Sunday, March 30, 2014

Residual Lies

One of the more ghastly features of Empire's war on reality is to what extent even those that have come to challenge its more recent lies still accept older ones as fact.

A perfect example is the otherwise enjoyable takedown of Mr. Obama's Brussels speech by Gayane Chichakyan on RT the other day. Responding to the Emperor's assertion that "NATO only intervened after the people of Kosovo were systematically brutalized and killed for years," Chichakyan simply said "Good point" and segued into talking about the civilian victims of NATO's 1999 aggression.

Here's the problem: it's not a "good point." It is just another lie.
NATO soldiers inspect a destroyed Serbian church in Prizren, following the March 2004 pogrom;
the graffiti (in gutter Albanian) reads "Death to Serbs" (photo: SrbijaDanas

In Mr. Obama's virtual universe, the "people of Kosovo" are ethnic Albanians, and their persecutors are the evil, genocidal Serbs. But in actual reality, the "people of Kosovo" who were "systematically brutalized and killed for years" are ethnic Serbs, as well as those Albanians who refused to get with the program of the "Kosovo Liberation Army", a terrorist organization backed by the U.S. government.

The KLA started up in early 1996 - in a remarkable "coincidence," just after the Dayton Accords ended the Bosnian War - and targeted Yugoslav government employees (from postal carriers to law enforcement officers), Serb civilians and Albanian "traitors" who wanted to live in peace with the Serbs. A high-ranking US diplomat even called them terrorists - having somehow missed the memo they were being groomed as a proxy force; he got "promoted" to Indonesia after that.

By the summer of 1998, the Yugoslav military and Serbian police had successfully suppressed the KLA - at which point the Empire stepped in and claimed "excessive force" had created a "humanitarian disaster", demanding that Belgrade call off the military - or be bombed!

In October 1998, Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic agreed to stand down the troops and allow an OSCE "verification mission" to deploy in Kosovo. The mission was led by U.S. ambassador William Walker (now a backer of Greater Albania), and staffed mostly with military intelligence officers. Not only did the KLA abuse the Mission's presence as a chance to regroup and recover, it also mysteriously acquired radios and other communication equipment it would later use to coordinate with NATO.

Walker played a key role in declaring the January 1999 firefight at Racak a "massacre of civilians", a propaganda ploy then used as a pretext for the Rambouillet ultimatum. And that false "peace conference" was then used as a pretext to begin the attack on Yugoslavia on March 24. Only then did NATO propaganda begin talking about "atrocities" and even "genocide," with claims of "hundreds of thousands" of Albanians allegedly murdered by the Serbs. Eventually the mainstream Western media tacitly agreed on an arbitrary number of "10,000 Albanian civilians", a number they keep repeating even now - and one that is demonstrably false.

It is simply not possible to claim alleged atrocities as the cause of NATO's intervention - because NATO planned to attack long before any of them actually (or purportedly) took place. German documents from early 1999 belie the claims of "genocide" or even "humanitarian disaster" in the province of Kosovo. As for what happened after March 24, publicly available numbers suggest NATO and the KLA were responsible for 78% of non-combatant deaths during the war.

And then there is the Albanians' conduct after the war, spun by the Western mainstream media as "revenge killings," which quickly required the NATO occupation force (KFOR) to shift from their original mission of protecting Albanians from the (alleged) threat posed by the Yugoslav Army to protecting the ethnic Serbs from Albanian marauding. Not that they've had much success.

So, with all that in mind, why do people still take at face value the claim that the Serbs were "oppressing" Albanians in Kosovo, or committing atrocities that justified NATO's aggression? I understand the mainstream Western media doing so - they were, after all, NATO's willing executioners in the whole affair - but how does one explain the critics of Empire joining them?

The only explanation that makes any sort of sense is that the myth of "genocidal Serb aggressors" is the Big Lie, the "colossal untruth" that most people would never dare think of themselves, and refuse to believe anyone else would. It is far easier to accept the falsified notion that the Serbs deliberately attacked all their neighbors and systematically raped and murdered them, than to face the uncomfortable truth that the Empire's propaganda machinery simply made up the vast majority of those horrors.

And if they lied about Kosovo, could it be that they also lied about Bosnia, or Croatia? Could it be that none of the Serbophopbic propaganda of the 1990s was actually true? What else might be a lie, then?

What else, indeed?

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