Byzantine Blog

Shouldn't the new "Iron Curtain" include SEATO (the Asian equivalent of NATO)?

SEATO was dissolved on June 30, 1977

My mistake... I was under the impression that the alliance was still active and that Japan and South Korea were members. Though it does raise questions as to why SEATO isn’t active when NATO is still active.

Deucaon...I haven't verified this but I'm thinking SEATO may have been dissolved as a result of the US "bugout" in Vietnam. Can't imagine any SEATO member wanting an ally with a history of bugging out when the fight is only half over...too timid to win and too gutless to stay the course...the US ran and took all military and economic aid with them. That is unless the adversary is non-communist and/or islamist and 1/100th your size (i.e.,Serbia) and no friends to stand with them.

Didn't NATO aggression against Serbia actually begin well before 1999? What about Bosnia-Herzgovinia in the early/mid 90's and the Krajina pogroms and genocide in which the US military provided operational support to the croat and muslim thugs?

@joesixpack31

I figured it was the result of Vietnam.

NATO aggression against Serbs did start much earlier... 1995 in fact (unless you count sanctions as aggression in which case it was 1991.) Both Republika Srpska Krajina and Republika Srpska Bosna were bombed by NATO forces while Croat/Muslim forces committed themselves to a ground offensive and were stopped short of Banja Luka by Arkan and his militiamen. The bombings forced Mladic to take action and put place captured UNPROFOR POWs in areas he thought NATO would bomb which (among other things) stopped the bombings. Also, Milosevic had a trade embargo on Republika Srpska Bosna and Republika Srpska Krajina since 1994 so the mechanized units within both armies were in no shape to fight. Basically it was a slaughter until Arkan showed up and Mladic took action.

I agree with most of what is written here, but I think it is counter-productive to have that map.

First of all, whatever NATO is, it's not behind an Iron Curtain, since people and information can travel quite across the borders.

Also, the non-NATO world is in no way "The Free World."

Considering the serious written content in the posting, a more serious illustration would be both more appropriate and more effective.

This style of propaganda no doubt appeals to the Michael Moore Move On Cindy Sheehan crowd, but of course there the same evil bastards who whipped up The War on Serbs in order to suck up to Muslims and distract the population from Clinton's whore-mongering.

I think that much of the demonization of Serbs (and now Russians) is due to the widespread and unselfconscious bigotry against Orthodox Christians. I say "unselfconscious" because most of the people who share that bigotry aren't even aware of it and would strongly deny ever even thinking about religion. But it's a habit of thought that pervades the Protestant and secular Roman Catholic West. It's something inherited from centuries of religious bigotry.

Most Westerners now take it for granted that "normal" = people who don't take religion very seriously.

I think this is the essential feature of New World Order: an assumption that multi-kulti, "post-nationalistic", "post-Christian", mildly religious, mildly socialistic, non-sectarian moral relativism is the essence of civilization. And the natural centres of civilization are found in London, New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, Frankfurt, Paris, etc. The same prejudices are shared by British "Conservatives" and Labourites, Canadian Conservatives and Liberals, American Republicans and Democrats, Western European Nationalists and EUrophiles. This should be obvious in the way that no matter how diverse they are culturally or politically, they can all come together and agree that Serbs and Russians are the only nations in the world today that everyone is free to hate.

Their arguments over Islam hide the fact that they share the same assumptions there too, but just disagree about methods. Almost everyone on the left or right agrees that if Muslims could just be assimilated and civilized then Muslims too will start taking religion as a joke and abandon Jihad and just get on board.

Their "humanitarian intervention" on behalf of Jihad against Orthodox Serbs was inspired or tinged throughout with the beliefs that:

(a) Crushing Serbs into submission wold force them to see the wisdom of abandoning "old-fashioned" "unenlightened" ideas about faith, and either get on the decadent secular bandwagon, or start Church-shopping like most Protestants due, or just submit to Rome and get used to it (different Westerners have different goals, but Orthodoxy is an obstacle to all of them) and

(b) Showing Muslims that Western nominal Christians are willing to spend a fortune and risk Western lives to kill Christians for the sake of Muslims would convince Muslims to love the West and get on board with the One World Government project.

I agree with most of what Akira says, except about the NATO countries: the information is absolutely not freely available in any of the NATO member-states and we are the best witnesses to that for the past two decades -- the information gets to the world under NATO boots thoroughly filtered, heavily censored and barely resembling reality on every single issue. NATO-member states do not operate with facts and information, they operate with propaganda, pure and simple. And there are literally countless examples to prove this.

As for people being able to travel abroad, well, so could we from former Yugoslavia. Not only could we travel everywhere, whenever and wherever we wanted to, but our passports were the most highly valued on the black market and we had to carefully guard them, because they were often stolen. And yet, Yugoslavia was also always referred to as the country "behind the iron curtain," only because of the socialist system. I think today's NATO-member states are more in the darkness about the key facts about the world that surrounds them than Yugoslavia ever was and their states' system is closest to fascism.

I like the map. Even if the rest of the world isn't perfectly free, it is freer than NATO in the sense it doesn't have to horde-up and gang up on different spots of the world, as Washington Massahs' caprices dictate.

Akira, brother, wonderful blog! truly unique and exceptional in more than one sense.

Pravoslavophobia is one of the keys, of course. Satanism is another (destruction of 154 Christian altars in Kosovo and Metohija province alone is a good news to many we naively expected to be as horrified as the Orthodox Christians are).

Lazar, quite right about NATO states. This is closest to fascism one can get.

Ditto Lazar - well put.
You have only to watch the current propaganda blitz against Russia to see what is going on in the western media.
Fortunately we now have the alterate news via the internet sites and that has broken the stranglehold of the Western media barons.
Had the war on Serbia taken place in today's computer age I think the Serbs would have had a better chance because their side would have been aired instead of being censored completely in the establishment media. Censored to the extent of the bombing of the Belgrade TV station - a war crime someone should be paying for.

Thanks, "BBlogstaff"

+ + +

Lazar, nowhere in the world is information just handed to you on a silver platter, but in most of the West, if you want to educate yourself about almost anything, then you're free to do so. This is obviously not the case in Communist China or North Korea or Zimbabwe or Saudi Arabia.

The problem is more cultural than legal. People have freedom to inform themselves, but don't take advantage of it. People are free to vote, but don't bother doing so. Almost any law-abiding citizen can run in an election, but often The Media Party conspires to bring down and discredit certain candidates [the trusty old "Racist!" "Homophobe!" "Misogynist!" "Islamophobe!" etc labels are deployed to this end.

People choosing to be ignorant is not the same as people kept ignorant by government fiat.

I really the problem is cultural. It's like when an old man told me how he used to bring a rifle to school every day, and the teacher would tell him to leave it in the corner. Then he'd try and shoot a rabbit or whatever on the way home, for dinner. He said, "Nobody, ever, ever, would have thought of shooting the teachers or kids." Now kids can't even make pretend gun signs with their fingers ("Bang! Bang!) without getting suspended.

As for Yugoslavia being behind the Iron Curtain. As far as I remember, Yugoslavia was never really considered an Iron Curtain country. That term was widely associated with the territory held by the Kremlin and the Red Army, no? All sorts of people used to go on holidays all the time in Yugoslavia, just for the climate and scenery and prices.

+ + +

I really wouldn't call NATO fascist. I think the problem is the "humanitarian" urge to enlighten and lift up the lesser "races" and nations, even as this great "humanitarian" civilization is constantly trashed from within.

Matthew 7:3; Luke 6:42.

Perhaps the problem with NATO and the West in general is the widespread desire to be good, to do good, to take action to help the oppressed, even though most people are too ill-informed to know how to achieve that good result, or identify the nature or source of the oppression; and at the same time society is being corrupted and people refuse to even identify what is good and what is evil. Even the word "evil" is laughably old-fashioned.

Who do you think would be more hated by the public; a gay guy who blew up a school bus, or a politician who called the bomber an "evil faggot"?

Or think of the London bus bombers. Does anyone in Britain even remember their names? [Admittedly, it's difficult when they're all called "Muhammad"] I doubt it. But if a politician dared call them "Murderous Muslim bastards!", you can be sure that politician's name would be on every newscast for a month until he was hounded out of office. It's like that movie "Munich". Spielberg and the writer are obviously more critical of the government plan to wipe out killers than they are of the original killers.

I think we're living through a very bizarre and unique cultural phase of human society. Massive ego and self-love and arrogance, combined with extreme self-loathing and moral cowardice and indifference.

Related:

http://brianakira.wordpress.com/2008/08/29/legalism-reality-morality-in-the-balkans-caucasus/

Please note what Solyzhenitsyn observed about the obsession with legalism [not The Law, in the Judeo-Christian sense of Truth and morality; but rather the drive to achieve legalistic cover for one’s actions, regardless of their morality]:

http://brianakira.wordpress.com/2008/08/05/aleksandr-isayevich-solzhenitsyn-rest-in-peace/

Solzhenitsyn:

"Western society has chosen for itself the organization best suited to its purposes and one I might call legalistic. The limits of human rights and rightness are determined by a system of laws; such limits are very broad. People in the West have acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting, and manipulating law (though laws tend to be too complicated for an average person to understand without the help of an expert). Every conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the ultimate solution."
...
"A society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society based on the letter of the law and never reaching any higher fails to take full advantage of the full range of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man’s noblest impulses.

"And it will be simply impossible to bear up to the trials of this threatening century with nothing but the supports of a legalistic structure."

Hello Akira

I'm afraid I find it difficult to have much sympathy with your last post.
'. People are free to vote, but don't bother doing so. Almost any law-abiding citizen can run in an election,' How simplistic can you get? In England, where I live there is no point. All three major parties are identical in policy. Not a tissue paper between them. You get to vote for the colour of the rosette the candidate is wearing. You get global, neocon, mass immigration, europe, neo-liberalism, anti Russia/Serbia and all the trimmings with all the parties. Regardless of public sentiment you get no vote against.
It is certainly also true of the USA and most other western countries. Democracy for me and most other western people is now a total sham.
I look longingly at Serbia, Russia amongst others. They still get a real choice. That is democracy how ever much the west slags it off.
'Perhaps the problem with NATO and the West in general is the widespread desire to be good, to do good, to take action to help the oppressed'
This takes not just the biscuit but the biscuit barrel for stupidity, naivety, call it what you will.
If you believe that people can inform and educate themselves I suggest you start.
Information Clearing House, Antiwar, What really happened, even good old Rense.
Google Paul Craig Roberts and start to read.
Pat Buchanan, Nabojsa Malic. There is no excuse for writing such a blindingly obvious incorrect and misleading statement as yours on NATO.
Explain that to the 1.2 MILLION!!!! Iraqi war dead, courtesy of NATO. The ICH keeps a tally, please check it out. As you say there is NO EXCUSE not to know.
The 70 dead Afghan children from the other day - how many other dead Afghans has NATO 'sought to do good by'. Tens of thousands are now rotting in their graves. That is really doing good.
But more to the point on this board - what good did NATO 'mistakenly' think it was doing when it blitzed the people and nation of Serbia for resisting the islamic terror NATO was paying for, training, arming.
Real good that was!!!!
The good that NATO did bombing schools, hospitals, power plants - everything - cluster bombs included.
As the butcher said - bombing back to the stone age.
If thats your idea of good then your quoting the christian bible seems singularly inappropriate to me.
Of course perhaps you mean they seek to do good but make mistakes. No way!! you don't make that many mistakes. I can't believe that anyone would believe that ridiculous assumption.
Are you even for real?

Elizabeth,

I'm not sure what your argument with me is based on.

Hello Akira

You say I'm "simplistic" for writing, "People are free to vote, but don't bother doing so. Almost any law-abiding citizen can run in an election." Whether I'm a simpleton or a complicated soul is irrelevant to the truth of my statement.

You write, "In England, where I live there is no point. All three major parties are identical in policy."

I'm sure that's more or less true, but who's fault is that. Isn't that the apathy I was referring to. The media plays a big part in that too (which is why I wrote "The Media Party"), when they trash anyone who comes close to threatening the status quo. Again, who's fault is that? Why haven't people risen up and trashed the BBC mandatory license fee? Are people forced to buy the Guardian and Times and Daily Mail? That's part of being a free people: Brits are free to be dumb and apathetic and concerned with dope and gossip, and many of them avail themselves of these freedoms.

You write: "You get to vote for the colour of the rosette the candidate is wearing. You get global, neocon, mass immigration, europe, neo-liberalism, anti Russia/Serbia and all the trimmings with all the parties. Regardless of public sentiment you get no vote against."

Is that my fault? By the way, no offense, but you yourself display the typical English apathy and sense of entitlement that is destroying Britain. "Why don't we have a better choice! Moan moan! Is this all we're given!?"

Me: "Perhaps the problem with NATO and the West in general is the widespread desire to be good, to do good, to take action to help the oppressed"

You: "This takes not just the biscuit but the biscuit barrel for stupidity, naivety, call it what you will."

First of all, the rest of that sentence was, "even though most people are too ill-informed to know how to achieve that good result, or identify the nature or source of the oppression; and at the same time society is being corrupted and people refuse to even identify what is good and what is evil."

Try to quote in context.

What's your problem with what I said anyway? Wasn't "Let's save the poor Bosnians" sold and supported as "Humanitarian Intervention"? And Kosovo too. And "Poor Georgia! We must do something to help these poor innocent peace-loving democrats!" And isn't Western media bloated with appeals to help women and gays and Blacks and Asians and Muslims and Jews and Burma and Darfur and a million and one other causes?

I never said that NATO was good, did I? I said that "in NATO and the West in general there is the widespread desire to be good, to do good." Desire. Learn to read please.

And BTW, there is no NATO involvement or deployment in Iraq.

Sorry, I don't have time to educate you further.

Akira...I don't believe I've ever seen "Serbophobia" and our current world dilemma analyzed any better than in your first post above. You have done a masterful job of analyzing the "mindless" mindset of modern protestants and evangelicans in thinking they can gain the love of islam the "religion of love"-G.W. Bush, by throwing the true Christian Church under the bus.

And Elizabeth, you have done a masterful job of rebutting Akira's statement re "NATO not an iron curtain". While NATO is not yet totally walled in with machine nests guarding against escape, there are extremely weird things going in addition to the one party politics that you mention Elizabeth ranging from our widespread election fraud in the US to legislative iniatives to turn over all broadcast content: radio, TV and internet to government to enable the widespread censorship of all broadcast content. While the west is not yet an "iron curtain" entity, it is rapidly heading in that direction and not for any altruistic motives.

Serbia say "Good by to habeas corpus"! Welcome to the Gulag EU !

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article4664049.ece

September 3, 2008

EU approves proposal to try Britons in their absence in foreign courts
September 3, 2008

Akira, hold your horses! Elizabeth has a right to disagree with you without having to suffer insults because of that. Be nice.

All those who have wronged the serbian people should just get run over by a car like the dogs that they are, Period!. nothing would make me happier, but of course we all live in a real world dont we?. But as all previous empires have fallen on the sword of srbija, so too shall the UStaseA. When I attend services I light a candle for life, a candle for my brother, and a candle for all the innocent victims of the USA,NATO,UN,EU aggression. Because I have faith in god and I know that god will give justice to those who can no longer speak.
Boze Pravde
СА ВЕРОМ У БОГА СЛОБОДА ИЛИ СМРТ

Hello Akira
'Perhaps the problem with NATO and the West in general'........
Your words.
You did not specify NATO but the 'west in general'.
Sure as heck its not the Russians in Iraq.
Last news I saw it was definitely the 'west'. They were largely wearing American uniforms and carrying american guns.
The same forces, same stars and stripes that bombed the defenseless Serbs for 78 days and nights from 30,000 feet, undoubtedly wishing to help the oppressed. The oppressed being of course a pack of murderous islamic terrorists that the west created, armed and trained.
If you wish to criticise me - be my guest, but at least be accurate.

Desire to do good may have existed at some point, but for the longest time it has been only an empty phrase, used to put the public back to sleep and reassure the die hard optimists Western powers are still the best thing there is, "good in essence", from time to time bungling things out of naivety and benevolent clumsiness. That is untrue.

There is no desire to do good, there is only desire to dominate the world while pillaging its resources. Period. There is no morality plot hiding behind, no good will and no 'best intentions'. There is crude interest, will to power and hegemony of which NATO is a cruel fist, used accordingly, to crush everyone who shows a shred of disobedience. Americans need to snap out of it and face the truth.

As Paul Craig Roberts wrote:

"The success of the Bush Regime’s propaganda, lies, and deception with gullible and inattentive Americans since 9/11 has made it difficult for intelligent, aware people to be optimistic about the future of the United States. For almost 8 years the US media has served as Ministry of Propaganda for a war criminal regime. Americans incapable of thinking for themselves, reading between the lines, or accessing foreign media on the Internet have been brainwashed.

"As the Nazi propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, said, it is easy to deceive a people. You just tell them they have been attacked and wave the flag.

"It certainly worked with Americans.

"[...] What we do know is that all this murder and destruction has no justification and is evil. It is the work of evil men who have no qualms about lying and deceiving in order to kill innocent people to achieve their undeclared agenda.

"That such evil people have control over the United States government and media damns the American public for eternity."

The Legion is their name. There are no good intentions, no inner-basic-essential goodness, no confusion, it is pure evil.

1. "Elizabeth has a right to disagree with you without having to suffer insults because of that. Be nice."

Insults?: "simplistic" "stupidity" "ridiculous" "are you even for real?"

2. Elizabeth: "Its not the Russians in Iraq. Last news I saw it was definitely the 'west'. They were largely wearing American uniforms and carrying american guns. The same forces, same stars and stripes that bombed the defenseless Serbs for 78 days and nights from 30,000 feet, undoubtedly wishing to help the oppressed."

Actually, Russians went to war with Iraq less than 20 years ago. Ukrainians, Poles, Georgians, Romanians, Koreans, Uzbeks etc have fought in Iraq more recently. Russia aided Saddam's Iraq in the present Iraq War including Spetnaz missions.

Elizabeth: "1.2 MILLION!!!! Iraqi war dead, courtesy of NATO"

NATO is not involved in the Iraq War.

The basis of the Gulf & Iraq Wars were geopolitical. They are and were the consequence of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, which destabilized both the world economy and international order, and was opposed by virtually every nation in the world; and exacerbated by Iraq's aggression against Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, etc.

All the talk of oppressed Kurds and Shia and so on is the normal sort of war propaganda known since the dawn of history. However, neither war was an example of the kind of "Humanitarian Intervention" that was specifically evoked by the likes of Madeline Albright and Clinton and Blair and Chirac in the Bosnian and Kosovo wars. The actions of Bosnian Serbs or Milosovic or Yugoslavia in Kosovo province did not justify any of the NATO military involvement that ended up taking place in both cases. Also, they were contrary to the letter and spirit of the NATO charter. To try and equate Serbs with Saddam's Iraq strikes me as very offensive to Serbs.

NATO's war against Afghanistan was legally and morally justified since the Taliban sheltered those responsible for acts of war against the United States.

However, the present legal and moral problems with Iraq and Afghanistan can be traced to the sort of widespread uber-"humanitarianism" that I originally alluded to here. The drive to liberate and "raise up". And of course the idea propagated by the likes of Wolfowitz that "moderates" are the "real" Muslims, and that the Muslim world can be civilized and reformed and made "normal" through Western benevolence.

I have always loved this blog but I can't agree with that map. Because of the plight of the Serbs (since at least 1878) I got to the point where I regard all governments, not just the Western ones, as terrorists of one kind of another. The Serbs and their own ancestral lands are the only side that always ends up paying the price, one way or another, for the murderous actions of the rest of the world. I have seen so many, too many things change since the late '80s that I don't think I could have any other world view, as far as politics, even at 29 years of age. The idea of this series of events to be held next spring is fantastic. Too bad in Rome there seem to be too few Serbs but I will try to do my little bit to help spread the awareness of this wonderful project.