Ralph Raico on the Kosovo War

Miscellaneous History
21

I think libertarians are usually good on finding records other people missed or never looked for, but they definitely need to be taken with a grain of salt. They really ideologize things (see the argument over Pinochet a while back) and have trouble seeing things outside of the government vs. everyone else paradigm. Government is a really powerful force in history, but it’s pretty inept; by emphasizing it so much they are making the same mistake the mainstream historians do by making history nothing but battles and kings and laws.

It’s also good to read non-mainstream historians outside of the libertarian circles; I particularly like Carlyle’s history of the French Revolution and David Irving.

22

I also think part of the issue is it is very modern and very Western, and when it gets out of the environment it thrives in, it tends to fall flat on it’s face.

Some really quick examples: It’s views (almost any view) of feudalism usually strike me as odd, and why some at Mises.org chose to glorify Spanish economists over the the Caliphite culture seems odd and a bit out of place.

23

I mean it is obvious that these are not experts/scholars on Byzantium, Persia or whatever so why bother looking for them on much analysis on the issues.

24

Most libertarians are seriously deficient of an understanding of the Near East and Asia, ancient or modern. They have a very eurocentric worldview; which is in some cases justified (Europe did build modern capitalism, as well as modern statism) but it ends up making you feel like Europe is floating in a vacuum. I still hear idiot libertarians saying China is ‘communist’. China is less Communist than the USA or Canada.

25

I’ve never seen an empty city in Canada.

26

I’ve never seen an empty city in Canada.

I don’t know what you are refereing to exactly here,and Chinese policy is a bit off my radar, but many times cities are subsidized tax eaters.

27

China’s Empty City

Is anyone here living in Albania? According to the Fraser Institute it has a similar fiscal model to Hong Kong.

28

I’ve never seen an empty city in Canada.

You’ve also never seen a de facto tax rate of under 10%.

29

Holly c!#p, we do what?! We’re certainly carrying a less onerous government than the European standard, and a few good policies have been enacted, but like HK? A little too much, I’m afraid.

30

I’d like to see the source showing China having under 10% anything.

31

Most people in the countryside don’t pay taxes at all. Low level city workers evade almost every tax except some sales taxes (even those are easily avoided in stalls and black market booths). The big industries pay almost all the taxes in China.

32

I see what is happening there. They don’t care about enforcing the tax because they run most of the industry directly, leaving a relatively free market in what is left.

33

They don’t have the money or men to really police the whole country, so they extract enormous rents from the coastal cities through tariffs and state partnerships, pretty much.

34

Almost every large industry in China is fascistic at best and still outright communist at worst. I would be the last to defend America and one of the first to praise China, but to state that China has more economic freedom than Canada or America is simply wrong.

35

The term ethnic cleansing was not made up by Leftists. It was coined by Serbian newspapers in the 1980s. The context was persistent, low-scale violence against Serbs in Kosovo which they alleged was being done to pressure them into selling their homes and moving away.

I agree that the enormous politicisation of the terms means that they have become utterly useless to understanding events. I found The Politics of Genocide by a leftists Edward Herman (co-writer of Manufacturing Dissent) to be excellent on this subject. Here is a free chapter from the book in case anyone would be interested: http://www.coldtype.net/Assets.10/Pdfs/0710.Genocide.pdf

36

You must consider the incentives. Propaganda war is an important part of warfare in the best of cases. When there is a situation where there exists a superpower which openly states that it reserves the right for itself to forcefully intervene in other countries for humanitarian reasons the propaganda war becomes crucial, even more important that the actual fighting taking place. The position of the USA that it will intervene to stop humanitarian disasters creates an enormous incentive for a weaker side in any conflict to exxagerate and even stage attrocities.

You must consider the results, the relative successes. Though they were more poorly equipt both Bosnian Muslims and Albanians achieved victory over the better armed Serbs. They were able to win because a superpower become involved in the conflict on their behalf. Albanian sucess is particularly spectacular, guerrila wars are usually very long, theirs took only a year.

You must consider the strategy. Both the Sarajevo government and the KLA solicited foreign intervention on their behalf since the very start of the conflict and even before the shooting actually commenced. Their strategy that won them the war was not a military defeat of the Serbs on their own, but sucess in securing for themselves a foreign intervention.

37

A book which I would heartily recommend is First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia by David N. Gibbs. It is a sort of diplomatic history which explains why the USA became involved in the 1990s Balkan conflicts (it was not for humanitarian reasons, but for matters of prestige and supremacy among NATO countries) and more importantly how the intervention helped to prolong and exacerbate the conflict, thus causing further humanitarian disasters and even played a role in causing the conflict in the first place.

Personally I think the book is slightly flawed when it talks about the events on the ground. That is, it is still too mainstream and reliant on standard narratives concerning the actual warfare and accompanying attrocities, but in its analysis of Washington’s policies it is fantastic. It is possible to get it at ebookee: link

Another book recommendation I can think of at the moment is Fool’s Crusade by Diana Johnstone. She has a good deconstruction of Srebrenica and Račak. A look at Milošević from the other side and some other things.

I know Canadian reporter Scott Taylor wrote a few as well, but I have not read them. But anyway they are not acessible online. Well except this one chapter: link

Of internet resources srebrenica-report.com comes to mind. I don’t know if this is of interest to you, since it relates to the Bosnian War not the Kosovo War, but the two are intertwined since the demonisation for the later war rellied on demonisation from the earlier one.

You could also go through Justin Raimondo’s or George Szamuely’s column archives at antiwar.com and look for any Kosovo themed ones. Particularly useful should be the ones soon after the end of the war, when the fog of war lifted and the facts started to come in. Be sure to take Szamuely with some reserve though, as he is an unrepenant statist and sometimes has some weird perspectives.

You may also want to check out the writting and radio apperances of a serbian libertarian over at antiwar.com Nebojša Malić. His column archive: http://original.antiwar.com/author/malic/ podcast interviews: 1 2 3 4 and his blog

Finally there is the Edward S. Herman archive over at Coldtype: http://www.coldtype.net/herman.html Close to the bottom of the page he has 3 or 4 Balkan themed essays.

I know CATO has some lengthy essays, but from the two or so I checked they are not that good.

I hope this isn’t too general and that you may find something useful and to your taste. I have been a fanatical reader of antiwar.com for full 10 years now so to me this is not even “revisionism”, as the guys over there debunk this stuff in real time. So I don’t really know what revisionist history Ralph Raico was talking about and if this is it, or if he was talking about some other stuff.

Anyway I’ll digg up an antiwar.com column with the Kosovo War bodycount later. I think that is the most relevant to what you are interested in.

38

NATO itself after the war revised its claim of the number of Albanian victims to 10,000 (down from 100,000). The official claim itself is 10,000. Even the Western-run ICTY did not indict anyone under the charge of genocide in relation to the events in Kosovo. It s strange that you assert something which is no longer a part of the official story.

Relevant to you argument, 10,000 killed out of a population of 1,800,000 could not create a gender imbalance of the sort you speak of.

A gender imbalance if it exists is more easily explained as a result of 40% unemployment in Kosovo than of genocide. Albanian men find work at construction yards in Germany, Austria, Slovenia but the women largely stay at home.

The 10,000 is the NATO claim mind you. NATO was a warring party in the conflict and therefore is not necessarily reliable. Combining the number of gravesites found and persons missing others have arrived at different numbers IIRC 4,000 was the most often stated number. This for all sides/ethnicities, and of all causes.

39

John Pilger (of Year Zero fame) quotes the ICTY (an instrument of the West) as having recovered 2,788 bodies in Kosovo (of these 2,108 in 1999 so sometimes you will see this figure): link

An interesting accompanying article of his from 1999 to portray the feel of the time: link Just as in 2003 you had expeditions descend on Iraq to engage in frantic and increasingly desperate scramble to find evidence of WMDs, you had expeditions of forensics teams descend on Kosovo to find evidence of mass killings - with similar results.

The Red Cross was listing 2,047 people as still missing in 2007: link

Figures such as these correspond to a low-intesity war.

40

Marko,

Thank you for your insight, recommendations, and links. Unfortunately, I feel as confused as ever about this issue given the divided opinions on this thread (including the account of a firsthand victim of Serbian agression). I guess I will have to do some reading…