[Peace] Fwd: The destruction of Yugoslavia

[karen aram]

> November 28, 2017 <https://www.facebook.com/eric.c.anderson.dc/posts/10156024912594430?__cft__[0]=AZWZzaLSpi78jq-Dorln5-7UPo_dCy67JHzKlaMiU6N1qKxtWEEk9tTTHus1kjJScPvDgGnuTO_p9qRBy25oPSyGrC26u3CHgNRaCl9wFunut2KRLOkmB7YRAOzqKd1Raanbd58d8L367vTUaOwWGP1MOfqvIg7yZR6kU-KC_KoiFjNawJO7zEnmm2CBGbZhhbg&__tn__=%2CO%2CP-y-R>  · 
> The decimation of Yugoslavia became the script the USA has used to implement its imperialist agenda. The following are excerpts from an essay by Michael Parenti:
> The Rational Destruction of Yugoslavia 25/11/2017 by Michael Parenti ( via email from David Alpert <https://www.facebook.com/david.alpert.33?__cft__[0]=AZWZzaLSpi78jq-Dorln5-7UPo_dCy67JHzKlaMiU6N1qKxtWEEk9tTTHus1kjJScPvDgGnuTO_p9qRBy25oPSyGrC26u3CHgNRaCl9wFunut2KRLOkmB7YRAOzqKd1Raanbd58d8L367vTUaOwWGP1MOfqvIg7yZR6kU-KC_KoiFjNawJO7zEnmm2CBGbZhhbg&__tn__=-]K-y-R> )
> In 1999, the U.S. national security state — which has been involved throughout the world in subversion, sabotage, terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, and death squads — launched round-the-clock aerial attacks against Yugoslavia for 78 days, dropping 20,000 tons of bombs and killing thousands of women, children, and men. All this was done out of humanitarian concern for Albanians in Kosovo.
> Or so we were asked to believe. In the span of a few months, President Clinton bombed four countries: Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq repeatedly, and Yugoslavia massively. At the same time, the U.S. was involved in proxy wars in Angola, Mexico (Chiapas), Colombia, East Timor, and various other places. And U.S. forces are deployed on every continent and ocean, with some 300 major overseas support bases — all in the name of peace, democracy, national security, and humanitarianism.
> While showing themselves ready and willing to bomb Yugoslavia on behalf of an ostensibly oppressed minority in Kosovo, U.S. leaders have made no moves against the Czech Republic for its mistreatment of the Romany people (gypsies), or Britain for oppressing the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, or the Hutu for the mass murder of a half million Tutsi in Rwanda — not to mention the French who were complicit in that massacre. Nor have U.S. leaders considered launching “humanitarian bombings” against the Turkish people for what their leaders have done to the Kurds, or the Indonesian people because their generals killed over 200,000 East Timorese and were continuing such slaughter through the summer of 1999, or the Guatemalans for the Guatemalan military’s systematic extermination of tens of thousands of Mayan villagers. In such cases, U.S. leaders not only tolerated such atrocities but were actively complicit with the perpetrators — who usually happened to be faithful client-state allies dedicated to helping Washington make the world safe for the Fortune 500.
> After World War II, socialist Yugoslavia became a viable nation and an economic success. Between 1960 and 1980 it had one of the most vigorous growth rates: a decent standard of living, free medical care and education, a guaranteed right to a job, one-month vacation with pay, a literacy rate of over 90 percent, and a life expectancy of 72 years.
> Yugoslavia also offered its multi-ethnic citizenry affordable public transportation, housing, and utilities, with a not-for-profit economy that was mostly publicly owned. This was not the kind of country global capitalism would normally tolerate. The dismemberment and mutilation of Yugoslavia was part of a concerted policy initiated by the United States and the other Western powers in 1989. Yugoslavia was the one country in Eastern Europe that would not voluntarily overthrow what remained of its socialist system and install a free-market economic order.
> The U.S. goal has been to transform the Yugoslav nation into a Third-World region, a cluster of weak right-wing principalities with the following characteristics:
> ...incapable of charting an independent course of self-development; a shattered economy and natural resources completely accessible to multinational corporate exploitation, including the enormous mineral wealth in Kosovo;
> ...an impoverished, but literate and skilled population forced to work at subsistence wages, constituting a cheap labor pool that will help depress wages in western Europe and elsewhere;
> ...dismantled petroleum, engineering, mining, fertilizer, and automobile industries, and various light industries, that offer no further competition with existing Western producers.
> ...U.S. policymakers also want to abolish Yugoslavia’s public sector services and social programs — for the same reason they want to abolish our public sector services and social programs.
> That U.S. leaders have consciously sought to dismember Yugoslavia is not a matter of speculation but of public record. In November 1990, the Bush administration pressured Congress into passing the 1991 Foreign Operations Appropriations Act, which provided that any part of Yugoslavia failing to declare independence within six months would lose U.S. financial support. The law demanded separate elections in each of the six Yugoslav republics, and mandated U.S. State Department approval of both election procedures and results as a condition for any future aid. Aid would go only to the separate republics, not to the Yugoslav government, and only to those forces whom Washington defined as “democratic,” meaning right-wing, free-market, separatist parties.
> In 1992, another blow was delivered against Belgrade: international sanctions. Led by the United States, a freeze was imposed on all trade to and from Yugoslavia, with disastrous results for the economy: hyperinflation, mass unemployment of up to 70 percent, malnourishment, and the collapse of the health care system.
> While pretending to work for harmony, U.S. leaders supported the most divisive, reactionary forces from Croatia to Kosovo. In Croatia, the West’s man-of-the-hour was Franjo Tudjman, who claimed in a book he authored in 1989, that “the establishment of Hitler’s new European order can be justified by the need to be rid of the Jews,” and that only 900,000 Jews, not six million, were killed in the Holocaust.
> ===================================
> It is important to know the history in order to see current events in context. What we are experiencing today with the US and NATO at war with several countries are not isolated events but part of an ongoing imperialist agenda.
> Over 20 million people have died at the hands of the US since WW2 and the US has attempted to justify this by claiming that "we" want to bring freedom and democracy to the rest of the world.
> David Alpert <https://www.facebook.com/david.alpert.33?__cft__[0]=AZWZzaLSpi78jq-Dorln5-7UPo_dCy67JHzKlaMiU6N1qKxtWEEk9tTTHus1kjJScPvDgGnuTO_p9qRBy25oPSyGrC26u3CHgNRaCl9wFunut2KRLOkmB7YRAOzqKd1Raanbd58d8L367vTUaOwWGP1MOfqvIg7yZR6kU-KC_KoiFjNawJO7zEnmm2CBGbZhhbg&__tn__=-]K-y-R> [ via email ]

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