Last Updated: Friday - 09/24/2010

The blood-stained trigger finger of NATO

Increasingly our government policies seem to be market-driven, instead of people-oriented. It makes one wonder how much leverage our friends in Washington and their advisers from the Chicago School of Economics employ to weaken our sovereignty.

Corporatism has wiped out any diversity of opinion among Western nations and their various political parties. There is only one ruling ideology in the world. Canada just seems to have jumped on this globalized bandwagon, reducing us to tenants in the Northern commodity zone.

I'm thinking particularly of the disastrous decision to go along with the economic and military obliteration of Iraq, in spite of the pope's repeated appeals to halt the sanctions.

And now we are up to our neck with our Cold War chums in what is left of Yugoslavia. We, honest brokers that we are, do our damage under the banner of peace, democracy and humanitarian concern.

The Serbs in this conflict are our chosen enemy - not a good word has been heard about them. We don't seem to understand that they are desperately trying to hang on to what is left of their homeland while it is pulled out from under them bit by bit like an old rug.

While the NATO forces are portrayed in the media as the good guys who have come to the rescue of a suffering nation, the hidden truth is that the industrialized West has contributed to the break-up of Yugoslavia by imposing its macro-economic restructuring program since 1980.

The resulting economic collapse and the dismantling of the welfare state led to a weakening of the federal state, a division between Belgrade and the republics, social and ethnic divisions, and paranoid scapegoating. It has turned individuals, persons, friends and neighbours into members of identifiable groups who can no longer trust each other.

What we are witnessing now is part of an elaborate plan initiated by the Reagan and Bush administrations to "dismantle Yugoslavia's market socialism" and to "integrate the Balkans into the free market orbit."

The plan, hatched in 1982 through 1984, was a national security directive entitled U.S. Policy Towards Yugoslavia with the objective "to expand efforts to promote a quiet revolution to overthrow communist governments and parties while reintegrating the countries of Eastern Europe into a market-oriented economy."

In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, and along with it Eastern Europe tumbled towards political and economic ruination. The West devised some humanitarian aid packages to give a semblance of compassion, we sent in some peacekeepers and did our usual media thing.

But while we held out loaves of bread and olive branches, we continued the divide-and-rule policy which has brought us to the present grievious situation where we are now engaged in a dubious strategy to bomb people into submission.

Cruise missiles are falling in the centre of Belgrade because, in a manner akin to faith, we have equated democracy with capitalism and liberty with the free market.

Since 1990 the IMF has virtually crippled the country. Economic restructuring which has been the cause of the fracturing in Yugoslavia is now recommended by the financial institutions as the medicine to put Humpty Dumpty together again.

In our fervour to create people in our image we have overruled the United Nations and turned to the closed shop of NATO buddies to force our creed on a people who are not prepared to accept our market god. While we point to the blood on the hands of Slobodan Milosevic we might do well to check our own stained trigger fingers.

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