TRANSCRIPT:Harold Channer (HC): Good evening and welcome very, very much to the conversation. We’re pleased to welcome to the program, Sean Gervasi. He is a professor and academic who is concerned with economics and particularly with what is relevant to what we want to talk about tonight. He has just returned from a long stay in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and knows something of that situation. Sean Gervasi, welcome very, very much to the conversation, and back to New York. Before we go into some detail about what in the world is going on in terms of the Balkans, from your experience ...
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Unfathomable as that may appear, yes, it was quite possible for the second-ranking slaughterhouse in Europe in recent memory to have slipped off the radar screen. Even such a renowned authority as Professor Gideon Greif is having an exceptionally difficult time of it in trying to put it back on.Precisely because it has not been the theme of any Hollywood spectaculars, Jasenovac does not attract any school excursions and textbooks are largely silent about it. Some background information on Jasenovac therefore seems like a good place to start.The Jasenovac death camp (1941 – 1945) is inextricably bound up with the ...
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While Zimbabwe was changing under various inexorable forces of power, the more sterile surrounds of The Hague and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia offered the scene for a conviction.The “Serb Warlord” or the “Butcher of Bosnia”, as he has been termed in various circles, had finally received a verdict few were doubting. One of the doubters was, naturally, the man himself, Ratko Mladić, who accused the judicial officers of incurable mendacity.Of the 11 charges levelled at Ratko Mladić, he was acquitted of one – genocide in Bosnian municipalities outside Srebrenica. Others covered genocide, war crimes and crimes ...
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Islam in the BalkansIt is the truth that the Balkan Peninsula is a mosaic of different and in some cases antagonistic religious communities with the Christian Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Islam as the principal religious denominations followed by different types of Protestants, followers of Judaism, Armenian Christian Orthodox, etc. The small Muslim communities existed at the Balkans even before the Ottoman conquest of the Peninsula which started in the mid-14th century but it was not until the mid-17th century that substantial Muslim population emerged firstly in Albania, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Bulgaria.In a course of time, the Balkan Muslims became in ...
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Message in the Bottle, One Hundred Years LaterSmyrna, Ottoman Empire, September 1922 Dear World – Our time has come to disperse like wildflower seeds in the wind. We are the last storytellers and children of the Ancients, their legacy and their accomplishments. The men and women have been separated. Many men were sent to the interior. Women clutching their babies, even in death, have walked miles. The elders have fallen by the roadside. The children, oh, the sweet children, their eyes are glazed with fear, their words lost, and, yet, they see a butterfly and for one moment, they smile. If only … ...
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Edward S. Herman died on November 11, 2017, at the age of 92. Fortunately, it was a peaceful death for a supremely peaceful man. In all he did, Ed Herman was a tireless champion of peace.Ed Herman could be considered the godfather of antiwar media critique, both because of his own contributions and because of the many writers he encouraged to pursue that work. Thanks to his logical mind and sense of justice, he sharply grasped the crucial role and diverse techniques of media propaganda in promoting war. He immediately saw through lies, including those so insidious that few dare ...
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Last month was the 18th anniversary of the attack on the Serbian village of Kravica committed by Moslem forces from Srebrenica under the command of Naser Orić on Orthodox Christmas day, January 7, 1993. Several dozen villagers were killed in the attack, the remaining Serbian population was forced to flee to safety, and many homes were pillaged, demolished and torched during the several weeks that Kravica was forcibly occupied by neighbours from nearby Srebrenica. Regardless of arcane debates of who started the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, on a human level the attack on the village of Kravica and the ...
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What is wrong with the American people? After several years of horrific policy toward the waking world, democracy’s standard bearers seem to be drowning in a lake of selfishness. Distracted, apathetic, or simply dumbed and numbed by unrelenting propaganda, the most admired society on Earth has turned to a wriggling mush of diverging ideals. I fear that American have become what we ultimately deplored, just another despicable cultural hegemony. Here’s a short brief on the matter.A recent article by James Carden at The Nation prompted me to discuss this unsavory truth today. The title of the piece, “Trump’s Syria Policy: ...
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While much is said in some American media outlets about “fake news” in the US, the smallness of the matters being discussed might come into focus when compared with Ukraine, which is of late producing rather much fake news about the Holocaust and elementary points in World War II history.As we reported back in October, Ukrainian media outlet Radio Svoboda — the Ukrainian arm of the US Government-funded arm of RFERL — posted a picture from the US Holocaust Museum. It is an image of Polish Jews being deported to a death camp. There was just one problem. Radio Svoboda claimed the picture ...
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“Ethnic affiliation has never been forgotten in the territories of the former Yugoslavia. It did play a certain role, and it did influence decisions even during the Tito's era of strict ‘Brotherhood and Unity’”[Várady T., “Minorities, Majorities, Law and Ethnicity: Reflections of the Yugoslav Case”, Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 19, 1997, p. 42]People, nation and stateI agree that “in Yugoslavia, all political problems are intimately linked with the issue of nationalism”.[i] Indeed, the fixing of inner or administrative borders between Yugoslavia’s nations and nationalities became one of the main issues that forged nationalism after the Second World War onward and ...
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Over the past several years, analysts and commentators have noticed a rising tide of domestic support for the Croatian homegrown Nazi movement of the Second World War, the Ustashe, which actively exterminated Serbs, Jews, and Roma in the territory it controlled from 1941-45. Far from condemning this alarming development, the Croatian government, the European Union, and non-state actors within it have tacitly and actively supported the rising tide of sympathy towards the Ustashe.This disconnect between the ostensible “European values” of human rights and tolerance that the European Union claims to represent, and its tacit support of trends towards extremist politics ...
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SERBIAN SETTLEMENT IN BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA BEGAN IN THE SEVENTH CENTURY A.D.Note: Croats settled much later and in insignificant numbers. That is why they are not mentioned much in the literature.THE EMPEROR CONSTANTINE VII PORPHYROGENITUS (reigned 913-957) REFERRED TO BOSNIA AS PART OF *THE LAND OF THE SERBS*.BOSNIA-HERCEGOVINA… THE LARGEST SINGLE NATIONAL ELEMENT IS THE ORTHODOX SERBS, followed by Moslem Slavs (few of whom can trace their origin to Turkish colonists) and Catholic Croats……The republics of Croatia and Slovenia are predominantly Roman Catholic, while the republics of Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and BOSNIA-HERCEGOVINA (!!!) are predominantly ORTHODOXIn the ’90-ies Alija Izetbegovic, former SS ...
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More than 20 years after the Srebrenica massacre, Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladić was found guilty of war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia this past November.Along with Mladić, the ICTY convicted the other so-called “Butcher of Bosnia”, the Bosnian Serb and former Republika Sprska leader Radovan Karadžić in 2016. Meanwhile, it fully exonerated the Bosnian Muslim army commander Naser Orić of similar charges which outraged the people of Serbia. Yet, it was the same court that posthumously exonerated former Serbian President Slobodan Milošević in 2016. If you weren’t aware of the latter, it’s because it ...
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As heavily-armed US and NATO troops enforced the peace in Bosnia, the press and politicians alike portrayed Western intervention in the former Yugoslavia as a noble, if agonizingly belated, response to an outbreak of ethnic massacres and human rights violations. In the wake of the November 1995 Dayton peace accords, the West was eager to touch up its self-portrait as savior of the Southern Slavs and get on with “the work of rebuilding” the newly “sovereign states.”But following a pattern set early on, Western public opinion had been skillfully misled. The conventional wisdom exemplified by the writings of former US ...
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Dr. Steven Leonard Jacobs holds the Aaron Aronov Endowed Chair of Judaic Studies and is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama-Tuscaloosa. An ordained rabbi, Professor Jacobs is a specialist on the Holocaust and Genocide, Biblical Studies, Jewish-Jewish Christian Relations, and is one of the foremost authorities on Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959), who coined the term “genocide” and devoted his life to the enactment of an international law on the punishment and prevention of genocide.Among his numerous publications, Prof. Jacobs is the author of the chapter entitled, “Lemkin on Three Genocides: Comparing His Writings on the Armenian, Assyrian, ...
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Long before Donald Trump successfully hung the “fake news” label on CNN, more discerning observers of the wars of the Yugoslav succession of the 1990s came to similar conclusions regarding the network’s news coverage of that tragedy. Headlined by Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s reporting, especially from Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, showed a clear pro-Muslim, anti-Serbian bias, painting the conflict in stark black-and-white colors, where the Christian Serbs were always the “black hat” “aggressors,” perpetrators of “genocide” and such, while the Bosnian and Albanian Muslims were inevitably the “white hat” “victims,” in dire need of U.S. and Western “humanitarian” intervention to spare them from extermination at ...
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Chris Deliso of Balkanalysis points out the latest travesty of the Western media: 59,000 stories on Auschwitz, three on Jasenovac. As if the third-largest death camp in Nazi-occupied Europe simply never existed. Franjo Tudjman certainly thought so, and it appears the current Croatian leadership shares his "historical" perspective.Contemporary German estimates of Serbs murdered by the Ustasha (in Jasenovac and elsewhere) ranged as high as 750,000. Wiesenthal center uses the number of 600,000. Serbian researchers have spoken of up to 700,000 victims. Modern revisionists, Croat and otherwise, talk of 30-100,000, at most. Among them is the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which ...
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In 1917, the Austro-Hungarian government erected a monument to Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife the Duchess Sophie in Sarajevo on the third year anniversary of the assassinations on June 28. It was called the Sühnedenkmal or Spomenik umorstva, The Atonement or Expiation Monument. The bronze statue was by Hungarian sculptor Eugen Bori.Photo left: 1918 Austro-Hungarian postcard featuring the monument to Franz Ferdinand and Duchess Sophie in Sarajevo date stamped August 25, 1918 by Kartenzentrale Jacob A. Cappon, Sarajevo, the same publisher of the Gavrilo Princip postcard published after the war. Sarajevo, Sühnedenkmal. Spomenik umorstva. 28 VI. 1914. Atonement or Expiation ...
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Somewhere in the 20th century — it is difficult to determine precisely when, but many point to the 1990s anti-Serb craze — historical revisionism on WWI that would have been laughed out of the room in the 1920s and 1930s became widespread in the western mainstream media.Nobody should be surprised to learn this is an ailment that therefore also affects RT. The Russian-funded outlet is staffed by westerners and modeled after western news channels – and is as such frequently only marginally less wrong on numerous issues than its western counterparts. (All the more so when it comes to the little-understood Balkans.)Covering ...
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After the Donald Trump administration’s decision to recognize the disputed city of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move the US embassy there from Tel Aviv, the national aspirations of the Palestinian people to live in their own state have been severely dashed by Washington’s move. Ever since the formation of the United States, it has been American policy to destroy aspirant nations like the internationally-recognized State of Palestine.The first nation destroyed by the United States was the Cherokee Nation, or Tsalagihi Ayeli, which, beginning in 1794, was slowly decimated by forced removals from territory in Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Alabama, ...
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