SunnyAnderson

@WallStreetMav I left the USA in 2003 for Europe, and madness started to show already. Never looked back! Often, I feel sad when I remember 90is. Great time!

How do other people who lived through the 80s and 90s stomach what's going on right now? I find this extremely sad to watch, knowing how awesome the USA was.

@GMSasu @nxt888 So, after a bit of online research, you are an expert. Did I get that right?

@SunnyCAnderson @nxt888 Apparently, sometimes it doesn't.

Think about what it meant to be a small country watching American power in 1999. Yugoslavia. A mid-sized European country with a functioning military, a real air defense system, genuine capability. Not a weak state. Not a failed state. Seventy-eight days of NATO bombing. Almost no ability to respond. Missiles falling on Belgrade. Infrastructure destroyed. No counter-strikes against NATO territory. No strikes against NATO allies. No ability to escalate in ways that changed the cost calculation for the other side. Just absorbing it. Until Milošević surrendered. Now think about what it means to be a small country watching the Iran situation. Iran closes the most strategic waterway on earth. Strikes the largest LNG facility in the world. Hits one of the most defended refineries of its strongest regional adversary. Issues a counter-threat to a presidential ultimatum that is credible enough to make the president withdraw the ultimatum. Publicly laughs at the reformulated American position. Watches the United States go to China for help. Watches China say no. And the strait is still closed. The same world is watching both of these events. The same world is updating its model of what American power means. Vietnam was one update. Afghanistan was another. Iraq was another. But all of those were updates in the category of: "American power is costly and has limits." They were still, fundamentally, about the giant stomping through someone else's house and eventually leaving, having caused immense damage but finding it wasn't worth continuing. This is a different update. This is the update that says: there are actors who can make the giant stop mid-stomp. That update is categorically different. And it is being received. Right now. In every capital that matters.

@alchemist2114 @nxt888 Main problems came from violent, uncivilized, and unjust Serbian rule of the whole country.

@SunnyCAnderson @nxt888 The boundaries between the 6 Yugoslav republics drawn up by the unelected Communists after the Second World War did not correspond with the ethnic realities on the ground and thus, when the country disintegrated, violence erupted.

@GMSasu @nxt888 I lived through it. Does that count!?

@SunnyCAnderson @nxt888 Compare the 2 posts, do a bit of online research, and I'm confident you'll figure it out if you approach it with an open mind. Good luck!

@roryontour @nxt888 Learn something about the dissolution of communism in E.Europe. Serbs were backed by Russia, nothing small about them. Croatia was forced to offer them autonomy and thanks God they were so arrogant, and they refused. You do know Cro is a small country, 4M? Serbia has 8M people.

When a nuclear-armed military alliance tells a small, war-exhausted nation, "Accept the total dissolution of your sovereignty or we will bomb you for 78 days," that's not diplomacy That's an ultimatum. And when you craft the terms to ensure rejection, you're not seeking peace. You're seeking a "casus belli." "they wanted all or nothing, so you got nothing" is the language of a colonial captain. "They refused our generous offer, so we were forced to destroy them." It's the same justification used by every empire from Rome to Washington. The strong present impossible terms, the weak refuse, and the strong claim that the refusal justifies the violence they always intended to unleash. My position is simple: you don't get to bomb a country just because it refuses to sign its own surrender. The West wasn't offering autonomy. It was offering subjugation. When Yugoslavia refused, NATO did exactly what empires always do when the colonised refuse the "generous offer." They claimed humanitarian necessity and unleashed the bombs. The real tragedy isn't that Serbs rejected a deal. It's that the world's most powerful military alliance entered the 21st century by proving that the only "negotiation" it recognises is "sign or we bomb." That's not peace. That's imperialism with a human rights brochure.

@roryontour @nxt888 Before Operation Storm, Serbs were offered full autonomy, and they said no, they wanted 1/3 of Croatia to be Serbia or Yu and under full Serbian control. You are right. It was designed to be rejected by Serbs! They wanted all or nothing, soo you got nothing!

The diplomatic measures taken by the US and EU were not genuine attempts to avoid war but rather a calculated strategy designed to create a pretext for NATO's illegal intervention. The "failure" of diplomacy was intentional—a product of deliberately maximalist demands, the strategic use of international bodies, and a fundamental US-EU power imbalance that allowed Washington to dictate the terms of "peace." The US and EU presented The Rambouillet talks as the final diplomatic effort to avoid war but the terms were explicitly designed to be rejected by Belgrade. NATO acted without a specific UN Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force. The bombing was justified based on earlier resolutions (1199 and 1203), which condemned the violence but did not authorize military intervention. This bypassing of the UN was a deliberate assertion of NATO's new doctrine of unilateral intervention outside of international law. And look at the world that kind of unlawful interventionist west has led to? It's a free for all, where international law is completely ignored by Western powers.

@marko_ristic3 @rade235 @nxt888 No, whatever doesn't fit your narrative, you change! Let's agree to disagree! Past is past, and Croatia has nothing with Serbia. But that's difficult to accept for Serbs! Why?

@SunnyCAnderson @rade235 @nxt888 Serbs tried for hundreds of years to change that? Specify how and when? Serbia was under Turkish occupation until 1912…Croatia was under austrian rule and occupation until 1918, and not a country until 1991…much less a “western country”. You spread lies with full impunity 🤦🏻‍♂️

@cavale01 @roryontour @nxt888 Well, that minority had heavy guns, armor, and taste for murdering unarmed people, so I guess that helped Croatian independence cause!

@SunnyCAnderson @roryontour @nxt888 Explain how so? In what manner? By unilaterally recognizing Croatia's unconstitutional declaration of Independence without factoring in how their large Serbian minority would react?

@samirbeg_sa @nxt888 Well, it took 5 bloody years and hundreds of thousands of dead to get NATO to do something. I think the EU is getting fed up with Israel's crimes. And Americans, too! Hopefully, something will be done soon!

@SunnyCAnderson @nxt888 We both know it won't. So, if NATO won't intervene against Israel for doing 100 times worse than Serbia did, what is the justification for the illegal, criminal and unprovoked attack against FR Yugoslavia. There is none, never was. Stop posing.

@cavale01 @FrederickO57988 @nxt888 I asked for realistic numbers and didn't imply anything.

@SunnyCAnderson @FrederickO57988 @nxt888 Are you seriously implying that Serbs were responsible for 100% of the approx 250k deaths during the breakup of Yugoslavia? You're not a serious person.

@cavale01 @nxt888 Sure, do you have any realistic numbers that compare civilian casualties?

@SunnyCAnderson @nxt888 Oh fuck off if you think Milošević was the only one guilty of perpetrating crimes against civilians while you ignore the Mujahideen head choppers in Bosnia and the far right Nazi sympathizing fascists in Croatia and all the crimes they committed against Serb civilians

Every time NATO bombs a country, the conversation immediately becomes about how terrible that country's leader was. Milošević. Saddam. Gaddafi. Assad. The monster is always pre-positioned. Always ready. So you never have to discuss the 78 days of missiles falling on Belgrade. On bridges. On hospitals. On water treatment plants. On the Chinese embassy. On a television station. Sixteen journalists killed at their desks. Called "collateral damage" from 15,000 feet. "Failed communist state." Yugoslavia had a higher standard of living than most of Eastern Europe. Free movement. Free healthcare. Free education. Western trade relationships. Its own independent foreign policy that defied Moscow. Not exactly the profile of a failed state. "Made up of different cultures." So is Switzerland. So is Belgium. So is the United States, spectacularly so. Diversity didn't kill Yugoslavia. Western interference, IMF structural adjustment gutting its economy through the 1980s did. And a very deliberate Western strategy of recognizing breakaway republics before any political settlement existed. Germany recognized Croatia in December 1991. Unilaterally. Against the advice of the UN Secretary General. That recognition was gasoline. And since we're doing the full history: Operation Storm, 1995. Croatia ethnically cleansed over 200,000 Serbs from Krajina in days. The largest single ethnic cleansing in Europe since World War II. U.S. operational support. General Wesley Clark helped plan it. You didn't hear much about it because it was the right kind of ethnic cleansing, conducted by the right kind of people. NATO didn't bomb Serbia to stop Milosevic. They had cozy relationships with far worse leaders that same decade, in Saudi Arabia, in Egypt, in Indonesia, where the bodies were still warm. They bombed Serbia because a European country was resisting the architecture of the post-Cold War order, and that required an example. Same logic as Vietnam. Different accent. My point was never about whether Yugoslavia was a paradise. It was about power and the ability to respond to power. Yugoslavia had none. It absorbed 78 days and surrendered. Iran absorbed 48 hours and made Trump publicly beg China for help. That's the only comparison I was making. You can despise Milošević and still recognize that NATO had no UN mandate, no legal authority, and no right to bomb a European capital while calling it "humanitarianism." Those two things are not in conflict.

@samirbeg_sa @nxt888 I agree, it should happen!

@SunnyCAnderson @nxt888 Israel killed tens of thousands of civilians, very probably hundreds of thousands. Where is NATO bombing?

@twitbender @nxt888 It's the other way around! Reality forced NATO to do something. They didn't really want to.

@nxt888 @SunnyCAnderson They can’t tell propaganda from reality. 😂

@roryontour @nxt888 US and EU tried for 5 years, didn't succeed!

@SunnyCAnderson @nxt888 There's no excuse for bombing a European city no matter how distressed the target state is alleged to be. You are supposed to use diplomacy and political pressure to fix failed states. 🙄

@nxt888 Operation Storm was a legitimate military operation, Croatia had every right to take back occupied territory. That's it! Serbs were offered to stay, but most of them refused and went to Serbia.

I've answered the Milosevic question. Twice now. You're not engaging with anything I actually wrote. Not the IMF. Not Operation Storm. Not the UN mandate. Not Wesley Clark. Not the Chinese embassy. Not the television station with sixteen journalists inside. All of that... gone. New subject. This is the conversation pattern that lets every NATO intervention escape scrutiny forever. Spend five years building the monster, then when the bombs fall, point at the monster. Repeat until everyone forgets what questions were actually being asked. I'll ask you directly, once: Did NATO have a UN Security Council mandate to bomb Yugoslavia? Yes or no. Everything else you're bringing up, the history, the atrocities, the complexity, I'm not dismissing it. But none of it answers that question. Because the answer is no. And "we didn't need one because the cause was just" is exactly the logic every empire uses. Always. Without exception. Every single time.

@nxt888 No, it didn't! Everyone got sick of horrific crimes committed by Serbs for 5 years. Monster Milosevic wasn't created in 5 years, communists are monsters, no need to create them. If you knew anything about Yu, you'll know that.

@Ashesof_Pompeii @nxt888 Bush administration told Serbs to "take care of it quickly," but Serbs couldn't stop killing and bombing. Apparently, being a mass murder just for the heck of it doesn't last!

The anti-Serb narrative is very strongly impalnted in the western mind. To go against it could lead to people questioning the entire post-wall world order. We can't have that! (Atrocities were happening on both sides but only one side gets called out. And it likely wouldn't have got to that without the west pushing for the break up of Yugoslavia.)

@ProgRebel @nxt888 @yugopnik I understand Yu very well, unfortunately. Terrible experience.

@SunnyCAnderson @nxt888 The Yugoslav misunderstander has logged on. Where's Yugopnik? @yugopnik

@basfdecromo @rade235 @nxt888 Wanting your own independent state is not fascism.

@SunnyCAnderson @rade235 @nxt888 Well, given fascism is a western creation, no doubt Croatia qualifies as it.

@GMSasu @nxt888 Why?

@SunnyCAnderson @nxt888 And yours are not!