Kosovo: Lost to Serbia and to the West

Kosovo: Lost to Serbia and to the West
From the desk of John Laughland on Mon, 2008-10-27 21:12

A few days spent in Belgrade feels like an age. Although I have been here more times than I can remember (albeit not for five years or so) the country remains almost insuperably foreign. There is something radically different about the Balkans, with respect to the rest of Europe, and there are few more quintessentially Balkan states than Serbia.

Where else, for instance, would you meet a man with the wonderful name of Slobodan Despot who smiles and hands you a copy of “The Road to Revolution” by Thomas Kaczynski, a.k.a. the Unabomber? Mr. Despot is a publisher previously worked for a conservative pro-Serb publishing house in Paris and the other titles in his own list now include a consolidated calendar of Orthodox and Western saints, and the memoirs of a woman who opened a sex shop in Paris in the early 1970s.

And where else would you find yourself on a sofa sipping wine and talking to a civilised young professor of medicine who was himself ethnically cleansed from his home town of Urosevac in Kosovo in June 1999, as NATO guards transported Albanian guerrillas in their Hummers across the province to commit their vicious and systematic arson, murder and rape? Where else – especially in Europe – would you meet a monk whose 25 parishioners (in one of the main towns of Kosovo) have to run the gauntlet every Sunday in order to avoid getting killed on the way to Mass?

All these things happened to me – and much more – in the space of a very short stay last week. Ever since the United Nations took over Kosovo in 1999, indeed, the province’s endemic corruption has exploded, as I was able to confirm by talking to two American policemen who work for the international administration there. “Every level of society is corrupt,” one of them said. “Every single aspect of the society is criminal.” This is largely because the Kosovo Liberation Army, the US-backed Contra-style guerrilla force which runs the province and which controls the government, the army and the police, is also notorious for its role as a powerful organisation running drugs, guns and sex slaves to Western Europe.

If organised crime is a way of life in Kosovo, so is the systematic destruction of churches: more than 150 churches and monasteries have been blown up on the UN’s watch in the last nine years, as Albanians seek not only to expel all Serbs from the province but also to eradicate any physical record of their ever having been their in the first place. Kosovo, one should never forget, is the original heartland of medieval Serbia, the Serbs having migrated North to Belgrade and the Pannonian plane beyond as a result of the Turkish invasions. Images of an angry mob pulling down crosses and stamping on them, such as were filmed on 17 March 2004, have not been seen since the early years of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia; just under a century later they are now, once again, part of Europe’s present.

In spite of these atrocities, which include the pogrom conducted against Serbs in March 2004 – a killing spree which went largely unreported in the West and which is now completely forgotten about – the European Union and the United States have pushed Kosovo to proclaim its own independence unilaterally, even though international law clearly forbids such a step. In 1998, the Supreme Court of Canada rejected Quebec’s right unilaterally to secede from Canada, on the grounds that the inhabitants of Quebec had full civil and political rights within Canada. Since Kosovo has been governed by the UN since 1999, their proclamation of independence now can only mean that they did not have full political and civil rights under that administration – the very body thrust onto Serbia by the “international community” in the name of human rights and democracy.

In the remaining months of this year, the Western powers (the EU and the US) will try to finesse a way of transferring power from the UN administration to one run by the European Union. The main obstacle comes from Russia which has a veto in the UN Security Council, the only body which can relinquish authority over the province. For the time being, the Belgrade government says that it opposes EULEX because EULEX was created as a vehicle for the independence of Kosovo, and Russia has said it will support Serbia. In private, however, Serb ministers admit that they will do anything to get into the EU, including accepting the amputation of 15% of their state territory.

However the circle is squared, the likely fudge of authority between the EU and the UN will cause what little government there is in Kosovo to break down completely. As one of the American policemen said to me, “How can you arrest someone if the lines of authority are unclear?” This unclarity will of course again further benefit the gangsters, pimps and drug-runners who currently constitute the government of Kosovo, and who have been the West’s allies since 1998.

Kosovo is therefore now decisively lost to the Serbs, and therefore to Christian civilisation. A war waged in the name of human rights in 1999 has led to nothing less than genocide – the wholesale eradication both of the Serb population of Kosovo since then (the few remaining Serbs live in ghettos) and of the historical memory of that population. In 1999, to justify the attack on Yugoslavia, the US State Department published a document called “Erasing History” which documented the alleged genocide against the Albanians. Now we know that the bulk of that document was war propaganda, its claims unproven despite years spent trying to prove them at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. Yet “erasing history” is precisely what the Albanians have done in Kosovo since NATO occupied the province, and on its watch. They have also erased democracy, human rights, and all the basic tenets of common human decency. The history of the last ten years in Kosovo is nothing but tragedy and hypocrisy blended into one – a true death of the West and all it stands for.

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/3614

I have taken the liberty of bolding certain lines. GA.

Tags: Kosovo, Brussels Journal

Big Business, the Driving Force behind Immigration

In Britain, the House of Lords has reported that the economic impact of immigration is minimal and has concluded that it ought to be capped. The report is seen as a decisive defeat for the government’s long-held view that immigration boosts the economy by increasing production.

The Lords have found that, while the total size of the economy does rise when there is high net immigration, this does not mean that prosperity as such rises. Per capita GDP remains the same. In other words, the size of the economy rises only to the extent that there are more people in the country than before. The economic benefit of mass immigration is zero.

The social costs, of course, are very considerable. The most significant of these is the impact on the cost of housing. The report finds, among other things, that if the present rate of immigration continues, then the average property will cost 10.5 times the average income in 2031. Eight years ago, the ratio was 4 and now it is 6.5.

The inflation of property prices causes immense social and economic damage, although Britain’s numerous property owners have for years deluded themselves that they are getting richer because their houses go up in price so spectacularly. When property rises in cost, the whole economy suffers since all businesses need premises from which to operate. Families suffer, too, because people have fewer children if they cannot afford enough bedrooms to put them in.

The Lords’ report is a huge vindication for the brave campaigning of Sir Andrew Green, Chairman of Migration Watch, and someone whom I have the honour to know personally. Since immigration exploded when New Labour came to power, this former Ambassador to Saudi Arabia has managed brilliantly to put immigration on the agenda without ever giving off so much as the slightest hint of racism. On the contrary, his measured tones and careful statistics have ensured that he is listened to with great respect. The report is nothing less than a total vindication of everything he has been saying for years.

Why, then, has there been such a firm lobby in favour of immigration for so long? The answer lies in one of the most arresting facts about modern politics – a fact which, in my view, even the most redoubtable experts like Andrew Green have perhaps not quite taken on board. I refer to the unlikely alliance between big business and the New Left.

This alliance reached its apogee under Tony Blair, who was known for his slavish admiration for rich people whose hospitality he so often enjoyed for free. But it extended throughout New Labour. Peter Hain, the onetime anti-apartheid campaigner, a man whose progressive credentials could hardly be more immaculate, had to resign in February because he had accepted £100,000 from a pharmaceutical magnate, one of whose companies is facing prosecution for the biggest fraud ever alleged in the United Kingdom.

The alliance between big business and the New Left is not, however, based merely on the greed, opportunism and venality of politicians, or on the desire of big companies to buy political influence. Instead, it is based on ideology. Specifically, big business is in favour of immigration not only because it drives down wages – allowing profits to remain high without companies actually having to sell more products – but also because it is culturally in favour of multiculturalism.

The entire ethic of post Cold War globalisation, indeed, is profoundly anti-national. The multinational corporation, like Marx’s worker, “has no country”: the modern international corporate executive is more at home in an airport departure lounge or a Hilton hotel than in a village pub. He scorns any notion that the legislative framework of a state should give preference to the fixed inhabitants of that state, and instead tells the government that he will simply re-locate, like some disembodied spirit, to another part of the world if the tax regime is not favourable to him. To put it bluntly, multinational companies are vehicles of cosmopolitanism, every bit as powerful and influential as the more intellectual proponents of multiculturalism and the end of the nation-state.

The big corporation likes immigration because immigrants drive down wages and are typically not unionised. Big companies do not care if immigrants do not pay taxes, or if they make extra demands on schools and hospitals, because the state picks up the bill for that. They do not care if there is general inflation, or sector-specific inflation such as in property, because they have their eye on next year’s bottom line, and on their Christmas bonus, not on what will happen a generation hence. Big companies operate on the principle “privatise the profits, socialise the losses”, demanding that policies be pursued which increase their income because the costs are passed onto the taxpayer and society at large.

As Pat Buchanan argued brilliantly in The Death of the West, economic history shows that periods of high immigration do not coincide with periods of high economic growth. Japan grew spectacularly in the period 1955 – 1993 but immigration over that time was zero. The periods when America’s prosperity has risen are those when immigration has been low; the economy stalls, by contrast, when it is high.

Ever since Mrs Thatcher, the predominant ethic in British politics has been pro-business. The slogan is “free trade”, but that is not the same thing. Of course it was necessary in the early 1980s to free Britain from the excessive shackles which the trades unions represented; but, in domestic politics as in diplomacy, there are no permanent victories, especially not if political parties stop thinking, as the Tory part did long ago. So deeply entrenched has “free trade” now become that it is a taboo which unites the whole political class. Any suggestion that the activities of business should be limited or directed by the state is dismissed as Luddite economics, reactionary thinking worthy of a flat-earther.

In fact, Britain and many other European states are themselves just as much in hock to the demands of big business now as they were to the labour movement a generation ago. The pendulum has now swung too far in the opposite direction. Let us hope that the breaking of the taboo of immigration will mark the moment at which it starts to swing slowly back.

Source
The Brussels Journal