JULIA GORIN: THE WASHINGTON TIMES PRINTING NAZI PROPAGANDA ****
http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/2012/06/05/washington-times-printing-nazi-propaganda/?print=1
Well we knew it wouldn’t be long. If nationalists win a Serbian election, it follows that there will be an article in the Washington Times by Croatian-supremacist Jeffrey Kuhner, as usual angling for a new war against Serbia — by making the argument that Serbia wants it. As a typical rapist would.
Below is the letter I submitted to Washington Times, followed by a deconstruction of Kuhner’s latest excuse for Serbia needing another good bombing.
Dear Editor:
Are there no fact-checkers at the paper, or is Mr. Kuhner exempt from such rigors? (“Did Serbia Vote for War?” May 24.) Or perhaps Balkans facts are still expendable in America. Mr. Kuhner repeatedly references the “Greater Serbia project” that was reluctantly but repeatedly disproved at the Serb-hostile Hague, and brandishes the “neo-fascist” label that is so popular to use against Serbs. This from a champion of the nation that still reminisces about its Hitler-bestowed Independent State of Croatia, and still holds Mass for its fuehrer Ante Pavelic.
Nor is Mr. Kuhner concerned with the Albanian nationalism which not only started a terrorist insurgency to wrest 15% of Serbian land (is it “nationalist” to have a problem with that?), but which employed organ-harvesting, jihad, and human- and drug-trafficking in its service. He likewise isn’t bothered by the fundamentalist Muslim president of Bosnia who insisted on war to begin with. No, Mr. Kuhner wants to keep readers eternally fixed on Serbs. This is a man with a chip on his shoulder.
In time for Memorial Day Weekend, Mr. Kuhner gave a slap in the face to thousands of WWII vets, tracing Serbianationalism™ to “Drazen” (sic: Draza) Mihailovic and his Chetniks, the royalist guerrillas who fought not only the Nazis, but also the Communists after Tito’s Partisans attacked them. Something for which Ronald Reagan singled Serbian heroism out and for which President Truman bestowed a posthumous Legion of Merit upon Mihailovic. ( “The ultimate tragedy of Draza Mihailovich cannot erase the memory of his heroic and often lonely struggle against the twin tyrannies that afflicted his people, Nazism and Communism.” — Gov. Ronald Reagan, 1979)
It was articles like this, calling the Serbs and Chetniks “racist” and “far-right” — and inverting the documented, Axis-aligned fascism and continuing supremacy of Croats, Albanians and Bosniaks — that were so hard for American WWII vets like the aging Chetnik-rescued Richard Felman to take in the 90s, when the West was angling for the next betrayal of the Serbs. He was aghast to see Axis propaganda being printed in American newspapers at the turn of the millennium. And here we are more than a decade past, still repeating it.
Kuhner has the Chetniks “slaughtering tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims, Croatians and Kosovar Albanians.” As any Jewish library can show, one-third of Croatia’s Serb population was liquidated by the Croatians’ Ustasha regime which Mr. Kuhner is covering for with his inversions; and huge swaths of Kosovo’s Serbs (plus 400 Jews) were rounded up by those “Kosovar Albanians” in their fez-capped Nazi uniforms. I won’t go into Jewish Holocaust survivor Cadik Dannon’s experience with a Bosnian Muslim working at a Croatian concentration camp, but suffice it to say that it wasn’t the Croats, Albanians, or Bosniaks whom the Germans had to threaten to kill by the hundred for every dead German soldier; it was the Serbs. And this of course affected the attack plans of Mihailovic’s Chetniks. An obscure term to Americans, which the writer hisses like a true partisan of one of the sides in the Balkan wars.
By equating the recently victorious Serbian Radical Party with “Mihailovic’s Chetniks,” Kuhner elevates the object of his derision. That he means to do the opposite at Mihailovic’s expense the very month that Congress yet again praised Mihailovic and his Chetniks for helping execute the largest air rescue in American combat history (and two days after Bronze Star recipient George Vujnovich was inducted into the New York Senate Veterans’ Hall of Fame for coordinating it), should have readers asking why The Times is allowing itself to be used as a mouthpiece, and lowered to the level of the Islamic and Nazi-heir propaganda websites where this ‘information’ comes from.
“No wonder nationalists celebrated [Tomislav Nikolic’s] victory, unfurling Chetnik flags and symbols,” continues Mr. Kuhner. Yes, take it from someone who has no problem with the chilling symbol of Croatian purity that is the checkered flag of Croatia, resuscitated during that country’s 1990s re-embrace of fascism, complete with Nazi and Ustasha symbolism and street names.
Mr. Kuhner doesn’t even bother with the veneer of accuracy for the paper’s sake, using the obsolete figure of “250,000” killed in the Balkan wars. Even if, to the 100,000 killed on all sides in Bosnia, you add the 20,000 in Croatia and the 3,000 in Kosovo before the NATO bombs and the 5,000 after, that still leaves us under 130,000. The mainstream media long ago, if imperfectly, corrected themselves on this, but here we have the generally more honest Times still latched onto the inflated propaganda figures that came from the MSM in the first place. Considering how widely cited the more accurate figures have been, including the very week before Mr. Kuhner’s article ran (upon the opening of the Mladic trial), one can only deduce a profound professional ignorance on Mr. Kuhner’s part, or an even more profound hatred. How else does one explain the right-leaning Kuhner continuing to propagate Amanpourite “facts”?
He further continues to peddle the debunked German-Bulgarian-cooked hoax about there being a Serbian plan to “annihilate ethnic Albanians in Kosovo,” referring to “Belgrade’s genocidal project,” which Hague prosecutors were at a loss to demonstrate. That he uses the term “final solution” to describe it is offensive, including to the memory of reporter Daniel Pearl, who in his December 1999 article found that the Serbs were engaging in nothing of the sort. Mr. Kuhner must have also missed the scores of other articles like it appearing in virtually every newspaper at the time, though they all subsequently opted for the original fiction over the findings. (I’d thought Washington Times to be better.)
To brazenly fly in the face of observable facts on the ground, namely a Kosovo almost devoid of non-Albanians (as per the original stated Albanian goals) takes a personality type that’s entirely alien to me. As does the hubris that enables one to recklessly abuse a prominent podium such as The Washington Times.
Kuhner makes sure to specify that Belgrade “launched” brutal wars “of aggression.” This is so readers have no idea these were actually defensive wars that neither the Bosnian nor the Croatian Serbs wanted, let alone Belgrade. “I don’t know if he is a war criminal,” Canadian former ambassador James Bissett said of Radovan Karadzic in 2008. “But I do know he did his damnedest to prevent the war.”
Kuhner also mentions Serb units in Croatia engaging “in systematic murder and destruction,” for he knows it’s unlikely readers will ever hear from the muzzled UN soldiers who are still in therapy and disability over the crimes they witnessed by Croatian troops against Serbs. The body of one charred teenage girl was still smoking when Canadian troops found her.
The Times should be ashamed, but it doesn’t know enough to be. And it cares even less.
DECONSTRUCTION: KUHNER: Did Serbia vote for war?
New ultranationalist president promotes instability (May 24)
Another war is brewing in the Balkans. Recently, Serbia’s voters elected a new president. Ultranationalist Tomislav Nikolic narrowly defeated the liberal, pro-European Union incumbent, Boris Tadic. Mr. Nikolic’s victory means the Balkans may be plunged into ethnic violence again.
[Bwwwahahahaha! The above INSERT STOCK PARAGRAPH HERE is saying it’s not violence while only Serbs (and Roma) were being picked off (in Serbia’s Kosovo) or targeted for war crimes prosecution (which becomes persecution).]
…
The 60-year-old former cemetery manager is a neo-fascist, who wants to restore a “Great Serbia.”[OF COURSE! That Greater Serbia project that didn’t exist last time and doesn’t exist this time. Coming to you from someone who internalized the truly fascist-spun version of the 1990s Balkans.]
Mr. Nikolic embodies the worst forms of Serbian nationalism, whose ideological roots go back to the “Chetniks” – the term for Serbian royalists – of World War II. Led by Drazen Mihailovic, the Chetniks formed a racist far-right-wing movement that sought to forge an ethnically pure Great Serb empire incorporating Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo,Macedonia, most of Bosnia and large chunks of Croatia. Allied to Benito Mussolini’s fascist Italy, the Chetniks engaged in murderous ethnic cleansing, slaughtering tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims, Croatians and Kosovar Albanians.
THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS TO NEWSPAPERS INFILTRATED BY BALKANITES FROM THE FASCIST SIDE. Almost every drop of the preceding paragraph is written in reverse of actual events, as the reams of documentation (including Jewish documentation) of WWII Balkans attest. Both the Partisans and Chetniks dealt with the Italians and Germans in between fighting them, depending on what arrangements eventually became necessary, each ganging up with the Fascists at least once against the other, as the Chetniks found themselves simultaneously under attack from the Communists in Tito’s power struggle.
The Partisans (and the Fascists) made sure that the Allies — and history — would remember it only one way, and in the most nefarious-possible context. Which is the way Kuhner continues to propagate it, engaging in purposeful obfuscation and oversimplification. Just to give a small sense of the intricacies of what has been simplistically construed as “Chetnik collaboration” with the Fascists (again, a laughable decoy given Croatia’s opportunist, Hitler-aligned clerical-fascist bloodbath in contrast to the Serbs’ multiple, suicidal attempts to fight the Nazis including a national revolt against Serbia’s first would-be collaborationist regime), below is a paragraph from British writer John Cripps, a contributor to a 2001 book titled Action This Day. He is none too kind to the Chetniks, while nonetheless criticizing Churchill’s ultimate decision to back the Partisans. In the course of disputing the widely (and correctly) perceived notion that Churchill’s decision to abandon Mihailovic and support the Partisans came from Communist spies advising Churchill (something that Churchill would later call his biggest mistake of WWII), Cripps has the following paragraph showing the complexity of the situation that’s been distorted for our (and the distorters’) convenience:
Decrypts showed that the Italians were supplying the Chetniks with weapons and transporting them in lorries to get into position against the Partisans. In fact, during March the Germans did not advance against the Partisans or attempt any action against the Chetniks. Many years later, it became clear that there had been a ceasefire between the Germans and the Partisans, initially for the exchange of prisoners, but also because the Partisans were negotiating with the Germans for recognition as combatants, and for possible joint action against the Chetniks. Hitler put an end to the negotiations. Two Abwehr decrypts had, however, revealed that one of their agents, a German who reported as Dr Baux, was in negotiation with the Partisans, although it was not clear what the negotiations were about.
The above context is in addition to the fact that not only were Tito’s Partisans taking credit for several of Mihailovic’s victories against the Germans, misreporting to London, but just as some Croatian fascists donned Partisan uniforms to save their skins toward the end, so was there a sort of corollary wherein some Chetniks ran for their lives from marauding Partisans, alongside retreating Nazis. Nor were they necessarily “Mihailovic’s Chetniks,” though there were some. But the game is to paint all ‘chetniks’ (i.e. guerrillas) in a monolithic way so as to lump Mihaiilovic and his men — the saviors of hundreds of American pilots — in with guerrilla factions and individuals who may have had more to do with the Germans. It’s an attempt as brazen as it is insidious, given that (to offer just one factoid) a top Mihailovic commander fell out with Mihailovic because the former wanted to “assist the Germans against the Partisans, a course of action Mihailovic refused to contemplate.”
Back to Kuhner’s ongoing disinformation:
As Yugoslavia disintegrated in the 1990s, Belgrade launched brutal wars of aggression against Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. [He doesn’t even know who started the wars.] More than 250,000 were killed and nearly 2 million ethnically cleansed. Mr. Nikolic openly championed Serbia’s power grab and territorial annexations.
I had wanted to include the following sentence in my already too-long blog about the MSM’s “coverage” of the opening day of the Mladic trial: “At least now they’re printing “100,000″ Bosnia war deaths — and on all sides — rather than the “250-300,000″ they’d been reporting for a decade and a half.” But not Kuhner! He won’t be fooled by any deprogramming, and he’ll take his newspaper down with him.
In Croatia, he served in notorious Serbian volunteer units where, dressed in Chetnik uniforms and espousing ultranationalist[™] ideology, they engaged in systematic murder and destruction….
I won’t dwell on the reversals contained in that sentence, whose egregiousness can be ascertained just from the testimonies of the Canadian soldiers who witnessed the crimes by Croatians against Serbs. No, I’ll dwell on something else.
To see the regional term “Chetnik” — intended by most of its modern users as an anti-Serb slur — dripping from an American newspaper, no less from the otherwise anti-propagandistic Times, is surreal indeed. It’s an obscure, esoteric term virtually unknown to today’s Americans (who hardly even know what a Serb is except that it’s bad); a term which hasn’t really even entered the language lexicon — yet there it is in the Washington Times. With a definition thoughtfully provided for you. The only definition you need to trouble yourself with if you know what’s good for you: the one propagated by an unholy alliance of Fascists, Communists and Islamists (and originated by those who allied with the Germans to begin with). Again, it’s a testament to what can happen when someone from one of the warring sides implants himself at an American news outlet, think tank, business, film studio, institution or government office (see Capitol Hill in the 90s).
So, a term that general media are hardly familiar with is being vomited from the pages of The Washington Times, all because a speared tail wags a dog that’s obliviously allowing itself to be used as a mouthpiece. By someone who’s got a horse in a foreign race. It’s the cherry on top of the complete graft we’ve transplanted onto ourselves of the distant ethnic rivalries from, of all places, the utterly blocked-out and unsorted-out-by-Americans region called the Balkans. We don’t even realize we’re engaging in the kind of ethnic bias that runs so counter to what we fancy our values to be, still believing that here is where ethnic rivalries are forgotten.
…In short, [Nikolic] is not some flinty Serbian patriot but a radical nationalist whose election threatens the region’s security. Mr. Nikolic has not abandoned the dream of a Greater Serbia. [Never mind about the actualized dream of “a Kosovo without Serbs” as part of the now openly admitted Greater Albania project.] He claims, however, that he wants to achieve it “peacefully.” He demands that Kosovo be restored to Belgrade’s control [as I’ll demand that Jerusalem be to Israel’s when the world tries to gift it to the Arabs]; that the Bosnian Serb Republic secede from Sarajevo [as any rational being including Bosnia’s Croats want to do]; and that Croatia relinquish areas claimed by Serbian revanchists. [He means the areas that the Serbs living there for four centuries were violently cleansed from upon Croatia’s illegal secession.]
…Yet his policies will lead to only one outcome: war. He is challenging the national sovereignty and territorial integrity of Serbia’s neighbors. [Translation: Never mind about Albania, Kosovo, Croatia, Bosnia, and Slovenia (and soon Hungary) successfully challenging their neighbor Serbia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, causing these inevitable counter-claims.] Mr. Nikolic is a political thug with delusions of grandeur. Serbia is eerily reminiscent of Weimar Germany. Defeated, humiliated and sliding toward an economic abyss, Serbian voters have opted for a neo-Nazi. He is not their savior. Rather, he is leading the Serbs – again – to doom and disaster.
And Mr. Kuhner, like so many MSM “journalists” in the 90s, will do his part to make sure of it.
Only a few days after the Kuhner column appeared, another one followed, this time reprimanding Obama over his recent reference to “Polish concentration camps.” In it, Mr. Kuhner partially covered his tush by giving a single-phrase mention to the Croatian Ustashas in the midst of rattling off a dozen countries seized by Nazi fever during WWII. He then predictably — to satirical proportions — expended the rest of the paragraph re-fixating on Serbia (in case anyone thought it was any better than the rest for having resisted the Nazis the most), and made sure to include the standard anti-Serb propaganda sentence about German-occupied Serbia having become “Judenfrei” (Jew-free).
Without a touch of irony, he then gave the credit that Reagan gave to Serbs about fighting twin evils — to Croatia’s fellow Catholic Poland:
This is what makes the Poles so remarkable. Guided by their deep Catholic faith and unflinching patriotism, they stood up against the two seminal evil ideologies of the 20th century – Nazism and communism. Poland is a Christian nation. It has been crucified repeatedly throughout its long, tragic history.
Not to take anything away from Poland, but in addition to all of the above applying to Kuhner’s reviled Serbs, unlike Poland the latter have also had to contend with perpetually encroaching Islam, which they’ve historically staved off from the West. (They similarly tied up Hitler long enough to delay him in reaching Stalingrad until the Russian winter, which proved a decisive disadvantage to the Germans.)
It is often forgotten that Hitler’s victims also included millions of Slavs, Catholics, Gypsies, homosexuals and disabled people. According to Nazi racial doctrine, Slavs were deemed “subhuman” – fit only for slave labor. Hence, countless Poles and others perished at the hands of Nazi butchers.
Again, Kuhner’s hated Serbs can check off ‘All of the Above,’ and yet this list glaringly excludes “Orthodox Christians” — such as those whom his Catholic Slavs in Croatia liquidated. So he’s talking about the plight of Slavs as if the Slavs who had it worst weren’t the ones who were also under attack by their fellow Slavs
Imagine, the subhead under the headline “Obama’s Holocaust revisionism” actually read “Pinning Nazi atrocities on Poland dishonors a loyal friend.” Again, no touch of irony about what Kuhner spends his professional life doing to our Serbian ally, to which we’ve done more than just insult.
As for that nationalist election victory in Serbia, here is just something to keep in mind when hearing or reading about “Serbianationalism™”. In addition to the fact that it’s nothing like the supremacist nationalism of those whom the West did buttress (count the non-Croats in Croatia, the non-Slovenians in Slovenia, the non-Albanians in Kosovo and the non-Muslims in Sarajevo, and compare those figures to multi-national Serbia’s ethnic minorities). What to keep in mind is that those who dare to preserve historical memory and identity are commonly called “nationalists” by a world in the process of extinguishing the nation-state as such. Nationalist is what they’ll call any American who objects when the same one-worlders come for our country too. After having practiced on Yugoslavia and Serbia.
“Yet nationalism is simply the determination of a people to cultivate its own soul, to follow the customs bequeathed to it by its ancestors, to develop its traditions according to its own instincts. It is the national equivalent of the individual’s determination not to be a slave.” – Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, 1935
Now we know why it’s under attack.
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