EXTRA! Hague Trib Outs Self as Star Chamber!--by Mick Collins, CM/P

FLASH!!!

This is one of those

‘Get in here, Kent!’

‘What is it, Mr White?’

‘Get Lois and Jimmy in here, too!’

‘Tear out the front page.’ -flashes:

In the middle of writing this article about the NY Times’ petty resentful coverage of the enormously effective opening presentation of the Milosevic Defense, this item from my friend Vlada Krsljanin at SLOBODA and the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic (of which I am still a dedicated member!) hit my in-box:

HAGUE: IMPOSITION OF INTERNATIONAL DICTATORSHIP

NATO/US/UN "Tribunal" at The Hague decided today to
impose a counsel on Slobodan Milosevic against his will.

Now this is some seriously sick shit here!

But then The Hague was always that kind of pussy pick-up game where the rich kids could order the best player on the other team (the only player, in this case!) off the field—for playing too well.

So, what to do about the article I’d been working on for a couple, three hours already?

Since, last year, I suggested that the Prosecution hadn’t made any kind of a case that the President should defend himself against, and I felt that this undeserved history lesson he was giving these empty robes ought not be continued and no defense at all be presented; I thought I could just stick the above headline/lead at the end of my piece—set up one of those ‘I don’t wanna say “I told you so”, but you heard it from me first’-moments.

But why would the Tribunal impose counsel on President Milosevic? Sure, there’s been a lot of talk about doing it since he refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Tribunal and was only participating in it as a NATO hostage. But such an obviously illegal and self-defeating act of desperation seemed beneath even this contemptible excuse for a court.

So, see if you can stay with this story until the end, and maybe we’ll find out more about what’s at the heart of this New Totalitarianism.

[My articlus interruptus begins here:]
[Just like Emperor’s Clothes, huh?]

re: Milosevic Startled: His Rousing 2-Day Defense Wins No Applause
by MARLISE SIMONS
[Published: NY Times online, September 2, 2004]

In the 2 September 2004 issue of the NY Times online, Marlise Simons, exhibiting delusions of being The Times’ long-gone theatre reviewer Howard Taubman, seems to have reached the very limit of her very limited critical competence. And The Times has so Simons-ized it’s coverage of The Hague Tribunal (and, for that matter, all affairs Balkaniques) that it’s hard to find informational traction, even to see past the cheap veneer of their hi-gloss reportage.

In her story on the second day of President Milosevic’s Defense, Simons confines herself strictly to meta-statements on the President’s presentational style (that he’s ‘wasting the court’s time’ and otherwise ‘insulting’ this august body), and the rather disingenuous—no, the downright duplicitous complaints that his weak health might be interfering with his self-defense (some seem concerned that he might not be following the court-ordered medicinal regimen to control his hypertension, but might actually be dipping into ‘illegal’ medications against stress [i.e., drugs prescribed by a home town croaker]). But as my friend Michael Parenti wrote: if Milosevic is not well enough to defend himself, he is not well enough to stand trial.

Imagine: one man, hunted and hounded mercilessly by some of the most malicious curs in the history of imperial warfare; before being kidnapped by a quisling Prime Minister, Zoran Djindjic, who’d fled his country during its great suffering at the hands of his own German and American patrons (and eventual assassins!); then was bagged off to a high-end (with a $270 million a year budget) version of Court TV (only without much TV!); to face a pack of gibbering and slavering, mass-murdering snitch-ass punk accusers (blood-soaked freaks like Lord David ‘Doc Oct’ Owen, the death squad DI, Wm Walker, the Judas-goat, Paddy Ashdown, and Michael Moore’s favorite sack of wet dove shit, Gen. Wesley Clark), all of whom had passed around the ‘joint criminal enterprise’ that pulled off the reduction of the once formidable Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia to the weak and servile Federation of Serbia and Montenegro: this man-alone is told by the Court and NY Times that his questions pertaining to the destruction of his country and the gruesome and deadly diseases that continue to be visited upon his people in every area of their lives, are ‘irrelevant’ to the charges against him.

As Judge Patrick Robinson, who’s filling the damp robes of the now-defunct Judge Richard May, put it:

You have to be careful. It is questionable whether a lot
of what you are saying is relevant to the case and
certainly it would not be admissible in evidence.

Indeed!

The rules of evidence at these Tribunals (ICTY & ICTR) are pretty goosey. Kinda: ‘If the glove doesn’t fit . . . well, hell, we’ll go down to the mall and find us one that does!’

They’re saying that President Milosevic should really try to pick up the pace of his defense. Stop stalling behind this ‘too sick to play’ dodge. Because time is money and he, not having much of either, really shouldn’t be messing with the low-ball hitters and high-ball drinkers at this Beach-Front Country Club—without an accompanying pro, anyway! Even though on the front nine, he spotted the Prosecution two strokes a hole, let them play off the ‘bitches’ tee’, lay their balls WHEREVER they felt like, and it still took them two years and 295 gimmies to hole out—and he spanked them like British schoolboys on every hole. Now they want the President to play the back nine in just 5 months—and with only his putter.

Fore! Sure.

Of course, Simons’ job is not to reveal the truth about the Milosevic case. No, that would only get her transferred to the fashion desk in The Times Omaha bureau. Rather, she’s supposed to further occultize the case—and the occult is a very important factor in the new globlization wars.

So it is not surprising that she doesn’t even once mention the content of President Milosevic’s opening remarks. Nothing about any of this:

Accusations leveled against me are an unscrupulous lie
and also a tireless distortion of history. Everything has
been presented in a lopsided manner in order to protect
those who are truly responsible . . .

or

. . . They call themselves the international community,
but in the territory of Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo,
they supported a totalitarian chauvinist elite, terrorists,
Islamic fundamentalists, neo-Nazis, whose objective was
an ethnically pure state. That is to say, a state without
any Serbs. . . .

or

. . . In the early 1990s, it was the Serbs who were killed
and expelled from Croatia... It was the Serbs who were
being killed and expelled from Kosovo... Persecution of
all non-Albanians (in Kosovo) continues with undiminished
fervour, continues until this day. . . .

or

. . . This international community, headed by the USA,
favored Islamic fundamentalism in Bosnia and Herzegovina,
and Kosovo. . . . In addition to everything else, crimes
against Serbs are being committed in Kosovo with the
full assistance of the Nato-led coalition. . . .

or

Yugoslavia did not simply disappear into thin air . . .
this country was destroyed by a plan, a war that
continues to be waged

or

. . . The fratricidal war in Yugoslavia was instigated and
supported precisely by those who established this court
of yours. . . .

or

. . . Under the auspices and protection of the United
Nations, all these crimes were committed, trampling on
the UN resolution, transforming the security forces of
the United Nations into forces of occupation in
collaboration with the Albanian terrorists. . . .

or

. . . [Croatia] is a classical example of an armed rebellion
against a state. . . . A state has the right to use all
means necessary to control the rebellion. . . . Both under
law and morality, historical facts and what is most important,
the well-being of its people, [federal Yugoslavia] had the
right to survive. . . .

or

. . . Yugoslavia did not simply disappear into thin air . . .
this country was destroyed by a plan, a war that continues
to be waged. . . .

or

. . . The Clinton administration throughout its time in office
applied these double standards which has turned very
aggressively against themselves which can be seen by
what happened on September 11. . . .

or

. . . A multi-ethnic, multi-confessional state was destroyed
. . . this constitutes the gravest international crime. . . .
Hundreds of thousands of people were wounded and
maimed. Thousands of people fled their homes, mostly
Serbs.

So what’s Simons occultizing? What are all these media lies trying to achieve? The lies about Yugoslavia, and Iraq/Iran, and Afghanistan/Pakistan, and Palestine/Israel/Syria, and North Korea, and China/Tibet, about Georgia/Chechnya/Russia, about Venezuela and Haiti, and about Rwanda/Uganda/Congo/Sudan: all these lies are meant to occultize secular order, laicism, and replace it with the sectarian chaos of world-wide war—the very thing that guarantees the ever-increasing consumption of Western waste production, that sole surviving, fully-functioning economic engine that drives First World economies.

Why was Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia/Yugoslavia singled out for extermination—like the Afghanistan of Noor Mohammed Taraki, like the Palestinian Authority of Yasser Arafat, like the North Korea of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jung Il, like Saddam’s Iraq, like Bashir’s Sudan, and like Juvenal Habyarimana’s Rwanda? These were all unaligned, secular states that represented the interests of the vast majority of their citizens and were striving for national self-sufficiency. In order to be taken down and forced into political and economic dependence on the West, they would first have to be broken into feuding sects—the laic would have to be supplanted by the metaphysical, the mysterious, the occult—the irrational underpinnings of tribal, ethnic and religious conflict. This would ensure a constant and increasing demand for the West’s principle product: the fuelled chaos best expressed as state-terrorism.

Who benefits most from the current wars? Who benefited from the destruction of Yugoslavia? Who benefited from yesterday’s double bus bombing in Israel? Who benefits from the Iraqi resistance and the Palestinian Intafadas? Who benefited from the massacre in Gatumba? Who benefited from 9/11? Only the pathologically naïve and terminally narcissistic would believe that these are all acts of vengeance or expressions of jealousy over the victory of chic Western values.

To justify the current imperialist crusades (these Fools’ Crusades, as my friend Diana Johnstone has named them in her wonderful eponymous book), the victims must be villainized and the real villains victimized. And once this binomial equation has been rationalized, there is no reversing it.

This is why religious organizations (of every stripe) are found supporting the victimizers in each of these globalization wars. Christian (Protestant and Catholic), Jewish and Muslim fundamentalist associations, in the name of Human Rights or Self-Determination, supported the various secessionist groups against the Serbs in the dismemberment of Yugoslavia—even the Orthodox Church often stood with the opposition against the Milosevic governments. And the NGO movement, with UN complicity, has given institutional cover to this perverse proselytism that has created more cadavers than converts.

One need look no further than France’s current predicament over the ‘foulard’, the veil worn by Muslim women. Once the question of whether the foulard should be allowed in the public schools (in PE classes, to be exact!) was raised, French secularism was dead. ‘For’ or ‘against’ doesn’t matter—once religion becomes the issue, the sectarian shit’s in the fire.

And today there are only two nations who consistently collaborate on a global scale for the promotion of religious and ethnic divisions in previously laic countries: the US and Israel. The US State Department’s desk on Religious Freedom, currently occupied by pluri-convicted felon Eliott Abrams, of Iran/Contra infamy, routinely sanctions nations like China, Myanmar, Iran, Iraq and Sudan for persecuting people for their religious faith and practices. Even France fell afoul of these theocrats’ enforced tolerance when it was chastened for its ‘persecution’ of Scientologists and Jehovah’s Witnesses. And Israel has for some time financially supported both Hamas and Hezzbolah, its avowed Islamic enemies and the alleged sources of much of the terror that afflicts that little Middle Eastern waste station and money laundry to global crime, because they represent the most effective counter force to Palestinian secularism.

These two warrior nations have consistently fomented fundamentalist religious strife as a weapon against atheistic communism, as with the Mujahadin against the Soviets in Afghanistan, or to subvert religious coalitions, as was done in pre-invasion Iraq and Lebanon. This betting-both-dogs-in-the-fight stratgegy guarantees the optimum utilization of their military-based waste economies.

So when the two French journalist, Christian Chesnot of Radio France International and Georges Malbrunot of Le Figaro, were kidnapped in Iraq, it quickly became apparent that their kidnappers were not doing much good for those they pretended to represent. French journalists, unlike their US and European colleagues, seem to have imbedded themselves in the Iraqi Resistance and have been furnishing some of the best images of the war from behind the sights of Iraqi AK’s. And since this kidnapping has been universally denounced by Islamic groups, the kidnappers’ chief demand, that France revoke its law banning the foulard in gym classes, would seem to be doing little for the people in the fiery streets of Najaf or the bombed-out suburbs of Baghdad—but doing a great deal for Israel’s false flag incitements of French Jews and Muslims: from Marie L’s faked attack on the RER D train, to Betar’s phony rabbi stabbings and cemetery and synagogue desecrations.

Thus the illegal, immoral and cowardly imposition of counsel on President Milosevic, which effectively removes him and the true history of the events under investigation from further participation in this the most-vaunted war crimes trial of the New Century, is really just another example of how, through the shabby offices of flacks like Marlise Simons and petty vindictive law school egg-heads like Dr. Michael Scharf, our feudal masters have replaced critical inquiry and due process of law with delusional irrationality and the occulting of the historical record to cinch tighter the bonds that neutralize any resistance to their authoritarian administration of our quotidian reality.

And yet, in a Hegelian sense, Slobodan Milosevic remains the only free man on that sinking slave ship that is the ICTY. But I don’t know that Hegel ever jailed—cut off from all the people he loved and who loved him. So, now more’n ever, we have to redouble all our efforts to

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