By illegally occupying Kosovo and then violating the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Serbia by recognizing Kosovo “independence” in contravention of the United Nations and international law, the US and NATO set a dangerous and reckless precedent […]
Yada…yada…yada. The discussion on the unprovoked and planned aggression by Georgia on South Ossetia is futile and moot because Russian President Dmitry Medvedev announced last week that the Russian Government would recognize the independence and freedom of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. On August 25, 2008, both houses of the Russian Parliament or Duma voted unanimously to recognize the independence of both South Ossetia and Abkhazia. On August 26, 2008, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev announced that the government of the Russian Federation officially recognized the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Save your rhetoric. Georgia has lost those areas permanently. Ossetians and Abkhazians can never live in the same state with Georgians again. Period. South Ossetia will be an independent nation a la Kosovo. In other words, like Kosovo, South Ossetians will unilaterally declare independence from Tbilisi. And who will stop them? The answer is: No one. South Ossetia is exactly like Kosovo.
South Ossetians are over two-thirds of the population of South Ossetia. In other words, they are the majority. Moreover, in 2006, South Ossetians voted in a democratic referendum in which over 90% favored independence. South Ossetians have a right to self-determination and to self-rule. And as a majority, they have the democratic right to decide their own fate.
Just think of South Ossetia as a Caucasus Kosovo. If Albanian Muslims can have two countries in the heart of Europe, then why can’t South Ossetian Christians have their own country as well? Everything is on the side of the South Ossetians. And Russian Federation T-72 tanks and SS 21 misssiles do not hurt either.
As Mr. T would say, stop all this jibber jabber. South Ossetia has been de facto an independent nation at least since 1992. And now, Russian leaders have announced that South Ossetia will be recognized as an independent and free nation. If the Albanian Muslims can unilaterally declare “independence” in violation of the UN and international law, then why can’t the South Ossetians? What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
South Ossetia is exactly like the Kosovo scenario. Both are essentially proxy wars.
Albanian Muslims have two countries in the heart of Europe now. Why? Because of US tanks and missilies, because of the US and NATO military presence in Kosovo, an internationally and legally recognized part of Serbia. In both cases, tanks are deciding the issue. In Kosovo, it is US tanks. In South Ossetia, it is Russian tanks.
Kosovo is not a country. It has no economy and no political or social history. The name “Kosovo” is actually a Serbian word that means “place of blackbirds”. Almost all of the towns, cities, and villages in Kosovo have Serbian names and a Serbian history that goes back half a millennium. Kosovo is a phony country. It is in fact a legal part of Serbia and is part of the UN recognized borders of Serbia.
What the US did is pull a fast one here. Kosovo was not recognized as independent by the UN and by Serbia and about three-quarters of the world. Only the US and its satellite states have recognized Kosovo. So, under international law and the UN, the unilateral declaration of independence is illegal and criminal.
But the US government does not tell you this. The US occupation of Kosovo is illegal under the UN and international law.
Then the US has the audacity and arrogance to accuse Russia over the issue of South Ossetian independence. Kosovo and South Ossetia are the same scenarios. They only exist because of respective American and Russian tanks. Take away American tanks in Kosovo, and there is no more Albanian Muslim Kosovo. Serbia would reintegrate it within its internationally recognized borders.
Russian leaders announced last week that South Ossetia and Abkhazia will be recognized as free and independent. On August 26, 2008, the Russian Federation recognized South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent. And who is going to stop them? No one is. Kosovo and South Ossetia are about force, brute military force, nothing else. Might makes right. Both cases are based upon the same principle. The Kosovo scenario was a precedent in that it made the recognition of South Ossetia inevitable and necessary. When international law and sovereignty were violated in the Kosovo scenario, the only recourse is force.
Just compare the facts in both cases. South Ossetians are a majority of the population in South Ossetia and in a 2006 referendum they voted overwhelmingly for independence from Tbilisi, over 90% voting for independence. Moreover, this genocidal aggression and attack on Tskhinvali by a US proxy and puppet leader, one installed in what was essentially a CIA coup, the CIA-funded and CIA-organized “Rose Revolution”, means that Georgia has lost these areas forever and permanently. Only World War III can change these facts on the ground. And that is why Kosovo and South Ossetia are exactly the same scenarions: Independent “nations” that exist only due to the proxy wars of the superpowers, that exist only through force.
But South Ossetia has a more legitimate claim to independence because it has been de facto independent since 1992 and emerged during the break up of the Soviet Union. The Kosovo case is different because Kosovo was always legally a part of Serbia, even when Yugoslavia broke up in 1991-1992, internationally recognized as a part of Serbia. The way the US and NATO got around this legal barrier was to create a bogus and phony Holocaust or genocide claim for Kosovo. That genocide assertion has since been proved to be a US and NATO propaganda hoax. There was never any basis in fact for the genocide claim. In other words, the US and NATO occupation of Kosovo was illegal and criminal ab initio with no foundation in international law, the UN, or in the practices and customs of sovereign nations. But that didn’t stop the US from using Kosovo as a proxy conflict to dismember Serbia and to support an illegal separatist movement.
At any rate, discussion is moot and futile because both South Ossetia and Kosovo are guaranteed by the superpowers. Russian tanks are in South Ossetia along with SS 21 missiles. In Kosovo, there are American tanks. Might makes right. Both cases are exactly the same.
The most important point regarding analyses of the media coverage of the South Ossetian conflict is that a propaganda or media war is an adjunct to every war. Every war also brings up epistemological issues. In other words, we always see a war through a certain filter or lens. We never see a war without this lens or filter. And filters and lens distort reality. This is an important point.
In every war, there is an issue of reality control and perception management. CNN and Fox News in the US sought to portray or present the war as “aggression” or an “invasion” by Russia. In fact, it was Georgia that invaded the breakaway region of South Ossetia, which has been de facto independent since 1992. Which view is correct and the “truth”? It depends on which paradigm or lens you use.
The first paradigm is: Georgia is a sovereign country that has UN recognized borders. Based on this assumption, Georgia can do no wrong. Everything it does will be legitimate and legal. Georgian troops can murder 200,000 Russian civilians or 2,000 South Ossetians and that will be seen as legitimate because Georgia was safeguarding its UN recognized borders. This is the paradigm the US media used, following the marching orders of the US Government and US State Department. The US government tells the US media what paradigm they must follow. In this regard, US media is state-run or state-controlled media.
Of course, the US did not apply this paradigm to Serbia. Serbia too is a sovereign nation that has UN recognized borders. But then why did the US dismember Kosovo and detach it from Serbia outside of the UN and international law? Based on the UN and international law, what the US diod was illegal and against international law.
The issue here is: Who gets to decide? The US gets to decide these matters. It is selective. The US can arbitrarily and subjectively decide what is legal, legitimate, and adheres to international law. In other words, the US is the “international community”. This is a bit of a smokescreen but the US can get away with it because it has the largest army in the world and controls all media.
The second paradigm is: Georgia committed an act of aggression by launching a planned war against Russian peacekeepers in a region with de facto independence and an international peacekeeping mission. Like Kosovo, the South Ossetians should be allowed to vote in a democratic referendum on whether they want to be independent. Moreover, the principles of self-determination apply to South Ossetia. Of course, the US Government rejects this paradigm vis a vis South Ossetia but accepts it vis a vis Kosovo. The US is just applying an arbitrary standard based on whether the parties are proxies or adversaries. The US applies one paradigm to Albanian Muslim separatists and another one to Ossetian Christian separatists. The scenarios are identical. But in one case the parties are proxies and in the other they are adversaries.
There is no critical media literacy in the US. This is because the corporate and military and political interests in the US want to keep Americans dumb and stupid, brain-dead zombies. This is for obvious reasons. People must be out buying all sorts of things they do not need, they must rush to the next movie blockbuster, and they must support the latest US “humanitarian intervention” to save mankind.
Media analysts cite Joseph Goebbels and Nazi propaganda techniques as sui generis and in vacuo. What the media analysts neglect to mention about Goebbels is that the Nazi propaganda machine was based on American models. Goebbels based much of his propaganda techniques on the pioneering work of American Edward Bernays. In fact, Goebbels studied Berenay’s books on propaganda and had at least one on his shelves. Not many Americans know that Joseph Goebbels based his propaganda techniques on US media persuasion techniques developed by Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann. That is a fact we subconsciously reject and self-repress and deny.
All wars entail propaganda and media wars because all wars present epistemological issues. How we see a war depends on the lens we use. And all lenses distort and alter reality.
By illegally occupying Kosovo and then violating the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Serbia by recognizing Kosovo “independence” in contravention of the United Nations and international law, the US and NATO set a dangerous and reckless precedent. The US showed contempt and disdain for international law and the UN and the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Serbia. Force is all that matters. Might makes right. The Kosovo precedent made the secession of South Ossetia and Abkhazia inevitable and unavoidable.
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
On this day in 1973 the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, was overthrown by General Augusto Pinochet. In the aftermath, 3000 leftists were murdered, tens of thousands tortured and hundreds of thousands driven from the country.Since it doesn’t serve to justify further domination by the powerful few in the Canadian media will commemorate the ‘original 9/11’. Even fewer will recognize Canada’s role in the US backed coup.The Pierre Trudeau government was hostile to Allende’s elected government. In 1964 Eduardo Frei defeated the openly Marxist Allende in presidential elections. Worried about growing support for socialism, Ottawa gave $8.6 million to ...
How Dumb is the CIA? With the hydrogen bomb test by North Korea, it should be recalled the CIA was dumb enough to be responsible for North Korea acquiring nukes.Reorganized Murder IncorporatedAccording to a Washington Post article, John Brennan has set out to restructure the CIA's longstanding model:"At issue is a basic structure that has been in place since the agency’s inception, with employees divided by function among four major directorates. The best known are the National Clandestine Service, which sends case officers overseas on spying missions and carries out covert operations, and the Directorate of Intelligence, which employs thousands ...
How did Russia and the West slip back into what seems like the Cold War all over again? How dangerous is the current confrontation? Should the world be ready to face a nuclear war? We ask somebody who’s renowned for his insights. World-famous academic, linguist, philosopher and political commentator Noam Chomsky is on Sophie&Co today.Follow @SophieCo_RTSophie Shevardnadze: World-renowned academic Noam Chomsky, Professor Noam Chomsky, welcome to the show, it’s a great pleasure to have you with us today. Now, today U.S.-Russia relations are at a Cold War low. Rhetoric resembles what we heard in the 80-s. What is the worst-case ...
South-East Europe, and especially the Balkan Peninsula as the main part of it, have traditionally been the object of numerous geopolitical, geostrategic, and publicist analyses, as well as the subject of debates among the Balkan, European, and global experts in international relations. The new Iron Curtain or the Cold War 2.0 between western and eastern Europe was not the end of the Balkan’s importance for the US administration and NATO as well. At present, along with the Serbian and Macedonian national questions, the most controversial issue is the Albanian national question or, more precisely, the question of the Kosovo knot.[1] ...
President Bill Clinton’s favorite freedom fighter just got indicted for mass murder, torture, kidnapping, and other crimes against humanity. In 1999, the Clinton administration launched a 78-day bombing campaign that killed up to 1500 civilians in Serbia and Kosovo in what the American media proudly portrayed as a crusade against ethnic bias. That war, like most of the pretenses of U.S. foreign policy, was always a sham.Kosovo President Hashim Thaci was charged with ten counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity by an international tribunal in The Hague in the Netherlands. It charged Thaci and nine other men with ...
The Imperial Anatomy of Al-Qaeda. The CIA’s Drug-Running Terrorists and the “Arc of Crisis”Part IIntroductionAs the 9th anniversary of 9/11 nears and the war on terror continues to be waged and grows in ferocity and geography, it seems all the more imperative to return to the events of that fateful September morning and re-examine the reasons for war and the nature of the stated culprit, Al-Qaeda.The events of 9/11 pervade the American and indeed the world imagination as a historical myth. The events of that day and those leading up to it remain largely unknown and little understood by the ...
The media is currently in the midst of an anti-Russian hysteria that many have dubbed Cold War 2.0. Of course the first cold war never really ended as the wars in Yugoslavia, Chechnya, and even Afghanistan were aimed at Russia as was the relentless NATO expansion. This manufactured panic is a form of psychological warfare that went into high gear during the Sochi Olympics in 2014 as the US was working to launch a fascist coup in Ukraine. Since most ordinary people would be shocked to discover that Nazis had been installed in power in Ukraine an anti-Russian hysteria was ...
What has happened is that NATO provides cover for these transgressions of the United States government’s policy. In other words, it absolutely legitimizes what effectively is NATO aggression. Moreover, what one needs to bear in mind and what one needs to be mindful about is the fact that in Western Europe you no longer have rulers with the independence of Charles de Gaulle.It seems that Washington, and we can use Washington, America and NATO interchangeably because NATO is dominated by the United States. It is a command structure, which ultimately is based on American military power and American military precedence. ...
Israel claims that it’s in a mortal struggle with Islamic terrorists …But as we reported last year, the Israeli military has admitted to supporting Syrian Islamic jihadists. And see this.Last week, Daily Mail journalists embedded with Israeli troops reported:Almost every night, Israeli troops run secret missions to save the lives of Syrian fighters, all of whom are sworn enemies of the Jewish state.***Analysts suggest the Jewish state has in fact struck a deadly ‘deal with the devil’ – offering support to the Sunni militants who fight the Syrian ruler Assad in the hope of containing its arch enemies Hezbollah and Iran.***Many of the casualties ...
CNN recently discovered a paradox. How was it possible, they asked, that in 1989, Viktor Orban, at the time a Western-acclaimed liberal opposition leader, was calling for Soviet troops to leave Hungary, and now that he is Prime Minister, he is cozying up to Vladimir Putin?For the same reason, dummy.Orban wanted his country to be independent then, and he wants it to be independent now.In 1989, Hungary was a satellite of the Soviet Union. Whatever Hungarians wanted, they had to follow directives from Moscow and adhere to Soviet communist ideology.Today, Hungary is ordered to follow directives from Brussels and adhere ...
IntroductionBelow are TENC's October 1999 interviews with three Serbian women from the Kosovo town of Orahovac. They recount how, prior to the June 1999 NATO-UN takeover of Kosovo, they believed NATO's promise that it would institute multi-ethnic harmony. They discovered too late that for NATO multi-ethnic meant rule by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).In September, TENC had published its first interview with an eye-witness to the NATO-UN Kosovo takeover: Cedomir Prlincevic, President of the Jewish community and Chief Archivist in Pristina, capital of Kosovo.Mr. Prlincevic described how he and the rest of the small Jewish community were driven from their ...
There are many definitions and/or understandings of war. However, from the very academic point of view, war can be understood as an armed conflict between at least two sides usually but not necessarily states fought usually for some (geo)political goals. The focal conceptual idea of war is the use of force between large-scale political subjects like states, empires, or coalitions. Historically, wars have been fought mainly for the control of certain land for different reasons ranging from a purely political one to a purely economic one or a combination of several of them.Many types of war and warfare can be ...
The U.N. Organization was established in 1945 for the very security reason – to preserve the peace in the world. We believe that the governmental bodies and administrative structures of the U.N. have to be composed by the proved democratically oriented politicians and magistrates but above all this requirement has to be applied to the post and function of the U.N. Secretary-General. Nevertheless, in the history of the U.N. there is at least one (extremely) problematic appointment to the post of the U.N. Secretary-General: Kurt Waldheim from Austria.On the official website of the U.N. about its fourth Secretary-General one can ...
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1244 (1999) guaranteeing sovereignty and territorial integrity of Serbia and the autonomy of Kosovo and Metohija within Serbia, is the highest binding legal document that obliges all UN members, including the member states of the EU, NATO, the OSCE, the OIC, the African Union.Resolution 1244 is the only reliable basis and the framework for any negotiations concerning status. Owing to grave mistakes made by the former Serbian authorities, the UN system has produced certain damaging documents of advisory and non-binding character. It is vital that no similar or even greater mistakes are made either presently ...
After Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo is a second ISIS in Europe today. From June 1999, when NATO troops occupied Kosovo and brought to power militant Muslim Albanian Jihad fighters, systematic destruction of (Serbian Orthodox) Christianity is visible on every corner.The most disappointing fact in post-war Kosovo reality is ethnic and cultural cleansing of all non-Albanians and not-Albanian cultural heritage. The proofs are evident and visible on every corner of Kosovo territory. For instance, on the arrival of KFOR (international but in fact NATO „Kosovo Forces“) and UNMIK („United Nations Mission in Kosovo“) to Kosovo in 1999, all the names of the towns ...
More than six decades after Berlin’s capitulation which capped World War II, the war is still raging, now in the form of revisionist attempts to cast a shadow over the memory of Soviet soldiers who fought in it. Among other things, the efforts aimed at equating fascism – a monster nurtured by the West in the 1930s-1940s – and Russia’s XX century wartime past are supposed to divert attention from the continuity between the Anglo-Saxon imperialism and the German national socialism. The nature and key traits of the continuity are exposed in “From Imperialism to Fascism: Why Hitlers’ India was ...
So much after the fact; so much in terms of opportunism gone to seed and destruction. But planned historical calamities tend to be rare. There are only absurd moments, dastardly opportunities, and tragic convergences. History is less the outcome of wise deliberation than folly dressed up as reason, occasionally tinged by a touch of malice.On November 2, 1917, the British government published the Balfour Declaration (one of “sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations”) by means of a letter written by Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur James Balfour to Lord Walter Rothschild. It suggested forthcoming British assistance for the establishment of a Jewish ...
Each of the full-blown wars between Israel and its Arab neighbours have carried a great measure of significance. The War of 1948 led to the creation of the modern state of Israel, a cause for euphoria among the world’s Jews in the post-Shoah-era, in contrast to the Nakba inflicted on the Arabs of Palestine.The War of 1967, during which Israel routed three Arab armies in six days established Israel as a regional hegemon while its defeated Arab neighbours stewed in their humiliation and the Palestinian communities in the West Bank and Gaza came under occupation.The Arab-Israeli War of 1973, known ...
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
When we use the genocide label for other kinds of killing (e.g. death through neglect, or bureaucratic elimination) do we diminish the weight of the word genocide? Many non-Indigenous Canadians bristle at the notion that a label like genocide applies to Canada.As early as November, 1907, the Canadian press was acknowledging that the death rate within Indian residential schools exceeded 50% (see Appendix, “Key Newspaper Articles”).And yet the reality of such a massacre has been wiped clean from public record and consciousness in Canada over the past decades.Small wonder; for that hidden history reveals a system whose aim was to ...
