Just recently, this column examined the many facets of falsifying history, noting in passing the role of the Hague Inquisition in currently the largest such effort in the world. Indeed, the ICTY is an endeavor more massive even than the current campaign to conjure a...
Hardly a day goes by in the southwestern corner of Europe without local authorities and their foreign minders repeating their worn platitudes about the importance of democracy and social engineering, and the need for more of both. Yet the lives of the people they are...
History is the collective memory of a society. Individuals can be manipulated by tampering with their recollections (see Christopher Nolan’s eerie Memento), but doing this to societies is much easier. Personal memory is at least derived from human senses,...
In two commentaries this past week, Empire’s Balkans adventures were brought up in connection with the planned invasion and occupation of Iraq. They didn’t say, though they could have, that the new UN resolution paving the way for weapons inspectors was akin...
If memory is what defines an individual, history is what defines a nation. Just as personal memory is colored by individual perceptions, collective memory – history – tends to be colored by the perceptions of those who record it. However economy of scale,...
The Serbs are arming Saddam Hussein's drive for world domination. Huh? If it sounds like a plot of a pathetic spy caper, that's because it does. But even Hollywood flacks, who habitually insult the intelligence of American moviegoers, would never dare stoop this low....
[Lat. casus – opportunity, occasion; bellum,-i –war] Not a day goes by in which the inhabitants of the Balkans are not reminded, in some way, that they are servants of the Empire. On top of the visible legacy of imperial intervention, its hidden consequences...
Results of the Bosnian general elections should be official by now, though it was already obvious on Tuesday that ethnic parties triumphed convincingly. Though agency reports over the past several days have made a great deal of that outcome, as usual they refused to...
Results of the Serbian presidential vote this past weekend were entirely predictable, and Vojislav Kostunica is likely to win come the October 13 runoff. And while any outcome of the vote will make little difference in the grand scheme of things – for the future...
When the New York Times published the current government’s "National Security Strategy of the United States" last week, the American Empire – already a painful reality – became official. According to one review, "the 31-page document...
