Crimes of Fascism, Crimes of Silence - the Myth of Albanian Revenge
By George Thompson (posted 12-17-1999) Introduction by Jared Israel
Editor's Note: This is the third of five parts of an Report that every American needs to read. It has bothered me for several years that the American press has NEVER made any effort to honestly report what is happening in the Balkans.
How can I say that? Because every report, going back to the Bosnian conflicts, were invariably reported only from the Muslim perspective. I spent a lot of time checking numbers of Muslims who actually lived in the towns where, it was reported, large numbers of Muslims were "massacred" by Serbs. The numbers killed often exceeded the numbers that were there in the first place by thousands. Reporters were not reporting where all the supposedly "missing" Muslims had come from.
It has not been said in this report, but the facts are so different than what you are being told, just as was the case in the 1930s when Adoph Hitler was convincing the German people that the Poles were planning to "attack Germany," as he planned his attack ON Poland, that you, as an individual are faced with the sobering challenge: Are Americans standing silently by as an entire nation of people are being killed or forced to flee yet ANOTHER European nation?
Mary Mostert, Analyst, Original Sources (www.originalsources.com)
The Committee for National Solidarity Tolstojeva 34, 11000 Belgrade, YU
Imagine that the Serbs were Jews. Does this sound far-fetched? I believe it's apt. First of all, after the Jews, the Serbs suffered the worst slaughter at the hands of World War II Nazi's and the Nazi proxy groups in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. You see, when Hitler's troops invaded Yugoslavia the Serbian people, and both political factions among the Serbs (the royalist Chetniks and the communist Partisans) refused to round up the Jews. This convinced Mr. Hitler that the Serbs had low culture and he supported plans for their extermination, in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. Moving to the present, there are now over a million refugees in Serbia, about 10% of the population. The entire Serbian population has been driven from the two main Serbian ancestral areas (the Krajina section of what is now Croatia, and also from Kosovo). Literally tens of thousands have been slaughtered. Serbs who remain in Kosovo, in towns such as Orahovac, are literally imprisoned in Warsaw Ghetto-type situations. And Serbs have been subjected to vicious and largely unanswered attacks in the media for ten years. This includes special issues of magazines and other reading material used in elementary schools throughout the US, so that Serbian-Americans can be tormented even before they get to be full-blown, grown-up monster Serbs. Doesn't all this resemble the treatment given the Jews in Eastern Europe during WWII? It does to THIS Jew.
By way of illustration
Anyway, even if you disapprove my Serbian-Jewish comparison, please stay with it for a moment. Let the imagination soar. Imagine: it is World War II. Some Jews and some Gentile "defenders" of the Jews are putting forward Position Two, you know, helping out the way Prof. Chomsky, Z Website, Fr. Sava and the others do today. They are arguing that sure, maybe some Jews do grind up Gentile kids for Matzo - but not ALL Jews. Hitler is greatly exaggerating. And even if the Jews do sometimes grind up a Gentile baby or two, is this a valid reason to butcher all Jews? No way. Moreover, the whole thing is the fault of certain authoritarian Jewish leaders who have organized the gentile-grinding groups so stop blaming the whole Jewish religion for the crimes of these authoritarian rulers! By attacking all the Jews, you just make the authoritarian Jews more powerful. Instead, Mr. Hitler should help the anti-grinding Jews take over and before you know it Gentile-grinding will be a thing of memory.
Imagine now that an anti-Auschwitz organizer is speaking to a group of Gentiles. The minute the organizer brings up the issue of the Jews, the thought of MEAT GRINDERS comes quite involuntarily to the Gentile mind. The gentiles quietly turn green and they think: we sure don't want to see anybody get gassed, but dear God those Jews are some AWFUL people.
This in fact is similar to what really happened in World War II. Anti-Semitism was so pervasive that many people who would not have themselves advocated gassing six million human beings were hesitant to come to their defense. They therefore did nothing. That was all the murderers needed.
THE SERBIAN PEOPLE - AND GOVERNMENT - DESERVE OUR SUPPORT
That's the Third Position. It is held by many in the American peace movement, by almost all Serbs in Serbia, by most people in the European peace movement, probably by most people in most other countries, by perhaps MOST Serbs living outside Serbia including in the U.S. and by Emperors-Clothes.com. And by me.
According to Position 3: the moral equivalency of Position Two is profoundly wrong. The Serbian "regime" (as Position Two people like to call the elected government that runs Serbia) had and has a perfect right to GO TO WAR to defend its territory - KOSOVO and the rest of SERBIA. If it has made mistakes these are mistakes that were made IN A JUST CAUSE. The Albanian minority is not and never was an oppressed group.