🚀 go-pugleaf

NATO, Sieg Heil!
It's bracing to see the Germans taking part in NATO's bombing. It
lends moral tone to an operation to have the grandsons of the Third
Reich willing, able and eager, to drop high explosive again, in this
instance on the Serbs. To add symmetry to the affair, the last time
Serbs in Belgrade had high explosives dropped on them was in 1941 by
the sons of the Third Reich. To bring even deeper symmetry, the German
political party whose leader, Schroeder, ordered German participation
in the bombing is that of the Social Democrats, whose great
grand-fathers enthusiastically voted credits to wage war in 1914, to
the enormous disgust of Lenin, who never felt quite the same way about
social democrats ever after. Whether in Germany or England or France
all social democratic parties in 1914 tossed aside previous pledges
against war, thus helping produce the first great bloodletting of our
century. Today, with social democrats leading governments across
Europe-Schroeder, Blair, Jospin, Prodi-all fall in behind Clinton.
This is, largely, a war most earnestly supported by liberals and many
so-called leftists.

There's been some patronizing talk here about the Serbs' deep sense of
"grievance" at the way history has treated them, with the implication
that the Serbs are irrational in this regard. But it's scarcely
irrational to remember that Nazi Germany bombed Belgrade in the Second
World War, or that Germany's prime ally in the region, Croatia, ran a
concentration camp at Jasenovac where tens of thousands of Serbs -
along with Jews and gypsies - were liquidated. Nor is it irrational to
recall that Germany in more recent years has been an unrelenting
assailant of the former Yugoslav federation, encouraging Slovenia to
secede and lending determined support to Croatia, in gratitude for
which Croatia adopted, on independence in 1991, the German hymn,
"Danke Deutschland".

So much for Serb feelings about Germany. Serbia has some reason to
feel similar resentment towards the United States. The biggest single
ethnic cleansing of the mid-1990s in the former Yugoslavia was
conducted by Croatia under the supervision of the United States, whose
military generals and CIA officers issued targeting instructions to
Croatian artillery for the ethnic clearing. The targets were Serbs,
living in Serbian territory, in the Krajina. Heading the Croatian
cleansers was president Franjo Tudjman, who has rehabbed Nazi war
criminals. Yet somehow it is Serbia's Milosevic who is demonized here
as Hitler.