We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.

Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]

A quick Balkan Blog

I am slightly dazed and significantly bruised from my holiday in Austria, so this is just a quick catch up post.

The Serbian Authorities in Bosnia are up to their usual tricks and are driving out Croatian civilians from Drvar and Grahovo. Of course the outrage of the international community is strangely absent. What a surprise. These poor people are all ending up in accommodation around Knin. Having been through that myself, my heart goes out to them. At least none of them were killed. I wonder if these ethno-socialist morons in Republika Srbska realise they are in effect causing the colonisation of depopulated Serbian areas around Knin with pissed off Croats who are not going to be willing to move again? Pure genius.

On a seperate note, Yugoslavia agreed to vanish, at least in name. It will probably be called The Union of Serbia and Montenegro. Good riddance. I still think that Montenegro should try to engineer a ‘velvet divorce’ and go it alone.

I was also going to write about the latest EU regulatory madness but I am too sleeeepy!

Natalija hits the road tomorrow

I am supposed to be going to Milano tomorrow for a long delayed business meeting, but maybe I will instead sneak off to Budapest to spy on Brian Linse and see what he is up to. Perhaps he will cast me as a femme fatale in his movie.

Steven Dorff seem rather cute so that might be fun, hehehehe! Keep checking his Internet entry to see if under trivia someone has added ‘Dated actress Natalija Radic’. Then again, I am not sure I want to be regarded as ‘trivia’, so maybe you will have to look under the trivia entry for famous blogger Natalija Radic and see if it says ‘Dated actor Steven Dorff’. Yes, much better

Rule 1 of blog criticism…

…make sure you have actually read what the person you are criticizing did, and did not say.

Matthew Yglesias called the Croatian reoccupation of Krajina ‘genocide’ and apparently I enjoy it. And where exactly are the mass graves of thousands of this ‘genocide’? Even the much more vicious Serbian cetnic activities in Croatia, Bosnia i Herzegovina and Kosovo were not ‘genocide’ and I speak as someone who was personally on the receiving end of them. They were ‘ethnic cleansing’ to use the modern term. Mass murder for sure. Mass rapes for sure. But genocide? What happened to the Jews in Europe 1939-1945 was genocide, what happened in Rwanda was genocide. What happened in Armenia was genocide. So to call the Croatian activities in Krajina ‘genocide’ is both absurd and idiotarian. Mr. Yglesias’ use of the term makes him Fisk-able, not me.

I never claimed that the Croatian military did not do some bad things (or more usually HOS or someHVO militia groups), merely that the re-occupation of Krajina per se was not one of those ‘bad things’. I know exactly what did and did not happen to many Serbs when we retook our country. But the big difference here was that what some Croatian elements did under people like Tuta in BiH was not a systematic program of centrally directed murder and rape based ethnic displacement in the manner conducted by Arkan, Seselj etc. and backed by the Yugoslav and Bosnian Srpska authorities under Milosevic and Karadzic. The Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam was conducted by US forces and it was ghastly but it was not ordered by the US government.

Were some Croats also involved in ‘bad things’? Yes, for sure. What the Croats who engaged in war crimes did (and I have no problem calling it that) was a series of isolated, not systematic, atrocities and on a tiny scale compared to what was done to us and the Bosnians. There are two Serbian families living directly across the street from my parent’s house in Glina right now! They did not flee on the theory that unlike many others who had looted the homes of absent Croats, they had no reason to flee. That said I (and they) never had an unrealistic view of the Croatian Army and MUPs circa 1995-1996, particularly as many of its members were people who has suffered the loss of family and loved ones in 1991 and had scores to settle. Thus our Serbian neighbours were very glad when my parents moved back and were able to vouch for their definite non-cetnic credentials to the new ‘powers that be’. I do not have a simplistic view of this. However wars in the real world are not just fought from 5000 metres up, they involve people on the ground and so bad things always happen.

Next time someone criticizes my remarks, I hope they read them in order to see what I did and did not actually say and not just attribute views to me based on their ignorant prejudices.

A little anti-idiotarian history lesson

Joshua Micah Marshall makes some pretty strange remarks about some recent history on his blog.

But let’s go back to 1992 and ’93. Back then, one of the contested areas was the part of Croatia called the Krajina. This was essentially an ethnic Serb enclave within the borders of Croatia and as you might imagine this became a volatile crisis point in the fighting between Serbs and Croats. In any case, United Nations peace-keepers were sent into the region in the beginning of 1992 to maintain the peace. And did a reasonably good, though by no means perfect, job at it. For a while, the matter was thus placed in suspense, until 1995 when then-Croatian President Franjo Tudjman gave the UN Mission an ultimatum to leave. Eventually the Croatians rolled in and retook the region with some quite ugly consequences.

Let me set him straight on a few points: The UN had nothing to do with the reduction in fighting in Croatia in 1992. The reason the fighting died down was that the Croatian National Guard (ZNG) and the Serbs had fought each other to a standstill. The front line stabilised because that was as far as the Serbs could get once Croatia’s ad hoc army was able to dig in. However the Croatians, due to the criminal and immoral arms embargo that favoured the heavily armed Serbian Yugoslav Army, lacked the ability to mount offensive operations to retake Krajina…therefore stalemate. The UN was utterly irrelevant to that outcome.

Thereafter, the Serbs shifted their attention to Bosnia i Herzegovina whilst the Croatians used whatever means they could to build up their army, now called the HV. The UN did not ‘keep the peace’, it just presided over the stalemated front line in Croatia while Croats armed and trained their army and Milosevic, Karadzic, Mladic, Arkan, Seselj etc. and the people who were willing to follow their orders got on with raping and murdering their way across Bosnia i Herzegovina whilst the international community subjected them to grimaces and intermittent clucking sounds.

So the fact that the Croatia, subjected to the criminal arms embargo that had impaired its ability to defend us, took measures to ensure that political forces in the USA would not continue to act against our interests, is bad exactly how? I assume Joshua is equally against Israel’s vast lobbying efforts in the USA as well. Does Joshua expect Croatians to accept that we were not entitled to retake Krajina? Sorry but I see it rather differently. I am from Glina and one of the ‘quite ugly consequences’ of the Serbian cetnic’s arriving was Croats like me getting killed in their homes because they were Croats. I didn’t see this on CNN or read about it in the newspapers, I saw it out of my fucking bedroom window before my family and I managed to get out of town and ended up as refugees.

So if Joshua expects us to feel bad about taking Krajina back and trying to manipulate US political forces which were originally a party to the embargo against us, he is going to be disappointed. Certain US political forces helped keep us weak so why should we not try to change that given the harm we suffered as a result? I wonder if Joshua thinks the nice Mr. Arkan and nice Mr. Seselj would have eventually admitted it was all just a big misunderstanding and let bygones be bygones if only us mean old Croats had not come back with guns blazing and tanks rolling? One of the ‘quite ugly consequences’ of the Croatian Army expelling the UN and then the Serbian Army from Krajina was my family and I got to go home. I take this matter a little personally. If you have a problem with that, go fuck yourself.

Ben Sheriff names the names…

Splendid blogger Ben Sheriff from Layman’s Logic has produced a wonderful page called Slobogoogling for Profit and Pleasure that is a menu of juicy morsels for all self respecting anti-idiotarian bloggers to use as prey. Each of the signatories of the petition to free ethnic clenser and mass murderer Slobodan Milosevic is listed in easily Google-able form. By their own words they shall be revealed.

I have myself written that I do not think the Hague is the correct place for the Vile One to be tried (in fact I favoured his summary execution in Republic Square in Belgrade), but the people who signed this document actually think Slobo is the good guy… they are the modern Mitfords, no different from the apologists for Hitler and Stalin from the 1920’s to the 1960’s.

Ben is a splendid blogger and I am reliably informed that he is still agreeable company even when exceedingly drunk, which surely makes him an indispensable asset to the blogosphere!

Ben roars at Slobo at the Brit Blogger Bash

SFOR screws up again

SFOR seem rather good at raiding Croatian banks and overturning democratic election results it dislikes but it seems the NATO troops in Bosnia i Herzegovina are rather less good at capturing war criminals.

If there were any French forces involved, no doubt Karadzic was tipped off. What a disappointing waste of time.

Gotterdammerung for Karadzic?

I have heard news on the radio that vile mass murderer from Bosnia i Herzegovina Radovan Karadzic is surrounded by troops trying to arrest him. I hope they do not take him alive. I also hope he is feeling some of what so many other people felt when they realised that armed man more powerful than themselves were surrounding where they lived.

Splendid news!

More phun phooling with philosophers

I thought I would try the same test Perry tried to see where I was rated. I too was surprised to see some of the influences attributed in the listing though the top three seem about right for me.

1.  Rand   (100%)
2.  Nietzsche   (91%)
3.  Hume   (84%)
4.  Sartre   (80%)
5.  Stoics   (80%)
6.  Kant   (69%)
7.  Hobbes   (68%)
8.  Prescriptivism   (64%)
9.  Spinoza   (57%)
10.  Mill   (54%)
11.  Cynics   (53%)
12.  Aristotle   (51%)
13.  Plato   (49%)
14.  Bentham   (46%)
15.  Epicureans   (44%)
16.  Augustine   (40%)
17.  Ockham   (38%)
18.  Aquinas   (35%)
19.  Noddings   (22%)

Not just fact-checking of ‘asses’…

But also kicking of ‘asses’ is going on, being conducted by a militia of many blogs. I was away from my computer for a while and then checked Matt Welch‘s wonderful blog and could not believe my eyes…he has become Slobo-Google central. The true nature of Slobodan Milosevic’s vile apologists is laid open to the world. A few weeks ago their words which libeled the very dead themselves in their mass graves made me weep with helpless fury.

But Matt has shown that by their own words, they are revealed for what they are. Each of those google search links on Matt’s blog is a badge of honour for the bloggers who have done them. Suddenly I don’t feel so bad any more.

The time for choice is long past

The murderers of Daniel Pearl live in another world. It is a world in which acts of deception that result in the murder of an unarmed noncombatant is seen as somehow heroic. It is an inverted world in which showing your weakness by murdering the would-be journalistic bearer of your own message is seen as showing your enemies that you are strong. It is a world with a chain of unfathomable logic that suggests that a course of action that murders a single fine but helpless American in Pakistan will change America foreign policy more to the murderers’ liking even when killing 3,000 helpless Americans in New York did not.

Well in the last one they are at least partially correct. By killing 3,000 Americans they filled the skies of Afghanistan with thunder and caused the destruction of their patron government, which was indeed a change in American foreign policy. And by killing this good man they move America closer to another change. Pakistan must now realise that they have no choice any longer but to crush the serpent in its midst with whatever force it takes or the United States will rightly do it for them in Daniel Pearl’s name. Just as these monsters filmed their foul acts of cowardice, so too we may soon see the deaths of his murderers, if not from the forces of the Pakistani state then through the green light of night vision scopes and guided bomb cameras of a vengeful America.

The European Union: enough to drive you to drink

The EU has decided to set minimum levels of tax on alchololic drinks and no prize for guessing which way that will move prices for consumers. We have been saying that EU tax ‘harmonisation’ only ever moves up and this is a case in point.

The European Commission argues that the proposals should be good for health, limit tax fraud and reduce wide differentials in rates, which have caused an increased cross border smuggling.

But why not reduce taxes downwards for everyone? Help consumer, retailers and producers? Oh, silly me. This is Europe we are talking about, what was I thinking?

fuck_the_eu.jpg

Can this be the name of George Lucas’ new movie?

BraWarstm! Nice Will Vehrs over on Blog Watch 2 makes a request for a Valentine Day Party report and next thing I know I have caused an international incident. So do Megan and I get those cool light-sabre thingies?

Just call me Chaos Girl