World journalistic elite gathers in Belgrade

Have they No Shame?

After all they did to deceive people worldwide into supporting NATO’s illegal war of aggression on Serbia, this conference would be an ideal opportunity for my journalistic colleagues to apologize for those years of demonization and institutionally biased anti-Serbian reporting.

At least they could use this forum to formally retract the IPI 1999 false statement that Albanian journalist Baton Haxhiu was "executed" by Serbian police. They could also take a stand and demand prosecution of NATO leaders for their premeditated killing of 16 staff members of Radio-Television Serbia -- the single worst targeted slaughter of media people not only in the illegal NATO war but in any conflict since World War Two.

However, judging but their collective amnesia over NATO’s perpetration of the single worst mass slaughter of Albanians in Kosovo when they killed over 70 Albanian civilians (see my own report here http://imcnews.com/ ) I guess we can’t expect anything better.

The fact that IPI Director David Dadge is *not* quoted as condemning NATO as a top journalist-killer bodes ill for the future of reporters who ever dare to cover the "other" side of one of the West's humanitarian wars of convenience.

As for Tadic's absurd statement that "he will never stop to insist that those guilty of murder and violence against journalists in the 1990s are punished, 'irrelevant of their name'", perhaps he should explain how his comment squares with his continuing love affair with NATO and how it is that he has never once demanded that NATO be punished. The famous statue of Lady Justice carrying a balance scale evidently has no relevance in Tadic's Serbia.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn dubbed the era of the West's destruction of Yugoslavia "The Age of Hypocrisy". It is therefore most fitting that IPI Director David Dadge and NATOphile Boris Tadic appear to be competing for the lead role in this international assembly of the world's most influential hypocrites.

Have they no shame?

Sincerely,

John Bosnitch
Washington DC
john.b@imcnews.com

Dear John !

You are 100% right ! This tribune should be used as a unique chance for the Serbs to deliver the truth to the ears of western peoples cause in the rest of the world all are aware of what has happened.

The Serbs must stress that everything happening to you today is motivated mostly with the biggest wish of NATO members to close somehow the criminal page of 1999. It's quite an American approach when the winners are not judged ... So Kosovo brakaway attempt is only a step to end the war somehow.

The fast changing situation in the world is in Serbia's favor. If only your internal Fifth Column not betray now you will have an increasing chance for a compromise over Kosovo.

Regards !

Hi Piotr !

Thanks for the congratulations ! It was less than we could hope for but it leaves us a chance. As for the Polish team I am afraid your best players will go on playing for those who pay more. It is life ... I also think both of our teams has not used the potential they obtain.

As for the innocence in politics we don't have to judge the events in the past on modern standards. And if we do so then many things would have different appear. Say Polish-Russian conflicts were painted nationalistic colors only since 20-th century when religion ment not so much for Russia. Before that everything that happened was in a big degree a result of our permanent conflict with Vatican.

You are right the history is the view if the winners. What I really ment was that Russians have no compromise only if we have direct threat while the Yankees can fight long only to keep up their image of a superpower. Evidently sooner or later both coalitions in Iraq and Afghanistan will be defeated but still they keep on massacre not to undermine their positions in the world.

Dear Peter,

Historical revisionism used to occur long after the fact, when it was easier for the revisionists to mislead an audience that was not personally familiar with the events. Luckily I was present as a reporter at the time of these events on the ground, reporting from the battlefront(s) throughout the Balkans conflict. I witnessed a false picture being generated right in front of my eyes because I had internal access to the work of my fellow journalists -- I watched them compare notes and coordinate their news to create a one-sided received image very different from what we journalists had all seen together. I wrote about it in an article printed by Japan-based media and reproduced here:
http://www.srpska-mreza.com/Yugoslavia/views/Bosnitch-Bosnia.html

I also analyzed the media manipulation in a New York Times forum in an article reproduced here:
http://www.srpska-mreza.com/Yugoslavia/views/Bosnitch-NYT.html

I can tell you that I was just as incredulous as you, Peter, when I first realized the amazing degree to which Western publishers, broadcasters and editors centrally manipulate international perceptions and politics.

Specifically, a decision to present a negative image of a country or people can be taken by a small group of people and then be presented as fact across thousands of magazines, TV stations, and newspapers within under 24 hours around the entire planet. Reporters who have never met each other before and have never been in a conflict zone before can meet for the first time on a bus organized for journalists in Sarajevo for example and be shocked by the fact that they already share the identical same view of a place they have never examined journalistically except through the filters controlled by the main media and news agencies. As a result, programming the thoughts, even of supposedly independent journalists, has become child's play. Adding to the pre-programming that green journalists face before entering a situation, media managers also impose unrealistic deadlines of as little as four hours from the time of arrival in the target country for a journalist to submit his first report... essentially meaning that he/she writes his first story on the airplane on the way there, based on his/her prior programming and merely uses the short visit to Sarajevo (for example) to spice the story up with a bit of what we call "local color" -- a few quotes, a few names of "men in the street" and a few photos, all of which give legitimacy to the pre-programmed message.

The problem with this situation is precisely the one that you are worried about: revisionism. But what is happening now is that the mass media is so centralized and technologically efficient that the "revisionist" official version of events actually reaches your ears before the true version! In that way, when the truth does eventually get out, it can easily be misrepresented as a biased attempt to revise what you already think you "know". This is where the money, networking, interdependency, and collusion of the powerful mass media gives them the advantage over the honest investigative reporter who needs more time to unearth the facts, to identify the real power-brokers, to trace the clues to the money-masters and then, most challengingly, to find someone who will print or broadcast his now very unorthodox view of what the public has already been programmed to believe. We are all becoming the victims of what can best be called "near-real-time revisionism".

I recently spoke with a State Department source who had personal access to the U.S. Secretary of State during the period leading up to the Bosnian War and who described to me how the Secretary's freedom to act was severely limited by an anti-Serbian media campaign that led politicians to pressure the Secretary to intervene against the Serbs immediately in the Bosnian conflict. The source described the situation as a privately controlled media cartel, fed a picture by well-paid lobbyists, dragging the government of the "world's sole superpower" along by the nose. Clinton eventually did as ordered because he simply was not strong enough to resist (and had no particular reason not to in any case).

You might have heard of the "great man" theory of history in which men like Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt shaped the world around them according to their designs. What we face today is the opposite: the "weak man" era of human leadership in which virtual puppets hold the leading political positions in much of the world, subject to the whims of oligarchs who control the media *and* economy in an interlocking network that can bring down almost any elected leader. This problem is present not just in America.

Specifically, Russia at the time of the NATO invasion of Serbia was ruled not by President Yeltsin but by the grace of the handful of oligarchs around him who had compromised his freedom of action to the point that he could do nothing. Yeltsin's ineffectiveness was also the product of two unusual factors:

1. Yeltsin was completely drunk to the point of unconsciousness during much of his time in office, allowing people like Yevgeny Primakov (who extorted the Yugoslav army's withdrawal from Kosovo from Milosevic) to function in his absence. Madeleine Albright has since referred to the pliable Mr. Primakov as the man she enjoyed working with most of all...

2. Russia itself was extremely weak and not capable of projecting the regional power needed to balance the overbearing presence of both the US and the EU in the Balkans.

Fortunately for us all, Putin's ascendancy has brought back a multi-polar international balance that has even allowed China to take up its own role and which will soon bring forth India and Brazil as major influences on the course of modern human history.

For the short time that the ownership elite in America could even exceed the God-like power of Louis XIV by saying "the world (not just the state) is us" they did indeed run the events in the Balkans. But that time is over and it may well prove to have been the beginning of the end for the US as a world power. The God-like authority that those ruling oligarchs assumed during that era reminds me of the warning in the First Commandment:

"Do not have any other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments."

Each and every one of us who allowed a small group of men to freely violate the laws and norms developed over the length of human history by waging a war of aggression on nonexistent grounds had in fact submitted to a false God: we had submitted to a new world order run through the mass media by a handful of information-network owners and their well-paid managers. We are all starting to realize how totally we were duped and that false media God is now starting to crumble and will surely collapse.

But do not get me wrong – the collective media “Gods” did *not* do this only against Serbia in some unique conspiracy. They certainly did *not* say anything like “the Serbs and Albanians are the most important issue in the world so lets conspire on that subject”. No, they simply let their machine run as it does around the entire world, seeking out the options closest to their economic and political objectives, and then implementing them by default due to the lack of any other input. If anyone is guilty, it is us, the common people of the world, because we have failed to insist upon any direct input in the decision-making processes used by those who rule us.

That, Peter, is the world that we Serbs are resisting today, just as we resisted the totalitarian world represented by Hitler, Kaiser Wilhelm, the Ottoman Turk empire and so on, back into history… our tendency to resist is simultaneously our best quality and a deadly curse that makes us sacrifice ourselves generation after generation.

The happy result of the flagrant abuse of power in the Balkans by our modern-day oligarchs will inevitably be a worldwide understanding that in the "Age of Information", there must be democratic control of the collection and dissemination of the "news" or we will all be doomed to perpetual slavery to a hidden and irresponsible elite who act, by default, only in their own interests.

The revolutionary nature of the freedom-loving Serbian people has, again merely by default, given us the historic mission of leading this battle for worldwide freedom from rule by the media-economy oligarchs. The unacceptable alternative, as defined by French philosopher Jacques Elull is a world run by total propaganda:

“a mass media which makes possible the use of propaganda techniques on a societal scale. The orchestration of press, radio and television to create a continuous, lasting and total environment renders the influence of propaganda virtually unnoticed precisely because it creates a constant environment.”

That, Peter, is a world in which none of us belong.


Sincerely,

John Bosnitch
Washington DC
john.b@imcnews.com

John

"After all they did to deceive people worldwide into supporting NATO’s illegal war of aggression on Serbia, this conference would be an ideal opportunity for my journalistic colleagues to apologize for those years of demonization and institutionally biased anti-Serbian reporting. "

Could you please explain why NATO intervened militarily in Kosovo, the UN (Russia and China included) had to set up an interim administration of the province outside of Serbian control (de facto separation of Serbia already) and peacekeepers are still being stationed there to this day if indeed Serbia did nothing wrong and this was only a US-led war of aggression against Serbia? I think you overestimate the importance of Serbs and Albanians in the world if you think this was some anti-Serbian/pro-Albanian conspiracy.

Smells like nationalist revisionism to me, something I have seen a lot of, being Polish and discussing WWII with some citizens of my neighbour countries, if you are following my drift.

ORTHODOX.RU

Hello Sergey, first of all, congratulations against Greece. I just saw one thing here that you wrote:

"It's quite an American approach when the winners are not judged ... "

I am not going to go deeply into this, but I assure you Sergey that this is not an exclusively American approach. History is written by the victors, and this is something that has been seen many times in the past 60-70 years, and their perceptions are often then taken as the whole truth. Unfortunately, Russia is not innocent when it comes to this either.

Mr. Bosnitch:

Do you or the journalists you worked with have photos/videos of the heavy traffic in Sarajevo in the middle of the war versus the extremely light traffic on the Serb part?

Do you also have other pictures of the city, frontlines and away from the frontlines?

Seems like any photos and videos should be put up on a webpage and/or youtube to illustrate what you say.

Further, did you notice the different sides of Sarajevo at night and how lit up or dark each side was relatively?

Have they No Shame?

After all they did to deceive people worldwide into supporting NATO’s illegal war of aggression on Serbia, this conference would be an ideal opportunity for my journalistic colleagues to apologize for those years of demonization and institutionally biased anti-Serbian reporting.

At least they could use this forum to formally retract the IPI 1999 false statement that Albanian journalist Baton Haxhiu was "executed" by Serbian police. They could also take a stand and demand prosecution of NATO leaders for their premeditated killing of 16 staff members of Radio-Television Serbia -- the single worst targeted slaughter of media people not only in the illegal NATO war but in any conflict since World War Two.

However, judging but their collective amnesia over NATO’s perpetration of the single worst mass slaughter of Albanians in Kosovo when they killed over 70 Albanian civilians (see my own report here http://imcnews.com/ ) I guess we can’t expect anything better.

The fact that IPI Director David Dadge is *not* quoted as condemning NATO as a top journalist-killer bodes ill for the future of reporters who ever dare to cover the "other" side of one of the West's humanitarian wars of convenience.

As for Tadic's absurd statement that "he will never stop to insist that those guilty of murder and violence against journalists in the 1990s are punished, 'irrelevant of their name'", perhaps he should explain how his comment squares with his continuing love affair with NATO and how it is that he has never once demanded that NATO be punished. The famous statue of Lady Justice carrying a balance scale evidently has no relevance in Tadic's Serbia.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn dubbed the era of the West's destruction of Yugoslavia "The Age of Hypocrisy". It is therefore most fitting that IPI Director David Dadge and NATOphile Boris Tadic appear to be competing for the lead role in this international assembly of the world's most influential hypocrites.

Have they no shame?

Sincerely,

John Bosnitch
Washington DC
john.b@imcnews.com

Dear John !

You are 100% right ! This tribune should be used as a unique chance for the Serbs to deliver the truth to the ears of western peoples cause in the rest of the world all are aware of what has happened.

The Serbs must stress that everything happening to you today is motivated mostly with the biggest wish of NATO members to close somehow the criminal page of 1999. It's quite an American approach when the winners are not judged ... So Kosovo brakaway attempt is only a step to end the war somehow.

The fast changing situation in the world is in Serbia's favor. If only your internal Fifth Column not betray now you will have an increasing chance for a compromise over Kosovo.

Regards !

John

"After all they did to deceive people worldwide into supporting NATO’s illegal war of aggression on Serbia, this conference would be an ideal opportunity for my journalistic colleagues to apologize for those years of demonization and institutionally biased anti-Serbian reporting. "

Could you please explain why NATO intervened militarily in Kosovo, the UN (Russia and China included) had to set up an interim administration of the province outside of Serbian control (de facto separation of Serbia already) and peacekeepers are still being stationed there to this day if indeed Serbia did nothing wrong and this was only a US-led war of aggression against Serbia? I think you overestimate the importance of Serbs and Albanians in the world if you think this was some anti-Serbian/pro-Albanian conspiracy.

Smells like nationalist revisionism to me, something I have seen a lot of, being Polish and discussing WWII with some citizens of my neighbour countries, if you are following my drift.

ORTHODOX.RU

Hello Sergey, first of all, congratulations against Greece. I just saw one thing here that you wrote:

"It's quite an American approach when the winners are not judged ... "

I am not going to go deeply into this, but I assure you Sergey that this is not an exclusively American approach. History is written by the victors, and this is something that has been seen many times in the past 60-70 years, and their perceptions are often then taken as the whole truth. Unfortunately, Russia is not innocent when it comes to this either.

Hi Piotr !

Thanks for the congratulations ! It was less than we could hope for but it leaves us a chance. As for the Polish team I am afraid your best players will go on playing for those who pay more. It is life ... I also think both of our teams has not used the potential they obtain.

As for the innocence in politics we don't have to judge the events in the past on modern standards. And if we do so then many things would have different appear. Say Polish-Russian conflicts were painted nationalistic colors only since 20-th century when religion ment not so much for Russia. Before that everything that happened was in a big degree a result of our permanent conflict with Vatican.

You are right the history is the view if the winners. What I really ment was that Russians have no compromise only if we have direct threat while the Yankees can fight long only to keep up their image of a superpower. Evidently sooner or later both coalitions in Iraq and Afghanistan will be defeated but still they keep on massacre not to undermine their positions in the world.

Dear Peter,

Historical revisionism used to occur long after the fact, when it was easier for the revisionists to mislead an audience that was not personally familiar with the events. Luckily I was present as a reporter at the time of these events on the ground, reporting from the battlefront(s) throughout the Balkans conflict. I witnessed a false picture being generated right in front of my eyes because I had internal access to the work of my fellow journalists -- I watched them compare notes and coordinate their news to create a one-sided received image very different from what we journalists had all seen together. I wrote about it in an article printed by Japan-based media and reproduced here:
http://www.srpska-mreza.com/Yugoslavia/views/Bosnitch-Bosnia.html

I also analyzed the media manipulation in a New York Times forum in an article reproduced here:
http://www.srpska-mreza.com/Yugoslavia/views/Bosnitch-NYT.html

I can tell you that I was just as incredulous as you, Peter, when I first realized the amazing degree to which Western publishers, broadcasters and editors centrally manipulate international perceptions and politics.

Specifically, a decision to present a negative image of a country or people can be taken by a small group of people and then be presented as fact across thousands of magazines, TV stations, and newspapers within under 24 hours around the entire planet. Reporters who have never met each other before and have never been in a conflict zone before can meet for the first time on a bus organized for journalists in Sarajevo for example and be shocked by the fact that they already share the identical same view of a place they have never examined journalistically except through the filters controlled by the main media and news agencies. As a result, programming the thoughts, even of supposedly independent journalists, has become child's play. Adding to the pre-programming that green journalists face before entering a situation, media managers also impose unrealistic deadlines of as little as four hours from the time of arrival in the target country for a journalist to submit his first report... essentially meaning that he/she writes his first story on the airplane on the way there, based on his/her prior programming and merely uses the short visit to Sarajevo (for example) to spice the story up with a bit of what we call "local color" -- a few quotes, a few names of "men in the street" and a few photos, all of which give legitimacy to the pre-programmed message.

The problem with this situation is precisely the one that you are worried about: revisionism. But what is happening now is that the mass media is so centralized and technologically efficient that the "revisionist" official version of events actually reaches your ears before the true version! In that way, when the truth does eventually get out, it can easily be misrepresented as a biased attempt to revise what you already think you "know". This is where the money, networking, interdependency, and collusion of the powerful mass media gives them the advantage over the honest investigative reporter who needs more time to unearth the facts, to identify the real power-brokers, to trace the clues to the money-masters and then, most challengingly, to find someone who will print or broadcast his now very unorthodox view of what the public has already been programmed to believe. We are all becoming the victims of what can best be called "near-real-time revisionism".

I recently spoke with a State Department source who had personal access to the U.S. Secretary of State during the period leading up to the Bosnian War and who described to me how the Secretary's freedom to act was severely limited by an anti-Serbian media campaign that led politicians to pressure the Secretary to intervene against the Serbs immediately in the Bosnian conflict. The source described the situation as a privately controlled media cartel, fed a picture by well-paid lobbyists, dragging the government of the "world's sole superpower" along by the nose. Clinton eventually did as ordered because he simply was not strong enough to resist (and had no particular reason not to in any case).

You might have heard of the "great man" theory of history in which men like Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt shaped the world around them according to their designs. What we face today is the opposite: the "weak man" era of human leadership in which virtual puppets hold the leading political positions in much of the world, subject to the whims of oligarchs who control the media *and* economy in an interlocking network that can bring down almost any elected leader. This problem is present not just in America.

Specifically, Russia at the time of the NATO invasion of Serbia was ruled not by President Yeltsin but by the grace of the handful of oligarchs around him who had compromised his freedom of action to the point that he could do nothing. Yeltsin's ineffectiveness was also the product of two unusual factors:

1. Yeltsin was completely drunk to the point of unconsciousness during much of his time in office, allowing people like Yevgeny Primakov (who extorted the Yugoslav army's withdrawal from Kosovo from Milosevic) to function in his absence. Madeleine Albright has since referred to the pliable Mr. Primakov as the man she enjoyed working with most of all...

2. Russia itself was extremely weak and not capable of projecting the regional power needed to balance the overbearing presence of both the US and the EU in the Balkans.

Fortunately for us all, Putin's ascendancy has brought back a multi-polar international balance that has even allowed China to take up its own role and which will soon bring forth India and Brazil as major influences on the course of modern human history.

For the short time that the ownership elite in America could even exceed the God-like power of Louis XIV by saying "the world (not just the state) is us" they did indeed run the events in the Balkans. But that time is over and it may well prove to have been the beginning of the end for the US as a world power. The God-like authority that those ruling oligarchs assumed during that era reminds me of the warning in the First Commandment:

"Do not have any other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments."

Each and every one of us who allowed a small group of men to freely violate the laws and norms developed over the length of human history by waging a war of aggression on nonexistent grounds had in fact submitted to a false God: we had submitted to a new world order run through the mass media by a handful of information-network owners and their well-paid managers. We are all starting to realize how totally we were duped and that false media God is now starting to crumble and will surely collapse.

But do not get me wrong – the collective media “Gods” did *not* do this only against Serbia in some unique conspiracy. They certainly did *not* say anything like “the Serbs and Albanians are the most important issue in the world so lets conspire on that subject”. No, they simply let their machine run as it does around the entire world, seeking out the options closest to their economic and political objectives, and then implementing them by default due to the lack of any other input. If anyone is guilty, it is us, the common people of the world, because we have failed to insist upon any direct input in the decision-making processes used by those who rule us.

That, Peter, is the world that we Serbs are resisting today, just as we resisted the totalitarian world represented by Hitler, Kaiser Wilhelm, the Ottoman Turk empire and so on, back into history… our tendency to resist is simultaneously our best quality and a deadly curse that makes us sacrifice ourselves generation after generation.

The happy result of the flagrant abuse of power in the Balkans by our modern-day oligarchs will inevitably be a worldwide understanding that in the "Age of Information", there must be democratic control of the collection and dissemination of the "news" or we will all be doomed to perpetual slavery to a hidden and irresponsible elite who act, by default, only in their own interests.

The revolutionary nature of the freedom-loving Serbian people has, again merely by default, given us the historic mission of leading this battle for worldwide freedom from rule by the media-economy oligarchs. The unacceptable alternative, as defined by French philosopher Jacques Elull is a world run by total propaganda:

“a mass media which makes possible the use of propaganda techniques on a societal scale. The orchestration of press, radio and television to create a continuous, lasting and total environment renders the influence of propaganda virtually unnoticed precisely because it creates a constant environment.”

That, Peter, is a world in which none of us belong.


Sincerely,

John Bosnitch
Washington DC
john.b@imcnews.com

Mr. Bosnitch:

Do you or the journalists you worked with have photos/videos of the heavy traffic in Sarajevo in the middle of the war versus the extremely light traffic on the Serb part?

Do you also have other pictures of the city, frontlines and away from the frontlines?

Seems like any photos and videos should be put up on a webpage and/or youtube to illustrate what you say.

Further, did you notice the different sides of Sarajevo at night and how lit up or dark each side was relatively?