Surprise! Serbs Will Not Be Serfs – OpEd

June 1, 2012

Eurasia Review

By Lawrence S. Schneiderman

In a recent opinion piece*: "Serbian Transition Worries West," by Daniel Serwer, Professor of Advanced International Studies at John Hopkins University. He writes:

 "What Brussels and Washington need to do now is draw clear red lines that both can support wholeheartedly. Once the new parliamentary majority is formed and the government appointed, they should ask Belgrade—which will seek a date to begin    negotiations for European Union membership—to end its resistance to Kosovo's independence, push the Bosnian Serbs toward full acceptance of the Sarajevo government, and begin deep reform of the security services. There is no reason to coddle Nikolic, who in the past has proven himself pragmatic when faced with clear and forceful requirements."

Professor Serwer is in guter Begleitung. During her trip to the region in August 2011, German Chancellor Angela Merkel made it clear that if Serbia wanted to join the EU, it must be prepared to relinquish northern Kosovo and recognize Kosovo’s independence. That was reaffirmed when Austria’s minister for European and International Affairs, Wolfgang Waldner, told Serbia that setting the date for talks about Serbia’s entrance into the EU would depend largely on Belgrade sorting out “territorial conflict with neighboring countries.”

Are they serious? 

We know that Germany and Austria are historic enemies of Serbia. I suspect the Austrians have not gotten over their defeat at the hands of the Serbs in World War I. So, we can understand their animosity towards Serbia.

As for the professor, given this election and current events in Europe, his analysis contradicts every reality. The West should be worried, but they have no one to blame but themselves.

The Serbian people elected a new President, Tomislav Nikolic, in a "surprise victory." Surprise to whom – apparently to western journalists and tendentious pollsters. The Serbian people are telling the EU imperialist technocrats that they had enough of their baloney. Serbs will not be serfs. 

Serbia has done everything asked of them by the West. Turning over every war criminal the West has indicted. First, former Serbian President, Slobodan Milosevic, was turned over to the International Criminal Tribal for the Former Yugoslavia (in The Hague) on June 28, 2001, (St. Vidus Day) for trial. Then they handed over indicted war criminal Radovan Karadzic on July 21, 2008. Finally, on May 26, 2011 the Serbian authority arrested wanted war criminal Ratko Mladic, and have handed him over to authorities in The Hague.

Meanwhile, Albanian war criminals from Kosovo and Albania go free. Including, Hashim Thaçi, the Prime Minister of Kosovo!

In a report** by Mr. Dick Marty, of Switzerland, dated December 12, 2010, entitled, "Inhuman treatment of people and illicit trafficking in human organs in Kosovo," the findings confirm that some Serbians and some Albanian Kosovars were held prisoner in secret places of detention under KLA control in northern Albania, and were subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment, before ultimately disappearing. This included the inhuman harvesting of their organs for illicit transplantation.

Serbia will look eastward toward Russia, because the West, including the US, has pushed it there. In his first foreign trip as President, Tomislav Nikolic, on May 26, met with Vladimir Putin, in Moscow, his Russian counterpart.

There is a larger issue here. And, it is serious. Naïve and foolish foreign policy cost lives. People die. Don’t expect Mr. Obama to rush into another Balkan war. Without American firepower, Serbia would be a formidable foe to any continental military force. And, one cannot predict that Russia will sit on the sidelines this time after their humiliation in the aftermath of the last Kosovo War.

Kosovo independence was folly. Lady Ashton, the EU’s foreign minister, and the other EU technocrats want a foreign policy success, and think Kosovo is the place to find it. They better keep looking, because Kosovo is a failed state. Perhaps, the professor should think again about those clear red lines he so fervently proffers.

Engagement, not confrontation should be American and European foreign policy with Serbia.

       

*Daniel Serwer, “Serbian Transition Worries West,” The National Interest, 25 May 2012.

**http://www.assembly.coe.int/CommitteeDocs/2010/ajdoc462010prov.pdf

The Euro: Or, "What The Hell Is Going On Out There!"

Ja!

Someone please tell ‘Fraudlein’ Merkel to be thankful that they got away with this Euro scam as long as they did. The Euro has been very, very, very good to Germany. But now it's time to fly. It is senseless to go down with this fraudulent ship. The banksters are rich enough. It's time (and long overdue) to think about the people you were actually elected to represent.

Yet, we should all know by now, that these supercilious imperious bureaucratic dwarfs, Messieurs Junker and van Rompuy, et al., will not give up their privilege lifestyle. Like Nero fiddled as Rome burned. Like Marie Antoinette shepherded sheep at Rambouillet. Southern Europe will burn before this bunch cancel their luncheon reservation.

There’s A Debt You Gotta Pay: Obama and His Fed

 The Fed’s Quantitative Easing (QE) policy doesn't expand the money supply uniformly. It doesn’t go to just any Financial Institution, i.e., small banks. Rather, it directs capital transfers (money) to the largest banks; whether by overpaying them for their financial assets or by lending to them on the cheap; minimizes their borrowing costs; and lowering their reserve requirements. All of these actions result in enormous handouts to the financial elite (Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, etc.), with the hope that they will subsequently unleash this capital, raising demand and prices wherever they do. The operative word being “hope,” and so far there has been very little.

Hypocritically, Mr. Obama and the Fed are transferring immense wealth from the middle class (taxpayers) to the most affluent (those Bankers and Hedge Fund managers who so generously contribute to his campaign war chest); from the least privileged to the most privileged. This redistribution has been a far more outrageous source of disparity than the president's presumption of tax unfairness (if there is anything unfair, it is that approximately half of a population are paying zero income taxes). So, why don’t Mr. Obama and his Federal Reserve Chairman, Mr. Bernanke, stop redistributing it to the most privileged?

Charity is a virtue. A parasitic lifestyle is a vice. There are no merits to redistributing wealth in any direction. The expectation should be that people work. The expectation should be that people want to work. The expectation should be that welfare is a temporary condition. The expectation should be that if you bring children into this world, that you, and not your neighbor, is responsible for their well-being such as a stable home environment, food, clothing, education, etc..

What there is – is a debt that we are going to have to pay. So, in the words of Tracy Nelson* and Mother Earth, Mr. Obama and Mr. Bernanke should remember this:

Mother Earth is waiting for you, there’s a debt you gotta pay.

I don’t care how rich you are,

I don’t care what you were, 

When it all comes down, you have to go back to Mother Earth.

You may have a billion dollars, 

You may drive a Mercedes Benz,

But, Mother Earth is waiting for you, and there’s a debt you gotta pay.

* I don’t know Ms. Nelson’s politics, and I don’t much care. In the end, we are all accountable.

The Mendacious Professor Eco

While in Italy this past January (2012), I had a conversation on the subject of the Italian author, Umberto Eco. We both had a mutual affection for the movie, "The Name of the Rose."

It was a terrific movie, but in fact it was a fraud -- like Umberto Eco’s book of the same name. The Benedictines are portrayed as the bad guys, and the Franciscans as the good.

In fact, the Benedictine Order was responsible for monasticism, which became the basis of Western monastic life, aka, the Rule of St. Benedict. Equally important, the Benedictines, in no small part, were responsible for preserving the history of western civilization by instituting the tradition of scriptorium, literally a place to copy manuscripts by monastic scribes. Bendict of Nursia, aka St. Benedict (529), initiated the tradition of Benedictine scriptoria that not only improved the minds of monastic monks, but also produced a valuable product – books. Each monastery was required to have its own extensive library, hence saving the religious and secular literary works of the West.

On the other hand, Professor Eco portrays the Franciscans as all that is righteous. In truth, the Franciscan Order was established against the directive of St. Francis. Francis of Assisi, who’s legacy created the Franciscan Order stipulated in his own Testament (1226), against building convents to themselves. His followers ignored him. More importantly, the followers of St. Francis were among the chief sustainers of the growing hatred of Jews in medieval Western Europe (13th Century); avid prosecutors of the Inquisition in Italy and Spain, along with the Dominicans; and brutal subjugators of the indigenous populations of the Americas. Yet, to read Professor Eco, this history is whitewashed, in favor of the Franciscan myth of poverty, truth, and benevolence to all God's creatures.

Arcane esoteric semiotics does not render a particular supposition valid. Perhaps, those who do not understand Professor Eco do so because there is nothing to understand. In the words of one literary critic, "there is no there there." Unfortunately, many who read Professor Eco's books do not understand that it really is fiction -- and all to often, bad fiction at that.


Below is a critical opinion piece of Umberto Eco's latest book, "The Prague Cemetery."

Overrated: Umberto Eco
DANIEL JOHNSON

Who said: "When men stop believing in God they don't believe in nothing: they believe in anything"? The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations attributes it to G.K. Chesterton, but it cannot be found in any of his works and appears to have begun life as a paraphrase by his biographer Emile Cammaerts. One does not need to be a scholar to trace this cliché to its origin. Yet on the home page of the extensive website of Umberto Eco, one is greeted with the following quotation by the great man: "When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything."

Undergraduates who tried to palm off such a hackneyed misquotation as their own might expect to be laughed at or even reprimanded by their teachers. But Eco is Europe's most celebrated living writer, with countless academic honours to his name. Why does a man so feted, who boasts that he owns 50,000 books (including 1,200 rare titles) "in my various homes", seek to appropriate Chesterton's gnomic wisdom? Is it possible that Umberto Eco is, as Henry IV of France said of James I of England, "the wisest fool in Christendom"?

In his own eyes, at least, Eco is the opposite: the most disillusioned of men, "fascinated by error, bad faith and idiocy", and thus perfectly equipped to expose everyone else as a fraud. In his recent published conversation with Jean-Claude Carrière, This is Not the End of the Book, he reveals that his vast library consists entirely of "books whose contents I don't believe”; these "lies" include a first edition of Joyce's Ulysses. Eco makes no distinction between fiction and forgery. He also assumes that most of his readers are hopelessly ignorant: "The current generation is probably tempted to think, as the Americans do, that what happened 300 years ago no longer matters..."

This pose of the learned skeptic, even the arch-cynic, has stood Eco in good stead. Without it he could never have written The Name of the Rose, the medieval whodunit that became a film vehicle for Sean Connery and has gone on to sell more than 50 million copies. The novel is an exercise in debunking the monks to whom he owed his education and who immunized him from fascism. Eco's first book, based on his doctoral thesis, is his best: The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas. He still recalls the joy of being surrounded by old books and manuscripts at the Sainte-Geneviève Library in Paris. Then he lost his faith and has spent the rest of his life in search of a substitute.

Eco found his pseudo-religion in the pseudo-science of semiotics, which he has taught for many years. His novels are case studies in postmodernism, which elides all categories of truth, beauty, morality and politics into an esoteric game. The Plan, which forms the theme of Foucault's Pendulum, his second bestseller, shows Eco was already obsessed with conspiracy theories, involving everything from the Knights Templar to Kabbalah. But the subversive message of the novel is that conspiracy theories may after all be true, and secret societies may actually exist. The dissolution of reality into mere "narratives" lends the conspiracy theory new life.

In Eco's latest novel, The Prague Cemetery, his idée fixe mutates into a gothic fantasy embracing Jesuits, Freemasons and above all Jews, culminating in the most pernicious conspiracy theory of them all: the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Eco claims that he has invented only one character, the protagonist Simone Simonini, whose fictitious diaries record how he forges the Protocols, frames Dreyfus and infects Europe with anti-Semitism. "But on reflection," he adds, "even Simone Simonini ... did in some sense exist. Indeed, to be frank, he is still with us." In other words, Eco deliberately confuses fact and fiction. Having immersed his readers in conspiracy theories against the Jews, he then leaves them wondering whether some of these vile slanders might, after all, be true.

The trouble with what his publisher calls "an inspired twisting of history and fiction" is that Eco is playing with fire. This time it is not a game. There is nothing esoteric about the Protocols, millions of copies of which circulate in the Muslim world. Anti-Semitism is on the march, not only in the Middle East but across the globe, including the West, fuelled by that multiplier of conspiracy theories, the Internet. The leaders of Iran have made Holocaust denial state policy and signaled that they plan a second Holocaust, using nuclear technology supplied by, among others, Germany and Russia — the two worst persecutors of Jews in the recent past. Eco's frivolous treatment of Jew-hatred as a cloak-and-dagger mystery, to fund his collection of incunabula, while real Jews are targeted by terrorists from New York to Mumbai and from London to Buenos Aires have left many readers feeling queasy.

The doubts sown by the book fall on fertile soil, for ours is a culture that long ago lost its bearings, thanks to the prestige of postmodernists such as Umberto Eco. He stands for the intellectuals of the 21st century who, like those of the last century, commit trahison des clercs by flirting with anti-Semitism when their duty is to take a clear stand against it.

Charles Alan Murray (1943 - )

In 1984 I read Charles Murray's "Losing Ground." It was the definitive indictment of the Great Society, a game changer for anyone with an open mind and an intellect that wanted to comprehend progressive social policy for the past two decades. In the 1980's you could not study US public policy without knowing something was very wrong. Yet, most in academia choose to ignore Charles Murray's scholarship.

It is now 2012. The bankrupt theories of the Great Society have gotten a rebirth from the liberal left who have ruled this country for the last 7 years. This time, unfortunately, their bankrupt theories are destroying the fabric and culture of American society. So for a moment, consider this from a brilliant man:

"It is condescending to treat people who have less education or money as less morally accountable than we are. We should stop making excuses for them that we wouldn't make for ourselves. Respect those who deserve respect, and look down on those who deserve looking down on."

James Q. Wilson (1931 – 2012)

In graduate school at Vanderbilt University, working towards my doctorate in Public Policy Studies, my principle advisor and Chairman of my dissertation committee, Erwin C. Hargrove, directed me to the work of James Q. Wilson. My particular interest was implementation, and Professor Wilson had a lot to say.

In implementation I was taught that some factors are more critical than others in their impact on a particular program’s implementation. Analysis, therefore, should not give equal weight to each factor. In this sense, Professor Wilson (1967) was instructive. For example:

“The government – at least publicly – seems to act as if the supply of able political executives were infinitely elastic, though people setting up new agencies will often admit privately that they are frustrated and appalled by the shortage of talent, that the only wonder is why disaster is so long in coming.”

It may sound simple, but you have no idea how many people in positions of power throughout government at every level, just do not get it. Common sense is not common.

In tribute* I postulate this deferential corollary to James Q. Wilson’s antidote for “selfishness,” or "greed" (in the parlance of our time):

Ownership confers title,
Title confers responsibility,
Responsibility confers accountability,
And, accountability confers the ability to succeed or fail.

*Tonight I’ll do what I always do to honor the life of a great man – I’ll take a drink or two of Blanton’s.

Awareness 2012: A New Year’s Greeting

The hour comes today,
We say good-bye,
To this year’s last light.

The sun sets,
We can hope we did some good,
Yet, we know this is not our way.

Should we lament the change that tears our fiber?
Should we quell the acts that give us pain?
We await another voice.

O Abraham, let your son trumpets his horn,
There is a false prophet in the land,
And, his deeds must tumble.

A commitment to excellence and exceptionalism,
Work, sacrifice, perseverance, selflessness,
Respect for our way of life.

This is the toll,
To achieve our goals,
So the wise Man said.

No whining, no whimpers,
No lying, no deceit,
No generational parasites, no billionaires prophesying.

To achieve success,
Whatever the job,
We must all pay the price.

Remember, The sun also rises.


L. S. Schneiderman