This is NOT nostalgia! Just smells a little stale is all.

[Couple more blasts from the musky past--two more from Notes 4 Yugoslavia. Full of youthful--make that late-middle-aged incontinence about 'expansionist jihads' and 'Islamic death squads' and 'other Muslim states being missiled'--it's become quite clear that Western missiles have been consistently directed against SECULAR STATES, like Yugoslavia, Palestine, Iraq and Sudan: stuff's right out of military Zionist bum wad like Emp's Clothes or Balkans Infos--which is where most of it came from, actually. But the call, in Aug 98 (pre-Racak), that some heinous atrocity'd bring a Bosnia(95)-like NATO terror bombing of the Serbs is still pretty cool, huh? Not really! Since bombing was being threatened from the end of the Summer of 1998 when the Serb Special Police and Territorial Defense Forces started neutralizing that year's massive KLA offensive, taking back about 60% of the territory these 'NATO ground-pounders' had seized since Nov-Dec 97. But it all went right back after the miserable Richard Holbrooke (Kerry's Sec of State?) conned SM into standing down his forces so that wily Willy Walker and his band of merry prankster-peace-monistors could put some of their OSCE-shit in the game. Nostradamos Lives!! Well, he hangs out sometimes--@ CM/P.]

(13 August 1998 - Paris)

Wm Pfaff has demonstrated the political and historical contortions a Liberal must get up to if he wants to keep what many consider a very cushy job indeed. With the luxurious equanimity of a Salon Socialist and from a perch so Olympian that the many historical peaks, major moments in European history, are crisply visible through rolling clouds of socio- and econo-metrics, he draws the fine distinction between Franco the Fascist dictator and Hitlerian suck-up, and Franco the premature anti-Communist who made Spain safe for Royalty and Democracy.

I don't know about Hitler's not delivering Gibraltar and Morocco, but Franco happily delivered a fully fascist Spain, its popular forces destroyed (some self-destroyed and therefore expediently entered in the ledger of victims of Communist murder), driven mad or driven into the hills, while Hitler was too busy fighting his way out from under 20 million Russian corpses to return Franco's calls. (I am curious as to which side gets credit for this fat number in "The Black Book . . .")

Toward the end of the war it became clear to Franco that the Yanks and Eisenhower would take better care of Spanish fascism than either Hitler or Mussolini, the latter, by that time, badly hung up domestically and in no position to help anyone. Hitler and Goebbels could but marvel at how the Americans played the Big Lie and how their propaganda system maintained the sort of authoritarian control that the Third Reich only dreamed of—but then Mr. Pfaff is a wily practitioner of this great American folk art: Liberalism’s capitulating to Authoritarianism, all his limp-wristed swipes at "manifest destiny" and "globalisation" and "market forces" not withstanding.

And such false distinctions serve only to reinforce the overall false identification, the conflation of fascism and communism: the collaborationist- historian's last desperate attempt to win the Emperor's favor for his effete criticisms. Pfaff's overall equating of Hitler and Stalin does not distinguish him, since in the West anti-communism trumped anti-fascism long ago, and those, like Pfaff, who dwell in the realms of gold have always felt above both, above all, all history and politics as experienced in the world of toiling women and men. But this left-wing anti-communism requires constant vigilance because yesterday's ally, yesterday's Uncle Joe or Ferdy Marcos or Manny Noriega or Saddam, can become today's pariah—just as terrorists become freedom fighters, and vice versa, with just a word from Hill and Knowlton.

It is also sad to say that yesterday's compromise often becomes today's compromission. Pfaff grudgingly supported the EU, the UN and NATO in their war against Yugoslavia, assigning all responsibility for starting the war to "the Serb dictator" Milosevic's dreams of a ‘Greater Serbia’, rather than the Western sponsored, unnegotiated secession of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia; never recognizing the first two for the retro-Nazi puppet states they've become, and Bosnian President Izetbegovic for the unreconstructed, pre-Khomeni Islamist, complete with snipers and death squads, that he always was. His telling us about the roots of terrorism, his brief but spare catalogue of Islamist terror and Western counter-terror (where were the bloodbath in Beirut, the Iranian Air Bus, Bhopal, the 8 year war between Iran and Iraq, all the occupied territories?), begs for some mention of ‘the poor, pissed-off Muslims’ who comprise the Kosovo Liberation Army, infiltrated into Serbia (Kosovo) from Bosnia and Albania and points much further east ("Roughly 65% of Albania's 3 million or so citizens are
Muslim. . ." from R. Jeffrey Smith's piece in the Trib, and perhaps only the second time the association between Muslim warriors and Kosovo or Albania
has been made in that paper!), and early on referred to as terrorists by both Holbrooke and Gelbard.

But to cast the KLA among the terrorist rabble once directly or indirectly sponsored by the West would be too much: It would dampen the glare of demonization currently focused on the Serbs and Slobodan Milosevic, and perhaps even give some consideration to the citizenship of these people, Albanian, Bosnian, Croatian, Gypsy, Jew and Serb, 97% of whom elected him President of what is left of Yugoslavia.


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(3 October 1998 - Paris)

The situation in Kosovo is a stone repetition of Bosnia three years ago, down to the Muslims, which is what the so-called ethnic Albanians are so seldom called, refusing to sit down with the Yugoslavs, which is what the so-called Serbs are like-wise so seldom called, and negotiate an end to their "holy war" until the "infidels" have been broken by Western airpower.

After all, Milosevic may be a "Serb dictator", but he's also the elected president of Yugoslavia, what's left of it. But I don't suppose it matters what you call anyone anymore: Whether it's Serb, Slav, Gypsy, Albanian, Bosnian, Bosno-Serbian, Bosno-Croatian, Kosovar, Sunni, Shiite, Islamist freedom fighter or terrorist; what it looks like now is that the Kosovo Liberation Army-side, trained and equipped by an unholy alliance between the U.S., NATO, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, has kept things hot enough long enough to just about qualify for one of those big reparations packages—it's up to something like $6.5 billion in Bosnia. War is a great way to take care of unemployment.

All the rebels have to do to close this deal is call in the air strikes. And with CNN and the New York Times cranking the siren for them, that shouldn't be all that hard. Milosevic is dancing like an organ grinder's monkey on speed to keep those cruise missiles landing in other, more backward, Islamic states.

What you should expect in the next week or so is some really heinous atrocity, something like the shell in the marketplace in Sarajevo but uglier. And with a better cover: Since the one about that shell being shot off by the Serbs on their way to peace negotiations, because they figured the two spates of NATO bombing and the resulting military reversals in the Krajina and Northwestern Bosnia were just not enough punishment, just doesn’t stand up to much critical reflection. Unless, of course, one assumes it was self-loathing that forced the Serbs to call down upon themselves two solid weeks of non-stop bombing, without even the short breaks Hitler used allow them to bury their dead.

Now, was that shell that blew apart the Sarajevo marketplace a Serb shell? Or was it a Russian shell purchased from the Serbs by the Bosnian Muslims for a couple tank cars of gasoline and a truckload of cigarettes? Or was it a British shell purchased by the Bosno-Muslims and then fired by the Croats under contract to Izetbegovic's jihad?

Whatever. The point of all this is that the recent massacres, with their incumbent horror of butchered women and children, just didn't seem to do the trick. All the howling about monstrous Serbs didn't make up for the absence of significant motive—not to mention such material evidence as bodies (e.g., where are the ‘mass graves’?). In fact if one looks even glancingly at these atrocities, at all that throat cutting, one quickly recognizes the m.o. of two distinctly non-Serb suspects: First are the Islamic death squads in Algeria and Bosnia, not talked about by the Western media until long after Dayton; and the second is O.J. Simpson, but I think he can prove he was on the golf course at the time.