LOSERS CIRCLE: G7 Leaders Meet to Talk Support for Ukraine, Stealing from Russia w/ George Szamuely
Leaders of the Group of Seven came together in Italy for talks, as Biden plans to sign a new defense agreement with Zelensky, while pushing his EU colleagues to seize the profits from frozen Russian assets in order to secure a $50 BILLION loan for Kiev.
George Szamuely of the Global Policy Institute noted that while G7 leaders are showing their support for Ukraine, their resolve isn't backed up by the public, as the EU parliamentary elections spelled major defeats for Olaf Scholz and Emmanuel Macron, with the future political careers of Joe Biden and Rishi Sunak also at stake...
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Hi Rachel, George Szamuely has done a wonderful job of exposing Washington DC's/NATO's propaganda claims about its so called "humanitarian interventions" in Bosnia and Kosovo.
During your interview with Boyle he falsely claimed that Washington DC/NATO militarily intervened in Bosnia on behalf of the Bosnian Muslims in order to supposedly "put a stop" to a "genocide" there. This is absolutely laughable! We know this is laughable because DC/NATO have actively promoted and protected the very worst totalitarian, genocidal regimes on the planet for many decades and did all they could to actually **allow** - rather than prevent - the genuine genocide to occur in Rwanda in 1994 via then US ambassador to the UN (later US Secretary of State), the infamous Madeleine Albright, continually running interference on behalf of the perpetrators by placing road blocks at the UN Security Council.
Szamuely has also exposed Boyle's blatantly false claims about the ICJ ruling in the Bosnia vs Serbia reparations case back in 2007.
Here's a few excerpts from Szamuely's article about the ICJ's ruling that Serbia under Milosevic was actually NOT guilty of genocide in Bosnia and the blatant lies spread by the New York Times' Marlise Simons: "Still Slandering Serbia: Manufacture of news, faithful service on behalf of powerful interests" and a review of Szamuely's excellent book "Bombs for Peace, NATO’s Humanitarian War on Yugoslavia" :
[Excerpts begin below]
A classic case of the [New York] Times molding the news to make it fit to print was its recent coverage of the International Court of Justice’s ruling on Bosnia-Herzegovina’s suit against Serbia, charging genocide and demanding billions in reparations.
Thus the ICJ ruling that came down on Feb. 26 could not but have been a severe disappointment to the Times. The court ruled, first, that the atrocities in Bosnia did not amount to genocide. And, second, that the government of Yugoslavia not only did not commit genocide, but that it was not responsible for the killings in Bosnia because it didn’t exercise effective control over the armed forces of the Bosnian Serbs.
To be sure, the ICJ ruling was problematic, to say the least. The court said no genocide took place in Bosnia, other than in Srebrenica. But this makes no sense. Genocide, if it means anything, is an attempt to destroy an entire nation or an entire ethnic group. If you kill many members of an ethnic group in one village, but leave them alone in the next village, and, indeed, in every other village, you may, if they are unarmed, be committing a war crime, but you are not committing genocide.
Raphael Lemkin, drafter of the 1948 Genocide Convention, defined genocide as “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.” Thus, in ruling that the killings in Bosnia didn’t amount to genocide, but that the killings in one small town—Srebrenica—did amount to genocide, the court was hardly in accord with the convention.
Moreover, the court, again following the ICTY, held that the Bosnian Serb forces had no intention even to capture Srebrenica, merely to reduce it in size. According to the court, “at some point…the military objective in Srebrenica changed, from ‘reducing the enclave to the urban area’…to taking over Srebrenica town and the enclave as a whole.” Thus, the supposed “plan” to kill all of the military-age men in Srebrenica wasn’t even conceived until after the capture of the town. “ The necessary intent was not established,” the ICJ said, “until after the change in the military objective and after the takeover of Srebrenica, on about 12 or 13 July.” In addition, the court accepted that this “intent” didn’t encompass the entire Muslim population of Srebrenica. The court, like the ICTY, didn’t dispute that the Bosnian Serb forces transported Srebrenica’s women, children and old men to safety.
Since, according to the ICJ, the takeover of Srebrenica was an improvised plan, since there was no intention on the part of the Bosnian Serbs to carry out executions until after the change in the military objectives, since Belgrade had no effective control over the Bosnian Serbs, since Belgrade didn’t know ahead of time about the intention to capture Srebrenica, since Belgrade had no armed forces of its own in Bosnia, it is hard to see what it “should have” done to prevent the alleged massacres. The United Nations, which actually had forces stationed in Bosnia, was in a far better position to do something to prevent them.
Review of George Szamuely's book, Bombs for Peace: NATO’s Humanitarian War on Yugoslavia.
Szamuely details the maneuvers by U.S. diplomats at peace talks in Rambouillet, shortly before the NATO bombing campaign, in which they steered the outcome towards war. The inescapable conclusion is that U.S. leaders wanted war.
The bombing of Yugoslavia provided a lesson for future interventions. The absence of evidence to buttress wild and exaggerated propaganda claims is no impediment.
“Nothing succeeds like success. And the measure of success is the lack of NATO casualties. Small wonder, then, that in 2002 and 2003 U.S. and British officials and their media boosters disdainfully ignored the intelligence that raised serious doubts about Iraq’s WMDs. The Kosovo experience had taught them that failure to find evidence to support the claims used to launch an armed attack would be quickly forgotten amid the scenes of public rejoicing and ecstatic military parades.”
That scenario was to be replayed in Libya, where Western accusations of an imagined impending massacre provided the self-justification for bombing.
“Yet, as in Yugoslavia, the Western powers made no attempt to ascertain whether a crime had been committed or was about to be committed. . . . The NATO powers were determined to start bombing as soon as the Security Council passed its resolution. Any delay might have led to a peaceful resolution of the crisis, an outcome the powers were as anxious to avoid in 2011 as they were in 1999.”
In Bombs for Peace, George Szamuely, a senior research fellow at the Global Policy Institute at London Metropolitan University, has produced a revealing and sharply argued analysis of Western intervention in the Balkan wars of the 1990s. The primary focus of the book is on Western diplomatic and military interventions, which played a crucial role in the breakup of Yugoslavia and the plunge into conflict. Continued intervention fueled deeper conflict, as the United States repeatedly smashed every prospect for peaceful settlement until it could impose its control over the region.
The author places these events in a wider policy context, exploring how Western leaders capitalized on conflict in the Balkans to reorient NATO into an offensive organization suited for out-of-area operations. From participation in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan to the bombing of Libya, NATO’s aggressive role is firmly established. Feeding the public with simple-minded morality tales, Western leaders distracted attention from their real goals. “NATO,” Szamuely writes,
“under constant U.S. prodding, seized on the crisis in Yugoslavia to transform itself from a defensive alliance into a global superpower, a coalition of powers that would purport to use force to secure peace and stability, a protagonist in other people’s conflicts yet also a referee. NATO could nonetheless not admit publicly that it had now become a war-making machine. So it came up with an ingenious formula. . . . Humanitarian war was to become its credo.” Non-Westerners rightly perceived NATO’s humanitarian war doctrine “as a fraud, a smokescreen to confuse the public, a mélange of wild exaggerations and deceptions to justify intervention in the affairs of small, weak states or in complicated conflicts on behalf of certain protagonists and against others.”
https://www.globalresearch.ca/still-slandering-serbia/5847
https://www.globalresearch.ca/bombs-for-peace-natos-humanitarian-war-on-yugoslavia/5475425
https://www.globalresearch.ca/spandau-am-see-report-attempted-visit-general-ratko-mladic/5826104
https://www.globalresearch.ca/yugoslavia-human-rights-watch-in-service-to-the-war-party/5021