The acquittal of William Jefferson Clinton by the United States Senate is a good thing, although amidst the gloom that justifiably surrounds this fin de siècle, one is tempted to overlook the good side of the bad news. The acquittal should help dispel three dangerous illusions that still prevail among many Americans who cling to...
Author: Srdja Trifkovic (Srdja Trifkovic)
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Split-Run Issues
Canadian magazines would be protected against the tidal wave of split-run issues of U.S. publications that has swept across the border, under legislation sponsored by Heritage Minister Sheila Copps. The cabinet in Ottawa supported her proposed Bill C-55, which will prevent American magazine publishers from selling advertising to Canadian companies if those ads are meant...
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America’s Eroding Influence in Europe
The Iraqi crisis last fall seriously eroded American influence in Europe. On November 16, European foreign and defense ministers gathered in Vienna to examine the potential evolution of the Western European Union (WEU) into the full-fledged military arm of the European Union (E.U.), a possibility which would effectively replace NATO in Europe and exclude the...
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Multiculturalism and Islam
“Some say there is an inevitable clash between Western civilization and Western values, and Islamic civilizations and values. I believe this view is terribly wrong. False prophets may use and abuse any religion to justify whatever political objectives they have—even cold-blooded murder. Some may have the world believe that almighty God himself, the merciful, grants...
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Dayton Discord
Dr. Biljana Plavsic can go back to her microscope now that she has failed to win re-election as president of Bosnia’s Republika Srpska. A tenured professor at Sarajevo University, she was elected dean of the faculty of math and science in 1988. As a respected scholar and community leader, she carried, the most votes of...
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Well Supplied
Kosovo Albanians have been well supplied with arms and money. Some of the support has come from Islamic fundamentalists in the Middle East, and some from the extensive heroin trade controlled by Albanians. More recently, as Germany’s Social Democrats and their Green coalition partners prepared to take over the reins of government in Bonn, evidence...
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Albanian Separatists
Albanian separatists have been attacking policemen in the Serbian province of Kosovo for years, though only recently has the conflict escalated to the point where Slobodan Milosevic felt compelled to respond with a show of force. Not surprisingly, Milosevic’s action was met by the familiar media barrage against the cruelty of “the Serbs” and bellicose...
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A Democratic Politician
“An historian is a prophet in retrospect.” —A.W. von Schlegel Wir sind mit Hitler noch lange nicht fertig (“We are nowhere near done with Hitler”): the warning by two contemporary German historians provides an apt opening line to John Lukacs’s delightful book. His “history of the evolution of our knowledge of...
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Christmas Visit to Bosnia
President Bill Clinton’s announcement, made during his brief Christmas visit to Bosnia, that U.S. troops were going to stay in that blighted Balkan province well beyond the initially announced “deadline” of June 1998, surprised only the naive. The only surprising aspect of the announcement was Clinton’s refusal to set any new deadlines: the troops were...
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A Traditionalists’ Alliance
Seldom has a piece of foreign legislation elicited such an outcry among America’s bien pensants as did a recent Russian bill designed to regulate the activities of the many religious sects that have been setting up shop in Russia since the fall of communism. While the media chorus from New York and Washington was predictable...
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Diana’s Image
Diana is dead. The sudden and gruesome death of a woman in her prime, especially the mother of adolescent children, is a sad event. With Princess Diana, it has the makings of a real tragedy. She was pushed into a public marriage with an unloving and eccentric man 14 years her senior. To make matters...
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The Albright-Soros Attack on the Nation-State
Madeleine Albright’s rendition this summer of Madonna impersonating Evita Peron (“Don’t cry for me, Argentinaaaa . . . “) was neither intrinsically interesting nor aesthetically pleasing. The venue was an aircraft—paid by you and me—en route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Singapore; and according to an eyewitness, the only thing missing was a red orchid...
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Three New Members
NATO has three new members: Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. The event has taken place at a time when Europe is as stable and unthreatened as it has ever been in history. The Russians—regardless of political persuasion—are profoundly disturbed at the shift eastwards of the limit of NATO’s Article 5 guarantee, which postulates that...
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Slobodan Miloševic, Our S.O.B.
Our government is capable of swift and efficient action when it decides that the regime in a foreign country has outlived its usefulness, or has become a “threat” to what passes for national security inside the Beltway. Grenada, Panama, and Haiti all come to mind, but the methods deployed in this geographic area tend to...
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Hobbesian State of Anarchy
Albania has descended into the Hobbesian state of utter anarchy, which seldom happens to a European country. Armed mobs have ransacked stores, unruly soldiers have stolen cars at gunpoint, foreign nationals have been evacuated by helicopter from embassy compounds, and rebels have stolen some 100,000 light arms from government arsenals. The sinking in March of...
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A Lurid Melodrama
So Deng Xiaoping has joined Saint-Just, Molotov, Himmler, Djilas, et al., in that niche of the nether regions reserved for the Unrepentant Accomplices of Ideology-Driven Mass Murderers. One hopes that the place is only a little less unpleasant than that inhabited by their bosses, Robespierre, Stalin, Hitler, Tito, and Company. The fact has been obscured...
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Why Milosevic Must Go
Experience teaches us that dictatorial regimes are anything but indestructible. They are inherently irrational and therefore unstable. Sooner or later they collapse. To reach ripe old age and die in bed, like Tito, is exceptional for a dictator; to set his country on the steady road to democratic reform, like Franco, is unique. The method...
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The Fixer
“A politician . . . one that would circumvent God.” —William Shakespeare The title gives the game away: David Owen, a failed British politician who was for three crucial years (1992-95) Europe’s chief negotiator on the issue of the former Yugoslavia, seeks to cast himself as a Homerian hero. After 400 pages of tedious and...
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The Hague Tribunal: Bad Justice, Worse Politics
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once referred to the Cheka as “the only punitive organ in human history that combined in one set of hands investigation, arrest, interrogation, prosecution, trial, and execution of the verdict.” He was probably mistaken about “human history,” but his anger was just. What he chronicled was indefinite imprisonment without trial; investigations and indictments...
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A Dirty Little Secret
Holland has a dirty little secret. In the North Sea resort of Scheveningen, there is a prison where you can be indefinitely incarcerated without trial, or where you can be delivered on the orders of an ad hoc “court” that sometimes issues warrants only after politically motivated arrests have been made. The court is ten...