Timothy Garton-Ash on hysterical form. The poor man is not well.
First Iran and now this: it's not looking good for the neocons. If Kosovo declares independence, then the Serbian army will be straight in there, with the full assurance of unlimited Russian backing. And that will be the end of the neocon-backed separatist aspirations of pimping, heroin-trafficking Wahhabi wearing black shirts in deference to their SS fathers and grandfathers. Nobody is going to risk World War Three for the likes of them. Are they?
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David, why do you claim that all Balkan muslims are smack-smuggling Nazis? You have made similar claims about Bosniaks.
ReplyDeleteAs someone who recently spent three days in Bosnia-Herzogovina, I did not see any "black-shirt wearing wahabists". Maybe they do not wear them during the winter, or they knew I was in town (Sarajevo and Mostar) or the black shirts were in the laundry.
Certainly despite the amount of mosques in Sarajevo and Mostar, in no way is it a wahabist society. Booze (sold in practically every shop) and "adult materials" (sold in magazine and DVD form at newstands) are much more freely available than in the UK.
There were some women with headscarves, but they were exception and not the rule. Men with beards were rare. Women there dress pretty much the same as they do here.
I went to contemplate this contradiction at the Sarajevo brewery which is around the corner from a mosque while early evening prayers were being called. I spent an hour drinking crno pivo (black beer) at 1.20 a pint with a big painting on the wall of the brewery's beerhall of a Bosnian soldier in the Austrian army wearing a red fez, beer in one hand and arm round the waist of a woman. The painting was dated 1883 and the brewery was founded in the 1860's - during the Ottoman period.
See, just for a start:
ReplyDeletehttp://byzantinesacredart.com/blog/2006/08/berliner-zeitung-kosovo.html
http://www.worldpress.org/Europe/2335.cfm
http://emperors-clothes.com/bosnia/svijet.htm
http://www.srpska-mreza.com/library/facts/Thompson.html
Also well worth a look:
http://byzantinesacredart.com/blog/2007/12/dung-heap.html
Three of those articles come from ultra-naionalist Serbian propaganda sites and not to be trusted.
ReplyDeleteVery few wahabists in Sarajevo. Saw one Saudi flag. Also saw an Iranian Islamic centre so everbody and their wife from the umra are there.
Concerning SS connections, the Serbs have a problem (not unnaturally) that many of their rivals in the Balkans were in SS-related organisations. Lets be blunt here David, all the countries occupied by the Germans provided SS regmiments if the Germans allowed. The Dutch, the Danes (you have read Sven Hassel books I presume), the French, the Belgians, the Baltic nations, the Ukrainians all produced SS regiments - and it would have been no different in the UK if we had been occupied.
I presume you have seen "It happened here" - the budget drama about occupied Britain. It starred Robert Shaw (Anikin Skywalker in Return of the Jedi). It showed German propaganda movies showing British and German SS men admiring a symbol of Anglo-German unity - the statue of Prince Albert outside the Albert Hall and talked about how the British and Germans had always been allies. Such as the Hanover connection the Anglo-German victory (Hanoverian and Prussian troops) at Waterloo. We are all Teutons. We come from the same stock. It is natural we are together!
God even I am believing that for a minute! Seriously, do you hate the Dutch because of their high-level of collaboration?
Did Muslims from other countries come to fight in Bosnia? Yes. Some of these people having settled in Bosnia are now facing deportation and are complaining bitterly that they are not being deported for having beards and they are not wahabists.
But to suggest that Bosnia is a hotbed of smack-smuggling wahabists is junk. If this was the case then why are the borders with the fundamentally Catholic Croats so porus. Never went through a customs check moving between the two countries - twice and was able to re-enter Bosnia from Croatia without a passport check at Neum.
Concerning Bosniaks wearing fezes, this is a traditional headress hailing from the Turks. Orthodox Romanians and Moldovans even wear a type of wooly fez in rural parts.
By the way David, are you a denier of the crimes of the Chetniks and massacres of Croats - or do two wrongs make a right.
I might add a wee anecdote from a friend of mine from his time at Oxford (St Edmund's Hall). He had a Serb aquaintance there who one night got drunk and started shouting about how one day he was going to lead a thousand Serbian horsemen to charge the gates of Constantonople to drive out the Turk.
Now this guy was an ultra-nationalist and it has to be said that the Serbs are a proud and hospitable people. But they have to own up they did not always treat their partners in Yugoslavia that well from the banning of the Macedonian language to the centralising constitution of 1920. They blame their partners instead. A bit like how the Turks blame the Armenians, Greeks, Bulgarians et al for the way that the Turks treated them. Maybe the Serbs and Turks have more in common than just cevapci and burek that some Serb ultra-nationalists will admit----
People who wish to preserve what remains of Yugoslavia are anything but "ultra-Nationalists". Or do you mean that as a compliment?
ReplyDeleteYes, there would have been British SS divisions; there are persisitent rumours that there were, made up of POWs who'd been either Fascists sympathisers or general villains before being called up, but that the Great Unwashed is still not quite ready for the full story.
The direct linear successors of the Flemish SS are the neocon-backed secessionists in Flanders today, and the direct linear successors of the Danish SS were part of the Danish government that formed part of the "coalition of the willing".
But the Bosniak and Kosovar support for the Nazis went far beyond even that: I really do doubt that the male halves of whole towns and villages in Britain would voluntarily have joined the SS, any more than they did in, say, Flanders or Denmark.
Izetbegovic himself was an SS recruitment sergeant, and the KLA still wear black shirts to this day (although Newsnight shockingly claimed last night that it had been disbanded, a sign of which side the BBC is going to take).
The Serbs, by contrast, are our old allies, first against the Turks and then against Hitler, who sometimes expressed his regret that the Battle of Vienna had not gone the other way and saved the Teutons from the decadence out of which he felt bound to rescue them, and who had a number of notable allies in the Islamic world.
Bosnia might not yet be run along Wahhabi lines, but it will be, just as Izetbegovic and his Saudi backers intended, and that will come to pass as soon as Republica Srpska declares independence, which it will do as soon as Kosovo does.
As for Bosnian links with Croatia, that state was founded by the Western-backed Franjo Tudjman, a Holocaust-denier who recreated in the 1990s the full panoply of 1930s Fascism, and who notably remarked that he "would never allow a Serb, Jew or Gypsy to marry into [his] family". The country that he built is now a member of NATO and the EU.
And the Dutch, Norwegian, Ukrainian, French and Baltic State's SS?
ReplyDeleteThere is no evidence Izetbegovic was in the SS. He was a teenager when the war ended. He was 19. It is a bit like the claim Tudjman was in the Ustasa when actually he was a lieutenant of Tito's during the war. Tudjamn I might add was a dictator, a bit like his opposite number in Serbia and liable for war crimes as well.
Tudjman has an ornate tomb in Zagreb's main cemetery, a cemetery where the graves of Ustasa troops still lie unmarked. Their section is just wasteland with a couple of wooden crosses marking roughly officially unmarked graves.
Concerning the Belgian SS, what about Leon Dregelle. He was no Flem. Indeed if I remember rightly many Flemish Nazis converted to the notion of being pro-Belgian due to common Celtic heritage between Flems and Walloons. Probably bought the propaganda put about by Vichy who justified its collaboration in the name of common Celtic roots with the Germans. Check the Celtic Axes symbol of the "French State".
Were the Serbs our Allies in Two World Wars. Yes by default. Serbia is blamed for sponsoring the assasination of Franz Ferdinand in 1914, kick starting round one. Yugoslavia would have kept out of World War II (indeed the Karageovic-regency had signed a pact with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy before the war). What went wrong was the Italians decided to invade and extend their Balkan real estate - like they did to the Albanians in 1938. The Germans were sucked in to bail them out.
Remember partisans from all over Yugoslavia fought under half-Slovene Croat Tito. Not just Serbs.
"And the Dutch, Norwegian, Ukrainian, French and Baltic State's SS?"
ReplyDeleteWe might well find out in the next 10 years, especailly if Kosovar and Flemish secession come to pass, very significant victories indeed for that tradition.
"There is no evidence Izetbegovic was in the SS. He was a teenager when the war ended. He was 19."
It is a fact. And how old do you think that SS men were?
"Concerning the Belgian SS, what about Leon Dregelle. He was no Flem."
Oh, it was very active in Wallonia as well. But that's not where the present Flemish separitist movement sprang from, obviously.
"Were the Serbs our Allies in Two World Wars. Yes by default."
That's almost beneath contempt. But even it cannot be said of the Bosniaks and Kosovars, our out-and-out enemies in two World Wars. And if you believe (not that I'm saying that I necessarily do) in the theory of the current Third World War against "militant Islam", then our enemies in that, too.
Bosniaks and Kosovars could be found in the partisans as well. There is a large partisan cemetery in Mostar with people with Muslim first names in it.
ReplyDeleteIndeed there is a Bosniak soldier buried in Edinburgh at Costorphine Hill military cemetery. He is buried in the Polish miltary section.
War time alliances are all very well and good. However this does not excuse crimes. Despite the help from the Arabs during World War I (Lawrence of Arabia etc) and a bit less in World War II, we do not back Hezbollah, Hamas etc against Israel despite the fact that many Israelis forebears in World War I (such as from Austro-Hungary, Germany and Bulgaria) were our enemies. It would not make sense.
There is no evidence that Izetbegovic was in the SS. He would probably not have lived to as long as he did if he had. Balkan collaborationist forces summarily executed en masse by the Partisans after the war.
Question David, if you are for "terriotrial integrity" on point of principle then obviously you cannot support the creation of Yugoslavia. After all about half the territory came from Austro-Hungary. You do not seem too defensive about the integrity of the Habsburg lands.
Are you one of the 1000 horsemen riding towards the gates of Constantonople?
Now there's a thought...
ReplyDeleteThe 1990s Bosnian separatists did not, and today's Kosovar separatists do not, identify with the Partisans, but very explicitly with the other side, huge numbers of whom, including Izetbegovic, certainly were not executed after the War.
Hezbollah and Hamas are not Arabist movements. They are Islamist ones.
Austria-Hungary was one bulwark against Islam and potentially against Fascism (look what happened to much of it between the Wars, even before Hitler). And Yugoslavia was another bulwark both against Islam and actually against Fascism.
The civil war was provoked by talk of "Greater Serbia" and Milosovic seeming to want to revoke the federal constitution of Tito in favour of a centralised one of 1920. He started the process by getting the end of autonomy in Vordinja province and threatening the same for Kosovo province and using his influence in the Republic of Montenegro. The northern Republics then bolted the stable. Nothing to do with fascism as such.
ReplyDeleteWas not Milosovic when he was talking of a "Greater Serbia" a bit of fascist?
Concerning Austria-Hungary, the Empire kept the peace but refused to reform itself.
Concerning Islam and your obvious Islamophobia, do you boycott Muslim-owned shops and other businesses (such as Indian (usually Bangladeshi-owned) businesses) as well as products from Muslim states. Maybe you should and try and walk as much as you can so you do not travel in vehicles fueled by Arab oil products. Does the boycott start today?
It was not "Greater Serbia". It was "Yugoslavia", on the character of which try the first of the following quotations:
ReplyDelete1. "Socialism, in particular, being a progressive and just society, should not allow people to be divided by national or religious identity";
2. "I would never allow a Serb, Jew or gypsy to marry into my family"; and
3. "The first and most important lesson from the Koran is the impossibility of any connection between Islamic and non-Islamic systems."
The third comes, of course, from the old Nazi recruitment sergeant Alija Izetbegovic, father of the as-yet-unrealised idea that Bosnia-Herzegovina (with no Muslim majority, nor any history of independence: they have both always been part of somewhere else, and I don't mean a federation with each other) should be turned by force of arms into the Taliban Afghanistan of Europe, ably assisted by the same forces that created the Taliban Afghanistan of Afghanistan.
The second comes from the Western-backed Croatian President, Franjo Tudjman, who astonishingly recreated the full paraphernalia of 1930s Fascism in Europe in the 1990s: like Izetbegovic, he was never charged with anything; but then, like Izetbegovic, he was never kidnapped in order to stand trial before an illegal court.
And the first? Three guesses. His farcical "trial" never produced the slightest evidence against him despite numerous illegal extensions of its time limit, and Serbia herself has since been cleared entirely of waging war against Bosnia-Herzegovina.