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.
For decades former Nazis and German war criminals served at the highest echelons of NATO. Most of them were highly decorated Nazis, who later served in top positions in the Western German army, and were later promoted to serve as Commander and Chief of all NATO forces in Europe. This was not a unique event, but a very common phenomenon in post WW2 western Europe and especially in Western Germany. Nazi war criminals and people who supported and helped Hitler to carry out the holocaust and other war crimes, genocides and crimes against Humanity were almost never put on trial ...
Five days before the celebration of the 71th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s capitulation to the Soviet and allied troops in the WWII, the new NATO Supreme Commander in Europe Curtis Scaparrotti announced that he came to beat the drums of war again. Ignoring the historic facts and legitimate Russian interests in its around, in his first speech after assuming office he condemned alleged “Russian aggressive behavior that challenges international norms” and called the bloc members to “fight tonight if deterrence fails.”This commonplace declaration fairly correlates with the military and media strategy the Western ruling class adopted decades ago. Even putting aside the ...
Against the backdrop of US aggression against North Korea, NATO is intensifying its preparations for war with Russia, the world’s second largest nuclear power. A report in the German news magazine Der Spiegel (Issue 43/2017) based on a secret NATO document indicates how far plans for war have progressed. The news magazine concludes:“In plain language: NATO is preparing for a possible war with Russia.”In the document entitled “Progress report on the Alliance’s Enhanced Deterrence and Defence Disposition,” leading military figures call for a major boost to military capabilities in order to conduct a so-called “Major Joint Operation Plus.” The abstruse ...
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: ...
To gauge the transformation in the response by the U.S. military, the mainstream media and the public to a U.S. war crime, one need only compare the reactions to two of the most heinous American crimes: the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the gunning down of innocent Iraqis on a Baghdad street in 2007.The latter was captured on a cockpit video from attacking Apache helicopters and revealed in a video released by WikiLeaks ten years ago today. Wikileaks obtained the video from a conscientious U.S. Army intelligence analyst, Chelsea Manning. The My Lai incident was revealed to the public ...
Having already violated every tenet of international law in its proxy jihadist war against Syria, including the seizure of one-third of the country, the United States invoked a Non-Law, a Law That Never Was, to justify its missile strikes against fictitious “chemical warfare” facilities. Syrian President Assad “kills his own people,” said Trump, leader of the nation whose police kill more of its “own people” than any country except (fellow white settler state) Brazil, and whose prisons entomb one-quarter of all the world’s inmates. (One out of every eight prisoners on the planet is an African American.)On the Saturday morning ...
General Adolf Heusinger (August 4, 1897 – November 30, 1982) was a German general officer who briefly served as Adolf Hitler’s Chief of the General Staff of the Army during World War II and served as the first Inspector General of the Bundeswehr, the West German armed forces, from 1957 to 1961. Heusinger served as Chairman of the NATO Military Committee from 1961 to 1964.Heusinger was born in Holzminden, in the Duchy of Brunswick, German Empire. He entered the Imperial German Army on June 17, 1915, and was assigned to 7. Thüringisches Infanterie-Regiment Nr. 96, an infantry regiment raised in ...
With the March 24 ICTY decision condemning Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic for war crimes, exactly 17 years after NATO began its bombing spree on Serbia, international criminal justice revealed itself once again as an instrument of US and NATO foreign policy.[They chose that the 24th of March to render judgment regarding Karadzic iquite deliberately with a view to erasing the history of NATO crimes.]If any doubts persist, it is worth remembering how the Former US Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, David Scheffer, perceived that tribunal. Writing about it in his memoirs, Scheffer wrote unabashedly:the tribunal was an important judicial tool, and I had enough ...
Such important reality as is shown in this picture is virtually unpublishable in mainstream US ‘news’media, because US ‘news’media need to deceive their public about the most important international realities — such as that the US imposed upon Ukraine a nazi regime against Russia, and the US now lies to accuse Russia for doing what Russia must do in order to protect itself from the US nazi regime next-door.This picture is among many which were originally published in the excellent 4 July 2018 article by Asa Winstanley at The Electronic Intifada. His article was headlined "Israel is arming neo-Nazis in Ukraine”. That article focuses upon Israel’s strong support for ...
There has long been speculation about a Turkish good-bye to NATO.The U.S. and its military proxy organization in Europe are doing their best to further such a move:The image of Atatürk was displayed as a target during the drill at NATO’s Joint Warfare Center in Stavanger, Norway held between Nov. 8 and Nov. 17, while a NATO soldier posted defamatory words about Erdoğan on the social media.Atatürk is the founder of the secular Turkey. He was designated as "target" during a desk-top drill. NATO's Joint Warfare Center is not a low level school but an elite officer training institution led ...
Only one example of traditional Western liberal democracy's support of the notorious war criminals, bandits, and gangsters: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.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]Save
Like most Englishmen, I grew up with a natural dislike of “abroad” and a belief in the inferiority of all foreign things. I think it took me five visits to France before I began to regret leaving that lovely country rather than to rejoice at my return to our safe and familiar island.It often strikes me as quite funny that I spent so much of my life as a foreign correspondent, a profession for which I am so unfitted. When I went to live in Moscow in 1990, I felt that I had somehow betrayed my native soil. (I was ...
General James Mattis, the US Secretary of Defence, visited Macedonia on September 17 and declared that “We do not want to see Russia doing [in Macedonia] what they have tried to do in so many other countries. No doubt that they have transferred money and they are also conducting broader influence campaigns.”His observations were made in the run-up to the referendum to be held on September 30 in which Macedonians will vote on a deal reached in June with Greece that would change the country’s name to the Republic of Northern Macedonia. The referendum question is “Do you support EU and NATO ...
For the approximately 200 Canadian military trainers currently deployed to Ukraine, it is likely that on the first of January they would have witnessed a torch lit procession. Throughout Kiev and numerous other towns in Western Ukraine, thousands of civilians took to the streets – not to usher in the New Year – but to celebrate the 110th anniversary of the birth of a man named Stepan Bandera.This was not the first time Ukrainian nationalists marched with torches to celebrate Bandera’s birthday, but it was the first time such a spectacle was an officially sanctioned affair.On December 28, 2018, Ukrainian ...
The Federal Prison Industries (FPI) under the brand UNICORE operates approximately 52 factories (prisons) across the United States. Prisoners manufacture or assemble a number of products for the US military, homeland security,and federal agencies according to the UNICORE/FPI website. They produce furniture, clothing and circuit boards in addition to providing computer aided design services and call center support for private companies.UNICORE/FPI makes its pitch for employing call center support personnel to firms thinking about off-shoring their call center functions. The logic is that, hey!, they may be prisoners, but it’s keeping the jobs in the USA that matters. Fair enough. ...
Russia and its President, Vladimir Putin, a little more than a year ago, in July 2014 were the focus of attention in Europe and North America, accused, without a shred of forensic evidence, of shooting down an unarmed civilian Malaysian airliner over eastern Ukraine. The Russians were deemed out to restore the Soviet Union with their agreement to the popular referendum of Crimean citizens to annex into the Russian Federation and not Ukraine. Western sanctions were being thrown at Russia by both Washington and the EU. People spoke of a new Cold War. Today the picture is changing, and profoundly. ...
“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.”— Seneca“When the CIA goes to church, it doesn’t go to pray.”— South American aphorismLet’s be clear. Syria is invading nobody. North Korea is attacking damn all. And Russia is threatening zilch. But on the eve of the apocalypse these nations are the ones being stoned. The sanctimonious are having a field day crucifying the leaders of these countries and stomping all over the humanity of their peoples.In a godless universe the tormentors of Syria, Russia and North Korea are behaving as if ...
If the danger of the anti-Putin, anti-Russian disinformation propaganda campaign out of the Pentagon and promoted by the US corporate media weren’t so serious, the effort itself might be laughable. I did laugh.In fact, listening last night to a discussion by an NPR host with a government spokesperson about the latest propaganda effort to blame the downing of a Malaysian jumbo jet over Ukraine on July 17, 2014 on Russia. After hearing the government official, whose name I didn’t catch, say that Dutch prosecutors had found “solid evidence” that it was a “Russian-made” BUK antiaircraft missile launched from “pro-Russian” rebel ...
The title page of Rūta Vanagaitė’s best-known book contains two pictures of young men. “This one is a Jew,” she said, pointing at the picture on the left. “He was a bicycle-racing champion. Good enough to represent Lithuania in international competitions, but not good enough to live.” He was executed during the Holocaust. The man in the picture on the right was a Lithuanian executioner. “They are both us,” Vanagaitė explained. “But Lithuanians don’t like to think of them as ‘us,’ because one is a Jew and the other is a killer.” Her book is called “Us.” (The title has ...
The Working Group for the Chapter 35 of the Serbian National Convention on the European Union (EU) has called for the authorities in Serbia and Kosovo to create a cooperation to reduce the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.“We witness the coronavirus pandemic (COVID19) representing a great danger everywhere in the world and the health systems increasingly burdened with the number of infected patients. The pandemic has shown that the spread of the disease goes beyond borders, national and ethnic origin or religion of the affected, and can only be combatted through joint action, cooperation and solidarity. Cooperation is necessary primarily ...
