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        U.S. policy in the Balkans, which made its clumsy debut in the closing years of the Great War, has never been about the Balkans. President Woodrow Wilson, while advocating the creation of Yugoslavia in 1918, did not know, or care, that the unification of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was at least half-century overdue: had it happened at the time of Bismarck's and Mazzini's unification projects, it could have worked. By the time of Versailles the process of separate cultural development, and the emergence of separate - even mutually incompatible - national identities among the South Slavs had been completed. But like any good liberal, Wilson did not allow mere realities to get in the way of his creativity. He combined the Puritan self-righteous zeal with the Progressive Era’s belief in the power of politics to change the world for the better. Subsequently his concepts of “enlarging democracy” and “collective security” signaled the birth of a view of America’s role in world affairs which has created - and is still creating - endless problems for both America and the world. With similar historical inattention, and inspired by a similar zeal for ethnic and social engineering, present American leaders do not want you to know what Bosnia or Serbia were like during the long centuries of Ottoman misrule. the practice of kidnapping Orthodox boys to be trained as Janissaries and the spiking of infidels.

The shrill scream of “it was such a long time ago” is applied even to the massacre which Croat and Bosnian Muslim Quislings systematically perpetrated against Serbs - and Jews, and Gypsies - in 1941-45. And yet, what has happened in Croatia and Bosnia after 1991 cannot be understood without taking account of what the Encyclopaedia Britannica laconically describes as the Ustasa "policy of racial purification that went even beyond Nazi practices.” The brutal murder of at least one-half-million Orthodox Christian Serbs by their Croatian Catholic and Bosnian Muslim neighbors during the Second World War is not ancient history, it is a contemporary political fact of life par excellence. And yet, the relevance of the Serb Golgotha to today’s events is denied, in the West, by the very same people who would be horrified at the suggestion that “the Holocaust was such a long time ago” and no longer worthy of mention as a fact of our current experience.

After the war the Communist regime attempted to sweep this bloody legacy under the carpet, in the name of Tito’s policy of ‘brotherhood and unity.’ In the ensuing 45 years the wounds remained unhealed, merely concealed; but at the outset of the present Yugoslav crisis, six years ago, the Serbs’ basic argument was pretty clear: they had lived in one state since 1918, when Yugoslavia came into being. They reluctantly accepted Tito’s internal boundaries between the six federal republics, which left almost one third of them outside Serbia-proper, on the grounds that the Yugoslav framework afforded them a measure of security from the repetition of the nightmare of 1941-45. But they would resist any attempt by the breakaway republics of Croatia and Bosnia to force over two million Serbs living there to become minorities, literally overnight, in their own land.

Even without the vividly remembered trauma of the Second World War, they reacted in 1991-92 just as the Anglo citizens of Texas or Arizona might do if, in two or three decades, they are outvoted in a referendum demanding those states’ incorporation into Mexico. They demanded the right that the territories, which the Serbs have inhabited as compact majorities long before the voyage of the Mayflower, not be subjected to the rule of their enemies. In the same vein the Loyalists Ulstermen demanded - and were given - the right to stay apart from united Ireland when the nationalists in Dublin opted for secession in 1921. The issue at stake in Yugoslavia was not that of ‘Serbian aggression’ versus ‘collective security.’ The insistence of “the international community” on territorial integrity of the former Yugoslav republics of Croatia and Bosnia - whose boundaries were arbitrarily drawn by the communists, and bore no relation to the ethnic realities on the ground - fatally clashed with the principle of self-determination of the people living inside those boundaries, i.e. the Serbs west of the Drina River.

Yugoslavia was a deeply flawed polity, and there could have been no objection to the striving of Croats and Bosnian Muslims to create their own nation-states. But equally there could have been no justification for forcing over two million Serbs west of the Drina to be incorporated into those states against their will, and without any guarantees of their rights. Yugoslavia came together in 1918 as a union of South Slav peoples, and not of states, or territorial units. Its divorce should have been effected on the same basis. This is, and has been, the real foundation of the Yugoslav conflict ever since the first shots were fired in the summer of 1991. Even someone as unsympathetic to the Serb cause as Lord Owen conceded, in his book of memoirs, that Tito's internal boundaries were arbitrary, and that their redrawing should have been countenanced at the time of Yugoslavia's disintegration:

It is true that there could not have been a total accommodation of Serb demands; but to rule out any discussion or opportunity for compromise in order to head off war was an extraordinary decision. My view has always been that to have stuck unyieldingly to the internal boundaries of the six republics within the former Yugoslavia [ ... ] as being the boundaries for independent states, was a folly far greater than that of premature recognition itself.

This political essence of the war has been systematically hidden in the United States behind the portrayal of the Serbs as primitive ultranationalists who want to conquer other peoples’ lands, gang-rape their women, kill their children, and burn their homes. The most vehement such accusations, coming from Muslim and Croat sources, went wholesale into the media machine, Congressional speeches, and the pseudolegal fatuities of The Hague war crimes tribunal.

Sadly, there are many Serbs who have not followed their Patriarch’s instruction: “If we live as people of God, there will be room for all nations in the Balkans and in the world. If we liken ourselves to Cain, then the entire earth will be too small even for two people.” We should pray for them, and their victims, and for the perpetrators of crimes from the other two sides, and for their Serb victims. But the systematic portrayal of the Serbs as demons, and the Muslims of Bosnia as innocent martyrs in the cause of multi-ethnic/cultural tolerance, had nothing to do with the realities on the ground. The American public was not allowed to learn that the Bosnian Muslim leader, Alija Izetbegovic, proudly proclaimed, in his ‘Islamic Declaration,’ that ‘there can be no peace or coexistence between the Islamic faith and non-Islamic societies and political institutions,’ and that this paragon of multiconfessional tolerance warns his fellow Muslims that ‘the Islamic movement should and must start taking power as soon as it is morally and numerically strong enough not only to overthrow the existing non-Islamic power structure, but also to build a great Islamic federation spreading from Morocco to Indonesia, from tropical Africa to Central Asia.'

The demonization of the Serbs was a schooltext case of social constructivism, of media-induced pseudoreality in the service of the Washingtonian political class which, by the end of 1991, had articulated its choices in the Balkans. An orchestrated campaign soon followed to contextualize the brutalities of the Balkans with the horrors of the Holocaust, and - with an appalling irony possible only in a society steeped in historical amnesia and ignorance - the Croats and Muslims became identified with the victims, the Serbs with the Nazis. A crude Serbophobia was not only allowed, but encouraged; hating The Serb was fun. He had joined the Afrikaaner and the Southerner in the shooting gallery of Non-Identical Idenity.

Such contextualization worked wonders for the Croats, and - even more so - the Bosnian Muslims. They could hardly believe their luck! In a complex conflict with confusing and contradictory pieces, hard to fit into the full picture, Americans were offered a powerful package which simplified the equation into a clear-cut story of ‘bad guys’ and ‘good guys’. The convergence was not that which might have been expected - of Auschwitz with Jasenovac, of Izetbegovic’s Islamic Declaration with the Himmlerian ravings of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and of the Serbs of today with the loyal allies in two world wars. As Philip Jenkins of Penn State aptly put it, “Looking for a frame for Bosnia, Westerners could so easily have found meaning in terms like ‘fascist’ and ‘Islamic radical’: they actually found it in ‘genocide’ and ‘holocaust’ - leaving no room for compromise or even debate.”

‘Saving’ the Muslims (who in the meantime had become ‘Bosniaks’ without anyone even noticing) would thus expiate for not saving the Jews of Warsaw or Budapest fifty years earlier. ‘Something Must Be Done,’ screamed a thousand editorial writers, who knew less about the Balkans than I do about contemporary feminist poetry. The sheepishly parrotted catchword was ‘Munich,’ containing the preposterous implication that one and a half million Serbs of Bosnia threatened global peace in 1992 - just as the Third Reich did in 1938.

Once the paradigm was successfully planted, with potential doubters equated with ‘holocaust deniers’, the possibilities were limitless. The Serbs were to be punished if they violated the "safe areas," but the Muslims were not expected to demilitarize them, on the contrary, were encouraged to use them as springboards for military offensives. Muslims were ‘ethnically cleansed’, but Serbs were merely ‘leaving’ their homes. When this happens on a Biblical scale, as in the Krajina in 1995, there is silence, or an exultant cry that they had it coming. The fact that the Serbs constitute the most numerous refugee population outside the sub-Saharan Africa is not reported, or cynically used as a proof of their paranoid refusal to share in the experience of ‘multiethnicity.’

At the trivial level, the Holocaust analogy created the market for a latter-day Anne Frank: ‘Zlata’s Diary’ was eventually proved to be a crude forgery, but its impact was made in 1993, when it mattered most. Ditto with stories of mass rape and ‘death camps’ - but they equally served the purpose at the time. When the carefully constructed mythology of Serb bestiality collapses, and the full truth of the other sides’ misdeeds begins to emerge, ‘Serbian rape camps’ will be a term of dismissive derision used to describe bogus stories peddled on behalf of special interest groups. But this demonization of ‘the Serb’ indicates that there is a ready market for similar constructs in the future. The frightening thought is that we may often remain unaware of the extent to which we are being manipulated, because we do not know enough about the subject to see what the spin-masters are up to. The safest strategy is not to believe them anything at all.

When Madeleine Albright, while still the ambassador at the U.N., declared at the opening of the Holocaust Museum that “there is no more appropriate a place to discuss the War Crimes Tribunal for former Yugoslavia” - you should have assumed that she had an agenda; and you’d have been right. Now, in the five decades since the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials there have been well over one hundred million human fatalities due to war, genocide, democide, politicide, and mass murder. Pol Pot, Mao, Indonesia in 1965, India's partition, Bangladesh in 1971, Afghanistan, Angola, Albania, Romania, Ethiopia, Iraq, North Korea, Uganda... have all contributed their own hecatombs to the total.

Democracies admittedly kill few of their own citizens - which is scant comfort to the relatives of children burnt at Waco, or to Randy Weaver - but they are far less restrained in killing foreign civilians in declared or undeclared wars, Dresden and Hiroshima being merely the worst examples. It may be years before we are told of the estimate for civilian deaths, in Baghdad in 1991, or in the Bosnian-Serb Republic in 1995. One may safely assume that there will never be any trials of the culprits, military or political. But the empirically verifiable fact is that, compared to the horrors of Afro-Asian post-colonial killing fields, the war in the Balkans is a medium-sized local conflict. Counting bodies is poor form - even one death is one too many - but it has to be done if we are not to assist exploitation of distortions for political purposes. Yes, Bosnia was a horror, and Yugoslavia a tragedy, but there was no "holocaust"!

So why the lie, why the multi-layered myth which has already come to be contained in that one word, ‘Bosnia’? In the case of the Germans, it is old geopolitics, plain and simple. They are after their Mitteleuropa, under the EU guise this time, and they knew who their reliably obedient Balkan clients were. In a funny way, one can hardly blame them; it is Realpolitik 19^th century style, and Kohl and Genscher could say, Luther-like, ”Ich kann nicht anders.” This does not justify their actions, but at least their motives are not too hard to deduce.

But in early 1992 the European Union - having contributed to the break-up of Yugoslavia on German prompting and thus unleashed war in Croatia - made an effort to prevent the same outcome in Bosnia. Lord Carrington, one time British Foreign Secretary and Secretary-General of NATO, was given the task of damage limitation. He was an old Tory cynic who thought that there was precious little to choose between the three warring factions in the Balkans. His views on messrs Milosevic, Tudjman and Izetbegovic were scathing in the extreme, but he equally despised the strident tone of pseudomoralists on both sides of the Atlantic. In his view, the advocates of unitary Bosnia ruled from Sarajevo were living "in a realm of fantasy." Carrington was clear that the optimal post-Yugoslav solution would involve a Serb-Croat swap, with a solid state for the Muslims in the middle. He understood that no "Bosnia" was viable on Yugoslavia's ruins. Carrington brokered an agreement initialled in February 1992 by leaders of the three Bosnian constituent nations, Serb, Croat and Muslim. This agreement was based on the three-way de facto split of Bosnia into self-governing units, with a weak central government in Sarajevo making decisions by consensus on a few matters of common interests; a bit like America before Lincoln turned its presidency into one of the most dangerous institutions in the world.

At this point America intervened decisively and fatefully. Presumably acting on the instructions from Washington, U.S. Ambassador in Belgrade Warren Zimmerman went to Sarajevo and induced Izetbegovic to renege on the agreement, promising him all political, diplomatic and military aid if he did so. Izetbegovic needed little persuasion. He reneged on the agreement, opting for the single, centralized Bosnian state under Muslim control. The Bosnian war began, and it has yet to truly end. As in Greek tragedy, one act by a protagonist set a train of events irrevocably in motion.

During the ensuing years, America pulled the strings from the background in support of the Muslim side. It brought into line the Russians, who entertained futile hopes of large-scale western investment and aid, and whose diplomacy was in the hands of one Andrei Kozyrev, now described in Moscow as the best foreign minister America has ever had. Washington kept pressing EU members like Britain and France, which had serious misgivings, to accept its faits accomplis. The U.S. encouraged and facilitated the dispatch of arms to the Muslims from Iran and Eastern Europe - in violation of UN embargoes and resolutions adopted on American insistence - thus providing the mullahs with a bridgehead in the heart of Europe. This fact was denied in Washington in the face of overwhelming evidence, but the deniers were lying through their teeth. This is now common knowledge in Washington, and in European capitals. Several senators stated at Anthony Lake’s CIA confirmation hearings last year that this policy made the US in effect “a partner” with Iran. But Lake, always the adherent of the view that aim justifies means, while not denying the illegality of the operation, and admitting that American allies were kept in the dark, added that the main thing was that the policy “worked”!

 Worked to what end? So that the Clinton Administration could use NATO and the UN as its policy instruments, and so that it could block all peace moves, of which there were several between 1992 and 1995. Its deliberate sabotage of the Vance-Owen and Owen-Stoltenberg peace plans is particularly well documented. Then, having effectively prevented the EU from reaching agreement - the US was finally able to launch massive air strikes against the Serbs, sparked off by staged incidents in the market places of Sarajevo - stunts reminiscent of the Battleship Maine and the Gulf of Tonkin. It finally imposed a peace settlement at Dayton which no side regards as permanent and stable.

So much for the “how”. But why? Here we have the most powerful country on earth deeply involved off its own bat in Balkan affairs, which bear absolutely no relationship to American security, extending its power into Eastern and South Eastern Europe, involving itself in long-standing and perhaps incurable national conflicts, between Serbs and Croats, Christians and Moslems, (Slav) Macedonians and Greeks, Slovaks and Hungarians, Hungarians and Romanians, Romanians and Ukrainians... Why, for that matter, was the U.S. pressing Czechs, Poles, and Hungarians to join NATO at this juncture? The official line on Bosnia - that it is a budding multi-ethnic democracy which should be protected against aggression - is an evident non-sequitur: if the collapse of Yugoslavia was due to the allegedly insurmountable contradictions between its ethnic groups, is not Bosnia even less a viable state? Are not the same dynamics present in that South Slav microcosm, which could remain relatively peaceful only within the wider, Yugoslav context? And are not the divergent interests among its three ethno-religious communities even more strongly pronounced?

The U.S. advocates of a "multiethnic" Bosnia have never satisfactorily explained the paradox that their arguments are also the arguments for the reintegration of the whole of Yugoslavia, while their objections to such reintegration are also the arguments against Bosnia's viability. What, then, was the motive? By now, I hope, it hardly needs stating that the actions of Clinton, Albright & Co. are not rooted in the concern for the well-being of the South Slavs as such, or indeed any moral principle, in foreign and domestic policies alike. As for the morality, this presidency has descended to the point where you either understand what they are about, or you don’t; words have almost become meaningless in conveying the deeply flawed essence.

Clinton’s secretary of state is an apt member of his team: she, too, believes that ends justify means, and that human life has no intrinsic value, vis. her reply to a question about the death of half a million Iraqi children as a result of sanctions: ‘I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, is worth it,’ (CBS 60 Minutes, May 12, 1996). She, too, understands that ‘ideology’ - which in her scheme includes religion, of which she has had three so far - is but a cloak for the quest for power, and its exercise. So let me state - as if it needed stating - that U.S. policy in the former Yugoslavia - or for that matter anywhere else in the world - has no basis in the law of nations, or in the notions of truth or justice. So what is it about?

There are two levels of analysis here. At the meat-and-potato level of institutionalized corruption, which passes for ‘the political process’ in the nation’s capital, it is the end-result of the interaction of pressure groups within the power structure. U.S. foreign policy in general, and "Bosnian" policy in particular, reflects those groups' concern for their particular interests and global policy objectives. A Washington insider put it bluntly in the early days of the conflict:

      The simple facts are these: we are getting incredible pressure form the Saudis and others to help the Muslim cause in Bosnia. They remind us that the Islamic world provides us with all the oil  we want at relatively low prices, that Islamic states have billions of petrodollars to invest in "friendly states"  and offer a potential market of over one billion people for the goods and services of "friendly countries"; and finally, that the peace process between Israel and the Islamic world would go better if Israel's main friend was also a friend to an Islamic group. When  you weigh these facts against what eight million Serbs can do for  America's interests, its clear what we have to do.

But this, by itself, is insufficient to explain a virulently anti-Serb, agenda-driven form of Realpolitik which has dominated America's Bosnian policy. Its creators use the neo-Wilsonian language of morality, but in the service of rampant unilateralism. ‘Morality’ is no longer treated as a function of actual behavior, but of the place of the actor within the ideological system: if Iraq kills Kurds, it gets bombed; if Turkey kills Kurds, it is OK, or at least we’ll keep quiet about it. If Muslims and Croats secede from Yugoslavia, or Kosovo Albanians from Serbia, it is a democratic exercise in self-determination; if Serbs (and now, Croats) want to leave Bosnia, it is aggression. If Serbs take Srebrenica, it is genocide; if there are no bodies to support the claim, it is the proof of their dastardly deviousness. As one hundred thousand Serbs were trecking out of Sarajevo in early 1996, Nicholas Burns was quite specific when he declared that “the Bosnian [that is, Muslim] government does not practice ethnic cleansing.”

A good example of this new relativism is Washington’s treatment of Slobodan Milosevic. Every time he needs to sign another surrender, he is demonised in the press and someone in a position of authority makes a statement about the desirability of his removal from power. And then, as soon as he signs on the dotted line, he is instantly turned back into an unsavory but nevertheless indispensable “partner in the peace process” and guarantor of what had been signed. Over the past five years this communist apparatchik has proven his readiness to play the role of the NWO Gauleiter in the Balkans. Mr Milosevic has shrewdly purchased the lasting benevolence of those who run today’s ‘Western democracies’: it was with the skins of the Bosnian and Krajina Serbs, and most recently with those of the remaining Serbs in Kosovo, that he has turned himself from ‘the butcher of the Balkans’ into ‘a necessary partner.”

Surely enough, appropriate lip service is being paid to the advocates of democracy in Serbia, and independent Belgrade media have been visited by a few itinerant congressmen. But this Administration and its European partners are loath to see the fall of Mr Milosevic, the man provenly unable and unwilling to say “no” to the likes of Richard Holbrook. The people of Serbia are finding it very difficult to present the Clintonites with fait accompli, and get rid of Milosevic regardless of their ‘friendly’ advice. They are puzzled that the leaders of nations parading as models of democracy place their misperceived strategic interest ahead of the ideals they claim to uphold. They do not see that these corifei of rights without liberty, and lives without substance, are not really much different from Mr. Milosevic, or, indeed, from their former ‘communist’ opponents during the Cold War.

So, at a deeper level, ‘Bosnia’ is about more than Arab oil millions and Israeli security; it is about something called ‘American leadership,’ and it is ultimately about the future of the world. So back to that favorite of mine, Madeline Albright. Speaking as ambassador to the UN she stated that the US policy in Bosnia was the foundation of its policies for Europe.This was a chilling admission, coming from a certified Cold War junkie, a connoisseur of confrontation. Think of the implications: lying and cheating, fomenting war in which civilians are the main casualty, and in which old passions feed on themselves, involving America in a maelstrom easier to enter than to leave; and above all risking long-term conflict with a Russia which should be the West’s natural ally against militant Islam, which will be the gravest external threat to what remains of our civilization in the coming century.

But at this deeper level ‘Bosnia’ is an attractive concept to our rulers because it is an inherently unstable entity; it is the very opposite of a nation in any conventional sense, a grotesque caricature in fact, where the most obscurantist side has been instructed in the rhetoric of ‘multiethnicity’ for the benefit of Upper East Side, Boulder, Aspen and Berkeley. They insist ad nauseam that Bosnia has to be preserved as an ‘experiment in multiculturalism’; so political oppression, even ultimate exodus, of one third of the denizens of Bosnia who happen to be Serb is justified, as well as the war itself, for the sake of a pet-project of theirs - which can only end in a global empire devoid of nation-states, cleansed of the hierarchy of values, culture, tradition, and bonds of loyalty born out of centuries-long shared experiences. 

To present the USA as the policeman, judge, jury, and DA of this emerging global empire is endlessly seductive for the Washington community of foreign policy professionals - often poorly educated, high on excitement and low in statesmanlike patience. Look at their brainchild, The Hague Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia, the model for which is not Nuremberg 1946, but Moscow 1938. It is consistent with the brave new world in which the U.N. will generate criminal law on behalf of the dominant elites, in chilly disregard of the dictum that people can be obligated to obey only those laws to which they have consented. It deliberately nurtures the incompatibility between a model of the legal order under which the laws of war are administered by an "impartial" agent of organized humanity, and a model under which the laws of war are administered by each body-corporate of the international legal order within its own competence.

The Hague sends a clear message that, in today's world, there can be crime without punishment, and punishment without crime, depending on the arbitrary will of 'the international community' embodied in Clinton, Albright & Co. After the decline of higher cynicism in the name of Human Progress we now witness the ascent of higher cynicism in the name of Human Rights. Its proponents fear that the world will happily pass them by unless America imposes herself, rises to 'the challenge' and throws her weight about. But to live for the adrenaline is to ride for a fall and to walk with Hubris.The longing to be the world's social engineer-in-chief cum policeman will never be admitted as the basis of policy. Clinton knows that he should always deny the charge. Throughout the Bosnian Intervention he was the respectable front-end of the Albright program. Inside the State Department and the CIA there is always room for the pretense that policy is more limited and calculated than the passions and arrogance which drive it. In the same vein German policy before 1914 was defined, on paper, by men more rational and cool than their political bosses.

American power and prestige are in the hands of men and women unable, or, worse still, unwilling to resist the Temptation to invent new missions, lay down new embargoes and fabricate new courts.  For the time being,  they control the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, the mightiest arsenal of high-tech weaponry ever seen, and the vast majority of the satellites which watch us from every quadrant of the skies. They sense limitless opportunities, of which the former Yugoslavia was merely a test case, and we must ask what ambitions they will declare next.

Sadly, such declarations are there for all who care to read and listen on both sides of the dominant political spectrum. The “neo-conservatives,” having kidnapped the name of those who resist the neoimperialist trend, have promptly proceeded to aid and abet the enemy. Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan, for instance, gloat in what they call “benevolent global hegemony.” The world is America’s ‘domain.’ Other powers, notably Russia and China, will bristle at this, but who cares: we should take their ire ‘as a compliment.’ They call for an indefinite massive military build-up unconnected to any identifiable military threat, and for ‘citizen involvement,’ in effect, militarization of the populace. The traditional ‘citizen soldier’ concept is reversed - their goal is to get suitably indoctrinated young Americans to go and risk their lives not for the honor and security of their own country, but for the preservation of some new ‘multiethnic Bosnia’ thousands of miles away.

The neocons’ definition of Pax Americana is summarized in those two gents’ exultation that we have never lived in a world more conducive to [our] fundamental interests in a liberal international order, the spread of freedom and democratic governance, [and] an international economic system of free-market capitalism and free trade.  They don’t tell us how the US will preserve the traditional moral fabric, social structure and economic interests of its own people - what most Americans still mean by ‘national interests.’  Their concern is exclusively with the blessings America should bestow upon the rest of benighted humanity.

An optimist might say that Bob Dole didn’t win, ergo Messrs Kristol & Kagan are not running the show at Foggy Bottom, America is safe from such hubristic ravings, and power-hungry prophets of post-Christian globalism are at bay. But what of Albright, of whom almost enough has been said, and whose entire mindset is summarized in her famous question to General Colin Powell: "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?" This is tantamount to saying that the ownership of a nice, chrome-plated 38-special calls for its imminent use against any inconvenient neighbor.

 With such lumens in charge, it seems incredible that at the beginning of this altogether awful century, the European, Christian world - clearly including America - dominated the planet. But this world embarked upon an unprecedented orgy of self-destruction in 1914, a catastrophy rooted in an imperial hubris of near-Albrightesque proportions. Two decades later Europe staggered into a belated Round Two, with the Cold War to follow. The result is a civilization that is just a shadow of its former self, crippled, spiritually comatose, and demographically moribund: when people refuse to produce offspring at even bare replacement level, we should fear that the disease is terminal. We are bogged down in the wreckage of 1918, with the legacy of three very similar, crassly materialistic, anti-traditional ideologies. Two of the rogue little bastards had found a home in one of the destroyed empires: Marxist Socialism in Russia, where the bacillus was deliberately planted from the West, and National Socialism in Germany, where it was pretty much home grown. But those twin brothers proved too clumsy, too rough; their orgies of violence too repulsive for the tired, disillusioned elites, which - after a long flirt with Stalinism, which for some of them is still not over - went in search of a kinder, gentler variety of Dr. Kavorkian.

And so we have the third heir of Europe’s decrepitude. It calls itself ‘liberal democracy’ or even ‘democratic capitalism’ - which is a rich joke, considering the distribution of the national wealth. This third child ostensibly resembled the old pre-1914 model, just as a vampire resembles a living man. The form was there, but without even the pretense that its substance rested upon the old certainties which make ordered and good life possible. It shared with its red and brown siblings the same moral relativism and disregard for personal responsibility (but in a different form, of “Ve Are All Guilty!”). Above all, it shared with them the arrogant belief that people could solve all the mysteries of the universe by their own unaided intellects.

This was the voice of 1789, all right, but without the raw emotion and Freude of Romantic millenarianism - it is too Puritan for that! Its initiates are, by now, firmly entrenched in the academe, in the media, and in government, from Brussels to Canberra, from Vienna to Ottawa. Jean-Jacques Rousseau may go on burning wherever he is now, with one comforting thought: his dictum that human beings could be transformed by the political process was not defeated at Waterloo in 1815, in the Berlin bunker in 1945, or on the Berlin wall in 1989. ‘Liberal democrats’ are keeping the legacy alive and well: the ever-sprawling Nanny State would bring the good things to all - regardless of the preferences of the hoi polloi - and they would selflessly run the show for the good of all. 

And what are the goodies to be force fed to us all? According to Samuel Huntington (a man who explicitly puts Orthodoxy in the same league with Islam vis-a-vis ‘the West’) the core concepts of our civilization are supposed to be individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state. Kristol and Kagan, Albright and Lake, Berger and Cohen, Al Gore and both Clintons… would agree wholeheartedly, especially since there is no mention of Christianity, of shared ethnic and linguistic origins of the European family, of common historical experiences.

The corollary of such ‘core concepts’ is an array of secondary ‘isms’ and movements, which my friend Jim Jatras lists as feminism, environmentalism, homosexualism, consumerism, evolutionism, hedonism, educationism, antidiscriminationism, eroticism, etc., “which are used to further break down traditional moral restraints and national  identity, leaving an atomized population without resistance to ideological direction.” Notions which would have struck our grandfathers as eccentric at best, demonic at worst, but at all times insane, now rule the ‘mainstream’. To them any notion of an ethno-religious culture, inhabiting a homeland, is verboten. In the meantime, as any visitor to the low-cost suburbs of Berlin, Marseilles, Bradford or L.A. may testify, our world is "the candy store with the busted lock."  While a wholesale migratory invasion proceeds unabated, our hegemonist elites still pretend that we are running the show: hey, you can get a Big Mac in Ouagadougou, and listed to Michael Jackson in Jakarta.

But to ‘them’ - neoconservatives and liberals alike - the enemy is still in the East. The Serb today, the Russian tomorrow… and the Greek had better take notice, lest the Turk be unleashed for another bout of ethnic cleansing, the likes of which we’ve seen in Smyrna in 1922, in Constantinople in 1955, and in Cyprus in 1974. In their heart of hearts the globalists fear the revival of Christianity, and want to perpetrate the old Schism that has done so much harm to us all. They are not content with the moral, spiritual and demographic wasteland they have created in what used to be Christendom; they are plotting the final showdown - in the tradition of the  infamous Fourth Crusade, almost 800 years ago, which allowed the Ottomans to sweep across Asia Minor, the Balkans, and up the Danubian plain all the way to Vienna. What else is the meaning of not merely preserving NATO - now that the threat which created it is gone - but extending it eastwards? It is seen as a hostile act in Moscow, and it IS a hostile act, a logical follow-up to the ongoing plunder of Russia’s natural resources, in conjunction with the treasonous gang of recycled apparatchiks who currently run that country. One supplementary motive for the kind of policy the U.S. government has pursued in the Balkans was to set up the political, legal, military and psychological precedent for the demolition of Russia as a great power, its permanent exclusion from ‘Europe’ and its consignment to the depths of the Eurasian land-mass, with a cordon sanitaire of NWO satellites around it.

      The pursuit of Global Power for its own sake is the Great Temptation in human history, the path of ruin that winds from Xerxes, the Persian King of Kings, to Napoleon and Hitler. But how are we to raise the alarm if so many Americans have never heard of the first, and have only the foggiest of notions about the other two, if they are ignorant of their own history, let alone that of other peoples’? Who will listen when we warn that their rulers are doing in Europe today what Athens did after leading the Hellenic coalition against Persian aggression, attempting to convert leadership into hegemony? The result, as we know, was destruction of Hellas as a political and military factor for all time, and America will be just as surely destroyed if its rulers are allowed to proceed with their mad quest for the Weltmacht.

As per Cicero, failure to remember what has gone on before condemns us to remain forever children. Albright’s and Clinton’s hubris is the path which Washington and Jefferson forbade America ever to take. Given the choice, the people of this country would never opt for it, but can they prevent it, in this age of ‘managed mass democracy’? The American foreign policy elite - and this term is woefully inadequate in the context - is hell-bent on forcing 250 million to follow their path of Global Glory, and their co-conspirators in the media are calling it a pilgrimage. Bosnia was the litmus test, and they claim it worked. Kosovo is a well-rehearsed sequel. If there is any comfort in all this, it is the certainty that power will ultimately generate countervailing power. I know not how this will come about; but the least we can do is to warn against the Project, and the pointless sacrifices it will entail, including the ruin of America itself. This struggle carries no guarantee of success, but it is the quest for sanity and common decency, armed with faith and love, that epitomizes the story of humanity throughout the ages.

Eight years ago, quite by accident, I came across two Serb names in the midst of the Confederate soldiers' cemetery in Vicksburg, Mississippi. An incurable pessimist might say that it was all too apt for those two Southern Serbs to have fallen fighting for The Lost Cause. I disagree, not only because I believe that no just cause is ever totally lost. If they deemed their new homeland worth fighting for, they had found the Archimedean ‘place to stand’ without which we move nothing, which helps us to go on, because we know that, ultimately, this world is divinely ordained Kosmos, not Chaos. Were it the latter, then - as Dostoevsky reminds us - everything would be allowed, including the wanton destruction of the Orthodox nation of my forebears by the people who run America, but who deny the American nation.

Let me add a personal note. Quite apart from the Balkans, what they are doing to this country pains me deeply. As a Serb by birth who would not have made America his home had it not been rooted in the European, Christian tradition, and who would not be able to love it were it merely a melange of whoever and whatever happens to be within its borders at any given moment in time, I desperately hope that it will be able to withstand the onslaught of one-world enthusiasts and eroders of its sovereignty.

What they did in the Balkans over the past eight years is just a case study of what they can, and therefore will do, wherever they can. They’ll lie and cheat, and deny what they’re up to; but then, THEY don't know the meaning of shame. We do, living, as we are, in this presidency.

Dr. Trifkovic is Executive Director of The Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan Studies and a corresponding editor of “Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture”

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