Excerpts from a speech to the H.L. Mencken Club, Baltimore, October 23, 2010 Two weeks ago the first “gay pride parade” was staged in Belgrade. Serbia’s “pro-European” government had been promoting the event as yet another proof that Serbia is fit to join the European Union, that is has overcome the legacy of its...
Author: Srdja Trifkovic (Srdja Trifkovic)
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Eastern Europe Versus the Open Society
Excerpts from a speech to the H.L. Mencken Club, Baltimore, October 23, 2010 Two weeks ago the first “gay pride parade” was staged in Belgrade. Serbia’s “pro-European” government had been promoting the event as yet another proof that Serbia is fit to join the European Union, that is has overcome the ...
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Ground Zero Mosque: Correcting the Non-Debate
Excerpts from a speech at Providence College given on Thursday, Oct. 21, 2010. Two sets of fallacies have dominated the mainstream debate about the Ground Zero mosque—and before we go any further, let’s get this straight: it is a mosque, frantic insistence by the Qusling elite to use one euphemistic misnomer or another notwithstanding....
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Ground Zero Mosque: Correcting the Non-Debate
Excerpts from a speech at Providence College given on Thursday, Oct. 21, 2010. Two sets of fallacies have dominated the mainstream debate about the Ground Zero mosque—and before we go any further, let’s get this straight: it is a mosque, frantic insistence by the Qusling elite to use one euphemistic misnomer ...
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An Ambiguous Victory for Wilders
The news just in that Dutch prosecutors have changed their mind about prosecuting Geert Wilders for the Orwellian crime of “discriminating against Muslims” and “inciting hatred” is prima facie a victory for free speech and all that. In fact it is not nearly as good as it may seem. The establishment is scared of continuing to hound the...
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An Ambiguous Victory for Wilders
The news just in that Dutch prosecutors have changed their mind about prosecuting Geert Wilders for the Orwellian crime of “discriminating against Muslims” and “inciting hatred” is prima facie a victory for free speech and all that. In fact it is not nearly as good as it may ...
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Hillary Clinton’s Ongoing Bosnian Fixation
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton started her two-day Balkan tour in Sarajevo on Tuesday by issuing a fresh call for Bosnia’s centralization. She urged “reforms that would improve key services, attract more foreign investment, and make the government more functional and accountable.” Hatreds have eased, she went on, “but nationalism persists. Meanwhile the promise of...
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Pernicious Myth of “Free Trade”
In the last week of September the House of Representatives passed legislation aimed at imposing trade sanctions against China unless it lets its currency appreciate, thereby reducing its export advantage. In a subsequent speech clearly aimed at China, Japan and Brazil, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner attacked currency policies likely to result in “short-term distortions...
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Pernicious Myth of “Free Trade”
In the last week of September the House of Representatives passed legislation aimed at imposing trade sanctions against China unless it lets its currency appreciate, thereby reducing its export advantage. In a subsequent speech clearly aimed at China, Japan and Brazil, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner attacked currency policies likely to ...
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Serbia Humiliated
On October 5, 2000, in an almost bloodless coup by the security forces staged against the backdrop of massive street protests, Slobodan Milosevic was removed from power in Serbia. Ten years later, many of those who cheered his downfall then (this author included) have nothing to celebrate. In the run-up to “Peti oktobar” they...
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Serbia Humiliated
On October 5, 2000, in an almost bloodless coup by the security forces staged against the backdrop of massive street protests, Slobodan Milosevic was removed from power in Serbia. Ten years later, many of those who cheered his downfall then (this author included) have nothing to celebrate. In the run-up ...
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Joe Sobran’s Timeless Lesson on America’s Role in the World
I met Joe Sobran in early 1997 at a conference near Chicago on the American intervention in the Balkans. It was not his area of primary interest, but he understood all of the key issues because he understood U.S. foreign policy and its domestic roots. His diagnosis, which applied then, in Bill Clinton’s second...
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Iran: The Score, the Options
In recent weeks the proponents of an American war against Iran have been getting impatient with President Obama’s apparent unwillingness to get with the program. Joe Lieberman, Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman, and Howard Berman, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, now press the President to impose a short time limit on the...
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Standing Straight
The notion of the “French intellectual” makes a decent man reach for a gun. Almost as odious as its Manhattan equivalent, it evokes images of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida and Bernard-Henri Lévy. Evil degenerates, enemies of God and man. Gen. Pierre-Marie Gallois, who died on August 23 in Paris at the...
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Bill Clinton and the Ground Zero Mosque: A Perfect Fit
Former President Bill Clinton declared his strong support for the Ground Zero mosque in an interview broadcast on September 12. He also suggested a clever new spin to the promoters of the project. Much or even most of the controversy, he said, “could have been avoided, and perhaps still can be, if the people who want...
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The Worst GOP Candidate In History
“Conservative” Joseph DioGuardi’s “sensational” election as the GOP Senate candidate in New York has shaken up the Republican Party, gloats the Tropoja-based Albanian Minerals President M. Mujaj in the Wall Street Journal Blog. “The American people have spoken,” this self-styled compatriot of ours is telling us. “The American way of life needs to be rebalanced. Households...
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The Worst GOP Candidate In History
“Conservative” Joseph DioGuardi’s “sensational” election as the GOP Senate candidate in New York has shaken up the Republican Party, gloats the Tropoja-based Albanian Minerals President M. Mujaj in the Wall Street Journal Blog. “The American people have spoken,” this self-styled compatriot of ours is telling us. ...
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Turkish Referendum: Neo-Ottomans Victorious
Over the past eight years, Prime Minister Rejep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Islamist government and his AKP (Justice and Development Party) have been successful in undermining Mustafa Kemal’s legacy and the character of the state founded upon that legacy. What remained, until last Sunday’s referendum, was ...
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The Path to Modernity
The Hobbesian mayhem that struck Europe in the first half of the 17th century was not an event, or a series of events, befitting the designation of a war. The plural form, as in the Napoleonic Wars, would be more apt. It was a pancontinental minus-sum-game involving all major players (save Russia) that continued, relentlessly,...
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New From Israel
The dispute over settlements has “transformed the American-Israeli connection and forced Israel to face new international realities.” Israel and the United States are facing “the worst split” in decades, a former Israeli foreign minister asserted, and the tremors may turn very soon into an earthshaking shift, “unless the Israeli government moderates its position on settlements.” ...
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The Soviet Intervention in Afghanistan
Hoping to bolster its geopolitical position, a great power sends troops to Afghanistan and installs a puppet leader. That leader has little authority with the influential tribal chieftains and insufficient means to buy their complicity. Resistance soon grows into a full-blown insurgency, which leads to harsh reprisals by the occupying forces. The vicious circle becomes...
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On the Quai at Smyrna
The literature in the English language on various long-established communities eradicated by the horrors of the 20th century is largely dominated by the Jewish holocaust. Accounts of other disappeared communities—of Italians in today’s Croatia, the Poles of Galicia, the Serbs of the former Habsburg Military Border, or Germans everywhere east of the Oder-Neisse line—are available...
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Jovan Trboyevic, R.I.P.
On January 10 Jovan Trboyevic, a good friend and longtime supporter of The Rockford Institute, died at his home in Chicago at the age of 89. He will be remembered in his adopted city as a restaurateur extraordinaire who set uncompromising standards for fine dining and customer behavior. As the Chicago Tribune obituarist recalled, “The...
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Swiss Minarets
Swiss voters approved a constitutional amendment banning the construction of new minarets last November, to the howls of bien-pensant rage at home and abroad. The proposal was supported by 57.5 percent of the participating voters and 22 of the 26 Swiss cantons. It was originally drafted in May 2007 by a group of conservative politicians,...
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A Tale of Two Subversives
The intention of postmoderns to destroy real people, with their natural loyalties, traditional morality, and inherited cultural preferences, is the same everywhere. Its specific manifestations may be different in the United States and Serbia—the homes of our two interlocutors and my good friends—but the underlying motivation is identical. It is Christophobia, the incubator of countless...
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Alex Dragnich, R.I.P.
The death at age 97 of Prof. Alex N. Dragnich, a leading American expert on Serbian and Yugoslav history, marks the departure of one of the last witnesses to an era in which this country’s involvement in Southeastern Europe was neither contrary to her traditional values nor overtly harmful to the region’s inhabitants. His dozen...
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Patriarch Aleksy, R.I.P.
Aleksy II, Patriarch of Moscow and head of the Russian Orthodox Church, died of heart failure on December 5, 2008, at the age of 79. Born in Estonia in 1929 into a pious family of Russian émigrés of German extraction, Aleksei Mikhailovich Ridiger was ordained a priest in 1950, completed his ...
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The North Worth Saving
“Defeat in detail” is a military concept that denotes the rout of an enemy by dividing and destroying segments of his forces one by one, instead of engaging his entire strength. A brilliant example was Stonewall Jackson’s 1862 Shenandoah Valley campaign, when his force of 17,000 beat three mutually unsupported Union commands almost four times...
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Patriarch Alesky, R.I.P
Aleksy II, Patriarch of Moscow and head of the Russian Orthodox Church, died of heart failure on December 5, 2008, at the age of 79. Born in Estonia in 1929 into a pious family of Russian émigrés of German extraction, Aleksei Mikhailovich Ridiger was ordained a priest in 1950, completed his theological studies in St....
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The Clintons Are Back
Hillary Clinton’s appointment as the third woman U.S. secretary of state is likely to deepen the crisis of the once-venerable institution at Washington’s Foggy Bottom, to which her two female predecessors have contributed in different ways. Madeleine Albright will be remembered for her hubris, coupled with studied callousness. (“If we have to use force, it...
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Le dernier mot: Washingtonian Madness
My farewell column has a melancholy air not only because all partings are inherently sad, but because the times are genuinely grim. The world is changing . . . not for ...
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Bosnia, Hillary’s Playground
At a time when the U.S. power and authority are increasingly challenged around the world, the incoming team sees the Balkans as the last geopolitically significant area where they can assert their “credibility” by postulating a maximalist set of objectives as the only outcome acceptable to the United States, and duly insisting on their fulfillment....
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Misallocated Infamy
For the past 67 years America has commemorated over 2,400 sailors, soldiers and airmen who were killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Every such anniversary reminds us that all history is to some extent contemporary history: Almost seven decades after the event, the myth of FDR’s goodness and greatness—revived for...
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A New Grand Strategy
Strategy is the art of winning wars, and grand strategy is the philosophy of maintaining an acceptable peace. America is good at the former and often confused on the latter. Making the world safe for democracy (Wilson 1917) or fighting freedom’s fight ordained by history (Bush 2002) may be dismissed as tasteless yet harmless rhetoric...
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Olmert’s Bombshell
Israel’s outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says Israel will have to give up almost the entire occupied West Bank, including most settlements and East Jerusalem, as the price for peace with the Palestinians. “What I am saying to you now has not been said by any Israeli leader before me,” he declared—and he was right. ...
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India, Jihad’s Permanent Battleground
Teams of heavily armed terrorists carried out seven coordinated attacks in India’s financial capital
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The Price of Hillary
No secretary of state will come to that office with stronger pro-Israel credentials or closer ties to the Jewish community than Sen. Hillary Clinton, Douglas Bloomfield assures his readers in The Jerusalem Post. Good for them, and for Bosnia’s Muslims and Kosovo’s Albanians; but for the rest of us Mrs. Clinton’s appointment as the third...
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Unstable Multipolarity
It is professionally vexing and personally alarming for a world-affairs analyst in today’s America that neither rationality nor consistency can be taken for granted among the foreign-policy community in Washington, D.C. That much has become obvious from the crisis in relations between the United States and Russia over Georgia. This crisis heralds a particularly dangerous...
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Kim Jong Il’s Disappearing Act
North Korea’s “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il is rumored to be ailing or even dead. Given his furtive ways and the nature of his regime, denials from Pyongyang are meaningless unless ...
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Haider: The Death of a Populist
Jörg Haider, the best known Austrian politician, was killed in a car crash on October 11. His death marks the end of a colorful career untypical for a “far-Right” figure. Armani-clad fitness fanatic, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s pal with a permanent tan, Haider cut a figure vastly different from the bland establishmentarians who have ran Austria for...
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Caucasian Trap
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s order to attack South Ossetia’s capital, Tskhinvali, was a breathtakingly audacious challenge to Russia, to which she was bound to respond forcefully. That response was promptly exploited by the American mainstream media machine and the foreign-policy community in Washington to paint Russia as a rogue power that is not only dangerous...
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The Big One Is Nigh!
“The global economy is like the St. Andreas Fault: You know that a terminal disaster is inevitable, but you keep your fingers crossed and try not to think about it,” I wrote in the print issue of Chronicles seven months ago (“Waiting for the Big One,” March 2008). “When a tremor occurs, you often fear...
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Witnessing at The Hague
All history is to some extent contemporary, but none more so than that analyzed, interpreted, and sometimes constructed by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague. ...
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Britain Adopts Shari’a
British papers are reporting that shari’a law has been officially adopted in Britain, with shari’a courts given powers to rule on Muslim civil cases, notably including wife beating. Gordon Brown’s Labour government “has quietly sanctioned ...
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Chronicle of an Announced Arrest
The media frenzy surrounding the arrest of the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic on July 21 was based entirely on the doctrine of nonequivalence inaugurated in 1992: Serb crimes are bad and justly exaggerated; Muslim crimes are understandable. This doctrine was spectacularly reiterated a month before Karadzic’s capture, when the Muslim wartime commander of...
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Witness to the Truth: Through Every Human Heart
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did not share the fate of some 2,000 writers, established or aspiring, who perished during Stalin’s reign of terror. Solzhenitsyn lived, against all odds, because he was chosen by God to share his people’s Calvary, to stand as its witness, and to provide a rare source of light in the cultural and moral...
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Georgia: The Score
Russia’s recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia makes it imperative to analyze the situation in the Caucasus dispassionately and comprehensively. The mainstream media (MSM) treatment of the crisis has been predictably monolithic, however -- almost as biased (“bad ...
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The Brezhnev Doctrine: Alive and Well
On August 21, 1968—40 years ago today—the Soviet army entered Czechoslovakia, followed by smaller contingents from four other Warsaw Pact countries. The occupation (“Operation Danube”) marked the end of the Prague Spring, a doomed attempt ...
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Musharraf, Out of Tricks
Parties comprising Pakistan’s ruling coalition continue to be deeply divided in the aftermath of former president Pervez Musharraf’s sudden resignation last Monday. The late Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and ex-prime minister Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N), which lead the coalition, were able to agree on impeachment charges that forced Musharraf out of...
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Caucasian Games: The Score
A week after Georgia’s failed attempt to conquer the breakaway province of South Ossetia, the crisis is over. The only major issue still unresolved concerns Mikheil Saakashvili’s motivation. His order to attack on the night of August 7-8 was a breathtakingly risky move; but was it a calculated, or reckless gamble? That Saakashvili acted with...