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The West Lied About Kosovo

It should be obvious by now that the idealistic rhetoric of American and Western European hegemonists is a whitewash of their neo-imperialist ambitions, as evidenced by their reversal over the sovereignty of Kosovo. Prior to the 1999 NATO invasion of Yugoslavia, the Western allies agreed to UN Security Council Resolution 1160, which affirmed “the commitment of all Member States to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.” During the bombing, the G-8 countries agreed to “an interim administration for Kosovo … under which the people of Kosovo can enjoy substantial autonomy within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.”

As the Russians and Serbs recognized, these assurances were empty lies, as the West in practice has shown little regard for Serbian sovereignty over the province, which dates back to the Middle Ages. After the NATO bombing, the Yugoslav army was forced to withdraw from Kosovo, resulting in the ethnic cleansing of 250,000 Serbs from the province under the intimidation of the Kosovo Liberation Army, a Muslim guerrilla organization with a history of kidnappings and reprisal killings. Historic Orthodox churches and monasteries were vandalized or destroyed, erasing much of Kosovo’s cultural legacy.

The aftermath of the war revealed that NATO accusations of Serbian war crimes were greatly inflated, but nonetheless the West relentlessly pursued the prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic, while neglecting similar crimes committed by Croats and Muslims during the Yugoslav wars. This ploy of magnifying the threat posed by a weak adversary is a common imperialist tactic used to justify lopsided military interventions.

Now, President Bush’s statement that Kosovo should be independent is nothing more than a logical culmination of Western policy designed to weaken Serbia to the point of irrelevance. Since the bogeyman of Milosevic can no longer be invoked, it is clear that the real crime of Yugoslavia was its strength and independence of the West. With its dismemberment, the West can easily impose its interests throughout the Balkans as it has done in the rest of Eastern Europe.

Putin knows better than to trust the West, which is why he had the prudence to send troops into Pristina ahead of the NATO forces. He also knows that the U.S. claim that Eastern Europe needs a missile shield against North Korea and Iran is a clumsy lie, so he has sought to defuse this claim with a counterproposal for a shield based in Azerbaijan. The destruction of Yugoslavia and expansion of NATO are an affront to Russian ambitions that will not pass without firm resistance.

Apart from exacerbating tensions with Russia, the West’s reversal on the independence of Kosovo undermines the credibility of claims to support a unified Iraq. Once again, the real goal of invasion was to squash the regional ambitions of a second-tier power, in this case rendering Iraq militarily impotent. With the systematic destruction of the Baath regime down to its lowest levels, economic chaos and sectarian violence were the inevitable results. Finally, some U.S. presidential candidates are recognizing the consequences of this destructive policy, and calling for a partition of Iraq, contrary to the long-standing assurances of the current administration. The moral of the story: when the West pretends to help your nation, prepare to be dismembered.

The Leyenda Negra Rears Its Head

Historical objectivity has never been a strong point among leftist ideologues, as Pope Benedict recently discovered when he ventured to contradict the anti-Catholic myth of a genocidal evangelization in the Americas.  Like most good myths, this is a confused mixture of facts and half-truths linked in an implausible chain of causality and intentions.  The brutalities committed by the conquistadores are conflated with the commendable actions of Catholic missionaries, and the term “genocide” is abused to refer to the effects of diseases on the indigenous population.  The falsity of this myth is amply demonstrated by the visible presence of people of indigenous and mixed races throughout Latin America, often seamlessly integrated into the population, whereas in condescending North America, the Indians are almost all either dead or on reservations.

The Pope’s offending statement was that “The proclamation of Jesus and of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbus cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture.”  To accuse this erudite pontiff of a gross historical error is to reveal one’s own ignorance, but few leftists could resist the opportunity to trot out the tired old trope of an old man supposedly out of touch with reality.  We are to ignore the fact that their supposed genocide rests on the implausible assumption of a pre-Columbian indigenous population many times greater than that of Europe, and also plays fast and loose with causality.  It is a clumsy error indeed to say that because missionaries were later followed by opportunistic conquistadores that the former endorsed the actions of the latter.  Even if that were the case, it would not affect the truth of the Pope’s statement, lost on careless minds, that evangelization itself did not involve the alienation of pre-Columbian cultures.

A fair-minded person can hardly avoid the conclusion that Catholic missionaries showed tremendous respect for indigenous cultures, in fact to the point that they were sometimes faulted with being too indulgent toward Indian traditions.  The leftists ought to be red with shame for their display of historical ignorance, as evidenced by the career of Mexico’s first Archbishop Juan de Zumarraga, who lived among the Indians in friendly communion, as did many of his successors in the secular and regular clergy.  Catholic missionaries learned Nahuatl and other indigenous languages, composing grammars and publishing histories in the indigenous tongues.  Far from suppressing the indigenous cultures, they gave them a voice through the printed word.  At times, they would even appeal on behalf of the Indians to the government, over matters such as relief from obligatory labor in the building of churches, or more famously, against more heinous crimes such as those related by the Jesuit Bartolome de Las Casas.  Almost everything we know about crimes against the Indians in Latin America are related by outraged Catholic clerics.

In a twist of cruel hypocrisy, the accounts of Las Casas and others were used by the English as propaganda against their Spanish rivals, even as English pirates raided Spanish galleons with Crown’s blessing, privateers trafficked millions of Africans into slavery, and colonists warred with the Indians, who often sided with French Catholics.  To this day, the accounts of Las Casas are cited for rhetorical purposes, without embedding them in the broader historical reality of ordinary relations between the Spanish and Indians, which, if even a tenth as bad as they are portrayed by the left, would never have resulted in a racially integrated Latin America.  There would be hardly any mestizos and mulattos, but demographic reality unmistakably proclaims the contrary.  In contrast, there was virtually no racial mixing in North America; the Indians practically vanished, and mulattos are such a rarity that there is no word for it in English.  Many hand-wringing Caucasians fret over insubstantial disputes over terms like “Indian” or “mulatto”, but a non-bigoted society has no need for sensitivity over arbitrary labels.

Meanwhile, Hugo Chavez tries to appeal to impoverished indigenous peoples by repeating the myth of genocide, while he cynically consolidates his own power and suppresses dissent.  We could hardly ask for a better illustration of the insincerity of supposed concern for indigenous peoples, when the real motivation is poorly disguised hatred of the Church.  The Church has no army, so it is an easy target for weak-kneed revolutionaries who would certainly lack the temerity of those missionaries who went unarmed among the fiercest Indians of South America to preach the Gospel, even to be killed by their catechumens after years of living among them.  For all the modern talk of respecting other cultures, few would have the courage to live this principle to that degree, once again showing how “tolerance” is grounded more in rhetoric than in action.

Color is Everything

The sea pirates were white. The people who were already on the continent when the pirates arrived were copper-colored. When slavery was introduced on the continent, the slaves were black. Color was everything.
– Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

The American obsession with race still thrives, as the death of Kurt Vonnegut has been obscured by a media frenzy over a petty racial incident. While the BBC devoted a full segment to Vonnegut on 12 April, ABC omitted coverage in favor of the ongoing cause celebre of an aging disc jockey who referred to the Rutgers University women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos,” a term so offensive that it is repeatedly broadcast and printed in major media without censorship. Even conceding that the term is racist and that coarse discourse should be banned from the airwaves, we are a long way from accounting for the disproportionate magnitude of the reaction, stoked in part by career race-baiters such as Al Sharpton.

Vonnegut’s observation, “Color was everything,” remains poignant today, despite efforts to create similar obsessions over gender, ethnicity, and sexual behavior. Sharpton actually lamented that not enough feminist groups had mobilized against the sexist aspect of the deejay’s comment, apparently not realizing that even career feminists can’t possibly muster enough outrage to challenge every instance of the word “ho” used in public discourse. Recently, Hispanic groups have sought a share of the spotlight, demanding that a WWII documentary place special focus on Hispanic veterans, a pure example of special pleading taking precedent over scholarly analysis. For many historical questions, ethnic distinctions are simply not relevant, which of course is what no advocacy group wants to hear. Despite their numbers, non-racial advocacy groups can scarcely summon the hysterical shock that follows a single racial slur.

Race remains the ultimate taboo, a topic to be approached only at grave peril. A torrent of blasphemies against God is protected free speech, and our society even takes pride in its liberal tolerance of such discourse, but thou shalt not blaspheme against race, for that is “hate speech”. Our culture worships the gods of racial identity, these mysterious essences of social groups.

The racial pantheon is subordinate to a chief god, “America,” considered as a pseudo-racial identity. “America is the greatest country in the world,” is not a mere patriotic boast, but a conviction of theological certitude, not to be challenged even by those from other lands. A stark example of the supremacy of this cult can be found in the astonishingly racist attitudes of many urban black Americans toward blacks from outside the U.S. Ironically, the historically oppressed groups tend to be the most acutely race-conscious of all.

The cults of racial identity make it impossible to discuss race candidly, as a simple anthropological fact. Our American obsession with color exposes itself at the most importune times, transforming a simple rape allegation into a racial crisis, as was the case with the railroaded Duke University lacrosse team last year. The usual suspects, African-American studies, women’s studies, and English professors (beneficiaries, in some cases, of an academic ideology that favors social identity over qualifications), signed onto an advertisement that was clearly sympathetic to the alleged victim and not to the accused, yet they speciously argued they had not prejudged the case. They did not explain how they could regard the allegation as a sign of “social disaster” unless the rape actually occurred. Given that much of their profession is devoted to subverting academic inquiry to emotional causes, we should not be surprised by this insult to our intelligence.

The best remedy I can see for this self-righteous hypersensitivity is to gently mock these taboos so they are taken less seriously. There are ample opportunities to poke fun at these pseudo-intellectuals and media hos, but for now I’m fagged out.