On Sunday, March 16, two polls will be held in Eastern Europe. One will be a complete mockery of democracy, resulting in a government determined to trample a country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. The other will be a referendum on independence in the Crimea.
The same powers that launched the illegal, illegitimate war of aggression against Serbia in 1999, occupied and in 2008 illegally declared a portion of Serbia an independent state, now howl about "aggression" from Russia and "territorial integrity" of Ukraine. As Justin Raimondo puts it, "Western leaders only bloviate about moral and ‘international law’ when it suits their purposes. Otherwise, when that law is supposed to apply to them, they shrug it off and suddenly it’s might makes right." The hypocrisy ought to be breathtaking, but it’s the normal state of affairs in the West. "All rights for me, and none for thee" is the sum of the New World (Dis)Order.
EUtopia
The official Western explanation for the "peaceful protesters" forcing out an elected government with firebombs and guns is that President Yanukovich was corrupt, and the "people of Ukraine" wanted a future in the EU, which is not corrupt at all. Ahem.
The new government just happens to be headed by the man U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland favored for the post in a conversation leaked in early February. He leads the party whose name translates as "Fatherland." Key security and military positions in the self-proclaimed cabinet are held by brownshirts from the "Freedom" Party and "Right Sector." The first thing the new regime did was abolish the law guaranteeing equal rights to Russian and other languages in the country. But Washington says they are democratic democrats, and all this is Russian propaganda. And Washington never lies, so.
No one has bothered to answer why any Ukrainians would aspire to become vassals of the EU and live like the Greeks. The EU is advertised as being one great Germany, but the stark truth is that only Germany is prospering inside the super-state, while the newer members are seeing their traditional industries smothered by the ever-rising mountain of impossible regulations.
Also going unmentioned is that becoming like Greece would actually be the end result of a long, costly and painful process of "reform." In the meantime, Ukraine would be more like Serbia, the EU’s current model candidate.
And Serbia is a country that is independent and sovereign only in the very loosest sense of either word; where no matter who the people vote for, the government is put together by Brussels and Washington; and the country is run by what can only be described as a quisling cult of EU and Empire sympathizers, fanatically devoted to denying and suppressing all thought there might be an alternative to "Euro-Atlantic integrations."
On Sunday, March 16, such a Serbia will go to the polls in a command performance designed to provide a new majority for the ruling Progressive Party, and bestow legitimacy on the governing coalition’s policies of looting, lawlessness and treason.
Coup to Con
How did Serbia get to be this way?
What it could not accomplish with bombs in 1999, the Empire did in October 2000 through the prototype "color revolution": it toppled a "dictator" in Belgrade who refused to follow orders, and replaced him with a "democrat" who would. When he refused to be a puppet, he was politically sidelined in favor of a "pragmatist go-getter" PM – and when the PM began harboring delusions of independence and refused to be ordered around by the Imperial ambassador, he was shot. By early 2004, a suitable sycophant was installed as president, and in 2008 a coalition government under his leadership was tortured out of electoral results. Then, in 2012, a brazen con job switched out the spent former president and his Democrats for a replacement quisling and the Progressives. The regime’s policy, however, changed not a bit – and in fact became more fanatically servile.
Before they were re-branded as "Progressives" by US political consultants, the current President and "First Deputy Prime Minister" (looking to drop the "First Deputy" bit next week) of Serbia were the leading members of the Serbian Radical Party, long demonized as "hardline ultranationalists." In the 2012 election, they campaigned on a platform of wanting to engage the EU and the Empire, but seeking to protect Serbian sovereignty and interests. Once installed in power, however, the Progs executed a U-turn: Serbian identity, history and interests were declared "baggage of the past," and getting rid of them was necessary for the sake of the bright European future!
The key to this program of identity removal was declaring the NATO rape of Serbia consensual. Giving up Kosovo, you see, is the key condition for (maybe, some day, eventually) joining the EU. So a pact made in Brussels, in April 2013, de facto recognized the statehood of the occupied province (declared independent in 2008) and disavowed the four counties still standing for the Serbian constitutional order. This was treason, yet the West praised it as statesmanship of the highest order.
The much-ballyhooed "fight against corruption" amounted to overhyped drug busts and trumped-up charges against one tycoon who conveniently lacked political protection. The highest court in the country has all but admitted the April 2013 "Brussels Agreement" is neither legal nor constitutional, but gave the government "six months to make it work."
Meanwhile, economic "development" consists of taking out ruinous loans from the IMF and Arab sheikhdoms, while selling off the country’s assets as collateral. What isn’t pawned off is looted outright: in just the first decade following the October 2000 coup, as much as $51 billion has been siphoned out of Serbia into various offshore accounts. There is yet no data as to how much the Progs have contributed to enlarging that sum.
The Actual Kosovo Precedent
Contrary to hysterical pronouncements in the Anglosphere, Russia’s reaction to the Empire openly meddling on its doorstep has been remarkably restrained. How would Washington react if a hostile government were installed in Ottawa by force and fraud? Yet Moscow did not stage a countercoup, or send the tanks into Kiev. Instead, it moved to secure the Crimean peninsula, which was assigned to Ukraine by Nikita Krushchev in 1954. Crimea is home to the Russian Black Sea Fleet, and an overwhelmingly ethnic Russian population.
Imperial propaganda insists that, unlike the case of Kosovo, the separation of Crimea is absolutely different and there can be no comparison. This is a red herring. The only context in which Russia has mentioned Kosovo is the 2010 decision of the International Court of Justice on the legality of independence declarations.
As predicted here at the time, the ICJ’s shameful decision is now coming home to roost. When Serbia challenged the "Kosovian" declaration of independence, the Empire strong-armed the ICJ into ruling that it wasn’t illegal per se. As the dissenting judges pointed out, this involved a "judicial sleight-of-hand" which redefined the ethnic Albanian provisional legislature – operating under specific UN rules – as something else. The Crimean legislature is legal, legitimate and has every right to do whatever it pleases come Monday. And the only "argument" the Empire can offer in dissent is, "because we say so." Come to think of it, that’s precisely all the "argument" it offered in Kosovo.
