A Place to Stand: Kosovo - Steve Sailer on How, for the Pleasure of Bombing People, NATO Squandered "the most valuable lesson learned from centuries of war"

A Place to Stand

Comments from Scotland on politics, technology & all related matters (ie everything)/"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."Henry Louis Mencken....WARNING - THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS HAVE DECIDED THAT THIS BLOG IS LIKELY TO BE MISTAKEN FOR AN OFFICIAL PARTY SITE (no really, unanimous decision) I PROMISE IT ISN'T SO ENTER FREELY & OF YOUR OWN WILL

Friday, August 12, 2011

Kosovo - Steve Sailer on How, for the Pleasure of Bombing People, NATO Squandered "the most valuable lesson learned from centuries of war"

I have previously praised the intelligence of Steve Sailer. This is a fisk, in light of what we know now, of an article he did, some years ago, decrying the Kosovo War. This was long before the public acknowledgement of the dissection of living people by NATO "police" though most of the other atrocities were on the record. Clinton, Blair and the other Nazis knew it all, indeed must have known of the previous organlegging by the people they hired and armed to pose as the "Liberation Army" and ultimately appointyed, in complete viopation of the occupation agreement they had just signed, as "police". He came to very much the same conclusion as I of why it is not merely evil but also not in the interest of any of the rest of us who would rather have the safety of a civilised world (so clearly he must be highly intelligent!) He also writes more lucidly than I. I have added further information lin italics not available, at least to the public, at the time all of which narrows the range of possibility of whether the NATO leaders were foolish or evil

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Exactly one year ago, NATO attacked Yugoslavia. It's worth recalling President Bill Clinton's explanation of Why We Fought: "[T]he principle we and our allies have been fighting for in the Balkans is the principle of multiethnic, tolerant, inclusive democracy."

Well ... happy anniversary, Kosovo!

Our adventure in "humanitarian warfare" proved a fiasco, as anyone with a firmer grasp of history than Mr. Clinton could have predicted. .....

Ascendant in the '80s, the Albanians began to cleanse Kosovo of its Serbian minority. The New York Times reported in 1987, "Ethnic Albanians in the [Kosovo] government have manipulated public funds and regulations to take over land belonging to Serbs ... Wells have been poisoned ... crops burned. Slavic boys have been knifed, and some young ethnic Albanians have been told by their elders to rape Serbian girls." ...

Then, last year, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright convened the Rambouillet conference to demand that Milosevic allow NATO's armies to invade not only Kosovo, but Serbia itself. Obviously, no national leader could acquiesce. Milosevic refused to sign; NATO initiated war. it is now known Albright gave an off the record briefing to world media saying she had deliberately set up the negotiations to fail so that bombing could take place...

NATO's aggression backfired as Milosevic responded by expelling roughly a million Albanians. we now know he didn't it was being bombed by NATO, terrorised by NATO's KLA and the thought of being in the midst of a ground invasion and that NATO always knew this ...

Eventually, Milosevic gave in and withdrew his forces from Kosovo. A glorious victory for the forces of multiculturalism over ethnic hatred? Proof that with enough virtue, will power and cluster bombs, we can affirmatively answer the famous question posed by Rodney King, "Can't we all just get along?" Not exactly. Our Albanian pals in the KLA promptly began ethnically cleansing Serb civilians from Kosovo. While they were at it, they also sent most of Kosovo's Gypsies fleeing ....

There is nothing uniquely evil about the Balkans. In this world, there are several thousand ethnic groups with their own nationalist/separatist movements. Most such movements do not represent a majority of their peoples, being comprised of a few underemployed intellectuals hoping someday to become the rulers of a newly independent Lower Slobbovia.

But the ethnic troublemakers know that if they can provoke the government into repressing their entire group, they might convert their kinsmen to separatism (under their leadership, of course) or simply if they can fake such things and have the ear of the NATO powers....

Mr. Clinton and his comrade, Tony Blair, blundered in the Balkans because they didn't understand that the sanctity of national borders contributes to international peace in the same way that a settled distribution of property rights contributes to domestic peace. The secret to the success of the "Anglosphere's" experiment in self-government since, say, the Magna Carta has been the assurance that property rights, especially in land, will be respected and enforced by the state. If you can't be sure that your land title is secured and respected by the state, then for your own protection you need to cast your lot with your armed extended family. And since a racial group, like the Serbs or the Albanians, is nothing more than an extremely extended family, insecurity of property is an open invitation to ethnic strife.

It's no surprise Clinton and Blair didn't grasp the importance of settled borders -- both for real estate and for nations -- because they've never had to worry about them in Britain or America. Much of what we know about Shakespeare's life comes from the English equivalent of the county registrar of deeds office. His real estate dealings are on file because there has been no major interruption in the security of property in Britain. So when the Peruvian economist Hernando DeSoto visited North America, the leading economists wanted to talk about the money supply, currency devaluations and fiscal deficits; but he kept raising something they had never considered: how do you set up and run a registrar of deeds office?...

If domestic property rights are not secure, bad things follow. People arm themselves and band together with their extended families/clans/ethnic groups/races for self-defence. They shoot first and ask questions later.

Basically, the same things happen when national property rights are not secure. If you are the dictator of a small country, what lessons do you draw from watching NATO pound the hell out of Yugoslavia? The joys of multiculturalism are probably not the first that come to mind. More likely, your thoughts follow the same trajectory as those of a drug dealer when he realizes that the law does not protect his stock in trade. You must arm yourself heavily enough to deter NATO. Missiles, nukes, chemicals, and germs readily suggest themselves. NATO recruited the KLA form several sources but Albanian drug lords was probably the largest

And what about that separatist group that wants to split your country in two? Do you let them go as the Czech Republic let Slovakia go a few years ago, when the Gulf War had seemingly ended the era of international aggression so that nations could be as small as they liked without risking conquest? Hell no. National security will require every draftee and tax dollar you can drag in at gunpoint.

After the glorious events of 1991 in Kuwait and Moscow, the world appeared to be entering a pax Americana even more promising than the pax Britannica that helped make the 19th century such an age of human betterment. A world dominated by a single superpower with no territorial ambitions and committed to protecting lawful property. Yet now, less than a decade after the liberation of Kuwait, the West has grown so arrogant that we've squandered away the sanctity of national borders, the most valuable lesson learned from centuries of war.

Still, should the world sit idly by while civil wars cause humanitarian nightmares within sovereign states? Not necessarily. There are certain countries so dysfunctional that they cry out for internationally supervised revision. Yugoslavia might have been one, and Sudan is one. What can the West do? The answer, shockingly enough, is to sponsor ethnic cleansing.
In certain regions, ethnic strife is so endemic that the last resort of wise statesmen must be some form of partition followed by population transfers. The Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 ended hundreds of years of war between Turkey and Greece by uprooting Greeks from Turkey and Turks from Greece. Similarly, the fractious island of Cyprus has been at peace for quarter of a century due to its division into Turkish and Greek zones.
Even the Bosnians have stopped killing each other now that Serbs, Croats, and Muslims each have their own sectors. While heterogeneous Northern Ireland is notorious for sectarian strife, the exit of Protestants has left the Republic free of troubles.
Madeleine Albright's Czechoslovakia expelled millions of Sudeten Germans at the end of the Second World War, permanently ending that source of friction. Overall, we victors in the war agreed to the deportation of at least 12 million Germans from Eastern Europe. According to "A Brief History of Ethnic Cleansing" in a 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs, "About 2.1 million of these died from a combination of war, hunger, cold and disease."
The question, however, is how to conduct ethnic cleansing humanely. This is necessary for practical reasons as well as moral ones. Ethnic cleansings that leave the displaced feeling robbed and humiliated are likely to lead to future violence -- e.g., the Palestinians. If property rights have to be violated, compensation should be paid. ...
The simplest way to prevent the 1.8 million Kosovar Albanians from being repressed by the Serbs, for instance, would be to give them independence. But the 200,000 Serbs who lived in Kosovo would have had to be taken care of so that the Albanians didn't oppress them. A big chunk of Northern Kosovo, home of most Kosovar Serbs and Serbia's sacred battlefields, could have been permanently ceded to Serbia. That might have left, say, 100,000 Serbs living in Albanian Kosovo and 100,000 Albanians living in Serbian Northern Kosovo.

These Serbs and Albanians could then have exchanged homes -- NATO chipping in $50,000 per family of four to grease the skids. Then NATO could have paid $2.5 billion to Serbia as compensation for its lost territory. A grand total of $5 billion -- a pittance set against the costs of war. NATO, well officially the US & EU but it is the same thing. have probably spent more than10 times that since to prop up their client regime of genocidal, sex slaving, organlegging "freedom fighters" and to maintain a massive American military base of little other conceivable military use

Further, NATO could have gained a huge degree of leverage in the region by making the compensation payable over a ten-year period, dependent upon good behavior. If Kosovo Albanians violate their contract by, say, trying to destabilize neighbouring Macedonia, the uprooted Albanians families get cut off. The same goes for Serbs. the KLA, with new cap badges hastily sewn on, did invade Macedonia and carry out terrorism in southern Serbia, presumably with NATO approval since members of the "police" were allowed leaves of absence to carry out the invasion I have no idea if Milosevic would have accepted such a deal. But it would have been a more honourable offer than Albright's at Rambouillet. And if Milosevic had rejected it, could he have stayed in power? Again not reported by our media, Milosevic had already done more than that - when Albright demanded as part of the Ramboullet "deal" that NATO should have the right to occupy all of Serbia, take anything not nailed down and destroy anything that was, Milosevic countered by offering to join NATO which would have given NATO forces entrance legally but is a degree of leverage greater than Sailor suggests here but without the pleasure of getting to bomb civilians

These kind of cold-blooded calculations may seem unappealing to all those in the media who whipped themselves into a moralistic frenzy over the crimes of the Serbs. They may feel that Yugoslavia deserves to have its territory stripped away without compensation, and that all those vile Serbs should lose their homes. According to God's scale of justice, they may (or may not) be right.we now know, as the leaders and media did at the time, that the atrocities by the our ex-Nazi allies were at least many times worse that anything the Serbs did.The worst atrocities in Bosnia were when our ex-Nazi Croatian allies represented western civilisation by burning villages of Moslems represented, at least in out media, by the ex-Nazi Moslem Izetbegovic, a representative of western civilisation whose expressed opinions about genocide make his and our ally at the time, bin Laden, look moderate But it's unlikely that the Serbs will view it that way. And those innocent Kosovar Serbs who fled the KLA's lynch mobs are not likely to forgive and forget. People in the Balkans are used to waiting for that sweet moment when they can cry, "Vengeance is mine!"

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This leads to a whole range of Steve Sailer VDARE.COM Articles - while that is the only one on Kosovo they are well worth reading. You will see nothing remotely as informative, or indeed honest, on the MSM