-Caveat Lector-
>From antiwar.com/justin/justincol.html
(which is a division of the Centre for Libertarian Studies)
> By Justin Raimondo
> September 15, 1999
>
> NATO'S RED ARMY: THE RESTALINZATION OF THE BALKANS
>
> All over the world, war clouds gather. On every continent, and by any measure,
> the portents are ominous indeed. From the Straits of Taiwan to the South China
> Sea, from the Balkans to the distant shores of the Caspian, flashpoints
> proliferate faster than we can keep up with here at Antiwar.com. And with the
> prospects for peace nil to nonexistent, the prospects for liberty are equally
> dark. One is a function of the other, and nothing dramatizes the indissoluble
> connection between peace and liberty more vividly than a recent op ed piece in
> the New York Times, "Battles After the War," by Richard Holbrooke, one of the
> architects of the Dayton Accord that supposedly "ended" the Bosnian civil war,
> and now the U.S. representative to the United Nations.
>
>
>
> SOMETIME NEVER
>
> Holbrooke, just back from a recent trip to Bosnia and Kosovo, avers that "our
> work isn't done in the Balkans." Addressed to those largely Republican lawmakers
> who are beginning to wonder if the US "investment" in Bosnia and the Balkans
> isn't an endless drain on our resources and patience, Holbrooke's piece is
> hardly reassuring: indeed, it seems to confirm the Republicans' worst fears of a
> quagmire. Holbrooke vows that we cannot leave Europe and specifically Bosnia and
> Kosovo "so long as war, ethnic hatred, and conflict exist within its space."
> Sure, we can leave Europe to its own devices one day – once war is forever
> abolished and universal brotherhood reigns supreme. What this means is that we
> can never leave the Balkans, or indeed any part of the world, since "conflict"
> is inherent in human nature.
>
> HEADY DAYS
>
> Without mentioning any of the specifics, Holbrooke writes that Kosovo "still
> lives in the heady but confusing aftermath of the war and the liberation from
> oppression." Well, that's one way to describe the execution of Serbs, the
> reverse ethnic cleansing, and the rampaging Kosovar mobs who have instituted a
> reign of terror in Kosovo. From the tone of Holbrooke's rhetoric, I am not at
> all surprised that he finds this bloody spectacle "heady." He who speaks of "the
> timelines of history and reconstruction" in the Balkans is not one to shy away
> from a grandiose vision. When you're busy "reconstructing" a continent, you
> don't have too much time or inclination to notice a few minor casualties on the
> ground.
>
> BACK TO THE FUTURE
>
> But what is truly ominous about the Holbrookian vision is the strange sense of
> déjŕ vu that overcomes the reader as he reads the following: "Meanwhile, many of
> the forces of darkness – separatists, racists, war criminals and crooks – are
> still there, continuing their efforts to keep the people in the Dark Ages." In
> its stridence and inflexibility, this kind of language resembles nothing so much
> as the stylized and highly jargonized sloganeering of Communists and other
> Marxists, circa 1935. The cheap vulgarity of a phrase like "the forces of
> darkness" is a linguistic clue to the insincerity and indeed the ill intent of
> its author. And who, in this arena, are the Forces of Light? The Muslims, whose
> party is openly authoritarian, and whose government is stealing us blind? And
> certainly not the Croats, who have more than their share of defendants before
> the International Tribunal at The Hague.
>
> SAVE YOUR CANDLES, THE DARK AGES ARE COMING!
>
> If anyone is taking Bosnia and Kosovo into the Dark Ages, it is Holbrooke,
> Madeleine Albright, and the architects of the war of "liberation." Their vast
> social engineering projects in Bosnia and Kosovo are literally taking the
> Balkans back to an earlier time, when Tito constructed the Socialist Republic of
> Yugoslavia out of a collection of ethnic enclaves. Like Tito, the NATO
> occupation army suppressed all opposition, closing down Serbian radio and
> television stations. As in the Communist era, "hate speech" in Bosnia was
> defined in explicitly political terms (anything that dissed NATO). In Kosovo,
> NATO and UN officials will monitor and regulate the media just as Tito's censors
> once did – in order to safeguard "democracy," of course. And now, in the Titoite
> tradition, Commissar Holbrooke wants to close down not one but two Serbian
> political parties in Bosnia.
>
> THE DIKTAT OF HOLBROOKE
>
> While praising a "new generation of leaders," left unnamed, Holbrooke does name
> those Forces of Darkness alluded to earlier, and furthermore proposes a blunt
> and pitiless strategy to defeat them:
>
> "But two major political parties in the Serb part of Bosnia continue to preach
> ethnic hatred and attack the very foundations of the Dayton agreement: the war
> criminal Radovan Karadzic's Serbian Democratic Party, and Vojislav Selselj's
> racist, fascistic Serbian Radical Party. These two parties should be
> disestablished by international order (as Dayton authorized the High
> Representative to do), just as the Nazis were outlawed in Germany after World
> War II."
>
> POLITICAL CRIMES
>
> To dispute any part of the complex and even Byzantine Dayton agreement – which
> was never agreed to by the Serbs of Bosnia, only by Slobodan Milosevic – is
> equated with promulgating "ethnic hatred." For this one can be charged with the
> grave thoughtcrime of "separatism" – which was also a political crime under the
> Tito dictatorship.
>
> COMRADE HOLBROOKE
>
> Note, also, how the guilty parties are defined in terms of specific individuals,
> as if they were David Koresh-style cults that somehow deserve to be annihilated.
> But the Serbian Democratic Party is far larger than Radovan Karadzic, and indeed
> for a while the US government was aligned with a faction of it that managed to
> gain temporary control of the Bosnian Serb Republic of Srpska, under President
> Biljana Plavšic. But she apparently fell out with her American allies, and then
> lost her position: now the US is calling for the party to be banned. And Plavšic
> herself once served in the same Cabinet as Karadzic – but never mind. In the
> Communist lexicon of old, today's ally could be tomorrow's "fascist," depending
> on the Party line, and comrade Holbrooke seems entirely immersed in this
> tradition.
>
> ACTION AND REACTION
>
> As for the Serbian Radical Party, the Republic of Srpska edition is unlikely to
> be under the direct control of the much-vilified Vojislav Selselj. In any case,
> whatever the West finds unpleasant in the party's doctrines is likely to be
> confirmed and strengthened by the actions of the Allies, who are treating the
> Bosnian Serbs like a conquered people.
>
> THIRD PERIOD CLINTONISM
>
> In its Orwellian language – instead of being banned, the offending parties must
> be "disestablished – and emotional vehemence the language of Holbrooke evokes
> the "Third Period" of the Stalin era, in which Communists likened all their
> enemies to "fascists" and no rhetorical excess was too extravagant. In comparing
> these two parties to the Nazis, Holbrooke trivializes history and tramples on
> common sense, so that any validity in his critique is dissolved in his own
> vehemence. He assures us that the "genuine multiethnic parties" in Srpska "will
> surely grow in numbers with each election" – in spite of the fact that these
> thinly-disguised US fronts have been decisively repudiated at the polling booth
> a number of times – but that we have to make sure that "the pressure is kept on
> the extremists." The manipulation of elections until the "right" results are
> gotten, censorship of the media, ideological campaigns against various forbidden
> "isms" – where have we seen all this before?
>
> HAIL RED ARMY?
>
> I'll tell you where: When the Red Army moved into Eastern Europe, at Roosevelt's
> invitation, a number of "coalition" governments were set up, and staged
> "elections" were held, ratifying what had already been decided by the presence
> of Soviet troops. A similar charade is going on in Bosnia and Kosovo today, with
> Holbrooke, Albright, and the so-called High Representative presiding over it all
> – as arrogant, murderous, and openly authoritarian as any Communist despots of
> yesteryear.
>
> THE GREAT "EXPERIMENT," THEN AND NOW
>
> In what have to be the most revealing few sentences in his article, Holbrooke
> actually has the nerve to excuse the atrocities carried out by the Kosovo
> "Liberation" Army in the same sort of exculpatory language Western Communists
> and fellow-travelers used to describe the Soviet Russian "experiment": "A people
> who have known nothing but various forms of oppression since at least 1912 have
> emerged into the harsh light of the modern world," writes Holbrooke. "The
> internal Kosovo political scene is chaotic, and will take time to sort out." In
> other words: sure the KLA is just another gang of tribalist thugs, but they're
> our thugs. And besides, give these guys a break: after all, they've just been
> "liberated."
>
> UNCLE SAM'S CHILDREN
>
> But don't worry: with plenty of US tax dollars, and a dictatorship enforced by
> NATO's centurions, we'll have the New Kosovar Man up and running in a few
> decades. In the meantime, we have to foot their bills, censor their media, and
> make sure they do all their homework without getting too mixed up in drugs. This
> taking on of two new dependencies, Bosnia and Kosovo, is like having children:
> "The leaders of the effort against Slobodan Milosevic cannot turn their backs on
> what they have started," we are told. "Having started the job, we must continue
> to lead the effort to finish it successfully." Like an unwed mother stuck with a
> squalling brat, the US must care for and raise her young protectorates – and, in
> the beginning, at least, attend to them twenty-four hours a day. The Allies,
> says Holbrooke, "will be sorely tested." But in the end, it will all be worth it
> – or will it?
>
> A FAMILIAL FOREIGN POLICY
>
> And what would it mean to "finish it successfully"? Do you ever really get rid
> of your children? Even if you're totally estranged, even if they run off and
> join the Moonies or Heaven's Gate, you are linked to them in some fundamental
> way, and, most would argue, obligated to them. No matter how callous you are,
> the relationship never really ends, until one of you dies. The truth is there is
> no end to the task Holbrooke would have us take up, no end to the job of
> policing Europe, and especially the Balkans. For years, the Clinton
> administration has been putting time-constraints, and "deadlines" on the US
> military presence in Bosnia: three times a withdrawal date was set, prior to the
> Kosovo war, and three times it was postponed. And each time the Republicans went
> along with the fiction that this was not a permanent fixture of our overseas
> military operations, as if wishing could make it so.
>
> THE PROSPECT OF WAR
>
> The diktat of Holbrooke – his draconian program to impose a "democratic"
> dictatorship on Bosnia and Kosovo – comes at a crucial time. For there are
> rumblings from General Wesley Clark that hostilities could resume: the General
> charges that Serbian "paramilitaries" are "infiltrating" back into Kosovo to
> "cause a little bit of trouble here and there." On the other side of the
> Kosovo-Yugoslav border, Serbian generals are demanding that the terms of the
> peace agreement be honored, and that they must be allowed to post soldiers and
> customs officials on Kosovo's frontiers. Meanwhile, next Monday is the third or
> fourth "deadline" set by NATO and UN authorities for the KLA to completely
> disarm, and the violence (including mortar attacks on Serb civilians!) continues
> unabated. While Kosovo has managed to stay out of the headlines, hardly a day
> goes by without a new atrocity, a new bombing, and fresh incidents of Serb blood
> spilled – but don't shine too "harsh" a light on these incidents. After all,
> practically anything is justified in a battle against the Forces of Darkness –
> isn't it?
>
>
>
> Check out Justin Raimondo's article, “China and the New Cold War”
>
> “Behind the Headlines” appears Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, with special
> editions as events warrant.
>
>
>
> Archived Columns
>
> Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com. He is also the author
> of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement
> (with an Introduction by Patrick J. Buchanan), (1993), and Into the Bosnian
> Quagmire: The Case Against US Intervention in the Balkans (1996). He is an
> Adjunct Scholar with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, in Auburn, Alabama, a
> Senior Fellow at the Center for Libertarian Studies, and writes frequently for
> Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. He is the author of An Enemy of the
> State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (forthcoming from Prometheus Books).
>
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