NATO began dropping bombs on Serbian forces in Kosovo on March 24, 1999:
America and NATO went to war in Kosovo for humanitarian reasons. There was no vital national interest at stake. The Serbs, already responsible for the lion’s share of the atrocities during the Bosnian war, were to be punished and deterred from further mass killings in their restive, majority-Albanian province of Kosovo. Proponents of intervention compared ethnic cleansing in Kosovo to the Holocaust, sometimes inflating the death counts of Serbian atrocities by a factor of 10. That the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army was considered “without any questions, a terrorist group” by President Bill Clinton’s own special envoy to the Balkans was hand-waved away.
Kosovo gave birth to the idea of the responsibility to protect—“R2P” in international relations shorthand. R2P cast aside the Westphalian state system by declaring that when a government proved unwilling or unable to protect its people from crimes against humanity, it was the duty of other nations to intervene. British Prime Minister Tony Blair declared that Kosovo was “a battle between good and evil; between civilization and barbarity.” Established during America’s decade of unipolarity and hyperpower status, R2P thus implicitly called on America to be a force of intervention for global good.
Proponents of this doctrine unabashedly cast aside state sovereignty for the sake of humanitarianism. As would later come in Iraq, with no United Nations Security Council mandate, the war’s backers proclaimed that it had “legitimacy if not legality,” an argument that would be repeated a few years later in Iraq. R2P was celebrated by internationalists and interventionist human rights activists. After sitting on its hands for too long in Bosnia, America was now acting swiftly to prevent a potential genocide in Europe. At home as abroad, that “moral arc of the universe” was bending toward justice.
[...]
R2P proponents helped carry water for America’s disastrous wars in Iraq and Libya. R2P was not explicitly used by the Bush administration when it made the case for invading Iraq, but humanitarianism and Saddam Hussein’s undeniable brutality were used as rhetorical cudgels against those who dissented from this war of choice. In Libya, R2P was the casus belli. Intervention was explicitly and indeed solely justified by the responsibility to protect Libyan civilians in Benghazi from the coming wrath of dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Of course, the goal posts were quickly moved, as NATO airpower helped the rebels to win the civil war and Gaddafi was murdered in the street. Libya sank into further strife, with militias battling in the cities, foreign militants flooding in, and even slave markets appearing.
In Syria, humanitarian concerns only led the United States to arm jihadis and conduct a few feckless cruise missile strikes, rather than launch a full-scale invasion of yet another Arab country. One of the primary architects and apostles of R2P, then-UN ambassador Samantha Power, was left to sputter and rage about the atrocities of one side in the civil war.
The Kosovo campaign exposed the hollow force that NATO had become less than a decade after the end of the Cold War. All Western nations rightly took a peace dividend after the Soviet Union collapsed and the fearsome Red Army became the farcical Russian Army that (initially) couldn’t even subdue tiny Chechnya. The Europeans cut far more deeply than the United States, however. The vaunted Royal Air Force nearly ran out of bombs and spare parts in Kosovo. U.S. aircraft ended up conducting about two thirds of all sorties during the 78-day war and carried far more of the load in the early days of the campaign. Eighty-three percent of all munitions dropped were American.
American generals were unpleasantly surprised by the state of NATO air assets. The European NATO states were most lacking in the most critical capabilities: ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) and strike. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld initially rejected European assistance in the wake of the September 11 attacks, so struck was he by European military impotence in Kosovo two years prior.
The limits of NATO’s smart bombs and precision strike capabilities also became clear in Kosovo. Despite overwhelming technological superiority, including the first combat use of the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber and the now standard GPS-guided Joint Direct Attack Munition, coalition attrition of Serbian forces turned out to have been more limited than early reports indicated. Poor weather, Serb cunning, and legacy air defense capabilities combined to limit the air campaign’s effect on Serbian materiel. The Serbs built dummy tanks with wood, plastic sheeting, and camouflage netting; metal plates and even hot water were used to spoof NATO thermal sensors. It took NATO the first 12 days to conduct the same number of strike sorties that the U.S.-led coalition had achieved during the first 12 hours of Operation Desert Storm. When Serbian troops withdrew from Kosovo at the end of the campaign, they left in good order, having suffered perhaps 20 percent of the casualties the coalition had originally claimed to have inflicted.
NATO’s material inadequacies were matched by a lack of will. European member states demurred from an aggressive U.S. plan to bomb Belgrade from the outset, likely prolonging the air war. When they did sign on to a broader air campaign, European leaders insisted on micromanaging the target list, in the manner of President Johnson in Vietnam 30 years before. This centralization, risk aversion, and fixation on preventing civilian casualties would become familiar to those who served with NATO troops in Afghanistan a few years later.
Americans were right behind Europeans in risk aversion, however. Much of the indecisiveness of the air campaign was due to keeping NATO planes at high altitude to avoid the remaining Serbian air defense assets. Decoy tanks and dummy artillery pits were much tougher to spot at 15,000 feet than at 500. No pilots in body bags trumped operational effectiveness and decisive victory.
The biggest legacy of the Kosovo war came in its immediate aftermath. Russia had tried to position itself between its Western economic benefactors and its traditional Serbian ally. Russian mediation offers were rejected by the U.S., and air strikes on Belgrade inflamed Russian public opinion. Even Boris Yeltsin, who owed his reelection in 1996 to U.S. intervention (the original, reverse Russiagate), could not stand for this level of shame.
When Serbia capitulated, Russian troops rushed into Kosovo from neighboring Bosnia to seize the airport in the capital, Pristina. Elite Norwegian and British troops met the Russians at the airfield, but General Clark insisted on trying to block the runway to stymie Russian attempts to reinforce their 250-man company at Pristina. His more level-headed British subordinate, General Mike Jackson, refused to carry out Clark’s orders and reportedly told the hyper-ambitious Arkansan, “I’m not going to start the Third World War for you.” Cooler heads prevailed, no shots were fired, and Clark left his post early, headed for eventual irrelevance in the 2004 Democratic presidential primary. But the ailing and humiliated Yeltsin resigned six months later, giving the Russian presidency to Vladimir Putin.
The war had left Kosovo as an autonomous region of Yugoslavia and then Serbia, policed by NATO’s Kosovo Force (KFOR). But Serbia’s continuing authority over Kosovo was still internationally recognized. The Kosovars, frustrated with the pace of final status negotiations, unilaterally declared independence on February 17, 2008. The international community was and is divided on recognizing Kosovo’s sovereignty, but Russia’s reaction was unequivocal. Vladimir Putin described the recognition of Kosovo’s independence by the U.S. and many European nations as “a terrible precedent, which will de facto blow apart the whole system of international relations, developed not over decades, but over centuries.” He warned the West: “they have not thought through the results of what they are doing. At the end of the day it is a two-ended stick and the second end will come back and hit them in the face.”
Putin explicitly invoked Kosovo after his incursion into Georgia in 2008 and his annexation of Crimea in 2014. Speaking to the Russian State Duma on March 18, 2014, Putin quoted America’s April 2009 Written Statement to the UN International Court in support of Kosovo’s independence, and asked what made Kosovo a special case. He told the Duma’s deputies, “This is not even double standards; this is amazing, primitive, blunt cynicism. One should not try so crudely to make everything suit their interests, calling the same thing white today and black tomorrow.” Turnabout is fair play. America’s ill-considered endorsement of Kosovo’s independence not only deepened tensions with Russia, it quickly provided justification for Russian land grabs and wars on both sides of the Black Sea.
Regardless of America’s laudable intentions and aims, the Kosovo war proved a handmaiden of two decades of disastrous interventions abroad. American hyperpower hubris, set free in a tiny corner of the Balkans, would unleash far more disastrous interventions in far more important regions of the world. Then-secretary of state James Baker had said of Yugoslavia in 1991, “We don’t have a dog in that fight.” Since Kosovo, America has found fights wherever it looked for them.
Kosovo was a disaster, and one that came mostly because Clinton needed a distraction from his domestic issues.
Did not help that the State Department was utterly clueless about the entirety of the Balkans, either. The guy they sent out to us in the early 90′s for involvement in corps-level exercises did not impress me one little bit–He was supposedly some kind of “area officer” for the State Department, with over a decade in-country “experience” in Yugoslavia. He did not understand one little bit of the ethnic animosity over there, or where it came from. I had to explain to this idiot why the Serbs hated the Muslims, and all the rest. Somehow, he’d missed the entire backstory for Turkish conquest and everything else that attended to that, and had never once asked any questions about things I literally learned at the knees of my stepdad and his expat friends. Sad commentary when I’m the only guy in the room, who’s just there to make sure all the computers are working and to keep the coffee maker going during the CPX, and I had a better working knowledge of the country they were training for than many of the friggin’ “area experts” they brought in.
In my personal experience, the majority of the State Department personnel I’ve dealt with were complete and utter wastes of oxygen. Intellectually, they have credentials, but zero actual knowledge or desire to learn about other countries. They know what they were indoctrinated with in college, and that’s it. Anything past that point? Forget it. Some of those people I actually overheard boasting that they hadn’t read a book since grad school…
This is one of the things that makes me sad.
I don’t have ANY academic qualifications, just a layman’s interest in history, and the absolute ignorance at the highest levels blows my mind!
I keep thinking “Surely, they have advisors that know this stuff and tell them..”, and I am wrong!
I look at the early days of the Iraq invasion and and Cheney’s R.M.A., and I think, “They can’t be that ignorant”, yet they are! We had a meticulous plan for administering occupied Germany, surely they could be dusted off and applied.
I watched in horror, as Afghanistan devolved into the same mess as every other COIN operation. Spending money on P.R.T.s etc BEFORE we had established real and enduring local security. Going out to “do good”, building schools and holding clinics, and them going back behind the wire, and surrendering the local terrain every night! Like Malaya (one example of doing it right!), Vietnam, Algeria, Rhodesia, etc. had never happened. There are libraries full of books on what to do and what not to do, and we made the same old mistakes all over again!
It wasn’t as bad in the early 2000s as now- military and civilian COIN advocates could still cite such past experiences in professional and even public settings, although perhaps with obligatory caveats and with some overwrought agenda in some cases [Max Boot].
Didn’t actually much practise the lessons, but could talk and write about them.
Imagine starting out now. Whole swaths of the political and civilian audience would be horrified at the suggestion there is anything comparable in those experiences. Maybe one could get away with Vietnam and Malaya at the margins. But citing Rhodesia and Algeria… Yikes.
Remember Rick Rescorla? Head of security for one of the financial companies, maybe even Cantor Fitzgerald, and a fallen hero of 9/11. A Cornishman, I hope I remember correctly. Articles praising him and telling his life story in places like, pretty sure I remember, The New Yorker, described his military service in Rhodesia without using that to blot his copybook, even without comment beyond the narrative. Now, I think it would be given a huge disclaimer.
There was actually a very well thought-out plan for the post-invasion Iraq campaign. Problem with it was, it was predicated on the Iraqis being rational actors–Which they were not. I know, because I was there.
The basic plan was pretty much the same as for Germany. Invade, break the regime, hand off to civil authorities. Trouble was, there were no civil authorities. City water plant in Tikrit, for example? Thing hadn’t been maintained since the days of the British occupation. Literally. None of the charcoal or sand filters had been replenished since sometime in the late 1960s. There were no civil authorities to hand off to, because everything flowed from Baghdad, and when the authority taps got turned off, everyone out in the hinterlands turned feral.
The Army planned for a Germany, or even, God forbid, an Italy. They got a Somalia. It was that bad–Saddam had killed every intermediate layer of government. There were no local authorities to hand off to, and if someone stepped up and took responsibility, the “insurgents”, who were actually former regime thugs, would kill them. It was like trying to assert authority in an area where the gangs had taken over, and civil commons had ceased to exist.
There was a plan. The problem was, Iraq defied planning. We knew there would be a certain level of dysfunction, but nobody realized how bad it was going to be. Just about everything had to be rebuilt, and once you did that, then handed it over…? Prepare for it to be looted, and the requirement to do it all over again within six months.
I gotta be honest with you; in my opinion, there was nothing you could have planned for or done to prevent all that “Iraq” from happening. Iraqis are gonna Iraqi, and that’s the end of it all. After Saddam, what we were doing wasn’t an invasion, it was an intervention in a domestic violence case where the victim spouse was deep into full-bore Stockholm Syndrome, and utterly irrational.
Goes to show that what things look like from the outside aren’t necessarily what it actually is.
That said, it re-enforces something I have come to believe about interventions. We have been in Haiti how many times now? Afghanistan has been going on for how long now?
Seems to me, there are three practical options.
1. Like the Emperor of the Known Universe Shaddam IV, or Col. Kurtz, or the Romans, destroy and entirely subjugate.
2. Punitive expedition. “Bash and Bolt”. Hammer the miscreants and give them a “don’t make me come back there” message, and leave.
or,
3. Proper occupation and colonization, stay for 50-100 years and build everything from scratch and remake it in our image.
We are not ruthless enough anymore for number one (and rightly so!), and we are too fickle for number 3, and we don’t ever do number 2, instead we do a half arsed job of number 3.
Y’all don’t want my take on what we should have done, after 9/11. You really, really don’t.
I have a concept I call “The temptation towards simplistic solutions”, which I have the um-nerving idea that it likely works.
“Going Roman”.
The Romans accepted that on the frontier, from time to time, rebellion would inevitably occur, a part of a Legion, or a whole Legion would be lost, and a punitive mission would be necessary. So, you did it. You came, you saw, you wiped out as many villages as you needed, and things were quiet for a few generations, but inevitably, you needed to do it again.
Cost of doing business, as it were.
Occasionally, they went further. People say violence doesn’t solve anything. Well, ask the Romans if they still have a Carthage problem.
We don’t have the attitude (at the moment), to do things this way. I think that if push came to shove, we might be quite surprised what happens, and a lot of people won’t like it.
Mark Steyn always talks about the impending Islamification of Europe. I am not particularly worried about that, I expect the opposite. As the blogger Tamara Keel put is “Europeans have the fastest zero to jackboots time”.
I can easily see a future that looks like the movie Children of Men, minus the Sci-fi sterility.
Kosovo. Yeah. It was the first push which eventually landed me in nationalist camp. I was anything but nationalist before.
There’s much to agree with in this analysis. Good intentions gone awry. Kosovo was a revealing cluster-f**k, where we won very, very, ugly despite holding nearly all the cards. It was like winning 4-3 over Lichtenstein in extra time.
From an insiders POV, it was obvious that the political and military imperatives were not aligned, and all was not well in the capabilities of NATO’s shiny war machine. I recall seeing the classified BDA, and the only reason I wasn’t shocked is because I had the highest level of cynicism in the office. Most of my colleagues at the time didn’t want to believe it. But that is why they failed.
If I disagree here, it is in degree rather than manner. In a few places this piece over-claims.
1) Putin may (plausibly) have been aggressive to minor nations on his periphery anyway. He’s violated many other tenets of international law without the precedent of Kosovo. I regard the Balkans intervention link to a nationalistic, hostile, Russia as contributory but unclear how important.
2) The humanitarian intervention argument is a real one. I don’t weight it highly, but failures in Libya, Afghan and Iraq has to be set against (mostly) success in the Balkans and Sierra Leone, Côte d’Ivoire, etc. Those of us on the non-interventionist side have to square our shoulders sometimes and say honestly “these people will probably die from violence, we might be able to save them, but we deem the cost too high or likelihood of success too low”. We can’t pretend it doesn’t have some moral traction.
3) The Iraq war had wider, geo-strategic rationale about disrupting Arab state authoritarianism and resultant negative externalities. I always took the humanitarian argument a distant second here.
Over the last 27 years, since the fall of the USSR, the US has run amok, bouncing from one unjustifiable, unwinnable, and unendable war after another. We still have some special forces troops operating in Somalia going on 27 years.
There is evidently a psychosis gripping our Ruling Class, and the only possible end to it is the destruction of the US as a major world power. The actual breakup of the US is a distinct possibility.
It is notable that Trump, who promised to end all these pointless, insane wars has submitted completely to the Deep State/Cabal Ruling Class. Pompeo and Bolton now control our foreign and military policies, and Trump, like the Queen, merely reads to position papers handed to him.
As to Putin, he is a Russian nationalist. Almost all his interventions have supported ethnic Russians in neighboring countries. His famous quote about the fall of the USSR is always truncated. He more or less said that the fall was a tragedy because it resulted in ethnic Russians being stranded in foreign countries and separated from other Russians.
He, along with Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Medvedev, also said that Russia should be a full member of both NATO and the EU, “a united Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok,” Putin’s words. What kind of world would we have today if both Bushes and Clinton has accepted that proposal?
I was a participant in the Kosovo war and occupation. Everything you said about it was true. In the long run, we were on the wrong side of that conflict. Our intervention emboldened the Jihadis and incensed the Russians. Not to mention giving some support to the never-sufficiently-to-be-damned ICC at The Hague.
Coupla thoughts on “insurgency”, “counter-insurgency”, and the attendant fuzzy thought on the issues surrounding them.
First off, the problems of every so-called “insurgency” are different. None of them are the same, and “lessons” and “techniques” that work in one will not necessarily work in another.
Che Guevara found out the hard way that what worked for him in Cuba did not work very well at all in Bolivia. Same-same, the US discovered in Vietnam that the techniques taught to them by the British didn’t work out so well in that conflict.
You want a successful campaign of insurgency or counter-insurgency, you first need to ensure that there is a “there” there. Che was able to do his thing in Cuba because the matrix he was working in was conducive to that, and in large part, because he and Fidel were able to cozen the American public into supporting their fasco-communist asses. Without US support, Cuba would have likely been Bolivia for both of them, early on–But, the US public bought into the whole “Fidel-as-George Washington” shtick, and here we are. Likewise, Malaya worked because the mostly ethnic Chinese communist insurgents were operating in a milieu of revolutionary fantasy, and the underlying support (and, external support…) was not there. In Vietnam, the US had the exact opposite situation. Even so, you could say that the US won, because the South Vietnamese did not fall to an insurgency, it was a purely conventional armored invasion that had more Soviet armor in it than the Germans took into the opening of Barbarossa.
So, a lot of the “lessons” out there are pretty much bullshit. You hear these people argue “Malaya”, and you can pretty much ignore anything they have to say, when you try to apply “Malaya” to an “Afghanistan”. Conditions are too different, and the underlying human material is what matters. In Malaya, most of the populace you were having to worry about were ethnic Chinese, fairly civilized people. Afghanistan? LOL… Afghanis will give Somalis a run for their money, winning the crown as “Most Feral Humans” on the planet. What worked in Malaya ain’t going to work in Afghanistan, in other than the most general terms. Which are “Apply troops liberally; do what is necessary…”. In Afghanistan, that probably means “Kill everyone, and start over…”. You are not going to change the essential nature of the body politic in that country, except over generations and with great brutality. The more brutality you apply, the quicker it will happen, but knowing my Afghanis, I think you’d have to pretty much kill the majority of them off. I await the results of China taking that country over with great schadenfruede, because it’s gonna be ugly for them and the Afghans. China will probably apply the lessons of the Uighurs, and all hell will break loose. The results will be a vast sucking wound, and will likely persuade the Chinese that their Imperial expansion really ought to come to a halt before they get into even more trouble. And, I suspect that moment will come about the time their demographic time bomb goes off, so it’ll be entertaining to watch during my dotage. Idiots, the lot of them… Afghans and Chinese. Also, anyone trying to impose civilization on Afghanistan, to include Afghanis… That place has been a suppurating chest wound for thousands of years, and I don’t see that changing any time soon. Not until the current lot of Afghans and their culture are gone, gone, gone.
Vis-a-vis Kosovo, the Serbs, and Russia…? Here’s a thing a Serbian friend once told me: “…the problem with the Balkans is that we produce far more history than we can consume, locally…”. That, in a nutshell, is the issue. Nobody in that part of the world can forgive or forget; every move you make is made on the blood and bones of people long dead, who got screwed by their neighbors–So, the solution today is to do unto that neighbor before you get done unto yourself.
The US naivety in dealing with that region started back in the 70s, when American diplomats pressured the government of Tito not to utterly crush Izitbegovic, who’d been out making noise about a great revival of that old-time Islam for Moslem Bosniaks. Seemed harmless to those idiot American diplomats–After all, religion was a really useful tool with which to beat back those godless communists, right…?
Problem was, when idiot Izitbegovic spoke, he was saying things that triggered memories in both the Muslim Bosniaks, and the Serbs. Time was, those people were ethnically the same people, but the difference was that the Bosniak Muslims were the turncoat quisling city-dwellers who turned out for the Turks, and administered their state functions in the region, keeping a thumb down on all those country bumpkin Serbs who clung to their guns and religion. In so doing, they were bankers, tax agents, and administered the vast Turkish slave trade in sexy young Balkan girls and boys–The majority of whom were Christian, and Serb.
So, Izitbegovic saying to Bosniak Muslims “Hey, let’s bring back the good old days…” meant to the Serbs “Hey, let’s bring back the days when we were selling little Serbian girls to the Turks for harem duty…”.
That’s the root of the problem, right there: Too much history. And, in that region? You’d better pay attention to what your neighbor is listening to, because sure as hell, it’s going to affect you. If you stop and analyze the incessant feuding that goes on, even that begins to make sense after awhile–If you don’t take revenge, two things happen: You lose allies, and you’re perceived as weak. So, if Great Grand-Uncle Ivan got killed back around 1880 by Alia Mustafa in a “discussion” over a goat, well… You need to ensure that you’re seen to kill Alia’s great-grandson when the opportunity arises, because if you don’t…?
The whole thing makes Shakespearian politics look like a game for pussies. The Balkans are essentially an area of the world that ought to be walled off, and treated as an open-air insane asylum. It’s nobodies fault, but that’s just a fact: Balkan logic applies only there, and if you entangle yourself in it, as an outsider? All you’re going to do is create problems. Let the Balkans Balkan, I say–They’ll work it out. It will look like internecine slaughter and utter horror, but the odds are, today’s victims are paying bills for checks their ancestors wrote. Ain’t nobody operating with clean hands in that region.
Same-same with the Russians. Here’s a thought, Mr. Putin: Maybe those ethnic Russians don’t actually belong in Ukraine? After all, they were settled there by force during the Imperial era, and during the Communist nightmare; maybe they ought to go home, and leave Ukraine for Ukrainians? Ya think the Holodomor is going to be forgotten or forgiven any time soon? Likewise, the rest of Russia Irredenta: Most places that weren’t ethnic Russian during the pre-Imperial era really don’t have cause to love Russians; smart money is, get them the hell out and call it good. Regaining that territory, which was never really Russian in the first damn place…? It ain’t going to happen, not with Russia’s drastically reduced place in the world, which stems entirely from Russian excess in the first place. Russia built a big empire by way of brute force and ferocity, both things that tend to wane as the people to conduct such things wear out and run down. Few of Russia’s neighbors who were forced under the yoke with Russia really wanted to be there, and that fact is playing out. Referring to Russia as the penitentiary of nations isn’t far off, and Russia as jailer is rapidly running out of energy and ability to guard the gates. Give it up, or your grandchildren are going to be lucky to have control over what amounts to a Grand Duchy of Moscow…
Not to take a definitely pro-Russian position on Ukraine, because:
a) I recognize Russia as an opponent and strategic challenge, if not with the hysteria that seems to dominate the minds of people who were on the wrong side of the Cold War when it really mattered
b) I was long quite sympathetic to Ukrainian nationalism for very Canadian reasons [we have very many Ukrainians]
c) I was one of the young hothead types as a student who wanted Russia humiliated after 1989 and agreed with calling Bush senior’s address the Chicken Kiev speech, and I don’t want to wholly chicken out and decline I ever was like that
but
On the pro-Ukrainian side, there is a great truth. When Kievan Rus was destroyed by the Mongols, two areas of Rus culture survived- the principality of Vladimir-Suzdal in the north, and the principalities [later one] of Halych and Volhynia in the west. The former ended up seated at Moscow and is the root of Great Russian identity. The letter, independent for a time, then under Lithuania and Poland, is the root of the Ruthenian [later Ukrainian] identity. As such the Ukrainians truly are as much heirs of the Rus tradition as Moscow. At least. If you’re a Moscow hack, you can say that means they should all be in Russia. If you’re pro Ukrainian, that means you can say with proper conviction that Ukraine has as deep a past and as much right to nationhood and the Rus legacy.
OTOH, none of the lands in contention these days were ever part of Kievan Rus in the old days, and were first conquered, colonized and settled under the authority of Russia [the Moscow/St Petersburg empire we all so know and love] as part of its wars against the Tatars and Turks. It’s part of Ukraine because of settlement patterns in the Russian empire and the creation of the Ukrainian SSR by the Soviets, and the widely remarked 1954 donation of Crimea to same.
It’s not an unassailable argument for Russian claims, but it is worth remembering there wasn’t an ancient ‘Ukrainian’ presence in all these places and the Russians just showed up and planted colonists on the Ukrainians. Not like, say, the Baltic states where that’s exactly what the Russians did.
I can never think of a true North American analogy, but the fact that most of the key events happened in the late 18th century always makes me wish I could. The Tatar khanate fell in 1776.
Some possible analogies for parts of this issue could include- my admittedly bizarre personal and belated annoyance at the parts of the Declaration of Independence and Articles of Confederation that assumed the future territory of Canada was any business of the thirteen colonies. Or the question of who the American southwest really belongs to- the US by right of conquest and settlement, the Mexicans by right of prior Spanish conquest and settlement, or the Indians by having been there.
Naturally, and today I think the only way, the major voice is ‘what do the people who live there want’. But that doesn’t always solve the problem whether in the future US, today’s Ukraine, or past Kosovo. And it shows the demographic issues in sharp relief, as any Serb would no doubt observe.
Those were excellent points about Izetbegovic, to be sure. Those aspects of the issues were largely ignored in the west in the trumpet sounding euphoria of the late 1990s.
I don’t necessarily oppose the US doing stuff like that, if only I could have confidence they knew the issues and what was at stake.
If you think Savimbi is the George Washington of Angola, or the mujahidin are going to hold the next great constitutional convention like Philadelphia, you’re out of your depth. If you think they are good enough tools to give the Russians a bloody nose or hold some strategic position, and think the country in question will be about the same except on your side more or less, or at least no worse, then that is solid reasoning.
Even the legendary blowback problem is to be expected. The US needed the Russians to beat the Germans, then the Chinese and the Muslims to grind down the Russians. The jury is out, but on the whole I think in each case there was net improvement in the scale of potential medium term threat/challenge to the US.
I don’t think history ends, for all the US public keeps expecting it to.
Or to use a current pop culture metaphor- the wheel might slow or stop for a while, but it won’t break.
“Those who don’t learn from history, etc…” The trouble with history is most people can’t make heads or tails out of it, but they think they understand it perfectly.
History doesn’t speak for itself. It has to be interpreted, and it’s easy to misinterpret. It’s a huge collection of complex data. I favor the macro approach. Look for recurring patterns. History doesn’t always repeat itself, but when it does, there’s a lesson. That’s the signal of deep reality amidst the noise of details.
Vis-a-vis the Russo/Ukraine issue, or the former Yugoslavia, the thing that has to be remembered is that while the involved parties are essentially the same people, in terms of ethnicities and a lot of their shared history/backgrounds… Well, history happened. The proto-Russians and proto-Ukrainians (probably the proto-Belorussians, as well) may have once been the same rootstock “peoples”, but… Things have happened, since. For the Russians and Ukrainians, things like the Holodomor happened, and that’s not going to be forgiven or forgotten, either. The Russians have this nasty habit, in common with the Serbs, of trampling their neighbors, and then wondering why they’re universally hated and despised. This thing with Crimea and the Donbas? Were you to examine it in vacuum, you’d see a point to the Russian case, but when you look at it in terms of everything that the Russians have done over the centuries to the Ukraine, well… Yeah. You’re never going to reconcile the Ukrainians with the Russians, just like you’re never, ever going to get the Serbs to overlook centuries of oppression and exploitation by their turncoat kin, the Bosnian Muslims. That shit will never, ever be forgotten, and I venture to predict that if the last two people on this planet are a Serb and a Bosniak, odds are pretty good for one of them killing the other.
What’s really screwed up is if you start to try to understand the Serbs, an awful lot of their mindset starts to make sense, and if you talk to one long enough, pretty soon you’re thinking “Y’know… He’s right… You can’t trust those filthy Muslim bastards, and I really ought to get with the program, myself… Do unto others before they do unto you…”.
Likewise, you hook up with a Bosnian Muslim, and you start thinking “Man, those damn Serbs… Always with the trouble-making…”.
Correct answer to the issues of Russia/Ukraine, and what’s left of the former Yugoslavia? Build walls, take away their nukes, and let nature take its course. They’re not going to stop; they’re like the Kilkenny Cats, and if you try to do an intervention, well… Prepare to have your arm chewed off, and the fight to start again as soon as you leave to seek medical care.
Case in point, to illustrate the problem: Growing up, my stepdad was Slovenian, and he had a bunch of friends who were fellow expat Yugoslavs. Now, Slovenes are probably the most sane members of the Balkan melange, but the rest of them? Oh. My. God. There used to be a solidarity, a general “Hey, we’re all Yugoslavs…”. Shit started in the late 80s, all that “Hail, fellow, and well-met…” crap evaporated like so much water on a red-hot griddle. All of his friends disconnected, and while it might have been because of his death, a lot of it was the Croats severing themselves from the Serbs, and so on. Even unto the second-third generations. Once the shooting started…? Oh, holy ever-loving-crap… I’m surprised that some of the old fraternal lodges didn’t go to war, here in the States…
In any event, we kept touch with all sides, being kinda-sorta neutral in all this ethnic BS. In the course of things, I’m talking to one of our Serb friends, and he casually mentions affairs back home, to the effect that the ‘effing Croats are finally getting theirs, and it’s only fair ‘cos he cites the Croats having come in and murdered a bunch of folks in his home village, killing the Orthodox priest (who he named…), and all the attendant sort of thing you’d expect.
Thing is, I know where his home village was, and it’s nowhere near the fighting. So, I ask: “Branko, I haven’t heard of anything near where you’re from… When did this happen?”.
He was referring to something that went down back in the 18th Century.
That’s how far back the animosity goes, and how deeply rooted it is. Think about that: Could you name a priest your family received sermons from, in the 1650s? Would you even remember where the hell your family lived in 1650?
Like as not, if you’re an American or a Canadian, the answer is not only no, but “no” with a heaping helping of “WTF? Who cares?”. You’re here in the US or Canada, you’re someone who is descended from people who were done with that bullshit, and wanted out. So, you forgot and forgave–Like as not, you and your kids are happily boinking people your ancestors would have happily slit the throats of, over things that happened to vague ancestors of theirs…
We are the descendants of those who said “Nope. Not gonna play that game, no more…”, so when we encounter those that are still playing “that game”, we simply don’t get it. The Hatfields and McCoys are ‘effing pikers lacking real commitment to the art of the feud and vendetta; in the Balkans, that crap would still be going on, and people would still be dying in the streets of Memphis over what happened in 1860.
Tito tried to suppress it all, but we can observe how effective he was. I don’t know what to do about what was once Yugoslavia, but my fervent recommendation is not to get involved at all. Yeah, it’s ugly to watch on the news, but you’re really not going to stop it without adopting the tactics of the locals. And, to be honest, I’m not so sympathetic to any of the sorry maniacs–The Serbs have been assholes, the Bosniaks have been assholes, the Croats have been assholes, and when you look at it on a generational scale, the ones getting screwed today were the ones doing the screwing on the last go-round. I say a pox on all their houses, until they grow the f**k up. All of them.
I think most people even in Western Europe lost much of their ability to keep local ties and feuds that deep going on quite a while ago.
Those of us in their diaspora lost it pretty quickly in the 19th century or so, and it was comparatively thinly felt at that. Even the worst cases don’t really measure up to Balkan or some Middle Eastern or Central Asian standards.
I can only say where my family probably was in 1650 Scotland and Ireland. Can’t say a thing about who they were, their names, exact villages, or which branch of Christianity they followed at that particular moment. It’s all fog at that distance.
Keeping a grudge going that long is a lot of hard work; every generation has to be indoctrinated anew, and the need for it has to be there. If everyone “disarms” and forgets, you’re cool. If, however, you’r still in danger because Alia over there remembers the vendetta, and deals accordingly with you over something your great-umpty-ump grandfather did to his…?
Yeah. You can’t afford to stop feuding when the other party in the feud doesn’t.
So, this crap goes on, and over in the Balkans, the people for forgave and forgot either migrated out, or they died because they did their forgetting ahead of everyone else.
Hobson’s choice, prisoner’s dilemma. No matter how you want to frame it, it’s an issue, and you have to include it in the calculations you make dealing with the region. Most American diplomats either never knew, or were operating in the mode that “…there is just no way that can still be an issue…”. You try to discuss this crap with your average college-over-educated WASP idiot, and you get blank stares: “That just doesn’t make sense…”. Talk to your average non-college-going redneck from Tennessee, and they’re like “Oh, yeah… I can see that being a problem…”.
I’ve developed a lot of disillusion about what benefit education actually provides, and that stems from issues precisely like this.
What?!?
Are you suggesting these problems can’t be solved by setting up a multilateral working group with a view to establishing a task force with CIVPOL and Development support in a 3D conceptual framework backed by forces able to operate in the 4th generation 3 block war in order to achieve a stable end state of coalition governance shepherding a society of diversity and inclusion?
I mean, my God. What else is there?
I am in awe at your mastery of the pertinent buzzwords, yet simultaneously concerned for your mental health. That you can so easily produce that jargon-vomit indicates a few too many hours of exposure to it… Likely in some interminable meeting or briefing that a small, yet vitally important, part of your psyche is still trapped within.
The sheer pathos of that leaves me weeping for you… You, too, have been where I have gone, and suffered for it…
Honestly, I’d prefer a nice gutshot and prolonged, suffering death to another staff meeting filled with that meaningless drivel.
Thing I had to say a lot in the period of the Kosovo war: “The Balkans are balkanizing? Who would have thought it!?”. I think part of the issue was that the powers-that-be had swallowed the Soviet line about solving the Nationalities Problem.
Kirk, Graham,
Please….stop…staff….jargon….spilling whiskey….
Yes, I’m a Canadian civilian, so my organization is the softest of the soft when it comes to that jargon. We only use a fraction of the military jargon, but are heavy on the development, diversity and inclusion.
Good times.
John Dougan:
I know, right? The ‘Balkan’ is right there in the name of the place. You’d think that would have been a clue.
Bob: “It is notable that Trump, who promised to end all these pointless, insane wars has submitted completely to the Deep State/Cabal Ruling Class. Pompeo and Bolton now control our foreign and military policies, and Trump, like the Queen, merely reads to position papers handed to him.“
How to Get America out of the Infinity War in the Middle East: A Three-Step Plan
Step 1. Announce your immediate withdrawal of all troops from Afghanistan.
Step 2. Announce a sudden reversal of your immediate withdrawal of all troops from Afghanistan.
(you are here)
Step 3. Bomb Venezuela and take its oil.
You can’t always get what you want / But if you try sometimes / You just might find / You get what you need
You Boomers are so ungrateful, maaan.
Kirk: “Like as not, if you’re an American or a Canadian, the answer is not only no, but “no” with a heaping helping of “WTF? Who cares?”. You’re here in the US or Canada, you’re someone who is descended from people who were done with that bullshit, and wanted out. So, you forgot and forgave–Like as not, you and your kids are happily boinking people your ancestors would have happily slit the throats of, over things that happened to vague ancestors of theirs…“
So, for one thing, America is a land of pioneers. The whole “melting pot of teeming refuse” thing is a Jewish retconn that was taught to you as gospel by a network of think tanks and the gullible teachers in their employ, themselves taught by the very same apparatus.
For another, I don’t think that the critical event was the emigration/immigration of the founding stock of the country. I think it was the proliferation of public schooling, i.e. education by the state.
And it’s the state that doesn’t give a shit about things that happened in the past except inasmuch as he who controls the past controls the future.
Which is the greater breaker of cultural continuity: your people transplanting themselves across an ocean, or your child’s self not learning your people’s history from the elders of your people?
Just a thought.
Promising what the electorate wants is all too easy, on the campaign trail. Then, you get into office, and you are suddenly faced with the reality of making it happen, and you find things out that don’t jibe with your understanding of the situation before you took office… Which means that if you do what you say you are going to do, running for office, simply because you said those things…? You’re a bad president.
That’s how we got into Vietnam, if anyone remembers.
Given just how many election-promises Trump has fulfilled, I’m willing to give him a bye on these specific ones. Unwinding the spool of what others have done, from Carter forward…? Yeah; nightmarish. I wouldn’t take the job on a bet.
So, I’ll cut the man some slack. He’s picked decent advisers, and I’ll defer to their judgment. Me? By this time, if I’d been running things immediately post-9/11? We’d probably just now be getting the first oil out of the fully irradiated ground in what was once Saudi Arabia, and the population of the Third World would be drastically lower, having starved to death in the interim. There’s a lot of fertilizer and fuel necessary for feeding that lot which comes out of Saudi Arabia, and they’d have had to go without while I dealt with the aftermath of the Saudi’s refusal to hand over their officials involved in 9/11 for trial and execution. Pakistan would have likely gone nuclear after similar demands for the turnover of the entire ISI, and we’d be looking at a fairly radioactive Indian sub-continent.
On the whole, y’all are really fortunate I wasn’t in charge during that period. I have a very simplistic outlook on these things, and I also have a tendency to opt for solutions to problems which stay solved…
Never ceases to amaze me, the things that the Vast Jewish Conspiracy(tm) is responsible for. It’s almost like that’s the go-to explanation for everything wrong in some people’s lives, or the world.
Which makes it really easy to avoid personal responsibility for those things, or to have to do some real self-examination about the assumptions one holds.
Also, for a Vast Conspiracy, they’re pretty ‘effing bad at it all. You’d think they’d be more subtle, less visible, and living as something other than openly Jewish–If they really were part of a conspiracy. Of course, the best explanation is that all those supposed goyim that took part in all this sophistry and stupidity we interpret as “conspiracy” must really be crypto-Jews, hidden in the woodwork… Yeah, that’s it: Hitler was really a Jew, and all his Nazi buddies were, too–That way, they could hold the Holocaust, get rid of all those Jews who weren’t in on the conspiracy, and build up all that credibility for the ones who were out in the open, and… and… and…
Yeah. Dude, if you sound like some of my Serb friends that I grew up listening to, well… You’re probably not a rational actor, and it’s far past time to take a deep breath, grow the f**k up, and recognize that there ain’t no “Vast Conspiracy” to blame for any of this shit–It’s sheer human hubristic stupidity, and the Jews are as prone to it as anyone else.
Also, about nine-tenths of the crap you lay off on “the Jooooos” wasn’t anything that they did, at all–At the time, if you know any of the history at all, and aren’t a purblind idiot, the people espousing for the “melting pot” idea were not Jewish; they were mostly WASP as hell–The Jews were many of the ones that they wanted to melt into the pot.
Frankly, y’all… I hear someone start up about “Jewish” anything, and I quit listening, while laughing to myself about you and your ideas. The historical record is pretty f**king clear: If there is a “Vast Jewish Conspiracy(tm)”, then it’s about the most incompetent and bad-luck conspiracy in the history of history.
Jewish friend of mine and I were comparing notes; I was wondering when I was going to start getting invited to the meetings for the patriarchy, and getting my checks for taking part in the whole thing, and she was wondering the same damn thing about the whole Jewish thing–She’s never gotten the invite, and she sure as hell ain’t getting the checks, either.
From that, I suppose I should take that I’m an inferior male, and she’s an inferior Jew…
Everyone is conspiring all the time. That’s how it works. Every world event began as a small conspiracy of a few people, which gradually picked up more people and more steam until it had smashed the stuff in its path, arrived at the bottom of its particular mountainside, and come to a stop.
So, assuming that Jews are humans and that humans conspire, it’s worth asking what, exactly, Jews are responsible for. And one of those things is that disgusting poem on the Statue of Liberty.
And, of course, they’re responsible for a lot more. The Federal Reserve System, for instance; the Russian Revolution; dragging an unwilling America into the Second World War; etc. None of this is disputable. The facts are all out there. In many cases, even, they’re bragged about by the heirs of the people who did them. And I’m not going to dispute them with you.
Are Jews solely responsible for everything bad that happens in the world? Not even close. But the problem with you Boomers is that, as you yourself said basically word for word, your brain shuts down upon first encounter with the very word “Jew”. I’ve forgotten exactly what Moldbug called that — brain worm? something — but I remember what Orwell called it: CRIMESTOP.
Your friend, the Common Jew, is regarded by her betters as being nearly as disposable as any goy. A pawn, if that. An invite is not in her future, she isn’t going to be getting any checks, and she isn’t even expected to reproduce. Her descendants, if she has any two or three generations from now, will almost certainly not survive as a coherent people. (They would be a potential threat.)
That in itself makes neither you nor her “inferior”. It does make you both born to the wrong parents. Congratulations, you now understand the nature of aristocracy.
I have no idea where you got the inane drivel about Jewish Hitler or anything else. I get my history from Wikipedia and other mainstream sources. To wit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Lazarus
Everyone knows who did 9/11, and it wasn’t Saudi Arabia. You know it too, or you wouldn’t have spontaneously brought it up.
Yawn.
I think it benefits any small, culturally coherent, externally derived or connected minority to have a society that tolerates just such groups, and ideally doesn’t cohere very strongly around any particular other ethnic, cultural, religious or social identity. If the group has international presence, then a good deal of transnationalism is of some value, though tricky- it means others take part in the trade, too, whatever it is.
That applies in its peculiar ways to Jews in lots of places, Lebanese all over the Middle East and West Africa, Armenians in some places including Lebanon, Chinese all over SE Asia, and probably others that don’t come immediately to mind, present, past and future. It can also apply to classes- European royalty particularly of the 19th century formed a relatively closed caste as against others in their countries, but a cosmopolitan group across national borders. Although not quite so inclined against domestic nationalism, of course, but occasionally conscious of its perils. More so if they had a diverse empire. Even the British royals tended to promote a more cosmopolitan ideal than some other Britons.
All that is just about aggregate benefit, only occasionally about the deliberate intellectual parsing of the idea or specific actions taken. And even where action, it is usually more intuitive or individual or based on sincere belief in some value or ideology, whether it’s revolutionary international socialism, or the weird hybrid of WASP cultural supremacism and early globalism that was the Round Table and Milnerism.
The melting pot was definitely an assimilation strategy, largely endorsed by a WASP elite that seemed to want manpower for national development and expected to maintain control of it through cultural assimilation. It worked unevenly. We heard much of it in critical terms in school in the 70s in Ontario, as by then our value system of multiculturalism was being preached. Multiculturalism was more of a liberal concept stressing openness and nondiscrimination when compared to progressive emphases on diversity, inclusion, and race/gender essentialism. But even then we were taught that we were a ‘mosaic’, not a melting pot, and that there was something dimly racist about the melting pot ideology. We were a bit overwrought even then. One can see in that the hint that it’s not enough to welcome people of other nationalities or even races, you have to not only value all cultures the same but allow all to exist in parallel without any overall scheme.
But I digress. Melting pot was the wrong concept to pin it on. But there was a definite cultural and political shift implied in the idea that America was to be a ‘nation of immigrants’ without distinction of historical circumstances or of settlement or colonization; of ideals and values only or primarily, over and above even institutions let alone culture; about Ellis island and the golden door, with Lexington and Concord seen not as less important but as prelude; with the Statue symbolizing immigration more than liberty or republicanism or Franco-American amity. They’re not intrinsically opposed, but there’s a difference between “the mystic chords of memory tying each home and hearth… to every battlefield and patriot grave” and “give me your tired, your poor…”
It doesn’t actually require opposing the newer idea to notice the change, though I find some would like to obscure that.
As far as Jews and Judaism go, I’ve been a ginormous philosemite and Israel partisan in my day, not that they need go together. I still am to some degree. It goes with being an 80s kid exposed to AMerican pop culture at one of the peaks of its pro-Israel form and with Jews at one of many peaks in their roles in the arts and pop culture. It also goes with having had an interest, for a time, in the interplay of conservative Christian and conservative Jewish philosophy and political thought, as they then existed. I imbibed worries of some Jewish writers that their ethny and faith would disappear through intermarriage. I still kind of hope that doesn;t happen, touch me though it has not.
On the other hand, sometimes one finds a Jewish American academic or political/media commentator praising past generations of Jewish Americans for things like the overwhelming secularization and commercialization of Christmas music in postwar America. Or pioneering the concept of camp. Or postmodernism. Or sarcasm and outsider satire comedy. Or whatever Seinfeld’s show about nothing was. Lighthearted nihilist comedy?
I grew up with, consumed, and liked American postwar pop culture including in those forms. I loved Rodney Dangerfield and Jackie Mason and moderately enjoyed Seinfeld. I get it. It was good stuff as pop culture goes.
And then sometimes I look at in light of what I said in my first para above. Yep.
Is it a conspiracy? No, of course not. Is it destructive in intent, no not really if at all. Maybe for some folks. It’s hard not to credit entertainment industry producers with destructive intent, but it’s not to advance Judaism. They’re seemingly just relatively nasty people in the business. It’s a product of how cultures work in the kind of settings I started with. Perhaps, and this only occurs to me now, it works most when the host culture is also inclined at least some of the time to sympathize with the leading minority on some other religious or philosophical grounds, or contains within it some other elements that tend in the same social directions.
The Lebanese will not, for example, have much deeper influence in West Africa than their commercial and political influence networks have now. The Chinese of Southeast Asia have probably peaked at a lower level, too, but a respectable one.
I think the civilized course remains to argue these issues on the non conspiratorial level.
Every so often, one sees some of the more conservative American Jews bemoan how much Hannukah has become identified with Christmas, as a Jewish verison of Christmas, and also secularized and commercialized like Christmas, as opposed to the moment of reflection on a stylized but real event in the actual political and religious history of the Jewish people that it is. I quite sympathize. I’d endorse their taking it back if I could move Christmas back a few notches. There won’t be agreement.
In passing, I can’t figure out how that emergence of Hannukah to its current form and profile came to be. I can see it as having been an assimilationist move in postwar America, an attempt to conform and therefore perhaps an “oppression”, but it also contributed to making Hannukah far more visible and the much larger general visibility of Jewish culture in American culture writ large. Canada also has a substantial Jewish community especially Montreal and Toronto, but like in the US it’s not that large by actual numbers or percentage. I can’t guarantee I met a Jewish person until university for sure. York was and is a very Jewish influenced campus. Maybe high school, but I wasn’t much the type to ask. But from American tv, sitcoms in particular, I knew in early childhood all sorts of Jewish and American Jewish concepts and tropes, from the major holidays to food and Yiddish slang. At York, I also got Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur as days off from class. Mazel tov to the Jewish community of Toronto for that.
At any rate, I have meandered much. In theory, I need to be using the web to find a new apartment soon. Stupid objective reality.
All but one of the American Jews I’ve known have regarded white gentiles as a threatening “other”. They regard Jews as naturally superior — yet somehow, we produced western civilization and they didn’t. They just don’t like us, and they’re very ethnocentric. It’s “obvious” to them that things should be run for the benefit of the Jews. The intensity of these feelings runs from mild to aggressively inflamed, but it’s there, in whole or in part. As with American blacks, the ethnonarcissism is just about invariably part of the picture.
That’s not a conspiracy, it’s how minorities think and behave. Find a smart minority and give them power, and you get what you get.
The Israelis I’ve known were a different case. Apparently a lot of them come here and think we’re suckers because we’re so honest (or so I hear from other Israelis), but I just never got a sense of the weird malicious inferiority complex American Jews have.
Thank you.
I was tending in some similar directions but that was wonderfully succinct.
“… Kirk says:
May 13, 2019 at 11:14 pm
Y’all don’t want my take on what we should have done, after 9/11. You really, really don’t…”
Attack Israel????
Stop pretending that Israel doesn’t own the US and it’s legislature. A Jew buys the WTC complex then SHAZZAM the complex is hit by planes and one of them falls the same speed as a rock dropped in air for roughly 108′. Now there’s no special gravity flux by that building, building 7, that makes it’s gravity any different from any other place on earth. If it fell the same speed as a rock dropped in air it means it was only supposed by AIR when it fell. We all know this is bullshit. If that won’t do then we can talk about the building between #7 and the North tower which somehow blew the whole entire center of itself all the way up, building 6. If that won’t do then we can talk about the FEMA photographer,(who had to flee the country from death threats), that photographed the vault under building#6, and lots more, where the door was open and all the gold was removed from it. Wonder how that happened?
9-11 did and is still doing irreparable damage to the US and the Jews did it. They screwed up and it’s just a matter of time before the blow back begins. Never forget the Jews did this to us and that they go on pretending that somehow a bunch of Arabs did all this. Anyone that chimes in with this sort of nonsense is a liar and knows it.
Let’s not forget the Ukraine disaster, the Holodomo, over 10 million dead, was done by the Jews and the recent take over by the Jews and civil war in the Ukraine was done by them also. A civil war started by a sniper who shoots civilians AND the police with the same rifle. How convenient that a billionaire Jew from Switzerland was ready to come in and run the Western portion.
The FED is run by the Jews for their convenience and used our credit worthiness to to create junk bonds, take over all our industry and move it China. If that wasn’t bad enough they caused the bank housing crash and then bought the rest of the economy with bailouts and close to zero interest rates from the FED,(they did the EXACT same thing in Germany). I expect this time they will not inflate away the whole economy as that might even be too obvious for even the Jews.
Let’s add to this the whole pozzing of the culture and mass genocidal immigration and…well I’m not hapopy about what the Jews have done to my country and you don;t need to cal it a conspiracy to think this way. Any attempt to call these facts a “conspiracy” or some sort of irrational hatred of the Jews is vile and evil. The Jews earned their hatred by those of us who know what they did fair and square. And don’t pretend that it’s “just a few Jews” because they’ve been doing the exact same thing for thousands of years.
It’s often said that anti-Semites blame the Jews for everything. That’s a damn lie we only blame them for getting us into WWI and WWII, the Federal Reserve, killing Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy. The destruction of Russia, Germany, Spain, England, US and all of Eastern Europe. The opium trade into China. Bringing slaves to America. Bringing in all the people after the 1965 change in immigration laws and all illegal immigration. Destruction of the studies of anthropology, psychiatry and social sciences. Destruction of the school system through uncivil rights for Blacks. Mass murder of Whites by Blacks due to uncivil rights laws. Destruction of all our major cities. Destruction of competence of government employees by uncivil rights laws banning effective testing. Destruction of the culture by mass media, just a few of which are radio, TV, movies and music. Widespread tensions between Men and Women due to their pushing of Feminism and attacking Women. Psychological warfare by portraying White Men as evil, corrupt, deranged and serial killers. Police committing widespread murder due to Jews training the police. Corruption of the government by bribery and when that doesn’t work blackmail. Murder of people to cover up corruption. Destruction of truth through distortion of the education system and mass media. The lowering of morals through pornography and evil behavior in film and TV. Sexual degeneracy and illegal forcing of Women and Men into trading sex for work. Pedophile attacks on girls and boys in Hollywood. The pushing of communism and socialism. The movement of manufacturing to China. Widespread theft of military secrets and subsequent selling of those to the USSR , China and who knows who else. The banking collapse and subsequent bailout. Running a fraudulent FED currency scheme. Securities fraud in the bank bail outs and Mortgage backed Bond business. Blowing up our buildings and killing our people on 9-11 and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan, Iraq. Libya, and Syria. Multiple false flags where Americans have been murdered. The war in Ukraine. ISIS. The murder of Lebanese and Palestinians. Organ smuggling. Drug smuggling. Lots and lots of business and bank fraud. There’s more but that’s the major ones.