We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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I was just watching CNN and saw that Wim Kok will resign along with much of the Dutch government over a damning report on the massacre of Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica by Bosnian Serbs under Ratko Mladic.
Although I am bitter regarding the role of the UN throughout Croatia and Bosnia i Herzegovina, at least the Dutch are objective enough and have the courage to face the reality of what happened just seven years ago and their part in it. The efforts of the Dutch army to cover up this dark page in their military history has been thwarted by enough fine Dutch people (including some in their army) who were determined that the truth be known and publicly faced. I am glad that blame is being taken although in truth the Dutch soldiers were placed in an invidious position,without a clear mandate on the use of force, lightly equipped and denied air support when they demanded it.
For this, although the Dutch are rightly searching their souls for being a party to the murder of 7000 men and children, I primarily blame that epitome of despicable moral relativism, Yakushi Akashi and the entire rotten edifice of the UN for which he worked, for allowing the UN ‘Safe Havens’ to become a lethal fiction, making them nothing more than collection centres for mass murder by Ratko Mladic and his cetnic einsatztruppen.
…when the law you break has no moral basis.
In 1991, a crime was committed in New York. The UN imposed an arms embargo on all of the former Yugoslavia and all the national governments who voted for that resolution were parties to that crime.
At the same time as this crime against the peoples of Croatia and Bosnia i Herzegovina was happening, Argentine Economics Minister Domingo Cavallo was conspiring successfully to sell Argentine weapons to Croatia via a series of dummy companies and third parties.
Now I am under no illusions that Mr. Cavallo was motivated by any desire to right the wrong done by the UN when it tried to prevent the poorly armed Croatian and Bosnian peoples under attack by the Yugoslav Army from defending themselves. Nevertheless, that was exactly what the results of his self-serving actions were. We were able to fight and survive and eventually prevail.
Yesterday Domingo Cavallo was arrested under the orders of politically motivated judges for his part in that entirely moral series of arms sales between 1991 and 1995. Argentine congressional deputy Elisa Carrio, an independent anti-corruption campaigner, welcomed the ruling that resulted in Cavallo’s arrest yesterday saying “Truth and justice will prevail”. Guess what, Elisa… it already has and you would not know what either looked like if they bit you in the behind.
And so, Domingo, whatever else you may have done and deserve to be punished for, I hope you beat the rap on this one because there was no moral reason for you not to have done it and several excellent reasons to do so. And given the state of the Argentine economy, I hope you stashed your end of the proceeds in Zürich, not Buenos Aires.
I am slightly dazed and significantly bruised from my holiday in Austria, so this is just a quick catch up post.
The Serbian Authorities in Bosnia are up to their usual tricks and are driving out Croatian civilians from Drvar and Grahovo. Of course the outrage of the international community is strangely absent. What a surprise. These poor people are all ending up in accommodation around Knin. Having been through that myself, my heart goes out to them. At least none of them were killed. I wonder if these ethno-socialist morons in Republika Srbska realise they are in effect causing the colonisation of depopulated Serbian areas around Knin with pissed off Croats who are not going to be willing to move again? Pure genius.
On a seperate note, Yugoslavia agreed to vanish, at least in name. It will probably be called The Union of Serbia and Montenegro. Good riddance. I still think that Montenegro should try to engineer a ‘velvet divorce’ and go it alone.
I was also going to write about the latest EU regulatory madness but I am too sleeeepy!
And quite reasonably too I might add. Josh Marshall lays out what he meant and raises the valid point that his remarks were aimed with an American audience and context in mind.
But the Internet being what it is, one’s audience can be far more diverse than a person might expect and thus the context within which the remarks will be read can be quite different. I had this brought home to me a week ago when I got a detailed and intelligent critique of my views on the EU from a man in Dakar, Senegal.
Although I suspect I do not entirely agree with all of Josh Marshall’s views on the subject, for the most part I actually do. His post is measured and intelligent and in reality there is not that much daylight between his and Natalija’s views either. What is more, the point that increased Natalija’s blood pressure was really more a matter of how she interpreted what was being said. As she is off on a business trip I doubt she will be posting herself for a few days but I did speak to her on the telephone, repeated the article to her and she does concede that perhaps she did read a more negative spin on the original piece than was really justified. In truth the recent ‘Free Slobodan Milosevic’ petition and associated procession of totalitarianism’s “useful idiots” has made her a tad sensitive on certain matters.
Natalija’s suspicions seem to have been correct
Both The Telegraph and The Times are reporting in their print editions that a French officer may have tipped off war criminal Radovan Karadzic about the impending operation to grab him in Bosnia.
Is anyone surprised?
…make sure you have actually read what the person you are criticizing did, and did not say.
Matthew Yglesias called the Croatian reoccupation of Krajina ‘genocide’ and apparently I enjoy it. And where exactly are the mass graves of thousands of this ‘genocide’? Even the much more vicious Serbian cetnic activities in Croatia, Bosnia i Herzegovina and Kosovo were not ‘genocide’ and I speak as someone who was personally on the receiving end of them. They were ‘ethnic cleansing’ to use the modern term. Mass murder for sure. Mass rapes for sure. But genocide? What happened to the Jews in Europe 1939-1945 was genocide, what happened in Rwanda was genocide. What happened in Armenia was genocide. So to call the Croatian activities in Krajina ‘genocide’ is both absurd and idiotarian. Mr. Yglesias’ use of the term makes him Fisk-able, not me.
I never claimed that the Croatian military did not do some bad things (or more usually HOS or someHVO militia groups), merely that the re-occupation of Krajina per se was not one of those ‘bad things’. I know exactly what did and did not happen to many Serbs when we retook our country. But the big difference here was that what some Croatian elements did under people like Tuta in BiH was not a systematic program of centrally directed murder and rape based ethnic displacement in the manner conducted by Arkan, Seselj etc. and backed by the Yugoslav and Bosnian Srpska authorities under Milosevic and Karadzic. The Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam was conducted by US forces and it was ghastly but it was not ordered by the US government.
Were some Croats also involved in ‘bad things’? Yes, for sure. What the Croats who engaged in war crimes did (and I have no problem calling it that) was a series of isolated, not systematic, atrocities and on a tiny scale compared to what was done to us and the Bosnians. There are two Serbian families living directly across the street from my parent’s house in Glina right now! They did not flee on the theory that unlike many others who had looted the homes of absent Croats, they had no reason to flee. That said I (and they) never had an unrealistic view of the Croatian Army and MUPs circa 1995-1996, particularly as many of its members were people who has suffered the loss of family and loved ones in 1991 and had scores to settle. Thus our Serbian neighbours were very glad when my parents moved back and were able to vouch for their definite non-cetnic credentials to the new ‘powers that be’. I do not have a simplistic view of this. However wars in the real world are not just fought from 5000 metres up, they involve people on the ground and so bad things always happen.
Next time someone criticizes my remarks, I hope they read them in order to see what I did and did not actually say and not just attribute views to me based on their ignorant prejudices.
Joshua Micah Marshall makes some pretty strange remarks about some recent history on his blog.
But let’s go back to 1992 and ’93. Back then, one of the contested areas was the part of Croatia called the Krajina. This was essentially an ethnic Serb enclave within the borders of Croatia and as you might imagine this became a volatile crisis point in the fighting between Serbs and Croats. In any case, United Nations peace-keepers were sent into the region in the beginning of 1992 to maintain the peace. And did a reasonably good, though by no means perfect, job at it. For a while, the matter was thus placed in suspense, until 1995 when then-Croatian President Franjo Tudjman gave the UN Mission an ultimatum to leave. Eventually the Croatians rolled in and retook the region with some quite ugly consequences.
Let me set him straight on a few points: The UN had nothing to do with the reduction in fighting in Croatia in 1992. The reason the fighting died down was that the Croatian National Guard (ZNG) and the Serbs had fought each other to a standstill. The front line stabilised because that was as far as the Serbs could get once Croatia’s ad hoc army was able to dig in. However the Croatians, due to the criminal and immoral arms embargo that favoured the heavily armed Serbian Yugoslav Army, lacked the ability to mount offensive operations to retake Krajina…therefore stalemate. The UN was utterly irrelevant to that outcome.
Thereafter, the Serbs shifted their attention to Bosnia i Herzegovina whilst the Croatians used whatever means they could to build up their army, now called the HV. The UN did not ‘keep the peace’, it just presided over the stalemated front line in Croatia while Croats armed and trained their army and Milosevic, Karadzic, Mladic, Arkan, Seselj etc. and the people who were willing to follow their orders got on with raping and murdering their way across Bosnia i Herzegovina whilst the international community subjected them to grimaces and intermittent clucking sounds.
So the fact that the Croatia, subjected to the criminal arms embargo that had impaired its ability to defend us, took measures to ensure that political forces in the USA would not continue to act against our interests, is bad exactly how? I assume Joshua is equally against Israel’s vast lobbying efforts in the USA as well. Does Joshua expect Croatians to accept that we were not entitled to retake Krajina? Sorry but I see it rather differently. I am from Glina and one of the ‘quite ugly consequences’ of the Serbian cetnic’s arriving was Croats like me getting killed in their homes because they were Croats. I didn’t see this on CNN or read about it in the newspapers, I saw it out of my fucking bedroom window before my family and I managed to get out of town and ended up as refugees.
So if Joshua expects us to feel bad about taking Krajina back and trying to manipulate US political forces which were originally a party to the embargo against us, he is going to be disappointed. Certain US political forces helped keep us weak so why should we not try to change that given the harm we suffered as a result? I wonder if Joshua thinks the nice Mr. Arkan and nice Mr. Seselj would have eventually admitted it was all just a big misunderstanding and let bygones be bygones if only us mean old Croats had not come back with guns blazing and tanks rolling? One of the ‘quite ugly consequences’ of the Croatian Army expelling the UN and then the Serbian Army from Krajina was my family and I got to go home. I take this matter a little personally. If you have a problem with that, go fuck yourself.
Splendid blogger Ben Sheriff from Layman’s Logic has produced a wonderful page called Slobogoogling for Profit and Pleasure that is a menu of juicy morsels for all self respecting anti-idiotarian bloggers to use as prey. Each of the signatories of the petition to free ethnic clenser and mass murderer Slobodan Milosevic is listed in easily Google-able form. By their own words they shall be revealed.
I have myself written that I do not think the Hague is the correct place for the Vile One to be tried (in fact I favoured his summary execution in Republic Square in Belgrade), but the people who signed this document actually think Slobo is the good guy… they are the modern Mitfords, no different from the apologists for Hitler and Stalin from the 1920’s to the 1960’s.
Ben is a splendid blogger and I am reliably informed that he is still agreeable company even when exceedingly drunk, which surely makes him an indispensable asset to the blogosphere! 
Ben roars at Slobo at the Brit Blogger Bash
SFOR seem rather good at raiding Croatian banks and overturning democratic election results it dislikes but it seems the NATO troops in Bosnia i Herzegovina are rather less good at capturing war criminals.
If there were any French forces involved, no doubt Karadzic was tipped off. What a disappointing waste of time.
I have heard news on the radio that vile mass murderer from Bosnia i Herzegovina Radovan Karadzic is surrounded by troops trying to arrest him. I hope they do not take him alive. I also hope he is feeling some of what so many other people felt when they realised that armed man more powerful than themselves were surrounding where they lived.
Splendid news!
But also kicking of ‘asses’ is going on, being conducted by a militia of many blogs. I was away from my computer for a while and then checked Matt Welch‘s wonderful blog and could not believe my eyes…he has become Slobo-Google central. The true nature of Slobodan Milosevic’s vile apologists is laid open to the world. A few weeks ago their words which libeled the very dead themselves in their mass graves made me weep with helpless fury.
But Matt has shown that by their own words, they are revealed for what they are. Each of those google search links on Matt’s blog is a badge of honour for the bloggers who have done them. Suddenly I don’t feel so bad any more.
It is a bit like some strange dream reading about the things Slobodan Milosevic has been saying in the Hague. In this parallel moral universe uniformed murderers are noble victims and the man who heads the government which pays the salaries of the murderers and gives them their orders, is absolved from guilt due to the fact he did not literally do it himself… whereas a couple hundred injured soldiers and civilians dragged from a hospital in Vukovar and then slaughtered by the brave Yugoslav Federal Army (not paramilitary cetniks) like animals at a nearby farm, are somehow just reduced to a shrug and ‘shit happens’. Matt Welch restored some of my faith that all America had not suddenly gone collectively insane by showing that people are not buying into the revisionist lies of Milosevic and his EVIL supporters and apologists.
Also, and far more important than those human compost heaps, my e-mail address is not working properly so Perry, our Chris Patten baiting editor, will be setting me up with a proper samizdata POPmail account sometime today, instead of just a forwarder. Anyone who has sent me e-mail to my private address recently might want to send it again. [Ed: the new e-mail account is now set up as a POP mail account]
Will Vehrs of Blog Watch II cannot be accused of submitting to demands by noisy Balkan women for three-star rating of articles… he gave me four! 
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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