By Felix Quigley
The issue of Kosovo and the whole issue of Yugoslavia is shown very clearly in the rotting corpse which is Irish bourgeois nationalism, the rotten and venal state that was set up as part of a grand compromise with the British Imperialists in 1921. Consider a number of things:
The Irish have been very fond of sticking their nose into the affairs of just about every country where there is what they label “trouble”. Why this should be so I have no idea. Do they have some kind of mission given to them by some supernatural being or do they just get a feel good feeling out of acting the role “we are the great charitable Irish, land of saints and scholars”, who a long time ago brought Latin back to Europe, and they never let anybody forget about that. All mixed in with drinking Guinness, Croke Park, the “craic”, that sadly is contemporary Irish nationalism. It all pretty well stinks.
An Irish website I have been reading has this to say. I think it gives the flavour I have been talking about:
start quote here
Outstanding news for the Irish Defence Forces. From August of next year until July 2008 Ireland will take controlof the peace keeping mission in Kosovo! They will be responsible for the “co-ordination of the Nato-led international task force in the Balkan state, commanding, controlling and directing operations”. While Irish Officers have served as Force Commander on UN missions; such as Lt Gen W. Callaghan on UNIFIL or Lt General David Stapleton on UNDOF, Major General John Vize on UNIKOM, this will be the the first time that Ireland will be in overall command of the multinational task force.
Excellent news for our Defence Forces and a testament to the magnificent contribution our soldiers have made to peacekeeping operations since joining the United Nations in December 1955.
Since 1958 our soldiers have had a continuous presence on peacekeeping missions either as observers or peacekeepers serving over 50,000 individual missions on UN operations in numerous hot spots throughout the globe.
Our first mission was to the Lebanon in 1958 as observers (UNOGIL) and since then our troops have served with distinction in the Lebanon with Unifil [a small group still serve there today], The Congo (ONUC), West New Guinea (UNTEA), Cyprus (UNFICYP), India-Pakistan (multiple missions), The Sinai (UNEF II), Afghanistan, the Iran/Iraq border (UNIIMOG), Namibia (UNTAG), El Salvador (ONUSAL), Angola, Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Somalia (UNOSOM II), Haiti (UNMIH), Macedonia (UNPREDEP), East Timor (UNAMET +), Kosovo (UNMIK +), Ethiopia & Eritrea (UNMEE), Liberia (UNMIL), Bosnia, Croatia, Albania, Russia, South Africa, Rwanda, Honduras and manyother cases you never hear about including the Irish troops seconded to various NGOs for missions in Somalia, Angola, Rwanda and Zaire.
And if you have been watching the papers recently you’d know that Irish Troops are likely to be deployedonce again to the Lebanon in partnership with the Finns on what could be a difficult peacekeeping operation. In 1998 Ireland underlined our committment to UN peacekeeping operations by committing 850 Defence Forces personnel to UN peacekeeping under the UN Standby Arrangements System so it’s great to see Ireland not shying away from sending her troops into difficult situations such as exists in Lebanon today.
end quote here
http://www.ssi-developer.net/rant/?p=795
So given this parody of jingoism, from a low rate capitalist state little better now than a colony of the US, with no independence at all from the EU, an insult really to the struggle for Irish Independence fought for by brave men and womenin Ireland in Easter 1916, it is not really worth asking is it what Ireland will jump on the issue of Kosovo. They follow their EU and US masters like the trained little sheep dogs that they are.
And it is only a very few weeks that the Government Minister was being photographed somewhere in Munster standing alongside and giving support to the antisemitic Irish Palestine Solidarity Campaign, and believe me there are no worse antisemites in the world than that crew. But the Government Minister of “wonderful” Ireland does not give a damn about that. So on Kosovo this is what transpired:
start quote here
Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern is to recommend that Ireland formally recognise Kosovo’s independence. “We are faced with a decision to recognise Kosovo. My intention is to do so,” he said yesterday.
“Serbia effectively lost Kosovo through its own actions in the 1990s. The bitter legacy of the killings of thousands of civilians in Kosovo and the ethnic cleansing of many more has effectively ruled out any restoration of Serbian dominion in Kosovo.”
A spokesman for the Defence Forces, Cmdt Gavin Young, said the 300 Irish troops based in Kosovo were on “high alert” .
He said most of the Irish soldiers were deployed on operations aimed at controlling any celebrations among the majority ethnic Albanian population that could spark unrest.
The Irish troops are in Kosovo as part of the multinational 16,000-strong, Nato-led peace force.
Ireland’s Brig Gen Gerry Hegarty commands a multinational taskforce of 1,500 troops. It oversees an area of central Kosovo, including Pristina, with a population of more than 900,000, representing around half the population of the territory.
Prime Minister Hashim Thaci, who led separatist rebels during their 1998-9 war with Serbia, told parliament after it had voted in favour of independence: “We, the leaders of our people, democratically elected, through this declaration proclaim Kosovo an independent and sovereign state.”
end quote here
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/frontpage/2008/0218/1203093443077.html
You can see the situation and the way these people find each other. One week standing somewhere in Munster with the Irish antisemite brigade, the next O’Dea is linking up with arch terrorist and Serb Hater Thaci.
It is all really about the selling of myths. Maybe it is not so surprising that the big Palestinian Arab lie about the “refugees” caught on in Ireland. And more lately the Big Lie about Milosevic being the cause of the problems in the Balkans, the Srebrenica “Massacre”, a fake along with so many others.
Because after all the Irish are the people who joke about the “little folk” and of course this is mixed up with layers of Christian mythology with lots of myths about Jews laid on top.
The struggle to tell the truth about what happened is now a big issue. On the David Vance blog last week some big loud mouth and Serb hater calling himself “Peter” was challenged by a certain Nicola to read the speech which Milosevic made in 1988 in Kosovo. To try to escape Peter replied he had “looked at it Nicola” and he (Peter) was claiming that it was ambiguous. Nicola responded, why ambiguous, it is in type and challenged him again. In the end this big mouth and Serb hater Peter had to concede defeat and he ran away from Nicola like a scalded cat. But still attacking the Serbs and Milosevic. That is what Serb hatred and Jew hatred is really all about. You can only go so far to answer these liars with reason. They are really committed liars, unfortunately, like our friends Kamm and Hoare.
I thought the issue was very well put last week in the following by wonderful blogger Julia Gorin:
start quote here
The perverseness of the Kosovo situation is such that on the eve of the land theft last week, conservative Heritage Foundation writers Nile Gardiner and Sally McNamara co-blogged a piece titled “The West Must Back Full Independence for Kosovo,” filled with the usual talking points referencing Srebrenicaas the “biggest atrocity in Europe since the Second World War,” and a quick gloss over the supposed case for independence — in much the same language that’s being parroted by every country supporting Kosovo independence to avoid unpleasantness from Albanians:
In 1998 and 1999, Serbia waged a barbaric campaign of ethnic cleansing against ethnic Albanians that left more than 10,000 people dead.
Although the “barbarism” was debunked even in the mainstream media, like our politicians, Gardiner and McNamara know that the American public was long sold on its mythology, so they easily build a false argument off this faulty premise and move on to the next point. Doing so involves swallowing all the media-circulated, State Department-spawned, and Muslim-financed propaganda that conservatives otherwise are very suspicious of when it doesn’t concern the Balkans or Serbs.
And so new rules are made up as we go along in which its fabled butchery “exempts [Serbia] from the rule that international borders can only be changed with the agreement of all parties,”
from Kosovo warps even the Heritage Foundation by Julia Gorin
http://www.juliagorin.com/blog.html
end quote here
I myself have learned that it is impossible to defeat the Kamm-Hoare-Cohen lying machine, the lies of the BBC, of the Guardian, of the Irish Times, etc. by words and reason.
I think it is a revolutionary issue. These liars are the props of a capitalist and imperialist system in mortal crisis. We need the mobilisation of workers, youth and the best and most principled intellectuals in a revolutionary party.
4international 