"Vote or Suffer"

I have already written about some incongruities in the campaign preceding the Bosnian general elections, scheduled for next weekend, but there is one thing I left out, as it deserved a post of its own.

Local TV stations aired two ads in the third and fourth week of September, produced by USAID - the Empire's "Agency for International Development." Both had the punchline "Vote or Suffer" (Glasaj ili trpi). 

Still from the USAID propaganda video - "Vote or Suffer"

The first ad (watch on YouTube) blames the Bosnian authorities for failing to help the victims of May and August floods (!). On the same day it aired, the Imperial embassy website published a blog post co-authored by the military attache and the USAID head of mission, which accused the Bosnian authorities of embezzling the flood aid funds!

Both the Serb Republic and Federation authorities responded right away that the Empire was flat-out lying: they couldn't have embezzled anything, as not a penny of the promised flood aid from the US and the EU had actually arrived. But the Imperial officials refused to retract their claims. A few days later, another ad appeared, this time criticizing the economic situation (watch on YouTube).

There is no question that Bosnia is in a dire economic predicament, but a great deal of blame for that lies in the absurd legislation the locals outright copied from the US and the EU, under constant pressure from Washington and Brussels. One example is a 2009 law on "animal rights" which turned the Sarajevo Canton into a free range for feral dogs.

Let's also remember that US and EU officials supported the "demonstrators" with supposedly economic and democratic grievances, who earlier this year torched government offices in Sarajevo, Zenica and Tuzla, Maidan-style.

Lest you think this is someone impersonating USAID on YouTube, you can see both videos featured on the agency's official website. The claim by the agency head and Embassy officials that this is purely a "get out the vote" campaign is absurd. The ads very specifically urge the voters to elect a different government - presumably one more willing to obey orders from Washington. More to the point, USAID is engaging in behavior that would be blatantly illegal in America itself. Imagine a foreign agency running TV ads urging Americans to "vote or suffer"!

This is but the latest in a series of attempts by the Empire to influence the outcome of Bosnian elections. Imperial officials have turned a blind eye to jihadist activity (even when directed against the US!) in Bosnia for years, backed the rioters who torched government offices in February, sent in additional troops as a way of signaling support to those they back and threaten those they oppose, and outright "midwifed" the opposition coalition in the Serb Republic, recycling a name of a previous creation in the process. Thanks to genuine activists on the ground, their interference has been documented and brought to light.

Keep that in mind when Empire's stooges begin crying foul, after they lose at the polls.

Skewering the Liars

A satirical German TV show "Die Anstalt" (The Institution) has aired a segment on September 25 mocking the Western coverage of the conflict in the Ukraine.

Someone was kind enough to post it with English subtitles. Watch and enjoy:

Bosnia 2014: The Recycled Election

General elections in Bosnia-Herzegovina will be held on October 12. The date was originally supposed to be October 5, but the whole thing was postponed by a week at the insistence of the Muslims, because October 4 is Eid-al-Adha.

In the Serb Republic (Република Српска), the contest will be between the ruling coalition - led by Milorad Dodik - and the opposition alliance slapped together by the Empire. Ironically, the opposition's mainstay is the Serb Democratic Party (SDS), once led by Radovan Karadžić (now before the Hague Inquisition on charges of "genocide") and demonized by both the Empire and its Muslim clients.

Is Washington hoping to replicate the 2012 Serbian scenario? If so, the effort is as lazy as it is transparent: the opposition calls itself the "Alliance for Change" - the same name as a contradictory coalition the US had created back in 2000, only in the Muslim-Croat Federacija.

The original "Alliance for Change" ended up being an abusive marriage of (in)convenience, in which the Social-Democrats were constantly undermined by the Party for Bosnia, a splinter of the Islamist SDA (Alija Izetbegović's Orwellian-named "Party of Democratic Action").

A decade later, the Social-Democrats got to try again; this time they chose to ally with the SDA and fringe Croat groups. After the SDA's sudden but inevitable betrayal, they tried a pact with another splinter party: Better Future Alliance (SBB), run by the shady media magnate and ex-SDA propaganda chief Fahrudin Radončić. That too ended badly, surprising precisely no one.

Properly explaining the dynamics of Bosnian Muslim politics would take years; suffice to say that the momentum currently seems to favor the SDA. Its chairman, Sulejman Tihić, died of cancer last week; the funeral rites were an occasion for much rhapsodizing and rallying around Tihić's longtime rival Bakir Izetbegović (yes, Son Of), who has now taken over the party and is running for re-election in the country's three-member Presidency. The SDA is also sure to get a last-minute boost from the Islamic clergy, during the Eid festivities.

After four years of ever-shifting mathematical coalitions, the SDA is running with a seductive message of "Strength in Unity" (U jedinstvu je snaga):

from the SDA campaign website, snagabih.ba

If that slogan sounds vaguely familiar, that's because it is. Here's a still from the 2005 movie "V for Vendetta", showing a poster of the Anglo-fascist ruling party "Norsefire":

"V for Vendetta"

It's a year for plagiarism in Bosnia, it seems. First the Empire "recycles" the name it used 14 years ago in the Federation for the political group it's now backing in the Serb Republic. Then the SDA runs on a fascist slogan from a Wachowski movie.

But wait, there's more: the former chief mufti, Мustafa Cerić - now a private citizen running for the Presidency - outright plagiarized not one, but two Western designs: the logo of a Las Vegas casino, and that of the Virginia Mennonite Conference (!).

Though I suppose even that is better than the aforementioned Fahrudin Radončić's party advertising itself as a "Tsunami of justice" - in a country that's just been hit by two major floods...

Meanwhile, the politics of hatred and mistrust remain unchanged.

A Bomb and ISIS Show

Despite the ongoing air attacks of the Empire and its Gulf Vassals, it appears the ISIS Caliphate forces are advancing on Baghdad. Meanwhile, Iraqi helicopter pilots "mistakenly" directed food and ammo drops to ISIS forces, rather than their own. These supposedly inept and inexperienced pilots were trained by the Empire. Draw your own conclusions...

Cartoon by Jeff Danziger (source)

There is a thick fog of disinformation out there concerning this "Islamic State", ISIS, ISIL, Caliphate, or whatever it is. A week ago, we had to suffer through the Emperor personally chairing the UN Security Council meeting on the greatest-ever-threat of Islamic-but-unrelated-to-Islam terrorism, complete with calls for criminalizing volunteers who fight in foreign wars - so long as they fight against the Empire, anyway. Empire's proxies, clients and quislings are obviously exempt.

Yet it should be intuitively obvious to the casual observer that ISIS arose from the fertile soil of Imperial support for a rebellion in Syria against the Assad government, launched back in 2011. For all the talk of "moderates" and "democrats for human rights," it was the jihadists who had the will and skill to use those planeloads of arms the Empire provided via Croatia and Jordan.

There are even some who claim that the Imperial government created ISIS deliberately. If true, it wouldn't be the first time: Zbigniew Brzezinski boasted of setting off the Afghan jihad in order to provoke a Soviet intervention. But I am loath to give the Imperial government any more credit than it actually deserves. Having witnesses its appalling incompetence in a range of affairs on a daily basis, why would anyone believe it is somehow a genius international manipulator?

More likely, this is all perception management again. ISIS arose from the idiotic policy of backing the jihadists in Syria (and in general), but hey - we can spin it as a retroactive justification of the Iraq invasion, and a fresh new terrorist threat that will justify new strip-searches and snooping while making Barack the Blessed look more presidential. A win-win!

Spin, that's how all of this works. On one hand, acts of puppetry like the Kiev coup or the Hong Kong protests are presented as "spontaneous", while on the other hand, genuine disasters, blowbacks and fiascoes stemming from Empire's ignorant belligerence are spun as parts of some brilliant grand strategy - thus furthering the illusion that the Atlantic Empire is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-competent, though in reality it is none of those things.

Scotland

It is tempting to cheer for the independence of Scotland strictly out of spite for all the ills the United Kingdom has visited upon the world over the past three centuries. But that's not really fair to the English, who are just as oppressed by the coterie in London as the Scots or for that matter the Welsh.

Why on Earth would anyone want to be ruled by people who allowed Rotherham to happen? Who created a culture of repression in which protecting children from sexual abuse became impossible out of fear of being labeled a "racist"? Who deliberately flooded the country with unassimilable immigrants to spite their own people?

From the very beginnings of human society, people have made an implicit bargain: they would tolerate government - be in in the form of tribal chieftan or faceless bureaucrats - in exchange for its promise of protection for their lives and property from enemies foreign (invaders) and domestic (thieves and murderers). Modern government has not only outright failed to deliver on its end of the bargain, but has actually become the biggest threat to lives and property of its subjects. Examples are a legion, from the depredations of Quisling Cult regimes installed by "color revolutions" from Serbia to Kyrgizstan, to the sex-slavery of Rotherham and the police violence in the United States of America.

So the question isn't so much whether the Scots ought to "throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security" (source), but why so many others have not done so - and what are they waiting for?

Eppur si muove

I chose not to write a special essay on the anniversary of 9/11. What would be the point?

I've said everything I've cared to say over the past thirteen years - how one cannot fight terrorism and support it at the same time, how there are no "good" terrorists just because they currently serve one's agenda, how it's madness to appease jihadists in hopes of earning their gratitude, etc. etc. Go through the posts tagged 9/11 if you wish, and see for yourselves whether the questions I've posed are not just as relevant today as a year ago, or five, or ten.

And I stand by my contention that there was never any war on terror(ism): the grand crusade was all about power. Don't believe me? Listen to the Emperor's speech declaring war on ISIS.

Proving that the brevity of Twitter can be the soul of wit, someone named "Stalingrad & Poorski" summarized the speech thus:

POTUS Summary: We'll be bombing a sovereign nation (Syria) We'll be arming terrorist groups while fighting them. #Ref Economy is Great
— Stalingrad & Poorski (@Stalingrad_Poor) September 11, 2014

Justin Raimondo rightly called the speech a "dreary peroration exuding a skunk-like aura of insincerity" and correctly identifies it as a back-door attempt to effect "regime change" in Syria. Make no mistake, that is what "assistance to the Syrian opposition" really means. By the by, the mythical "Syrian opposition" is basically an adjunct of ISIS!

Jan Oberg dubbed the speech a "record low in terms of moral and intellectual analysis," and dwelt on the last two minutes of "everything is fine" (continuing the theme of protesting too much): "A combination of unbearable self-praise, slight megalomania and denial of the changing U.S. role in our changing world."

It's like watching the coyote from the old cartoons, chasing the road-runner bird over a chasm. Once he realizes he's running on air - but not a moment sooner - he immediately plummets to the ground. It now appears as if the Imperial government has convinced itself that so long as it pays no attention to the chasm, the law of gravity does not apply.

Newsflash: it does. 

The Emperor Doth Protest Too Much

His Most Elevated Majesty, Barack the Blessed, gave a speech in Talinn (Estonia) on Wednesday, filled with words such as "freedom" and "democracy" and "real progress" - whatever that means.

I'll deal with it in more detail in my Antiwar.com piece tomorrow (update: here's a link). For now, though, just some thoughts.

photo via RT

C-Span has the 30-minute video. The White House has a transcript.

Listen to it. Compare what he says to be the truth, with actual truth. Compare the actions of his own government, his own officials, his own troops - to his platitudes about "big bullying the small" and "dignity" and "independence". I dare you to listen with a straight face to his words about freedom of press and thought, what with Anglosphere media marching in absolute lockstep and every dissent dismissed as "propaganda."

Listen to his soothing platitudes about how NATO isn't aimed against anyone - the blood of Serbs, Iraqis, Afghans and Libyans begs to differ. Listen to his lies about how there were no Nazis in the Maidan, or how there was no coup in Kiev. "These are facts, provable, not subject to dispute" - except they are not.

And the "currents of history... flow towards freedom"? Who wrote this speech, Citizen Kang?

All this talk of the inevitable triumph of freedom, democracy, "real progress" (whatever that is) - methinks that's just His Imperial Majesty protesting too much. He is trying too hard to persuade his "allies" (i.e. clients) that he is still the most powerful, still the strongest, still the richest, that End of History is just around the corner.

Not everything in the speech was a lie. Moral strength is more powerful than tanks. People generally do wish to be free from bullying, and be independent. Might indeed does not make right.

So why is his country and his own government using tanks (or planes, or missiles)? Why does he bully other countries into making only the "choices" his government dictates, under threat of "kinetic military action" or "color revolution"? Why is it the core belief of the current government of the United States of America that might does make right?

He lies about motes in the eyes of others, while failing to see the beam in his own.