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Edited on Wed Feb-22-06 11:55 PM by arendt
American Milosevic - Playing with Matches in a Sectarian Tinderbox
by arendt
"In the end the primary responsibility for the Yugoslav catastrophe must rest with the
Serbs and their elected leader Slobodan Milosevic. It was Milosevic whose bid for
power drove the other republics to leave. It was Milosevic who then encouraged his
fellow Serbs to carve out territorial enclaves and who backed them with his army...
"The appalling ferocity and sadism of the Croat and Bosnian wars - the serial abuse,
degradation, torture, rape and murder of hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens -
was the work of Serb men, mostly young, aroused to paroxysms of casual hatred
and indifference to suffering by propaganda and leadership from local chieftains
whose ultimate power came from Belgrade. What followed was not so unusual: it
had happened in Europe just a few decades before, when - all across the continent
and under the warrant of war - ordinary people committed quite extraordinary crimes.
"...there was a history upon which Serb propaganda could call...But the decision to
arouse that memory, to manipulate it and to exploit it for political ends, was made by men:
one man in particular (Milosevic)...those wars did not just break out from spontaneous ethnic
combustion. Yugoslavia did not fall: it was pushed. It did not die: it was killed."
- Tony Judt, "Postwar - A History of Europe Since 1945"
Yugoslavia should be a cautionary object lesson for America in just how quickly civilization
can vanish into brutal mayhem. Yet America under George W. Bush is embarked upon
exactly the same course as Yugoslavia, under Slobodan Milosevic. Milosevic manipulated the
regional and religious sensitivities of the Serbs to destabilize the federal government
and loot it on behalf of his constituency. He then turned his constituency loose upon
the rest of the country, backed by the federal army, in a decade of paramilitary slaughter
that ended in the bankruptcy and bombing of Serbia and its relegation to backwater
economic status, behind even its medieval neighbors, Romania and Bulgaria.
Follow along as we trace the parallels between what happened in Yugoslavia and what
is happening in America today.
Milosevic wormed his way up the pyramid of power by perverting the Constitution via
appeals to regional pride. He gerrymandered and excluded until he had a phony
plurality that paralyzed the political process:
..."Nationalism was Milosevic's way of securing a hold over Serbia...By forcing
...through an amendment to Serbia's own constitution, he 'absorbed' the hitherto
...autonomous provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina into Serbia proper - while allowing
...them to retain their two seats in the federal presidency (of Yugoslavia). Hence-
...forth, Serbia could count on four of the eight federal votes in any dispute. Since
...Milosevic's goal was to forge a more unitary (Serb-led) state...the federal system
...of government was effectively stalemated."
We have recently watch Bush parlay two stolen elections into control of all three
branches of government. The GOP do not have a majority. They have a brutal
and illegal political machine that places political ideologues in control of Elections
and voter rolls, puts hackable voting machines or no voting machines in
opposition districts, and uses every rule, procedure, tradition or political habit
as a one-sided club in their grab for absolute power.
..."The last straw...came in December 1990 when - under Milosevic's direction - the
...Serbian leadership in Belgrade seized without authorization 50 percent of the entire
...drawing rights of the Yugoslav federation to cover back pay and bonuses for federal
...employees and state enterprise workers. The Slovenes - whose 8 percent of the
...population contributed one-quarter of the federal budget - were especially incensed."
For five years, America has watched Bush dismantle taxation, burning through trillions
of dollars of our money to reward corporations and the super rich - his constituency.
Almost all Blue states are net losers of Federal revenue, while almost all Red states
are net gainers of Federal revenue - even as the Red states scream about the unfair
burden of taxation. This palpable sense of looting, accelerated by the obscene
boondoggle of a war in Iraq bleeding our country to the tune of $100 Billion per year,
is the last straw for everyone. We are being robbed by Bush and we know it. Our
children are being robbed even more, but most people cannot appreciate that in the abstract.
..."Yugoslavia...because its various populations were so very intermingled,...offered
...fertile ground for demagogues like Milosevic, or Franco Tudjman, his Croat counterpart.
...In fashioning their exit from Communism around a new political constituency, they could
...play an ethnic card no longer available in Europe - and substitute it for a concern with
...democracy."
At this point, with Bush having extracted all the cash, future credit, and portable wealth from the
American middle class and the Blue states and having brought true democracy to death's
door, we watch as the propaganda barrage of religious hysteria is cranked up in preparation
for letting loose gangs of thugs to terrorize the infidels of non-fundamentalist America and
religiously cleanse our nation. The fundamentalist insanity that has provided not just the core,
but almost the entirety of Bush's constituency - especially for the policy of warfare - is being
empowered across parts of the country in which it is foreign. We witness provocations such as
pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions, school boards which throw science in the garbage,
state legislatures that hold sectarian prayers, and federalized police and swat teams that treat
peaceful demonstrators like terrorists and keep them miles from any GOP gathering. This
is all part of the "differentiate, demonize" phase. We are about to enter the "destroy" phase.
At this point, without a draft for thirty years, the military is a nation apart. Its ranks, when not
drawn from military families directly, are drawn from the rural, the less educated, and the
more religious and fundamentalist parts of America. The Air Force Academy - the only one
not located in the East Coast urban megalopolis - has effectively been taken over by the
local evangelicals, in total violation of the Constitution and military tradition. Its loyalty to
the Constitution, as opposed to the Scofield Reference Bible, the Rapture, and George
W. Bush, is questionable - especially as the upper echelons are purged of genuine patriots
and replaced by cult loyalists.
--------
"Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it." - G. Santayana
America is busy demonstrating that it cannot remember what happened less than twenty years
ago. We have lobotomized ourselves. At this point, I would say America's future prospects are,
relatively and absolutely, worse than Yugoslavia's at a comparable stage of corruption:
--- While the Serbian were trying to escape from Communism to a more productive Capitalism,
the American Fundamentalists are about to escape from Capitalism into Global Corporate Feudalism.
......."In the 1980s, capitalism triumphed over communism. In the 1990s, capitalism triumphed over
.......democracy."
.........- David Korten, "When Corporations Rule the World"
We should have been gearing up to stop the robbery. Instead, the fundamentalists have been
gearing up to load the trucks of the looters and wish them bon voyage.
--- While the fall of Serbia had no global economic impact, the destruction of American production and
markets, in conjunction with Peak Oil and Global Warming, will devastate the world economy and
cripple any future recovery.
--- While Milosevic was eventually pulverized by the complete military superiority of NATO, the Bush
Crime Family has grabbed the most powerful arsenal on the planet and shown its willingness to use it
ruthlessly.
--- While the ethnic minorities of Yugoslavia at least had historic homelands and traditions to rally around,
with the exception of the Southern Culture that is the homeland of fundamentalism, the rest of America is a
giant bowl of de-politicized consumerist mush. There are no "centers" of resistance, just large pockets of
defenseless potential victims packed into easily disrupted and easily cut-off urban areas.
--- While the rest of the world eventually was forced to intervene to protect the innocent victims of the
Serbs, the world today is thoroughly disgusted with America and would probably let us rot for about
as long as we let the Yugoslavians rot (about five years of civil war) before they bothered to intervene.
And from their point of view, its probably a good idea to make sure America trashes its capacity to
make global mischief - and a bonus that we kill ourselves rather than killing other countries' soldiers.
--------
In summary, the more I look at the parallels and the differences, I expect to die here, prematurely, unhappily,
and for no sensible reason. Maybe the Chinese or the Europeans will eventually drag the perpetrators
of our looting and insanity before a court of law. But America will be rubble long before that happens.
To those who say I am a Cassandra, look at the list in the introductory quote:
............serial abuse, degradation, torture, rape and murder...
Have we not already perpetrated all these crimes in Iraq?
Where is the outrage? Where are the mass demonstrations? I believe they are too late in coming. We have
made our bed, and we are about to sleep in it. Starting a war with Iran will be equivalent to lying down and
pulling up the covers. Good night, America, sleep tight.
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