Kosovo – Where the West took the US hegemonic path – and kept going. By Edward Spalton
Fri 3:36 pm +00:00, 28 Jun 2024 1Back in 1999 few people seemed to notice what had happened to NATO. Under the leadership of President Clinton and Tony Blair, it converted itself from a very successful defensive alliance into an organisation with the self-awarded power of pro active interventions around the world on behalf of an undefined “international community”.
Its first target was Serbia which had been in the sights of the USA since the early Nineties.
It was with a feeling of doom-laden deja-vu that I recently heard on the news that Croatian and Albanian football fans at the Euro competition had been chanting “Kill the Serbs!” There is an old Austrian saying “Im Balkan stirbt niemand” – Nobody dies in the Balkans (not of natural causes, that is). In 1999 people certainly were dying in Kosovo in fighting between the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) and Yugoslav federal forces. Statistics from before the war suggested that an Albanian in Kosovo was about as likely to meet a violent death as an ordinary inhabitant of Washington DC at the same period whereas a Serb was several times more likely to come to an untimely end. Nonetheless this was adduced by the Americans as evidence of genocide by the Serbs. They also helped the KLA provide fake evidence of a mass execution at Racak. Bodies from fighting in the area were assembled to look like victims of a firing squad. The Western media accepted the tale eagerly without question. New Labour applied all its considerable powers of media manipulation to the project.
The massacre that never was constituted sufficient evidence for America-led NATO to present the ultimatum of Rambouillet which demanded free access for NATO troops to all of Yugoslavia for an unspecified period and a commitment to the eventual independence of Kosovo – or else they would bomb – and so they did. It is interesting to compare statements of the different leaders of fragmented Yugoslavia – some of whom were supported by the West as suitable promoters of civilised European values. Just have a guess from their words which leaders received the benison of American and Western approval, as well as arms and technical support.
(a) “Genocide is a natural phenomenon in keeping with the human-social and mythological divine nature. It is not only permitted but even recommended by the the Almighty for the spreading of the One True Faith”.
(b) “Protect brotherhood and unity….nationalism always means isolation from others, being locked in a closed circle and stopping growth. Emerge from a state of hatred, intolerance and distrust…”
(c) “There can be no peace or co-existence between the Islamic faith and non-Islamic institutions. The Islamic movement must and can take power as soon as it is morally strong enough, not only to destroy the non-Islamic power but to build a new Islamic one.”
Leader (a) was the clerico-fascist president of Croatia, Franjo Tudjman , who also said “Thank God my wife is neither a Jew nor a Serb”. The initial quotation was from his magnum opus – his very own equivalent of Mein Kampf. He was strongly supported by the German Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher who triumphantly remarked of Croatia’s diplomatic recognition by the EU – “By this, Germany has regained diplomatically everything lost in Eastern Europe as a result of two world wars”. It opened the path to Germany’s new economic and political (and historical) Drang nach Osten.
Leader (b) was none other than the Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, whom the British press dubbed “The Butcher of the Balkans”. He died in custody in suspicious circumstances before the international tribunal could pass verdict or sentence on him. Perhaps that was just as well for the West. He had been hitting prosecution witnesses for six for some time. The quotation was an appeal to the Political Correctness of the Tito era. In July 2016 the international court very quietly exonerated him post mortem from complicity in atrocities in Bosnia on page1303 of the very lengthy judgment against Radovan Karadzic . This was neither much mentioned nor noticed in British or Western media.
Leader (c) was Alia Izetbegovic, first president of Bosnia Hercegovina, armed by the USA and eulogised by Paddy Ashdown at his funeral as father of his people. Ashdown was the EU’s “High Representative” in Bosnia, effectively its Viceroy with total power. He approved that the Muslim war dead should be classified as “Shahid” – martyrs in the Jihad against the infidel Serbs.
So what were the objectives of the USA? In Sir Alfred Sherman’s paper “The Empire for the New Millennium?” he quoted the US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright’s broad view –
“We are privileged to live in a country that, through most of this century, has chosen to lead. Today we are helping to shape events in every region in every corner of the world. We exercise this leadership not out of sentiment but out of necessity. We must mobilise every foreign policy tool from the simplest act of persuasion to the blunt instrument of force………We must work to sustain our prosperity by creating an ever-expanding global economy in which American genius and productivity receive their due…”
Not much concern for human rights and a “rules based order” there and a tone of arrogance which we have often heard from America before and since.
The attack on Yugoslavia coincided with the first expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe, contrary to assurances which had been given to Russia that they would not advance “an inch”! That action speaks as loudly and stridently as Madeleine Albright’s words.
Srdja Trifkovic wrote an Afterword to Sir Alfred’s paper entitled “Why it’s not just the Balkans”. Twenty five years ago Trifkovic was writing presciently on matters with which we have since become all too familiar – the perversion of the very nature of the state, society and of the individual. He begins –
“The behaviour of the masters of the Western world abroad is an unsurprising extension of their behaviour at home. The gnostics who rule in Washington, to take the obvious example, are hell-bent on destroying all real communities in America and on eradicating the remains of its faith, tradition and culture ….all in the name of ideological concepts invoked to justify total control. All remnants of republican government at home and national sovereignty abroad, are to be subjugated to the Supreme Good of democracy, human rights and free markets.
Ideological assumptions that but two generations ago would have been deemed eccentric if not utterly insane, or even demonic, now rule the “mainstream”.
Trifkovic notes that the US Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott declared that the United States may not exist “in its current form” in the 21st century, because the very concept of nationhood – here and throughout the world – will have been rendered obsolete. It should be noted that Talbott’s was an exultant prophecy, not an impartial analyst’s assessment. Talbott wrote in Time magazine (July20 1992) that he is looking forward to a universal government run by “one global authority”.
Here is one optimist’s reason for believing unity will prevail….within the next hundred years …nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognise a single global authority ..A phrase briefly fashionable in the mid twentieth century – “citizen of the world” will have assumed real meaning by the end of the 21st. century”…
Trifkovic then goes on to consider what is planned for humanity itself according to one Jon Huer, professor of sociology and philosophy at the University of Maryland.
“And now we come back to the Serbs. …Dr Huer noted that the bombing by Americans and human-shielding by Serbs were symbolic of two different worlds.
The high technology “of ultimate sophistication, so logical and so rational with little human involvement” is countered by the total disregard of logic and rationality”. Huer contends that this fact contrasts “two archetype societies, one future-oriented and the other past-oriented”. Americans believe in the powers of technology “and all that implies – reason, logic, practicality, solution-finding”. Serbs believe in the power of their destiny “powerful and so human”.
Americans are now entering a wholly different era of society and culture, one that the world has never seen before. It is what we might call the “Post Human Era” where all aspects of social life are streamlined and rationalized, and all shades of human relations and nuances simplified into manageable routines and procedures. In a Post-Human society, each individual is isolated from other individuals so that his or her self-calculation can be logically derived without distraction from other human beings.”
Dr Huer goes on:
“ My historical hunch is that Americans are the future prototype humans, and Serbs an atavistic holdover from a bygone era. The Post-Human America will dominate the coming century…. elaborating popular culture, dominating economics and finances and continuing military hegemony the world over….. It would behoove the Serbs to recognize this inevitable development ..and join up with what will be, not what was or should be.”
So that was the future for us and the rest of the world, not just the Serbs, as seen twenty five years ago by an academic, one of what we would now call the global elite . It was obviously a view shared by many of our own political class who had forgotten the example of Vietnam. Very much more quickly, the Biden administration and its global hangers-on have forgotten their exemplary humiliation in Afghanistan. So, whilst Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum (to which our own British sovereign defers) is nurturing new generations of would-be “Young Global Leaders” to take us down this path, the world has changed .
The overwhelming ultimate sanction for the project, its final enforcer, that “blunt instrument of force”, so beloved of Madeleine Albright and the American dominant class, can still destroy the world but is no longer inevitably effective. Experiences in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and proxy wars in Syria and Ukraine demonstrate the fact.
Apart from economic dislocation and impoverishment, the main effect on Europe has been the arrival of hordes of immigrants – just such as the Americans are admitting at their own border. That is a process which the globalists in all the main parties have positively encouraged to weaken national cohesion – and democracy. It is not mere coincidence.
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