This Declaration was made at the conclusion of the International Conference held in Belgrade organized by the Beograd Forum For A World Of Equals in association with other organisations, including the World Peace Council, attended by delegates, ministers, and officials from countries around the world, and headed by Zivadin Jovanovic, President of the Forum and former foreign minister for Yugoslavia at the time of the NATO aggression.

WE, participants of the International Conference held in Belgrade on March 22-24, 2024, on the occasion of marking the 25th anniversary of NATO’s armed aggression against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) dedicated to the theme “From the Aggression to a New Just Order”, gathered from all over the world, hereby declare:

We belong to different countries, nations, ideologies, religions and civilizations, but stand firmly united in our commitment to peace, equality, and prosperity for all peoples, as well as in our condemnation of interventionism, expansion, domination, and hegemonism.

We firmly condemn the unprovoked armed aggression by NATO against the FRY (Serbia and Montenegro) in 1999 as an unlawful, invading and criminal war against a sovereign, peace-loving European country, waged devoid of a UN Security Council mandate, in blatant violation of the United Nations Charter, the OSCE Helsinki Final Act (1975) and the fundamental principles of international law.

We underline:

That the aggression was carried out under false pretexts and that therefore NATO’s responsibility cannot be diminished. It was not state authorities but, instead, NATO’s expansionism that actually threatened a ‘humanitarian disaster’. What happened in Rachak was not a ‘massacre of civilians’, but instead a legitimate response of the state to terrorism. The ‘Horseshoe Plan’ did not exist. ‘Humanitarian’ wars or interventions do not exist. Prevention of human suffering can hardly be prevented by depleted uranium, cluster bombs and by poisoning the air, soil and water.

Back in 1999, NATO reintroduced the war on the European soil, ironically, a war that Europe waged on itself.

It was neither a “little Kosovo war”, but rather a war of these geopolitical goals: a) carving the Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija out of Serbia and a full control over the Balkans; b) deployment of the US troops in the Balkans for the purposes of the strategy of Eastward expansion; c) creating a precedent for subsequent interventions conducted in violation of international law and of the inviolability of the UN Security Council; d) justifying the existence of NATO and its acting beyond the area defined in its Founding Act of 1949. “Wherever the law presented an obstacle to the policy of expansion, it must be removed” – was yet another NATO new rule.

The NATO aggression embodied the undoing of the legal order of peace and security in Europe and the world, established on the outcome of the Second World War. Today, the Balkans is more unstable, Europe militarized on dangerous tracks, without autonomy, identity and vision.

The aggression took the lives of 1,139 soldiers and police officers, about 3,000 civilians also including 89 children, while some 10,000 people were wounded. However, the consequences of prolonged effects of weapons filled with depleted uranium and toxic compounds are by far greater.

NATO, also, bombed the Embassy of the PR of China, in Belgrade, killing three Chinese journalists and destroying the building of the Chinese Embassy.

We pay our highest respect to all the fallen innocent people and express our deepest, sincere condolences to their families.

The aggressor had been systematically destroying or badly damaging civilian infrastructure, such as railways, roads, bridges, airports, energy system, as well as apartment buildings, industrial facilities, schools, hospitals, kindergartens, and many more objects. Over thirty radio and TV stations and transmitters had been bombed, including the national public TV RTS killing 16 professional employees on duty. The direct damage totals some USD 100 billion.

We emphasize that NATO and its member states, participants in the illegal act of aggression, are obliged to compensate Serbia for the war damage they have inflicted.

We appeal that special state and expert bodies, tasked with determining the consequences of aggression on the health of people and the environment, resume their work, and that the war crimes against civilians and crimes of non-compliance with the war-related conventions be prosecuted and sanctioned.

We express our strong support and solidarity with Serbia’s efforts to mitigate the consequences of the aggression and her endeavoring to prevent the continuation of NATO’s armed aggression by other means.

We express our full support to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Serbia in her internationally recognized borders within which she continued her membership in the UN, the OSCE, and other universal international organizations.

We are deeply concerned about the mass-scale violation of the basic human rights of the Serbian community in Kosovo and Metohija embodied in the continuation of their systematic expulsion from, and in preventing the free and safe return of over 250,000 expelled Serbs and other non-Albanians to, their homes and property.

We firmly believe that the future status of the Province of Kosovo and Metohija may be resolved only in accordance with international law and, in particular, with UN Security Council Resolution 1244 of June 10, 1999, which is a lasting, legally binding document. We demand that all provisions of the UNSC resolution 1244 be fully respected and implemented.

We condemn each and all violations of that Resolution and the policy of blackmail and pressuring, and all one-sided steps aimed at legalizing the seizure of state territory and completing the ethnic cleansing of the remaining Serbian population, in preparation to create the so-called Greater Albania.

We oppose the unipolar world order based on the strategy of hegemonism and global domination with NATO as its military feast. The aggression against the FRY in 1999 was speeding up of the strategy of expansion to the East, and a source of danger to peace in Europe and the world. At the time of the aggression, NATO had 19 members, and today counts 32. After the erection of US military base Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo and Metohija, there followed dozens of new NATO bases. Presently, Europe hosts a far larger number of foreign military bases and stockpiles of nuclear weapons than it did during the bipolar world and the Cold War era.

We express our deepest concern about the accelerated escalation of hostilities and conflicts in global relations that add fuel to the fire of conflict, continued provocations, and the looming danger of a global conflict. The world sits on the brink of the abyss. Humanity will either restrain the rampant aggressiveness of the alienated power centers, or fall into that abyss.

This makes us stand unified in the demand for an immediate beginning of the dialogue at the strategic level, under the auspices of the UN, aimed at putting to a halt the escalation, the accumulation of conventional and nuclear weapons, and the breaching of international agreements.

We demand the closure of foreign military camps, the complete withdrawal from Europe of the US tactical nuclear weapons and installations of the so-called anti-missile defenses that make security more volatile.

We call for an end to warmongering rhetoric, and invite all responsible statesmen to resort to dialogue and to finding peaceful, just and sustainable solutions to the ongoing conflicts and crises.

We appeal to all peace-loving forces in the world to join forces in the struggle for the observance of international law, sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries, reinforcing the authority and role of the United Nations and other universal international organizations, the observance of principles of equality, sovereignty and territorial integrity, and for cooperation and coordination in the fight against terrorism and separatism as global threats.

We support the process of multi-polarization of global relations and their democratization on the basis of the sovereign equality of all states and peoples.

We support the peace, security and development initiatives that are based on the principle of mutual indivisibility of peace, security and development, and that take note of the root causes of problems. The key roles in that process play BRICS, EAEU, Global Initiative “Belt and Road”, Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, NAM. We support the abolition of all monopolies, privileges based on ‘exceptionalism’. We refuse unilateral sanctions, erection of new ‘walls’ or divisions. The attempt to divide the world into ‘democracies’ and ‘autocracies’ is a trickery of the power-centers designed to extend the life of the unipolar world order.

The policy of confrontation, interventionism, and interference in internal affairs, backed by the military-industrial complex and large financial capital, must give way to dialogue, partnership, respect for fundamental norms of international law and the multipolar world order.

Peace, stability, democracy and inclusive development require radical changes in present global relations, observance of sovereign equality, non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries, multilateralism, respect of common interests, and exclusion of any egoism, protectionism and privileges of the past.

The biggest obstacle to the world order of sovereign, equal nations is the relics of the Cold War. That is why NATO should be dissolved and the doctrine of hegemonism, expansionism and neocolonialism consigned to history.

We condemn the mass-scale killing of the innocent Palestinian people, in particular of children, and call for an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and other areas inhabited by the Palestinian people, in order to finally stop this human suffering unprecedented in recent history, and for unhindered delivery of food, medicines, water, and other necessities of life to the vulnerable population.

We support a two-state solution, the free and safe return of all expelled persons, the abolition of the occupation and the establishment of a Palestinian state within the pre-June 4, 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as the capital, all in accordance with the United Nations Resolutions.

We express our solidarity with the people of Cuba, who have been suffering the devastating consequences of the unilateral US embargo for many years. The Cuban people have an inalienable right to choose the paths of internal development of their own, without external interference. We demand respect for the UN positions on the lifting of the US blockade of Cuba, and the removal of Cuba from the list of ‘states sponsoring terrorism’ because it was inserted without any bases.

We hold that the Ukrainian crisis is a corollary of NATO’s strategy of expansion to the East, under betrayal of all agreements of the otherwise.

We believe this crisis can be resolved peacefully, by acknowledging and removing the causes and by guaranteeing equal security for all countries. The common future of humanity excludes egotism and selfish approaches such as the ‘golden billion’ security thesis.

We express our acknowledgment and gratitude to our hosts – the Belgrade Forum for a World of Equals, the Club of Generals and Admirals of Serbia, SUBNOR of Serbia, the Diaspora Fund for Serbia, and the Association of Veterans of the Military Intelligence Service, as well as to the citizens of Serbia – for their hospitality and good organization of the Conference.

The organizers express their acknowledgment to the participants of the Conference, including the World Peace Council and all its members, for their decades long solidarity and support to Serbia and the Serbian people, as well as for their extraordinary contribution to the results of this Conference.

Belgrade, March 23, 2024

STATEMENT OF CONDEMNATION OF THE TERRORIST ATTACK IN MOSCOW

Participants of the International Conference held in Belgrade on March 22-24, 2024, on the occasion of marking the 25th anniversary of NATO’s armed aggression against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia,

– Condemn in the strongest terms the heinous, bestial and provocative terrorist attack in Moscow that killed so many innocent people, and express belief that the perpetrators will be quickly apprehended and brought to justice.

– At the same time, express their deepest condolences to the families of the killed and the injured ones, to the citizens of Moscow, and to the entire Russian people, in the moment of their pain and huge grief.

– Call for a determined and coordinated combatting of terrorism as a global danger that threatens all the peoples of the world.

In Belgrade, March 23, 2024

Source: https://journal-neo.su

Download PDF here: izdvojeno-CC_20240326_06.pdf

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Editor's Note:

April 4, 2024, marks the 75th anniversary of the founding of NATO. As a product of the Cold War, NATO should have been disbanded, but over the years, it has served as a war machine and facilitated US hegemony. The Global Times talked to a number of experts and scholars to reveal how the US exploits NATO to serve its geopolitical purposes and how NATO destabilizes the world, exacerbates nuclear threats and brings confrontation to Asia.

In the first interview of the series, Global Times (GT) reporter Wang Wenwen talked to Zivadin Jovanovic (Jovanovic), president of the Belgrade Forum for a World of Equals who served as the minister of foreign affairs of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia between 1998 and 2000. Serbia recently marked the 25th anniversary of the NATO bombing of what was then Yugoslavia. He recalled this brutal operation of NATO and how the US and NATO obstruct a just world order.  

GT: How does the NATO bombing in 1999 still affect people in Serbia today?

Jovanovic: Serbia mourned and paid respect to around 2,000 civilians killed by NATO 25 years ago. We also remembered that NATO bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade killing three Chinese journalists. We recall that NATO used missiles with depleted uranium, cluster bombs and other forbidden means and methods. This resulted in maligned diseases and deaths of people even today, and material damage amounting to over $100 billion.

The objective of the US-led NATO was to take the Province of Kosovo and Metohija from Serbia, transform it into the Balkans carrier of US troupes for expansion to the East, topple the government of former president Slobodan Milosevic, and make a precedent for future military interventions violating the UN Charter and the supremacy of the UN Security Council and International Law, in general. The aim was also to firmly discipline European allies behind the concept of unipolar world order, supporting US geostrategic interests. In 1999, NATO went beyond its founding treaty, abandoning its defensive and adopting an offensive, aggressive character.

The US-led NATO pursues these interests today. Military aggression has been replaced by other means. Right now, they use pressure, including blackmailing Serbia to recognize the secession of its autonomous province of Kosovo and Metohija and accept its membership in the international organizations. Serbia, of course, will not submit. Economically, Serbia has not as yet fully recovered. Ruins from the aggression could be seen even in the heart of Belgrade, but Serbia's GDP nevertheless maintains a constant rise, even above the European average. Unfortunately, the Balkans are far from stable. It is divided, dependent and militarized.  

GT: You attended an international conference in Belgrade a few days ago that marked the anniversary. The theme of the conference was "From the Aggression to a New Just Order." What are the obstacles to a new just world order?

Jovanovic: The main obstacle to the new world order based on the principle of sovereign equality and non-interference in internal affairs is the policy of expansion and global domination of the minority of Western countries led by the US. It seems that they do not understand the global changes and trends of multi-polarization and tend to believe that they can stop those historic trends, even reverse them, by force, including nuclear. These doctrines represent the main source of serious threats to global peace and development. This is a threat to humanity.

GT: Taking into consideration NATO actions from NATO bombing Yugoslavia 25 years ago to the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict, what role does NATO play in facilitating US hegemony?

Jovanovic: The NATO aggression on Yugoslavia in 1999 was the beginning of the globalization of military interventionism of the US-led NATO. Afterward, we saw many interventions and aggressions based on the 1999 NATO precedent on Yugoslavia. German politician Willy Wimmer said in 2022 that the first bombs fell on Ukraine in 1999.

The US-led NATO, in my opinion, is the military, nuclear fist of expansionist strategy, of global domination within unipolarity.

GT: The US has leveraged NATO to sustain dominance over Europe. Do you think Europe has the will and ability to reflect on its position? Is Europe feeling more secure or less secure?

Jovanovic: European autonomy at present is at its lowest point since World War II, this includes its dignity, identity and morality. It is not because of the people, European nations or cultural heritage. It is, first of all, because of the quality of the present political elite which has lost its sense of traditional civilization values, which seems to have abandoned morality, solidarity, justice and legality and which has practically reduced everything and everybody to the profit by all means. I don't know, really, what term would best express such characteristics, but perhaps, it is not far from - corruption, one way or the other. Global changes could hardly leave Europe untouched. Some changes toward autonomy, dignity and sovereignty are taking place, particularly in some European countries, like Hungary, Slovakia and others. We shall see what the elections for the European Parliament in June will show. I hope it will be the beginning of changes, changes for the better. One election may not be sufficient, but the trends matter.

GT: China was also a victim of the NATO bombing 25 years ago. In the past two years, NATO has declared China a security challenge. The NATO chief also linked what's happening in Ukraine to the Taiwan question. What do you think of the NATO moves against China?

Jovanovic: It is true. China was not only the victim, but also the target of NATO military aggression in 1999. Just minutes later, I was at the scene seeing public services rescuing survivors from the debris. Bombs were still hitting a nearby hotel and the surrounding park, when then-Chinese ambassador Pan Zhanlin was freed out of the ruins. I expressed my condolences and assured him of my government's solidarity and support.

Should anybody wonder why Serbia and China are "iron friends" and comprehensive strategic partners ever since?

Who, what and why represents the challenge depends on who is assessing it and from positions of which values. Learning from recent history, I suppose, countries demanding equal security and sovereignty over natural resources, such as oil and gas reserves, uranium and other strategic minerals deposits, huge markets, and geostrategic connectivity lines have always been a challenge for NATO and Western power centers.

What we have been witnessing over the past decades is that the US and NATO have for years now been expanding and reinforcing their presence through their branches in the Far East and Indo-Pacific like Quad and some newly born alliances. Seen from Europe, the US-NATO expansionist strategy is directed to the East, to Russia, the Caspian Sea and the Middle East. Asia and Siberia seem to be real objectives, from both geographic positions. US-NATO exploits similar, or the same means and methods: spreading fear, insecurity and disorientation, demonstrating power through a series of massive "defenders" exercises, offering protection of scarred ones, use of separatism, terrorism and human rights. We know from their rhetoric that China represents a "systemic" challenge and Russia a "malign influence." This only means that they have no solutions for their own problems nor do they have the courage to face today's reality. So far, they opt to continue living in the past, instead of accepting a new reality called equality and living in togetherness.

Source: https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202404/1309971.shtml

KIT KLARENBERG·MARCH 24, 2024 The grayzone

Top secret papers reviewed by The Grayzone reveal Tony Blair demanded strikes on civilian targets in Yugoslavia days before NATO attacked them. While the UK military acknowledged a NATO strike on Hotel Jugoslavia would mean inflicting “some civilian casualties,” it insisted the deaths were “worth the cost.”

Declassified British Ministry of Defence (MOD) files reviewed by The Grayzone reveal that officials in London conspired to embroil US troops in a secret plan to occupy Yugoslavia and “topple” President Slobodan Milosevic during NATO’s 1999 war on the country. Though the crazed scheme was never implemented, details of the plot reveal precisely how British officials successfully shaped Washington into a blunt force instrument of their vanquished empire in years to come.

March 24 marks the 25th anniversary of Operation Allied Force, NATO’s 78-day-long bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. Still venerated in Western mainstream as a successful “humanitarian intervention” conducted to prevent an impending “genocide” of Kosovo’s Albanian population, the war was in fact a wantonly destructive, illegal assault on  a sovereign, multiethnic country, based on lies and atrocity propaganda. Belgrade had in fact been engaged in a counterinsurgency battle against the CIA and MI6-backed Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), an Al Qaeda-linked extremist group.

The KLA—funded by the narcotics trade and organ harvesting—explicitly sought to maximize civilian casualties, in order to precipitate Western intervention. In May 2000, a British parliamentary committee concluded all purported abuses of Albanian citizens by Yugoslav authorities occurred after NATO’s bombing began, finding that the alliance’s intervention had actually encouraged Belgrade to aggressively neutralize the KLA. Meanwhile, in September 2001, a UN court in Pristina determined that Belgrade’s actions in Kosovo were not genocidal in nature, or intent.

These findings are largely overlooked today. A February Politico investigation into the West’s post-war pillage of Kosovo axiomatically asserted that NATO intervened in Yugoslavia “to halt an unfolding genocide against the ethnic-Albanian population.” Similarly forgotten is just how close leading NATO states came to invading Belgrade during that chaotic spring.

British proposals for US invasion of Yugoslavia

By April 29, 1999, NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia had entered its fifth week. On that date, Richard Hatfield, then-Policy Director of Britain’s Ministry of Defence, dispatched a “Strategic Planning Group discussion paper on Kosovo ground force options” to London’s military, security, and intelligence apparatus. In a documentmarked “Secret – UK eyes only,” Hatfield demanded an “immediate” decision on whether to formally invade Yugoslavia:

“If we are to influence US thinking on ground force options, we need to pass the paper to them very quickly…Our planning is ahead of the US, other allies and [NATO HQ]…We believe the US may be developing its initial thinking on ground force options this week. Our paper could exercise significant influence on their conclusions. The [Chiefs of Staff] therefore agreed we should pass it to the US privately (through military and policy channels) as quickly as possible.”

According to Hatfield, London had to “overcome” a “great deal of reluctance and scepticism” in Washington regarding a formal ground invasion, so “decisions need to be taken quickly if we are to launch an operation before Winter.” Evidently, a firm timeline for action had germinated in London. It was simultaneously vital to “make clear” to then-Prime Minister Tony Blair that “although we can influence planning for a possible ground campaign, we cannot expect the US or NATO to accept British views easily or unreservedly.”

Therefore, an “early agreement in principle to a ground campaign” was considered “more important than the details,” the document states. In other words, securing US commitment to putting boots on the ground trumped all basic technical concerns. After all, Blair’s invasion fantasy hinged entirely on Washington dispatching hundreds of thousands of US soldiers to Yugoslavia. London would by contrast deploy just 50,000—most of the available British Army at the time. This disparity was likely a key source of American “reluctance and scepticism.”

London therefore drafted four separate scenarios for the war. This included invading Kosovo alone and “liberating” the province from Belgrade’s control. This option would limit “overspill into other areas of Serbia”, while guaranteeing “no permanent military presence elsewhere” in the country. Another proposal, dubbed “wider opposed,” would see NATO invade Yugoslavia outright, with the aim of “defeating the Serb armed forces and if necessary toppling Milosevic.” The latter forecast an “organised Serb resistance” at every level in response.

Another source of US “reluctance and scepticism,” no doubt, was the fact that every country bordering Yugoslavia—even NATO members and aspirants—were either on the record as having rejected, or being expected to reject, the use of their territory for ground invasion. For example, two of London’s war proposals depended “fundamentally on Greek agreement to use their port facilities and airspace.” Without Greece’s acquiescence, NATO “would have no choice but to mount a wider opposed operation from Hungary, Romania and/or Bulgaria, which would be even more difficult politically.”

Coupled with deep historic and cultural ties, the longstanding record of warm relations between Athens and Belgrade effectively ruled out both plans that were dependent on Greece. An invasion conducted via the latter countries, on the other hand, meant that “it would be impossible to constrain the scope of war with Serbia.” Meanwhile, Albania, which supported the KLA while serving as NATO’s effective headquarters throughout the bombing of Yugoslavia, and Macedonia, “where [NATO] troop levels [were] already causing problems,” were said to fear becoming formal belligerents in any conflict due to likely “Serb retaliation.”

Blair calls for ‘coalition of the willing’

Despite the apparent infeasibility of a ground invasion, British officials—Blair in particular—were completely determined to push ahead in Yugoslavia. Their bombing campaign was a failure. Limited to the skies, NATO jets relentlessly blitzed Serbian civilian, government, and industrial infrastructure, killing over a thousand innocent people—including children—and violently disrupting daily life for millions. But Yugoslav forces cunningly deployed decoy vehicles to divert the military alliance, while concealing their anti-KLA operations under adverse weather and deception tactics.

In public, NATO military apparatchiks, political pawns, and media minions exalted their stunning success and inevitable victory on the battlefield. But the declassified files show Ministry of Defence officials spent much of their time bemoaning the fact that their bombs were neither intimidating Milosevic, nor hindering the Yugoslav army’s war on the KLA.  Belgrade’s forces were said to have consistently deceived NATO “very successfully” via extensive use of “camouflage, dummy targets, concealment and bunkers.”

British officials repeatedly expressed concern that the Yugoslav army could actually succeed in expelling the KLA from Kosovo entirely, allowing Milosevic to declare victory and dictate peace terms to NATO. Blair was reportedly determined to reject any such offer. Moreover, it was well-understood that NATO’s bombing had rallied citizens to support their leader. As one paper conceded, alliance airstrikes on Yugoslavia’s Interior Ministry “demonstrated to Belgrade citizens just how vulnerable their city is, but achieved little else.”

“Forewarned by a target list posted on CNN’s website last week, the Serbs had already moved out of the building. Kosovo has been swept clean in less than a week and in the US, a climbdown may be on the cards, as the costs and dangers of escalation hit home,” the April 4 missive asserted.

The following day, Blair dispatched a personal “note for the record” to senior British government, intelligence and military officials. He lambasted the bombing campaign’s lack of “vigour,” suggesting the British public “does not have the confidence we know what to do,” before concluding: “we appear not to have a grip.”

Blair then proposed the formation of a “coalition of the willing” to counteract opposition to escalation within NATO and “prosecute this to the end.” In an apparent fit of bloodlust, the Prime Minister proceeded to outline a series of demands:

“We must strengthen the targets. Media and communication are utterly essential. [Attacking] Oil, infrastructure, all the things Milosevic values… is clearly justified.”

“What is holding this back?” Blair fumed. “I have little doubt we are moving towards a situation where our aim will become removing Milosevic. We will not want to say so now, but autonomy for Kosovo inside Serbia is becoming absurd. And plainly Milosevic will threaten the stability of the region as long as he remains.”

The Ministry of Defence subsequently circulated a memoon “targeting,” which warranted “immediate attention,” that noted London had “offered the US three significant targets” identified by MI6: Belgrade’s iconic Hotel Jugoslavia; a Cold War-era Bunker; and the Yugoslav capital’s Central Post Office. While conceding that a strike on Hotel Jugoslavia would mean “some civilian casualties,” the memo insisted that their lives were “worth the cost.”

NATO subsequently hit Hotel Jugoslavia on May 7 and 8 in 1999, damaging its bars, boutiques, and dining halls while killing a refugee who sought shelter inside. The Washington Post promptly justified the strike by claiming it may have targeted a notorious Serbian paramilitary leader, who allegedly owned a casino housed within the hotel. Asked by the newspaper if he took the bombing personally, the fighter, known as “Arkan,” replied:

“When they hit civilians, I take it personally. You don’t change minds with Tomahawks. If they want to bring me to justice, why do they want to kill me? If they want to get Arkan, send ground troops so I can see their faces. I want to die in a fair fight. Bill Clinton is in deep you-know-what. He bombs what he can. He says ‘God bless America’ and the rest of the world dies.”

NATO bombing stokes Chinese and Russian fears

Later that April, as per Blair’s personal order to target “media,” NATO bombed the Belgrade headquarters of the Yugoslav TV network RTS. The strike killed 16 journalists and wounded 16 more, with many trapped under rubble for days. The Prime Minister personally defended the criminal assault, claiming the station was a core component of Milosevic’s “apparatus of dictatorship and power”.

The NATO-funded International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia later investigated the RTS bombing. It concluded that while the site wasn’t a military target, the action aimed to disrupt Belgrade’s communications network, and was therefore legitimate. Amnesty International branded the ruling a miscarriage of justice. Then-NATO General Wesley Clark, who oversaw the bombing campaign, admitted it was understood that the attack would only interrupt RTS broadcasts for a brief period. Indeed, RTS was back on-air after just three hours.

The RTS strike represented one of several egregious war crimes NATO committed throughout the Yugoslavia campaign with total impunity. Officially, the 78-day-long aerial onslaught destroyed just 14 Yugoslav tanks, while devastating 372 industrial facilities, leaving hundreds of thousands jobless. The military alliance allegedly took directions on what to target from US corporations, including Philip Morris. NATO’s deliberate obliteration of chemical plants polluted soil, air, and water across the Balkans with over 100 toxic substances. Not coincidentally, Serbia today is a world leader in cancer rates.

On the first night that Hotel Jugoslavia was bombed, NATO carried out a simultaneous strike against Beijing’s embassy in Belgrade, killing three journalists, wounding dozens sheltering inside, and outraging Chinese and Serb citizens alike. NATO declared that this was merely an accident, caused by erroneous CIA targeting data. While the declassified Ministry of Defence files conspicuously contain no reference to this highly controversial international incident, they do mention grave Chinese concerns over the wider campaign. Namely, that it would “constitute a precedent for intervention elsewhere.”

British officials sought to allay these fears not only in Beijing, but Moscow. Then-Russian premier Yevgeny Primakov learned NATO had launched its campaign against Yugoslavia while he was literally mid-air, en route to the US for an official meeting. He immediately ordered the pilot to return to Russia. Despite his protest, the Kremlin thereafter attempted to compel Milosevic to cease hostilities in Kosovo via diplomatic channels.

Once it became clear that Russia would not intervene on his side, Milosevic folded and pledged to withdraw all Yugoslav forces from Kosovo on June 3 1999. In turn, NATO would occupy the province. That same month, a cable dispatched from the British Embassy in Moscow observed the bombing was widely viewed locally “as a blow to [the] UN Security Council and threat to Russian interests… setting an unacceptable precedent for action out of area, circumventing the Security Council if necessary”:

“[Moscow’s Ministry of Defense] has used NATO’s resort to force to argue Russia’s new military doctrine should take more serious account of a potential threat from NATO, with all that that means in terms of force levels, procurement and the future of arms control… The UK’s forward position on the use of force has not gone unnoticed… The Kosovo campaign has reinforced the perception here of an expanding NATO as a powerful tool for the imposition of US will in Europe.”

Blair reportedly walked away from his destruction of Yugoslavia with newfound confidence. According toveteran British journalist Andrew Marr, the Prime Minister realized “he had tried to bounce [Clinton] too obviously over Kosovo,” thus concluding that “American Presidents need tactful handling” to achieve desired results. Blair also “learned to cope with giving orders which resulted in much loss of life.” Directing Yugoslavia’s collapse furthermore “convinced him of his ability to lead in war, to take big gambles, and to get them right.”

It was this arrogant attitude that guided Blair into the quagmire of Iraq, and to further interventions which wreaked havoc on the globe.

Blair fulfills ‘Britain’s destiny’

With the Yugoslav army fully withdrawn from Kosovo, the province began to resemble post-World War II Germany, carved into Western occupation zones. As a November 1999 OSCE report documented in sickening detail, a very real genocide immediately commenced. KLA fighters proceeded to not only purge Kosovo’s Roma and Serb population, but also clear out their Albanian political and criminal rivals via intimidation, torture, and murder—all under the watchful eye of NATO and UN “peacekeepers.”

The Independent reported that month that the KLA’s post-war campaign of “murder and kidnap” in NATO-occupied Kosovo—officially described as an effort “to ensure public safety and order”—reduced Pristina’s Serb population from 40,000 to just 400. A local European human rights worker told the newspaper that over the prior six months, “every single Serb” they knew had “been intimidated—verbally in the street, on the telephone, [or] physically” by the Al Qaeda-tied KLA.

In December 2010, a British “peacekeeper” posted to Kosovo during this time attributed Pristina’s modern day status as “an impoverished, corrupt and ethnically polarised backwater” to NATO’s “unwillingness to control KLA gangsters.” He recalled how London under his watch consistently “emboldened the KLA to greater brutality.” Whenever he captured the terror group’s fighters on the streets, heavily armed and “intent on murder and intimidation,” his superiors ordered them freed:

“I witnessed… the KLA rampaging like a victorious mob intent on retribution,” he explained, adding that “systematic murder of Serbs, often shot in front of their families, was commonplace.” Given that “KLA thugs wielding AK47s, knuckledusters and knives terrified residents of Serbian apartment blocks, Many Serbs fled,” the former soldier noted.

“The Blair government’s spin machine wanted moral simplicity. The Serbs were the ‘bad guys’, so that must make Kosovo Albanians the ‘good guys’… Prostitution and drug and people trafficking increased as the KLA’s grip on Pristina tightened.”

However, KLA fighters were shielded from ICTY prosecution for their innumerable horrific crimes by direct NATO decree. Only today is justice being vaguely served, to almost total Western indifference. In many cases, American politicians continue to sing the praises of brutal KLA leaders. In 2010, then-Vice President Joe Biden referred to later-indicted war criminal Hashim Thaci as Pristina’s “George Washington.” Thaci’s 2018 autobiography proudly features fawning promotional quotes from the current Oval Office occupant on its sleeve.

Since 1945, British officials have been overwhelmingly preoccupied with maintaining the bigger, richer, more powerful US Empire’s global dominance, so as to surreptitiously guide it in direction of their choosing. Rarely is this sinister mission so candidly articulated as in the documents presented here. While Blair’s reverie of “toppling” Milosevic via US force was unrequited, Washington’s calamitous post-9/11 “Global War on Terror” was explicitly British-inspired.

Not long after planes hit the World Trade Center that fateful day, Blair dispatched a bust of Winston Churchill to the White House, evoking the wartime leader’s famed December 1941 address to Congress, which heralded Washington’s entry into World War II. At the same time, the British premier privately wrote to President George W. Bush, urging him to exploit “maximum” global sympathy produced by 9/11 to launch military interventions across West Asia. This wave of belligerence was foreshadowed during Blair’s 1997 election campaign:

“Century upon century it has been the destiny of Britain to lead other nations. That should not be a destiny that is part of our history. It should be part of our future… We are a leader of nations, or we are nothing.”

A British-steered global Pax Americana was forged in Yugoslavia 25 years ago, in an incendiary baptism of airstrikes and atrocity propaganda, which subsequently inflicted death, destruction, and misery throughout the Global South. Today, untold millions across the world grapple with the painful legacy of Blair’s determination to fulfill London’s “destiny.”

Download this article: China Investment Zivadin Jovanovic New Era Jan Feb 2024.pdf

Download and read the article in PDF format here:
Hommage to Dick Marty and John Pilger.pdf

By John Pilger
Global Research, January 02, 2024

John Pilger’s legacy will live.

Global Research will be featuring in the next few days several of his most important writings.

To access his archive of Global Research articles (2007-2023), click here.

This article focussing on media propaganda was first published on August 22, 2023, is John Pilger’s edited version of an address to the Trondheim World Festival, Norway, on 6 September, 2022.

In an address to the Trondheim World Festival in Norway, John Pilger charts the history of power propaganda and describes how it appropriates journalism in a ‘profound imperialism’ and is likely to entrap us all, if we allow it.


In the 1970s, I met one of Hitler’s leading propagandists, Leni Riefenstahl, whose epic films glorified the Nazis. We happened to be staying at the same lodge in Kenya, where she was on a photography assignment, having escaped the fate of other friends of the Fuhrer.

She told me that the ‘patriotic messages’ of her films were dependent not on ‘orders from above’ but on what she called the ‘submissive void’ of the German public.

Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? I asked. ‘Yes, especially them,’ she said.

I think of this as I look around at the propaganda now consuming Western societies.

Of course, we are very different from Germany in the 1930s. We live in information societies. We are globalists. We have never been more aware, more in touch, better connected.

Are we? Or do we live in a Media Society where brainwashing is insidious and relentless, and perception is filtered according to the needs and lies of state and corporate power?

The United States dominates the Western world’s media. All but one of the top ten media companies are based in North America. The internet and social media – Google, Twitter, Facebook – are mostly American owned and controlled.

In my lifetime, the United States has overthrown or attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, mostly democracies. It has interfered in democratic elections in 30 countries. It has dropped bombs on the people of 30 countries, most of them poor and defenceless. It has attempted to murder the leaders of 50 countries.  It has fought to suppress liberation movements in 20 countries.

The extent and scale of this carnage is largely unreported, unrecognised; and those responsible continue to dominate Anglo-American political life.

In the years before he died in 2008, the playwright made two extraordinary speeches, which broke a silence:

‘US foreign policy,’ he said, is ‘best defined as follows: kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in’.

It is as simple and as crude as that. What is interesting about it is that it’s so incredibly successful.

It possesses the structures of disinformation, use of rhetoric, distortion of language, which are very persuasive, but are actually a pack of lies. It is very successful propaganda. They have the money, they have the technology, they have all the means to get away with it, and they do.’

In accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, Pinter said this:

‘The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America.

It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.’

Pinter was a friend of mine and possibly the last great political sage – that is, before dissenting politics were gentrified. I asked him if the ‘hypnosis’ he referred to was the ‘submissive void’ described by Leni Riefenstahl.
The All-American Lie Factory

‘It’s the same,’ he replied.

‘It means the brainwashing is so thorough we are programmed to swallow a pack of lies. If we don’t recognise propaganda, we may accept it as normal and believe it. That’s the submissive void.’

In our systems of corporate democracy, war is an economic necessity, the perfect marriage of public subsidy and private profit: socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor. The day after 9/11 the stock prices of the war industry soared. More bloodshed was coming, which is great for business.

Today, the most profitable wars have their own brand. They are called ‘forever wars’: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and now Ukraine. All are based on a pack of lies.

Iraq is the most infamous, with its weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist.

Nato’s destruction of Libya in 2011 was justified by a massacre in Benghazi that didn’t happen. Afghanistan was a convenient revenge war for 9/11, which had nothing to do with the people of Afghanistan.

Today, the news from Afghanistan is how evil the Taliban are – not that Joe Biden’s theft of $7billion of the country’s bank reserves is causing widespread suffering. Recently, National Public Radio in Washington devoted two hours to Afghanistan – and 30 seconds to its starving people.

At its summit in Madrid in June, Nato, which is controlled by the United States, adopted a strategy document that militarises the European continent, and escalates the prospect of war with Russia and China. It proposes ‘multi domain warfighting against nuclear-armed peer-competitor. In other words, nuclear war.

It says: ‘Nato’s enlargement has been an historic success’.

I read that in disbelief.

A measure of this ‘historic success’ is the war in Ukraine, news of which is mostly not news, but a one-sided litany of jingoism, distortion, omission.  I have reported a number of wars and have never known such blanket propaganda.

In February, Russia invaded Ukraine as a response to almost eight years of killing and criminal destruction in the Russian-speaking region of Donbass on their border.

In 2014, the United States had sponsored a coup in Kyiv that got rid of Ukraine’s democratically elected, Russian-friendly president and installed a successor whom the Americans made clear was their man.

In recent years, American ‘defender’ missiles have been installed in eastern Europe, Poland, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, almost certainly aimed at Russia, accompanied by false assurances all the way back to James Baker’s ‘promise’ to Gorbachev in February 1990 that Nato would never expand beyond Germany.

Ukraine is the frontline. Nato has effectively reached the very borderland through which Hitler’s army stormed in 1941, leaving more than 23 million dead in the Soviet Union.

Last December, Russia proposed a far-reaching security plan for Europe.

This was dismissed, derided or suppressed in the Western media. Who read its step-by-step proposals? On 24 February, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy threatened to develop nuclear weapons unless America armed and protected Ukraine.  This was the final straw.

On the same day, Russia invaded – according to the Western media, an unprovoked act of congenital infamy. The history, the lies, the peace proposals, the solemn agreements on Donbass at Minsk counted for nothing.

On 25 April, the US Defence Secretary, General Lloyd Austin, flew into Kyiv and confirmed that America’s aim was to destroy the Russian Federation – the word he used was ‘weaken’. America had got the war it wanted, waged by an American bankrolled and armed proxy and expendable pawn.

Almost none of this was explained to Western audiences.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is wanton and inexcusable. It is a crime to invade a sovereign country. There are no ‘buts’ – except one.

When did the present war in Ukraine begin and who started it? According to the United Nations, between 2014 and this year, some 14,000 people have been killed in the Kyiv regime’s civil war on the Donbass. Many of the attacks were carried out by neo-Nazis.

Watch an ITV news report from May 2014, by the veteran reporter James Mates, who is shelled, along with civilians in the city of Mariupol, by Ukraine’s Azov (neo-Nazi) battalion.

In the same month, dozens of Russian-speaking people were burned alive or suffocated in a trade union building in Odessa besieged by fascist thugs, the followers of the Nazi collaborator and anti-Semitic fanatic Stephen Bandera.  The New York Times called the thugs ‘nationalists’.

‘The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment,’ said Andreiy Biletsky, founder of the Azov Battaltion, ‘is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival, a crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.’

Since February, a campaign of self-appointed ‘news monitors’ (mostly funded by the Americans and British with links to governments) have sought to maintain the absurdity that Ukraine’s neo-Nazis don’t exist.

Airbrushing, a term once associated with Stalin’s purges, has become a tool of mainstream journalism.

In less than a decade, a ‘good’ China has been airbrushed and a ‘bad’ China has replaced it: from the world’s workshop to a budding new Satan.

Much of this propaganda originates in the US, and is transmitted through proxies and ‘think-tanks’, such as the notorious Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the voice of the arms industry, and by zealous journalists such as Peter Hartcher of the Sydney Morning Herald, who labeled those spreading Chinese influence as ‘rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows’ and called for these ‘pests’ to be ‘eradicated’.

News about China in the West is almost entirely about the threat from Beijing.

Airbrushed are the 400 American military bases that surround most of China, an armed necklace that reaches from Australia to the Pacific and south east Asia, Japan and Korea. The Japanese island of Okinawa and the Korean island of Jeju are loaded guns aimed point blank at the industrial heart of China. A Pentagon official described this as a ‘noose’.

Palestine has been misreported for as long as I can remember. To the BBC, there is the ‘conflict’ of ‘two narratives’. The longest, most brutal, lawless military occupation in modern times is unmentionable.

The stricken people of Yemen barely exist. They are media unpeople.  While the Saudis rain down their American cluster bombs with British advisors working alongside the Saudi targeting officers, more than half a million children face starvation.

This brainwashing by omission has a long history. The slaughter of the First World War was suppressed by reporters who were knighted for their compliance and confessed in their memoirs.  In 1917, the editor of the Manchester Guardian, C.P. Scott, confided to prime minister Lloyd George:

‘If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow, but they don’t know and can’t know.’

The refusal to see people and events as those in other countries see them is a media virus in the West, as debilitating as Covid.  It is as if we see the world through a one-way mirror, in which ‘we’ are moral and benign and ‘they’ are not. It is a profoundly imperial view.

The history that is a living presence in China and Russia is rarely explained and rarely understood. Vladimir Putin is Adolf Hitler. Xi Jinping is Fu Man Chu. Epic achievements, such as the eradication of abject poverty in China, are barely known. How perverse and squalid this is.

When will we allow ourselves to understand? Training journalists factory style is not the answer. Neither is the wondrous digital tool, which is a means, not an end, like the one-finger typewriter and the linotype machine.

In recent years, some of the best journalists have been eased out of the mainstream. ‘Defenestrated’ is the word used. The spaces once open to mavericks, to journalists who went against the grain, truth-tellers, have closed.

The case of Julian Assange is the most shocking.  When Julian and WikiLeaks could win readers and prizes for the Guardian, the New York Times and other self-important ‘papers of record’, he was celebrated.

When the dark state objected and demanded the destruction of hard drives and the assassination of Julian’s character, he was made a public enemy. Vice President Biden called him a ‘hi-tech terrorist’. Hillary Clinton asked, ‘Can’t we just drone this guy?’

The ensuing campaign of abuse and vilification against Julian Assange – the UN Rapporteur on Torture called it ‘mobbing’ — brought the liberal press to its lowest ebb. We know who they are. I think of them as collaborators: as Vichy journalists.

When will real journalists stand up? An inspirational samizdat  already exists on the internet:

Consortium News, founded by the great reporter Robert Parry, Max Blumenthal’s  Grayzone, Mint Press News, Media Lens, Declassified UK, Alborada, Electronic Intifada, WSWS, ZNet, ICH, Counter Punch, Independent Australia, the work of Chris Hedges, Patrick Lawrence, Jonathan Cook, Diana Johnstone, Caitlin Johnstone and others who will forgive me for not mentioning them here.

And when will writers stand up, as they did against the rise of fascism in the 1930s?

When will film-makers stand up, as they did against the Cold War in the 1940s?

When will satirists stand up, as they did a generation ago?

Having soaked for 82 years in a deep bath of righteousness that is the official version of the last world war, isn’t it time those who are meant to keep the record straight declared their independence and decoded the propaganda?

The urgency is greater than ever.

Source: globalresearch.ca

Empires rise and empires fall, often through the looking glass of their own internally destructive and self-inflicted wounds.

The Roman Empire, it is said, collapsed under the circumstances of unsustainable debt driven by fiat currency, insatiable desire for war and conquest, disintegration of the moral and social fabric, corrupt degeneracy of its elite, and absorption of foreign elements that never integrated into the pre-established Roman social norms.

The Global American Empire, sometimes known as the Empire of Chaos, will regrettably meet a similar end if it continues on its current path.

As hard-working Americans gathered their families around the Thanksgiving table, more expensive from year to year, the nation’s disengaged ruling elite had no real strategy or willingness to assist their own deteriorating country or citizens. The uni-war party on both sides of the political landscape is rather full of nationalistic fervor, sympathy and passion for every nation and people not named America or American.

In a similar vein, the administration of President Joe Biden continues to be cloaked in secrecy due to a number of controversies that tangle like webs.

The latest polls indicate a significant decrease in popular support for the president and his administration, with the majority of voters agreeing that the country is falling into the abyss. Given Biden’s questionable mental capacity to serve, Americans are left wondering who actually is conducting this train as it runs off the tracks.

Moreover, the administration is perceived as a third Obama mandate, especially when it comes to foreign policy. There are even explicit suggestions that Biden should be openly viewed as the worst president in history, seeing him as the deceitful embodiment of every destructive system and regime.

His policies blatantly threaten to undermine the founding principles, upending established social norms and family structure, destabilizing the economy, engaging in entangling alliances, and violating every civil right and religious freedom that our forefathers struggled for.

Unbothered by criticism and questionable cognitive abilities, Biden and his political allies appear to be eyeing a second presidential term. This means a continued squandering of tax dollars on things like never-ending wars, foreign aid to nations that hate us, welfare for illegal immigrants via the unprotected and open borders, the World Economic Forum’s “green” agenda, persecution of political opponents, sexualization of children, and 10 percent for the Big Guy as usual.

Meanwhile, mounting discontent and public protest are audible across the political spectrum, leading to further polarization and growing resentment toward the entire ruling political elite. Both the Ukraine and Israel fallouts serve as a massive blemish on Biden’s administration, bringing about escalating global chaos and a potential World War III that could go nuclear.

It is more than evident that a number of fundamentalist organizations operate freely in the U.S. under the convenient and now clearly failed pretext of “multiculturalism,” encouraging intolerance, undermining our American traditions, and using racial and economic unrest as a weapon against the majority of the population.

America is being inundated with large numbers of people — receiving full social assistance, which adds to the economic burden — who despise it and would stop at nothing to undermine its Christian customs and values. Through cunning manipulation of ignorant voters with a mask of social problems and policies like women’s rights and abortion, LGBT rights and gay marriage, minorities’ rights, and racial divisions, radical leftist ideology is progressively gaining more power, dividing and conquering, affirmed by the spineless uni-party.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of the architects of leftist globalist policy, warned us a long time ago that Russia and China would gradually overtake America as the world’s superpowers, ushering in a new era of multipolarity.

The unaffordable national debt, economic outsourcing, and a financial system controlled by the private Federal Reserve Bank that enslaved the American people and created widening income disparity with an impoverished middle class are the main causes of the pessimistic outlook for America’s future. The world’s developing nations are investing in infrastructure while America is aging, worn out and collapsing under its own unsustainable weight.

America’s single constant investment — more than the combined GDP of the top 10 nations and with ample support from the uni-war party — is in armaments, demonstrating the single-minded continuation of the global racket — WAR.

Given that the U.S. is led by selected avaricious and corrupt people and policies, it is unclear how and when the world’s most powerful nation will fall, as well as who will fall with it into the abyss. The greatest nation on earth has been built by generations of honorable and unselfish Americans, but sadly, the worst forms of greed, corporatism, kleptocracy and never-ending hostility are destroying it.

Like many people worldwide, Americans are victims of a governmental, media and financial empire of political duopoly — one party with two faces — that continues to mislead and manipulate. This is an existential battle in which Americans must awaken from their apathy and lethargy if we are to not only survive, but leave a lasting legacy to future generations.

Will the American-created geopolitical West face its permanent sundown as freedom ventures East where the sun rises, or are we going to fight unconditionally for America First: of, for and by We the People?

Source: https://www.westernjournal.com/op-ed-collapse-global-american-empire/

Renown Chinese and World economic magazine China Investment has published in its December 2023 issue the article authored by Zivadin Jovanovic, president of the Belgrade Forum for a World of Equals titled "The Belt and Road to Better Life", which is reproduced bellow.

Link to the article: mp.weixin.qq.com

Manlio Dinucci

“Israel has known Hamas' attack plan for over a year,” reveals the New York Times. A 40-page document code-named by Israeli intelligence as "Walls of Jericho" proves it. Without specifying the date, it outlines point by point exactly the attack carried out by Hamas on October 7, 2023. The plan has circulated widely for over a year before October 7, 2023, among Israeli military and intelligence leaders. Still, they concluded that “an attack of this magnitude is beyond the capabilities of Hamas.” Last July, just three months before the attack, a veteran analyst from Unit 8200 Israel's intelligence agency warned that Hamas had conducted an intense exercise similar to the one described in the plan. But an intelligence agency colonel trashed her report. On October 7, 2023, Hamas executed the attack plan with "astonishing precision": a barrage of rockets, drones to disable security cameras and automatic machine guns along the barrier surrounding Gaza, armed men entering Israeli territory from gaps opened with bulldozers in the barrier. Exactly as it was written in the plan called the "Walls of Jericho" by Israeli intelligence.

This exceptional documentation - the political-media mainstream has essentially passed over it in silence - confirms what we have demonstrated based on facts and not opinions since episode 113 of Grandangolo entitled "September 11th in the Middle East": the leaders of Israel were not taken by surprise by the Hamas attack, but contributed to its execution to have the pretext of implementing their strategic plan. It consists of exterminating the population of Gaza: the dead and seriously injured people, mostly women and children, have so far amounted to around 60 thousand, equivalent to around 2 million dead and seriously injured in Italy (if we were in a similar situation). At the same time, the plan consists of making Gaza uninhabitable by pounding it with thousands of bombs supplied by the USA: in less than seven weeks Israeli bombings have destroyed almost 70% of the buildings in the North, and they are now doing the same in the South, while in throughout the Second World War, Allied bombing of Germany destroyed 60% of the buildings in Dresden and other cities.

In the plan of Israeli leaders, the final solution involves the deportation of the Gaza population to the Sinai desert and the cancellation of Gaza as  Palestinian territory, then they will do the same thing with the West Bank. The leaders of Israel are thus committing not only crimes of war but a real crime of genocide. This international crime consists of the methodical destruction of an ethnic, racial, or religious group as such, carried out through the extermination of individuals, the dissociation and dispersion of family groups, and the dismantling of all social, political, religious, and cultural institutions.

November 29th 2023

Dear friends,

On occasion of the Day of International Solidarity with the Palestinian People the Belgrade Forum for the World of Equals expresses sincere solidarity with the friendly people of Palestine and strong support for their long-standing just struggle for freedom, and the realization of legitimate national rights, based on the universal principles of International Law, and relevant resolutions of the UN Security Council.

We deeply sympathize Palestinian people which is exposed to the tragic humanitarian consequences of Israel`s brutal military action in the Gaza Strip. We strongly condemn the forcible displacement of the Palestinian people and the brutal attacks by Israel in the Gaza Strip, which have been followed by the indiscriminate destruction of Palestinian population, hospitals, schools and children`s institutions, which led to thousands of innocent victims, particularly among children, women and disabled persons. Contrary to the international law, Palestinian people of Gaza has been exposed to a total blockade leaving two million civilian people without food, water, electricity, medicine, fuel and other necessities.

The current military attack on the Gaza has become one of the largest humanitarian tragedies of the recent history. It is direct consequence of the 75-year of occupation by Israel, of the violent expulsion of hundreds of thousands of the Palestinian people from their land, of establishment of illegal settlements on the Palestinian territory, and of the prolonged denial of their legitimate national rights.

In order to uproot the causes of the current conflict, avoid any further human tragedies, prevent spillover of the war and create conditions for lasting peace in the
Middle East, the Belgrade Forum for a World of Equals calls that the current cease fire be extended indefinitely, and negotiations under auspices of the UN be renewed on the principles of existence of the two independent states, and ending of any occupation, in accordance with the relevant resolutions of the United Nations.

We also demand the unconditional release of all Israelis prisoners of Hamas, and Palestinians political prisoners from Israeli prisons.

We call on the international community, especially the United Nations, to urgently provide the people of Gaza and the entire Palestinian people with the necessary humanitarian and reconstruction aid, in urgent elimination of the tragic consequences of war conflicts, and for the establishment of lasting peace in the Middle East.

Friendly greetings,    
Zivadin Jovanovic
President of Belgrade Forum for a World of Equals

Mensaje de Zivadin Jovanović
Presidente del Foro de Belgrado por un Mundo de Iguales

El bloqueo de los EE.UU a es ilegal e inhumano. Contrario a la Carta de la ONU y el derecho internacional

FINAL DECLARATION OF THE ROME PEACE CONFERENCE
[Rome, October 28, 2023]

Delegates from 40 organizations and individuals from 25 countries gathered in Rome on October 27 - 28, 2023, to discuss the causes of the current war in Ukraine, the war’s impact on international peace, the dangers facing our people and the tasks of the movement for a fair and permanent peace.

Our conclusions:

- The aggressive policies of the United States and its closest allies (the West) are the root causes of the war in Ukraine and, as we see in Palestine, are pushing humanity to the brink of a third world war.
- In order to maintain a unipolar world order, the West needs imperialist domination. It aims to transform the great majority of the world’s countries into vassal states, leading to a neocolonial international system.
- The imperialist elite uses the pseudo-progressive ideological mask of “democratic globalization”, the defense of human and civil rights and the overcoming of national states as a pretext for their domination. They use institutions such as the E.U., the World Bank, the I.M.F., and W.E.F. to impose economic domination, and NATO to impose military domination.

In this framework the West:

- Attacks Russia with the clear goal to destroy it as a sovereign state and split it into a collection of weak vassal states.
- Encircles China with military bases, warships and new military alliances; escalates arms deliveries to Taiwan and continues provocations in the South China Sea in order to force China into a military response that can be used as a pretext for war.
- Continues the war provocations around the Korean peninsula.
- Supports Israel, its main instrument for its neo-colonial politics in the Middle East, in order to extinguish the Palestinian people and to force Iran into war.
- Maintains the occupation of Iraq, maintains the conflicts in Yemen, Syria, Libya, Lebanon ---- and above all continues the occupation of Palestine.
- Constantly plunders Africa and Latin America while imposing puppet governments and instigating its vassal states to invade independent countries — for example in the Sahel.
- Employs armed militias in regime change operations and organizes assassinations of Russian and Iranian intellectuals, politicians, scientists and journalists; commits terrorist actions like blowing up Nord Stream 2 .
- Through illegal unilateral coercive measures (UCMs), tries to strangle the economies of the countries that resist imperialism, callous regarding the catastrophic consequences for these countries’ populations and for the working class and all poor people in the West itself.
- Poisons and kills. The U.S. has already used nuclear weapons, not only in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also by using depleted uranium weapons (DUW) against Iraq, Serbia and now against Russia. DUW permanently contaminate the land and have killed a yet uncounted number of people.
For these reasons the Western elites amount to a permanent threat against peace and development of the world and threaten the very existence of humanity.

Our stance regarding the current war in Ukraine:

It was not on Feb. 24, 2022, that the war in Ukraine started, nor even when the U.S. incited the 2014 coup, but further back in time, with the bloody expansion of NATO towards  East Europe. The dirty wars in Yugoslavia and  the disintegration of the once strongest Balkan state, the instigation of wars in Caucasus were all phases of the same project. The war against Russia had already started right after the illegal dissolution of the USSR, which was imposed against the will of its citizens. The formation of new borders in Eastern Europe and Central Asia has been imposed outside the framework of international law.

NATO was the instrument of the U.S. to impose its control over all Europe. Its  expansion to the East was illegal and presents a permanent threat against all sovereign and independent countries.

The Russian government tried to avoid the current phase of the war, but the West, through its proxies in Ukraine, has continued targeting the Russian populations and has refused any peace agreement based on equal security, as proposed by Russia. The West’s actions made the war unavoidable.

How the West conducts the war shows that it aims at an unending escalation and to exhaust both Ukrainians and Russians to the maximum. The use of illegal weapons like cluster bombs and depleted uranium ammunition shows that the inhumane action of the western elites has been without limits. Their efforts to involve all the Eastern European countries −− as well as other countries −− in the conflict show that the West’s leading elites are trying to use the European population as cannon fodder just as they now use Ukrainians.

The only basis for solving international disputes should remain International Law, which has at its core the UN Charter. The will of the U.S. and its allies −− the so-called “rules-based order” −− should no longer be a compulsory rule for the world. .

What the world’s people need:

- A defeat of NATO in Ukraine. Without this prerequisite there is no possibility for a durable peace. A Western victory over Russia would be a new disaster for humanity. It would become a starting point for new wars in the Balkans, the Middle East and in East Asia, significantly in South China Sea and Korean peninsula,that is a protracted third world war.

- A new framework of cooperation in East Europe and Balkans, liberated from U.S.-EU control, based on equal relations and reshaping the catastrophic consequences of the West’s victory in the Cold War.

- A world of sovereign countries where peoples can determine their future, free of the global economic dictatorship imposed by the West, free of Unilateral Coercive Measures. The world needs commercial, financial, communication and transportation networks free from the West’s control. In this direction, the formation of new organizations for cooperation between states, free from Western control, and the enhanced role of the Global South in the existing international organizations are positive developments.

- A new architecture in the UN reflecting the rights of the global South and the principle of equal sovereignty for all states.

Our tasks

- We have much to do regarding information and education. There exists in NATO-EU countries and other U.S.-dominated countries a virtual total censorship. We should inform these populations that the West’s war in Ukraine is an unjust war.
- We must stop the dispatch of weapons, ammunition, equipment and personnel to the battlefield but,
- Our main task should be to liberate our countries from NATO membership, from U.S. control and from U.S. military bases. This will be the pinnacle of our solidarity to the resisting people of the world.

We have decided

1. To form a permanent network to coordinate the above tasks under the name of
“Stop World Word 3 – International Initiative for Peace”
2. To organize  international actions and  solidarity delegations to  Russia – Donbass and Palestine
3. To organize the 2nd international peace conference by the end of 2024

The World Peace Council expresses its deep concern about the circle of bloodshed in Palestine and Israel which has led already to the loss of lives of hundreds of civilians on both sides along with thousands of injuries. As WPC we state clearly that the root cause for this escalation is and remains the decades’ long Israeli occupation of the Palestinian lands, the policies of settlements, land robbing, the separation wall in the West Bank and the daily humiliation, harassment and killings of Palestinians by the regime of occupation, the thousands of Palestinian prisoners, the road blocks, the discrimination and deprivation of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people to their own state.

It would not be wise to expect that the accumulated injustice and occupation would not trigger and produce reactions of the Palestinian people who have the legitimate right to resist the occupation, as it is clearly stated in the International Law. The current Israeli government, in continuation of all previous ones, has escalated further the provocations in the West Bank, in East Jerusalem and the live of millions of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip is more of an “open air” prison.

The decision to end the current hostilities lies with the Israeli government, which tries to take advantage of the situation by heavy bombardment of the Palestinian Gaza Strip while heavy and severe responsibilities belong to the USA, the EU and their allies in the region and the world, who not only support and endorse the ongoing occupation and all its actions but also speak today hypocritically about the “right for self-defense of Israel”, neglecting provocatively any such right to the Palestinian people.

The government of Israel is actually hostile also to its own people (Jews and Arabs) by the ongoing occupation of Palestine; the current escalation proves that the denial of the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people does not allow peace and stability in the whole region and especially these hours where the danger for a regional war exists.

The WPC reiterates and underlines its demand for the end of the occupation of all Palestinian lands by Israel, the establishment of an independent State of Palestine within the borders of pre-4th June 1967, with East Jerusalem as its capital. We demand the release of all Palestinian political prisoners from Israeli jails and the right to return of all the Palestinian refugees according to the UN resolution 194. Occupation and Injustice cannot last forever!

The WPC Secretariat   8th October 2023

Alexander Wolfheze
A Serbian Triptych

Preliminaries

(*) Dedication: This three-fold ‘iconostasis’ is dedicated to an Eagle in the East: the Serbian nation and its courageous freedom fight against truly overwhelming odds.

(*) Organization: Part One of this three-part essay gives a written outline of the author’s presentation for the Serbian Eurasianist Movement in May 2023. It serves to remind the international reader of the fact that the anti-globalist struggle, at the highest level of international diplomacy and military effort, not only has an Eastern Front, where a titanic, truly world-changing battle is currently being fought over the Eastern Slav lands, but also a Balkan Front, where a smaller, true David-against-Goliath battle was recently fought over the South Slav lands. Part Two, the centrepiece of this essay, gives the author’s review of Michel Chossudovsky’s book The US-NATO War of Aggression against Yugoslavia, one of the few impartial English-language treatises on the largely ‘memory-holed’ topic of the West’s ‘controlled demolition’ of Yugoslavia. It serves to remind the reader of the Yugoslav War antecedents of the current Ukraine War: the former prefigures the latter as a stand-off between Western sea-power, which aims at imposing Atlanticist hegemony and globalist uni-polarity, and Eastern land-power, which aims at creating Eurasianist sovereignty and non-globalist multi-polarity. Part Three concludes this essay with the author’s report on his July 2023 attempt to visit General Ratko Mladic, a long-term political prisoner in a United Nations-sponsored facility located in the author’s old home city of The Hague, the Netherlands. For over twelve years now, General Mladic is serving a life sentence, allegedly for ‘war crimes’ but actually for defending his country and his people against Atlanticist aggression, while people like Clinton and Blair, the actual instigators of the first European war of aggression since 1945, walk free. This third part serves to remind the reader that doing the right thing in the present must start with righting the wrongs of the past.

(*) Acknowledgements: The author wishes to express his gratitude to Rade Drobats, Deputy President of the Belgrade Forum for Equals, for providing a review copy of Michel Chossudovsky’s book The US-NATO War, to Milorad Djoshic, Editor-in-Chief of publishing house Cirilitsa, for facilitating an important forum discussion, and to Bobana Andjelkovits, Eurasianist Movement representative, for her many useful introductions and good conversations.

Part One: ‘Unforgiven’

Presentation for the Serbian Eurasianist Movement

(Belgrade, May 2023)

Errare humanum est sed perservare diabolicum

The first time the author of this essay visited Serbia, then still at the heart of the Yugoslavian state, was in the summer of 2000, a little over a year after NATO’s ‘humanitarian intervention’ and a few months before the colour ‘Bulldozer Revolution’ overthrow of President Slobodan Milosevic. At that time, Belgrade was undoubtedly one of Europe’s most tourist-proof capital cities: that year, very few visitors from NATO aggressor states were tempted to visit Belgrade. Admittedly, it was a surreal experience: the city was studded with patches of bombed-out buildings, suffering frequent utility blackouts and many city centre shops and establishments were permanently boarded up. The train connection from Budapest was interrupted at Novi Sad due to the NATO bombing of some bridge - the journey had to be continued by car, with taxis slowly slaloming around bomb-damaged intersections on improvised field roads and endlessly queuing at supply-starved fuel stations. Although wads of worthless billion-dominated old banknotes still adorned the few tourist kiosks of the near-empty Kalemegdan park avenues, hyperinflation had already given way to the grim austerity of the Deutschmark-pegged last Yugoslav Dinar. The sanction-struck economy was clearly on its last legs: during that last summer of independent Yugoslavia, scarcity and poverty had already pushed many citizens to the standard responses of ‘disaster capitalism’: the black market, emigration and despair. The vacant stare of young soldiers in well-worn uniforms on the bus stops, the resigned patience of old women in tattered scarves scouring the markets and the paranoid alertness of dark-suited body-guards at Mercedes car doors - all these tell-tale signs pointed to the impending ‘final victory’ of ‘market economy’ and ‘democratic values’. Rump-Yugoslavia, by then reduced to Montenegro and Serbia (minus its NATO-occupied southwest), simply constituted the very last outpost of the doomed Second World, just about to disappear.

Clearly, this was the terminus of the old Eastern Bloc, the very edge of the blank slate that is supposed to come with the ‘End of History’, reached only after a full decade of the West’s full-spectrum assault on the East. The full history of this decade of systematic and coordinated Western infiltration, bribery, sabotage, blackmail, sanctions and violence perpetrated on the then-Eastern Bloc - with multiple variations on the theme of Stunde Null for each of the affected countries - has yet to be written, but it is unlikely to be well-received until some great historical change has occurred within the current Western Bloc. Any attempt at historical fact-finding regarding the defeat of the Eastern Bloc is, in fact, sure to be carefully censored as long as the victors’ narrative stands - and it will stand as long as its beneficiaries stand: the corrupt sell-outs of the old communist nomenclature, the shameless traitors of the abolished nation-states and the collaborating conmen of the neo-liberal order. In the widest sense, this beneficiary category includes all those belonging to the nouveau riche ‘money class’ that grew fat on the corpse of the Eastern Bloc during the wild 90’s ‘regime change’ decade - from the handful of oligarch billionaires who came out on top during the ‘privatization’ gold-rush, to the multitudes of now-‘legit’ black market pioneers who pocketed the last savings of the betrayed workers and peasants of East Europe’s former ‘people’s republics’. And the ex-Eastern Bloc’s successor generation, its present-day gilded youth, comfortably wrapped in a ‘virtual reality’ bubble-life of Western-style materialism and hedonism, is unlikely to be interested in the true story of their parents’ path to status and money. Their parents’ true story, crawling through the ‘90s open sewer of raw gangsterism, naked prostitution and shameless grifting, has been glossed over by a very carefully crafted narrative that permits no substantial questioning of its ideological dogmas - especially any actual content investigation of its ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ and ‘meritocracy’.

But if it is still too early to write a full history of the fall of the Eastern Bloc and the break-up of its larger states, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, it is not too early to learn some preliminary lessons about the geopolitical strategies by which these larger states were defeated, strategies that allowed the First World West to quite literally devour the Second World East. Such propaedeutics, a collection of well-researched case studies on the agony of Yugoslavia, are now available in Michel Chossudovsky’s book The US-NATO War of Aggression against Yugoslavia, which is reviewed in Part Two of this essay. It would be highly perilous for the presently rising Multipolarity and Eurasianist movements to ignore the lessons that can be learnt from Professor Chossudovsky’s historical study because it describes the globalist West’s standard multi-dimensional warfare strategies, strategies by which it not only defeated, divided and enslaved Yugoslavia but by which it exercises hegemonic power all around the world. Since the Western conquest of Yugoslavia, these same strategies, ranging from media manipulation and economic blackmail to colour revolution and military invasion, have been used against many minor and medium-sized ‘poles’ of resistance to the Western hegemon’s unipolar New World Order project, from Venezuela to Iraq, from Hungary to Hongkong and from Belarus to Yemen. More importantly, the Western hegemon has recently engaged these same strategies  - albeit with ‘updated’ technical instruments and on a much larger scale - in what appears to be meant as a final offensive against the world’s last major sovereign powers, Russia and China. The neocon-created Ukrainian phantom-state - effectively a Neo-Khazarian anti-state, is meant to handicap, challenge and degrade Russian sovereignty, most directly through proxy war, in the same way that the phantom-state of ‘Kosovo’ was (and continues to be) meant to handicap, challenge and degrade Yugoslavian and Serbian sovereignty. Anyone studying Professor Chossudovsky’s work will immediately notice the similarity in the schemes of the Western hegemon: it should be compulsory reading for all those who wish to understand current global geopolitics as well as for all those who are engaged in realpolitik resistance to the Western hegemon’s imperialist agenda.

But before proceeding to the review of Professor Chossudovsky’s book the author, who was born, raised and educated in the West, here wishes to address a few words to his ex-Yugoslav and especially his Serbian audience. It is only proper to state the obvious: that no words of apology, however well meant, would undo the evil done to Yugoslavia as a whole, and to Serbia in particular, by the Western war-mongers responsible for that evil - such words would neither bring back the dead to life nor undo the tangible (‘depleted uranium’) and intangible (‘guilt narrative’) poison that the West injected into the Balkans during the ‘90s. But is also important to state the less obvious: that no such words can be expected to be spoken unless and until the Western Empire of Lies collapses in on itself - an outcome that may be hoped for and striven to, but that only Divine Providence can have the final word on. The burden of guilt and shame, created by the Yugoslav war and many other subsequent wars of aggression farther afield, now accumulated by the collective West, is simply too great. It would require a true revolution of mind and soul (in more archaic words: repentance and atonement) to acknowledge and discharge this burden - and no such revolution is possible as long the key institutions of the Empire of Lies - NATO, EU, IMF, World Bank - endure.

The author’s memory may here serve to illustrate the true weight of this collective burden. One day during the first week of ‘Operation Noble Anvil’, i.e. the NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999, when the author was still employed by a large financial corporation in Amsterdam, during his break, he joined his colleagues in the corporate canteen where a large crowd of office staff watched the TV news on a large screen. Almost without exception, his colleagues cheered and clapped as they watched a barrage of missiles and bombs hitting Belgrade, much like a crowd of football fans watching an exciting match. Then and there, the author realized that talking and arguing with such people is useless: these people unthinkingly cheered on the death of innocent people and the destruction of precious work, for reasons that they were too stupid to understand and under pretences that they were too lazy to investigate - all from the safety of their spacy offices and their luxury apartments, filling their fat bellies from their fat paychecks. No meaningful apologies can ever come from such people: these are not merely docile ‘sheeple’ - these are accessories to murder and accomplices to evil. Since that time, these people and their brood - and there should be no mistake about it: there are still masses of them around the West - have consistently added to the mountain of their collective guilt, now weighing down on the collective West to the point of altering its collective consciousness. These people are complicit in the reign of terror that the Western ‘rules-based order’ has unleashed on the world and that has, over decades, drowned entire nations in blood, tears and sweat, first far away - Libya, Syria, Yemen and Syria to name but the most obvious places were suffering was deliberately imposed - and then nearer to home, in Ukraine. They have, again and again, swallowed the MSM lies hook and sinker (‘911’, ‘weapons of mass destruction’, ‘Russian collusion’, ‘MH17’, ‘Putin is Hitler’), they have, again and again, voted in obvious cheats, liars and war criminals (Clinton, Blair, Bush, Johnson, Biden), they have, again and again, enthusiastically supported degeneracy exports (‘Femen’, ‘Moscow Pride’, ‘SOVA Centre’) and they have, again and again, generously funded war-mongering puppets (Saakashvili, Guaidó, Zelensky).

By now, the West - one could say: ex-West because it lost the soul that gave it life[i] - is so deeply mired in sin, having deliberately distanced itself from redemption, that the crimes it has committed, and continues to commit, at the collective level have surpassed the level of mere ‘deadly sins’: these sins are now attaining the level of what, once upon a (pre-Vatican II) time, the now effective defunct Catholic Church recognized as peccata clamantia: ‘screaming sins’, i.e. sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance, designed to deliberate provoke the Wrath of the Creator. There is, however, one level of sin deeper still: the unforgivable sin, i.e. the kind of persistence in mortal sin, without penitence, that is inspired by sheer malice. In the final analysis, this ultimate sin involves the sinner’s self-condemnation, by-passing divine mercy by the sinner’s free and conscious choice, to hell. Of course, hell on earth is exactly what the West’s radical nihilism, taken to its logical consequences, aims at. Within the ex-West, that hell has already been realized in many ways and many spheres. One need only look at the unspeakable filth of the West’s online ‘sexual liberation’, the industrial-scale genital mutilation of its children, the massive child sacrifice resulting from its ‘abortion’ and ‘vaccination’ rituals, the perversely inverted ‘justice system’ that glorifies criminals (‘BLM’) and punishes the innocent (‘J6’), the institutionalized racism that gives preferential treatment of colonizing invaders (represented as being ‘asylum seekers’) while dispossessing innocent natives (represented as having ‘white privilege’) and the shameless lies and false flags by which it justifies its ever-escalating wars of imperialist conquest, aimed at carving up resource-rich states that dare resist its demands (Libya, Syria, Russia). Once these sins, deadly and screaming to Heaven for vengeance, do finally reach the status of unforgivable sin, a time of reckoning is sure to follow. Without excluding a truly (eschatology-) ‘based’ scenario, in which the ex-West drags all of humanity into a fire-and-brimstone final reckoning, we should remember that it is also possible - and it would not be the first time in human history - that the Wrath of the Creator is channelled through human agents. Sometimes, the avenging angel is just a man who decides he has had enough. It is not inconceivable that, at some point in the not-too-distant future, enough good men will have had enough and decide that they will settle the score once and for all. The Eurasianist mission is to work towards just such a brotherhood:

эа вашу и нашу свободу.

Part Two: The Yugoslav Crucible Revisited

Review of Michel Chossudovsky, The US-NATO War of Aggression against Yugoslavia (Belgrade Forum for Equals: Belgrade, 2021)

Vae victis

Preliminaries

(*) Overall assessment: Chossudovsky’s book is one of the very few solid, i.e. professionally researched and historically contextualized, English-language publications on the Yugoslav conflict in which the author is brave enough to take draw honest conclusions about its root causes, narrative repercussions and moral implications. The main reason Chossudovsky manages to avoid standard-narrative pitfalls, such as ‘end of history’ teleology or ‘clash of civilization’ schematism, is that he manages to consistently maintain an older and more realistic analytic model, viz. the Marxist model of capital accumulation and imperialist expansion as important geopolitical factors. Especially useful contributions by Professor Chossudovky are his depth-analysis case study studies of specific episodes from the long-drawn out agony of Yugoslavia, such as the strategic and financial foundations of Camp Bondsteel (appendix to his Ch. 5), the eco-warfare bombing of the Panchevo petrochemical plant (his Ch. 6) and the human impact of NATO’s uses of depleted uranium ammunition in a de facto campaign of low-intensity nuclear warfare (his Ch. 7). Chossudovsky ruthlessly exposes a number of deeply disturbing  - and equally deeply memory-holed - ‘hybrid warfare’ strategies of the West’s war on Yugoslavia, including the West’s deliberate and extensive employment of drug mafias and terror networks, and he shows how the West’s take-down of Yugoslavia was in some ways a ‘test run’, after which they became standard instruments in the globalist cabal’s foreign policy tool kit.

(*) Review aim: Above all, this review aims to ‘operationalize’ the lessons of Chossudovsky’s book, i.e. to show how they are useful in exposing the main strategies and the overall aims of the West-based globalist cabal in their ‘inverse crusade’ to make the world ‘safe for tyranny’ ever since the end of the Cold War. If what the West did to Yugoslavia in the ‘90s is taken as a comprehensive ‘test run’ of full-spectrum ‘hybrid warfare’, then what the West is now doing to Russia in the ‘20s may be looked at as the ultimate test of the ‘hybrid warfare’ tools and mechanisms ‘tested’ in Yugoslavia. It should be noted that this perspective in no way diminishes the sufferings and injustices inflicted upon the people of Yugoslavia: rather, the lessons that can be learnt from the globalist cabal’s successful dismantling and recolonization of Yugoslavia in the ‘90s should be taken to heart by those tasked with preserving the integrity and independence of Russia in the ‘20s - and by all those dedicated to the defence of all authentic forms of state sovereignty and national identity. Above all, the various means and mechanisms of the globalist cabal’s ‘hybrid warfare’ should be understood as mutually reinforcing, continually improved and carefully selected tools and mechanisms from within a fairly standard ‘tool kit’. Their ultimate aim is nothing less than ‘multi-dimensional’ and ‘full-spectrum’ dominance: not merely the subjugation of nations, groups and individuals and the achievement of political and economic control, but their essential alteration and the utter destruction of their original identities. The ever more transparently anti-human, trans-human and post-human nature of the globalist hegemon’s policies is explained by the ever more consistent, sophisticated and invasive application of these tools and mechanisms in pursuit of total control. Currently, the globalist cabal is engaged in a crucial campaign in its quest for world dominance: its ‘Ukraine War’ campaign against Russia aims at taking down its single most important state-sovereign challenger in the international agenda. It cannot afford to lose this campaign and is bound to use its entire ‘multi-dimensional warfare’ arsenal: it is important that those entrusted with the defence of state sovereignty and national identity in the face of the globalist onslaught, now reaching its climax in the West’s war on Russia, a take full cognizance of the precedents and antecedents of the West’s war on Yugoslavia. This applies especially to those operating in the very vanguard of cognitive warfare - above all, the Eurasianist movement.

(*) Reader alert: The lessons to be learnt from the West’s war on Yugoslavia are inevitably shaped by historical and geopolitical settings and well-educated and tradition-informed readers will appreciate the importance of a firm grasp of history and geography as the necessary basis of classical international diplomacy and politics, i.e. the realm of pre-globalist international relations and statecraft. But this appreciation - and this may seem to be a contradiction but is anything but - also constitutes a grave danger in the sense that it may skew the reader’s view, blinding him to the fact that the globalist cabal acts, thinks and feels in direct defiance of history and geography - and of reality itself. It insists upon altering reality, completely and forever: it seeks to rule the world and reshape it, erasing history, overcoming geography and destroying reality. The more intelligent of the globalist cabal’s puppets and mouthpieces, the Blinkens, the Nulands, the Sunaks, the Macrons, are not blind ignoramuses: they just deliberately chose to ignore history, geography and reality. They are driven by a ‘greater’ vision that is stamped upon them and maintained in the very peculiar ‘cultic bubble’ void in which they ‘live’. Essentially, it is an anti-human, trans-human and post-human vision - a vision that undoubtedly anticipates and prepares the as-yet-unrealized vision of the Antichrist, who long ago deliberately set himself up against the reality of creation. Thus, the tools and mechanisms of the globalist cabal’s arsenals are deliberately applied against history, geography and reality. The entire package - military aggression (from ‘humanitarian intervention’ to ‘regime change’), economic warfare (from ‘sanction regime’ to ‘market reform’), bio-leninist subversion (from ‘women’s suffrage’ to ‘critical race theory’), psycho-social deconstruction (from ‘MK Ultra’ experiments to ‘transgender’ legislation), biotechnical control (from to ‘morning-after pill’ to ‘vaccination mandate’) - has only one direction and one exit. The anti-globalist East now experiences the ruthless real-world application of these tools and mechanisms to its collective body and mind, but it should know that there is something still worse than being killed and maimed in body and mind. The still-standing East only has to look to the already-fallen West, to look at its zombified masses, and it will know what it means for the soul to be killed and maimed:

fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul

but rather fear Him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell

- Matthew 10:28

Tools and techniques

After showing how the demolition of Yugoslavia was planned by the US-led West as far back as the early ‘80s (tracing such planning back to the Reagan administration’s 1982 National Decision Directive 64), Chossudovsky groups the tools and mechanisms by which this demolition was achieved into two main categories: (1) economic-financial and (2) political-military.

(Ad 1) The West’s economic-financial assault on Yugoslavia involved the ‘opening up’, through a combination of bullying, bribery and blackmail at the highest policy-making levels, of the Yugoslav economy to neo-liberal (‘Reagonomic’/’Thatcherite’) ‘free market’ mechanisms. The dictates of the high finance-directed ‘international institutions’ (International Monetary Fund, World Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Bank of International Settlement), always imposed with the help of and for the benefit of ‘venture capitalist’ ‘investors’ such as George Soros, resulted in a round of economic ‘shock therapy’ (‘market reforms’, ‘austerity programs’) that destroyed the Yugoslav economy and Yugoslav society as well as - indirectly - the Yugoslav state. The de-regulation of foreign trade led to grotesque ‘dumping’ practices: markets were flooded with cheaply imported commodities, elbowing out domestic producers. The abolition of protective trade barriers led to the mass insolvency of state- and worker-owned enterprises: these found themselves suddenly and artificially ‘indebted’ and forced into fire-sale liquidation. These state- and worker-owned assets, including real estate, industrial facilities and inventory stocks, were then sold off to foreign ‘vulture fund’ investors at bargain prices: local currency-nominated ‘book values’ were signed off by corrupt bureaucrats and managers who were either bribed or ‘partnered in’. These - largely communist party - apparatchiks were directly complicit in the economic demolition of their own nation’s economy and state.[ii] In the course of ‘liberalizing’ foreign investment legislation, state revenue became collateral for foreign debt servicing, which meant that a sovereign economic policy was no longer possible. At the same time, foreign donor support and international reconstruction loans were made conditional on the implementation of legal and political ‘structural reforms’, allowing foreign powers to effectively impose their legal frames and political ideas on Yugoslavia. Yugoslav federal government control was systematically degraded and thwarted as loan conditions were imposed, credit lines were threatened and budget controls were imposed. Crucially, transfer payments by the federal government funds to Yugoslavia’s constituent republics and autonomous regions were interrupted and federal government tax powers were devolved to these republics and regions: federal government authority was fatally compromised. At the same time, Yugoslavia’s social fabric started coming apart under sheer economic pressure: plant closure and budget cuts led to mass unemployment, ‘austerity’ imposed wage freezes and ‘privatization’ imposed utility price-rises led to collapsing living standards. Faced with reform-mandated currency devaluation, shrinking government tax revenue and ballooning foreign currency-denominated external debt the federal government resorted to money printing, leading to skyrocketing inflation. Between 1990 and 1994, Yugoslavia went through five currencies and multiple cycles of hyper-inflation, ending only when the final Yugoslav dinar (Novi Dinar), the YUM, was pegged to the Deutsch Mark, replacing the previous dinar, the YUG at a rate of 1 YUM to 13 million YUG (some months before, the YUG had itself replaced the earlier YUO at a rate of 1 YUG to 1 billion YUO). Over this time, the destruction of industry, the roll-back of workers’ rights and the dismantling of the welfare state, meant that the mass of people lost their rights and livelihoods: rights and livelihoods that had been carefully built up over decades were erased in the course of a few months. Ordinary people, wage-earners, the unemployed, the sick, and pensioners, were exposed to pre-modern living conditions, often thrown into Dickens-style poverty and squalor. The social fall-out was catastrophic, as evidenced by mass emigration, spiking crime rates, endemic substance abuse and widespread prostitution. Even today, Yugoslavia’s successor states still struggle to overcome the impact of Yugoslavia’s ‘controlled demolition’: the legacy of mass emigration, the ‘brain-drain’ of young professionals, the exodus from the countryside, the degradation of honest work and dignified retirement, the mafia culture of gangster survivalism and the culture-distorting impact of decades of negative birth-rates are heavy mortgages, weakening the successor states’ social fabric and stunting their socio-cultural development. As usual, however, history is written by the victors: Administered in several doses since the 1980s, NATO-backed neo-liberal medicine has helped destroy Yugoslavia. Yet, the global media [and academia] ha[ve] carefully overlooked or denied its central role. Instead, they.. sing.. the praises of the ‘free market’… The social and political impact of economic restructuring in Yugoslavia has been carefully erased from our collective understanding. Opinion-makers instead dogmatically present cultural, ethnic, and religious divisions as the sole cause of war and devastation. …Such false consciousness not only masks the truth, it also prevents us from acknowledging precise historical occurrences. Ultimately, it distorts the true sources of social conflict. When applied to the former Yugoslavia, it obscures the historical foundations of South Slavic unity, solidarity and identity in what constituted a multiethnic society. (p. 43-4) …The eventual ‘reconstruction’ of Yugoslavia formulated in the context of the ‘free market’ reforms and financed by international debt largely purport to create a safe haven for foreign investors rather than to rehabilitate the country’s economic and social infrastructure. The… national economy will be dismantled, [Western] banks will take over financial institutions, local industrial enterprises which have not been totally destroyed will be driven into bankruptcy. The most profitable state assets will be transferred into the hands of foreign capital under the World Bank sponsored privatisation programme. In turn, [this]

‘strong economic medicine’ imposed by external creditors will contribute to further boosting a criminal economy… which feeds on poverty and dislocation. (80-1)

(Ad 2) The West’s initial political-military strategy involved the systematic fostering of secessionist political movements and the undercover organization of armed secessionist militias in the constituent republics and autonomous regions of Yugoslavia, which was a federal state inhabited by a large number of different ethnicities with widely diverging languages, religions and culture. This strategy aimed at undermining Yugoslavia’s relatively young and tenuous state identity, which dated back to the assertion of a common Southern Slav national idea during the weakening and the collapse of the Ottoman and Hapsburg rule throughout the Balkan between the early 19th Century rise of the independent Serbian state and the early 20th Century fall of the Austria-Hungarian state. Yugoslav state identity was based on the shared history, the common culture and the Serbo-Croatian lingua franca. After Yugoslavia’s liberation struggle during World War II, this state identity was expanded to include a state ideology of moderate ‘market-socialism’ at home and ‘non-alignment’ abroad. As ‘market socialism’ allowed Yugoslav society a balance between the extremes of capitalism’s Darwinist ‘war of all against all’ and communism’s all-levelling ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ domestically, so ‘non-alignment’ allowed the Yugoslav state to balance between the West Bloc and the East Bloc internationally. Thus, Yugoslavia managed to remain truly independent during the Cold War, when almost all of Europe was effectively reduced to vassal status under either the United States or the Soviet Union. Yugoslavia also gained diplomatic leverage and international prestige as the de facto centre of the Non-Alignment Movement, founded in Belgrade in 1961 at the initiative of President Tito, supported by international heavy-weights such as India’s Nehru, Indonesia’s Sukarno, Egypt’s Nasser and Ghana’s Nkrumah: it effectively led much of the Third World on the ‘third way’ of non-alignment. As the Cold War drew to a close and as the communist East Bloc started to dissolve, however, Yugoslavia could no longer sustain its ideological and geopolitical balancing act: its sovereignty at home and its status abroad had been a function of the ‘bipolar’ Cold War global balance of power and were no longer sustainable at the start of the ‘unipolar’ era: after the fall of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, Yugoslavia faced the full, unchallenged might of Atlanticist power alone. The Western purpose was to split Yugoslavia, a medium-size, semi-autarkic state of considerable demographic, economic and military weight, into a patchwork of small-size, import-dependent vassal-states unable to challenge the hegemonic power of Anglosphere-based Atlanticist hegemon. Divide et impera. Ideally, from an Atlanticist perspective, would be an ex-Yugoslavian space crowded by a maximum number of sub-sovereign successor states, thoroughly alienated from each other and each separately subject to ‘foreign debt rescheduling’ and ‘structural readjustment negotiations’. From a larger historical perspective, the ‘leaders’ of these successor states would be nothing but collaborators with an informal but no less real Atlanticist occupation regime. As Chossudovsky points out repeatedly, these ‘leaders’ are nothing but vassals in a system of globalist colonial rule imposed on the former Yugoslavia, as proven by the fact that they enthusiastically lined up to join globalist trans-nationalist power structures - EU, NATO - as soon as possible. In those cases where successor states are so grossly artificial that joining these formal structures is problematic, as in Bosnia and Kosovo, openly neo-colonial regimes are imposed, with globalist-written ‘constitutions’, globalist-cloned legal systems and un-elected, non-native UN ‘high representatives’. The West’s political-military campaign to achieve Yugoslavia’s formal division into successor states, more or less along ethnic and religious lines, began with covert sponsorship of separatist politicians and militias (ranging from intelligence and funding to military training and equipment), it continued with overt propaganda for separatist movements (including ‘atrocity propaganda), it expanded to include diplomatic pressure (newly-united Germany obliged its Atlanticists masters by initiating the ‘diplomatic recognition’ of break-away states) and it finally peaked in direct military intervention (in Bosnia and Kosovo). Of course, the West’s political-military campaign ran simultaneously with the West’s economic-financial campaign: the latter undermined Yugoslavia’s civilian economy and it destroyed Yugoslavia’s social cohesion to such an extent that its people lost their trust in the old system, the old state and the old leadership, making them susceptible to the Western-sponsored narratives of ‘market reforms’ and ‘national self-determination’. Even so, the demolition of Yugoslavia was far from easy: the Yugoslav state died hard and it only did so after the application of the full force of Western military might. The greatest challenge to the Western campaign of demolition was Serbian nationalism: in many ways, the first Yugoslav state had been the natural extension and crowning achievement of Serbia’s struggle for independence. After a series of ferocious freedom fights against its old-empire Ottoman and Hapsburg overlords and a series of brutal border wars against its new-nation Italian, Hungarian, Bulgarian and Albanian neighbours, Serbia had effectively created Yugoslavia as the logical expression of its maximal territorial aspirations (the unification of all Serbs and their fellow South Slaves in one state) and its maximal strategic needs (the creation of a land-corridor to allied Greece, broad access to the Adriatic Sea and a territorial buffer around its capital). The Western demolition of Yugoslavia, however, required more than the mere roll-back of Serbia’s gains: it also required the permanent impairment of Serbia’s status as a regional power. This means permanently ‘disabling’ and ‘handicapping’ Serbia, which is why it has been reduced to a small land-locked state, why it has been isolated as an island surrounded by a sea of EU-NATO enemies and why it has been made to suffer the amputation of sacred soil in Kosovo - so that it can never recover and stand up again. Aside from the fact that the Serbian state’s tradition of political independence and military prowess was bound to make Serbian revanchism inevitable, the main reason for the West’s implacable animosity towards Serbia was Serbia’s natural alliance with Russia. Throughout its existence, which overlapped with the late 19th and early 20th Century ‘Great Game’ period and Russia’s expansion towards Tsargrad-Constantinople and the Turkish Straits, the Serbian state had been Russia’s most consistent ally: fellow Slav and fellow Orthodox Russia had been Serbia’s faithful sponsor, ally and protector. It was, in fact, Russia’s commitment to the preservation of Serbian independence in the face of the Hapsburg intervention that triggered the outbreak of World War I. At the level of nationalist sentiment, Serbia’s historically intimate ties to Russia did survive Russia’s switch from devout Orthodoxy to communist atheism: the first Yugoslav state gave shelter to large numbers of White Russian refugees and the second Yugoslav state was founded on the strategic partnership between its founders and the Soviet Union. After the fall of the Soviet Union and communism, Serbia and Russia are again naturally aligned. This alignment follows from simple geo-political logic: they have a common enemy, viz. the Atlanticist hegemon invading the former Serbian and Russian imperial spaces. But this also follows simple cultural-historical logic: both are crowned with the double-headed eagle of Byzantium and both are called to defend Europe and Christianity against the double-tongued Atlanticist-globalist Empire of Lies:

they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength

they shall mount up with wings as eagles

they shall run, and not be weary

and they shall walk, and not faint

- Isaiah 40:31

Time-lines and fault-lines

This review of Chossudovsky’s book does not need to reconstruct the entire time-line of the prolonged agony of ex-Yugoslavia at the hands of its Atlanticist tormentors. Of course, Chossudovsky’s book focuses on the culminating stage of Yugoslavia’s defeat: the ‘Kosovo War’ of 1999, but he does repeatedly pay attention to its earlier (Slovenian, Croatian, Bosnian) and the later (‘Bulldozer Revolution’, ‘Macedonian Insurgency’) stages. It is important to note that Chossudovsky does so in terms of ‘parallel viewing’ and ‘pattern recognition’: he clearly shows how it is useful to view the entire process of Yugoslavia’s demolition - spread out over one and half decades if formally defined by the state’s break-up from 25 June 1991 (Slovenian and Croatian independence) to 3 June 2006 (Montenegrin independence) - as one single campaign. Or rather as a coherent ‘rolling operation’ showing consistent strategy patterns: …Washington’s military-intelligence ploy is… to replicate pattern[s]: …to fracture… territory, foster internal social divisions and fuel ethnic strife. The design is to destroy all social and political ties between [groups], who have coexisted for more than half a century within a multi-ethnic society. These socio-ethnic divisions are deliberately created so as to curb all forms of social resistance [and], more importantly, …to prevent the development of a broader ‘common front’ against the enemy. (p. 139) One very specific strategy pattern was the re-use of the personnel employed by Atlanticist organizations for the neo-colonial occupation and administration of various parts of Yugoslavia: [NATO] personnel and UN bureaucrats previously stationed in Croatia and Bosnia have been routinely reassigned to Kosovo. (p. 96) Many strategic patterns can be discerned within the domain of ‘information warfare’. On the one hand, the Western MSM consistently portrayed Atlanticist military aggression as ‘justified’ as a response to refugee crises that were actually deliberately engineered and to atrocity stories that were entirely fabricated. Thus, NATO air strikes against Yugoslav targets were consistently portrayed as ‘humanitarian interventions’ meant to ‘save’ Bosniaks in 1992 and Kosovars in 1999. On the other hand, the Western MSM consistently ignored the massive refugee crises and very real atrocities caused by Atlanticist-sponsored anti-Yugoslav militias. Thus, the systematic reign of terror unleashed by the KLA (‘Kosovo Liberation Army’, the ethnic Albanian militia set up by Western intelligence services to destabilize south-west Serbia) during the Kosovo crisis was deliberately glossed over. The massacres of civilians in Kosovo [we]re not disconnected acts of revenge by civilians by so-called ‘rogue elements’ within the KLA, as claimed by NATO and the UN. They [we]re part of a consistent and coherent pattern. The intent and result of the KLA sponsored atrocities have been to trigger the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Serbs, Roma and other minorities in Kosovo. (p. 89) In the reviewer’s opinion, however, the most important strategy pattern distinguished by Chossudovsky is the economic strategy pattern by which Yugoslavia’s successor states were effectively turned into Western colonies, with (‘privatized’) natural resources plundered and (‘debt interest’) tribute extracted to boost the profits of Western ‘venture capital’. An important part of the Western economic war strategy vis-à-vis Yugoslavia was to let war pay for itself: neo-colonial profits extracted from Western-conquered parts of Yugoslavia were used first to pay for the maintenance of occupation troops, (‘peacekeepers’, ‘security presence’) and then for the build-up of the armed forces of the newly ‘independent’ successor-states, with handsome profits boosting the Western military-industrial complex, including many private military contractors. Chossudovsky gives a particularly insightful analysis of how Camp Bondsteel (the grande dame in a network of US bases running both sides of the border between Kosovo and Macedonia – p. 106) was funded, making the fortunes of the defence contractors involved, including US Vice President Cheney’s Halliburton company (cf. appendix to his Ch. 5). In the final analysis, the West managed to make the chunk-by-chunk conquest and occupation of Yugoslavia pay for itself. In passing, Chossudovsky mentions that this very same strategic pattern, virtually ignored by Western historians and journalists, also applies to other - earlier and later - Western wars of aggression: few people realize Vietnam and Iraq were both billed for the West’s war expenses as a condition for the lifting of economic sanctions and the resumption of diplomatic relations.

This review of Chossudovsky’s book does not need to reconstruct all the ethnic, religious and cultural fault-lines that the Western aggressors managed to exploit during their campaign to bring down the Yugoslav state. It is important to note, however, that he sheds light on many frequently overlooked episodes in the long-drawn out Western campaign against Yugoslavia. Thus, he reminds the reader of the true background, the true nature and the true impact of ‘Operation Storm’, i.e. Western-backed Croatian conquest of the internationally unrecognized Serbian break-away proto-state of Kraina in August 1995. ‘Operation Storm’ involved foreign investors (eying newly-discovered coal and oil deposits) guiding Croatian policy making, foreign specialists (including retired US generals and German mercenaries) guiding Croatian military actions and foreign media ignoring massive suffering among the Kraina Serb civilian population (at least 420 killed and up to 180.000 displaced). Chossudovsky also reminds the reader of the equally overlooked episode of the ‘Macedonian Insurgency’, i.e. the Western-backed terror campaign by the NLA (‘National Liberation Army’, the ethnic Albanian militia set up by Western intelligence services to destabilize Macedonia) between January and November 2001. Similar to the KLA, its equivalent in Kosovo, the NLA was set up by Western intelligence services, funded by Western-facilitated drugs networks, trained by Western military contractors and, once put in action, directly supported by Western armed forces. The NLA’s terror campaign in north-west Macedonia served a similar purpose to the KLA’s terror campaign in south-west Serbia: to create ethnically cleansed base territories for these groups, which are meant to serve as safe zones for criminal activities and Western military bases, to weaken the central government and, last but not least, to generate long-term revenue for the West’s military-industrial complex. For Western policymakers, the ‘Macedonian Insurgency’ was a far easier operation to pull off than the ‘Kosovo War, because it was aided and abetted by corrupt Macedonian government officials and treacherous Macedonian army officers. The cost in terms of civilian suffering, however, was considerable: at least up to 100 dead and 140.000 displaced, almost all ethnic Macedonians and Bulgarians - this in one of Europe’s smaller countries, inhabited by only 1,8 million people. Once again, the true background, true nature and true impact of this campaign of terror and ethnic cleansing were either entirely ignored or thoroughly distorted in the Western press.

Lest we forget the true depths to which the West’s Empire of Lies has sunken over the last decades, it is only proper that we occasionally remind ourselves of all the injustices and crimes described in Chossudovsky’s book. And of the fact that we should not despair of justice:

the eyes of the Lord are in every place, beholding the evil and the good

- Proverbs 15:3

Pirates and prostitutes

Over the last four or three decades, under the impact of transnationalist power accumulation covered by liberal-normative ideology, all the formerly sovereign states of the West have undergone a slow but steady - albeit recently ‘reset’-accelerated - process of politicide. The power once vested in these states, and by extension the political power once held by the nations represented by their governments, has been almost entirely erased, to be replaced by a faceless ‘globalist’ power, increasingly overtly totalitarian in character as the ‘reset’ progresses. The power of the globalist regime ruling the West is financial and economic in nature, it is embodied in international banks and multi-national cooperations, and its interests are served by trans-national institutions, ranging from truly global organizations such as the UN, the IMF and the World Bank to large regional organizations such as the NATO, the EU and the ECB. Under this transnational level, the globalist regime’s political agenda is entirely negative: it aims at preventing, thwarting and undermining all forms of political action that would threaten the maximal exploitation of natural and human resources. Any exercise of political power that threatens the interests of globalist high finance and globalist big business - effectively the unrestrained and borderless rule of bankster usury and capitalist exploitation - is anathema to the globalist regime: any sovereign state threatening open borders, any religious institution threatening social atomization and any traditional family-structure incompatible with narcissist consumerism is will inevitably find itself the target of globalist demolition. Under the trans-national level of globalist control, the true aim of the globalist regime is the creation and maintenance of an anarcho-tyrannical anti-order: a permanent ‘free for all’ economic ‘jungle war’ of ‘all-against-all’, creating a ‘market-society’ in which literally everything is for sale, including people and ideas. To put it bluntly: the ideal globalist ‘state’ - referring to the psycho-dynamic ‘state’ of a people rather than a government - would only have gangsters and prostitutes as its inhabitants, with minor variants within the first category (pirates, pimps) as well as the last (pop-stars, porn-stars). Ideally, such a ‘pirate republic’ would be ‘charismatically’ led by the 21st Century equivalent of the 20th Century ‘five family’-style mafia council: a WEF/Davos-style Chief Executive Officer/Public Relation Manager congregation of compradors-in-chief. In such an ideal ‘state’, which may be provisionally termed the Gangster-Prostitute State (GPS) - of course, Made in USA - any deviation would be considered an anachronism and an obstacle: it would not leave any space for non-materialist vocations and non-hedonistic ideas. In the GPS, there would be no place for martial heroism, knightly honour, priestly piety, monastic celibacy, philosophical contemplation, scholarly wisdom, paternal responsibility, maternal love, marital fidelity or pre-marital chastity. There would be no love of any object except the ‘self’, baby boomer-style inflated into the narcissist stratosphere: no love for nation, tribe, family, spouse - least of all God. To the extent that any such anachronistic notions would still marginally exist, the GPS would be bound to erase them from the public sphere for the sake of the undisturbed ‘bubble life’ of the masses: it would be bound to impose an all-levelling weight of hyper-egalitarian legislation, to instil an anti-meritocratic ethos and to create an all-smothering blanket of perversion-propaganda. Throughout the Western world, huge strides towards the GPS utopia have already been made on each of these three fronts: tradition-killing matriarchy and xenocracy (the rule of post-gender ‘women’ and post-racial ‘immigrants’), ethos-killing plutocracy and idiocracy (the rule of the corruption-only ‘rich’ and the paper-only ‘higher educated’) and civilization-killing kakocracy and pornocracy (the rule of the lowest and dirtiest) are already facts of life. Throughout the Western world, however, there remains a significant residue of ‘legacy institutions’ (be it monarchic, parliamentary, ecclesiastic, academic, artisanal, entrepreneurial, literary or artistic in nature), delaying the full flowering of the GPS. Of course, the early ‘20s’ Great Reset has greatly accelerated the take-down of these institutions: ‘Covid’ lockdowns undermined the economically independent small business sector and the cognitively conservative middle class, ‘BLM’ activism undermined public safety and the rule of law, the ‘Biden’ coup undermined representative government and freedom of speech and the ‘Ukraine’ campaign undermined the economic system and global security - but the West has yet to achieve full-blown GPS utopia.

For a sneak preview of GPS utopia in action, it is necessary to look East, to ex-Yugoslavia, where a ‘model GPS’ of sorts has already been created in Kosovo, a.k.a. the ‘black hole of Europe’. In some ways, Kosovo may be considered the geopolitical equivalent of an anti-gravity experiment: within this ‘black hole’ the rules of geopolitics are suspended. The founding of the entirely artificial statelet of Kosovo constitutes the crowning achievement in terms of globalist ‘state building’: it embodies the highest achievemeny of what the globalist ‘rules-based order’ may achieve if left unopposed. Chossudovsky analyses the genesis of the Kosovo ‘state’ in great detail, describing it as a mafia-run pirate-state ‘safe haven’ for globalism’s many grey and black channels, created as a de facto safe zone for drugs traders, arms dealers, organ traders, people smugglers, money-launderers and terror-funders, and as a ‘safe house’ for compromised, redundant or retired ‘assets’. It is an arrangement that equally benefits the local mafia underlings, who are promoted to ‘legit’ status and gain legal immunity in charge of their own ‘state’, and their globalist overlords, who can ‘skim’ Kosovo for resource profits and showcase Kosovo as a model achievement of ‘international governance’. Western big business was able to buy up Kosovo’s mines (copper, zinc, gold, silver, coal) and industry (metal smelting plants, power plants, battery plants) at fire sale prices, Western high finance was able to take-over Kosovo’s currency (imposing the Deutsch Mark and then the Euro) and banks (taking over expropriated and excluded Yugoslav banks) and Western NGOs were able to sign lucrative ‘assistance’ and ‘training’ contracts (as in George Soros’ Open Society branch office in Pristina in support of ‘governance development’.

The vital link between the Kosovo mafia ‘government’ and its globalist overlords is found in the narcotics trade, which started with the KLA being funded from the highly lucrative Balkans narcotics route, linking corrupt Turkish officials to the East with Albanian emigrants to the West: …the KLA is sustained by organised crime with the tacit approval of the US and its allies. Following the pattern set during the war in Bosnia, public opinion has been carefully misled. The multibillion dollar Balkans narcotics trade has played a crucial role in ‘financing the conflict’ in Kosovo in accordance with Western economic, strategic and military objectives. (p. 48) …Western intelligence agencies have developed a complex relationship to the illegal narcotics trade. In case after case, drug money laundered in the international banking system has financed covert operations. …The pattern in Kosovo is similar to other CIA covert operations in Central America, Haiti and Afghanistan, where ‘freedom fighters’ were financed through the laundering of drug money. (p. 50) …The extensive links of the Kosovo Liberation Army to organized crime and the Balkans narcotics trade were not seen by the ‘international community’ as an obstacle to the installation of ‘democracy’ and ‘good governance’. (p. 41) The narcotics trade, however, was not the only ‘cash cow’ that was milked to raise the KLA: since the early ‘90s, with the international embargo on Yugoslavia and the Greek blockade of Macedonia, a triangular narcotics-oil-arms trade network had developed in the Balkans, expanded to Western Europe through the increasing corporation between Albanian and Italian crime syndicates in arms smuggling and prostitution racketeering. Soon, not only simple light arms but sophisticated anti-aircraft, anti-armour and electronic surveillance systems (the latter connected to NATO satellites) found their way to the KLA. At the same time, the KLA was provided with professional and motivated cadres through the enlistment of mujahideen fighters, often trained by Al-Qaeda affiliates in secret camps in Afghanistan and Bosnia. All this took place with the full knowledge of, and indeed at the instigation of, Western intelligence services.

The built-up of the KLA, its funding, equipment, intelligence and training were all instigated, funded and facilitated by the West and the same applies to the KLA’s terror campaign: in fact, Chossudovsky states that [t]he KLA killings [of civilians] were ordered by NATO. Blamed on Serbian police and armed forces, th[ey] were used as a pretext and justification to wage a ‘humanitarian war’ on Yugoslavia. The ties of the KLA to organized crime were actively fostered by the US and NATO. The result was the formation of what is best described as a ‘mafia state’. (p. 45) In the aftermath of the NATO air war, the Western occupation powers aided and abetted the KLA’s subsequent reign of terror, protecting KLA commanders responsible for crimes committed against the Serbian, Roma, Gorani and Turkish minorities, under the pretext of suspected collaboration with the Yugoslav authorities but often just as a simple settling of personal scores. Those Western-created organizations that were specifically supposed to uphold law and order, the peace-keeping ‘Kosovo Force’ (KFOR) and the ‘International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia’ (ICTY) above all, consistently turned a blind eye to the systematic campaign of confiscation, looting, arson, abduction, rape and murder by the KLA, with the Western MSM either ignoring or white-washing these atrocities as ‘regrettable but justifiable acts of vengeance’. Thus, through their direct involvement in NATO’s military action (in a particularly cowardly form, viz. a push-button air war), their indirect involvement in the KLA’s terror campaign and their deliberate inaction in the face of the KLA’s subsequent lawlessness, Western governments… bear a heavy burden of responsibility in the deaths of civilians, the impoverishment of both the ethnic Albanian and Serbian populations and the plight of those who were brutally uprooted from towns and villages in Kosovo as a result of the bombings. (p. 56) Thus, the geopolitical void in which the ‘Kosovo’ CPS took shape was created by the West: Chossudovsky’s analyses leave no room for ‘plausible deniability’ cover stories.

After the Kosovo War and the KLA take-over, Chossudovsky describes how Kosovo became a true ‘narco-democracy under NATO protection’ (Chossudovsky, 79): [n]arcodollars from the multibillion dollar Balkans drug trade [were] recycled towards servicing the external debt as well as ‘financing’ the costs of ‘reconstruction’. The lucrative flow of narcodollars thus ensures that foreign investors involved in the ‘reconstruction’ programme will be able to reap substantial returns. In turn, the existence of a Kosovar ‘narco-state’ ensures the orderly reimbursement of international donors and creditors, [who] are prepared to turn a blind eye [because t]hey have a tacit vested interest in installing [and maintaining] a government which facilitates the laundering of drug money. (p. 99) Following Chossudovsky’s analysis, Kosovo truly represents a GPS utopia: there, the West has truly created an ‘anti-state’: While calling for democracy and ‘good governance’ in the Balkans, the US and its allies have installed in Kosovo a paramilitary government with links to organized crime. The… outcome [has been] the outright ‘criminalization’ of civilian state institutions and the establishment of what can be best described as a ‘mafia state’. The complicity of NATO and the alliance governments, namely their relentless support of the KLA, points to the de facto ‘criminalisation’ of KFOR and of the UN peacekeeping apparatus in Kosovo. The donor agencies and governments providing financial support to the KLA, e.g. the funds approved by the US Congress in violation of several UN Security Council resolutions, are in this regard also ‘accessories’ to the de facto criminalisation of state institutions. (p. 96) …Under NATO occupation, the rule of law has visibly been turned upside down. Criminals and terrorists [have] become law enforcement officers. (p. 87)

With the KLA pirate regime in place, the prostitution of Kosovo began. Its resources, its industry and its infrastructure were ‘pimped out’ - sold to the lowest foreign bidder. Its Serbian, Roma and Gorani minority communities were ‘shunned’ - demoted to dispossession, displacement and discrimination. Its old and sick, its village folk and its working people were left ‘to fend for themselves’ - exposed to the elements (container ‘housing’, electricity ‘black-outs’), to disease (depleted uranium poisoning, land-mine injury) and to grinding poverty (record unemployment, sky-rocketing prices). Most of the middle-aged population, previously raised, educated and shielded by Yugoslavia’s semi-socialist system, was suddenly thrown into a free-for-all cauldron of b/gangster-style capitalism, mostly suffering utter ruination. Youngsters, to the extent that they did not join, or liaise with, the gangsters and mobsters ruling the streets and the ‘state’, were left waiting on the gangster, doing expat laundry or otherwise ‘servicing’ the NATO-UN-NGO (more specifically: KFOR-UNMIK-OSCE) crowd. To this crowd, the lands, riches and people of Kosovo are nothing but ‘spoils of war’. This is what Kosovo, the ancient cradle of the Serbian state and a model of peaceful multi-ethnic coexistence in the Yugoslav state, was reduced to under Western occupation - a Gangster Prostitute State:

How is the faithful city become a harlot! It was full of judgment, righteousness lodged in it, but now murderers. Thy silver is become dross, thy wine mixed with water. Thy princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves: every one loveth gifts, and followeth after rewards. They judge not the fatherless, neither doth the cause of the widow come unto them. Therefore saith the Lord, the Lord of Hosts, the Mighty One of Israel: Ah, I will ease me of mine adversaries, and avenge me of mine enemies - Isaiah 1:21-4

Echoes and omens

Undoubtedly, the most powerful message of Chossudovsky’s book is the importance of pattern recognition: readers are bound to be struck by its pin-point accuracy in recognizing certain strategic warfare patterns that recur throughout the West’s campaign against Yugoslavia. The historical patterns discerned by Chossudovsky in the Atlanticist take-down of Yugoslavia in the ‘90s may be said to constitute direct precursors to the fully-integrated strategy of fully-fledged multi-dimensional warfare waged by the Atlanticist West against the Eurasianist East in the ‘20s.[iii] It takes but a small step to project Chossudovsky’s pattern recognition forward, to the West’s current multi-dimensional ‘Ukraine’ campaign against Russia. As another reviewer of Chossudovsky’s book succinctly put it: time has confirmed [Chossudovsky’s] fear of the [Western] intervention [in Yugoslavia] being used to set a pattern, establish a principle to be used later on whenever convenient for the US. There have, in fact, ensued preventive and even preemptive wars, so-called ‘humanitarian bombings’ or colored revolutions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, Venezuela, Belarus. …[Chossudovsky] examines the consequences of such approach, and matters that the protagonists do not wish to discuss at all. Underlying the grand ideals of defending the human rights and freedoms of endangered people, are cruel operations which use depleted uranium-filled missiles, ecocides, and pacts with drug cartels or colorful radicals and fundamentalists. …[Chossudovsky’s] monograph, therefore, is more than a testimony in the search of truth, it is also a sort of warning. When the facts are ignored, there remains propaganda whose purpose is to conceal the truth, all that in order to enable various interest groups, be those official or behind the scenes, state, para-state or non-governmental ones, to achieve their goals even if they had, in the process, to violate international law, commit ecocides and war crimes, or cooperate with mobsters and terrorists. (Dushan Prorokovicj apud Chossudovsky, p. 162-3)

Following up on this important point of the West’s ‘information warfare’ - in other words: its war on the truth - it can be argued that the greatest value of Chossudovsky’s book is found in its break-out from the Western MSM ‘narrative bubble’. In the final analysis, the statement of truth about the Western campaign against Yugoslavia will be quite an important nail into the coffin of the Western Empire of Lies: the Yugoslav campaign was an important stepping-stone in the Western MSM’s achievement of ‘disinformation supremacy’ - it was its first systematic application of ‘inverse journalism’. For the first time, Western MSM’s blanket censorship of truthful reporting was systematically combined with deliberate and sustained disinformation: for over a decade, it managed to maintain a constant ‘firehose of falsehood’ on the topic of Yugoslavia, imposing a narrative of falsehood befitting the Western elite’s shift into fully-fledged ‘post-truth politics’.

One of the mechanisms by which the poison of the fork-tongued Western Lügenpresse worked its way into the Western collective psyche was the emotive and seductive use of ‘soothing’ and ‘therapeutic’ language, carefully calibrated to appeal to its key audience: the effeminate and reality-averse Western consumer masses. This sickening jargon, mixing ‘motivational’ management talk with ‘femo-feely’ psycho-babble, was designed to systematically prevent critical thoughts, sabotage realpolitik assessments and deceive gullible (‘midwit’, gutmensch) tv-audiences. In a mind-bending exercise of truly Orwellian proportions, ‘peace-keeping’ came to mean warfare, ‘good governance’ came to mean mafia rule, ‘confidence building’ came to mean word-breaking and ‘inter-ethnic reconciliation’ came to mean legal discrimination. The Western MSM, supported by well-paid academics and purged of honest journalists, deliberately engineered a ‘consensus’ that was so far removed from the truth that it may perhaps best be described as a ‘reality distortion field’. This war [wa]s also a war against the truth. …NATO has reinforced its clutch over the mass media. [Alongside] a stylized ‘wag the dog’ media masquerade, a full-fledged ‘cover-up operation’ has been set in motion with a view to thwarting public debate on the war. …[A]nti-war commentators have been carefully removed from mainstream public affairs programmes, TV content is closely scrutinised… [and] journalists are under tight supervision.…Public ‘disapproval’ of NATO bombings is immediately dismissed as ‘Serb propaganda’. Those who speak out against NATO are branded as ‘apologists of Milosevic’. …The hidden agenda is to ‘silence the silent majority’. The Western media heeding to the alliance’s demands has blatantly misled public opinion. (p. 61-3)

By and large, the Western MSM’s ‘information war’ during the Yugoslav campaign achieved its purpose. Undoubtedly, its most drastic cognitive effect was the utter erasure of the last remnants of geopolitical realism in the Western public sphere. Drowned in the barrage of media images and self-serving analyses, the broader strategic interests and economic causes of the war go unmentioned. The [West’s strategic goals] largely consisted in ‘installing a Western-style regime in Yugoslavia and reducing the geographic areas, power and influence of Serbia to a minimum’. In this context, the installation of American power in southern Europe and the Mediterranean also constitutes a step towards the extension of Washington’s geopolitical sphere of influence beyond the Balkans into the area of the Caspian Sea, Central Asia and West Asia. In this regard, NATO’s military intervention in Yugoslavia, in violation of international law, also sets a dangerous precedent. To achieve its strategic objectives, national economies are destabilized, regional conflicts are financed through the provision of covert support to armed insurgencies… The conflict in Yugoslavia creates conditions which provide legitimacy to future interventions of the alliance into the internal affairs of sovereign nations. (p. 59)

At the time that this review is written, Chossudovsky’s warning, that the West’s successful demolition of Yugoslavia would create a dangerous precedent in international relations, has been proven most accurate. The West’s ‘getting away’ with the demolition of Yugoslavia has merely whetted its appetite: it has since set its sights on much larger quarry. In fact, at the time of writing, the West’s multi-dimensional warfare arsenal is fully engaged in an all-out assault on the ultimate geopolitical prize: Russia. In hindsight, the Western campaign to divide and colonize the ex-Yugoslavia in the ‘90s was just a small-scale test run for the division and colonization of the ex-Soviet Union in the ‘20s. Much is at stake now: now in ex-Soviet space, as then in the ex-Yugoslav space, [i]n the name of global capital, borders [are being] redrawn, legal codes rewritten, industries destroyed, financial and banking systems [are being] dismantled, social programs eliminated. …At stake… are the lives of millions of people. [Globalist] macroeconomic reform combined with military conquest… [is] destroy[ing] livelihoods and [is making] a joke of the right to work. It put[s] basic needs such as food and shelter beyond the reach of many. It [is] degrading culture and national identity. (p. 44) Now, all the tools and techniques applied in the ex-Yugoslav space of the ‘90s are applied to the ex-Soviet space of the ‘20s, of course with slightly updated technology and on a hugely amplified scale. The same proxy strategy, now with Ukrainian instead of the Kosovar freedom fighter cannon fodder and ‘Azov’ instead of ‘mujahideen’ foreign volunteers. The same undeclared ground war, with the same ‘plausible deniability’ employment of the same ‘advisors’, ‘trainers’ and ‘special forces’. The same atrocity propaganda, now with a ‘Bucha Massacre’ instead of a ‘Ratchak Massacre’. The same ‘international outrage’, now with (cheaper) blue-yellow social media posts instead of Bosnia fundraising dinners. The same ‘international justice’ agenda, now indicting the Russian president instead of the Yugoslav president. The same nauseating self-righteousness, now starring ‘Biden’ and Johnson instead of Clinton and Blair.

But there is a difference: the sheer staleness of the West’s utterly worn-out slogans and the obvious futility of the West’s utterly predictable motions indicate that, after a long string of victories from Yugoslavia to Libya, the West has finally - and fatally - overreached itself. All indications are that it has fallen into the same age-old trap of triumphalist hubris and imperial overreach that finally brought down such once-invincible empires as Napoleon’s and Hitler’s. The West’s take-down of Yugoslav was possible in the limited regional setting of the Balkans, pitting the then substantial industrial and military resources of the combined West against a vastly outmatched enemy that lacked strategic depth and major power allies. None of these conditions apply now. Against Russia, the West operates in unlimited space on a global stage, possessing the world’s ultimate strategic depth in the Heartland of the World Island, and it is backed up by an ever-lengthening list of allies, including China, the world’s greatest industrial power. The West, on the other hand, has ‘outsourced’ its industry, ‘wokefied’ its military and ‘diversified’ its populace. The latter factor, ‘diluting’ the nations of the First World by decades of ‘immigration’ from the Third World, has fatally compromised the internal cohesion and core identity of the West: it is now but a shadow of its former self. This ex-West is rapidly decomposing in plain sight, transforming into a scary-looking but substance-less vampire, unable to substantially handle anything approaching a substantial ‘reality check’. Those that have to fight the ‘zombified’ ex-West would do well to remember that the ex-West has already largely abandoned actual reality: its people have largely retreated into virtual reality. The ex-West now bears all the classic hallmarks of the vampire, leading a ghostly existence of ‘virtualized’ experience, shunning the day-light of truth, leaching off the lifeblood of others and preying on the naive and vulnerable. That means, first of all, that the ex-West needs to be exorcized as much as it needs to be fought. For this to be accomplished, the ex-West’s now in-human nature and its now anti-human trajectory need to be properly understood. It needs to be understood that to collectively and consistently indulge in trans-human experiments - infanticidal ‘birth control’, black magic ‘transgenderism’, mRNA ‘gene-therapy’, AI technology ‘second life’ - is to abandon human rationality. It needs to be understood that to collectively and consistently indulge in sub-human experiences - eco-system destroying ‘conspicuous consumption’ gluttony, family-destroying ‘sexual revolution’ lust, society-destroying ‘Wolf of Wallstreet’ greed, world-destroying ‘rules-based order’ pride - is to abandon the human heart. Such things trigger a permanent severance from humanity.

After the ex-West severed itself from the Creator, it was just a matter of time before it severed itself from creation, first from the natural world and then from the human world - and, ultimately, from reality itself. Caught in a downward spiral of evil and madness, the West has now conclusively severed itself from the rest. De facto, the West is now at war with the rest. The rest must allow this harsh reality to sink in: reality must be accepted before it can be handled. The rest must choose - whether or not to follow the West on its chosen path. The echoes of the past and the omens of the present point to the end of that path - the path of

Severance:

the birds of leaving call to us

yet here we stand

endowed with the fear of flight

overland

the winds of change consume the land

while we remain

in the shadow of summers now past

indifference

the plague that moves throughout this land

omen signs

in the shapes of things to come

- Dead Can Dance, ‘Severance’

Part Three: Spandau-am-See

Report on an Attempted Visit to General Ratko Mladic

(The Hague, July 2023)

After being indicted by the Western-created International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in 1995 and living in hiding after the Western-supported ‘Bulldozer’ colour revolution overthrow of (Yugoslav President) Slobodan Miloshevitj in 2001, General Ratko Mladic (born Bozhanovici, Bosnia,[iv] 12 March 1942), Supreme Commander of the army of the break-away Republika Srpska during the Bosnian War (1992-95), was arrested by a multi-agency special forces unit in Lazarevo, Serbia, in the early hours of 26 May 2011, only to be extradited to the same tribunal, located in The Hague, five days later. Ever since that day - over twelve years ago now - General Mladic has been subject to the fury of the Atlanticist-defined ‘international community’, hell-bent to punish the General’s temerity to defy the Atlanticist-imposed ‘New World Order’ at its triumphalist zenith (the Yugoslav conflict started just after that order’s formal announcement in March 1991) - he has not walked in the sun or breathed the air as a free man since then. Following its insane - because megalomaniac - self-appointed role as ‘global conscience’, the triumphant West chose to deny the General his proper rights as a simple Prisoner of War, instead subjecting him to the farcical ‘international law’ proceedings of its own purpose-designed ICTY: not satisfied with the mere defeat of its Yugoslav and Serbian enemy, Western leaders decided to subject their defeated enemies to the humiliation of being branded as maximally-monstrous ‘war criminals’. Of course, in terms of ‘narrative marketing’ and ‘perception management’, the persecution of the best-known enemy war leaders, including the General, was best served by imposing various ‘remit restrictions’ on the ICTY, making sure that the ultimate instigators of the Yugoslav bloodbath would enjoy effective ‘legal immunity’ from persecution. Even the most obviously bloody-handed of Western political puppets and military yes-men were carefully shielded from the ICTY: neither Bill Clinton and Tony Blair nor Wesley Clark (born Kanne) and Javier Solana were ever indicted. Similarly, the political and military leaders of the Western-backed break-away states from Yugoslavia, even if most obviously involved in and responsible for bloodshed, were by and large left alone the ICTY. The irredeemable anti-Yugoslav and anti-Serbian bias of the ICTY was further proven by its consistent refusal to investigate obvious cases of Croatian war crimes, such as the Medak Pocket massacre (1993) and the shelling of Knin during Operation Storm (1995). These events were simply ‘memory-holed’: no publicity, no recriminations, no official record… [it] simply never happened (Chossudovsky, 95). In the final analysis, the ICTY failed to uphold even the illusion of impartiality: it merely served to demoralize the defeated. Of course, the old-fashioned practice of the victors [is] putting the vanquished to the sword, behind a facade of retroactive law and elegant speeches. …A powerful aggressor, if undefeated in war, cannot and will not be punished (David Irving, Nuremberg. The Last Battle). In the final analysis, the ICTY that convicted General Mladic was nothing but a kangaroo court: it allowed the Western MSM to spin a short-span narrative about General Mladic as a war criminal, but this will not alter his place in his own country’s long-span history, which is that of a war hero.

The ICTY, now defunct after serving its purpose from 1993 to 2017,[v] was a typical product of its time: it derived its international legal authority based on United Nations Security Council Resolution 827, passed at the triumphalist height of the ‘unipolar moment’, the zenith of Atlanticist power just after the fall of the Soviet Union. At that time, with the end of the Cold War, the defeat of the ‘Second World’ East Bloc and the disarray of the East Bloc’s erstwhile ‘Third World’ allies, the ‘First World’ West Bloc’s writ ran virtually unchallenged around the globe. The victorious leaders of the self-styled ‘Free West’ decided they were now the masters of the world and would create a ‘New World Order’ of which they would be the sole-superpower arbiter: they would simultaneously write, persecute and execute its laws - they would be jury, judge and hangman all rolled in one. Post Cold War, the West’s attitude to defeated Yugoslavia was similar to the Allies’ attitude to defeated Germany post World War II: the West’s vae victis verdict - the calculated cruelty, ruthless exploitation and shameless self-exaltation it imposed on a defenceless nation - was written with the same words of self-righteousness. If anything, the ICTY’s cloak of pharisaic hypocrisy in pronouncing on the rights and wrongs of Yugoslav history at The Hague was even thicker than the Allies’ International Military Tribunal that had pronounced sentence on German history at Nuremberg. Whereas ‘Nuremberg’ was a clear-cut and unabashed example of the Allies’ victor’s justice, meted out amid the smouldering rubble to which Germany had been reduced by these same Allies’ terror bombing, ‘The Hague’ was a fully-fledged attempt to create ‘international law’ ex nihilo. Following up on tentative attempts at building a theoretically ‘universal’ but practically West Bloc-defined ‘rules-based order’ in the wake of World Wars I and II (respectively, the ‘Commission of Responsibilities’ set up by the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and the International Military Tribunal set up at Nuremberg in 1945), the 1993 ICTY and the copy-cat 1994 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, were major milestones in the West Bloc’s campaign to permanently enshrine its world-view as absolute ‘international law’. The final stage of this campaign began in 1998, with the formal establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC), also in The Hague. According to its foundational Rome Statute, with came into effect in 2002, the ICC has full transnational authority, overriding national legislation and diplomatic protocol, to prosecute individuals from the statute’s signatory states who have been deemed to have infringed upon certain ill-defined crimes such as ‘crimes as humanity’ and ‘crimes of aggression’. Thus, it serves as a moral as well as legal reference point for the West Bloc-defined ‘rules-based order’: many of those who have dared to defy that order since the ICC was established, including several heads of state such as Muammar Ghadaffy of Libya, Omar al-Bashir of Sudan, Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya and Laurent Gbagbo of Ivory Coast, have been recipients of its indictments. As was the case with the early-globalist ICTY and the ICTR, the full-globalist ICC’s focus seems to be on ‘rogue leaders’ in ‘rogue states’ in the hic sunt dragones margins of the ‘civilized world’, outside the ‘golden billion bubble’ of the ‘rules-based order’ and especially on Black African or Orthodox Christian leaders. In this sense, the ICTY’s indictment of General Mladic, in July 1995, seems to have been a mere warm-up exercise for the much larger quarry in the ICC’s sights: more than a quarter century later, in March 2023, the ICC indicted President Putin of Russia. As was the case with the ICTY and ICTR, the legal status of the ICC as an instrument of ‘international law’ may be highly doubtful (major powers such as China and India do not recognize the ICC and both the US and Russia have withdrawn from the Rome Statute), but the overall trajectory is clear: the globalist elite of the West Bloc is creating a legal framework for its ‘New World Order’ project. Within that framework every non-compliant leader is not merely a threat to Western-imposed ‘global security’ but also a threat to the Western-defined ‘rules-based order’. In this sense, the ICTY-imposed punishment of the top figures of Yugoslavia’s recalcitrant political and military leadership, including Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, Krajina Republic President Milan Babic, Republika Srpska President Radovan Karadzic and Republika Srpska Army Commander General Mladic, above all served the purpose of creating a precedent in ‘international law’. Thus, a stark warning was sent to potentially recalcitrant leaders elsewhere: this is what will happen to you if you do not play by our ‘rules’. In this sense, the West Bloc’s  ‘rules-based order’ narrative is heavily invested in - even dependent on - upholding the punishments it inflicted upon its defeated enemies through ICTY: these punishments not only serve to remind defeated nations, such as Serbia, of their past defeat and humiliation - they also serve to remind as-yet undefeated enemies, such as Russia, of the future fate that they will suffer if they allow themselves to be defeated and humiliated.

Of all ICTY convicts still alive, only General Mladic is still detained in The Hague, the self-proclaimed ‘city of international justice’ - the other detainees have either served their sentences or have been transferred elsewhere. And a statistically remarkable number of them have died. Only one of these deaths may be credibly explained: Croatian General Slobodan Praljak took poison at The Hague ICTY during sentencing, in plain view of his persecutors, preferring Goering-like suicide over un-military dishonour. The ‘causes’ formally given for multiple other ‘deaths in custody’ are not quite as convincing, with the most high-profile controversy surrounding that of the tribunal’s main defendant, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. Whatever the exact circumstances of these other, highly suspicious cases, it is clear that imprisonment in The Hague facilities of ‘international justice’, or what MSM whorenalists often called the ‘Hague Hilton’, is not particularly healthy or conducive to a long life expectancy. At the moment of writing, of all ICTY only General Mladic still survives there. With the former ICTY defunct, with his former fellow inmates either dead, released or transferred, with the new ICC in place and with multiple globalist wars of aggression - from Iraq to Ukraine - pushing the Yugoslav wars into the forgotten past, the General’s presence in The Hague is becoming more and more of an anachronism: a left-over fixture from the past - a trophy kept to adorn the globalist ‘city of international justice’. The General’s detention in The Hague, more specifically in the sea-side suburb of Scheveningen, is becoming something of a time-warp aberration - not unlike the continued detention of Rudolf Hess in what became the single-detainee prison of the river-side Berlin suburb of Spandau Prison. In the same way as Hess’ Spandau imprisonment then, the General’s Scheveningen imprisonment now combines long-term victor’s justice ‘functionalities’: a reminder of who is in charge by insistence on continued imprisonment, an embarrassment to the nation that is made to host the prison - and an ‘example made’ in the simple human suffering of the prisoner. Because it should not be forgotten that every true warrior - and, if anything, the General was that - prefers to die with honour, either on the field of battle or by a firing squad, than to be kept in a cage with his honour smeared. But, of course, that is exactly what is here intended: to deny the courtesy, respect and honour due a now vanquished but once formidable enemy.

In the summer of 2023, to learn from somebody who embodies history and to have a friendly talk about matters of mutual interest, the author, supported by his Eurasianist Yugoslav friends, applied for permission to visit the General in detention - this application was first delayed and then refused on some bureaucratic pretext. The author may re-apply and the ‘powers that be’ may reconsider but these powers may be subject to ‘higher considerations’ outside of any sane reasoning. After all, the General belongs to a special prisoner category to be kept under special restrictions. But even if the United Nations Detention Unit (UNDU) that keeps the General in custody, falls under special ‘international’ jurisdiction (visitors need a passport to enter it) it is still located within an old but partially renovated Dutch prison (Penitentiaire Inrichting Haaglanden) in the sea-side Scheveningen suburb of The Hague. The General’s detention is, therefore, something of a legal anomaly: the sentence of actual all-life imprisonment, as currently served by the General, would be illegal and impossible under Dutch law. To illustrate the point: the man responsible for and convicted of the 2002 murder of Pim Fortuyn, the Netherlands’ most high-profile and most impactful political murder since the country’s founding, went free after serving twelve years. Whereas the Netherlands’ eagerness to host prestigious ‘international justice’ institutions such as the ICTY and the ICC may be explained by the wish to cling to the Netherland’s old - and by now fictitious - reputation as a neutral arbiter as well as the wish to cash in on the spin-off business that comes with hosting deep-pocketed foreign diplomates and dignitaries, but the Netherlands’ willingness to tolerate the UNDU facility and the General’s interminable imprisonment within it, in stark contradiction to the Dutch tradition of temperance and humanity, is truly intolerable.

Speaking as a Dutch citizen, the writer here wishes to suggest to those of his nation who still possess some sense of proportion and realism about the great affairs of international relations and basic geopolitics. If any degree of sanity can be restored to Dutch politics - which would have to start with denouncing and rejecting any further dealing with all the myriad globalist ‘letter institutions’ that thwart Dutch sovereignty and suffocate Dutch values, from NATO and EU to ICC and UNDU - then a good start may be made by our country’s unilateral decision to release the General and return him to his family, to spend his remaining years on the soil of his fatherland. This would go a long way to restore the friendship between his nation and our nation and it would send an unequivocal signal to all that our country will no longer permit its good name to be lent to the utter travesty and ugly perversion of ‘international justice’ that our transnationalist overlords are projecting from their present The Hague headquarters.

Let us not forget that once before, not too long ago, the very prison where General Mladic is currently held was used by those who sought to make our country part of another transnational utopia. Between 1940 and 1945, this prison was the place where the German occupiers used to imprison Dutch freedom fighters, political dissidents and minority undesirables; it was then known as the Oranje Hotel, Oranje - English ‘Orange’ - being the dynastic name of the Dutch royal family and a symbol of national resistance in the face of foreign occupation. From there, and from the window of General Mladic’s cell, it is but a short walk through the dunes and trees to the Waalsdorpervlakte, the quiet dune valley where the German occupiers shot many Dutch patriots and where the Netherlands’ second most important war memorial service is held, every year on 4 May. The German occupation may be a long time ago, but, in a cruel twist of fate, the Waalsdorpervlakte memorial is now only a stone’s throw away from one of the key power centres of the Netherlands’ new foreign occupation: since 2015, the new, purpose-built ICC ‘justice palace’ and its high corridors of globalist power are located right next to it. The German occupation of the Netherlands lasted five long years - nobody knows how long the globalist occupation of the Netherlands will last. But we may hope that both prisoners, the Dutch nation as well as the General, will outlast it because

The strongest of all warriors are these two:

Time and patience

- Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Notes

[i] Cf. Alexander Wolfheze, ‘Downfall of the West’, Geopolitica 29 October 2020 and Alexander Wolfheze, ‘The White Whale’, Geopolitica.ru 4 November 2022.

[ii] The Communist Party bureaucracy, most notably its military and intelligence sector, was… specifically… offered political and economic backing on the condition that wholesale scuttling of social protection for Yugoslavia’s workforce was imposed. (Ralph Schumann, ‘Divide and Rule Schemes in the Balkans’, The Organizer, 11 September 1995, apud Chossudovsky, The US-NATO War, 30)

[iii] For an up-to-date assessment of Atlanticist multi-dimensional warfare strategy, cf. Leonid Savin, Ordo Pluriversalis. The End of Pax America and the Rise of Multipolarity (Black House: London, 2020). For an in-depth review of Savin’s book, cf. Alexander Wolfheze, ‘Anima Mundi’, Geopolitica.ru 1 April 2022.

[iv] Note that, at the time of the General’s birth, his native town was formally located on the territory of the Axis-supported ‘Independent State of Croatia’, which had been carved out of the territory of the Axis-occupied first Yugoslav state. Thus, ironically, Bozhanovitj was located in Axis puppet-state territory at the time of his birth, as it is located in Atlanticist puppet-state territory now. From this perspective, the General’s 1992-95 Bosnian War campaign was something rather different than the simple black-and-white, good-Bosniak-against-evil-Serb ‘civil war’ portrayed by the Western MSM: it was an attempt, heroic in some ways, to prevent the foreign (Atlanticist, globalist) re-occupation of territory that had been liberated from foreign (Axis, Nazi) occupation at the cost of the blood, sweat and tears of countless Yugoslavs half a century earlier.

[v] Note that the ICTY’s (and the ICTR’s) residual legal tasks were subsequently relegated to the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT), set up in 2010 under the terms of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1966. Detainees convicted by the ICTY and now under IRMCT jurisdiction, such as General Mladitj, are physically held in the United Nations Detention Unit (UNDU) located in Scheveningen prison, The Hague - the UNDU now also holds ICC detainees.

Source: https://www.geopolitika.ru/en/article/eagle-east

The One Chart That Explains Everything

Look carefully at the chart below. What do you see?

You see the development of a high-speed rail system that is unrivaled anywhere on earth. You see the actualization of plan to connect all parts of the country with modern-day infrastructure that reduces shipping costs, improves mobility and increases profitability. You see a vision of the 21st century in which state-directed capital links rural populations with urban centers lifting standards of living across the board. You see an expression of a new economic model that has lifted 800 million people out of poverty while paving the way for global economic integration. You see an industrial juggernaut expanding in all directions while laying the groundwork for a new century of economic integration, accelerated development and shared prosperity.

Is there a high-speed rail system in the United States that is comparable to what we see in China today?

No, there isn’t. So far, less than 50 miles of high-speed rail has been built in the United States. (“Amtrak’s Acela, which reaches 150 mph over 49.9 miles of track, is the US’s only high-speed rail service.”) As everyone knows, America’s transportation grid is obsolete and in a shambles.

But, why? Why is the United States so far behind China in the development of critical infrastructure?

It’s because China’s state-led model is vastly superior to America’s “carpetbagger” model. In China, the government is directly involved in the operation of the economy, which means that it subsidizes those industries that enhance growth and spur development.

In contrast, American capitalism is a savage free-for-all in which private owners are able to divert great sums of money into unproductive stock buybacks and other scams that do nothing to create jobs or strengthen the economy. Since 2009 US corporations have spent more than $7 trillion on stock buybacks which is an activity that boosts payouts to rich shareholders but fails to produce anything of material value. Had that capital been invested in critical infrastructure, every city in America would be linked to a gigantic webbing of high-speed rail extending from “sea to shining sea”. But that hasn’t happened, because the western model incentivizes the extraction of capital for personal enrichment rather than the development of projects that serve the common good. In China, we see how fast transformative changes can take place when a nation’s wealth is used to eradicate poverty, raise standards of living, construct state-of-the-art infrastructure, and lay the groundwork for a new century.

Here’s more from a report by the Congressional Research Service on “China’s Economic Rise…”

Since opening up to foreign trade and investment and implementing free-market reforms in 1979, China has been among the world’s fastest-growing economies, with real annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth averaging 9.5% through 2018, a pace described by the World Bank as “the fastest sustained expansion by a major economy in history.” Such growth has enabled China, on average, to double its GDP every eight years and helped raise an estimated 800 million people out of poverty. China has become the world’s largest economy (on a purchasing power parity basis), manufacturer, merchandise trader, and holder of foreign exchange reserves…. China is the largest U.S. merchandise trading partner, biggest source of imports, and the largest foreign holder of U.S. Treasury securities, which help fund the federal debt and keep U.S. interest rates low.

China’s Economic Rise: History, Trends, Challenges, and Implications for the United States, Congressional Research Service

Here’s more from an article at the Center for Strategic and International Studies titled Confronting the Challenge of Chinese State Capitalism:

China now has more companies on the Fortune Global 500 list than does the United States… with nearly 75 percent of these being state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Three of the world’s five largest companies are Chinese (Sinopec Group, State Grid, and China National Petroleum). China’s largest SOEs hold dominant market positions in many of the most critical and strategic industries, from energy to shipping to rare earths. According to Freeman Chair calculations, the combined assets for China’s 96 largest SOEs total more than $63 trillion, an amount equivalent to nearly 80 percent of global GDP. Confronting the Challenge of Chinese State Capitalism, Center for Strategic and International Studies

And here’s one more from a report by the IMF titled “Asia Poised to Drive Global Economic Growth, Boosted by China’s Reopening”:

China and India together are forecast to generate about half of global growth this year. Asia and the Pacific is a relative bright spot amid the more somber context of the global economy’s rocky recovery.

As the Chart of the Week shows, the region will contribute about 70 percent of global growth this year—a much greater share than in recent years.” Asia Poised to Drive Global Economic Growth, Boosted by China’s Reopening, IMF

In short, the Chinese state-led model is rapidly overtaking the US in virtually every area of industry and commerce, and its success is largely attributable to the fact that the government is free to align its reinvestment strategy with its vision of the future. That allows the state to ignore the short-term profitability of its various projects provided they lay the groundwork for a stronger and more expansive economy in the years ahead. Chinese reformer Chen Yun called this phenom the “birdcage economy”, which means the economy can “fly freely” within the confines of the broader political system. In other words, the Chinese leadership sees the economy as an instrument for achieving their collective vision for the future.

China’s success is only partially due to its control over essential industries, like banking and petroleum. Keep in mind, “the share of State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in the total number of companies in the country has dropped to just 5%, though their share of total output remains at 26%.” And even though the state sector has shrunk dramatically in the last two decades, Chinese President Xi Jinping has implemented a three-year action plan aimed at increasing competitiveness of the SOE’s by transforming them into “market entities” run by “mixed-ownership.” Simply put, China remains committed to the path of liberalization despite sharp criticism in the West.

It’s also worth noting that the so-called Chinese Miracle never would have taken place had China implemented the programs that were recommended by the so-called “western experts”. Had China imposed the radical reforms (like “shock therapy”) that Russia did following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, then they would have experienced the same disastrous outcome. Fortunately, Chinese policymakers ignored the advice of the western economists and developed their own gradual reform agenda that produced success beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. The story is summarized in a video on You Tube titled “How China (Actually) Got Rich”. I have transcribed part of the text below. Any mistakes are mine:

The single most stunning economic story of the last few decades has been the rise of China. From 1980 to 2020, China’s economy grew more than 75-fold…. It was the largest and most rapid improvement in material conditions in modern history…. China had been one of the poorest countries on earth but now it is an economic powerhouse… Economists predict it will overtake the US as the largest economy in the world by the end of the decade. People call it The Chinese Miracle. Some people describe this miracle as a straightforward story of the “free market”. They say “it’s a simple story. China was poor (but) then the economy was freed from the grip of the state. Now China is rich.” But this is misleading. China’s rise was NOT a triumph of the free market. ...

Since the 1980s, free market policies have swept the globe. Many countries have undergone far-ranging transformations. Liberalizing prices, privatizing entire industries, and opening up to free trade. But many of the economies that were subjected to the market overnight have since stagnated or decayed. None of them have had a growth record like the one seen in China. African countries experienced brutal economic shrinkage. Latin American countries experienced 25 years of stagnation. If we compare China to Russia, the other giant of Communism in the 20th Century, the contrast is even more staggering.

Under state socialism, Russia was an industrial superpower while China was still largely an agricultural economy. Yet during the same period that Chinese reforms led to incredible economic growth, Russia’s reform led to a brutal collapse. Both China and Russia had been economies that were largely ordered through state commands. ….Russia followed the recommendations of the most “scientific economics” at the time, a policy of so-called “shock therapy” As a basic principle, the idea was that the old planned economy had to be destroyed, to make space for the market to emerge…. Russia was expected to emerge as a full-fledged economy overnight. …When Boris Yeltsin took power he eliminated all price controls, privatized state-owned companies and assets, and immediately opened up Russia to global trade. The result was a catastrophe. The Russian economy was already in disarray, but shock therapy was a fatal blow. (Western economists) predicted some short-term pain, but what they didn’t see coming was how severe and destructive the effects would be. Consumer prices spiraled out of control, Hyperinflation took hold, GDP fell by 40%.

The shock therapy slump in Russia was deeper and longer than the Great Depression by a large margin. It was a disaster for ordinary Russians…. Alcoholism, childhood malnutrition and crime went through the roof. Life expectancy for Russian men fell by 7 years, more than any industrial country has ever experienced in peacetime. Russia did not get a free market overnight. Instead, it went from a stagnating economy to a hollowed-out wreck run by oligarchs. If just getting rid of price-controls and government employment didn’t create prosperity but did destroy the economy and kill huge numbers of people, then clearly, the rapid transition to “free markets” was not the solution. …

Throughout the 1980s, China considered implementing the same type of sudden reforms that Russia pursued. The idea of starting from a clean slate was attractive, and shock therapy was widely promoted by (respected) economists… But in the end, China decided to not implement shock therapy. …Instead of knocking over the entire (economy) at once, China reformed itself in a gradual and experimental way. Market activities were tolerated or actively-promoted in non-essential parts of the economy. China implemented a policy of dual track pricing…. China was learning from.. the world’s most developed nations, countries like the US, UK, Japan and South Korea. Each of these managed and planned the development of their own economies. and markets, protecting early-stage industries and controlling investment.

Western free market economists thought this system would be a disaster …. But China’s leaders did not listen, and while Russia collapsed after following the “shock therapy” program, China saw remarkable success. The state kept control over the backbone of the industrial economy, as well as the ownership over the land,. As China grew into the new dynamics of its economy, state institutions were not degraded to fossils from the past, but were often the drivers at the frontier of new industries, protecting and guaranteeing their own growth. China today is not a free market economy in any sense of the word. It is a state-led market economy. The government effectively owns all land, and China leverages state ownership through market competition to steer the economy. The shock therapy approach advocated around the world was a failure. While Russia collapsed after its sudden transition, China’s gradual reforms allowed it to survive. And that made all the difference.” How China (Actually) Got Rich”, You Tube.

The fact that China’s SOEs are shielded from foreign competition and receive government subsidies, has angered foreign corporations who think China has an unfair advantage and is not playing by the rules. That is certainly fair criticism, but it’s also true that Washington’s unilateral sanctions—which have now been imposed on roughly one-third of all the countries in the world—are also a clear violation of WTO rules. In any event, China’s approach to the market under Xi has been ambivalent at best. And while “the state sector’s share of industrial output dropped from 81% in 1980 to 15% in 2005”, (in the spirit of reform) Xi has also ensured that the CCP has greater influence in corporate management and corporate decision-making. Naturally, none of this has gone-over well with US and EU businesses titans who firmly believe that corporate stakeholders should rule the roost. (as they do in the West.)

The larger issue, however, is not that China subsidizes its SOEs or even that China is set to become the biggest economy in the world within the next decade. That’s not the problem. The real problem is that China has not assimilated into the Washington-led “rules-based order” as was originally anticipated. The fact is, Chinese leaders are strongly patriotic and have no intention of becoming a vassal-state in Uncle Sam’s global empire. This is an important point that political analyst Alfred McCoy sheds light on in an article at Counterpunch:

China’s increasing control over Eurasia clearly represents a fundamental change in that continent’s geopolitics. Convinced that Beijing would play the global game by U.S. rules, Washington’s foreign policy establishment made a major strategic miscalculation in 2001 by admitting it to the World Trade Organization (WTO). “Across the ideological spectrum, we in the U.S. foreign policy community,” confessed two former members of the Obama administration, “shared the underlying belief that U.S. power and hegemony could readily mold China to the United States’ liking… All sides of the policy debate erred.” In little more than a decade after it joined the WTO, Beijing’s annual exports to the U.S. grew nearly five-fold and its foreign currency reserves soared from just $200 billion to an unprecedented $4 trillion by 2013. The Rise of China and the Fall of the US, Counterpunch

Clearly, US foreign policy mandarins made a catastrophic error-in-judgement regarding China, but now there’s no way to undo the damage. China will not only emerge as the world’s largest economy, it will also control its own destiny unlike western nations that have been subsumed into the oligarch-led system (WEF) that decides everything from climate policy to mandatory vaccination, and from transgender bathrooms to war in Ukraine. These policies are all set by oligarchs who control the politicians, the media, and the sprawling deep state. Again, the issue with China is not size or money; it’s about control. China presently controls its own future independent of the “rules-based order” which makes it a threat to that same system.

If we look again at the first chart (above), we can understand why Washington rushed into its proxy-war with Russia. After all, if China was able to spread its high-speed rail network across all of China in just 12 years, what will the next 12 years bring? That’s what worries Washington.

China’s emergence as regional hegemon on the Asian continent is a near-certainty at this point. Who can stop it?

Not Washington. The US and NATO are presently bogged down in Ukraine even though Ukraine was supposed to be a launching pad for spreading US military bases across Central Asia and (eventually) encircling, isolating and containing China. That was the plan, but the plan looks less likely every day. And remember the importance that national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski placed on Eurasia in his classic The Grand Chessboard nearly 3 decades ago. He said:

“Eurasia is the globe’s largest continent and is geopolitically axial. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world’s three most advanced and economically productive regions. ….About 75 per cent of the world’s people live in Eurasia, and most of the world’s physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for 60 per cent of the world’s GNP and about three-fourths of the world’s known energy resources.” (The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives, Zbigniew Brzezinski, p.31)
China’s Turn. Americas Hyper-Financialized Economic System Is No Match for China’s Government-Directed Investment Model.

The consensus opinion among foreign policy mucky-mucks is that the United States must become the dominant player in Central Asia if it hopes to maintain its current lofty position in the global order. Former Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz went so far as to say that Washington’s “top priority” must be “to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union.” Wolfowitz’s sentiments are still reiterated in all of recent US national security documents including the National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy. The pundits all agree on one thing and one thing alone; that the US must prevail in its plan to control Central Asia.

But how likely is that now? How likely is it that Russia will be forced out of Ukraine and prevented from opposing the US in Eurasia? How likely is it that China’s Belt and Road Initiative will not expand across Asia and into Europe, the Middle East, Africa and even Latin America? Check out this brief excerpt on China’s Belt and Road plan:

China is building the world’s greatest economic development and construction project ever undertaken: The New Silk Road. The project aims at no less than a revolutionary change in the economic map of the world…The ambitious vision is to resurrect the ancient Silk Road as a modern transit, trade, and economic corridor that runs from Shanghai to Berlin. The ‘Road’ will traverse China, Mongolia, Russia, Belarus, Poland, and Germany, extending more than 8,000 miles, creating an economic zone that extends over one third the circumference of the earth.

The plan envisions building high-speed railroads, roads and highways, energy transmission and distributions networks, and fiber optic networks. Cities and ports along the route will be targeted for economic development.

An equally essential part of the plan is a sea-based “Maritime Silk Road” (MSR) component, as ambitious as its land-based project, linking China with the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea through Central Asia and the Indian Ocean. When completed, like the ancient Silk Road, it will connect three continents: Asia, Europe, and Africa. (and, now, Latin America) The chain of infrastructure projects will create the world’s largest economic corridor, covering a population of 4.4 billion and an economic output of $21 trillion…

For the world at large, its decisions about the Road are nothing less than momentous. The massive project holds the potential for a new renaissance in commerce, industry, discovery, thought, invention, and culture that could well rival the original Silk Road. It is also becoming clearer by the day that geopolitical conflicts over the project could lead to a new cold war between East and West for dominance in Eurasia. The outcome is far from certain. (“New Silk Road Could Change Global Economics Forever”, Robert Berke, Oil Price)
The Future Is China

Xi Jinping’s “signature infrastructure project” is reshaping trade relations across Central Asia and around the world. The BRI will eventually include more than 150 countries and a myriad of international organizations. It is, without question, the largest infrastructure and investment project in history which will include 65% of the world’s population and 40% of global GDP. The improvements to road, rail and sea routes will vastly increase connectivity, lower shipping costs, boost productivity, and enhance widespread prosperity. The Belt and Road is China’s attempt to replace the crumbling post-WW2 “rules-based” order with a system that respects the sovereignty of nations, rejects unilateralism, and relies on market-based principles to affect a more equitable distribution of wealth.

The BRI is China’s blueprint for a New World Order. It is the face of 21st century capitalism and it is bound to shift the locus of global power eastward to Beijing which is set to become the de facto center of world.

*

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Michael Whitney is a renowned geopolitical and social analyst based in Washington State. He initiated his career as an independent citizen-journalist in 2002 with a commitment to honest journalism, social justice and World peace.

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Source: https://www.globalresearch.ca/one-chart-that-explains-everything-2/5825764

Q.-  The situation in Kosovo Metohija is considered perhaps the most difficult since the NATO aggression of 1999. What is your opinion/assessment of what concrete and realistic steps could be taken to find a "right" way out?

R. It is a month now since the situation in Kosovo and Metohija escalated.  It was triggered by forcible seizure of municipal mayor offices in four Serbian-majority Municipalities by new mayors, of Albanian descent, recently elected at the local municipal elections.

Elections were held in the wake of the general walkout of Serbs from the institutions, including municipal ones, under the Albanian-run institutions in Pristina claiming to be of so-called Kosovo. This was a collective political gesture of the Serbian people, because Pristina denied them living normal lives. Secondly, those elections were participated by about less than 5 percent of the electorate, almost exclusively ethnic Albanians. Serbs boycotted these elections, protesting, among many other issues, the militarization of the area, confiscation of their private and municipal land for erection of special Albanian forces’ bases, legal and physical insecurity, daily attacks and arbitrary imprisonment of Serbs, noncompliance with 2013 and 2015 Brussels Agreements on establishment of the Community of Serbian Municipalities. Hence, newly elected Albanian mayors were effectively imposed on Serbs who exclusively or predominantly populate those municipalities.

To avoid the worse, the causes must be removed. Concretely, it is necessary to free all unjustly imprisoned Serbs, to withdraw special forces and close their bases in the northern Serb populated districts, to withdraw illegitimate Albanian mayors and to establish Community of Serbian Municipalities as agreed and signed in Brusseles in 201.

The key cause of the prolonged crisis, however, is that Albanian leaders in Pristina have no interest in anything else but recognition of so called “Kosovo Republic” by Serbia. While the Province is still under UN mandate, Albanian leadership supported by their Western promoters, simply ignores UN SC resolution 1244 (1999) and any previously signed agreements, keeps continuously provoking Serbs, violating their basic human rights such as personal security, freedom of movement, private property. About 130,000 Serbs in the Province are treated as hostages in ghettos, whereas additional 250,000 expelled from the Province more than 20 years ago, still are not permitted to return to their homes and properties.

Unfortunately, western countries, primarily the USA, the UK and Germany, keep  ignoring such disturbing reality. Apparently, they are not ready to undertake concrete steps to  make Albanian leadership comply with UN SC resolution 1244, Brussels Agreements and basic human rights vis-à-vis Serbs. Their double standards policy appears now as punishing Serbia and Serbs by proxy, for not recognizing unilateral illegal secession of Kosovo and Metohija, for remaining military neutral, and for not adopting sanctions against Russia.

Q. - In many parts both in KosMet and outside, there is talk of a possible war. What is his point of view.

R. All that I can say now is that Serbia and Serbs are definitely for committed to peace, a peaceful solution based on the universal principles of International Law and UN SC resolution 1244. Nobody should expect that Serbia will recognize robbery of its sovereignty and territorial integrity. It is extremely dangerous that those same parties who conducted aggression in 1999 and imposed recognition of criminal secession in 2008, are trying now to compel Serbia to legalize all that, thus retroactively converting their actions into being purportedly moral, peace oriented, and free of expansionism and hegemony.

Therefore, provocations of Pristina, whoever may be behind them, must stop, human rights of Serbs must be respected, the signed Brussels Agreements implemented in their original wording, and the dialogue on normalization resumed.

Q - Demonstrations by some political forces against the government continue in Serbia. Are they attempts at a "color revolution"?

R. Weekly demonstrations started some days after the tragic events of last May in one Belgrade school and in the town of Mladenovac, under moto “Stop violence”. After Belgrade, now about 10 other cities hold simultaneous peaceful demonstrations demanding resignations of the Minister of Interior and the Director of Security Agency (BIA), replacement of members of Board of the Regulatory Authority for Electronic Media, replacement of management of the public TV RTS and alike. No doubt that the opposition political forces behind the demonstrations aim at changing the entire government. They insist on installing interim government, first, and holding elections later. The Government seems to be ready to hold early elections but refuses idea about interim government. All this coincides with the growing pressures by leading western powers on Serbian leadership to recognize unilateral illegal secession of the Province of Kosovo and Metohija, to abandon the policy of military neutrality and to introduce sanctions to Russia. While antigovernment demonstrations going on, Ambassadors of certain western powers in Belgrade keep making public statements that Serbs know that Serbia completely belongs to the West.

It is baffling that nobody from the actual government came up to remind them that 85% of Serbia’s population is against NATO, that approximately the same percentage is even against EU membership if conditioned by the recognition of secession of Kosovo and Metohija. Or, to ask such ambassadors if they really believe that Serbs forgot who had enforced most severe sanctions ever on them in the 1990s, who had launched criminal aggression in 1999 that took some 4,000 lives, wounded about 10,000 people, threw 15 tons of depleted uranium, and so on?

Q - I receive from the Province of Kosovo and Metohija, on the daily basis, many criticisms, doubts, perplexities and even attacks concerning the work of the Serbian President A. Vucic. What do you think?

R. I agree that there are reasons to criticize policy of the present government. For example, I think there is the need for Serbia’s leadership to be explicit in demanding full implementation and respect of UN SC resolution 1244 binding every UN member, including EU and NATO members, to respect territorial integrity of Serbia. The government should be much more proactive in international fora with a view to guaranty real genuine security and freedom for Serbs in Kosovo and Metohija. In parallel, there is the need for persistent initiative to guaranty the right to free and safe return of about 250,000 Serbs and other non-Albanians to their homes and their lands in the Province. Who needs now military exercises of Serbia with NATO, in spite of official moratorium?
It should be noted, however, that only a year ago, Aleksandar Vucic was elected President of the Republic in the first round, for the second time in a row. His Party (SNS) also easily won all elections from 2012 to the present day.

We should be mindful and learn lessons from historic experiences. While traying to solve real socioeconomic problems, to improve living standards and democratize governance, we must not repeat mistakes by overlooking dubious positions of some opposition forces about the future status of Kosovo and Metohija, membership to NATO, or sanctions against Russia. I believe that Serbia should continue to balance her political, economic and cultural relations with all countries and integrations which accept her as an equal partner, persistently defending own legitimate interest based on universal principles and international law, and stay neutral.

Thak You.  Enrico Vigna,

Ein Kommentar von Hermann Ploppa.

Es wird überall eifrig gezündelt, um den zerbrechlichen Noch-Frieden in Europa zu zerstören. Georgien, Berg-Karabach und Transnistrien sind neben dem Balkan buchstäblich ganz heiße Kandidaten für neue Brandherde.

Da gehen wieder Bilder durch die Medien. Derbe serbische Burschen greifen da im Kosovo Ordnungskräfte der internationalen Organisation KFOR wütend an. Es gibt auf beiden Seiten Verletzte <1>. Zum Glück noch keine Toten. Da fragen wir unbedarfte Fernseh-Konsumenten uns doch ganz unwillkürlich: was gibt es denn da wieder für Kloppereien? Können die sich nicht mal endlich vertragen?

Nun ja: die Vorgeschichte dieser Raufereien ist kompliziert und verschachtelt. Das oder der Kosovo ist eine kleine Provinz im Herzen des Balkan. Sie gehörte mal zu der Bundesrepublik Jugoslawien. Die  Bundesrepublik Jugoslawien war dereinst ein Leuchtturm des aufgeklärten Sozialismus. Jugoslawien geriet aber dann in die Verschuldungsfalle westlicher Banken. Um die Schulden abzutragen, mussten erhebliche Einschnitte in der Lebensqualität der Jugoslawen vorgenommen werden. Dann fachten westliche Politiker wie der ehemalige deutsche Außenminister Hans-Dietrich Genscher ethnische Konflikte in der vielgestaltigen Bundesrepublik Jugoslawien an. Es kam zu blutigen Kriegen zwischen Serben, Kroaten, Bosniern und Albanern. Slowenien, Kroatien und Bosnien-Herzegowina traten aus dem Bundesstaat Jugoslawien aus. Dass dieser Zerfall von der westlichen Wertegemeinschaft forciert wurde, leugnet niemand mehr. Mit dem völkerrechtswidrigen Überfall des westlichen Waffenbündnisses NATO auf die Reste der Bundesrepublik Jugoslawien im Jahre 1999 wurde das Ende eben dieser Bundesrepublik besiegelt. Es blieb als Rest der Staat Serbien.

Soweit, so schlecht. Der Austritt aus einer Bundesrepublik kann im besten Falle ein ganz normaler Vorgang sein. Auch der Bundesstaat Texas könnte rein theoretisch aus den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika ganz einfach austreten. Ganz genau so wie der Freistaat Bayern aus der Bundesrepublik Deutschland austreten könnte. Vollkommen legal. Allerdings wurde der völkerrechtswidrige Überfall der NATO auf Jugoslawien dadurch gekrönt, dass sich die NATO zusätzlich die Provinz Kosovo ganz kackfrech aus dem Teilstaat Serbien herausgeschnitten hat. Auf dem neuen quasi-staatlichen Gebilde Kosovo wurde die zweitgrößte US-Militärbasis in Europa nach Ramstein, Bondsteel, errichtet. Als Rechtfertigung für diesen zu hundert Prozent illegalen Landraub diente wieder einmal ein ethnischer Hintergrund. Denn in Kosovo leben mehrheitlich muslimische Albaner.

Mitte der 1990er Jahre wurde eine Terrormiliz mit Namen UCK von Deutschland aus massiv aufgebaut und aufgebläht. Eine extrem gewalttätige und zudem kriminelle Vereinigung, die den Hass und Terror gegen Serben kultivierte. Die UCK-Kämpfer agierten offen als Kollaborateure der NATO und unterstützten die westlichen Bomber bei der Auswahl ihrer Ziele. Nachdem das Kriegsziel der NATO, nämlich die Zerschlagung der Bundesrepublik Jugoslawien und die Installierung einer US-Militärbasis im Herzen des Balkans erreicht waren, wurde die UCK aufgelöst. Mission accomplished. Nun wurden die UCK-Extremisten in die Polizei und Armee des neuen Quasi-Staates Kosovo aufgenommen. Seitdem müssen die im Kosovo verbliebenen Serben verdammt gut aufpassen.

Im letzten Spätherbst wurden Bürgermeisterwahlen im Kosovo verordnet. Im Norden des Kosovo gibt es noch Gemeinden mit serbischer Bevölkerungsmehrheit. Die dort lebenden Serben boykottierten diese Kommunalwahlen. Die Wahlbeteiligung lag in diesen Regionen folglich bei unerheblich über drei Prozent. Die an der Wahl teilnehmenden albanischen Kandidaten wurden von ihren Landsleuten gewählt, sodass nun Bürgermeister mit der lächerlichen „Legitimation“, von drei Prozent der Wahlberechtigten ins Amt gehoben worden zu sein, die Rathäuser besetzen wollen. Dies war nun gerade der Fall. Die Serben in der Region sind nicht bereit, diese absurde Situation zu akzeptieren.

Das sehen auch die meisten Nachbarländer des Kosovo ganz genau so. Nicht nur Serbien lehnt eine völkerrechtliche Anerkennung des Kunstgebildes Kosovo ab. Auch Rumänien, Bosnien-Herzegowina, Slowakei, aber auch globale Schwergewichte wie die Volksrepublik China und Russland wollen mit dem Konstrukt Kosovo nichts zu tun haben. Das veranlasste vor einigen Monaten Bundeskanzler Olaf Scholz und den französischen Staatspräsidenten Emmanuel Macron, Serbien zu erpressen. Der Macron-Scholz-Plan gewährt Serbien nur den Eintritt in die Europäische Union, wenn Serbien die gleichzeitige Anerkennung und Integration des Kosovo in die Netzwerke des Europa-Rats, von Interpol, UNESCO, Europäische Union, UNO und schließlich NATO akzeptiert. Mit anderen Worten: Serbien soll den Diebstahl seiner Provinz Kosovo durch die westliche Wertegemeinschaft nicht nur akzeptieren, sondern sogar aktiv unterstützen.

Unklar ist allerdings in diesem Zusammenhang umso mehr, wer eigentlich jetzt ein Interesse an Unruhen im Kosovo hat und wer die Unruhen anheizt. Immerhin haben die Unruhen als Ergebnis, dass die westliche Wertegemeinschaft weitere 700 Soldaten ihrer KFOR-Einheiten in den Kosovo entsendet. Damit wird immer noch mal deutlicher, wer im Kosovo eigentlich das Sagen hat. Das wird schon lange unterstrichen durch eine Aufpasser-Organisation der Europäischen Union. Die Rede ist von der Rechtsstaatlichkeitskommission der Europäischen Union, der so genannten EULEX. Über zweitausend Polizisten, Gefängnisaufseher und Zollbeamte aus anderen EU-Staaten führen hier ein Eigenleben. Die kosovarischen Behörden haben kein Einspruchsrecht in das Wirken und Weben der EULEX.

Wie lebt es sich so im Kunstprodukt Kosovo?

 Das habe ich bereits im Jahre 2019 in meinem Buch „Der Griff nach Eurasien“ beschrieben. Zum Abschluss noch ein paar Auszüge aus meinem Buch, zur weiteren Illustration des völkerrechtlichen Skandals, der den Namen „Kosovo“ trägt:

„Nun muss Serbien auch noch ein Stück des eigenen Territoriums an die NATO abtreten, nämlich das Kosovo-Gebiet, wo sich mittlerweile kriminelle Banden und Faschisten eingenistet hatten. Rechtlich blieb Kosovo bei Serbien, jedoch wurde es sozusagen für nicht absehbare Zeit an die Westmächte kostenlos überlassen. Das Kosovo war jetzt zu annähernd hundert Prozent mit Albanern bewohnt. Die letzten verbliebenen Serben sowie Sinti und Roma wurden unter den Augen der eingerückten mittlerweile 50.000 NATO-Soldaten der KFOR-Mission bestialisch gelyncht. Im neu eroberten Kosovo installierten die US-Streitkräfte dauerhaft ihre Militärbasis Camp Bondsteel. Nun hatten die USA neben ihrer Militärbasis Ramstein in Deutschland eine zweite starke Basis in einem exterritorialen Raum. Sozusagen ein Stück USA in Südosteuropa, ein „Brückenkopf“ (in den Worten Brzezinskis <2>) für die Inbesitznahme Eurasiens.

Wir sprachen ja davon, dass das Organisierte Verbrechen seit der Einführung der Clearing-Systeme zu einem gleichberechtigten Spieler am runden Tisch der Weltbeherrschung aufgestiegen ist. Auch diese ehrenwerte Branche bekommt das Kosovo als Basis für ihre rege und munter expandierenden Geschäftstätigkeiten zugesprochen. Im Schutz des Militärs und der Exterritorialität entwickelt sich das Kosovo zur Drehscheibe des Drogen-, Organ- und Menschenhandels für das restliche Europa:

„Anscheinend war das schnelle Anwachsen der UCK auf eine ‚30.000 Mann starke Streitkraft mit Granatwerfern, Panzerabwehrwaffen und AK47-Kalaschnikows‘ im Jahre 1999 eng mit der wachsenden Beteiligung von Kosovaren am Heroinhandel in der Schweiz, in Deutschland und Skandinavien verknüpft.“ <3>

40 Prozent des heute in Europa konsumierten Heroins ist aus Afghanistan über Kosovo an die Endverbraucher gelangt. Außerdem gilt das Kosovo als Umschlagplatz von Kokain aus Lateinamerika, von hier aus unbehelligt von irgendeiner staatlichen Kontrolle portioniert und verschickt an die Endkunden in Europa. Es ist überhaupt kein Geheimnis, dass vom kleinen Drogenkurier bis zum Präsidenten dieser seltsamen Enklave im Herzen Europas alle von kriminellen Geschäften unterschiedlichster Art profitieren. Und wollen tatsächlich einmal europäische Fahndungsbeamte dieser Connection auf den Grund gehen, sind garantiert Herrschaften aus den USA zur Stelle, die die Fahnder ausbremsen <4>.

Das ist schon erstaunlich. Denn das Kosovo untersteht seit 1999 der Verwaltungshoheit der Vereinten Nationen <5>. Zudem wird seit 2008 die politische Entwicklung in der Enklave durch einen bürokratischen Wasserkopf namens EULEX überwacht. Und die kosovarischen Finanztransaktionen unterstehen seit 1999 der strengen Kontrolle durch den Internationalen Währungsfond und – der deutschen Commerzbank! Seit nunmehr zwanzig Jahren sind sämtliche ehrenwerten Weltorganisationen im Kosovo mit starkem Personal präsent. Und trotzdem, oder vielleicht gerade deswegen, floriert gerade hier das Organisierte Verbrechen so stark wie nirgendwo anders in Europa. Was sind daraus für Schlüsse zu ziehen?

Und obwohl im Kosovo eine beachtliche Anzahl von extrem teuren Nobelkarossen zu bestaunen ist, leben die normalen Menschen, die gerne einer ehrlichen Arbeit nachgehen würden, in einer Armut, die mit Bangladesh konkurrieren kann. Die Arbeitslosigkeit oszilliert um die 50 Prozent-Marke.

Jugendarbeitslosigkeit erreicht in schlechten Zeiten eine Marke von 70 Prozent. Und 34 Prozent aller Menschen in diesem Drogenparadies vegetieren unterhalb der Armutsgrenze vor sich hin. Wer kann, wandert aus nach Deutschland oder in andere Regionen dieser Welt. Nicht nur das Kosovo – der gesamte Balkan blutet aus. Junge Frauen aus dem Südosten Europas werden mit interessanten Jobangeboten nach Deutschland gelockt, um sodann in die Zwangsprostitution verkauft zu werden. Sklaverei in unserer Mitte ist an der Tagesordnung. Die Männer müssen ihr Leben vergeuden als LKW-Fahrer in Mitteleuropa, einsam und trostlos gepfercht in die Fahrerkabinen ihrer Gigaliner, von A nach B fahrend, ohne Sozialkontakte. In deutschen Trucker-Bordellen treffen sie dann womöglich Frauen aus ihrer Heimat wieder. Während gleichzeitig zuhause auf dem Balkan junge Männer und Frauen dringend benötigt werden, um die Trümmerlandschaften wieder aufzubauen.“

Verstehen Sie nun, warum es jetzt auch im Kosovo so ungemütlich brodelt?

Source: apolut.net