NATO ALWAYS ON THE SIDE OF LOVE
What follows is my English translation of an article by Comidad published on ComeDonChisciotte.org on 18th May 2024. (All emphasis mine).
Almost all observers noted that it was no coincidence that Xi Jinping's visit to Belgrade coincided with the anniversary of the NATO bombing of the Serbian capital. On that occasion, the Chinese embassy was also hit, with some casualties among its staff. As they say in diplomatic jargon, ‘the visit strengthened economic cooperation between the two countries’, but military cooperation should also be considered, which had already culminated in the supply of a Chinese anti-missile system to Belgrade in 2022. Other people's defensive systems are rightly perceived by us as a threat, since they alter the balance of power; not to mention that wanting to escape the pedagogy of bombing denotes a bit of arrogance on the part of the Serbs.
The NATO bombing in 1999 is considered a turning point in the evolution of the Euro-American alliance in an explicitly aggressive direction. In reality, NATO had already started bombing the Serbs four years earlier, in 1995. In that case, it was the Bosnian Serbs, considered by the Western media as being solely, or mainly, responsible for the exacerbation of the civil war in the former Yugoslavia, and even for a genocide against Bosnian Muslims. With NATO's help, an alliance of Croats and Muslims managed to regain a large part of Bosnia. In an article four years ago, the online newspaper “Il Post” recalled that event and tried to outline a number of possible causes.However, that reconstruction lacked macroscopic details and a decisive actor, namely the money and who provided it. Fortunately, Saudi sources themselves are prodigal with details on the flow of funds that the leading Gulf petro-monarchy has been directing to Bosnia since its declaration of independence in 1992, but also before that date. In the Saudi daily “Arab News”, one finds details on the amount and continuity of funding and also on the destination of funds, including “cultural” organisations and activities. Alzheimer's therapies pale in comparison: it seems that Saudi money has awakened the ethnic and religious memory of many Bosnians, about 51%, making them suddenly remember their Islamic roots and thus inducing them to vote for independence in the 1992 referendum. Money is not just purchasing power, it is suggestion, fascination. Max Weber's breakdown of the types of power has proved somewhat evanescent, in particular the legal-rational power of the state has turned out to be chimerical, given that all regimes live somewhere between legality and illegality, and moreover are subject to the extemporary urges of business lobbies. Charismatic power, on the other hand, has been demonstrated to be possessed by money, which hypnotises and draws in the crowds without even needing to pay them. The fetishism of money has conditioned even the Western oligarchies, since it took a war to discover that they had de-industrialised to the point of no longer being able to produce munitions.
In a poor country, the arrival of a mass of money obviously has a destabilising effect, upsetting power relations, expectations and social balances; so it is not strange that the Serbs may have felt in danger. If there had been a serious discussion about a peace settlement in Bosnia, Saudi Arabia should not have been absent from the negotiating table. However, NATO was not interested in the cessation of hostilities and massacres, but only in expanding eastwards at the expense of Russia's natural ally Serbia. Even in Chechnya, Libya and Syria, the arrival of money from the petro-monarchies coincided with Islamic radicalisation. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are autonomous imperialist entities, whose interests, however, converge with those of NATO and Israel, since they share the same targets.
Today we have internet and thus the possibility of finding information by accessing sources directly; but perhaps even in 1995 we could have understood at least that the mainstream narrative was lying when it placed the blame exclusively on the Serbian side. Today, as then, our beacon in the fog, our compass and spiritual guide is Adriano Sofri, the champion of pro-NATO publicity for at least thirty years. From him we have learnt what the classic “argumentum ad fondellum” is, the one that guarantees that we are all being lied to. It is the mantra “anti-Semitism and the like”, which Sofri was even able to trot out about Muslims in Bosnia being compared to Jews. In short, there are the bad guys, the “haters”, who suddenly lash out at some innocent person, so they have to be re-educated with bombs. Explaining any conflict by ethnic hatred exempts one from identifying the material conditions of war, i.e. those factors that allowed latent hatred to express itself. Between human beings, hatred is not a variable, it is a constant, it even exists within families. It is necessary to identify the new fact, the variable that tipped the balance. Perhaps that variable was NATO’s love.
The Saudis are a fraternal dynasty, in which succession to the throne takes place between brothers; this implies a habit of intrigue and conspiracy, so if an endeavour goes wrong, there is no drama about it, it is part of the family budget. We saw how the Saudis were ready to cordially re-embrace Assad, having sportingly acknowledged that they had failed to eliminate him. The Russian intervention in Syria in 2015 changed the balance of power in the entire Middle East. Although there was no intention on the Russian side to weaken Israel, objectively it did, as it conferred a chrism of immovability on the Alaouite Assad regime and its axis with Iran. This explains the current neurasthenia of the Israeli leadership.
During the 1980s, Russian imperialism had collapsed due to its unsustainable costs, but now it is being revived thanks to the love of NATO and the petro-monarchies, which have unwittingly offered it new opportunities for prominence.
Even sanctions have turned out to be a bargain for Russia. In a May 2022 article published in the “New York Times”, Paul Krugman, the US Nobel laureate in economics, was categorical right from the title, which evoked Putin's alleged economic strangulation. It must be remembered that at that time Europe had not yet completely disengaged (so he says) from Russia's energy supplies, that the measures against the “oligarchs” had only just begun, and that the famous “packages” of sanctions were still in their infancy.
In the article, Krugman explains the apparent paradox in a diffuse way: “Russian exports have held up and the country seems to be heading for a record trade surplus. So is Putin winning the economic war? No, he is losing it”. And so he concludes: “But Russia's trade surplus is a sign of weakness not strength. Its exports are holding up well, despite its pariah status, but its economy is crippled by reduced imports. And that means Putin is losing both the economic and military war”.
At this point it is clear why Proudhon wondered how two economists manage not to laugh when they meet.
Originally published on http://www.comidad.org/dblog/articolo.asp?articolo=1213