By Carl K. Savich

The year 2000 marked the political defeat of both Slobodan Milosevic and Madeleine Albright and the election of Vojislav Kostunica and George W. Bush, ushering in a new political era in both the former Yugoslavia and the U.S. For eight years, however, both Milosevic and Albright dominated and shaped events in the Balkans. With the Milosevic/Albright era over, we can now analyze their role and impact on the Balkan conflicts.

Slobodan Milosevic and Madeleine Albright formed an adversarial symbiosis, or a hate bond with each other. Both needed each other to maintain their policies and to exert political influence. Both needed each other to dispose of their psychological toxins. They projected their unconscious fears, vices, their "shadow" in Jungian terminology, their denied and repressed sides onto the other. Everything they despised in each other they attributed to the other side. Both created a shared delusional system that blamed the other for all the turmoil, tragedy, and bloodshed that was part of the breakup of the former Yugoslavia . They engaged in an infantile, childish "blame game" that is based in a paranoid psychological orientation. This paranoia is rooted in arrested psychological development. The paranoid mind is stuck in his or her family of origin, are still children. The blame game is a symptom developmentally of an infantile disorder. We shall attempt a psycho-political analysis of this adversarial symbiosis or hate bond. Who are these individuals, Slobodan Milosevic and Madeleine Albright?

Slobodan Milosevic was the president of the Republic of Serbia from 1989-1997 and president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) from 1997-2000. The future "butcher of the Balkans" and "thug" and "Balkan Adolf Hitler" was born in 1941 in Pozarevac in Serbia of parents from Montenegro after the real Adolf Hitler had invaded Yugoslavia and bombed Belgrade , killing thousands of Serbian civilians. His father was a school teacher who abandoned the family when Milosevic was in elementary school, Both of his parents committed suicide: His father in 1962, his mother in 1973. In 1959, Milosevic joined the Yugoslav League of Communists becoming a member of the Communist Party. In 1964 he graduated with a law degree from the University of Belgrade . His wife is Mirjana Markovic, a fellow student from his high school who was described as a "Communist activist", she was a staunch Titoist/Communist who came from a prominent Communist family in Serbia . Before entering politics in 1984, he was a bank director in Belgrade from 1978-1983. The leader of the Serbian Communist Party, Ivan Stambolic, put him in charge of the party organization in Belgrade in 1984.In January, 1986, Milosevic became the leader of the Serbian Communist Party. The same year, Stambolic became the president of Serbia . He gained prominence in 1987 when he spoke to Kosovo Serbs in Pristina in 1987, declaring: "The Serbs will never be beaten up again." He was gaining political power at the time when the Kosovo crisis was about to explode. Did Milosevic instigate or engineer the Kosovo crisis as Western pundits and political analysts assert? Milosevic was a hardline Communist apparatchik and staunch Titoist. He was not a nationalist. Indeed, he was the farthest removed from nationalism. Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic dismissed him as a "so-called Serb." What Milosevic did was to exploit and to capitalize on growing Serbian outrage and grievance against a policy of ethnic cleansing and genocide which was occurring in Kosovo. Albanian political leaders in Kosovo were sponsoring an ethnically pure and ethnically homogenous region of Serbia called "Kosova". The Serbian minority in Kosovo faced repression and extermination. The so-called Western media never reported on these events. Amnesty International and Helsinki Human Rights Watch were unconcerned about human rights abuses against the Serbian population. In fact, the US State Department was directing an anti-Serbian propaganda war, led by Republican Senator Robert Dole, inter alia, that had been going on for decades before Milosevic arrived on the scene. Why wasn't the Western media and the world community informed about what was going on in Kosovo? Because the US Government made certain that no one grasped the true state of affairs through disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda, bought and paid for by the Albanian lobby and their supporters, anti-Serbian groups, such as Croatian ultra-nationalists, and their supporters, Germany, the Vatican, and powerful Roman Catholic groups and the Roman Catholic lobby. In New York and Washington , the Israel lobby got behind the Kosovar cause and Jewish-American political figures and organizations were enlisted in the cause. Why didn't anyone know what was really going on in Kosovo? Because very powerful forces in the US Government did not want them to know. Simple as that. What was much easier was to find a scapegoat in the form of Milosevic. He was damned if he did and damned if he didn't. If the Serbian government sought to protect the Serbian population this was perceived by the US Government and the media it controls as "repression". If the Serbian government did nothing and allowed the Albanians to create an ethnically pure Greater Albania, then the US Government concluded that there was acquiescence on the part of the Serbian Government. Either way Kosovo Serbs lost, which was the outcome the US Government and media desired. The Serbian population of Kosovo were regarded as cattle or swine by the US Government. It only remained to delude the US public. What emerged was a view that blamed Milosevic for the emergence of nationalism, first in Kosovo, then in all of Yugoslavia . The US pundits, analysts, and experts saw Milosevic's support of the Kosovo Serb grievances as the beginning of the Yugoslav breakup. In fact, what led to the Yugoslav breakup was dissatisfaction with the standard of living and the low economic performance of the Yugoslav economy and the bankruptcy of the Communist political, social, and economic paradigm. There was no future in maintaining the Yugoslav federation or the Communist ideology. The US saw to that, especially through the IMF and other international financial institutions it controls. Just like it was easier to blame the German defeat in World War I on the Jews, it was likewise easier to blame the breakup of Yugoslavia on Slobodan Milosevic. Politics has its own logic, based in an infantile, paranoid orientation. It is futile and Quixotic to hold politicians and political analysts and pundits to mathematical consistency and to strict logic. Politics is emotional, irrational, illogical, and infantile. But as the real Adolf Hitler correctly noted, the masses are guided by emotion and not by the dictates of the so-called intellect. There is where the infantile blame game originates. But is it valid to blame Milosevic? Was it nationalism to attempt to safeguard the constitutional rights of constituents, to safeguard the civil and human rights of the Kosovo Serbian minority? Is it nationalism to attempt to prevent a genocide from occurring in Kosovo?

In May, 1989, the Serbian parliament elected Milosevic president of Serbia . In December, 1990, he was re-elected president in the first post-Communist multi-party and direct elections for president. He renamed his party the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS), which won 194 of the 250 seats in the Serbian parliament. This is where Milosevic stood before the breakup of Yugoslavia began in 1991.Madeleine Albright Korbel was born in Prague , Czechoslovakia in 1937. She was christened Madeleine Jana. There are unconfirmed reports that she was originally named Maria Jana or Marie Jana and that her name was legally changed during her youth. Contrary to US media reports, Albright is a Christian and not a Jew. All her life she was a member of the Roman Catholic Church. Albright worked to advance the cause of the Roman Catholic Church and of the Vatican all her life. Before she was appointed Secretary of State by Bill Clinton, the media "discovered" evidence that "suggests"that she was "probably" really Jewish. Why did this information surface at the time of her confirmation hearings as Secretary of State? Was it to appease the powerful Israel lobby? To appease Zionist groups and organizations within the US ? Why was this an issue at all? Eastern Europe is multi-ethnic. Racial purity is only known in former slave-holding states like the US with a racist history. We can surmise that she may or may not have had Jewish ancestors, which is irrelevant. She was brought up and raised as a Roman Catholic Christian, lived her life as a Christian, married a Christian, of the Episcopal Church, espoused the views of Roman Catholicism and based her views not on Judaism, but Catholicism. This distinction is important because to understand Albright and her views, we have to differentiate between Judaism and Roman Catholicism. Alfred Rosenberg, the intellectual mastermind or philosopher behind Nazism and the creator of the master race concept in his many writings, such as The Myth of the 20 th Century, was in fact a Jew. There are even assertions that Adolf Hitler was a Jew. For our purposes, Madeleine Albright Korbel is a Roman Catholic Christian. Her father, Josef Korbel, was part of the Czech diplomatic corps. From 1937-1948, Albright lived, first, in Belgrade, Serbia, then London, back in Prague, then back in Belgrade. She lived for many years in Belgrade when her father was the Czech ambassador to Communist Yugoslavia. At this time, Albright did not attend regular schools but was taught by a governess while she was in Serbia . At ten, she was sent to a boarding school in Switzerland . Why was she shielded so? Her father was strongly anti-Communist and "wanted to avoid exposing her to the influence of Communists." In February, 1948, the Czech government was overthrown and a Communist regime took power. Josef Korbel was charged in absentia with crimes against the state and sentenced to death by the new Czech Communist regime. At age eleven, Albright and her family sought political asylum in the US . Her father was her mentor and role model with whom she identified. These events are crucial in understanding her mindset and world view. Her father was a militant and staunch anti-Communist, "an intellectual humanist", so much so that he was condemned to death for his views. Albright herself became a strident, militant, and dedicated anti-Communist, a "true believer" in the anti-Communist crusade the US was waging. She fit in perfectly in the Cold War Joseph McCarthy America of the Communist witch hunts and the Red Scare of the 1950s. She became a Cold Warrior. Thus, we have the perfect bipolar dichotomy for an adversarial symbiosis, for a mutual hate bond. Milosevic was a hardcore Communist, while Albright was the exact polar opposite, a hardcore anti-Communist. The rest is almost academic. When we deconstruct the rhetoric, when we reduce the complicated hyperbole and propaganda to their fundamental components, the analysis becomes simple.

Albright began her career as a journalist but then switched over to political science when she was at Wellesley college. She worked briefly for a public relations firm in 1960. She "set about becoming Thoroughly American Madeleine", losing her Czech accent and quickly becoming socialized in Americanism, political correctness, and the Cold War. She studied under Zbigniew Brzezinski who directed the Columbia Institute on Communist Affairs. Like Albright, Brzezinski was a staunch anti-Communist Roman Catholic, a "true believer" like herself. He did not have to convert her. They shared an anti-Soviet, anti-Communist viewpoint, were staunchly anti-Orthodox, anti-Russian. This strong antipathy towards Russia and Orthodoxy would spill over against the Serbian Orthodox, who were perceived as agents or the instruments of Russia or as surrogates. She received her BA in 1959 in political science and an MA in 1968 in Russian Studies, i.e., she was a Soviet specialist or expert, a Soviet scholar. Her doctoral dissertation was on the role of the press in the 1968 Prague demonstrations to reform the Communist Czech regime. Thus, public relations, the media, journalism, and politics were all integral parts of her thinking. She was an assistant to Edmund Muskie and worked on his presidential campaign in 1972. In 1978, she joined mentor Brzezinski at the National Security Council. As national security advisor to Jimmy Carter, Brzezinski was her supervisor. In 1993, Clinton appointed her US ambassador to the UN. She sought to pursue a more strident US foreign policy and greater "activism" and humanitarian interventionism abroad, the new "military humanism". She maintained that "it is the responsibility of leaders not simply to parrot public opinion, but to shape it." In his memoirs, the new Secretary of State designee Colin Powell recalled her telling him: "What's the use of having this superb military you're always talking about, if we can't use it?" Powell became so upset and enraged that he almost had an aneurysm as he himself related. Albright maintained that helping people is what the US is good at. This does little for the over 250,000 "Croatian Serb" refugees of Krajina who are now displaced refugees living in the former Yugoslavia or the 300,000 Kosovo Serbian refugees also living in Yugoslavian refugee centers. The Palestinians, Kurds, Iraqis, and Native American Indians would likewise not be helped by this rhetorical posturing. This is where matters stood when the breakup of Yugoslavia was occurring.

The Communist, Slobodan Milosevic, and the anti-Communist, Madeleine Albright, thus formed an adversarial symbiosis, a hate bond, where they hate and love each other, a hate/love relationship. Indeed, in 1995, Milosevic became transformed into "a guarantor of peace" in the Balkans and as a vital player in bringing and maintaining peace. They are each others reason or justification for being, the raison d' etre. In the election between Slobodan Milosevic and Vojislav Kostunica, like the Kosovo Albanians, the US Administration, including Albright, supported Milosevic, not Kostunica. Martin Sieff of UPI in the article "Kostunica not Clinton Administration's man", noted that " U.S. leaders.are now used to attacking Milosevic as, if not a Hitler, then at least a Saddam Hussein figure." As Sieff remarked, the Clinton Administration does not support Kostunica because he represents the popular will or "democratic aspirations" of the Serbian people. This is anathema to the Clinton Administration. They want a leader like Milosevic who will make deals. What does democracy or the people have to do with it? This is the political reality. So both Milosevic and Albright need each other.

The paranoid mind engages in the infantile blame game and projection and name calling to escape from guilt and responsibility. This is why propaganda is a convenient tool. We learn that Albright is schooled in the art of public relations and persuasion and the role of the media in politics. Refutation is impossible in propaganda because it creates a "double bind". They are both "true believers" who see the world in black and white, in a dichotomy of us and them, a struggle between capitalism and communism. There is no middle ground. Both Milosevic and Albright need each other as group transference targets. The infantile, paranoid psyche sees the enemy as possessing traits of the bad parent. The enemy is thus omnipotent and has a degraded moral character. Thus, Milosevic is a "war criminal", "thug", "Hitler", "butcher", committing genocide and engaged in ethnic cleansing. He is all-powerful and must be stopped by a 19 nation coalition led by the US as part of NATO. A paranoid cannot accept equality, but must either dominate or be dominated. The paranoid must be an aggressor or a victim. Adversaries must be friends or foes. "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." Both have a Manichean or dualistic morality. It is sado-masochistic in approach. They are "victims" because they are "passive-aggressive", obsessed with power because they feel impotent and powerless. Paranoia creates a self-fulfilling prophecy, a vicious circle. We saw this pattern play out in the Bosnia and Kosovo conflicts. The US Administration would send the KLA to provoke Milosevic into the actions he would be accused of. In Bosnia , the Bosnian Muslim forces were encouraged to engage in attacks against the Bosnian Serbs which resulted in the kind of counter-attacks of which the US Administration accused the Serbs. But the US created this result through its own actions and policies. At Rambouillet, by "raising the bar", Albright forced Milosevic into acting the way she wanted him to act. It is a bizarre and invidious vicious circle. Their imagined atrocities and enemies become real enemies and real atrocities. These enemies become hypnotized with each other, "locked in a prison of mirrors". They love/hate each other, need each other.

The purpose of propaganda is to paralyze thought. We don't want the masses thinking for themselves. The paranoid is blinded to his or her selective morality and invariably sees their nation as moral and self-righteous while the enemy is hostile and evil. This is the splitting of the good and bad self, the shadow, and projecting it onto the enemy. Paranoia reduces anxiety and guilt by transferring to the enemy all the attributes one does not wish to acknowledge in oneself, there is this projection on the enemy. We have selective perception, a self-induced blindness or repression, which creates stereotypes of the enemy which thereby dehumanizes the enemy. For instance, during the Yugoslav conflict, none of the so-called Balkan experts could ever correctly pronounce Milosevic's name in the US and in Britain . Is Serbo-Croatian that abstruse, alien, and unknown, or is it willful and conscious error in pronunciation. Can't they hire someone to tell them how to pronounce Milosevic's name correctly? Is it that difficult to do? The US Government and media had no problem in pronouncing " Sarajevo " correctly and the names of the "Bosnians". Of course, mispronouncing his name is meant to dehumanize him even further and as a sign of contempt. It is an example of dehumanization in propaganda, but a very subtle one at that. Unintentionally, it reveals the ignorance and spite of the propagandists. They don't want to know how to pronounce his name correctly! Why do we need dehumanization? Dehumanization is used to lessen the guilt and responsibility when the enemy is killed. Killing the enemy is the object of propaganda. When we project our shadow, we systematically blind ourselves to what we are doing. Paranoia, projection, and propaganda are needed to maintain hatred. The paranoid mind projects its rejected vices onto the enemy. The enemy is constructed from denied aspects of the self. We hate or love our enemies in the same proportion that we love or hate ourselves or our own people or own nation. This is a crucial point because propaganda is created with a mirror that we look into. We can see this in Milosevic and Albright. Both hate aspects of themselves that they project onto the "enemy". Albright hates the "intellectual humanism" of Communism, its precepts of equality and justice and freedom and communal ideals so she projects this hatred onto Milosevic and the Serbian people and the Orthodox generally. Milosevic hates the affluence and individual liberty inherent in capitalism and projects it onto Albright. In the image we create of the "enemy", that is the mirror or reflection in which we will see ourselves most clearly. What are wars? At the psychological level, wars are nothing but rituals or shadow plays in which we habitually attempt to eradicate those aspects of ourselves we repress, deny, and despise. The image of the enemy is consciously created or manufactured, but we are the ones who create it within ourselves. The paranoid projects all of its rejected and discarded vices on the enemy. When we study the image we have created of the enemy we can learn a great deal about ourselves.

What is the end result of this adversarial symbiosis? The result is to deny the democratic aspirations of the Serbian people as Martin Sieff noted. In Krajina, the goal was to deny the democratic aspirations of the Krajina Serbs in seeking autonomy or independence, or the right to remain a part of the Yugoslav federation. With regard to Bosnia, the goal was to deny the Bosnian Serb population the democratic aspiration to decide their own political future, to deny them their right to self-determination, to not allow them to decide whether to remain part of Yugoslavia or not, or to seek autonomy, or independence. In Kosovo, the democratic aspirations of the majority Serbian population of the former Yugoslavia was denied. The upshot of the propaganda and infowar was to defeat the Serbian people, to not allow them to express their democratic aspirations, to deny them their civil and human rights. Ultimately, to kill them, that is the object of propaganda. Again, as Hitler noted, propaganda is not meant to provide "interesting distraction for blase young gentlemen". It is to enable one to kill the enemy without guilt, to feel good about it, in fact. So when we see the ongoing propaganda war against the Serbian people in Krajina , Bosnia , Kosovo and now in Southern Serbia, it should tell us where US policy is heading. This was the objective, to deny the "democratic aspirations" of the Serbian population. This was the result. In the process, the democratic aspirations of American citizens were concomitantly denied. The US Government infowar and propaganda war that Albright et al unleashed on us was just as brutal, mindless, and repressive as that unleashed by Milosevic and the Yugoslav media on the Serbian population. That is, in this adversarial symbiosis and love/hate bond it is the people in the respective countries that are the victims. We all suffer because of it. But we are alive, unlike the thousands of persons that had to die in this ritualistic shadow play we call war, a war to deny democracy to the Serbian people by the foremost democratic nation and the primary exponent of democracy around the globe.

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