Having witnessed how the Yugoslav tragedy was essentially driven (vis a vis "wag the dog" 20) by pseudo-intellectual thug "academics" and "journalists" who pimp themselves out to the highest bidder
The recent embarrassing censorship of Dr. Charles Murray at the hands of a student mob at Middlebury College1 gave me horrible flashbacks of my numerous unforgettable experiences with academic censorship as a Serbian-American activist in the Boston area when I was a graduate student at Harvard in the 1990s 2.
During this time, the Yugoslav civil wars were raging and the media and Western politicians were blaming the Serbs for everything bad that happened in the Balkans and beyond 3. Many conferences and lectures were suddenly and spontaneously organized at local colleges and universities. But just like the corporate-controlled mainstream media discussion of the facts surrounding tragic civil wars in the former Yugoslavia, I found that they were consistently presenting only 1/2 (or less) of the real story4,5.
Serbian experts were not being invited to present their side. Self-described pseudo-intellectual experts on the Balkans who werent even from Yugoslavia (and in many cases had not even visited the region) were instead regurgitating US State Department agitprop to demonize the Serbian people. And there were so many of them: dermatologist (!) Philip Cohen MD, NYT columnist Anthony Lewis, journalist (later US ambassador to the UN) Samantha Power, historian and journalist Noel Malcolm, columnist Georgie Anne Geyer etc. etc. etc., who were giving biased/distorted presentations at esteemed academic institutions against the Serbs and advocating military action against them with little or no counterpoint. We tried in vain to challenge their distorted arguments only to find hostile conference organizers who would allow maybe a two minute response - and it had to be in the form of a question (for an hour long talk) - if we were lucky - and then shut us down once they saw that we were disrupting their carefully constructed web of distorted information.
At one memorable conference at Wellesley College, Croatian nationalist professor Ivo Banac at Yale angrily, publicly and loudly called my friend who had civilly and diplomatically questioned his Yugoslav communist sources a Serbian propagandist. I made the point there publicly that there were no Serbian perspectives/voices who were invited. Afterward, an anthropology professor at Wellesley took my group out for a late dinner to apologize because he told me that he was asked to present a Serbian viewpoint but admitted that he knew nothing about the war or the region and felt that Wellesley had done a disservice to the Serbs. When my wife who was a Wellesley alumna wrote a letter to the president of the college explaining this horribly anti-intellectual situation, the president explained in written response that Srdja Popovic was invited. This is the same Mr. Popovic who openly called for bombing of his own people as a traitor while the majority of his family was safely in America courtesy of the US State Department. I wouldnt consider his views representative of the majority of Serbs.
Another American anthropologist at Boston University whom I knew and who actually did field work in Yugoslavia was viciously threatened by Croatian scholars when she presented her pro-Serbian (really just balanced but to be balanced in those days was to be pro-Serb) perspectives at another scholarly academic conference. She was rarely invited to present papers due to the anti-Serbian McCarthyesque hysteria that swept up academia in the 1990s despite the gravity of her important work in Yugoslavia in the 1970s. A Canadian sociology professor at McMaster University received death threats from Croatians in Hamilton Ontario when she wrote about the savage genocide of Serbian Orthodox Christians in WWII at the hands of the Croatian Catholic Ustashe 6-8.
A Japanese-American professor who was a friend of mine and fellow activist wrote a letter to Elie Wiesel to query him why he was so anti-Serbian given that he should have had some understanding of why Serbs were so terrified to live in a Croatia that sought to resurrect the symbolism and rhetoric of its shameful Nazi Ustasha era when hundreds of thousands of Serbs (my relatives included) perished. Prof. Wiesel wrote him back a bizarre, strangely worded and unintelligible response which was also sent to the president of his university demonstrating the McCarthyesque means that some scholars utilized to scare and possibly get fired those who disagreed with them.
Even MIT had a biased anti-Serbian panel which included a Bosnian Muslim warlord commander (who had likely committed war crimes against Serbian civilians) but with no Serbian side to challenge the information presented. When I pointed this out, I was threatened by some members of the largely Muslim student audience and had to make a hasty exit for fear of my life - at MIT of all places!
More recently historian and columnist Dr. Srdja Trifkovic was banned from entering Canada in 2011 due to an angry Bosnian Muslim organization/mob that prevented him from giving an invited talk on the future of the Balkans at the University of British Columbia just because he was Serbian and had written pieces and books critical of Muslim extremism in the past 9-12.
And so it went for many years and continues to go on to this very day. I write the Canada Free Press this piece because there are few (if any) American news outlets who would dare to publish this essay because to publish it would be to admit decades of censorship and information control in the American free and fair media 2. There was no real debate on the Balkans at our nations finest academic institutions because the intention was never to inform American students and scholars about the reality of the civil wars in Yugoslavia but to demonize the Serbs to build support for illegal military action against them and breakup Yugoslavia at Serbian expense. These actions culminated in the illegal and vicious bombing of Serbia in 1999 to enable an Islamic terrorist safe haven of Kosovo (from which we continue to receive blowback) by stealing it from Serbia and to create Camp Bondsteel for protecting the AMBO pipeline and act against Russia someday13-15.
Though many of the allegations against the Serbs have been proven to be grossly exaggerated and many of the atrocities against them have reluctantly and finally been exposed, the damage has been done. Yugoslavia, which was an anchor of stability in the Balkans, has been torn asunder and the Balkans has returned to its pre WWI status as an unstable and divided powder keg that could go off any moment thanks to NATOs desperate need find a new purpose and new enemies to justify its senseless existence after the fall of the Berlin Wall 16. And so this costly Quixotic quest for imaginary enemies, betrayal of century-old allies (e,g. WWI and WWII ally Serbia), and divide-and-conquer modus operandi continues to this very day in Libya, Syria, the Ukraine and elsewhere and now in my own country - America.
I will never forget the racism, ignorance, censorship that Serbians and Serbian-Americans endured at the hands of ignorant academics such as Samantha Power who were nothing more than pseudo-intellectual propagandists doing the bidding of their Bilderberger/CFR masters: globalists and master strategists such as Zbieniew Brzezinski and George Soros in their fanatical and sinister effort to force an unelected new world order which will enslave much of humanity 17-19.
Fast forward to the censorship of Dr. Charles Murray at Middlebury College and I see exactly the same McCarthyesque/fascist pattern of ignorant, immature, and misguided students (led by their mentors and other sponsors) most of whom Ill bet have not even read Dr. Murrays book but nevertheless feel self-righteous in their anger and censorship of this scholar.
The point of this essay is not to defend Dr. Murrays work. It is not even to say who was right and who was wrong in the Yugoslav civil wars where no side was innocent. The point of this essay is to explain that many so-called scholars and their students dont know how to debate and are destroying respect for and the purpose of academia. They are afraid of information that may not fit their carefully crafted and generously funded paradigms and so, to prevent the truth or at least different ways of thinking from emerging, they censor it. The Middlebury students betrayed the constitutional right of free speech by preventing Dr. Murray from presenting his ideas. As Americans, we have the right to hear and should hear ALL sides of any story (regardless of what is right and what is wrong) - particularly in an academic setting and to debate these ideas. They key to being a good scholar is precisely the willingness to examine different directions of thought that may be controversial but nevertheless, may yield tremendous insight and will at the very least instill caution where fools dare to tread. When we become afraid of ideas, we become slaves to that fear and lose our ability to think freely and thus be creative which is what made America great.
The essence of democracy and intellectual freedom is the free exchange and expression of ideas. Democracies require educated citizens to flourish and that requires exposure to differing points of view even if some citizens disagree with them. Civilized debate is the proper means for flushing out bad ideas so that we can agree on and adopt good ideas and move positively forward. Without debate, we encourage polarization, ignorance and confusion around controversial ideas which is extremely dangerous.
I was deeply disappointed in the students at Middlebury college who prevented different ideas from being presented. The immature students who disrupted the event should be severely reprimanded by college authorities and those who assaulted the professor should face criminal charges and be expelled from the college. If students are unwilling to even listen to opposing ideas (regardless of their political correctness) and civilly participate in the debate/discussion, they will never learn anything and have no business being in college.
Having witnessed how the Yugoslav tragedy was essentially driven (vis a vis wag the dog 20) by pseudo-intellectual thug academics and journalists who pimp themselves out to the highest bidder and encouraged mob/NATO violence against the Serbs culminating in the destruction of international law, and seeing how Nazi Germany got its way by similarly encouraging mob violence, bullying and burning books, I shudder for the future of academia and for my country. We should all be deeply concerned by what transpired at Middlebury College.
References:
The rest is here:
Censorship at Middlebury College - Canada Free Press