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January
3, 2002
Operation
Enduring Stupidity
The Year That Was
Upon
the completion of Earth's revolution around the sun, the only
things that change are the numbers on the calendar. Problems
that existed on December 31st are still there on
January 1st. Stupidity does not vanish at the stroke
of midnight, the way common sense does anywhere the Empire
gets involved.
More
to the point, whenever the Empire does get involved,
the existing problems are never solved. Instead, they are
treated temporarily, with nothing more than a band-aid "agreement"
or a half-witted "peace process," and left to fester. When
they inevitably erupt again, that – naturally – calls for
more "treatment" by Imperial diplomats, which is to be financed
by Imperial loans, which in turn produce further problems,
and so on, ad infinitum. This is not just the case
in the Balkans, by the way. From Somalia and Afghanistan (the
first time) to Haiti, Argentina and the
Middle East, the world is strewn with examples of Imperial
intervention's ongoing consequences.
MANIFEST
INSANITY
Recipients
(i.e. victims) of this "treatment" create elaborate
delusions of grandeur and suffer frequent bouts of groveling
whenever their Imperial masters are around. A perfect sample
case could be Serbia's Prime Minister, Zoran Djindjic. He
has exhibited symptomatic behavior before, and his latest
statements show no sign of recovery.
Three
days ago, Djindjic's optimistic, self-congratulatory holiday
message aimed to convince the Serbian population that
his government enjoyed the respect and admiration of the Empire.
To this purpose he employed phrases such as "equal partners,"
and "driving force of regional development," which were both
misleading and meaningless. The Empire has no partners, only
servants, and it certainly does not care for regional development – which, again, can hardly be driven by a nation whose infrastructure
was demolished by the Empire's bombs just three years ago.
No
less insane was the holiday message of Montenegro's
ruler Milo Djukanovic, who actually said that "not a single
Montenegrin problem can be resolved without our own Montenegrin
state." Given that Montenegro, under his leadership, already
has de facto independence and that its inhabitants
are still fairly miserable, Djukanovic's appeal to nationalism
is disingenuous at best.
MADNESS
WITHOUT METHOD
Victims
of imperialism also tend to substitute madness for elementary
logic. Normal reactions to certain developments are repressed
or even completely substituted by irrational expressions of
submission, no doubt motivated by the desire to secure the
Empire's ever-elusive but oft-promised affection.
Djindjic's
delusional visions would have the Serbs believe their government
is now favored by the Empire. This is no doubt buoyed by a
recent spate of self-serving
interference in the debate between Serbia and Montenegro
about the future of Yugoslavia. Indeed, official Belgrade
is not bothering to hide its excitement over the
possibility that the Empire might actually favor its position
(or the position the Empire "persuades" Belgrade to adopt?)
over Djukanovic's.
As
usual, reality does little to support Djindjic's claims. Instead
of favoring his regime, or even cutting Serbia a break, the
Empire continues to insist on absolute submission to the Hague
Inquisition. As a good vassal, Djindjic is supporting that insistence.
He is also trying to justify it as a price that must be paid
for becoming a province of the EU superstate (something most
Serbian politicians consider a worthy goal! O tempora,
o mores!).
Of
course, Djindjic might not be entirely delusional. He might
say things he does not really believe, knowing that if he
failed to submit, the Empire could simply stop giving him
money needed for his regime's survival. Or, if he really
got out of hand, they could reopen the old wound in
southern Serbia, right along the border of semi-amputated
Kosovo, where Albanians are still "restless." But whether
the Serbian Prime Minister (and the regime for which he stands)
is really schizophrenic, or simply pretending, the end result
is the same: groveling.
POINTS
OF DEPARTURE
There
is more, of course. When Kosovo's occupying governor Hans
Haekkerup unexpectedly
resigned just before the New Year, Kosovo Albanians by
and large hailed the news. They
saw both Haekkerup and his job as obstacles to their goal
of an independent, all-Albanian Kosovo.
Now,
Haekkerup was a governor of a Serbian province occupied by
some 20,000 NATO troops, ethnically cleansed of most Serbs,
Jews, Roma and other non-Albanians – with the remainder living
in ghettos surrounded by barbed wire. It was Haekkerup who
engineered an election that gave this occupation a pretense
of legitimacy. However "honest" and "decent" he may have
been, Haekkerup was still a representative of an illegal,
illegitimate occupying authority. Any rational government
would have maintained insistence on ending the occupation
as the matter of principle. The current regime in Belgrade,
however, expressed "regret" at Haekkerup's departure, and
the "elected" leader of Kosovo Serbs said she looked
forward to cooperating with the occupiers and their protégés.
Americans'
regret over Haekkerup's resignation was at least a
polite fallacy. Certainly someone in Washington will be
very happy that the new interim satrap in Kosovo is an American.
But if, after this, the Serbs still have any respect for
their leaders, then perhaps those are the leaders they deserve.
ALL
MY DREAMS, TORN ASUNDER
It
is hard to imagine that a year ago the future actually
looked better. The Emperor-designate had spoken about the
possibility of withdrawing from the Balkans, and cutting back
on his predecessor's worldwide warfare in general. There was
at least a glimmer of hope that something good could come
out of partisan bickering and a change of faces in Washington,
and that the Empire's crusade in the Balkans might end now
that its power-seeking purpose was accomplished.
2001
was also supposed to be a year of flying cars, colonies on
the Moon, and expeditions to Jupiter turned tragic because
of computers gone haywire. Humans have proven to be perfectly
capable of producing tragedies
without the help of artificial intelligence, and much closer
to home. The war fever in the aftermath of Black Tuesday only
confirmed what was obvious a month earlier in Ohrid, Macedonia.
Far from being over, the crusade was just getting started.
As
other parts of the world are being pulverized, driven to a
killing frenzy or drowned in delusions, the Balkans continues
to undergo a seemingly unending collective lobotomy at the
hands of Imperial surgeons. How much longer before the admittedly
flawed denizens of the Peninsula become permanently corrupted
into a more hideous form
of existence?
NO
WAY OUT?
There
is always hope, of course. As with any disease, only after
the proper diagnosis can one come up with a cure. At the root
of the Empire's success is a common ailment of the human mind,
a misguided belief that problems of the Society can only be
solved by the State. From there it follows
that problems that confound the state can only be solved by
a more powerful state, i.e. the Empire. Formerly known
as Communism or Fascism, depending on symptoms,
this ailment is more properly described as Tyrannical Statism
and commonly misdiagnosed as Democracy.
Obviously,
problems cannot be solved by the reasoning responsible for
creating them. Things can change – for better or worse, but
change – only if this dangerous mindset is replaced
with even the tiniest bit of rational, principled thinking.
For stupidity endures the test of time, but not the test of
reason.
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