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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Slobodan Milosevic Is the Scapegoat in a Show Trial by Marko Lopusina and Andre Huzsvai is nothing less than lies on the scale that the Nazi holocaust never happened. Marko Lopusina and Andre Huzsvai are not ‘presenting an interpretation’ when they make remarks like:
Were allegations of Milosevic’s “war crimes” in Bosnia and Croatia true, he would have been indicted in 1995, instead of rubbing elbows with U.S. politicos at the Dayton peace talks. Were Washington serious about toppling him, it could have done so in 1996 by supporting the Serb opposition movement, Zajedno.
“War crimes” in Bosnia and Croatia? What were they then, a mass suicide? And the idea that Zajedno would have toppled Milosevic in 1996 is preposterous. Lopusina and Huzsvai are deluded fantasist apologists for a mass murderer. If they wish to sue me for defaming them I will be happy to give them my address and see these two sacks of shit in court.
Natalija was going to write a first hand account of why these two pieces of crap are wrong but was so distressed by it that she decided to just ignore these cretins. The editors of the L.A. Times should hang their heads in shame for allowing this travesty of the facts to touch the pages of their publication. Shameful and disgraceful.
The L.A. Times belongs nowhere except in the bottom of cat litter trays. Kudos to Matt Welch for heaping righteous disdain on these people and for Brian Hoffman‘s letter to Matt.
Coming soon to the L.A. Times: the serialisation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion
I will be a bit provincial today. It has been a few days of mixed news in my corner of Europe. Very good news is that filthy war criminal Rade Vrga has been arrested in Hungary, which is splendid.
Not so good news is that the idiots governing Croatia have folded under pressure from the farmers political faction and given up trying to abandon the ridiculous policy of agricultural support that takes tax money from everyone and gives it to farmers because they are, well, farmers. Are farmers the only cyclical business that they should need special treatment? Yet an idiotic coalition of HSS and other economically ignorant not-so-reformed socialists think it is perfectly alright to act like vampires on the rest of the economy.
Even worse news is that yet another agreement was signed that is crawling Croatia closer to that ‘haven of fluorescent idiocy’ called the European Union.
And even worse news than that is that a certain Samizdata editor has yet another picture of me for the blog. I am going to have to wear a burqa next time I see that boy!
The Milosevic trial in the Hague is having trouble due to the fact most of the Kosovo war crimes evidence was gathered by western intelligence operatives, rather than independent investigators. However even if that part of the charges against him collapses, he will not be able to stonewall his way out of the charges relating to Croatia and Bosnia.
Nevertheless, I must say that I have never thought the Hague trials were either legitimate or, more importantly, sensible. To paraphrase Talleyrand, they are worse than a crime, they are a mistake.
For Serbia to recover from the monstrous era that the entire former Yugoslavia is emerging from, it needs to go through a process similar to the de-nazification Germany went through after World War Two. It must face its own history and that is not achieved by putting The Demon on trial in the Netherlands. He did not act alone and whole sections of Serbian society must face up to that fact.
The place Slobodan Milosevic should have gone on trial for mass murder and other war crimes was in Serbia because then, and only then, can Serbian society itself drive a stake through the heart of its own darkness. There are a lot of good people in Serbia who are quite capable of doing just that.
Of course this could have been achieved another way too: like Mussolini, Slobodan Milosevic, his vile hellish wife, most of his adult family and about fifty senior ministers, police chiefs and generals could have been strung up on meat hooks as a lesson to future generations. That would have worked too. It might not be pretty but it would have been justice.
I have been fuming about this for a while. A few days ago, Wolfgang Petritsch, the euro-gauleiter in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH), announced he thinks Croatia needs to structure its democratic system on multi-ethnic lines. In short, he wants ethnic groups to be encouraged to see themselves as politically different rather than as members of a common civil society. He has of course be informally invited to take his views, write them on sheets of stiff paper, roll them up tightly and stick them somewhere warm and dark. We have already lived through the aftermath of the Yugoslav experiment in tribal collectivism. I for one have no desire to do that sort of thing again, thank you very much.
Unlike hapless BiH, Petritsch would do well to remember that his views do not have a large NATO army to impose them in Croatia. Someone once asked me why I was so glad that NATO does not ‘guarantee’ Croatian security in the same manner as in BiH. Simple. What was the point of the war if we are going to trade taking orders from Belgrade for taking orders from Brussels via some petty Austrian politician like Petritsch? Security of the sort on offer from Petritsch and his Euro-collectivist kind is the security of the cage.
I could of course be referring to the fact, as David Carr wrote that socialism far from being dead has just re-branded itself, and is stalking the night looking for victims. And certainly that is true. However the news is not all bad. The political culture in Croatia still has a woeful hangover from the communist era, but things have nevertheless has taken a turn for the better lately. The Mayor of Zagreb, Milan Bandic was involved in a minor auto accident and just drove off. As a result, his political career is in tatters and public opinion scandalised so much that he has been forced from office. However just a few short years ago he could have done so with impunity. That is real progress.
But I wasn’t really thinking about that sort of thing at all. In my usual self-centred way I was thinking about something much more important: after being laid low with the flu (or whatever it was) I am actually up and walking around at last, still coughing like I have the plague but at least I am moving again like the undead risen from a coffin. Ok, I know that I do not live in Transylvania, but I am probably a hell of a lot closer to it that most of the Samizdata’s readers (about 350 km/220 miles away).
And so off I go to the market this morning to stock up my depleted shelves (I had someone else shopping for me but he never gets the right things). There is still about half a metre of snow on the ground and so I am wrapped up like a yeti, but it is so nice to be outside. After filling up my car, I drive back and start unloading the car… and who should saunter through the open front door but Little Monster, my missing cat. I am amazed. I thought he must be run over by car or frozen under half metre of snow one week ago.
Far from it. He is fluffy and smells slightly of perfume. Someone had even tied a strange looking ribbon on his little collar. I should have just thrown him out and told him to go back to who ever has been looking after him the last week.
Well, at least I finished unloading my shopping from the car before I fed him. That showed him who is the boss.
USS Clueless has a lengthy article about US unilateralism which makes some interesting points. He also makes some rather dubious ones.
We gave Europe one chance, after WWI, to dictate their own terms and the result was another bloody war. So the second time, we did call the tune — and the result was a hell of a lot better.
As for Britain and France dictating its own terms, what about Woodrow Wilson’s role in dismembering the Austro-Hungarian Empire and trashing all vestiges of the potentially stabilising old order? America shares some of the blame for the instability in Europe in the 1920’s and 1930’s. And the ‘second time’ was better for who? I don’t think too many Poles, Czechs and Hungarians would agree with Steven as they ended up with nearly half a century of communist rule. Does Steven think Yalta was America’s finest hour?
But that’s because we are willing to try the unconventional. For example: after WWI, France insisted that Germany, with its ruined economy, pay drastic reparations to France. The result was hyper inflation, collapse of the Weimar Republic, and the rise of the Nazi Party.
All of which may never have happened if the US had stayed out of the Great War and a negotiated settlement had been reached in 1917 or early 1918.
And even in the recent past the Europeans have proved that their counsel sucks. That’s what we learned in Yugoslavia, something I’ve discussed here at great length. Years of dithering where the US lobbied for military action and the Europeans counseled diplomacy and sanctions, and what it got us was years of slaughter and civil war there. Finally the US issued an ultimatum; and after 6 weeks of bombing, and the war there ended. Milosevic was deposed, and the Serbs went back to democracy and ceased to be imperialistic. And it’s been reasonably peaceful there ever since.
Yeah, and they all lived happily ever after dreaming good dreams about nice Uncle Sam. That is an… interesting… analysis of the intricacies of the recent Balkan Wars. Whilst I am not fan of European diplomacy (to put it mildly), US actions in the Balkans were at best only half right and Kosovo was a rather more ambigious matter than you seem to think. Do you not think the fact the Croatian and Bosnia Armies (not the USAF) had defeated the aspirations of a Greater Serbia might have had more than a little to do with Slobo’s declining political fortunes? He was politically very vulnerable due to the fact he had lead Serbia to catastrophe, horror and defeat in Bosnia and Croatia, unemployment was running at over 30% (50% by some estimates), the currency was fast turning into toilet paper and so is it really so surprising that he collapsed after yet another military defeat, this time at the hands of the largely US strategic air offensive that resulted from the Kosovo affair?
I am afraid Steven’s analysis contains some grossly simplistic elements and seems to ascribe almost magical qualities to the application of US military force: the USAF turns up and shazam… peace breaks out all over the Balkans. It is rather more complex than that.
[Editor: Link fixed. Now goes to correct article on USS Clueless]
I have flu and the world hates me, even the rascal Dawson does not like me any more. My dog is at my mother’s house and my cat took one look at me as I started to fall ill a few days ago and sodded off. It seems he has decided not to come back so I have stopped looking out of the window for him. Bastard. Typical guy. There is about half a metre of snow on the ground and my heating only works when it feels like it, so here I am, blogging to the world with my laptop under the duvet with me. Only my ‘editor’ in London calls me so I am starting to wonder if there is anyone left alive and unfrozen in all of Croatia… except for the idiot who lives next door. Why do some people feel the need to rev their cars for 20 minutes before driving off? If the damn thing starts, drive it!!!
I was going to write about our idiot mayor in Zagreb (naughty boy), cretin provincial journalists in the USA who see the world through the narrow prism of their own country and why if I had met a certain much commented on ‘libertarian anti war’ Internet writer in 1991 here in what used to be Yugoslavia, I would have put a 9mm bullet between his eyes.
However I have realised that all these things pale into insignificance compared to my own personal misery at the moment.
Irritable? Me? Nah.
Euroslavia?
THE FEARFUL BALKAN INTERMEZZO By Tomislav Sunic
The former Balkan drama is a textbook example of how petty nationalism, once on the loose, can lead to surreal crimes. The past wars amidst similar European peoples, in what was once known as Yugoslavia, have sealed national romance
elsewhere, throwing a bad light on every ethnic group in search of its own mini-statehood. Today, ten years after communist Yugoslavia had crumbled away, its quasi sovereign bits and pieces, i.e. Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, the Kosovo, and
Macedonia, are shamefully looking at their recent past, and are gearing up to enter another multicultural fray: the European Union.
The indictments of Balkan ethnic cleansers by the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague are in full swing and their legal proviso is designed to further strengthen the tenants of the supranational New World Order, including its itinerant semi-kangaroo courts. The results of the past wars in the Balkans seem to have strengthened and already cemented the mandatory multicultural, i.e.
multiracial lessons all over the European Union.
The consequences of the Balkan disarray should not be mistaken for its causes. The safest way to explain away the former Yugoslav conflicts is by putting most of the blame on the former Serb president Slobodan Milosevic, some of the blame
on the former Croat president, Franjo Tudjman, and a little bit of guilt on the former Bosnian president, Alia Izetbegovic. But the movers and shakers behind Yugoslavia’s break-up were not just ex-Yugoslav nationalists, but to a larger extent are the architects of the New World Order and its communist disciple, the late Yugoslav dictator Marshall Josip Broz Tito. The Western-sponsored Yugoslav
communist multiculturalism had led to distorted misperceptions among different and neighboring ethnic groups. Sooner or later this multiethnic Tito-Western styled make-belief unity had to end up in a bloody war.
The Yugoslav multiethnic experiment demonstrated twice in this century that it could not last. In 1941, the first Yugoslavia broke up, with Croats and Slovenes flocking to their ancestral central-European neighbor Germany. Serbs continued to toy partly with the Allies and partly with the Axis. In 1991, Croats and Slovenes again bailed out of the predominantly Serb-oriented communist Yugoslavia. The lesson that follows is that if the forced unity fails twice, there is no reason to believe in the viability of a third reunion. Divorce sounds preferable to a bad marriage.
Yet, the demise of the Yugoslav experiment in 1991 could never be fully shrugged away by the European Union and the apostles of the New World Order. The multiethnic ex-Yugoslavia had for decades squared away with liberal and communist pseudo-academic role models of multiculturalism. In addition, Yugoslavia was a blueprint for the budding and nebulous Soviet-inspired European Union. It had provided intellectual fodder for the disabused leftist intelligentsia all over Europe, which is today converting to the more successful
drama of globalism.
Ex-Yugoslavia went up in sky-high flames in 1991 and could neither be forgiven nor forgotten by the advocates of New World Order. Hence now, a new need has arisen, espoused by left-leaning EU officials and their New York plutocratic acolytes to create a new multi-ethnic laboratory in the state of Bosnia-Hercegovina and in the NATO protectorate of the Kosovo. In fact, the present artificial statelets of Bosnia-Hercegovina and the Kosovo are basically designed and militarily upheld in an effort to demonstrate another third multicultural experiment –which should be used again some day as still more educational homework for ‹peaceful ethnic groups living side by side and happily ever after.” Recent developments though, in the Albanian populated Kosovo, the fractured Macedonia, as well as the ongoing turmoil in the Croatian parts of Bosnia-Hercegovina, all point to the impossibility of such dangerous global endeavors.
Most of the blame must be attributed to the Versailles treaty architects of 1919. Little did they understand the ethnic intricacies of the region, let alone foresee the consequences of their New World Order projects. What those world-improvers wanted was the creation of an artificial multiethnic entity that could contain Germany’s access to the South and the East. The unhappy subjects of the
Versailles-created Yugoslavia other than having the common label of “Southern Slavs” had little in common. Subsequently, each ethnic group in the region had to pay a heavy price. The Versailles doctored-up-get-together of Croats, Slovenes, Serbs, and Albanians led to the perception of each ethnic group being the prime victim of the other ethnic group. The decades-long war of misperceptions resulted in the killing fields.
Although the Western media has handpicked the Serb Slobodan Milosevic as the household demon, his Croat nationalist counterparts do not fare better. A number of high-ranking Croat military officers were hailed as heroes not too long ago, but are now scheduled for The Hague War Crimes Tribunal hearings. The new leftist-liberal governments in Croatia and Serbia pay loud lip service to Brussels bureaucrats, yet appear unable to grasp the trap of the New World Order
To counter mass psychosis, which has been a hallmark of the Balkans throughout centuries, all eyes are riveted on the magic wand of the European Union. The official opinion among the new ruling classes in Serbia, Macedonia, Croatia, or Bosnia is that the EU is the rich men’s club that will henceforth dispense enormous wealth to everybody. On top of all this, EU officials have enough of their local nodmen in the Balkans willing to sign any paper in order to implement some feel-good semblance of paper stability.
Although the Versailles-sponsored multiethnic Yugoslavia failed, ironically, the Brussels-based Euroslavia, appears now to be the far more dangerous game in town. The tired Balkan masses, in what used to be once communist multicultural Yugoslavia, think that the road to Brussels is the quick way to heavenly bliss. Yet the vaunted European Union may soon face the storms of its own violent
balkanisation
I don’t know who Mr.Sunic is. He is described as an ‘author who writes from Europe’ which is not very helpful.
I also possess no more than a sketchy knowledge of the recent tragic history of the Balkans and, judging from his name alone, I assume that Mr.Sunic is vastly better equipped than I to speak on these matters. (I am also aware that we have a redoubtable Balkan Blogger in the shape of Natalija Radic)
I will say, however, that from the bottom of this particular fishtank, the dark forebodings in the above article do have the ring of prescience about them
In an article in the New York Times, Maureen Dowd writes that after September 11, Americans were turning away from unimportant things like expensive clothes and luxury
But now we are supposed to be in the era of the real rather than the pretentious, the warm rather than the cool, the fundamental rather than the grandiose.
So we must ask: Is the vast new $40 million Prada store that has just opened not far from Ground Zero, trumpeted by the company as “the New York Epicenter” and designed by the hot architect Rem Koolhaas, a relic of our gluttonous ways or a resumption of them?
Of course I realise that Americans are going through a process of adapting and trying to understand new realities, but at the risk of sounding unkind, all they are really doing is waking up from a dream and finding themselves in the real world.
It broke my heart when I saw those terrible images on television on September 11 and oh how I wished a thousand deaths on the monsters who were responsible for it. But I felt nothing more, or less, than I felt when Sarajevo was besieged for 1400 days, during which 10,000 of its people died and 50,000 more were injured out of a population of just over 500,000.
During the war, everywhere in what used to be Yugoslavia experienced shortage and hardship and sudden horror. Americans watched this through the filtering eyes of CNN and the BBC for a few minutes each day before going back to their dinner or driving to the mall, yet it might as well have been occurring on another planet psychologically speaking.
People in Sarajevo would have to dash across roads to go to the markets, risking death from Cetnik snipers and artillery fire on a daily basis. But if you ever go back and look at the videos, look very carefully at the people. You will see women with clean hair, lipstick and makeup. Men wearing pressed jackets and even ties. People determined to retain their humanity as well as just survive another day.
I think Maureen Dowd does not understand, at least not yet, that if the monsters can make you live in their world of poverty and sorrow, then they have truly beaten you. That is why when I realised that Benetton was about to open a shop in Sarajevo in 1995, I wept because I realised that the nightmare was almost over at last. So Maureen, take it from me that there is nothing noble about ‘sweat suits and old clothes already in the closet’. Listen to me and go to that place in New York, only a few blocks from the World Trade Centre that those evil people destroyed. Wander through the wonderful opulence of Prada’s shop and gaze at the exquisite Italian style, treat yourself to a nice little black dress: then look around again and realise that you have won and they have lost.
[Original link to NYT article via Instapundit]
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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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