for the last 20 years, making Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia Serbia, Kosovo Albanians, jump through hoops like trained poodles -- and that's no joke. They must have a plan or they wouldn't have invested so much time, money and energy on it. What that plan is, is anyone's guess.
As for the “gas ovens” remark-—dark humor is a perfect description of its reality-—the ovens/mass extermination/pogroms/butchery of Christians/etc. is a reality, and its stench still wafts throughout Europe, not just among Jews either. The most effective way for Germany and Germans to rid themselves of this association is to do nothing, that is stay out of the Balkans. They can't seem to do that. Thus “ovens” remains their legacy.
The 1990's was Germany's third attack on the Balkans on their Drang Nach Osten and the two previous attempts on Serbia led to Germany's undoing.
WWI: which led to the humiliating Treaty of Versailles.
WWII: where Serbian and Greek resistance tied down their troops so long that it directly led to the failure of Operation Barbarossa.
In 1999, German Intelligence fabricated "Operation Horseshoe", supposedly a plan by Milosevic to ethnically cleanse all the Albanians from Kosovo -- problem is that it was so badly done that they actually used a Croat not Serb word for "horseshoe"
One of the German pilots who dropped NATO bombs on Belgrade was the grandson of one of the Luftwaffe bombers that dropped bombs on Belgrade in Hitler's Operation Punishment in 1941.
Germany was determined to humiliate Serbia the way that they had been humiliated -- right down to labeling Serbs as "genocidal Nazis". Serbia's real "crime" -- successfully defying Germany twice.
Yet when push comes to shove, Germany knows that Serbs are actually less difficult to live with as "Europeans" than Germany's Bosnian Muslim and Albanian minions are -- the latter being useful as weapons but jihadists and Drug-running sex slavers are not someone you'd want as your next-door neighbors.
Perhaps I did miss the ‘dark humor’ intent of your comment, but I think that was a particularly poor subject to pick for ‘humor’. No need to drop an H-bomb on a mole hill.
Over 150,000 dead in the Balkan wars of the 1990's is not "a mole hill" -- and those were wars that Germany politically provoked and ultimately participated in . Germany's first military deployment since WWII was the 1999 bombing of Serbia.
And Germany's WWII incursion into Yugoslavia did involve "gas chambers". One of the former members of the WWII Einsatzgruppe was located in Seattle a couple of years ago and has since had his US citizenship revoked.
Anyone who knows anything about the EU, knows that Germany is the economic powerhouse of the EU and what Germany wants, it gets.
The only reason that Angela Merkel and Germany even tolerate Vuk Jeremic is that he speaks German and worked at Deutche Bank before he became a politician.
Mine may have been a dark joke and a bad joke, but it was not without some actual historical foundation.
Well, let's think of this a bit more more pragmatically.
That is, Milosevic's "original sin" was that he was a socialist (or Communist) who resisted the West's push (led mainly by Germany and the US) for the breakup of Yugoslavia as far back as 1989.
He (Milosevic) didn't want to subject Yugoslavia to the painful economic reforms of privatization, strict IMF rules, etc. that were afflicting so many of the other former Eastern-Bloc countries under communist rule. Because of his resistance to the West, the western media painted the conflicts in the Balkans as a war of good (The Muslims) against evil (The Serbs). As such, and with strong media support, it was easy for the Clinton administration to stigmatize Serbia as a rogue nation.
That said, Milosevic was also a thief, he stole approximately 900K from the Yusoslav treasury.
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