Dr. Michael Pravica
To all:
The following was posted on the New York Review of Books blog in response
to Charles Simic's article lamenting the "Serbian nationalist lunatics" support
to keep Kosovo within Serbia. Some of the comments below mine, especially by
John Bosnitch, are excellent. I encourage any of you who feel as strongly as I
don this issue to write a comment as well.
Michael
http://blogs.nybooks.com/post/225049181/the-serbian-charade
Dear Charles:
As a Serbian-American who has spent 17 years as
activist trying to defeat the unprecedented censorship of Serbs and
Serbian-Americans, and as one who met you at Columbia and at Harvard
when I was a graduate student there, I was deeply saddened by your
article. No nation gives up territory willingly. Serbia has been
mercilessly persecuted throughout the 20th Century and now in the 21st
Century because Her people are Orthodox Christians, Slavs, and have an
indomitable spirit and will for freedom ("better grave than a slave")
that has destroyed empires and brought hope to the world as some of the
last yoemen of Europe, thwarting German expansionism, and the plans of
Oligarchs and other "elites" to enslave the world. It has been the will
of many to destroy Orthodox Christianity (via communism, collapse of
morality a.k.a. "Western "ideals", and outright genocide) and yet,
somehow, the Serbs have survived all that has been thrown at them.
Wiping out any vestiges of the 1300 year old presence of Serbians in
Kosovo is merely part of this global strategy to reduce Serbia to some
bizarre 18th Century German ("Serbien mus sterben!") - designed
truncated Serbia and kill the independent spirit that made the Serbs so
special. Kosovo, the cradle of the Serbian Orthodox religion, is the
progenitor of that spirit.
Stealing Kosovo from Serbia cannot
be tolerated as it has already opened up a Pandora's box of problems
pertaining to violating the sovereignty and territorial integrity of
weak nations by "big bully" nations and tells the world that we now
live by the laws of the jungle - "might makes right" - instead of the
laws of international order which more or less kept the world
relatively stable for the past 60 years. Kosovo may become the catalyst
for WWIII as Western "elites" seek to turn the Serbs into NATO-robots
like their neighbors and ultimately use the region (vis a vis Camp
Bondsteel) as a springboard against Russia which WILL lead to WWIII. No
matter how much the US State Department wants us to believe that Kosovo
was/is a "special case," in fact, it is no different than any other
region of the world (Transylvania in Romania, South Ossetia in Moldava,
the Basque Separatists in Spain, Quebecers in Canada, Siciliy vis a vis
Italy, the Southwest US, etc.etc. etc) where different peoples of the
same nation must learn to live with one another.
Kosovo, the
terrorist black hole of Europe, is currently run by racist drug-running
nationalist/fascist fanatics and is an embarassment for all that
American stands for. Whereas the US State Department was so against
"Greater Serbia" (even though Kosovo has always been part of Serbia),
they have created "Greater Albania." Can you not see the blatant
hypocrisy here? Indeed, America's support for Kosovo's separatists will
one day come to haunt us here. No amount of Western mainstream
corporate-controlled propaganda will change the fact that Kosovo was
stolen from Serbia and must be returned to her rightful owner for the
sake of justice, respect for international law, and global stability.
