Eagle in the East – A Serbian Triptych: Part Two

The Yugoslav Crucible Revisited

Review of Michel Chossudovsky, The US-NATO War of Aggression against Yugoslavia (Belgrade Forum for Equals: Belgrade, 2021)

Vae victis

Preliminaries

(*) Overall assessment: Chossudovsky’s book is one of the very few solid, i.e. professionally researched and historically contextualized, English-language publications on the Yugoslav conflict in which the author is brave enough to draw honest conclusions about its root causes, narrative repercussions and moral implications. The main reason Chossudovsky manages to avoid standard-narrative pitfalls, such as ‘end of history’ teleology or ‘clash of civilization’ schematism, is that he manages to consistently maintain an older and more realistic analytic model, viz. the Marxist model of capital accumulation and imperialist expansion as important geopolitical factors. Especially useful contributions by Professor Chossudovky are his depth-analysis case studies of specific episodes from the long-drawn out agony of Yugoslavia, such as the strategic and financial foundations of Camp Bondsteel (appendix to his Ch. 5), the eco-warfare bombing of the Panchevo petrochemical plant (his Ch. 6) and the human impact of NATO’s uses of depleted uranium ammunition in a de facto campaign of low-intensity nuclear warfare (his Ch. 7). Chossudovsky ruthlessly exposes a number of deeply disturbing — and equally deeply memory-holed — ‘hybrid warfare’ strategies of the West’s war on Yugoslavia, including the West’s deliberate and extensive employment of drug mafias and terror networks, and he shows how the West’s take-down of Yugoslavia was in some ways a ‘test run’, after which they became standard instruments in the globalist cabal’s foreign policy tool kit.

(*) Review aim: Above all, this review aims to ‘operationalize’ the lessons of Chossudovsky’s book, i.e. to show how they are useful in exposing the main strategies and the overall aims of the West-based globalist cabal in their ‘inverse crusade’ to make the world ‘safe for tyranny’ ever since the end of the Cold War. If what the West did to Yugoslavia in the ‘90s is taken as a comprehensive ‘test run’ of full-spectrum ‘hybrid warfare’, then what the West is now doing to Russia in the ‘20s may be looked at as the ultimate test of the ‘hybrid warfare’ tools and mechanisms ‘tested’ in Yugoslavia. It should be noted that this perspective in no way diminishes the sufferings and injustices inflicted upon the people of Yugoslavia: rather, the lessons that can be learnt from the globalist cabal’s successful dismantling and recolonization of Yugoslavia in the ‘90s should be taken to heart by those tasked with preserving the integrity and independence of Russia in the ‘20s — and by all those dedicated to the defence of all authentic forms of state sovereignty and national identity. Above all, the various means and mechanisms of the globalist cabal’s ‘hybrid warfare’ should be understood as mutually reinforcing, continually improved and carefully selected tools and mechanisms from within a fairly standard ‘tool kit’. Their ultimate aim is nothing less than ‘multi-dimensional’ and ‘full-spectrum’ dominance: not merely the subjugation of nations, groups and individuals and the achievement of political and economic control, but their essential alteration and the utter destruction of their original identities. The ever more transparently anti-human, trans-human and post-human nature of the globalist hegemon’s policies is explained by the ever more consistent, sophisticated and invasive application of these tools and mechanisms in pursuit of total control. Currently, the globalist cabal is engaged in a crucial campaign in its quest for world dominance: its ‘Ukraine War’ campaign against Russia aims at taking down its single most important state-sovereign challenger in the international agenda. It cannot afford to lose this campaign and is bound to use its entire ‘multi-dimensional warfare’ arsenal: it is important that those entrusted with the defence of state sovereignty and national identity in the face of the globalist onslaught, now reaching its climax in the West’s war on Russia, take full cognizance of the precedents and antecedents of the West’s war on Yugoslavia. This applies especially to those operating in the very vanguard of cognitive warfare — above all, the Eurasianist movement.

(*) Reader alert: The lessons to be learnt from the West’s war on Yugoslavia are inevitably shaped by historical and geopolitical settings and well-educated and tradition-informed readers will appreciate the importance of a firm grasp of history and geography as the necessary basis of classical international diplomacy and politics, i.e. the realm of pre-globalist international relations and statecraft. But this appreciation — and this may seem to be a contradiction but is anything but – also constitutes a grave danger in the sense that it may skew the reader’s view, blinding him to the fact that the globalist cabal acts, thinks and feels in direct defiance of history and geography — and of reality itself. It insists upon altering reality, completely and forever: it seeks to rule the world and reshape it, erasing history, overcoming geography and destroying reality. The more intelligent of the globalist cabal’s puppets and mouthpieces, the Blinkens, the Nulands, the Sunaks, the Macrons, are not blind ignoramuses: they just deliberately chose to ignore history, geography and reality. They are driven by a ‘greater’ vision that is stamped upon them and maintained in the very peculiar ‘cultic bubble’ void in which they ‘live’. Essentially, it is an anti-human, trans-human and post-human vision — a vision that undoubtedly anticipates and prepares the as-yet-unrealized vision of the Antichrist, who long ago deliberately set himself up against the reality of creation. Thus, the tools and mechanisms of the globalist cabal’s arsenals are deliberately applied against history, geography and reality. The entire package — military aggression (from ‘humanitarian intervention’ to ‘regime change’), economic warfare (from ‘sanction regime’ to ‘market reform’), bio-leninist subversion (from ‘women’s suffrage’ to ‘critical race theory’), psycho-social deconstruction (from ‘MK Ultra’ experiments to ‘transgender’ legislation), biotechnical control (from the ‘morning-after pill’ to ‘vaccination mandate’) — has only one direction and one exit. The anti-globalist East now experiences the ruthless real-world application of these tools and mechanisms to its collective body and mind, but it should know that there is something still worse than being killed and maimed in body and mind. The still-standing East only has to look to the already-fallen West, to look at its zombified masses, and it will know what it means for the soul to be killed and maimed:

fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul
but rather fear Him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell
— Matthew 10:28

Tools and Techniques

After showing how the demolition of Yugoslavia was planned by the US-led West as far back as the early ‘80s (tracing such planning back to the Reagan administration’s 1982 National Decision Directive 64), Chossudovsky groups the tools and mechanisms by which this demolition was achieved into two main categories: (1) economic-financial and (2) political-military.

(Ad 1) The West’s economic-financial assault on Yugoslavia involved the ‘opening up’, through a combination of bullying, bribery and blackmail at the highest policy-making levels, of the Yugoslav economy to neo-liberal (‘Reagonomic’/’Thatcherite’) ‘free market’ mechanisms. The dictates of the high finance-directed ‘international institutions’ (International Monetary Fund, World Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Bank of International Settlement), always imposed with the help of and for the benefit of ‘venture capitalist’ ‘investors’ such as George Soros, resulted in a round of economic ‘shock therapy’ (‘market reforms’, ‘austerity programs’) that destroyed the Yugoslav economy and Yugoslav society as well as — indirectly — the Yugoslav state. The de-regulation of foreign trade led to grotesque ‘dumping’ practices: markets were flooded with cheaply imported commodities, elbowing out domestic producers. The abolition of protective trade barriers led to the mass insolvency of state- and worker-owned enterprises: these found themselves suddenly and artificially ‘indebted’ and forced into fire-sale liquidation. These state- and worker-owned assets, including real estate, industrial facilities and inventory stocks, were then sold off to foreign ‘vulture fund’ investors at bargain prices: local currency-nominated ‘book values’ were signed off by corrupt bureaucrats and managers who were either bribed or ‘partnered in’. These — largely communist party — apparatchiks were directly complicit in the economic demolition of their own nation’s economy and state.¹ In the course of ‘liberalizing’ foreign investment legislation, state revenue became collateral for foreign debt servicing, which meant that a sovereign economic policy was no longer possible. At the same time, foreign donor support and international reconstruction loans were made conditional on the implementation of legal and political ‘structural reforms’, allowing foreign powers to effectively impose their legal frames and political ideas on Yugoslavia. Yugoslav federal government control was systematically degraded and thwarted as loan conditions were imposed, credit lines were threatened and budget controls were imposed. Crucially, transfer payments by the federal government funds to Yugoslavia’s constituent republics and autonomous regions were interrupted and federal government tax powers were devolved to these republics and regions: federal government authority was fatally compromised. At the same time, Yugoslavia’s social fabric started coming apart under sheer economic pressure: plant closure and budget cuts led to mass unemployment, ‘austerity’ imposed wage freezes and ‘privatization’ imposed utility price-rises led to collapsing living standards. Faced with reform-mandated currency devaluation, shrinking government tax revenue and ballooning foreign currency-denominated external debt the federal government resorted to money printing, leading to skyrocketing inflation. Between 1990 and 1994, Yugoslavia went through five currencies and multiple cycles of hyper-inflation, ending only when the final Yugoslav dinar (Novi Dinar), the YUM, was pegged to the Deutsch Mark, replacing the previous dinar, the YUG at a rate of 1 YUM to 13 million YUG (some months before, the YUG had itself replaced the earlier YUO at a rate of 1 YUG to 1 billion YUO). Over this time, the destruction of industry, the roll-back of workers’ rights and the dismantling of the welfare state, meant that the mass of people lost their rights and livelihoods: rights and livelihoods that had been carefully built up over decades were erased in the course of a few months. Ordinary people, wage-earners, the unemployed, the sick, and pensioners, were exposed to pre-modern living conditions, often thrown into Dickens-style poverty and squalor. The social fall-out was catastrophic, as evidenced by mass emigration, spiking crime rates, endemic substance abuse and widespread prostitution. Even today, Yugoslavia’s successor states still struggle to overcome the impact of Yugoslavia’s ‘controlled demolition’: the legacy of mass emigration, the ‘brain-drain’ of young professionals, the exodus from the countryside, the degradation of honest work and dignified retirement, the mafia culture of gangster survivalism and the culture-distorting impact of decades of negative birth-rates are heavy mortgages, weakening the successor states’ social fabric and stunting their socio-cultural development. As usual, however, history is written by the victors:

Administered in several doses since the 1980s, NATO-backed neo-liberal medicine has helped destroy Yugoslavia. Yet, the global media [and academia] ha[ve] carefully overlooked or denied its central role. Instead, they.. sing.. the praises of the ‘free market’… The social and political impact of economic restructuring in Yugoslavia has been carefully erased from our collective understanding. Opinion-makers instead dogmatically present cultural, ethnic, and religious divisions as the sole cause of war and devastation. …Such false consciousness not only masks the truth, it also prevents us from acknowledging precise historical occurrences. Ultimately, it distorts the true sources of social conflict. When applied to the former Yugoslavia, it obscures the historical foundations of South Slavic unity, solidarity and identity in what constituted a multiethnic society. (p. 43-4)

…The eventual ‘reconstruction’ of Yugoslavia formulated in the context of the ‘free market’ reforms and financed by international debt largely purport to create a safe haven for foreign investors rather than to rehabilitate the country’s economic and social infrastructure. The… national economy will be dismantled, [Western] banks will take over financial institutions, local industrial enterprises which have not been totally destroyed will be driven into bankruptcy. The most profitable state assets will be transferred into the hands of foreign capital under the World Bank sponsored privatisation programme. In turn, [this] ‘strong economic medicine’ imposed by external creditors will contribute to further boosting a criminal economy… which feeds on poverty and dislocation. (80-1)

(Ad 2) The West’s initial political-military strategy involved the systematic fostering of secessionist political movements and the undercover organization of armed secessionist militias in the constituent republics and autonomous regions of Yugoslavia, which was a federal state inhabited by a large number of different ethnicities with widely diverging languages, religions and culture. This strategy aimed at undermining Yugoslavia’s relatively young and tenuous state identity, which dated back to the assertion of a common Southern Slav national idea during the weakening and the collapse of the Ottoman and Hapsburg rule throughout the Balkan between the early 19th Century rise of the independent Serbian state and the early 20th Century fall of the Austria-Hungarian state. Yugoslav state identity was based on the shared history, the common culture and the Serbo-Croatian lingua franca. After Yugoslavia’s liberation struggle during World War II, this state identity was expanded to include a state ideology of moderate ‘market-socialism’ at home and ‘non-alignment’ abroad. As ‘market socialism’ allowed Yugoslav society a balance between the extremes of capitalism’s Darwinist ‘war of all against all’ and communism’s all-levelling ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ domestically, so ‘non-alignment’ allowed the Yugoslav state to balance between the West Bloc and the East Bloc internationally. Thus, Yugoslavia managed to remain truly independent during the Cold War, when almost all of Europe was effectively reduced to vassal status under either the United States or the Soviet Union. Yugoslavia also gained diplomatic leverage and international prestige as the de facto centre of the Non-Alignment Movement, founded in Belgrade in 1961 at the initiative of President Tito, supported by international heavy-weights such as India’s Nehru, Indonesia’s Sukarno, Egypt’s Nasser and Ghana’s Nkrumah: it effectively led much of the Third World on the ‘third way’ of non-alignment. As the Cold War drew to a close and as the communist East Bloc started to dissolve, however, Yugoslavia could no longer sustain its ideological and geopolitical balancing act: its sovereignty at home and its status abroad had been a function of the ‘bipolar’ Cold War global balance of power and were no longer sustainable at the start of the ‘unipolar’ era: after the fall of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, Yugoslavia faced the full, unchallenged might of Atlanticist power alone. The Western purpose was to split Yugoslavia, a medium-size, semi-autarkic state of considerable demographic, economic and military weight, into a patchwork of small-size, import-dependent vassal-states unable to challenge the hegemonic power of Anglosphere-based Atlanticist hegemon. Divide et impera. Ideally, from an Atlanticist perspective, would be an ex-Yugoslavian space crowded by a maximum number of sub-sovereign successor states, thoroughly alienated from each other and each separately subject to ‘foreign debt rescheduling’ and ‘structural readjustment negotiations’. From a larger historical perspective, the ‘leaders’ of these successor states would be nothing but collaborators with an informal but no less real Atlanticist occupation regime. As Chossudovsky points out repeatedly, these ‘leaders’ are nothing but vassals in a system of globalist colonial rule imposed on the former Yugoslavia, as proven by the fact that they enthusiastically lined up to join globalist trans-nationalist power structures – EU, NATO – as soon as possible. In those cases where successor states are so grossly artificial that joining these formal structures is problematic, as in Bosnia and Kosovo, openly neo-colonial regimes are imposed, with globalist-written ‘constitutions’, globalist-cloned legal systems and un-elected, non-native UN ‘high representatives’. The West’s political-military campaign to achieve Yugoslavia’s formal division into successor states, more or less along ethnic and religious lines, began with covert sponsorship of separatist politicians and militias (ranging from intelligence and funding to military training and equipment), it continued with overt propaganda for separatist movements (including ‘atrocity propaganda), it expanded to include diplomatic pressure (newly-united Germany obliged its Atlanticists masters by initiating the ‘diplomatic recognition’ of break-away states) and it finally peaked in direct military intervention (in Bosnia and Kosovo). Of course, the West’s political-military campaign ran simultaneously with the West’s economic-financial campaign: the latter undermined Yugoslavia’s civilian economy and it destroyed Yugoslavia’s social cohesion to such an extent that its people lost their trust in the old system, the old state and the old leadership, making them susceptible to the Western-sponsored narratives of ‘market reforms’ and ‘national self-determination’. Even so, the demolition of Yugoslavia was far from easy: the Yugoslav state died hard and it only did so after the application of the full force of Western military might. The greatest challenge to the Western campaign of demolition was Serbian nationalism: in many ways, the first Yugoslav state had been the natural extension and crowning achievement of Serbia’s struggle for independence. After a series of ferocious freedom fights against its old-empire Ottoman and Hapsburg overlords and a series of brutal border wars against its new-nation Italian, Hungarian, Bulgarian and Albanian neighbours, Serbia had effectively created Yugoslavia as the logical expression of its maximal territorial aspirations (the unification of all Serbs and their fellow South Slaves in one state) and its maximal strategic needs (the creation of a land-corridor to allied Greece, broad access to the Adriatic Sea and a territorial buffer around its capital). The Western demolition of Yugoslavia, however, required more than the mere roll-back of Serbia’s gains: it also required the permanent impairment of Serbia’s status as a regional power. This means permanently ‘disabling’ and ‘handicapping’ Serbia, which is why it has been reduced to a small land-locked state, why it has been isolated as an island surrounded by a sea of EU-NATO enemies and why it has been made to suffer the amputation of sacred soil in Kosovo – so that it can never recover and stand up again. Aside from the fact that the Serbian state’s tradition of political independence and military prowess was bound to make Serbian revanchism inevitable, the main reason for the West’s implacable animosity towards Serbia was Serbia’s natural alliance with Russia. Throughout its existence, which overlapped with the late 19th and early 20th Century ‘Great Game’ period and Russia’s expansion towards Tsargrad-Constantinople and the Turkish Straits, the Serbian state had been Russia’s most consistent ally: fellow Slav and fellow Orthodox Russia had been Serbia’s faithful sponsor, ally and protector. It was, in fact, Russia’s commitment to the preservation of Serbian independence in the face of the Hapsburg intervention that triggered the outbreak of World War I. At the level of nationalist sentiment, Serbia’s historically intimate ties to Russia did survive Russia’s switch from devout Orthodoxy to communist atheism: the first Yugoslav state gave shelter to large numbers of White Russian refugees and the second Yugoslav state was founded on the strategic partnership between its founders and the Soviet Union. After the fall of the Soviet Union and communism, Serbia and Russia are again naturally aligned. This alignment follows from simple geo-political logic: they have a common enemy, viz. the Atlanticist hegemon invading the former Serbian and Russian imperial spaces. But this also follows simple cultural-historical logic: both are crowned with the double-headed eagle of Byzantium and both are called to defend Europe and Christianity against the double-tongued Atlanticist-globalist Empire of Lies:

they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength
they shall mount up with wings as eagles
they shall run, and not be weary
and they shall walk, and not faint
— Isaiah 40:31

Time-lines and Fault-lines

This review of Chossudovsky’s book does not need to reconstruct the entire time-line of the prolonged agony of ex-Yugoslavia at the hands of its Atlanticist tormentors. Of course, Chossudovsky’s book focuses on the culminating stage of Yugoslavia’s defeat: the ‘Kosovo War’ of 1999, but he does repeatedly pay attention to its earlier (Slovenian, Croatian, Bosnian) and the later (‘Bulldozer Revolution’, ‘Macedonian Insurgency’) stages. It is important to note that Chossudovsky does so in terms of ‘parallel viewing’ and ‘pattern recognition’: he clearly shows how it is useful to view the entire process of Yugoslavia’s demolition – spread out over one and half decades if formally defined by the state’s break-up from 25 June 1991 (Slovenian and Croatian independence) to 3 June 2006 (Montenegrin independence) – as one single campaign. Or rather as a coherent ‘rolling operation’ showing consistent strategy patterns:

…Washington’s military-intelligence ploy is… to replicate pattern[s]: …to fracture… territory, foster internal social divisions and fuel ethnic strife. The design is to destroy all social and political ties between [groups], who have coexisted for more than half a century within a multi-ethnic society. These socio-ethnic divisions are deliberately created so as to curb all forms of social resistance [and], more importantly, …to prevent the development of a broader ‘common front’ against the enemy. (p. 139)

One very specific strategy pattern was the re-use of the personnel employed by Atlanticist organizations for the neo-colonial occupation and administration of various parts of Yugoslavia:

[NATO] personnel and UN bureaucrats previously stationed in Croatia and Bosnia have been routinely reassigned to Kosovo. (p. 96)

Many strategic patterns can be discerned within the domain of ‘information warfare’. On the one hand, the Western MSM consistently portrayed Atlanticist military aggression as ‘justified’ as a response to refugee crises that were actually deliberately engineered and to atrocity stories that were entirely fabricated. Thus, NATO air strikes against Yugoslav targets were consistently portrayed as ‘humanitarian interventions’ meant to ‘save’ Bosniaks in 1992 and Kosovars in 1999. On the other hand, the Western MSM consistently ignored the massive refugee crises and very real atrocities caused by Atlanticist-sponsored anti-Yugoslav militias. Thus, the systematic reign of terror unleashed by the KLA (‘Kosovo Liberation Army’, the ethnic Albanian militia set up by Western intelligence services to destabilize south-west Serbia) during the Kosovo crisis was deliberately glossed over.

The massacres of civilians in Kosovo [we]re not disconnected acts of revenge by civilians by so-called ‘rogue elements’ within the KLA, as claimed by NATO and the UN. They [we]re part of a consistent and coherent pattern. The intent and result of the KLA sponsored atrocities have been to trigger the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Serbs, Roma and other minorities in Kosovo. (p. 89)

In the reviewer’s opinion, however, the most important strategy pattern distinguished by Chossudovsky is the economic strategy pattern by which Yugoslavia’s successor states were effectively turned into Western colonies, with (‘privatized’) natural resources plundered and (‘debt interest’) tribute extracted to boost the profits of Western ‘venture capital’. An important part of the Western economic war strategy vis-à-vis Yugoslavia was to let war pay for itself: neo-colonial profits extracted from Western-conquered parts of Yugoslavia were used first to pay for the maintenance of occupation troops, (‘peacekeepers’, ‘security presence’) and then for the build-up of the armed forces of the newly ‘independent’ successor-states, with handsome profits boosting the Western military-industrial complex, including many private military contractors. Chossudovsky gives a particularly insightful analysis of how Camp Bondsteel (the “grande dame in a network of US bases running both sides of the border between Kosovo and Macedonia” – p. 106) was funded, making the fortunes of the defence contractors involved, including US Vice President Cheney’s Halliburton company (cf. appendix to his Ch. 5). In the final analysis, the West managed to make the chunk-by-chunk conquest and occupation of Yugoslavia pay for itself. In passing, Chossudovsky mentions that this very same strategic pattern, virtually ignored by Western historians and journalists, also applies to other — earlier and later — Western wars of aggression: few people realize Vietnam and Iraq were both billed for the West’s war expenses as a condition for the lifting of economic sanctions and the resumption of diplomatic relations.

This review of Chossudovsky’s book does not need to reconstruct all the ethnic, religious and cultural fault-lines that the Western aggressors managed to exploit during their campaign to bring down the Yugoslav state. It is important to note, however, that he sheds light on many frequently overlooked episodes in the long-drawn out Western campaign against Yugoslavia. Thus, he reminds the reader of the true background, the true nature and the true impact of ‘Operation Storm’, i.e. Western-backed Croatian conquest of the internationally unrecognized Serbian break-away proto-state of Kraina in August 1995. ‘Operation Storm’ involved foreign investors (eying newly-discovered coal and oil deposits) guiding Croatian policy making, foreign specialists (including retired US generals and German mercenaries) guiding Croatian military actions and foreign media ignoring massive suffering among the Kraina Serb civilian population (at least 420 killed and up to 180.000 displaced). Chossudovsky also reminds the reader of the equally overlooked episode of the ‘Macedonian Insurgency’, i.e. the Western-backed terror campaign by the NLA (‘National Liberation Army’, the ethnic Albanian militia set up by Western intelligence services to destabilize Macedonia) between January and November 2001. Similar to the KLA, its equivalent in Kosovo, the NLA was set up by Western intelligence services, funded by Western-facilitated drugs networks, trained by Western military contractors and, once put in action, directly supported by Western armed forces. The NLA’s terror campaign in north-west Macedonia served a similar purpose to the KLA’s terror campaign in south-west Serbia: to create ethnically cleansed base territories for these groups, which are meant to serve as safe zones for criminal activities and Western military bases, to weaken the central government and, last but not least, to generate long-term revenue for the West’s military-industrial complex. For Western policymakers, the ‘Macedonian Insurgency’ was a far easier operation to pull off than the ‘Kosovo War, because it was aided and abetted by corrupt Macedonian government officials and treacherous Macedonian army officers. The cost in terms of civilian suffering, however, was considerable: at least up to 100 dead and 140.000 displaced, almost all ethnic Macedonians and Bulgarians – this in one of Europe’s smaller countries, inhabited by only 1,8 million people. Once again, the true background, true nature and true impact of this campaign of terror and ethnic cleansing were either entirely ignored or thoroughly distorted in the Western press.

Lest we forget the true depths to which the West’s Empire of Lies has sunken over the last decades, it is only proper that we occasionally remind ourselves of all the injustices and crimes described in Chossudovsky’s book. And of the fact that we should not despair of justice:

the eyes of the Lord are in every place, beholding the evil and the good
— Proverbs 15:3

Pirates and Prostitutes

Over the last four or three decades, under the impact of transnationalist power accumulation covered by liberal-normative ideology, all the formerly sovereign states of the West have undergone a slow but steady – albeit recently ‘reset’-accelerated – process of politicide. The power once vested in these states, and by extension the political power once held by the nations represented by their governments, has been almost entirely erased, to be replaced by a faceless ‘globalist’ power, increasingly overtly totalitarian in character as the ‘reset’ progresses. The power of the globalist regime ruling the West is financial and economic in nature, it is embodied in international banks and multi-national cooperations, and its interests are served by trans-national institutions, ranging from truly global organizations such as the UN, the IMF and the World Bank to large regional organizations such as the NATO, the EU and the ECB. Under this transnational level, the globalist regime’s political agenda is entirely negative: it aims at preventing, thwarting and undermining all forms of political action that would threaten the maximal exploitation of natural and human resources. Any exercise of political power that threatens the interests of globalist high finance and globalist big business — effectively the unrestrained and borderless rule of bankster usury and capitalist exploitation — is anathema to the globalist regime: any sovereign state threatening open borders, any religious institution threatening social atomization and any traditional family-structure incompatible with narcissist consumerism is will inevitably find itself the target of globalist demolition. Under the trans-national level of globalist control, the true aim of the globalist regime is the creation and maintenance of an anarcho-tyrannical anti-order: a permanent ‘free for all’ economic ‘jungle war’ of ‘all-against-all’, creating a ‘market-society’ in which literally everything is for sale, including people and ideas. To put it bluntly: the ideal globalist ‘state’ – referring to the psycho-dynamic ‘state’ of a people rather than a government – would only have gangsters and prostitutes as its inhabitants, with minor variants within the first category (pirates, pimps) as well as the last (pop-stars, porn-stars). Ideally, such a ‘pirate republic’ would be ‘charismatically’ led by the 21st Century equivalent of the 20th Century ‘five family’-style mafia council: a WEF/Davos-style Chief Executive Officer/Public Relation Manager congregation of compradors-in-chief. In such an ideal ‘state’, which may be provisionally termed the Gangster-Prostitute State (GPS) – of course, Made in USA – any deviation would be considered an anachronism and an obstacle: it would not leave any space for non-materialist vocations and non-hedonistic ideas. In the GPS, there would be no place for martial heroism, knightly honour, priestly piety, monastic celibacy, philosophical contemplation, scholarly wisdom, paternal responsibility, maternal love, marital fidelity or pre-marital chastity. There would be no love of any object except the ‘self’, baby boomer-style inflated into the narcissist stratosphere: no love for nation, tribe, family, spouse – least of all God. To the extent that any such anachronistic notions would still marginally exist, the GPS would be bound to erase them from the public sphere for the sake of the undisturbed ‘bubble life’ of the masses: it would be bound to impose an all-levelling weight of hyper-egalitarian legislation, to instil an anti-meritocratic ethos and to create an all-smothering blanket of perversion-propaganda. Throughout the Western world, huge strides towards the GPS utopia have already been made on each of these three fronts: tradition-killing matriarchy and xenocracy (the rule of post-gender ‘women’ and post-racial ‘immigrants’), ethos-killing plutocracy and idiocracy (the rule of the corruption-only ‘rich’ and the paper-only ‘higher educated’) and civilization-killing kakocracy and pornocracy (the rule of the lowest and dirtiest) are already facts of life. Throughout the Western world, however, there remains a significant residue of ‘legacy institutions’ (be it monarchic, parliamentary, ecclesiastic, academic, artisanal, entrepreneurial, literary or artistic in nature), delaying the full flowering of the GPS. Of course, the early ‘20s’ Great Reset has greatly accelerated the take-down of these institutions: ‘Covid’ lockdowns undermined the economically independent small business sector and the cognitively conservative middle class, ‘BLM’ activism undermined public safety and the rule of law, the ‘Biden’ coup undermined representative government and freedom of speech and the ‘Ukraine’ campaign undermined the economic system and global security – but the West has yet to achieve full-blown GPS utopia.

For a sneak preview of GPS utopia in action, it is necessary to look East, to ex-Yugoslavia, where a ‘model GPS’ of sorts has already been created in Kosovo, a.k.a. the ‘black hole of Europe’. In some ways, Kosovo may be considered the geopolitical equivalent of an anti-gravity experiment: within this ‘black hole’ the rules of geopolitics are suspended. The founding of the entirely artificial statelet of Kosovo constitutes the crowning achievement in terms of globalist ‘state building’: it embodies the highest achievemeny of what the globalist ‘rules-based order’ may achieve if left unopposed. Chossudovsky analyses the genesis of the Kosovo ‘state’ in great detail, describing it as a mafia-run pirate-state ‘safe haven’ for globalism’s many grey and black channels, created as a de facto safe zone for drugs traders, arms dealers, organ traders, people smugglers, money-launderers and terror-funders, and as a ‘safe house’ for compromised, redundant or retired ‘assets’. It is an arrangement that equally benefits the local mafia underlings, who are promoted to ‘legit’ status and gain legal immunity in charge of their own ‘state’, and their globalist overlords, who can ‘skim’ Kosovo for resource profits and showcase Kosovo as a model achievement of ‘international governance’. Western big business was able to buy up Kosovo’s mines (copper, zinc, gold, silver, coal) and industry (metal smelting plants, power plants, battery plants) at fire sale prices, Western high finance was able to take-over Kosovo’s currency (imposing the Deutsch Mark and then the Euro) and banks (taking over expropriated and excluded Yugoslav banks) and Western NGOs were able to sign lucrative ‘assistance’ and ‘training’ contracts (as in George Soros’ Open Society branch office in Pristina in support of ‘governance development’.

The vital link between the Kosovo mafia ‘government’ and its globalist overlords is found in the narcotics trade, which started with the KLA being funded from the highly lucrative Balkans narcotics route, linking corrupt Turkish officials to the East with Albanian emigrants to the West:

…the KLA is sustained by organised crime with the tacit approval of the US and its allies. Following the pattern set during the war in Bosnia, public opinion has been carefully misled. The multibillion dollar Balkans narcotics trade has played a crucial role in ‘financing the conflict’ in Kosovo in accordance with Western economic, strategic and military objectives. (p. 48)

…Western intelligence agencies have developed a complex relationship to the illegal narcotics trade. In case after case, drug money laundered in the international banking system has financed covert operations. …The pattern in Kosovo is similar to other CIA covert operations in Central America, Haiti and Afghanistan, where ‘freedom fighters’ were financed through the laundering of drug money. (p. 50)

…The extensive links of the Kosovo Liberation Army to organized crime and the Balkans narcotics trade were not seen by the ‘international community’ as an obstacle to the installation of ‘democracy’ and ‘good governance’. (p. 41)

The narcotics trade, however, was not the only ‘cash cow’ that was milked to raise the KLA: since the early ‘90s, with the international embargo on Yugoslavia and the Greek blockade of Macedonia, a triangular narcotics-oil-arms trade network had developed in the Balkans, expanded to Western Europe through the increasing corporation between Albanian and Italian crime syndicates in arms smuggling and prostitution racketeering. Soon, not only simple light arms but sophisticated anti-aircraft, anti-armour and electronic surveillance systems (the latter connected to NATO satellites) found their way to the KLA. At the same time, the KLA was provided with professional and motivated cadres through the enlistment of mujahideen fighters, often trained by Al-Qaeda affiliates in secret camps in Afghanistan and Bosnia. All this took place with the full knowledge of, and indeed at the instigation of, Western intelligence services.

The built-up of the KLA, its funding, equipment, intelligence and training were all instigated, funded and facilitated by the West and the same applies to the KLA’s terror campaign: in fact, Chossudovsky states that

[t]he KLA killings [of civilians] were ordered by NATO. Blamed on Serbian police and armed forces, th[ey] were used as a pretext and justification to wage a ‘humanitarian war’ on Yugoslavia. The ties of the KLA to organized crime were actively fostered by the US and NATO. The result was the formation of what is best described as a ‘mafia state’. (p. 45)

In the aftermath of the NATO air war, the Western occupation powers aided and abetted the KLA’s subsequent reign of terror, protecting KLA commanders responsible for crimes committed against the Serbian, Roma, Gorani and Turkish minorities, under the pretext of suspected collaboration with the Yugoslav authorities but often just as a simple settling of personal scores. Those Western-created organizations that were specifically supposed to uphold law and order, the peace-keeping ‘Kosovo Force’ (KFOR) and the ‘International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia’ (ICTY) above all, consistently turned a blind eye to the systematic campaign of confiscation, looting, arson, abduction, rape and murder by the KLA, with the Western MSM either ignoring or white-washing these atrocities as ‘regrettable but justifiable acts of vengeance’. Thus, through their direct involvement in NATO’s military action (in a particularly cowardly form, viz. a push-button air war), their indirect involvement in the KLA’s terror campaign and their deliberate inaction in the face of the KLA’s subsequent lawlessness,

Western governments… bear a heavy burden of responsibility in the deaths of civilians, the impoverishment of both the ethnic Albanian and Serbian populations and the plight of those who were brutally uprooted from towns and villages in Kosovo as a result of the bombings. (p. 56)

Thus, the geopolitical void in which the ‘Kosovo’ CPS took shape was created by the West: Chossudovsky’s analyses leave no room for ‘plausible deniability’ cover stories.

After the Kosovo War and the KLA take-over, Chossudovsky describes how Kosovo became a true ‘narco-democracy under NATO protection’ (Chossudovsky, 79):

[n]arcodollars from the multibillion dollar Balkans drug trade [were] recycled towards servicing the external debt as well as ‘financing’ the costs of ‘reconstruction’. The lucrative flow of narcodollars thus ensures that foreign investors involved in the ‘reconstruction’ programme will be able to reap substantial returns. In turn, the existence of a Kosovar ‘narco-state’ ensures the orderly reimbursement of international donors and creditors, [who] are prepared to turn a blind eye [because t]hey have a tacit vested interest in installing [and maintaining] a government which facilitates the laundering of drug money. (p. 99)

Following Chossudovsky’s analysis, Kosovo truly represents a GPS utopia: there, the West has truly created an ‘anti-state’:

While calling for democracy and ‘good governance’ in the Balkans, the US and its allies have installed in Kosovo a paramilitary government with links to organized crime. The… outcome [has been] the outright ‘criminalization’ of civilian state institutions and the establishment of what can be best described as a ‘mafia state’. The complicity of NATO and the alliance governments, namely their relentless support of the KLA, points to the de facto ‘criminalisation’ of KFOR and of the UN peacekeeping apparatus in Kosovo. The donor agencies and governments providing financial support to the KLA, e.g. the funds approved by the US Congress in violation of several UN Security Council resolutions, are in this regard also ‘accessories’ to the de facto criminalisation of state institutions. (p. 96)

…Under NATO occupation, the rule of law has visibly been turned upside down. Criminals and terrorists [have] become law enforcement officers. (p. 87)

With the KLA pirate regime in place, the prostitution of Kosovo began. Its resources, its industry and its infrastructure were ‘pimped out’ – sold to the lowest foreign bidder. Its Serbian, Roma and Gorani minority communities were ‘shunned’ — demoted to dispossession, displacement and discrimination. Its old and sick, its village folk and its working people were left ‘to fend for themselves’ — exposed to the elements (container ‘housing’, electricity ‘black-outs’), to disease (depleted uranium poisoning, land-mine injury) and to grinding poverty (record unemployment, sky-rocketing prices). Most of the middle-aged population, previously raised, educated and shielded by Yugoslavia’s semi-socialist system, was suddenly thrown into a free-for-all cauldron of b/gangster-style capitalism, mostly suffering utter ruination. Youngsters, to the extent that they did not join, or liaise with, the gangsters and mobsters ruling the streets and the ‘state’, were left waiting on the gangster, doing expat laundry or otherwise ‘servicing’ the NATO-UN-NGO (more specifically: KFOR-UNMIK-OSCE) crowd. To this crowd, the lands, riches and people of Kosovo are nothing but ‘spoils of war’. This is what Kosovo, the ancient cradle of the Serbian state and a model of peaceful multi-ethnic coexistence in the Yugoslav state, was reduced to under Western occupation – a Gangster Prostitute State:

How is the faithful city become a harlot! It was full of judgment, righteousness lodged in it, but now murderers. Thy silver is become dross, thy wine mixed with water. Thy princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves: every one loveth gifts, and followeth after rewards. They judge not the fatherless, neither doth the cause of the widow come unto them. Therefore saith the Lord, the Lord of Hosts, the Mighty One of Israel: Ah, I will ease me of mine adversaries, and avenge me of mine enemies — Isaiah 1:21-4

Echoes and Omens

Undoubtedly, the most powerful message of Chossudovsky’s book is the importance of pattern recognition: readers are bound to be struck by its pin-point accuracy in recognizing certain strategic warfare patterns that recur throughout the West’s campaign against Yugoslavia. The historical patterns discerned by Chossudovsky in the Atlanticist take-down of Yugoslavia in the ‘90s may be said to constitute direct precursors to the fully-integrated strategy of fully-fledged multi-dimensional warfare waged by the Atlanticist West against the Eurasianist East in the ‘20s.ii It takes but a small step to project Chossudovsky’s pattern recognition forward, to the West’s current multi-dimensional ‘Ukraine’ campaign against Russia. As another reviewer of Chossudovsky’s book succinctly put it:

time has confirmed [Chossudovsky’s] fear of the [Western] intervention [in Yugoslavia] being used to set a pattern, establish a principle to be used later on whenever convenient for the US. There have, in fact, ensued preventive and even preemptive wars, so-called ‘humanitarian bombings’ or colored revolutions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, Venezuela, Belarus. …[Chossudovsky] examines the consequences of such approach, and matters that the protagonists do not wish to discuss at all. Underlying the grand ideals of defending the human rights and freedoms of endangered people, are cruel operations which use depleted uranium-filled missiles, ecocides, and pacts with drug cartels or colorful radicals and fundamentalists. …[Chossudovsky’s] monograph, therefore, is more than a testimony in the search of truth, it is also a sort of warning. When the facts are ignored, there remains propaganda whose purpose is to conceal the truth, all that in order to enable various interest groups, be those official or behind the scenes, state, para-state or non-governmental ones, to achieve their goals even if they had, in the process, to violate international law, commit ecocides and war crimes, or cooperate with mobsters and terrorists. (Dushan Prorokovicj apud Chossudovsky, p. 162-3)

Following up on this important point of the West’s ‘information warfare’ – in other words: its war on the truth – it can be argued that the greatest value of Chossudovsky’s book is found in its break-out from the Western MSM ‘narrative bubble’. In the final analysis, the statement of truth about the Western campaign against Yugoslavia will be quite an important nail into the coffin of the Western Empire of Lies: the Yugoslav campaign was an important stepping-stone in the Western MSM’s achievement of ‘disinformation supremacy’ – it was its first systematic application of ‘inverse journalism’. For the first time, Western MSM’s blanket censorship of truthful reporting was systematically combined with deliberate and sustained disinformation: for over a decade, it managed to maintain a constant ‘firehose of falsehood’ on the topic of Yugoslavia, imposing a narrative of falsehood befitting the Western elite’s shift into fully-fledged ‘post-truth politics’.

One of the mechanisms by which the poison of the fork-tongued Western Lügenpresse worked its way into the Western collective psyche was the emotive and seductive use of ‘soothing’ and ‘therapeutic’ language, carefully calibrated to appeal to its key audience: the effeminate and reality-averse Western consumer masses. This sickening jargon, mixing ‘motivational’ management talk with ‘femo-feely’ psycho-babble, was designed to systematically prevent critical thoughts, sabotage realpolitik assessments and deceive gullible (‘midwit’, Gutmensch) tv-audiences. In a mind-bending exercise of truly Orwellian proportions, ‘peace-keeping’ came to mean warfare, ‘good governance’ came to mean mafia rule, ‘confidence building’ came to mean word-breaking and ‘inter-ethnic reconciliation’ came to mean legal discrimination. The Western MSM, supported by well-paid academics and purged of honest journalists, deliberately engineered a ‘consensus’ that was so far removed from the truth that it may perhaps best be described as a ‘reality distortion field’.

This war [wa]s also a war against the truth. …NATO has reinforced its clutch over the mass media. [Alongside] a stylized ‘wag the dog’ media masquerade, a full-fledged ‘cover-up operation’ has been set in motion with a view to thwarting public debate on the war. …[A]nti-war commentators have been carefully removed from mainstream public affairs programmes, TV content is closely scrutinised… [and] journalists are under tight supervision.…Public ‘disapproval’ of NATO bombings is immediately dismissed as ‘Serb propaganda’. Those who speak out against NATO are branded as ‘apologists of Milosevic’. …The hidden agenda is to ‘silence the silent majority’. The Western media heeding to the alliance’s demands has blatantly misled public opinion. (p. 61-3)

By and large, the Western MSM’s ‘information war’ during the Yugoslav campaign achieved its purpose. Undoubtedly, its most drastic cognitive effect was the utter erasure of the last remnants of geopolitical realism in the Western public sphere.

Drowned in the barrage of media images and self-serving analyses, the broader strategic interests and economic causes of the war go unmentioned. The [West’s strategic goals] largely consisted in ‘installing a Western-style regime in Yugoslavia and reducing the geographic areas, power and influence of Serbia to a minimum’. In this context, the installation of American power in southern Europe and the Mediterranean also constitutes a step towards the extension of Washington’s geopolitical sphere of influence beyond the Balkans into the area of the Caspian Sea, Central Asia and West Asia. In this regard, NATO’s military intervention in Yugoslavia, in violation of international law, also sets a dangerous precedent. To achieve its strategic objectives, national economies are destabilized, regional conflicts are financed through the provision of covert support to armed insurgencies… The conflict in Yugoslavia creates conditions which provide legitimacy to future interventions of the alliance into the internal affairs of sovereign nations. (p. 59)

At the time that this review is written, Chossudovsky’s warning, that the West’s successful demolition of Yugoslavia would create a dangerous precedent in international relations, has been proven most accurate. The West’s ‘getting away’ with the demolition of Yugoslavia has merely whetted its appetite: it has since set its sights on much larger quarry. In fact, at the time of writing, the West’s multi-dimensional warfare arsenal is fully engaged in an all-out assault on the ultimate geopolitical prize: Russia. In hindsight, the Western campaign to divide and colonize the ex-Yugoslavia in the ‘90s was just a small-scale test run for the division and colonization of the ex-Soviet Union in the ‘20s. Much is at stake now: now in ex-Soviet space, as then in the ex-Yugoslav space,

[i]n the name of global capital, borders [are being] redrawn, legal codes rewritten, industries destroyed, financial and banking systems [are being] dismantled, social programs eliminated. …At stake… are the lives of millions of people. [Globalist] macroeconomic reform combined with military conquest… [is] destroy[ing] livelihoods and [is making] a joke of the right to work. It put[s] basic needs such as food and shelter beyond the reach of many. It [is] degrading culture and national identity. (p. 44)

Now, all the tools and techniques applied in the ex-Yugoslav space of the ‘90s are applied to the ex-Soviet space of the ‘20s, of course with slightly updated technology and on a hugely amplified scale. The same proxy strategy, now with Ukrainian instead of the Kosovar freedom fighter cannon fodder and ‘Azov’ instead of ‘mujahideen’ foreign volunteers. The same undeclared ground war, with the same ‘plausible deniability’ employment of the same ‘advisors’, ‘trainers’ and ‘special forces’. The same atrocity propaganda, now with a ‘Bucha Massacre’ instead of a ‘Ratchak Massacre’. The same ‘international outrage’, now with (cheaper) blue-yellow social media posts instead of Bosnia fundraising dinners. The same ‘international justice’ agenda, now indicting the Russian president instead of the Yugoslav president. The same nauseating self-righteousness, now starring ‘Biden’ and Johnson instead of Clinton and Blair.

But there is a difference: the sheer staleness of the West’s utterly worn-out slogans and the obvious futility of the West’s utterly predictable motions indicate that, after a long string of victories from Yugoslavia to Libya, the West has finally — and fatally — overreached itself. All indications are that it has fallen into the same age-old trap of triumphalist hubris and imperial overreach that finally brought down such once-invincible empires as Napoleon’s and Hitler’s. The West’s take-down of Yugoslav was possible in the limited regional setting of the Balkans, pitting the then substantial industrial and military resources of the combined West against a vastly outmatched enemy that lacked strategic depth and major power allies. None of these conditions apply now. Against Russia, the West operates in unlimited space on a global stage, possessing the world’s ultimate strategic depth in the Heartland of the World Island, and it is backed up by an ever-lengthening list of allies, including China, the world’s greatest industrial power. The West, on the other hand, has ‘outsourced’ its industry, ‘wokefied’ its military and ‘diversified’ its populace. The latter factor, ‘diluting’ the nations of the First World by decades of ‘immigration’ from the Third World, has fatally compromised the internal cohesion and core identity of the West: it is now but a shadow of its former self. This ex-West is rapidly decomposing in plain sight, transforming into a scary-looking but substance-less vampire, unable to substantially handle anything approaching a substantial ‘reality check’. Those that have to fight the ‘zombified’ ex-West would do well to remember that the ex-West has already largely abandoned actual reality: its people have largely retreated into virtual reality. The ex-West now bears all the classic hallmarks of the vampire, leading a ghostly existence of ‘virtualized’ experience, shunning the day-light of truth, leaching off the lifeblood of others and preying on the naive and vulnerable. That means, first of all, that the ex-West needs to be exorcized as much as it needs to be fought. For this to be accomplished, the ex-West’s now in-human nature and its now anti-human trajectory need to be properly understood. It needs to be understood that to collectively and consistently indulge in trans-human experiments — infanticidal ‘birth control’, black magic ‘transgenderism’, mRNA ‘gene-therapy’, AI technology ‘second life’ — is to abandon human rationality. It needs to be understood that to collectively and consistently indulge in sub-human experiences – eco-system destroying ‘conspicuous consumption’ gluttony, family-destroying ‘sexual revolution’ lust, society-destroying ‘Wolf of Wallstreet’ greed, world-destroying ‘rules-based order’ pride — is to abandon the human heart. Such things trigger a permanent severance from humanity.

After the ex-West severed itself from the Creator, it was just a matter of time before it severed itself from creation, first from the natural world and then from the human world — and, ultimately, from reality itself. Caught in a downward spiral of evil and madness, the West has now conclusively severed itself from the rest. De facto, the West is now at war with the rest. The rest must allow this harsh reality to sink in: reality must be accepted before it can be handled. The rest must choose — whether or not to follow the West on its chosen path. The echoes of the past and the omens of the present point to the end of that path — the path of

Severance:
the birds of leaving call to us
yet here we stand
endowed with the fear of flight
overland
the winds of change consume the land
while we remain
in the shadow of summers now past
indifference
the plague that moves throughout this land
omen signs
in the shapes of things to come
— Dead Can Dance, ‘Severance’