The Bosnia List Quotes

Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It's not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights -- the "right" to education, the "right" to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery -- hay and a barn for human cattle. There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.

Bosnia is known as the powder keg of Yugoslavia, which itself is known as the powder keg of the Balkans, which in turn is reputed to be the powder keg of Europe. I would like to lengthen the list a bit by noting that Slobodan Milosevic was the powder keg of Bosnia. He is also one of the most extraordinary men you could hope to meet in your lifetime, a Halley's Comet of dictators, appearing once or twice a century. p. 199

That war [Bosnian war] in the early 1990s changed a lot for me. I never thought I would see, in Europe, a full-dress reprise of internment camps, the mass murder of civilians, the reinstiutution of torture and rape as acts of policy. And I didn't expect so many of my comrades to be indifferent - or even take the side of the fascists. It was a time when many people on the left were saying 'Don't intervene, we'll only make things worse' or, 'Don't intervene, it might destabilise the region. And I thought - destabilisation of fascist regimes is a good thing. Why should the left care about the stability of undemocratic regimes? Wasn't it a good thing to destabilise the regime of General Franco? It was a time when the left was mostly taking the conservative, status quo position - leave the Balkans alone, leave Milosevic alone, do nothing. And that kind of conservatism can easily mutate into actual support for the aggressors. Weimar-style conservatism can easily mutate into National Socialism. So you had people like Noam Chomsky's co-author Ed Herman go from saying 'Do nothing in the Balkans', to actually supporting Milosevic, the most reactionary force in the region. That's when I began to first find myself on the same side as the neocons. I was signing petitions in favour of action in Bosnia, and I would look down the list of names and I kept finding, there's Richard Perle. There's Paul Wolfowitz. That seemed interesting to me. These people were saying that we had to act. Before, I had avoided them like the plague, especially because of what they said about General Sharon and about Nicaragua. But nobody could say they were interested in oil in the Balkans, or in strategic needs, and the people who tried to say that - like Chomsky - looked ridiculous. So now I was interested.

For six years, you showed Pero reverence and admiration. So Pero, a sociopath, didn’t want to extinguish the rare flame of respect that illuminated his worthless ego,” Brian explained. “Killing you would have made him feel less powerful, not more.

It’s so savage. So primitive.” “Modern man isn’t far behind. Think of the Nazis in WWII. The Serbs in Bosnia. Khmer Rouge. Taliban. Chechnya. The list goes on. It’s all the same. Mass murder followed by cover-up. Nothing changes.

As first lady, she claimed to know nothing about the Travelgate firings when the evidence showed she ordered them herself. Later, on the 2008 campaign trail, she repeatedly told a story about how she had been under sniper fire and ran for cover when her plane landed in Tuzla, Bosnia. Video footage, however, showed there was no sniper fire and in fact Hillary was greeted on the tarmac by a child who read her a poem. She blamed the Benghazi attacks on an Internet video when she knew that was a fable. This is a highly abbreviated list.

The first sacrifice of the war was her flowers. We kept our shades closed to avoid being sprayed with bullets. Without sunlight, her cactus and hibiscus withered. During the fighting, patriotic anthems took over the radio - when we had batteries to listen. To avoid any trouble, she turned the music off. She had to watch, mute, while her plants died one by one.

I'd thought we were the ones who'd suffered more, torn from everything we'd known, sudden strangers in a new town with no friends or family, having to start everything over - penniless, car-less, petrified, stuck in other people's houses with a strange accent and foreign tongue. I'd flown back to my homeland still feeling rejected and bruised and twelve. I'd expected apologies and atonement to heal my old wounds. I had no idea I'd been insensitive myself. I'd been so myopic, I didn't even know that I'd neglected my closest relatives.

In reality, there was no happy ending. There was not even a clear military defence that we could mourn and start to recover from. The war was an open-ended, ongoing disaster, with no point, no positive outcome, no conclusive wisdom, no closure. But I couldn't settle for that unsatisfying stalemate.

I wondered whether by evoking endearing images of a common past I wouldn’t obscure the bloody images of the recent war, whether by reminding them of how Kiki sweets tasted I wouldn’t obliterate the case of the Belgrade boy stabbed to death by his coevals just because he was an Albanian, whether by urging them to “reflect on” Mirko and Slavko, the Yugopartisans of the popular comic strip, I wouldn’t be postponing their confrontation with the countless episodes of sadism perpetrated by Yugowarriors, drunk and crazed with momentary power, against their compatriots; or whether by calling up the popular refrain That’s what happens, my fair maiden, once you’ve known a Bosnian’s kiss I wouldn’t be dulling the impact of the countless deaths in Bosnia, that of Selim’s father, for instance. The lists of atrocities knew no end, and here I was, pushing them into the background with cheery catalogs of everyday trifles that no longer even existed.

After World War II, Germany apologized to Jewish victims of the Nazis, offering billions in reparations.

I looked around their small, modest, unfinished home, filled with other people’s ragtag, twenty-year-old furniture. Zorica’s Croatian house had been taken from her; her family had also been persecuted for their ethnicity. She’d battled cancer. Milos didn’t want to fight in the war. He was driving a cab to keep this roof over their heads. They were victims too. •

Throughout this section, we’ve seen how the US government, which increasingly resembles a terrorist organization, worked with extremists, including its then-asset Osama bin Laden, to destabilize and then destroy Serbia. According to John Schindler, professor of strategy at the US Naval War College, the American Department of State and President Clinton sought to bomb the Serbs to help the Muslims, “following the lead of progressive opinion on Bosnia.” Thousands of Arab-Afghans (Saudis, Yemenis, Algerians, Egyptians, Tunisians, Iraqis, Libyans, Jordanians, and others), with extensive combat experience gained fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan on behalf of the Americans, opened a new front in the Balkans. They had weapons procured with help from the US government, as well as money from the Saudis and Americans, including that passed through the al-Farooq mosque in Brooklyn. They had the assistance of the Maktab al-Khidamat (Services Office), set up to recruit, train, and aid fighters for the Afghan war. Richard Holbrooke, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, wanted a repeat of the Afghanistan model in the Balkans, using Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan to send arms to the combatants. Front companies, secret arms drops, and Clinton’s National Security Council all played a role. The result was the creation of a larger and more capable cadre of murderers, war criminals, and human rights violators. They enabled the United States to topple a socialist opponent of its policies in Yugoslavia, tap the natural resources of the region, and control the routes from and access to oil and natural gas in Central Asia. American propaganda that flooded the media about murderers, war criminals, and human rights violators was particularly effective in gaining support in the United States and abroad. Like actions against the USSR, the United States trained fighters, supplied arms, and provided financial aid to rebels seeking to overthrow their government. Washington and NATO applied economic sanctions to Yugoslavia, hastening the country’s collapse. The KLA, directly supported and politically empowered by NATO in 1998, had been listed by the US State Department as a terrorist organization supported in part by loans from Islamic individuals, among them allegedly Osama bin Laden.