Over the last half-dozen years I’ve regularly cited the work of John Beaty, a respected academic who spent his entire teaching career at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.
During World War II, Prof. Beaty served in Military Intelligence and his responsibilities included producing the daily intelligence briefing reports distributed to the White House and the rest of our top political and military leadership. That position provided him with a unique perspective on the entire course of the conflict.
After the end of the war, he resumed his academic career and in 1951 he published The Iron Curtain Over America, a book harshly critical of our government policies and the overwhelming Jewish influence that he had believed was responsible. He argued that Jewish domination over the publishing industry and the media had grown so powerful that most ordinary Americans never learned many important facts, with their dangerous ignorance maintained by the “Iron Curtain” of Jewish media control described in his title.
Since Beaty was a reputable scholar who possessed an insider’s crucial knowledge of our wartime activities, his many fierce critics both then and now have always chosen to attack his credibility on a minor side-issue. In his book, he had repeatedly claimed that instead of being the descendants of the ancient Israelites, most European Jews actually traced their ancestry to the Khazars, a fierce Turco-Mongolian warrior tribe that for several centuries controlled a substantial empire in portions of present-day southern Russia and Ukraine. Their rulers had converted to Judaism in the 8th century AD and according to Beaty, the Khazars eventually became the ancestors of the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe, who constituted the bulk of the global Jewish population, including an overwhelming majority of American Jews.
Beaty’s book became a huge conservative best-seller during the 1950s, and his claims about the Khazars were picked up by many other right-wingers hostile to Jewish influence. This was especially true of the leading antisemitic Christian preachers of that era such as Gerald L.K. Smith and Gerald Winrod, perhaps because they preferred believing that their Jewish adversaries were actually the descendants of Central Asian Turkic tribesmen rather than the holy prophets of the Old Testament; and since Beaty was himself a devout Christian, he may have been influenced by similar factors. In recent years, many anti-Zionists of all ideological stripes have also taken up that same theory, arguing that the European Jews who settled in Palestine were actually Khazars and therefore had no legitimate claim to that land. Indeed, among anti-Jewish or anti-Zionist activists on the Internet, “Khazar” has become quite common as a denigrating synonym for “Jew.”
Current efforts to promote this Khazar Hypothesis may have a practical political dimension. These days an important part of American support for Israel relies upon the large body of Christian Zionists, who identify today’s Jews with the Israelites of the Old Testament. Such Christians strongly supported the return of these exiled Jews to their ancient homeland and the restoration of a Jewish state in Palestine after two thousand years, regarding these events as the fulfillment of the biblical prophecies necessary for the return of Christ. So if they became convinced that Jews were instead Central Asian Khazars, their support might wane.
Since Beaty’s beliefs about the Khazars seemed irrelevant to the rest of his book, I’d mostly ignored them. But although such Khazar theories are rarely discussed in mainstream venues, they have become so widespread in fringe, conspiratorial circles that a few months ago I finally decided to review the evidence and publish my findings. However, my lengthy analysis of Jewish origins was buried in the middle of a very long article, bracketed on both sides by completely unrelated issues. Therefore, I’ve now decided to extract that material and expand it into a much more focused and comprehensive treatment of this important topic.
I had opened my analysis by mentioning Beaty’s claims and the attacks upon him:
Although I had been vaguely aware of the Khazar Hypothesis of Jewish origins, I regarded it as merely a rather marginal academic theory, finally laid to rest in the last couple of decades by modern DNA analysis. But Beaty had been writing more than seventy years ago, and he cited seemingly credible scholarly support for his claims, notably including the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia and the magisterial six volume History of the Jews, published in the nineteenth century by Heinrich Graetz. Beaty’s book had appeared several years before Watson and Crick had even discovered DNA, so his theory seemed a harmless eccentricity, hardly damaging his credibility on the major issues that fell within the purview of his personal expertise.
The overwhelming majority of Beaty’s material had seemed very solidly argued, so his eccentric Khazar claims were naturally seen as his greatest vulnerability, the issue that his bitter critics have focused upon for more than seventy years in order to discredit the rest of his analysis. Therefore, I decided to take some time to explore the Khazar Hypothesis and the broader question of Jewish origins, partly to evaluate Beaty’s credibility.
When Beaty published his 1951 book, the story of the Khazars had probably been unknown to nearly all Americans, but a generation later another book by a very different writer suddenly brought it to widespread public attention, at least in intellectual circles.
Arthur Koestler was a Hungarian Jew, an early Zionist and former Communist who later turned strongly against Stalin and soon became a prominent Cold War writer. He was best known for Darkness at Noon, a loosely fictionalized account of the Stalinist purge trials of the 1930s that had deeply impressed me when I’d read the novel in high school. Then in 1976 he published The Thirteenth Tribe, a widely-discussed book promoting the Khazar Hypothesis for the origins of European Jewry, and I recently reread it for the first time since the 1990s.
I wasn’t terribly impressed. Aside from the story of the conversion of their rulers to Judaism, apparently very little solid evidence exists concerning the large Khazar Empire, merely scattered references in the histories and correspondence of their Byzantine, Russian, and Islamic neighbors and rivals, so although Koestler’s short book only ran a couple of hundred pages, it actually felt heavily padded, substantially summarizing the much better documented histories of the other regional powers in order to fill out its pages.
Koestler was a literary intellectual rather than a trained historian or anthropologist, and the efforts he made on behalf of his controversial theory sometimes seemed rather strained to me. All analysts agree that the Eastern European Jews are either the descendants of Jewish migrants from the Rhineland area of Germany or else Turkic Khazar converts. But these Jews call themselves “Askenazim”—meaning “German”—and they speak Yiddish, a German dialect, which contains almost no Turkic words. Although this evidence does not conclusively establish the Rhineland case, it obviously does tend to support it. Koestler rather weakly tries to explain away those simple facts by arguing that the Khazar Jews were so impressed by the high culture of the Gentile German settlers whom they encountered that they adopted the language of the latter, which is possible but not very plausible.
Furthermore, we only begin to encounter references to the substantial presence of Eastern European Jews hundreds of years after the collapse of the Khazar Empire, so any connection between the two populations seems rather tenuous.
I also wondered whether Koestler’s advocacy might have been partly based upon a personal motive. Prior to the conquest of their present-day lands, the Magyar tribesmen who founded Hungary had spent centuries as vassals of the Khazars, and when they finally broke free during the ninth century and migrated into Central Europe, a small segment of their former Khazar overlords came with them. So if Koestler had successfully established his theory, he would have been able to trace his own Jewish ancestry to the former rulers of the Hungarian Gentiles of his own country, providing a pleasant psychological boost to the self-esteem of someone raised in the ethnic patchwork quilt of mitteleuropa.
The main argument in favor of the Khazar Hypothesis had been the question of numbers. The Khazar Empire was relatively large and populous, and advocates tend to argue that most of the inhabitants eventually followed their rulers in converting to Judaism, thereby becoming a far more plausible source of the eventual millions of Central and Eastern European Jews than the immigrant Jews from the Rhineland, who probably numbered only a few thousand. But this ignores the reality that populations that find a successful economic niche can grow very rapidly over time.
For example, top Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann had ten siblings in his Russian family, and similarly high fertility rates had helped Russia’s Jewish population grow from roughly a half-million around 1800 to a figure ten times larger a century later. So if we know that Russian Jews had increased ten-fold during the course of a single century, it’s perfectly possible that a few thousand German Jews might have multiplied a hundred-fold during the course of six or seven hundred years. In a different historical example, today’s many millions of French Canadians and Louisiana Cajuns are all the descendants of just a couple of thousand French settlers who arrived in the New World three or four hundred years ago, while many tens of millions of Americans trace most of their ancestry to a few thousand British settlers who had arrived on the continent around the same time.
Moreover, the very distinct economic activities of the Ashkenazi Jews is another factor strangely ignored both by Koestler and his critics. The Rhineland Jews overwhelmingly filled a minority business niche, being money-lenders and traders among their Gentile host population, and together with estate-management and alcohol sales, this was the same sort of occupational profile filled by the much later and larger Ashkenazi populations of Central Europe and the Ukraine. In sharp contrast, the Khazars were fierce Central Asian tribal warriors, and their sudden transformation into a middleman minority earning its livelihood from business and finance seems much less likely.
Koestler’s book provoked considerable discussion when it was published almost two generations ago, but many of the reviewers were skeptical or even dismissive, so I’m not sure whether it had much long-term impact on the debate. Indeed, some of Koestler’s sharp critics even suggested that he had written it merely in hopes that such a controversial work would revive his public profile which had largely faded away since his early writings of the 1940s had originally established his name.
Far more recent and more influential in mainstream circles has been the widely-praised international bestseller The Invention of the Jewish People by Prof. Shlomo Sand, a dissenting anti-Zionist Israeli historian, whose English translation had been released in 2009, a year after the original Hebrew edition. Sand’s basic thesis was considerably more measured than that of Koestler, primarily arguing that the majority of present-day Jews both in Europe and elsewhere were probably the descendants of later converts rather than the ancient Israelites of the Bible, with the Khazars merely being one of many such strands. I’d casually read the book about a dozen years ago, and despite the favorable recommendations had been rather unimpressed, but I decided to reread it.
Perhaps because I was now much more focused upon the topic of Jewish origins, my reaction to Sand’s work was far more positive than it had been the first time through.
For example, whereas Koestler had stretched the very thin historical evidence of the Khazars across an entire book, presenting his material in a rather tendentious and credulous manner, a professional historian such as Sand was far more judicious, treating it with considerable caution across 40 pages of text, much of which carefully summarized the conflicting views of many of the leading Jewish historians over the last two centuries.
As Sand explained, mainstream Jewish scholars who held a belief in the Khazar origins of European Jewry had always been a decided minority, but a minority that was both substantial and highly-regarded. During the 1950s, Prof. John Beaty had been roasted and vilified in our own country for his endorsement of the Khazar Hypothesis, which was portrayed as a lunatic-fringe belief probably motivated by his hatred of Jews; but during that very same period, Israel’s own Minister of Education was a prominent Jewish scholar holding very similar beliefs.
While Sand does seem to accept that a considerable fraction of Eastern European Jews probably have substantial Khazar roots, he hardly regards the case as solidly proven, nor is it central to his overall analysis, which instead focused upon a wide variety of different conversions to Judaism over the last two thousand years and more.
Some of the conversions emphasized by Sand seem absolutely undeniable though previously unknown to a non-specialist such as myself. For example, around 125 BC, King Yohanan Hyrcanus of the Maccabean dynasty conquered the small neighboring Semitic state of Edom and forcibly converted its inhabitants to Judaism. This history was often embarrassing and under-emphasized by many modern Jewish historians, especially since some of the most important later Judean leaders such as King Herod the Great, various leading rabbis, and even the most extreme Zealots involved in the Great Revolt against Rome were primarily of Edomite convert descent.
Numerous other apparent large-scale conversions to Judaism also took place, but on a voluntary basis. Sand gives the background to the later Jewish kingdom of Yemen that survived for more than a century, as well as the very large and flourishing Jewish communities of Alexandria and North Africa in the era of the late Roman Republic, while Cicero had famously remarked in 59 BC upon the substantial number of Jews living at Rome itself. Judaism was a proselytizing religion during this period, and that fact was almost certainly responsible for the rapid appearance of these large Jewish populations across the shores of the Mediterranean rather than any massive emigration of Jewish peasants from Palestine or any implausibly rapid natural population increase in small immigrant Jewish communities.
Indeed, despite the considerable loss of Jewish life during the revolts against Roman rule, over the next century Jewish numbers reached their high-water mark in the ancient world, perhaps 7-8% of the entire population of the Roman Empire, amounting to many millions. Sand plausibly argues that the rapid expansion of Judaism through conversion had probably begun with Alexander’s conquests and the creation of the large Hellenistic kingdoms that replaced the Persian Empire, and this process had then accelerated with the rise of Rome. All of this supports Sand’s central thesis that by the time of the late Roman Empire only a rather small fraction of its large Jewish population could actually trace their roots back to the Israelites of the Bible.
Many of the other facts that Sands recounts seem to have become solidly established in mainstream modern scholarship but had remained unknown to an ignorant layman such as myself.
For example, in the half-century since Israel’s conquests of the 1967 war, waves of determined Israeli archaeologists and historians have made every effort to uncover evidence of the wealthy and powerful Jewish state of King David and King Solomon, but have found almost nothing at all. This suggests that the story of their mighty kingdom was either entirely fictional or so wildly exaggerated that it amounted to the same thing, with those famous Biblical figures actually reigning over a tiny, impoverished scrap of territory, so unimportant and obscure that it was totally ignored in the chronicles of the major states of the Middle East and also by Herodotus when he compiled his very hefty regional history a few centuries later.
Consider also the belief that the Jews were expelled from their homeland following the failure of their repeated revolts against the Romans in the first and second centuries AD. This story of the Jewish Exile is probably almost universally assumed by Jews and Gentiles alike, constituting a central ideological pillar for the “restoration” of a Jewish homeland in the State of Israel in 1948 and the ingathering of Jews from across the world that soon followed. However, it has absolutely no factual basis and is accepted by few if any reputable scholars. Although the victorious Romans certainly might have exiled a thin stratum of the vanquished Jewish elites as punishment, they had no policy of deporting entire populations, so the ordinary Judeans who survived their defeat surely remained exactly where they were, merely suffering a loss of political independence.
As Sand persuasively argued, over the centuries many of those Jews eventually converted to Christianity then later to Islam following the Muslim conquest, and they are the ancestors of today’s Palestinians, leavened by an admixture from all the various conquering groups of the last two thousand years, including Arabs, Crusaders, and Turks. Thus, the direct descendants of the ancient Judeans lived continuously in their homeland prior to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. The tremendous historical irony that the current Palestinians—now suffering horrifying massacres in Gaza—are almost certainly the closest lineal descendants of the Biblical Israelites was highlighted by Sand and had been similarly emphasized by Beaty in his 1951 book.
Although this view might seem shocking to the vast majority of both Gentiles and Jews, certainly including most present-day Israelis, Sand and Beaty were hardly alone in reaching that conclusion. David Ben-Gurion was Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, while Yitzhak Ben-Zvi became the country’s second president after the death of Chaim Weizmann, and in 1918 as young Zionist leaders, they had co-authored Eretz Israel in the Past and the Present, the most important Zionist book of that era, very successfully released in both Hebrew and Yiddish. In that work, they summarized the strong historical evidence that the local Palestinians were obviously just long-converted Jews, expressing the hope that they would therefore be absorbed into the growing Zionist movement and become an integral part of their planned State of Israel; Ben-Zvi published a later 1929 booklet making the same points. It was only after the Palestinians became increasingly hostile to Zionist colonization and they began violently clashing with those European settlers that the Judean ancestry of the Palestinians was tossed down the memory-hole and forgotten.
Thus, despite a long series of military conquests and foreign overlords, the Israelites of the Old Testament had remained in place for well over two thousand years, annually plowing their fields until they were brutally uprooted and expelled from their ancient homeland by Zionist militants in 1948, a story I had told in a lengthy article last month.
The different elements of Sand’s reconstruction fit together quite snugly. Palestine had never been a very populous land and its inhabitants had overwhelmingly consisted of peasant farmers. Once we recognize that they had remained in place following the failure of their repeated revolts against Roman rule, the large Jewish populations we later find spread across the shores of the Mediterranean basin only become explicable as a result of large-scale religious conversions. Such a development was hardly surprising given the decline of traditional paganism and the rise of various new cults during those same centuries of the later Roman Empire. Thus, it seems undeniable that the overwhelming majority of the Jews of that era had little if any Judean ancestry.
Sand seems a highly-reputable scholar and his international best-seller was very respectfully treated or even glowingly praised by a long list of mainstream outlets and reviewers, including Israeli ones. But his academic specialty was French history rather than the classical world, and many of his claims about the size and status of the Jews in the Roman Empire seemed so surprising to me that I decided to evaluate them by reading The Jews in the Roman World, published in 1973 by Michael Grant, an eminent British ancient historian.
Although Grant’s emphasis was quite different, his account seemed generally consistent with that of Sand. Population figures from the classical era have considerable uncertainty, but Grant seemed to accept the very large Jewish population spread across Rome’s empire, which he reckoned might have reached a figure as high as eight million, perhaps representing as much as 20% of the total in the eastern, Greek-speaking provinces. The widespread evidence of Jewish conversions was also heavily documented, although unlike Sand, Grant believed that the Emperor Nero’s second wife was merely sympathetic to Judaism rather than an outright Jewish convert.
Some of the reviews I read also seemed to substantiate Sand’s important findings. A long article about his book ran on the front-page of one of the sections of the New York Times, and the journalist had contacted various mainstream experts, who confirmed many of the author’s surprising claims: the expulsion of the Jews from Palestine was merely a myth, modern Jews were very substantially the descendants of later converts, and today’s Palestinians were indeed probably the direct descendants of the ancient Judeans. I was also pleased to discover that the Times writer had focused upon many of the same surprising points I had taken from rereading the text. A comprehensive Wikipedia page provides an even-handed summary of Sand’s book, including the praise he attracted from so many leading Jewish public intellectuals.
Although Sand naturally drew much bitter criticism especially from Zionists, I noticed that many of the sharpest attacks against his work focused upon his support for the Khazar Hypothesis, although it only constituted a small part of his book and he was cautious in his claims. This closely mirrored the strategy employed against Beaty more than a half-century earlier.
I actually suspect that the visceral Jewish reaction to the Khazar Hypothesis promoted by Beaty, Koestler, and Sand may partly be due to an unfortunate coincidence. In Jewish culture, pigs are considered disgusting, unclean animals and in both Hebrew and Yiddish the word for pig is “Chazar,” pronounced “KHA-zer.” Since most Jews have probably never heard of the Khazars, they may have naturally assumed that name had the same pronunciation and was somehow related to pigs. So if they discovered that various academics were claiming that Jews traced their ancestry to some sort of “pig-people,” their very hostile response was hardly surprising.
For centuries, nearly everything we have known about the ancient world has been based upon literary and epigraphic evidence, but over the last generation DNA analysis and population genetics have begun providing additional, potentially far more scientifically objective sources of information. And the nature and origins of world Jewry has been an important target of that newly-enhanced research.
Sand is a historian, strongly committed to his anti-racist beliefs and an individual with deep Communist roots. When I originally read his book a decade ago, I was surprised that he seemed to almost completely ignore some of the revelations of Jewish origins produced by genetic studies that had recently been in the news and I was therefore quite dismissive of his work when I briefly mentioned it in a 2016 article:
For example, Shlomo Sand’s international best-seller The Invention of the Jewish People was very widely praised in left-liberal and anti-Zionist circles, and attracted considerable attention in the mainstream media. But although I found many parts of the history extremely interesting, the central claim appeared to be incorrect. As far as I’m aware, there seems overwhelming genetic evidence that Europe’s Ashkenazi Jews do indeed trace much of their ancestry back to the Holy Land, apparently being the descendants of a few hundred (presumably Jewish) Middle Easterners, mostly male, who settled in Southern Europe some time after the Fall of Rome and took local Northern Italian wives, afterward remaining largely endogamous for the next thousand-plus years of their growing presence in Central and Eastern Europe. However, being a historian rather than a genetic researcher, Prof. Sand was apparently unaware of this hard evidence, and focused upon much weaker literary and cultural indicators, perhaps also being somewhat influenced by his own ideological predilections.
Während eines Besuchs in Spanien am Samstag sagte der chinesische Handelsminister Wang Wentao, dass er im Einklang mit dem wichtigen Konsens, der beim jüngsten trilateralen Treffen zwischen den Staats- und Regierungschefs Chinas, Frankreichs und der Europäischen Union erzielt wurde, hofft, die Wirtschafts- und Handelskonflikte durch Dialog und Konsultation angemessen zu bewältigen, den berechtigten Anliegen beider Parteien Rechnung zu tragen und eine außer Kontrolle geratene Eskalation der Handelskonflikte zu vermeiden. Bei einem Besuch der Fabrik des Joint Ventures Unternehmens Chery-Ebro sagte Wang, dass China und Europa sowohl im Wettbewerb als auch in der Zusammenarbeit stünden. Die Ausweitung der Zusammenarbeit und die Erzielung von Win-Win-Ergebnissen in einem gesunden Wettbewerb sei der richtige Weg, um miteinander auszukommen.
Diese Aussagen von Wang haben erneut eine Richtung und ein Mittel vorgegeben, um das jüngste Risiko einer Eskalation der Handelskonflikte zwischen den beiden Seiten zu lösen, die durch den diskriminierenden Einsatz von Handelsinstrumenten durch die EU verursacht wurde. Dies steht auch im Einklang mit den derzeit weit verbreiteten Forderungen innerhalb der EU. Die Finanzminister Frankreichs und Deutschlands haben sich beim jüngsten Treffen der Finanzminister und Zentralbankchefs der G7 gegen einen Handelsstreit mit China ausgesprochen. Auch die Präsidentin der Europäischen Kommission, Ursula von der Leyen, betonte, dass „Europa sich nicht in einem Handelskrieg mit China befindet“. Es gibt auch Berichte, dass die Meinungsverschiedenheiten innerhalb der EU in der Frage der Antisubventionsuntersuchungen gegen China deutlicher geworden sind – „Minister aus anderen Ländern standen Schlange, um die Untersuchung zu kritisieren.“ Deutschland, Schweden, Malta und andere haben alle die mögliche Einführung zusätzlicher Zölle in Frage gestellt.
Vor nicht allzu langer Zeit kündigten die USA einen 100-prozentigen Einfuhrzoll auf chinesische Elektrofahrzeuge an. US-Finanzministerin Janet Yellen und einige andere US-Amerikaner forderten die EU öffentlich auf, entsprechend zu handeln, was in der Tat großen Druck auf die EU ausübte. Aber wenn die EU den USA folgt, wird dies für Europa offensichtlich schmerzhafter sein. Die USA haben ihre Tür für chinesische Elektrofahrzeuge schon lange verschlossen, und die von ihnen erhobenen Zölle ind wenig bedeutsam. Da Deutschland und andere EU-Länder tief in die chinesische Automobilindustrie und Lieferketten integriert sind, bedeutet die Einführung von Zöllen einen echten Geldverlust und eine Schädigung des Freihandelsumfelds, von dem Europas Entwicklung und Wohlstand abhängen.
Nicht nur im Handel, auch chinesische Unternehmen, die im Bereich erneuerbare Energien tätig sind, beginnen, erhebliche Investitionen in Europa zu tätigen. BYD kündigte im Dezember 2023 an, in Ungarn eine Fabrik zur Herstellung von Elektroautos zu errichten, und im April dieses Jahres kündigte Chery Pläne an, in den Bau einer Fabrik in Spanien zu investieren. Darüber hinaus gibt es mehrere „geplante Investitionen“ von Automobilherstellern. So kündigte die SAIC Group Pläne zum Bau einer Fahrzeugfabrik in Europa an, während die Dongfeng Motor Corporation angeblich eine Fabrik in Italien errichten will. Diese Investitionen werden nicht nur Kapital und Produktionskapazitäten nach Europa bringen, sondern auch wertvolle Arbeitsplätze vor Ort schaffen. Die Untergrabung der Zusammenarbeit zwischen der chinesischen und der europäischen Automobilindustrie wird beiden Seiten schwere Verluste bescheren.
Für die EU ist es am wichtigsten, ihre eigenen Interessen und ihre Entwicklungsrichtung klar zu verstehen. Offensichtlich ist die EU, wie China, ein standhafter Akteur in der globalen Reaktion auf den Klimawandel, und ein Weg des Protektionismus oder sogar des Isolationismus wird der EU nicht nützen. Wenn es Europas Hauptforderung ist, die eigene industrielle Wettbewerbsfähigkeit zu steigern und zu vermeiden, aus dem Wettbewerb ausgestoßen zu werden, dann ist das bloße Verbot und die „Vertreibung“ chinesischer Investitionen und Unternehmen keine „Schutzbarriere“ für die eigene Wettbewerbsentwicklung; vielmehr blockiert es die Tür. Die tiefe Grundlage, die China und Europa während ihrer langfristigen Zusammenarbeit bei der Bekämpfung des Klimawandels und der industriellen Zusammenarbeit gelegt haben, sollte als vorteilhafter Faktor für die Verbesserung der Wettbewerbsfähigkeit der EU angesehen werden und nicht als „Risiko“, das beseitigt werden muss.
Tatsächlich sollte die EU erkennen, dass China immer noch der Partner ist, der am ehesten einen Weg der Zusammenarbeit und des gegenseitigen Nutzens mit der EU verfolgen wird. Die USA verfolgen aufgrund ihrer Absicht, China einzudämmen, Richtlinien und Praktiken, die sogar eine „wettbewerbliche Koexistenz“ erschweren. Die EU ist jedoch anders. Sofern sie nicht darauf abzielt, China zu isolieren und Chinas technologische Entwicklung zu verlangsamen, können die EU und China gegenseitigen Nutzen erzielen. Es besteht kein Grund, ihren eigenen Entwicklungsweg zu blockieren. Indem sie bei der Expansion der Elektrofahrzeugbranche in China und Europa einen Ansatz des „inkrementellen Denkens“ verfolgen und dabei das Gesamtbild nicht aus den Augen verlieren, können die EU und China eine tiefere und breitere Kooperation im Bereich der mit alternativen Antrieben betriebenen Fahrzeuge eingehen, gemeinsam die Elektrifizierung vorantreiben und intelligente Technologien einführen. Dann werden sie einen positiven Beitrag zur Transformation und Modernisierung der Automobilbranche leisten.
Man muss bedenken, dass die jüngsten Maßnahmen der EU das Vertrauen chinesischer Unternehmen, die in die EU investieren, negativ beeinflusst haben. Hoffentlich nimmt die EU dies mit einem Gefühl der Krise wahr und glaubt nicht, dass ihre Handelsinstrumente „wirksam“ sind. Obwohl China noch keine konkreten Gegenmaßnahmen vorgeschlagen hat, haben europäische Medien kürzlich EU-Exporte nach China unter die Lupe genommen, die „potenziell Vergeltungsmaßnahmen“ ausgesetzt sind, von Brandy und Schweinefleisch bis hin zu Luxusautos mit großem Hubraum. Wenn man den USA folgt und zusätzliche Zölle auf chinesische Unternehmen erhebt, wird dies nicht nur wirtschaftliche Verluste für Europa bedeuten, sondern auch das bestehende politische gegenseitige Vertrauen zwischen China und Europa ernsthaft schädigen und damit den breiteren Raum für bilaterale Zusammenarbeit und gegenseitigen Nutzen verlieren. Dies ist kein lukratives Geschäft, und Brüssel sollte es sorgfältig kalkulieren.
„Hast Du die Nachrichten gehört? Gestern haben sie unser Dorf bombardiert.“ H. der die Autorin am Flughafen in Beirut abholt, berichtet gleich die jüngsten Neuigkeiten. „Eine Frau wurde getötet, die Kinder wurden verletzt ins Krankenhaus eingeliefert“, fährt er fort. „Zwei Raketen von einer Drohne.“ Er muss nicht sagen, wer die Drohne geschickt hat, um den Angriff durchzuführen. Nur die israelische Armee greift im Libanon Häuser von Zivilisten an. Von Karin Leukefeld.
Als die Autorin das letzte Mal Mitte Februar im Libanon unterwegs war, hatte Israel eine Drohne so programmiert, dass sie sechs Raketen auf ein Wohnhaus mitten in Nabatieh abfeuerte. Drei Generationen von einer Familie wurden getötet, als sie beim Abendessen zusammensaßen.
Wohnhäuser, landwirtschaftliche Gebäude oder Fahrzeuge und deren Fahrer, auch Ambulanzfahrzeuge sind nicht sicher vor den Drohnen der israelischen Armee. Immer wieder werden Felder, Obstplantagen, Weinstöcke und Olivenbäume mit Weißem Phosphor verbrannt. Die giftige Waffe, deren Einsatz in bewohnten Gebieten verboten ist, macht landwirtschaftliches Gelände auf Jahre hinaus unfruchtbar. Konzentrierten sich die israelischen Angriffe zunächst auf die Gebiete entlang der libanesisch-israelischen Waffenstillstandslinie, auch „Blaue Linie“ genannt, werden zunehmend Gebiete weit nördlich des Litani-Flusses bei Nabatieh, Saida oder auch in der Beeka-Ebene bei Baalbek angegriffen. Von libanesischer Seite werden die Opferzahlen täglich aktualisiert.
Die libanesische Souveränität
Die Hisbollah, die seit dem 8. Oktober 2023 zur Unterstützung des palästinensischen Widerstandes gegen die israelische Invasion in Gaza „Entlastungsangriffe“ auf militärische Stellungen der israelischen Streitkräfte bis zu 8 km südlich der Waffenstillstandslinie verübt, meldet bis zum vergangenen Montag (3.Juni 2024) den Tod von 326 Hisbollah-Angehörigen. Hassan Nasrallah, der Generalsekretär der Hisbollah erklärte den Militäreinsatz wiederholt als, sagte bei einer Rede am vergangenen Freitag (31.05.2024) der militärische Einsatz im Süden des Landes, sichere „die Zukunft des Libanon, seiner Wasser- und Ölressourcen und seine Souveränität“.
Hisbollah-Kommandos greifen mit Raketen militärische Infrastruktur wie Kasernen, Luftverteidigungsanlagen, Überwachungssysteme (entlang der von Israel befestigten Waffenstillstandslinie), Abschußrampen und gepanzerte Fahrzeuge an. Mit Ort, Uhrzeit und eingesetzten Waffen werden Angriffe auf israelische Militärbasen von der Hisbollah dokumentiert. Die dazu verbreiteten Videos werden auch von der israelischen Öffentlichkeit mit großem Interesse verfolgt.
Sobald ein Waffenstillstand in Gaza erreicht werde, würden die Waffen schweigen, sagt die Hisbollah. Sofern Israel sich daran halte. Dass es der Hisbollah ernst ist, zeigte sich bei dem einwöchigen Waffenstillstand im November 2023, während dem mehr als 100 israelische Geiseln aus Gaza freikamen. Im Gegenzug ließ Israel mehr als 200 palästinensische Gefangene frei.
Kein Schutz für die Zivilbevölkerung
Nach Angaben der libanesischen Tageszeitung L’Orient Today wurden auf libanesischer Seite 70 Zivilisten, mehr als 20 Sanitäter und mindestens drei Journalisten seit dem 8. Oktober 2923 bei israelischen Angriffen getötet. Nach Angaben von südlibanesischen Behörden wurden im gleichen Zeitraum 1.700 Gebäude zerstört und 14.000 weitere Gebäude beschädigt. Mehr als 90.000 Bewohner des südlibanesischen Grenzgebietes wurden evakuiert, viele von ihnen verloren durch die israelischen Angriffe ihre Häuser. Wiederholt ist Israel von internationalen Hilfsorganisationen kritisiert worden, Zivilisten und zivile Infrastruktur nicht zu schützen, wie das humanitäre internationale Recht es gebietet. Bei einem Angriff auf ein medizinisches Notfallzentrum in Hebbarieh (Südlibanon) wurden im März d.J. sieben freiwillige Sanitäter getötet. Libanon hat wiederholt Beschwerden bei den Vereinten Nationen gegen die israelischen Angriffe eingereicht. Genannt werden dabei auch Angriffe mit Brandbomben. Eine Reaktion seitens des UN-Sicherheitsrates liegt nicht vor.
Auf libanesischer Seite stieg die Zahl der Opfer am vergangenen Wochenende an. Bei zahlreichen Angriffen wurden ein Sanitäter, eine Frau, zwei Brüder und vier Hisbollah-Angehörige getötet. 17 weitere Personen wurden verletzt und ein Dutzend Häuser wurden zerstört. Der Sanitäter war mit seiner Ambulanz unterwegs, als sein Fahrzeug bei Naqoura zerstört wurde. Sein Kollege wurde verletzt, beide arbeiteten für das Islamische Gesundheitskomitee, das zur Hisbollah gehört. In Adloun, südlich von Saida, wurde eine Frau in ihrem Haus getötet, ihre Kinder wurden verletzt ins Krankenhaus gebracht. Zwei Brüder, die zur Unterstützung ihrer Familien Milch- und Joghurtprodukte ausfahren, wurden auf ihrem Motorrad getötet. Nachdem die Hisbollah den Abschuß einer israelischen Hermes-Drohne 900 meldete, verstärkte Israel seine Luftangriffe und bombardierte u.a. Gebäude im Beeka-Tal bei Baalbek. Nach Angaben von Beobachtern war es die 4. Überwachungs- und Angriffsdrohne der israelischen Streitkräfte, die von Hisbollah abgeschossen wurden. Stückpreis nach Angaben des israelischen Militärs je nach Ausrüstung zwischen 18 -30 Millionen USD.
US-Administration plant Abkommen
Die US-Administration will eine Ausweitung des Krieges in Gaza auf den Libanon vermeiden. Der US-Präsidentenberater Amos Hochstein, reist zwischen Beirut, Tel Aviv und Washington hin und her, um eine Einigung zwischen Libanon und Israel über die Grenze entlang der „Blauen Linie“ zu erreichen. Hisbollah und auch die libanesische Regierung haben erklärt, dass es keine Verhandlungen gebe, solange der Krieg gegen Gaza anhalte.
Er erwarte „keinen immerwährenden Frieden zwischen Hisbollah und Israel“, erklärte Hochstein im Gespräch mit der Carnegie Stiftung für Internationalen Frieden Ende Mai (23.05.2024). Doch ein Bündel von Vereinbarungen könnte die Spannungen lösen und zu einer von beiden Seiten anerkennten Grenze führen. „Das könnte einen weit bringen.“ Und zwar „in sehr kurzer Zeit“
Die vertriebenen Israelis südlich und Libanesen nördlich der „Waffenstillstandslinie“, sollten in ihre Häuser zurückkehren können. Gleichzeitig sollten die Libanesischen Streitkräfte gestärkt werden. In einer zweiten Phase solle ein „Wirtschaftspaket für den Libanon“ zeigen, dass die internationale Gemeinschaft „in sie investiert“. Dafür solle die Stromversorgung des Landes erneuert werden, um die Libanesen mit täglich 12 Stunden Strom zu versorgen. Aktuell gibt es nur wenige Stunden Strom aus dem öffentlichen Stromnetz. Wer bezahlen kann, kauft Strom vom Generator hinzu. Nach einem Wirtschaftspaket könne die Landesgrenze markiert werden, so Hochstein weiter. Mit der Stabilisierung der Wirtschaft könne der Einfluss des Iran zurückgedrängt werden.
Was Hochstein nicht sagte ist, dass Israel als eine Art Sicherheitsgarantie fordert, dass die Hisbollah sich aus der Grenzregion rund 30 km bis hinter den Litani-Fluss zurückziehen müsse. Die dann entstehende Pufferzone solle – auf libanesischem Territorium – von der UN-Friedensmission UNIFIL und der Libanesischen Armee kontrolliert werden. Israel beruft sich dabei auf die UN-Sicherheitsratsresolution 1701, mit der 2006 der Krieg beendet wurde. Darin heißt es, das die Hisbollah keine militärische Präsenz entlang der „Blauen Linie“ haben solle. Israel muss sich vom gesamten libanesischen Territorium zurückziehen. Aus Sicht des Libanon hält Israel große Teile von Palästina, aus Sicht Israel den Norden besetzt, darunter die libanesischen Sheeba Farmen.
Die Hisbollah – und mit ihr vermutlich eine Mehrheit der Libanesen, die sich noch an die letzte langjährige israelische Besatzung des Libanon (1982-2000) erinnern – lehnen einen Rückzug der Hisbollah aus dem Grenzgebiet ab. Selbst wer kein Freund der Hisbollah ist, erkennt an, dass deren militärische Präsenz und Stärke die einzige Garantie dafür ist, dass Libanon nicht erneut von Israel besetzt werden kann. Ein von Frankreich vorgelegter Plan schlägt ebenfalls eine ähnliche Mehr-Phasen-Lösung vor.
Alle Kraft für den Alltag
Für die Libanesen sind diese Planspiele weit entfernt. Ihr Alltag verlangt ihnen alle Kraft ab, um genug Essen für die Familie auf den Tisch zu bringen, um alle Kosten begleichen zu können. Viele können nur überleben, weil sie Hilfe von Verwandten aus dem Ausland bekommen. So können sie zusätzliche Stromkosten an den Besitzer eines großen Generators bezahlen, sich frisches Wasser liefern lassen oder die Chemotherapie für eine Krebsbehandlung bezahlen.
Armut, Unsicherheit, Drohungen und Perspektivlosigkeit bringen die libanesische Gesellschaft aus den Fugen. Die Kriminalitätsrate ist hoch, Entführungen zum Erpressen von Lösungsgeldern nehmen zu. Es gibt Berichte von Zwangsprostitution, Vergewaltigung von Kindern. Junge Mädchen werden verschleppt, um sie auf dem illegalen Heiratsmarkt in den vielen syrischen Flüchtlingslagern meistbietend verkaufen zu können.
„Es wäre besser, die Syrer würden nach Hause gehen“, ist immer wieder zu hören. „Wer sie hier unterstützt, kann sie auch in Syrien unterstützen, damit sie zurückkehren können.“ Vor einer Woche (27.05.2024) wurden auf der inzwischen „8. Geberkonferenz für die Zukunft Syriens und der Region“ in Brüssel 7,5 Milliarden Euro für die Versorgung von syrischen Flüchtlingen in der Türkei, Libanon, Jordanien, Irak eingeworben. Auch Inlandsvertriebene in Syrien – in Idlib und im syrisch-türkischen Grenzland von Idlib und Aleppo – sollen versorgt werden. Mehr als 6 Milliarden Euro brachten Europa und europäische Länder auf. Deutschland sagte 1,02 Milliarden Euro zu, die EU 2,12 Milliarden Euro.
Im Vorfeld der Konferenz hatten sich in Nicosia/Republik Zypern Vertreter und Vertreterinnen aus 8 EU-Staaten getroffen, um darüber zu beraten, wie die freiwillige Rückkehr von Syrern in ihre Heimat unterstützt werden könne. In einer gemeinsamen Erklärung forderten Vertreter aus Österreich, aus der Tschechischen Republik, Zypern, Dänemark, Griechenland, Italien, Malta und Polen, dass die Situation in Syrien neu bewertet werden müsse. Zwar gebe es keine vollständige Stabilität im Land, doch die Lage habe sich in weiten Teilen erheblich beruhigt. Besonders Zypern sucht Unterstützung, weil es die vielen Menschen, die mit Booten aus dem Libanon an seinen Küsten anlanden, nicht mehr versorgen kann. Ursula von der Leyen, Präsidentin der EU-Kommission bot dem Libanon 1,06 Milliarden US-Dollar an, um die Grenzen besser zu kontrollieren und den Strom der Menschen, die versuchen über das Mittelmeer nach Zypern (EU) und Italien zu gelangen, zu stoppen.
Doch wie Zypern kann auch der Libanon die syrischen Flüchtlinge nicht länger versorgen. Darauf weisen verschiedene Regierungen des Landes seit Jahren und zuletzt auch Interimsministerpräsident Najib Mikati hin. Die einzige Perspektive für die Region ist die Rückkehr der Menschen in ihre Heimat. Dafür benötigen sie Unterstützung, um in Syrien wieder neu anfangen zu können. Grundvoraussetzung dafür wiederum ist die Aufhebung aller wirtschaftlichen Strafmaßnahmen und Sanktionen für Syrien, die von EU und den USA gegen das Land verhängt worden sind. Sie blockieren die wirtschaftliche Erholung des Landes und die wirtschaftliche Stabilisierung der gesamten Region.
Good intentions can proverbially lead to hell. This is even more the case when the good intentions are actually evil intentions pretending to be virtuous.
A prime example is the resolution pushed through the UN General Assembly on May 23 designating July 11 as “International Day of Reflection and Remembrance of the Srebrenica Genocide of 1995.” The stated purpose is, of course, humane and noble: to foster “national reconciliation” and the “maintenance of peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina”, when the actual result, as anyone with any understanding of the situation knows full well, can only be the opposite.
Nothing can so effectively prevent reconciliation between the Serb and Muslim inhabitants of Bosnia Herzegovina than the obligation to declare one party (the Bosnian Serbs) to the three-sided slaughter in the 1990s guilty of “genocide” and the Muslim side as pure victims. Muslim leaders, of course, find this much to their advantage and are strongly encouraged in this claim by NATO, which used it to justify its 1999 bombing campaign against Serbia (by analogy with the Bosnian Serbs). The Bosnian Serbs will never accept this and are likely to move to withdraw their territory (Republika Srpska) from the state patched together at Dayton in 1995 by U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke – with help from Serbia’s president Slobodan Milosevic. The U.S. rewarded Milosevic with continued sanctions, support to murderous Albanian rebels in the Serbian province of Kosovo and finally, the 1999 NATO bombing to detach Kosovo from Serbia.
If there were anything going on in the world today which is not ironic, one could emphasize the irony of this Genocide Resolution being sponsored in the General Assembly by NATO states that not only reject accusations of genocide against Israel in Gaza but are actually supporting and arming Israel – and indeed, the leading sponsor of the Srebrenica Day resolution is none other than Israel’s fiercely committed supporter, the Federal Republic of Germany.
German Revanchism
Does it do a country a lot of good to be made to feel guilty for decades? If Germany is the example, the answer might be “no”. In penance for Nazi crimes in World War II, the Federal Republic has cloaked itself in total devotion to the racist Jewish State in the Middle East, thus thrusting any responsibility for devastation of Russia and other Slavic countries into oblivion.
Back in the 1980s, when West German leaders were hoping to seduce Gorbachev into letting them take over East Germany (called “reunification”), I recall the ardent commitment of German colleagues and acquaintances on the left, members of the SPD and the Greens, to reject all “enemy images” (stereotypes) of historic adversaries. Scarcely had German reunification been achieved in 1991, when Germans began to revive hostile stereotypes of Serbia, its enemy in two world wars, in support of Croatian secession from Yugoslavia. Ever since, Germany has directed its revanchist venom against Serbia, viewed as the “little Russia” in the Balkans. This led up to the all-out Russophobia of today, practiced notably by the former advocates of reconciliation, the SPD and the Greens.
The three-party power distribution between Muslims, Serbs and Croats decided at Dayton resembles the 1992 Lisbon agreement under European sponsorship meant to prevent civil war. It was cancelled by Muslim leader Izetbegovic with U.S. encouragement. The differences were dramatically deepened by all the death, destruction and bitterness caused by a civil war that could have been prevented. The shared government operates under a sort of royal veto from a European High Representative, currently a German conservative politician, Christian Schmidt. The population of Bosnia Herzegovina is in drastic decline, with a majority of educated youth planning to emigrate in search of better prospects.
Divide and Rule
Obviously, designation of one of many brutal acts during the Bosnian war as “Serbian genocide” is a way to keep the region divided and unstable indefinitely. It can also lead to renewed hostilities, which NATO could be expected to settle in its own way. If big Russia is proving hard to beat by Ukrainian proxy, the West can always hope to get away with another illegal bombing of little Serbia or the littler Republika Srpska.
The “Srebrenica Genocide Day” was also a bone of contention thrown deliberately by the West among representatives of the South in the General Assembly. Serbia, as the largest component of Yugoslavia, a leader of the Nonaligned Movement, had excellent relations with the Third World, notably with Arab States. When the U.S. backed the Muslim nationalist party of Izetbegovic in the 1990s, this was a continuation of the Brzezinski policy of support to Islamists in Afghanistan and Central Asia in order to destroy the Soviet Union and weaken Russia.
Major Islamic states that armed and supported the Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s could be expected to support the resolution, despite their differences with each other – such as Saudi Arabia and Iran – or with the West. The resolution thus served to arouse divisions within the Global South, despite its tendency to reject Western hegemony.
Nevertheless, this ploy was obvious to many in the General Assembly. The representative of the United Arab Emirates expressed concern for the Muslim victims, but expressed “severe misgivings about the timing and process” and abstained, noting the destabilizing impact of such a resolution on a tense region. Among those who abstained, Brazil and Mexico complained of the decision to force a vote on a resolution that clearly did not represent a consensus.
The final vote was 84 for, 19 against and 68 abstentions. In addition, many of the 193 member states did not attend the vote, so the resolution was adopted by under half the membership, with the combined negative votes and abstentions outnumbering the affirmative votes. Considering the moral pressure of the term “genocide” in addition to the more material forms of pressure exercised by the U.S. on small states, it was not an overwhelming victory. But it stands, and its Western sponsors will surely use every July 11 to remind the world of “Serb genocide in Srebrenica”.
Factual Uncertainties
Point number 2 of the resolution: “Condemns without reservation any denia l of the Srebrenica Genocide as a historical event, and urges Member States to preserve the established facts, including through their educational systems by developing appropriate programs, also in remembrance, towards preventing denial and distortion…”
This demand for indoctrination seems all the more necessary in that many people who have nothing to do with the matter consider that the term “genocide” has been applied to the Srebrenica massacre for political reasons with no solid basis in established facts.
Admittedly, the definition of genocide is open to interpretation. But putting that label on execution of prisoners, an undoubted war crime, while women and children were spared, broadens the definition of genocide to an extent that makes it arbitrarily applicable.
And that is exactly what the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia did.
Remember that the ICTY was totally run by NATO member states and concentrated its vengeful justice on Serbs. One needs to recall the context of the Bosnian war, which was portrayed by Western media as an attack by Serbs (often blurring the distinction between the Serbs of Serbia and those of Bosnia itself who were fighting for their own land) on the “Bosniaks” (Muslims) whose main strategy was to portray themselves as unarmed victims, in order to justify NATO support. In fact the Muslim side was being illegally armed from outside, notably by many Muslim states and by Islamic jihadists who came to fight on their side. International military monitors have reported that certain much publicized attacks on civilians in Sarajevo (in market places) attributed to Serbs were in reality Muslim false flags aimed at gaining international sympathy and support. Some Muslims believe that the Srebrenica massacre was deliberately provoked for this purpose. In a 1998 interview with the Muslim magazine Dani, Srebrenica police chief and local Social Democratic Party leader, Hakija Meholjic, recalled a September 1993 meeting in Sarajevo where Izetbegovic had claimed that President Clinton had told him NATO would intervene if Serbian forces marched into Srebrenica and massacred 5,000 Muslims.
Bosnian Serbs were known to be angry with the Muslim contingent in Sarajevo because of massacres it had carried out against surrounding Serb villages. Vengeance killings were to be feared. Significantly, the Bosnian commander in Srebrenica, Naser Oric, was absent when the Bosnian Serb army moved to capture the town on July 11, leaving his men without orders. Thousands panicked and fled through dangerous Serb lines toward the safe city of Tuzla. In September, the Red Cross requested information on the whereabouts of 3,000 men from Srebrenica who had been arrested by Serb forces as well as of 5,000 who had fled. It has never been established how many of those who fled reached safety and how many were killed in exchanges with Serb forces on the way. However, a New York Times report put those two figures together as missing, and that was the origin of the “8,000 men and boys” figure constantly repeated ever since as the number of victims of the Srebrenica massacre.
After July 1995, the search was on to find and identify the eight thousand announced victims. A Muslim Commission founded by Izetbegovic was incorporated into the International Commission for Missing Persons created by President Clinton in June 1996, with 93% Muslim staff and an American director. For years afterward, the ICMP searched a wide area for bodies of men who had been hastily buried, collecting their DNA, which did not lead to certain evidence of how or when they had died : whether by execution, as claimed, or as they fled through enemy lines.
This biased commission, operating without independent oversight, was the sole source of the varying body counts submitted to the ICTY.
What is not in doubt is that the ICTY was on the lookout for a Serb massacre that could be designated a genocide, and in a crucial trial they found a devious way to do so.
A Single Direct Perpetrator of a “Genocide”
Oddly enough, only one direct perpetrator has been convicted of what is called “the worst crime since the Holocaust”. A strange Bosnian Croat named Drazen Erdemovic, who had fought on various sides of the war, confessed to belonging to a Bosnian Serb unit of eight men who shot between 1,000 and 1,200 Bosnian Muslims on 16 July 1995 at a farm near the village of Pilica north of Srebrenica. The conviction rested entirely on Erdemovic’s testimony, in the absence of forensic proof or prosecution of his seven colleagues, whose names were known.
For his cooperation, he was in effect awarded a plea bargain.
On the basis of his admission of guilt, Erdemovic was sentenced to five years in prison and was released after three and a half years.
In fact, NATO justice, represented by the ICTY, was never interested in tracking down and punishing individuals who actually committed the war crime of executing prisoners. The whole point was to incriminate Serb leaders, not only the leaders of Republika Srpska but of Serbia as well. Erdemovic was brought in as a Prosecution witness in the ICTY trial of Slobodan Milosevic, who died in his cell in The Hague before he could complete his defense. The crimes of individuals were not politically interesting. The objective was to stigmatize the Serb side of the Yugoslav wars by convicting their leaders of “genocide”.
Erdemovic, who spent less than five years in prison after confessing to actual murders, was used to convict of “genocide” persons who were not near the scene of the alleged crimes at the time. One of them, General Radislav Krstic, was convicted by the ICTY of “genocide” on August 2, 2001 and sentenced to 46 years in prison. On May 7, 2010, he was found near death in his British cell, beaten and with his throat cut by an Albanian murderer serving a life sentence. General Krstic is now in a Polish prison serving a sentence reduced to 35 years.
A Unique Genocide
It is undisputed that General Mladic, who commanded the Bosnian Serb capture of Srebrenica, provided full protection to women and children, provided bus transport to Tuzla to Muslim women, children and elderly men who wished to move to safety in Tuzla. For those who were determined to classify the Srebrenica massacre as “genocide”, this was a challenge. The challenge was met by a sociological argument. It went like this:
The Muslim society of Eastern Bosnia was a patriarchal society in which men supported the women and children of their family. Therefore, eliminating the men amounted to eliminating the society as such. Thus the ICTY redefined genocide to suit the specific case of Srebrenica. It was the genocide of a single town, sparing the women and children (those who in reality determine the future life or death of a people). This unique case of “genocide” was subsequently confirmed without investigation by the International Court of Justice, making it “official”.
And such is the historical event that the world is called upon to commemorate annually, by less than half the members of the UN General Assembly. This is essentially an act of virtue-displaying by the West, containing the moral intimidation: those who don’t go along are “genocide deniers”, perhaps even genocide approvers.
Above all, it is a display of the Western powers’ policy of Divide and Rule.
The Peaceful Virtue of Forgetfulness
In the sixteenth century, France was torn apart by religious war between Protestants and Catholics. The bloody conflict was brought to an end by the accession to the throne of France by the Protestant leader Henri de Navarre, who became King Henri IV in 1594, accepting Catholic rites. This was a ruler who profoundly desired to bring peace to his wounded nation. He did not set up a special tribunal to try the perpetrators of the 1572 Bartholomew’s Day massacre of Huguenots by Catholics. Instead, as the best method to ensure much-desired peace, he issued the Edict of Nantes, which begins:
1. First, that the memory of everything which has occurred between one side and the other since the beginning of the month of March 1585 up to our accession to the crown, and during the other preceding troubles and on account of them, shall remain extinct and dormant as though they had never happened. And it shall not be allowable or permissible to our general prosecutors, or any other person whatever, public or private, at any time, or for whatever occasion there may be, to make mention of them, or institute a suit or prosecution in any courts or jurisdiction whatsoever.
2. We forbid all our subjects, of whatever estate or quality they may be, from renewing the memory of those things, attacking, resenting, injuring, or provoking one another by reproaches for what has occurred, for whatever cause and pretext there may be; from disputing these things, contesting, quarreling, or outraging or offending by word or deed; but they shall restrain themselves and live peaceably together like brothers, friends, and common citizens, under the penalty of being punished as breachers of the peace and disturbers of the public tranquility.
This did not work forever, as indeed no effort at lasting peace has ever worked forever up to now. But it can be seen as a wise intention, which should be contemplated in certain cases as an alternative to the current hypocritical insistence of certain Western powers to keep turning the knife in past wounds, while ignoring the outrages of the day in which they happen to be complicit.
We are constantly told that we must constantly remember the worst things people have ever done as the only way to prevent such things from happening again. There is absolutely no evidence to support such a doctrine.
For the unfortunate citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina, nothing could be better than a resolution to admit that when pushed to civil war, to a large extent incited by external powers, people on all sides commit dreadful acts in a cycle of revenge which can end only when it is agreed to forgive and forget.
Belgrader Mediziner über die verheerenden Langzeitschäden. Es wird Zeit für die deutschen Kriegsertüchtiger, sie zu studieren. Hartmut Sommerschuh zum NATO-Jubiläum.
Luftschläge waren im amerikanischen und britischen Kriegsdenken seit dem 2. Weltkrieg das bewährte Mittel, die eigenen Truppen zu schützen und – nach Art des Bomber Command unter Marshal Arthur Harris – die Zivilmoral der Bevölkerung zu schwächen. Als die achtmotorigen B-52-Bomber am 24. März 1999 abends vor der jugoslawischen Küste nach ihrem Start in England noch ein paar Schleifen zogen, um der serbischen Radarüberwachung zu zeigen, wer da kommt, begann ein zynisches Experiment. Obwohl es keine Zustimmung des UNO-Sicherheitsrates gab, hatte Javier Solana, der damalige Generalsekretär der NATO, dem Chef der alliierten Streitkräfte, US-General Wesley Clark, den Angriffsbefehl erteilt. 19 Länder schlossen sich an.
Frau Prof. Danica Grujicic, Neurochirurgin, bis 2022 Direktorin des Instituts für Radiologie und Onkologie Serbiens, mutige Autorin vieler Studien und inzwischen Gesundheitsministerin, brachte es Mitte März 2024 in einem Interview des Belgrader Rundfunks auf den Punkt:
„Alle Formen dramatischer Erkrankungen haben zugenommen. Die Sterilität bei Männern, Autoimmunkrankheiten, Fehlgeburten, die Aggressivität von Tumoren, Krebs auch bei Kindern. Es war ein nuklearer und chemischer Krieg, den die NATO 1999 führte.“[1]
Frau Prof. Danica Grujicic
In ihrer Zustimmung zu einem Luftkrieg erlag die deutsche Regierung unter Kanzler Schröder und den Ministern Fischer und Scharping gravierenden militärischen Fehleinschätzungen. Offenbar auch mit Lügen über ethnische Säuberungen und Massaker im Kosovo durch die Serben begründeten sie den ersten Angriffskrieg unter deutscher Beteiligung seit 1945. Obwohl in den Lageberichten des Amtes für Nachrichtenwesen der Bundeswehr für die Bundestagsabgeordneten bis zum letzten Tag vor dem Angriff immer nur von einem blutigen Bürgerkrieg zwischen UCK-Soldaten und der serbischen Armee die Rede war.
Nach dem Krieg beschrieb der britische General und ehemalige Befehlshaber der UN-Schutztruppe in Bosnien, Michael Rose, in einer Fernsehsendung des Ostdeutschen Rundfunks Brandenburg die verheerende mehrstufige NATO-Strategie:
„Das Ziel war, die Militärmaschinerie Miloševićs auszuschalten und zu zerstören. Doch das endete in einem Misserfolg. Daraufhin erweiterte man die Liste der Ziele auf sogenannte zivilmilitärische Ziele, also Brücken, Straßen, Stromversorgung, Krankenhäuser und sogar Fernsehstationen.“ [2]
Zerstört oder beschädigt wurden nicht nur 25.000 Wohngebäude, 470 Kilometer Straßen und 595 Kilometer Eisenbahnstrecken. 14 Flughäfen, 19 Krankenhäuser, 20 Gesundheitszentren, 18 Kindergärten, 69 Schulen, 176 Kulturdenkmäler, darunter auch Klöster, und 44 Brücken. In der Nacht des 23. April 1999 tötete die NATO bei einem gezielten Angriff auf ein staatliches Rundfunk-Gebäude auch 16 Fernsehmitarbeiter.
Der militärische Aufwand der Operation ALLIED FORCE war entsprechend: 2.300 Luftangriffe auf 995 Objekte. Mit über 18.000 Kampfflugzeug-Einsätzen, 420.000 Raketen, 1.300 Marschflugkörpern und 37.000 heute geächteten, aber in der Ukraine wieder eingesetzten „Streubomben“. Rund 200 Menschen starben allein durch sie, mehrere hundert wurden grausam verletzt.
Besonders zynisch und medizinisch katastrophal, so Frau Prof. Danica Grujicic, war die vorsätzliche Bombardierung der großen Chemiebetriebe in Pancevo, Bor, Novi Sad und vor allem der Einsatz von Uranmunition.
Allein die Stadt Novi Sad und ihre Vororte wurde zwischen dem 24. März und 9. Juni 1999 achtundreißigmal bombardiert. Die Energieversorgung und alle drei Brücken zerstört. Zehn Angiffstage mit Bomben und treffgenauen Marschflugkörpern galten nur der Ölraffinerie.
Bereits am 7. April 1999 liefen 80.000 Tonnen Öl liefen aus, verbrannten 20.000 Tonnen.[3]
Schon am 4. April 1999, zwölf Tage nach Beginn der Luftschläge, wurde zum ersten Mal auch die Raffinerie von Pančevo angegriffen. Das auslaufende Öl brannte zwei Wochen. Am 15. und 18. April 1999 und selbst noch am 8. Juni, kurz vor dem Waffenstillstand, zerstörte die NATO dieses große Chemiezentrum völlig. Nur wenige Jahre zuvor war es mit US-Hilfe modernisiert worden. Bauplangenau trafen computergesteuerte Cruise-Missiles die Düngemittelfabrik, die Ölraffinerie, das PVC-Werk. Und dort auf den Meter exakt einen noch halbvollen Tank mit 450 Tonnen Vinylchlorid, einem krebserregenden Vorprodukt für die PVC-Herstellung.
Mehr als 10 Tage zog eine 20 km lange Giftgaswolke über die Vororte von Belgrad in die Gemüse- und Kornkammern Serbiens. Die Konzentration des Vinylchlorids stieg dabei zeitweise auf das 10.600-Fache des internationalen Grenzwertes. Als der Wind sich drehte, kroch die Wolke weiter nach Bulgarien, Rumänien, Ungarn. 550 km südlicher registrierten Wissenschaftler der griechischen Universitäts-Station Xanthi hochgiftige Dioxine und polyzyklische aromatische Kohlenwasserstoffverbindungen.
Zum ersten Mal setzte die NATO 1999 auch panzerbrechende URAN-Munition ein. Während des 78- tägigen Krieges wurden 31.000 Uran-Projektile mit etwa 10-15 Tonnen abgereichertem Uran an über 91 Orten verschossen. Vor allem im Kosovo und in Südserbien. Bereits am 22. April 1999 machte die ARD-Sendung Monitor darauf aufmerksam.
Schon wenige Jahre nach Kriegsende beobachten serbische Mediziner wie der führende Belgrader Onkologe Prof. Vladimir čikarić und Frau Professor Danica Grujičić einen dramatischen Anstieg der Krebsrate und Sterblichkeit.
Doch erst im Mai 2018 konnten sie und weitere Ärztekollegen im westabhängigen Belgrader Parlament die Gründung einer Untersuchungskommission für alle Folgen der Angriffe mit Uranmunition und auf die Chemieindustrie durchsetzen. Grujičić recherchierte mit weiteren Ärzten Studien aus dem Irakkrieg:
„In dem Moment, in dem es zu einer Explosion kommt [ein Urangeschoss eine Panzerung durchschlägt], existiert Strahlung, danach sind es die Nanopartikel, die die Arbeit verrichten. Sie gelangen in Ihre Lunge, Ihren Verdauungstrakt und Ihre Nieren, und dann können Sie jeden Moment damit rechnen, dass ein Alphateilchen aus abgereichertem Uran, das 50-mal krebserregender ist als jedes andere, {…]in Ihrem Körper eine normale Zelle in eine bösartige Zelle verwandelt.“[4]
Lag die Zahl der jährlichen Krebserkrankungen in Serbien im Jahr 1990 bei 9.899, so stieg sie im Jahr 2000 sprunghaft auf 22.123, im Jahr 2010 auf 26.152 und 2011 auf etwa 33000 Fälle.[5] Heute erkranken unter den etwa 7 Millionen Einwohner jährlich 40 000 Menschen an Krebs..
Laut dem Europäisches Krebsinformationssystem (ECIS)[6] lag Serbien 2020 an erster Stelle mit einem Index von 150,6 Erkrankungen pro 100.000 Einwohner, während der europäische Durchschnitt bei 108,7 Fällen lag.
Prof. Danica Grujicic:
„Wir haben Tumore der Atemwege (Lunge), der Brustdrüsen, des zentralen Nervensystems, der Schilddrüse, des Kreislaufs und des Verdauungssystems. Es sind hinsichtlich der Sterblichkeit die Wichtigsten“[7] […] Viele Tumore traten erst nach 10, 15 Jahren auf. Und zwar nicht nur in erhöhter Zahl, sondern auch aggressiver. Wer beispielsweise zuvor einen Gehirntumor hatte, der im Frontallappen, Hinterhauptslappen oder Schläfenlappen lokalisiert war, hat ihn jetzt von frontal bis temporal und immer mehr davon. Tumore sind im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes zu Gehirnkrankheiten geworden.“
(Frau Professor Ursula Stephan und Kollegin)
Keine geringere als die damalige Vorsitzende der deutschen Störfallkommission, die Toxikologin Frau Professor Ursula Stephan, hatte bereits wenige Wochen nach dem Kriegsende 1999 die bombardierten serbischen Chemiezentren Pancevo und Novi Sad besucht. Und für den World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF) in Wien ein Gutachten erarbeitet. Über die humatoxikologischen Folgen der Zerstörung. Während sich die moderne Chemieindustrie mit Notfallplänen auf Störfälle vorbereitet, gäbe es, so Prof. Ursula Stephan,
„auf kriegsbedingte Gefahrenmomente dieser Dimension, keine Gefahrenabwehr. Diese nicht abschätzbaren Gefahren werden als exceptionelle Störfälle bezeichnet.“ [8]
Sozusagen als Super-GAU, eine Katastrophe außer Kontrolle, Vergleichbar mit Tschernobyl oder Fukushima.
Aus 78.000 Tonnen verbrannter Explosiv- und Raketentreibstoffe und den Abgasen aus über 150.000 Flugstunden der Bombenflugzeuge und Marschflugkörper wurden, so die Expertin, zu allen Chemikalien noch über eine Milliarde (1000 Mio) Kubikmeter luftverschmutzender Substanzen freigesetzt. Angesichts der damals schon laufenden Klimadebatte ein Extraverbrechen. Diese Gesamtmenge an Kohldioxid, Stickstoffoxiden und unverbrannten Kohlenwasserstoffen war seit dem Golfkrieg der größte Beitrag zur Luftverschmutzung und zum Treibhauseffekt! „Es war eine neue Form der chemischen Kriegsführung, quasie ein Gaskrieg.“ So Prof. Ursula Stephan.[9]
Ende Februar 2020 gab das serbische Ministerium für Umweltschutz bekannt, dass eine Sitzung des Gemeinsamen Gremiums zur Bestimmung der Folgen der Bombardierung der Republik Serbien für die menschliche Gesundheit und die Umwelt stattgefunden hat. Im Einvernehmen mit dem Gesundheitsministerium, dem Verteidigungsministerium und dem Bildungsministerium. Vorgestellt worden sei ein „Arbeitsprogramm zur Aufklärung der Veränderungen im Zustand der Umwelt und der Natur vor und nach dem NATO-Angriff.“[10]
Doch, so klagte Anfang 2021 Danica Grujičić, das staatliche Gremium zur Ermittlung der Folgen des NATO-Bombenangriffs sei nicht ins Leben gerufen worden. Zu groß war wohl inzwischen die Rücksicht auf die EU-Freunde im Westen:
„Selbst im vergangenen Jahr wurde nichts unternommen, damit das aus Vertretern der vier Ministerien der serbischen Regierung bestehende Gremium, das die Folgen des NATO-Bombenangriffs bestimmen sollte, seine Arbeit aufnehmen konnte.“ [11]
Ganz als Eigeninitiative von Danica Grujičić, dem Physiker Dr. Zorka Vukmirović und weiteren 33 Experten, legte Ende Juni 2021 nach vielen Bittgängen um Finanzierung die Serbische Gesellschaft zur Krebsbekämpfung eine Dokumentation vor:
„Die Wahrheit über die Folgen der NATO-Bombardierung Serbiens im Jahr 1999“.
Prof. Danica Grujičić:
„Indem wir diese Monographie (mit universellem Wert) Studierenden, Doktoranten und Forschern empfehlen, drücken wir die Hoffnung aus, dass diejenigen, die Entscheidungen treffen, bedenken, dass dies der letzte Moment ist, ein nationales Projekt zur Erforschung der gesundheitlichen und ökologischen Folgen von Kriegshandlungen auf europäischem Boden zu starten.“[12] [ Der NATO-Krieg ..] „war ein hässliches und unmenschliches Experiment für die gesamte Region, nicht nur für Serbien und Montenegro, und ich hoffe, dass die internationale Wissenschaftsgemeinschaft versteht, dass es auf wissenschaftliche Weise untersucht werden muss.“[13]
Christopher Hill, heute US-Botschafter in Serbien, war 1999 schon mit Richard Holbrooke bei den für Serbien unannehmbaren Verhandlungen in Rambouillet dabei. Zum 25. Jahrestag des NATO-Angriffes wurde er am 20. März 2024 im serbischen Staatsfernsehen zu dem Krieg 1999 befragt. Seine Antwort:
„Niemand war begeistert von der Bombardierung Serbiens […] Ich verstehe sicherlich, dass dies eine sehr schwierige Zeit der Geschichte war, für die Historiker wahrscheinlich viel Zeit benötigen werden, um sie zu bewältigen […] Aber meine Funktion als Diplomat, im Gegensatz zu einem Historiker oder Anwalt, der zurückblickt, meine Funktion als Diplomat ist es, nach vorne zu schauen. [14]
Nach vorne, das heißt vergessen, von einem EU-Beitritt träumen, sich westlichen Strategien andienen. Zur Hälfte mit einem Kredit der Entwicklungsbank des Europarates baut Serbien bis 2026 für 413 Millionen einen gigantischen „Bio4-Campus.“ Mit sieben Fakultäten und neun wissenschaftlichen Instituten, 1.000 Doktoranden und mehr als 4.000 Studenten. In einer Themenkombination von Biomedizin, Biotechnologie, Bioinformatik und Biodiversität.[15] Kernstück ist auch ein Vertrag mit Pfizer und Astra Zeneca. Bekannt für ihre Impfstoffe gegen COVID-19.
Gespräche gibt es auch mit Chinas BGI, einem der größten Genomforschungsorganisationen der Welt, mit den Firmen Roche, Merch Sharp, Dohme und Takeda.
Die stellvertretende Premierministerin und Verteidigungsministerin Milos Vucevic, die Ministerin für Wissenschaft, technologische Entwicklung und Innovation Jelena Begovic, der Minister für öffentliche Investitionen Marko Blagojevic, die amtierende Direktorin des Instituts für Virologie, Impfstoffe und Serums “Torlak” Luka Dragacevic sowie Prof. Danica Grujicic gaben gemeinsam den Startschuss.
Seitdem sie Gesundheitsministerin ist, schauen vom NATO-Angriff bis heute Betroffene misstrauisch auf sie. Wird ihre kritische Haltung bleiben? Eine Aufarbeitung der Kriegsfolgen gehört bislang nicht zum Campus-Plan.
[«5] Mihajlo Jovanovic, Folgen der NATO-Aggression gegen die Bundesrepublik Jugoslawien, Diplomarbeit 2018, Universität Belgrad, Fakultät für Sicherheit
Here is a modest proposal, nothing too radical, just good sense. Turn over Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan to the Iranian authorities on the understanding the two statesmen, very loosely defined, would spend 444 days at the U.S. embassy compound in Tehran. Let’s think of it as a reenactment.
Said premises, long a mess of barbed wire, weeds, brambles, mold and anti–American graffiti, is now a museum. The Den of Espionage, as it is called, is dedicated to the shameful history of U.S.–Iranian relations leading up to that fateful day, Jan. 16, 1979, when the shah was deposed by a nation that had had enough of him. Those unkind Iranians had to rub it in: The old graffiti is now covered over with mocking murals featuring Mickey Mouse and McDonald’s.
All the better, I say. My theory is that the Biden regime’s secretary of state and national security adviser would return from their year and 79 days in the embassy—sitting on the floor, sleeping in the offices, washing their socks in bathroom sinks, the whole nine—transformed almost beatifically into… into statesmen of high purpose and deep insight, the two being devoid of both as we have them now.
I am inspired to these thoughts by a good obituary The New York Times ran in its May 18 editions on the death of a good man named Moorhead Kennedy. Moorhead Kennedy’s blood ran very blue: Upper East Side childhood, Groton, Princeton, Harvard Law, a career in the Foreign Service. Having learned Arabic, he was something of a Middle East man, his assignments over the years including Yemen and Lebanon. And then destiny placed its gentle hand on Kennedy’s shoulder: He was on a temporary assignment as economics attaché in Tehran when the fecal matter hit the fan.
And so Kennedy was among those 52 Americans—diplomats, others in civil service jobs—who spent the famous 444 days captives of militant but nonviolent, I would say altogether righteous students who had broken down the embassy gates and climbed over its walls. They were of many stripes, secular and religious, but they were all repelled by the shah’s coercive insistence on Westernizing Iran in the worst kind of way—“Westoxicity,” as it came to be called. Many of them spent their days poring through the embassy files and diplomatic cables to reconstruct just how, covertly and criminally, the U.S. had been attempting to overthrow the Iranian government for the second time in 26 years.
I recall years later seeing black-and-white news footage of the hostages as they filed up the stairs to board an Air Algeria flight home on Jan. 20, 1981. One of the diplomats turned back a few steps short of the cabin door, shouted something the film did not record, and gave the Islamic Republic and all its citizens a great big middle finger. Ah, yes, I recall thinking, with what dignity are we represented to the world.
Moorhead Kennedy would have had as much reason to vent his anger as that vulgarian on the stairs. He was blindfolded and tied to a chair when students filed into his office. But something happened to Kennedy during the long months that followed. He began talking to those who had stormed the embassy. And most of all, he began listening to them. I have long argued that the first signs that an imperium is in decline are when it goes blind and deaf; it can neither see others for who and what they are nor hear what they have to say. Kennedy proved to suffer from neither of these symptoms.
As he later recounted his experience in an interview with a small public-affairs journal in Connecticut, Kennedy seemed to have brought a singularly open mind to what was supposed to be a brief assignment filling in for an absent colleague. “I was very interested in seeing a revolution in progress,” he told a reporter from CT Mirror in 2016. “It was a very fruitful time until, all of a sudden, I heard a shout from the Marines, ‘They’re coming over the wall!’ And then a whole new experience began.”
There is a wonderful photograph of Kennedy atop The Times’s obit, taken in the embassy during his captivity. It shows him sitting at his desk, calmly reading with his fingers to his chin. On the floor beside him are two colleagues whose beards make them look like they are among Kennedy’s captors. On his desk you see the paraphernalia of makeshift meals: a jar of mustard, a jar of Sanka repurposed as a sugar bowl, a box of Cocoa Krispies. I suspect Kennedy’s apparent composure had something to do with that unshakable aplomb you often find in American bluebloods.
It is odd now to think you are looking at a man midway through a life-altering metamorphosis from which he had the integrity never to turn back. It was in the embassy that Kennedy began to reflect on what he was doing as an American foreign service officer and to conclude that what he was doing was emphatically not what he ought to have been doing because the nation he served had it all wrong. “Mr. Kennedy’s thoughts on U.S. foreign policy,” as The Times’s obit explains, “were partly shaped by discussions with his captors.”
“Those Americans who applauded the Westernizing efforts of the shah had little notion of how his programs had disrupted lives at all levels of society,” Kennedy wrote, when he looked back later, in The Ayatollah in the Cathedral: Reflections of a Hostage (Hill & Wang, 1986). “Many Iranians, disoriented, forced to think in new and strange ways, to perform unfamiliar tasks in accordance with unfamiliar norms, humiliated by their inadequacies as they tried to behave as Westerners, and disinclined to become proximate Westerners, second-class at best, sought above all for a renewed sense of their own identity.”
There is something brilliant, in a certain way almost miraculous, in the deep, personal transformation implicit in those observations. Kennedy was telling us he learned while in the embassy a lesson I have long considered the most fundamental that our time requires of us but one too few of us even attempt: This is the capacity to see from the perspectives of others by way of seeing them with clear eyes and hearing them with open ears.
That “whole new experience” when Iranian students burst into his office does not seem to have ended until Kennedy died at 93 on May 3 in Bar Harbor, that waspy redoubt along the Maine coast. Upon his return to the States, he acted swiftly once the ticker-tape parades were over and the Klieg lights were off. He resigned from the Foreign Service without hesitation and turned himself into a dedicated, admirably insightful critic of U.S. foreign policy, bringing to bear his years of experience on the inside.
He lectured widely, interviewed often, and wrote extensively. As soon as he left the Foreign Service he founded the Cathedral Peace Institute at St. John the Divine on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the longtime home of many an activist in international affairs. The Times quotes an appearance he made on a public-access television show in 1986, when his book came out:
When it comes to foreign affairs, the last thing in the world an American is willing to do is to think or to try to think what it would be like to be a Soviet, to be an Arab, to be an Iranian, to be an Indian. And the result is that we think of the world as a projection of ourselves, and we think that others must be thinking along the lines we’re thinking. And when they don’t, we’re troubled by it.
This is luminous thinking. Kennedy did not limit his concerns to this or that mistaken policy—we got it wrong in Lebanon, in Angola, or wherever the world over. I value him in part because he took on the psychological deformations that have so much to do with what has made American foreign policy a rolling disaster since the 1945 victories and Washington’s pursuit of “global leadership,” that polite term for aggressive hegemony.
Here he is on what has become a familiar obsession within the policy cliques since his time in captivity began 45 years ago:
The elements in the Arab world and in Iran are reacting against us through another kind of war—a low-intensity war called terrorism. And I think it is a way of trying to make us understand, or at least be aware, that they have a different point of view.
When I read this remark my mind went immediately to that intellectual charlatan of the Bush II years, Richard Perle, who argued with supreme and consequential stupidity following the 2001 attacks, “Any attempt to understand terrorism is an attempt to justify it.” And then I thought of the discourse concerning Hamas: One must call Hamas “terrorist” at all times and without exception and in every mention so as to avoid all understanding, just as Perle insisted.
The line of thinking we call perspectivism—the recognition that none of us has a monopoly on truth, “values” or interpretations of reality—has been around since Nietzsche pondered it in the late 19th century. Moorhead Kennedy is what it looks like in practice, on the ground, reading at a desk while captive.
How impoverished have we made ourselves since Kennedy’s time. How vast a distance lies between his thinking and the ideological non-thinking of Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan. They are guilty on a daily basis of every sin Kennedy identified.
The day before The Times published its Moorhead Kennedy obituary, Sergei Ryabkov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, reflected on the state of U.S.–Russian relations in an interview he gave TASS, the Russian news agency, in mid–May. “They live in a bubble,” he said of the Biden regime’s policy cliques, “and do not perceive outside signals that go against their preconceptions.” He went on to say of the Atlantic nations as a whole, “We feel not an ounce of trust, which triggers political and even emotional rejection.” Isn’t this a good description, albeit coincidental, of how the Iranian students thought and felt toward the U.S. when they climbed over the wall and burst through the gates in 1979?
Send Blinken and Sullivan to the Den of Espionage, I say. Wouldn’t there be some slim chance the bubble they share would burst? And that maybe they would come home with a perspectivist grasp of the world they might suddenly see and hear, and they would stop running America’s standing in the world straight into the ground?
*Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a media critic, essayist, author and lecturer. His new book, Journalists and Their Shadows, is out now from Clarity Press. His website is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.
His threat against Warsaw came in response to remarks made by Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski during a May 25 interview with the Guardian. According to Sikorski, the likelihood of a Russian nuclear attack is low due to the stance taken by the U.S. He also mentioned that Poland backed Ukraine’s right to strike at military targets in Russia, arguing that the West had to stop constantly limiting itself in what it does to support Ukraine.
«The Americans have told the Russians that if you explode a nuke, even if it doesn’t kill anybody, we will hit all your [positions] in Ukraine with conventional weapons, we’ll destroy all of them. I think that’s a credible threat,» the foreign minister argued.
«The Russians are hitting the Ukrainian electricity grid, their grain terminals and gas storage capacity – civilian infrastructure. The Russian operation is conducted from the headquarters at Rostov-on-Don. Apart from not using weapons, Russia does not limit itself much.»
Medvedev, currently the deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, took to X to issue his warning. «Sikorsi, apparently, has decided to scare his own masters,» wrote the Russian official, also debunking the Polish minister’s assertions.
«First, the Yankees so far haven’t said anything exactly like that because they are more cautious than the Polacks. Second, Americans hitting out targets means starting a world war – and a foreign minister, even of a country like Poland, should understand that.»
Human knowledge is under attack! Governments and powerful corporations are using censorship to wipe out humanity’s knowledge base about nutrition, herbs, self-reliance, natural immunity, food production, preparedness and much more. We are preserving human knowledge using AI technology while building the infrastructure of human freedom. Speak freely without censorship at the new decentralized, blockchain-power Brighteon.io. Explore our free, downloadable generative AI tools at Brighteon.AI. Support our efforts to build the infrastructure of human freedom by shopping at HealthRangerStore.com, featuring lab-tested, certified organic, non-GMO foods and nutritional solutions.
«Third, considering that yet another Polack – [Polish President Andrzej] Duda – has recently announced the wish to deploy [tactical nuclear weapons] in Poland, Warsaw won’t be left out and will surely get its share of radioactive ash. Is it what you really want? The Polish are resentful; [they] have been like that for over 400 years.»
Medvedev at it again with his threats of NUCLEAR WAR
«I must admit that when asked about [hosting nuclear weapons], I declared our readiness. Recently, [Russia] has been relocating its nuclear weapons to Belarus. If our allies decide to deploy nuclear weapons as part of nuclear-sharing also on our territory to strengthen the security of NATO’s eastern flank, we are ready for it,» said Duda.
«We don’t have such a tradition. There has never been, unless my memory serves me wrong, such complete universal access to weapons in Poland. We can discuss loosening some of the shackles of requirements in this area, but I would be cautious about completely universal access to weapons.»
This was not the first time Medvedev, who served as Russian president from 2008 until 2012, issued threats of nuclear war against other countries. In February, he warned that the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and some Western capitals – Berlin, London and Washington – would feel the might of the «entire strategic arsenal» of nuclear weapons Moscow has.
«Attempts to return Russia to the borders of 1991 will lead only to one thing – to a global war with Western countries using the entire strategic arsenal of our state,» he wrote. Medvedev also urged Ukraine’s backers to stand down «before it’s too late,» claiming that Russian nuclear weapons would blast «beautiful historical places» to bits.
Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto issued this warning after a meeting with fellow foreign ministers from the bloc. According to him, the high casualty rates among Ukrainian forces combined with Kyiv’s difficulty to conscript its own population could see Brussels step in. If that instance happens, the EU would conscript youths – mostly in the geographical proximity of Ukraine – to fight against Russian troops.
«Ukrainian casualties are becoming more and more unbearable,» Szijjarto told Hungarian media. «Ukrainian men are not being allowed out of Ukraine, and now they want to conscript European youth into the war.»
«And obviously, as this escalation hits the neighborhood first, one can almost clearly hear the argument that the soldiers should be sent from the geographical proximity first. All this means [is] that they want to send Central European youth, including Hungarian youth, to the war with mandatory European conscription.»
Szijjarto did not disclose which foreign ministers or EU member states are exploring the possibility of a European conscription effort. However, several countries have said they would consider sending their own troops to Ukraine if Moscow had a breakthrough on the Ukrainian front. These include France, whose President Emmanuel Macron has repeatedly insinuated the need to send North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops to Ukraine, and the three Baltic states – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
We are building the infrastructure of human freedom and empowering people to be informed, healthy and aware. Explore our decentralized, peer-to-peer, uncensorable Brighteon.io free speech platform here. Learn about our free, downloadable generative AI tools at Brighteon.AI. Every purchase at HealthRangerStore.com helps fund our efforts to build and share more tools for empowering humanity with knowledge and abundance.
«A long-term goal of the left-liberal establishment in Brussels is the creation of an EU military force, including removing the decision-making process about defense from member states and centralizing it in Brussels. Under such a proposal, a potential conscription effort could arise that applies to all EU member states,» Remix News wrote.
Hungary says NO to mandatory EU conscription
During his interview with Hungarian media, the foreign minister described an extremely intense atmosphere at the Council of Foreign Ministers in Brussels ahead of the European Parliament elections in June. According to Szijjarto, the mood turned sour when those present began to discuss the release of €6.5 billion ($7.03 billion) for Ukraine. He rejected the proposal for the reason that it would escalate the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, but was chided by other countries for it.
«There was a big mess here. The German, Lithuanian, Irish, Polish [foreign ministers] and other colleagues fell against me in this matter, but this could not shake our position despite the shouting of Europe’s pro-war politician,» the foreign minister recounted. «They think that if they shout from many directions, then I will say ‘That is good, it is fine.’ However, they should already know us well enough to know this won’t happen.»
Szijjarto reiterated that he would be firmly opposed to any efforts to institute a European mandatory conscription. «Hands off Central Europeans, hands off Hungarian youth,» he said. «We will not allow Hungarian youth to be involved in the war, because this is not our war.»
«We do not investigate whether, according to the Ukrainians, the person is conscripted or not,» said the deputy prime minister. «Based on basic humanity, we will not allow them to be sent to their deaths. Every refugee from Ukraine is completely safe with us and receives all the help.»
Meine Freunde aus Bayern sagten einstimmig: Moskau ist die komfortabelste, technologisch fortschrittlichste, sauberste und schönste Stadt. Kurz gesagt, Moskau ist cool. Dies gilt auch dann, wenn Sie die Kreml-Schreine und viele Tempel nicht berücksichtigen. Sauber, komfortabel, überfüllt, lustig, lecker. Vollständiger Satz.
Gleichzeitig kann sich die Trägheit des spießbürgerlichen Denkens immer noch wiederholen, dass Paris und London wirklich cool sind und wir am Rande stehen.
Genau das ist die Trägheit des Denkens. Die meisten Menschen wissen nicht, wie sie denken sollen, mögen und wollen nicht. Und wenn sie sich verliebten und es wollten, würde ihnen klar werden, wie viel cooler Moskau als Paris ist und wie sehr die Zukunft mehr mit dem Borovitsky-Hügel als mit den Ufern der Themse verbunden ist.
Als der Westen ein Paradebeispiel für das war, was sie sagen: „Das Leben ist gut“, dann ließ die Spartan Scoop nicht jeden in den Westen. Nur Vertrauenswürdige aus der „Kultur“ und der Diplomatie hatten Zutritt. (Sie, die Schanden, haben später das ganze Land korrumpiert)
Und heute hat der Westen erneut ein sanktioniertes „Barriereriff“ errichtet. Aber nicht mehr, um unser „Paradies“ vor unserem „Dschungel“ zu retten. Und umgekehrt.
Um die alte Illusion zu bewahren: Wir hinken hier hinterher – dort gedeihen sie. Rohre! Alles wird dreist und hastig zerstört. Französischer Eleganz, deutscher Pünktlichkeit und englischem Puritanismus wurde ein langes Leben geschenkt. Es gibt überall Gottlosigkeit, Migranten, Dreck und alles andere.
Wenn man die Illusion aufrechterhält, den Westen als Analogon zum Paradies zu behandeln, und sogar den freien Eintritt beibehält, werden Millionen von Menschen in nur einem Jahr mit dem Gefühl nach Hause gehen, dumm getäuscht worden zu sein.
Deshalb muss sich der Westen vor uns schützen, die wir bereits gesichtet haben. Sonst kommen wir für einen Monat, verstehen in einer Woche alles, geben auf und kehren nach Hause zurück. Dies ist der Grund für Sanktionen für normale Bürger.
Wir geben Ihnen kein Visum, wir nehmen Ihnen Ihre Autos weg …
Ihr, ehemalige Allemannen, Hunnen, Langobarden usw. – Christus aus der Nichtexistenz ins Sein übersetzt, erhöht und verherrlicht. Jetzt haben Sie sich schamlos und dreist von ihm losgesagt. Und jetzt hast du den Tod. Langsam, beschämend und unvermeidlich.
Und in unserem Land wird der Heilige und Apostolische Glaube, auch wenn er nicht blüht, nicht sterben. Kommen Sie vorbei und überzeugen Sie sich selbst. Deshalb gehört die Zukunft uns. Und hinter dir steht ein Sarg ohne Kreuz und eine Trauerfeier.
Jeder vernünftige ausländische Besucher der russischen Hauptstadt ist der Meinung, dass dies so ist.
Der Friedensstifter 