It was not enough for the UN to whitewash NATO’s illegal invasion and occupation of Kosovo, to sit idly by and even justify the ethnic cleansing and barbaric destruction of Serbs and their cultural treasures, or even to stage sham elections designed to give a veneer of legitimacy to the abomination they have created. Now they will allow the appointment of a gangster, murderer, and terrorist as "prime minister" of the occupied province.
It was not enough to launch an illegal war of aggression against Iraq, occupy, and devastate the country, based on specious and outright false "intelligence." Now the exact same accusations are leveled at Iran, and the dogs of war are baying for a sequel.
It was not enough to create and fund a sophisticated fifth column to overthrow Slobodan Milosevic in the fall of 2000. The same recipe was used again in Belarus (where it failed), Georgia (03), and now Ukraine: propaganda, demonstrations, and threats seek to overturn electoral results. Sure, the ballot box is a false god, but the mob is the falsest.
Any sort of logic, principle, or coherent idea still in existence is under merciless assault of those whose only ambition is to conquer, and only pleasure to destroy. What we are seeing are not "double standards," as some complain, but no standards at all.
Our Man Ramush
Worried about "unrest and possible violence" if a former leader of the terrorist KLA were arrested, and citing the need for "stability," the occupation authorities in Kosovo have "ruled out blocking the appointment of an ex-guerrilla commander as prime minister" (Reuters). This clears the path for Ramush Haradinaj, already supported by an Albanian political coalition, to step into office.
It’s not that the UN and NATO and EU and the U.S. don’t know who Ramush Haradinaj is. After all, they made him: sponsored his terrorist army, promoted him from a local thug into a politician, covered up his murderous activities, and even patched him up when his victims shot back. So, his appointment is deliberate, and the limp protestations of EU’s foreign policy commissar are likely just a smokescreen.
Another factor in this travesty is that Kosovo’s occupiers are confident the authorities in Belgrade – who had indicted Haradinaj for murder, ethnic cleansing, abduction, and terrorism, to name just a few – would swallow this insult just like every other that has come from the Empire in the past five years. When Serbian leaders get angry, they talk about "human rights" and "European integrations." When Albanian mobs get angry, people die.
Adding insult to injury, viceroy Jessen-Petersen justified his choice by saying, "If I say no to this candidate, I would be saying no to democracy."
For you see, such feigned concern for "democracy" never stopped his colleagues in Bosnia to not only block appointments, but actually sack elected officials and ban them from public life!
"Leaving" Bosnia
Viceroy Ashdown’s Stalinist purges in Bosnia almost exclusively aimed at Serbs who seek to preserve the Dayton constitution and therefore interfere with plans for centralizing the country under a Muslim-dominated government. Though one of his predecessors has gone so far as to purge an elected president, no one has prosecuted any perceived thoughtcrime against the Empire as zealously as Ashdown.
This week marks the end of NATO’s original occupation mission, which was supposed to last one year and ended up pushing nine. Most American troops are leaving, turning the job over to an EU force. As most of the troops on the ground are from EU countries, they will simply change patches. So the changing of the guard is more a matter of style than substance.
Very little will change in the way Bosnia is run. If anything, Ashdown may renew his tyrannical efforts, perhaps going as far as abolishing the Serb Republic outright as an "outdated concept" in the Age of Brussels – all along using the ready-made excuse of pursuing "war criminals."
Though many war crimes happened, the "international community" really does not care about any of them, only about using them as a political weapon. The Hague Inquisition received literally truckloads of evidence pointing to Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic, but announced it had been "investigating" him only after he was safely dead. Izetbegovic was a darling of the Empire, both during the war and after, and anything that threatened his painstakingly crafted image of the victim has therefore been suppressed.
One example is the infamous death toll figure, cited by just about everyone as 250,000. But as early as last year, two investigators of the Hague Inquisition have established the number at 102, 622. Their findings, however, have been suppressed until two weeks ago, when a Norwegian news report brought them to light. Publishing these numbers in Ashdown’s Bosnia – and thus challenging the Official Truth about the "aggression" and "genocide" – may well be considered "hate speech."
Another truth that has not been allowed to interfere with the Imperial agenda was the presence of Islamic militants in Bosnia, and their ties to terrorism. EU worries about these people are dismissed by media who describe the Bosnian Muslims as "extremely moderate" (!?). Needless to say, the oft-quoted International Crisis Group that rejects any connection of Bosnian or Albanian militants to international terror as "Serb propaganda" applauds Ashdown’s rule and even claims Bosnia "could not function for a single day" without a viceroy.
But what of the recent report in the International Herald Tribune? In it, a former wife of an Islamic militant claims she witnessed the murder of three Serb prisoners: two were shot; one was beheaded, and the militants played soccer with his head. These revelations are most inconvenient, and will therefore be buried or banned. This is "democracy" in Bosnia.
Our Truth and Their Lies
That the Empire and its media have lied about the Balkans should have been obvious long ago, even without these recent revelations. Every war has atrocities, but some of the stories coming out of Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo were just too outrageous.
Worse, however, is the colossal hypocrisy of the media when it comes to covering other wars, in which the things dubbed "genocidal" when merely attributed to, say, Serbs are deemed fully justified when perpetrated by, say, Americans. Take Fallujah, for example, with the siege, air strikes, artillery attacks, shooting of prisoners and desecration of mosques – does it not remind anyone, even slightly, of claims made about Sarajevo? No, because no one has made such a comparison. Sarajevo was the politically correct victim; Fallujah is the politically correct enemy. That makes all the difference.
Media analyst Tom Engelhardt recently contrasted the coverage of Soviet and Russian warfare in Afghanistan and Chechnya with the reporting on U.S. warfare in Iraq. He discovered, unsurprisingly, that in Afghanistan and Chechnya the U.S. media would reject official accounts without hesitation and treat any allegations by Afghans and Chechens as credible. Yet when facing the exact same kind of warfare by the U.S. in Iraq, they quote no Iraqis, only U.S. official sources.
There’s a Biblical passage about specks in others’ eyes and a beam in one’s own, but one doesn’t need religious texts to see the obvious problem here. All too many people, and not just those who dream of world conquest, no longer believe that actions can be judged as good or evil. Rather, they a priori posit the goodness or evil of the perpetrator, which justifies – or damns – everything they do. According to this "logic," Imperial America can do no wrong, while the "genocidal Serb aggressors" can do no right.
What It’s All About
From Sarajevo to Samarra, from Kosovo to Kiev, the "values" the Empire claims to promote cannot seem to translate into anything coherent or meaningful. There is no principle behind the loaded but meaningless terms such as "democracy," no morality lurking behind "human rights." If and when one can fight past the debris of decency left behind by the world’s social engineers, one finds no great idea motivating the wannabe-Alexanders of our time. Instead, there is just a base passion humanity has always struggled to control. The Empire is about power: who has it, who will have it, and who is about to lose it. Everything else about it is just dust, thrown at the eyes of the ignorant and the gullible.
