May 30, 1999

Some of you may recognize this verse, especially if you are from Serbia or Montenegro, like poetry, and know history. It was written by Bishop Njegos who was also a Prince and a famous poet in Montenegro in the first half of the 19th century. Among his work was a great lyric poem, "Gorski Vijenac" (The Crown, or Garland of the Mountain), in which he sung his hope to see the Serbian people freed from the Turkish yoke. Njegos is remembered, perhaps cherished and revered, for his most famous verse, which entitles this column.

"Brat mi je bio, ma koje vere bio!" in itself is a true epiphany. It represents the manifestation of the essence of love. In the midst of centuries-long battles to recover Serbian freedom from the Ottoman empire and Islam, Njegos's verse transcended the caveman mentality. We are all brothers. "Double belief, double language, double opinion, and in between, on a slim link, a man," once said Iouri Tynianov. We are all brothers.

In Bosnia, however, Njegos's work is being purged from schools' textbooks. Carlos Westendorp, the Spanish diplomat who heads the "peace-keeping mission" has decided that the poet's words were an incitement to racial hatred. In the Republika Srbska, we want to ethnically purify the collective memory of an entire people.

In Serbia and Kosovo, from 15,000 feet high, Serbs do not exist. Only targets do, and collateral damage, not people. On an unexploded shell, an unnamed member of the US Air Force had written: "Do you still wanna be a Serb now!!." As this NATO pilot said in answer to a reporter's question about bombing civilians, "We are not romantic people. We are the Sega generation."

We have become the KLA Air Force and are proud of our 600 plus sorties a day. Certainly, the Serbs will learn their lesson. And we will finish them off with ground forces. They will capitulate, they will be assimilated into the New World Order.

When reason raises its voice, like that of Jimmy Carter, the 37th President of the USA, in an Op-Ed on May 27, 1999 in the New York Times, the next day a Kangaroo court indicts Milosevic for war crimes and the refugees reappear on TV and in articles all around Officialdom. We must win. Our credibility is at stake. We will bomb them into submission.

"The approach the United States has taken recently", says Mr. Carter, "has been to devise a solution that best suits its own purposes, recruit at least tacit support in whichever forum it can best influence, provide the dominant military force, present an ultimatum to recalcitrant parties and then take punitive action against the entire nation to force compliance." Mr. Carter ends his column thus: "Even for the world's only superpower, the ends don't always justify the means."

No more electricity, no more potable water, no more hospitals, medicine, bridges, factories, roads... Instead, more cluster bombs, radioactive ordinance, planes added to the region... Let's finish them off. "Do you still wanna be a Serb now!!"

We will prevail. We are erasing their past. We will erase their future. Serbs do not exist. Kosovars do not exist. Only our Sega reality does.

Almost sixty years ago, Hitler said: "As soon as sufficient forces are available and the weather allows, the ground installations of the Yugoslav Air Force and the City of Belgrade will be destroyed from the air by continual day and night bombardment. When that is completed we will subdue Yugoslavia."

Last Sunday, in The New York Times, just above William Jefferson Clinton's Op-Ed, entitled "A Just and Necessary War", was a 6" by 5"drawing by Matt Mahurin in gray, white and black, representing the sky and some gray land. On the land were miniaturized people aligned so that they formed the letters H E L P; and in the sky the letters U.S. were formed by a series of black planes, each bigger than each individual making up the word "help".

This is how the most powerful country in the world provides help today. What a symbol, indeed!

This is a country that does not provide universal health care to its citizenry, a country which gets rid of Welfare, which does not provide shelters to its homeless population, which cannot afford to provide free education and claims it can finance it by selling lottery tickets to the lower-middle class and the poor, whose entire assets and wealth are owned by a tiny minority, which defends the right to go hunting with machine guns, which has more prisoners per capita than anywhere in the world, where kids shoot other kids and schools are monitored by surveillance cameras and metal detectors, which is pro death penalty... This is a country that spends its week days in the office, evenings in front of TV sets, and weekends in the mall; a country of instant gratification and an aging population, filled with casinos, make-beliefs and false religions.

This is who we are. And we have our mercenaries -- sorry, our military -- our Sega people, to make darn sure that we are right and that help is on the way.

And so we will prevail. Because, for us, only power matters.

And the Kosovo Liberation movement will be able to write on its Web page as it presently has done regarding Germany in 1941: "As Germany overtook Yugoslavia in 1941, the Kosovar people were liberated by the Germans. All Albanian territories of this state, such as Kosova, western Macedonia and border regions under Montenegro, were re-united into Albania proper. Albanian schools, governmental administration, press and radio were re-established."

Only this time, it will read, "As the U.S. and its NATO allies overtook Yugoslavia in 1999..."

"Do you still wanna be a Serb now!!"

Serbs want. Serbs will. They are our conscience.

Note: The Hitler quote was sent to me by E-mail from the weekly update by Michael Albert of ZNet. I found the Kosovo Liberation movement quote in a page of quotes at beograd.com. And, if you want to explore the real meaning of "collateral damages," I strongly recommend this Web page, also at beograd.com.

This Week's Other Articles:

"letter to my Senator" by Mac Lawrence

Getting to the Root Cause by Joe Kresse

two E-mails deserving your attention and action.