Posted on 02/25/2008 12:29:23 PM PST by kingattax
Readers with exceptionally tenacious memories will recall that this pundit was opposed to the NATO intervention in Kosovo nine years ago. This may come as a surprise to readers without tenacious memories, since it is widely believed that I never saw a war I didn't like. Yet, believe it or not, I was opposed not only to the wanton bombing of Serbia, but also to the whole "inevitable" project of carving a new European Muslim state out of the flesh of that Orthodox Christian country.
I was not without sympathy for the "plight of the Kosovars," however. Like virtually all journalists at that time, not of Serbian ethnicity, I fell for a great deal of typically Balkan propagandist rubbish that has since been quietly withdrawn.
My rule of thumb, on wars, is to fight them with your enemies, when absolutely necessary; but never with your friends, and in particular, never in order to create new enemies. True, as we all know from personal experience, sometimes your friends are more irritating than your enemies, and the temptation to bomb them is always there. It is a temptation that must be resisted, however.
This temptation was surely in play with the Serbians, under the late Slobodan Milosevic, who seemed determined to inspire loathing and distrust, and suspicion that he was doing in Kosovo precisely what his nationalist allies had done in Bosnia: "ethnic cleansing," also known as the massacre of innocents. Although not nearly as monstrous as, say, Saddam Hussein, nor anything like Saddam's threat to the West, Milosevic missed as many opportunities to come clean with his diplomatic interrogators. The Serbs, who allowed this vicious old Communist, turned nationalist demagogue, to remain in power, showed very poor judgment.
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearpolitics.com ...
They got that "90%" by driving hundreds of thousands of non-Albanians out -- not just Serbs, but Roman, Gorani & other non-Albanians. They have state -- it's called "Albania". Why should we reward their terrorism and create TWO Muslim Albanias -- one of them on ancient Serb Christian land? And how is this, or was this ever, in US interests?
It is in the U.S. interest not to have a war break out in the Balkans.
Try again. I am not sure I can buy your explanation. Like we don’t have any other bases in Europe? Like we don’t have military installations closer to the Middle East than Kosovo if we need to project force there? Or are we rattling our swords at the Russians again? Or is this more BS from the State Department?
On that basis, we’d lose part of Michigan.
Having your own little country is only practical if you practically never have to defend it.
Nation states formed in the first place in response to bigger and badder armies of their neighbors. Better for all the French regions to pay homage to Paris than be Spanish territory.
Let's say I own some land that has been in my family for many generations, and I decide that the best use of the property is to build a large apartment complex on it. It's my land, I pay the taxes, hold the deed, maintain the property and there are buildings on it (churches) that are dear to me (where I & my family were all baptized & married for generations) and that show the length of time that the property has been in my family.
OK, I try to be fair and rent, not only to members of my own family, but also to other people who pay me rent and who observe the law and reasonable rules.
But eventually, the neighborhood around the complex starts to change, and many of tenants start coming from one single ethnic group. OK, doesn't matter, as long as they pay rent and maintain their apartment & behave, I don't care what ethnicity they are.
But over time, there are so many from this ethnic group that they start to take over and organize. They no longer pay me rent, but demand for me to support them, "because they are so poor". But their kids (and they have lots of them) start harassing and threatening my other paying tenants and driving everyone (including their own ethnicity) who agrees with me & not them, out.
Then they start selling drugs and using my property as a whorehouse. I call the cops repeatedly. I try going through the courts to have them evicted, but they give the judge exaggerated sob stories and he rules in their favor.
Eventually, the cops have had such bad publicity for coming out and dealing with these people, that they quit coming to my address. And whenever I try to deal with them, they twist it into I am "persecuting them". (Some college grads have grown up living here, among the drug dealers, and know how to manipulate the system.) Finally, I have had enough, the police have had enough, and we all decide to take care of this problem once and for all-- and do whatever it is that is necessary to regain control of MY PROPERTY! But, the organized ethnic group was ready for this -- they provoked me & the cops beyond all reason and had the media ready and waiting to film the results on CNN, having handed out talking points and press releases beforehand. The media shows "crying babies" being evicted, "pathetic people being turned out into the night", telling horror stories of "what it is like to live in my apartment complex" -- lies mixed with half-truths, but now I am called "The Evil Slum Lord" in the media
The people from this ethnic group, having saved up their rent money and spent it on lawyers, are so well organized that they have convinced the mayor to "condemn my property" and give it to them! They have destroyed my property and then convince the mayor that it is "a public health hazard" and they can manage it better than I can. After all, the apartment complex is now filled with "90% of their people" and only a small percentage of my family & others -- they call it "self-determination". So the mayor lets them take over "management", not ownership, of the property for nine years and starts pouring grant money into my property. But now the organized group sees a chance to drive the paying remaining tenants out, destroy my churches and pursue even more legal means to make the theft of my property permanent. Meanwhile, the mayor has slapped me with fines for having "unfairly treated my tenants", and lies about "the progress being made under new management" on the property, just to cover his own ass for having invested so much money in it.
Finally, I have tried everything I know to legally regain my property. But, after going through hell, the mayor with great flourish at "having improved the city, finally gives the organized group the title to my property! I can't believe it! I am not even allowed to set foot on the legacy that my family left me! I stand there shaking my head, not able to understand how in the hell this happened in a society that is supposed to respect property rights (sovereignty). Tell me how in the hell to get back what is mine!
Lost the last line to that there:
And that is where the Serbs are sitting today — wondering how to get back what is theirs.
BTTT!
Well explained for the people who are “new” to the Balkans!
Such as?
This is all about moving our troops in Europe out of places like Germany and closer to the middle east. Take a look at a map. We have troops stationed in Romania and Bulgaria, but we don't have our own bases in those countries. We are guests there. If there is are political changes there, we could lose that access. Nobody can kick us out of Kosovo, however.
So the USA is attacking Muslims in the ME by setting up two Muslim-dominated states in Europe?
Wow.
Like we DO have a base in Kosovo, and it's not going anywhere anytime soon. Best to keep the area calm and the local government friendly, than suddenly find a lot of billions of dollars in military hardware in close proximity to an unfriendly government keen on possessing all of it, if not only the land it sits on.
I know somebody that can.
Do you think property should be owned by individuals or the State?
Dicey question and you might want to ask the next person from Hawaii you come across his opinion on the topic. When you get a situation in which five or ten guys own ALL the property in sight and nobody else has any shot at it, the state sometimes is compelled to act (as they did in Hawaii). In the case of Kosovo, the manner in which the albunny Kosovars came into possession of most of the property is worth studying; it mostly amounts to stuff which most people would call terrorism.
The Hawaiians of old didn’t have any property rights so they can’t say that they want their land back. Commoners or maka’ainana were ruled by a caste of elite called the ali’i. This ruling caste was not even Hawaiian but rather a bunch of snotty elites that came from Tahiti to lord over the Hawaiians.
They lorded over the locals so completely that everything on the land and on the sea was owned by them so that they couldn’t even eat without their permission.
The ali’i were full of a divine power called mana which permitted them to arbitrarily place a taboo or curse on anything.
This rule by the ali’i continued until 1893 when Queen Lili’uokalani ( the writer of the song 'Aloha 'Oe', by the way) was deposed in a coup.
So you see, the Hawaiian people never had any property rights either until they were liberated from the war lords.
Just as an aside, I believe this also applies to the American Indians.
That’s very interesting, and it probably applies to most “homelands.” The 19th century was a fertile field for the production of ethnicism/nationalism, in many cases because the scientists of that time went around defining ethnic groups by things like skull size or shape, etc. and then attributing various cultural things to them as sort of ethnic built-ins.
Of course, in reality, every individual human being is free to participate in society in any way in which he wishes to do so, subject to certain moral laws. But the late 19th century had just discovered popular science, and this penetrated through the press into the very susceptible minds of many people.
We’re just now seeing its full flowering. It took a combination of the radical left, the journalistic left, and the stupid left to finally convince perfectly normal modern people that they were somehow tribesmen in some defunct and left-in-the-dust tribe, and then convince them that they had a modern legal right to some property that these people had once inhabited. Not as individuals, naturally, but as the “tribe,” the ultimate collectivist dream.
Of course, they all want to be chief. After all, he’s the one who gets the bucks, since any tribal system is heirarchical and essentially dominated by the wealthy guy at the top. But I guess they haven’t thought that far ahead...
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