August: Osage County and Lone Survivor: Sound and fury signifying not too much…and a celebration of the US military
![Former model, rapper and impudent punk Mark Wahlberg is the perfect actor to serve in a jingoist film. An early racist, Wahlberg had been in trouble 20–25 times with the Boston Police Department in his youth. By age 13, Wahlberg had developed an addiction to cocaine and other substances.[9][10] At fifteen, civil action was filed against Wahlberg for his involvement in two separate incidents of harassing African-American children (the first some siblings and the second a group of black school children on a field trip), by throwing rocks and shouting racial epithets.[11] At 16, Wahlberg approached a middle-aged Vietnamese man on the street and, using a large wooden stick, knocked him unconscious while yelling a racial epithet. That same day, he also attacked another Vietnamese man, leaving the victim permanently blind in one eye.[12][13]](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/markWahlberg898.jpg)
Former model, rapper and impudent punk Mark Wahlberg is the perfect actor to serve in a jingoist film like Lone Survivor. An early racist, Wahlberg had been in trouble 20–25 times with the Boston Police Department in his youth. By age 13, Wahlberg had developed an addiction to cocaine and other substances.[9][10] At fifteen, civil action was filed against Wahlberg for his involvement in two separate incidents of harassing African-American children (the first some siblings and the second a group of black school children on a field trip), by throwing rocks and shouting racial epithets.[11] At 16, Wahlberg approached a middle-aged Vietnamese man on the street and, using a large wooden stick, knocked him unconscious while yelling a racial epithet. That same day, he also attacked another Vietnamese man, leaving the victim permanently blind in one eye.[12][13]
Lone Survivor
Director Peter Berg’s Lone Survivor is based on the account of former US Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell. Luttrell, the only survivor of a four-man SEAL unit that undertook a mission in 2005 in Afghanistan, is played by Mark Wahlberg. The team’s goal was to assassinate a Taliban leader, who was a thorn in the side of the US invaders.
The majority of the film is spent paying tribute to the SEALs’ superhuman training, which, during the 40-minute, blood-splattered battle sequence, enables the four SEALs to fight on with bullets in their heads, injuries to all limbs and a war-is-great-hell camaraderie. Meanwhile, the “dark enemy,” that is, opposition to the US invasion and occupation, is mowed down with relative ease. Nonetheless, the team fails in its mission. Besides Luttrell, the other SEALs include Taylor Kitsch as Michael Murphy, Emile Hirsh as Danny Dietz and Ben Foster as Matt Axelson. Eric Bana plays their commanding officer.
In an interview, director Peter Berg boasted: “I spent months with active SEAL teams (but I was not allowed to film). I did go to Iraq. I was given permission by the SEAL community and special operations to go and embed. I am the only civilian to embed with an active SEAL platoon.” Congratulations, Mr. Berg, on your special relations with a death squad! That will be remembered.
According to a web site that monitors such things, nearly 75 percent of the more than 150 film critics whose opinions were registered endorsed Lone Survivor. Shameful, for example, were the comments of New York Timescritic A.O. Scott, who wrote: “The defining trait of ‘Lone Survivor’—with respect to both its characters and Mr. Berg’s approach to them—is professionalism, It is a modest, competent, effective movie, concerned above all with doing the job of explaining how the job was done. Afterward, you may want to think more about reasons and consequences, about global and domestic politics, but while the fight is going on, you are absorbed in the mechanics of survival.”
Global and domestic politics are the essential issue here, not an afterthought. Furthermore, Scott is way off the mark when he says the film is competently made. Lone Survivor ’s politics are reflected in its crude, ham-fisted aesthetics. For his own reasons, the critic of the right-wing New York Postwas far closer to the mark when he commented that “This is a movie about an irrelevant skirmish that ended in near-total catastrophe, during a war we are not winning.… Pull back a bit from the jingoism and it’s hard to see what was purchased with so much young blood.”
It should be mentioned in passing that director Berg proudly announced at the time of the release of his 2007 film The Kingdom—about an FBI investigation into a bombing in Saudi Arabia—that the movie received “a great reaction from the FBI in particular.”
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August: Osage County
Directed by John Wells (The Company of Men, 2010), August: Osage County is a “timeless” family melodrama set in rural Pawhuska, Oklahoma (near Tulsa), during a hot summer in 2007. The screenplay by Tracy Letts (born in Tulsa in 1965) is based on the latter’s 2007 award-winning play of the same name.
Letts was a longtime member of the Steppenwolf Theatre and co-founder of the Bang Bang Spontaneous Theatre (1990-2000), both in Chicago. Indeed,August: Osage County has a lot of emotional “bang bang,” but little “spontaneity,” as the star-studded cast generates a good deal of sound and fury in its presentation of intergenerational dysfunction.
“My wife takes pills and I drink,” says Beverly Weston (Sam Shepard), a once-acclaimed poet, as the film opens. He has recently hired a young Native American woman Johanna (Misty Upham) to be live-in caretaker and cook for the chaotic household. His wife Violet (Meryl Streep) introduces herself to the domestic while she flies high on prescription medication. A diagnosis of mouth cancer has not slowed down Violet’s pill-popping or chain smoking. To cover her balding, graying head, she wears an unlikely brown wig as needed.
Shortly afterward, Beverly disappears and family members are summoned. First on the scene is Violet’s sister Mattie Fae (Margo Martindale) and her husband Charlie Aiken (Chris Cooper). Violet’s youngest daughter, the subdued Ivy (Julianne Nicholson), lives in the area and is often the object of her mother’s derision. The oldest of the Westons’ three daughters, the willful Barbara (Julia Roberts), makes the trip from Colorado with her husband Bill (Ewan McGregor), from whom she is separated, and her teenage daughter Jean (Abigail Breslin).
Meanwhile, flashy middle daughter Karen (Juliette Lewis) arrives in a convertible with her latest beau, Steve (Dermot Mulroney), a sleazy operator from Florida (with a penchant for adolescent girls), whom Karen introduces as her fiancé. Mattie Fae and Charlie’s shy, insecure son “Little Charles” (Benedict Cumberbatch) will eventually join the crowd.
A few days later, Beverly’s corpse is found by the local sheriff. The Weston patriarch apparently took his boat out on a lake and ended up drowning. Suicide is suspected. A cold, efficient funeral is followed by a family dinner during which the drug-fueled Violet heaps scorn on family members with her malevolent, acerbic “truth-telling.” This leads to a physical confrontation with Barbara. Throughout the ruckus, Johanna waits on the family with a placid demeanor that eventually explodes at the expense of the teen-loving Steve. “All this meanness,” as Charles describes the family dynamic, does not resolve itself happily, or even peacefully.
The movie’s action takes place in extreme August heat in a shuttered old house, creating an airless, claustrophobic atmosphere. An inordinate amount of fanning, moaning and groaning does not help the family’s collective bad temper. The few quiet moments in the drama serve as life support for the audience.
Streep competently dominates August: Osage County. It is her vehicle. As an aging cat on a hot tin roof, she gives a tour-de-force performance. Shepard’s brief appearance is graceful and stands out in the generally ungraceful, badly organized movie.
Roberts tries hard to bring her angry, frustrated character to life, but remains fairly wooden. Nicholson as the repressed introvert and Lewis as the desperate, lonely and well-meaning airhead are effective. Martindale as Mattie Fae is striking—not literally, although striking does take place in the movie. Cooper as her husband, as always, is wonderful to watch.
McGregor as Barbara’s alienated spouse barely registers, and Cumberbatch as “Little Charles” stumbles through his portrayal of a self-effacing, supposedly mentally deficient but sweet bumpkin. McGregor and Cumberbatch are fine actors who could not make much of their paper-thin roles. Upham as the long-suffering, wise Native American seems to have been artificially inserted into the theatrics.
A brief reference is made to poverty, in regard to Violet’s and Beverly’s childhoods (Violet: “What do you know about life on these plains…about hard times?”), but neither social relations nor money are the film’s major concerns.August: Osage County is obsessed with its misguided and shallow notions that psychological relations are based on fixed personality traits and that early family experiences drive the world.
The trio of Roberts, Lewis and Nicholson are clearly intended to bring to mind Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters (a play that Letts has adapted) . But unlike Letts and Wells, even if somewhat passively, Chekhov offered insight into the lives of human beings suffocated by a dead-end provincial existence in a rotting social order. The dead-end, suffocated existence of Wells’s characters is presented superficially and never probed to its roots—a malfunctioning, life-destroying social order.
In August: Osage County, an abundance of acting talent is on display, but to what end? Actor and writer Letts comes out of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, which has its strengths, but specializes, in the end, in scattershot, “apolitical” emotionalism not grounded in the more profound social realities. This type of theater wins a lot of Tonys and Pulitzers, but has little impact on the cultural or political atmosphere. It tends toward social conformism cloaked in histrionics.
SPECIAL COMMENT
At least the old mythologizing of war (e.g. Thermopylae, the charge of the Light Brigade) used to start with the premise that it was the vastly outmanned or outgunned underdog who was the potential hero. Now in our current upside-down media world there is no hesitation in celebrating Goliath over David.
The massive disparity in American killing power that operates in all current and recent American wars should engender a powerful sense of shame and guilt, not chest-beating and glorification.
By Peter Schwarz, wsws.org Hans-Dietrich Genscher: Longtime chiseler in the corridors of power. Whatever deal he offers won’t be good for the Russian people. The release from jail of the Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky has been celebrated as a great success for German foreign policy. After his release from a Russian prison just before Christmas, Khodorkovsky flew directly to Berlin, where he was met at the airport by former German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher. As it turned out, in years of secret negotiations, Genscher had sought intensively to secure the release of the oligarch and had twice met with the Russian President Vladimir Putin, acting in close consultation with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Russia expert Alexander Rahr, who assisted Genscher, described Khodorkovsky’s release in the newsweekly Der Spiegel as a “triumph for German secret diplomacy”. It showed that “Germany still enjoys channels [of communication] to Moscow that the British or Americans do not have.” The term “secret diplomacy” is itself suspicious. Ever since the First World War, it was frowned upon because secret agreements between the great powers had contributed significantly to the outbreak of war. It was then completely discredited by the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939, with its secret clauses regarding the partition of Poland. Rahr is regarded as Germany’s most well-known Russia expert, advising both the government and industrial corporations. His mention of “secret diplomacy” raises the question of what secret agreements are linked to the release of Khodorkovsky, and what Berlin’s objectives are in making them. Genscher’s involvement shows that important goals are at stake. The 86-year-old Free Democratic Party (FDP) politician is a political heavyweight. He has belonged to every German government between 1969 and 1992, first for five years as interior minister and then for 18 years as foreign minister. He was involved in all the fundamental political decisions of the time, especially the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and German reunification in 1989-90. Genscher’s account of the release—that it was for purely humanitarian reasons—is not credible. There are tens of thousands of political prisoners worldwide who have far better humanitarian grounds to justify their release than Khodorkovsky. While it may be true that Russia’s richest man landed behind bars because he tangled with Putin and his circle of power, that does not make him a martyr of democracy. Khodorkovsky, now 50 years old, is one of that exclusive club of oligarchs who, after the collapse of the USSR, used their starting position in the Communist Youth League to enrich themselves by means of robbery, fraud and speculation to take over formerly nationalised property. They left behind not only a social wasteland, but also many dead bodies. Once the judicial authorities were let loose on Khodorkovsky, it was not difficult to find evidence for his conviction. In September 2011, even the European Court of Human Rights approved the actions of the Russian authorities against Khodorkovsky’s oil company Yukos. His prison sentence was at most “unjust,” because other oligarchs who had perpetrated similar crimes were spared prosecution. What makes Khodorkovsky of interest to German politicians is his absolute commitment to the looting of social wealth. “Our compass is profit, our idol is Her Majesty, capital,” is his oft-quoted credo from the year 1993. For Khodorkovsky, freedom means primarily the unrestricted freedom of the market, including the opening up of Russia to Western capital. This brought him into conflict with Putin, who also protects the wealth of the Russian oligarchs, but regards a strong Russian nation-state, which can also act internationally as a great power, as vital to a functioning Russian capitalism. Probably the most important reason for Khodorkovsky’s arrest in autumn 2003 were his efforts to sell up to 50 percent of the Yukos oil company to the US corporations Exxon and Chevron. For the Kremlin, this was not acceptable. After Khodorkovsky’s conviction, Yukos was broken up and incorporated into the state-dominated oil company Rosneft, which also controls the gas monopoly Gazprom, and is now the largest energy company in the world. The strategic role of oil and gas has changed over the last ten years. New extraction methods, such as deep sea drilling and fracking, have unlocked new deposits globally, undermining Russia’s position as an energy exporter. Putin was therefore looking for new ways of strengthening the position of Russia. The main project of his third term as president is to build a Eurasian Union. This is to be modelled on the European Union, and would include large parts of the former Soviet Union and other countries. Before the presidential elections, Putin presented the project in a detailed article in Izvestia on October 3, 2011. He stressed that the Eurasian Union did not “entail any kind of revival of the Soviet Union … It would be naïve to try to revive or emulate something that has been consigned to history.” Putin wrote that the Eurasian Union promised to strengthen Russia’s global position: “We suggest a powerful supranational association capable of becoming one of the poles in the modern world and serving as an efficient bridge between Europe and the dynamic Asia-Pacific region.” At the same time, he denied that the project was directed against the European Union. Rather, the Eurasian Union would “join the dialogue with the EU.” The goal is “a harmonised community of economies stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok.” The partnership between the Eurasian and the European Unions would “prompt changes in the geo-political and geo-economic setup of the continent as a whole, with a guaranteed global effect.” Putin’s article triggered disquiet in the US and Europe. There was hardly a major newspaper or a think tank which did not comment on it in detail. In particular, the German and US governments concluded that their strategy—bringing large parts of the former Soviet Union under their economic and political control, increasingly isolating Russia, and strengthening their influence in strategically important Central Asia—was at risk. Even Beijing reacted nervously. It saw Putin’s foray as a rival project to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which is meant to strengthen China’s position in Central Asia. The right-wing American think tank Heritage Foundation warned: “Russia’s Eurasian Union could endanger the neighbourhood and U.S. interests.” It advised the US and its allies in Europe and Asia, “to balance the Russian geopolitical offensive and protect U.S. and Western interests”. At a press conference in Dublin in December 2012, then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton clearly indicated that the United States will not tolerate Putin’s project. There is a “move to re-Sovietise the region,” Clinton said, regarding talk of a Eurasian Union. “But let’s make no mistake about it. We know what the goal is and we are trying to figure out effective ways to slow down or prevent it.” The EU and Germany are trying to pull former Soviet republics onto their side under the “Eastern Partnership.” This project is aimed at bringing Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Georgia and Armenia closer to the European Union. The EU explicitly excludes simultaneous membership of the Eurasian Union and the Eastern Partnership. The conflict escalated last November when, at the last minute, the Ukrainian government refused to sign an Association Agreement with the EU. The agreement with the EU would have meant massive cuts in pensions and social spending, as well as gas price increases for private citizens, which the government feared it would not survive politically. On the other hand, Russia was offering the almost bankrupt country loans and gas price discounts of some $20 billion. The EU and the US responded by massively supporting pro-European protests against President Viktor Yanukovych and his government. The UDAR party of professional boxer Vitali Klitschko, a spokesman of the opposition, is sponsored and trained by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU). They do not object when Klitschko regularly stands side by side with the fascist Oleh Tyagnibok from the All-Ukrainian Association “Svoboda.” So far, the opposition has not succeeded in forcing the government and the president, who have substantial backing in eastern Ukraine, to resign. But they are continuing demonstrations with Western support—signalling to the Kremlin that they are willing to divide the country, should it join Putin’s union. Without the 45 million inhabitants of Ukraine, the largest ex-Soviet republic after Russia, the Eurasian Union would be a rump organisation. It is in this context that Khodorkovsky’s release must be seen. Since German reunification 23 years ago, the German government has systematically worked to gain a foothold in Eastern Europe and the ex-USSR. In this, Berlin is following the traditional thrust of German imperialism, which in the First and especially the Second World War had conquered Ukraine and parts of Russia. Berlin has never excluded the possibility of cooperation with Putin, as long as this is on its terms. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (Social Democratic Party, SPD) enjoyed a personal friendship with the Russian President, and attested him to be a “flawless democrat.” Now Berlin sees a new opportunity to get back in business with Putin on its own terms. While in Ukraine it supports and organises the anti-Russian protests, Berlin hopes simultaneously for a greater opening up of Russia for German capital. This is how Alexander Rahr, Genscher’s assistant in the negotiations, interprets Khodorkovsky’s release. “If there are politicians who can influence Putin, it is the Chancellor and the former designers of German Ostpolitik ,” he wrote on 2 January in Die Welt. “The fact that Khodorkovsky was flown to Germany after his pardon shows that Putin is seeking a rapprochement with the West via Berlin.”Why Berlin is active on behalf of the Russian oligarch Khodorkovsky
U.S. Intensifies Military Encirclement of China
By Rick Rozoff
The irresponsible expansion of NATO and its conversion to a naked tool for Western (US-led) imperialism is laying the groundwork for a confrontation between continents as the US increasingly threatens China and Russia. The elimination of this type of malignant leadership is now essential for the survival of humanity and the arrival of a lasting peace. Given the appalling magnitude of their crimes, their pervasive corruption, most top Western leaders now fully deserve to be brought before a Nuremberg-type tribunal. —Eds
With the emergence of China as the world’s second-largest economy and its concomitant renewal of (comparatively minor) territorial claims in the East China Sea and South China Sea, the stage is set for a U.S.-Chinese confrontation of a nature and on a scale not seen since before the Sino-Soviet split of 1960.
Following the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization throughout Europe over the past thirteen years – every European nation is now a full member of or involved in one or more partnership arrangements with the U.S.-led military bloc except for Cyrus, which is under intensified pressure to join the Partnership for Peace program – which has enforced a cordon sanitaire on Russia’s western and much of its southern frontier, it was inevitable that the U.S. and its allies would next move to encircle, quarantine and ultimately confront China.
In the past decade the Pentagon has begun conducting annual multinational military exercises in nations bordering China (Khaan Quest in Mongolia, Steppe Eagle in Kazakhstan) and near it (Angkor Sentinel in Cambodia), has with its NATO allies waged war and moved into bases in nations bordering China – Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan and Tajikistan – as well as nearby Uzbekistan, and, even before the official announcement of the strategic shift to the Asia-Pacific region, acquired the use of new military facilities in Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Australia, Singapore and the Philippines.
President Obama’s current visit to Cambodia, Myanmar and Thailand and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s simultaneous trip to Australia, Cambodia and Thailand are exemplary of this trend.
Early this year NATO announced the launching of its latest, and first non-geographically specific, partnership program, Partners Across the Globe, which began with the incorporation of eight Asia-Pacific nations: Afghanistan, Australia, Iraq, Japan, Mongolia, New Zealand, Pakistan and South Korea.
Since the summer of 2010 the U.S. has been courting the ten members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam), several of whom are embroiled in island disputes with China, for inclusion into a rapidly evolving Asian analogue of NATO which includes the eight above-mentioned new NATO partners and is intended to be a super-Cold War era-like bloc subsuming the former members of the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) and Australia, New Zealand, United States Security Treaty (ANZUS) into a systematic initiative aimed against China.
The so-called Asia-Pacific pivot also entails the deployment of 60 percent of total American naval assets – quantitatively the largest and qualitatively the most technologically advanced and lethal in the world – to the Asia-Pacific region. Even before that U.S. Pacific Command’s area of responsibility has included over 50 percent of the world’s surface, more than 100 million square miles, with U.S. Central Command bordering China and India in the other direction. The U.S. Seventh Fleet, tasked to patrol the waters of the Asia-Pacific, is the largest overseas naval force in the world and will be further enhanced by the U.S. Navy’s intensified deployment to the region. The U.S. has eleven of the world’s twelve nuclear aircraft carriers and all eleven supercarriers.
Washington is also incorporating several Asia-Pacific nations into its global interceptor missile grid, in its initial avatar launched in conjunction with NATO and the so-called European Phased Adaptive Approach which will station increasingly longer-range land-based missiles in Romania and Poland and Aegis class cruisers and destroyers equipped with Standard Missile-3 interceptors in the Mediterranean and likely later in the Baltic, Norwegian, Black and even Barents Seas.
The Pentagon’s partners in the Asia-Pacific wing of the international missile system, which targets China as the European version does Russia, include to date Japan, South Korea, Australia and Taiwan, with the Philippines reported to be the future host of two Forward-Based X-Band Radar-Transportable interceptor sites of the sort deployed to Turkey at the beginning of this year and to Israel in 2008.
China is a critically important component of the two groups representing the greatest potential for a multi-polar world, BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Russia, its partner in both, confronting the same threats from the West, must, in its own interest as well as those of world peace and equilibrium, support China against American brinkmanship and gunboat diplomacy.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rick Rozoff has been involved in anti-war and anti-interventionist work in various capacities for forty years. He lives in Chicago, Illinois. Is the manager of the Stop NATO international email list at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/
e and elsewhere on TGP and the author’s site.
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THE BALKAN ENIGMA AND NATO’S CHAINS OF PROGRESS
by Gaither Stewart
Even though beaten down by NATO’s weapons superiority, the Serbian nation remain a formidable player in the Balkan equation. After all they are part of the “Southern Slavs” and share the resilience of their big brothers in the north. Serbian independence and Russian sympathies are likely to remain a hurdle to US imperialist designs in that crucial region for a long time.
(ROME-BELGRADE) NATO seems to find Serbia’s autonomy outrageous, its semi-neutrality unacceptable, its modernity anomalous and above all its path to progress dangerous. For North Atlantic Treaty planners and schemers, Serbia—maverick, outsider, rebel—is an infectious disease to be eradicated. Serbia must be chained, normalized and integrated with the rest of Europe as are most southeastern European lands. Serbia’s neutral existence is an affront, an obstacle to a final solution of the thorny Balkan conundrum.
What terrible threat does Serbia pose? It seems that Serbia’s very existence is a threat to the New World Order. You just never know what those rebellious Southern Slavs will do next. Untamed, all they think about is enjoying life. Dancing and drinking, the Belgrade slogan. Belgrade, voted the world’s Number One Party City. Endless bars and cafés, its great rivers, the Danube and the Sava. Its blasting brass bands. Joyous Serbs, living the present, but not forgetting their country’s recent brutal past.
Bulgaria to Serbia’s southeast is subjugated, NATO and U.S. military bases marking its landscape. The huge city-like bases in Germany for 100,000 troops are no longer necessary. America is “reconfiguring its footprint”—that is, reviewing global deployment of troops so as to be capable of applying military force anywhere rather than just sitting in place. More mobile bases. Lily pads, they are called in military jargon, bases from which troops hop from one to another.
Like frogs hopping from one water lily to the other, U.S and NATO soldiers and mercenaries can jump on demand (JOD) from one to another of a growing number of the empire’s foreign bases. Frogs equal battle-ready troops. Saudi Arabian restrictions on the use of U.S. bases there resulted in the construction of the Qatar lily pad. The air war against Serbia and the theft of its historic territory of Kosovo made possible the creation of the giant lily pad state there. Lily pad military bases now dot Bulgaria, Romania and the Czech Republic, northwards to the Baltic States, across the Black Sea to Georgia, another lily pad state, to giant lily pad state Iraq, and on to Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan. The circumference of the Earth is the only limit today to U.S. military expansion but the moon and Mars are not excluded from military Strangelove ambitions and dreams.
According to NATO strategy these joyous Serbs need a lesson in realism. “We in NATO want to help them learn to live democratically and in true freedom” – even if temporary chains are required to educate them. A good shock is needed to shake them out of their lethargy. These unruly and lazy people are lacking in ambition. They don’t even attempt to exploit the oil and minerals lying under the surface of their lands.
Serbian army: Women in special combat units.
NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen admits that “for understandable historical reasons there might be some skepticism in Serbia regarding a relationship with NATO”. Might be some skepticism, he says! “My mission is to see all countries in the Balkans integrated in the Euro-Atlantic structures of NATO and the EU”. NATO insists that since Serbia is a European nation, its future can only lie within the European community … that is, in warlike NATO. All the other Balkan countries are already normalized and integrated. Or the process is underway.
However, there is that small matter of the NATO 78-day air war against Serbia in 1999, a little over a decade ago, to be absorbed. NATO bombing of a major European capital city. Feature that! And then also the minor matter of the U.S. theft of the key Serbian province of Kosovo, declaring its independence, then recognizing it diplomatically and transforming it into a NATO military-intelligence, lily pad stronghold.
Serbs do not forget. War by the West against Serbia, by the way, is not new. Nazi Germany destroyed Belgrade in World War II. Italian Fascism treated Communist Yugoslavia viciously both during WWII and in its aftermath. In the 1950s the city of Belgrade still lay in ruins just as did the cities of defeated Germany. The West at the time then partially boycotted Tito’s Communist Yugoslavia even after it broke with the USSR. The Italian extreme right still today holds powerful grudges and prejudices against Serbia as the heartland of Yugoslav Communism.
Public opinion in Serbia hasn’t forgotten NATO’s unilateral decision to wage war against it. Despite Belgrade’s partially pro-Western government, surveys show that two-thirds of Serbians oppose NATO membership. Chiefly because planes of the NATO alliance departing from air bases in Italy bombed worker-managed factories in Serbia, allegedly in order to put a stop to the President Milosevic-led Serbian cruel crackdown on ethnic Albanian rebels in breakaway Kosovo. NATO-USA bombed what remained of Socialism in East Europe to make way for the multinationals.
That NATO’s intentions were humanitarian, Serbs are convinced, is bullshit.
Since then relations with NATO have improved somewhat, even though Belgrade—which has close ties to Russia—adopted a policy of military neutrality in 2007.
Twelve years have passed since NATO sent its bombers of death over Belgrade and Nish. Serbs have not forgotten. Opposition parties organize demonstrations in their maltreated though joyous capital city. Nationalists oppose contacts with NATO and the very idea of a scheduled NATO summit right in the capital Belgrade. “Shame for the country and the nation.” The ruins that NATO left behind are still there. A reminder of the real nature of NATO.
“Never in NATO,” says former Serbian Premier Kostunica, recalling the NATO bombing as does every Serb. Today nationalists point out the similarities between the bombardment of Tripoli and those of Belgrade in 1999. The Serbian Foreign Affairs Minister, Vuk Jeremic, says that “citizens of Serbia are not indifferent to the bombing in Libya. We have seen the sufferings of civilians in the attacks on us. Therefore we feel solidarity with Libyans.”
Any actions of the pro-western government in Belgrade alarm Moscow. Premier Putin, on a recent visit to Belgrade, stressed that Moscow does not want Serbia in NATO. “If NATO installs its missiles in Serbia,” he said, “Russia will be obliged to direct its nuclear potential against Serbia.”
One asks why Russia should stand up for Serbia? One recalls the long historical affinity between the two countries. Russia has long seen itself as the great protector of the Serbian people, traditionally due to their common Slavic background. Russia is the most powerful Slavic country and feels its duty is to protect struggling Serbia under attack from the West.
Russians, Serbs and other Slavic countries once shared a common belief called Pan-Slavism. Pan-Slavism meant that all Slavic countries shared a common heritage, as well as common language affinities. Russia long headed this movement. When Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia in WWI, Russia entered the war also to protect its cousins.
Serbia once stood as the bulwark in southern Europe of Eastern Orthodoxy, which after the fall of Constantinople had its greatest champion in the ‘Third Rome’ – Moscow. The Catholic Hapsburg Empire lay just to the west, as close as Croatia, while the Muslim Ottoman Empire occupied Serbia for centuries. In Serbia’s defense, the Russian Orthodox Church demonstrated the strong religious ties between the two countries when it inserted itself into the debate about Kosovo’s independence: “That act has unilaterally upset the balance in the world.”
The real reasons for Russia’s position on Serbia today are more pragmatic. Historically, everyone in the Balkans loves a good conspiracy theory. Today, the one in particular that involves energy pipelines and military bases is not theory, but fact. According to NATO and its many intelligence agencies, Russians are plotting to create a thinly-disguised military base in Serbia. If true, that would be the Kremlin’s first new European base since the end of the Warsaw Pact, a natural response to NATO’s expansion in the region. For the reality is that every country around Serbia is either in NATO or wants to be.
The story of the Russian base started when Russian President Dmitry Medvedev visited Belgrade last October. A new joint center for emergency coordination was to be created in the Serbian city of Nish. The site was to be on an all-but-unused airport there. Serbia’s Russian partner would be a powerful semi-military outfit whose activities would include disaster relief, but allegedly with close ties with Russia’s security services.
Speculation mounted that the Nish facilities could be used for spying or for military purposes. Nish is close to the point where Russia’s planned gas pipeline, South Stream, is to cross Serbian territory. The pipeline is a joint venture between Russia’s gas giant, Gazprom, and Italy’s energy company, Eni. The route crosses the Black Sea, enabling Russia to bypass Ukraine, seen as a troublesome transit country, and is designed to deliver gas direct to the Balkans, central Europe and Italy.
Serbia denies that Russia is opening a military facility. Officially Nish will not be a military base. Some eleven countries from the region were invited to a conference in Belgrade to discuss their part in the establishment of the logistics and training facility in Nish.
At the same time many observers now believe that oil, not worries about Serbian brutality or genocide in Kosovo, lay behind NATO’s bombing of Serbia in 1999, just as today in Libya. It’s the oil. Always the oil. After the war Americans built in Kosovo the huge military base, Camp Bondsteel. It appeared evident that the real purpose of the base was to safeguard the U.S. promoted AMBO oil pipeline that aimed to pump Russian and Caspian oil across the Black Sea, Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania to Europe.
Militarization in Serbia is a valid consideration – this time, however, by Russia as a response to NATO occupation of the Balkans and East Europe. Serbia is a major buyer of Russian arms. Belgrade stands to receive from Russia a 10 billion USD loan, 3 billion of which is to be spent on Russian arms to upgrade outdated Serbian defensive weapons. Russia also offers Serbia sorely needed fourth-generation jet aircraft.
The Serbian missile defense system which was practically destroyed during the war in 1999 showed that it was impossible to repulse NATO aggression with missile complexes developed during the 1960s and the 1970s. Serbia may now purchase two divisions of Russia’s renowned S-300 surface-to-air systems or an export variant of the S-400.
Practically all the radar stations in Serbia were also destroyed during the 1999 war. The country was deprived of the opportunity to control its own air space. There is every reason to believe that Belgrade will purchase Russian radar stations as well. However, three billion dollars is not enough to modernize the air force, to rebuild the missile defense system and re-equip radar troops. Two divisions of Russian surface-to-air missile systems is not enough. What can two divisions do if the alliance can use hundreds of its fighter jets as it did in 1999? Nonetheless, Serbia is determined to rearm. Serbian rearmament is the result of NATO’s war on Serbia and the theft of Kosovo.
According to the Independent Military Survey newspaper, NATO would not impede Serbia’s initiative to rearm its armed forces with Russian arms. Even though part of the Belgrade administration wants to join NATO, the possession of Russian hardware was not an obstacle for other European countries in obtaining NATO membership. Greece, for example, a member of NATO, buys S-300 systems from Russia.
The brutal reality however is that the EU and the USA would not welcome such a deal. Not for Serbia. NATO does not conceal its plans to separate Serbia from Russia. For the great secret across the world is America’s maniacal fear of Russia. Now, today, many such signs are appearing of a Russian renaissance in the troubled Balkans.
On the other hand Serbs believe that their problems have not been solved. After the collapse of Socialist Yugoslavia, many conflict areas remained in Serbia. There’s every reason to believe that the NATO shield would not defend Serbia in the future in cases of serious conflicts. For the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) took the side of the Albanians in Kosovo and detached it – that is, stole it – from Serbia.
And lest anyone forget, bloody World War I began when the Serbian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, assassinated the Hapsburg Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo. In Yugoslavia. In the Balkans. So keep an eye on the Balkans, NATO-USA occupied – except for lonely Serbia.
(*Thanks to Sergei Balmasov for his article in Pravda about Russia and Serbia.)
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