05/25/15 – Nebojsa Malic – The Scott Horton Show

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Introducing Nebojsa Malic.
He's a former regular columnist for antiwar.com for years and years.
He's now writing as a journalist for RT.
And, of course, he has his own blog, Gray Falcon.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Nebojsa?
Good.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me back.
Very happy to have you here.
And, well, very interested to know what you have to say about what is going on in Macedonia right now.
And I guess, you know, well, people find out real quick why this is important, but it seems like there's a big to-do-ins going on and that maybe it's got something to do with the United States and its interests.
Well, let me start off with something I said on Twitter last week, maybe a week before when the things started happening.
I said one look at the map should explain everything.
Back in September, when Bulgaria, at the behest of the United States government, or specifically after the visit by Senator McCain, told the Russians that they can no longer run the pipeline through their, the gas pipeline that they had agreed upon a decade ago and that was supposed to start supplying gas to Europe without having to worry about the government of Ukraine shutting it down like it did in 2009.
The Russians went to Turkey and said, fine, you know, can we run the pipeline through Turkey?
And the Turks said, sure, that's a great idea.
And then we run it through Greece and then onward to Europe.
Well, how do you get gas to Europe through Greece?
You can't go through Bulgaria because the Americans will, again, send McCain and he will say, no gas.
And the Bulgarians will obediently say, no gas, because the government there is entirely controlled by Washington, unfortunately.
A controlled period is, I guess, a bigger problem.
It would be bad if it were controlled by anybody else either.
And so the only way the gas can go from Greece is through Macedonia and on to Serbia, which is still on board with the pipeline, and then onward to Hungary, which is also still on board with the pipeline to the great consternation of European Union officials that are doing everything to stop it, which is kind of counterintuitive, but I think we've had a discussion about this before.
Why doesn't the EU want gas?
Because it's one of those cutting nose off despite face issues.
In any case, the moment the pipeline negotiations started sort of operationalizing things and saying, OK, well, we're going to run pipes through Macedonia.
Bam, you have a revolt in Macedonia, and you have armed terrorists attacking police and neighboring border villages and all that.
And it's so obvious.
Well, but now talking about it.
Let me stop you here for a second, because if I know Macedonia, and I don't know anything about Macedonia, but if I know Macedonia, the place is run by politicians, which means that the people probably hate their guts and want to overthrow them.
So maybe it's just a coincidence.
It would be accepted.
There's way too many things happening at once.
And you'll notice that every time there's an astroturf revolution, people start marching against corruption and politicians are corrupt.
Well, yes, but your choice is currently between corrupt politician A and corrupt politician B.
And you're telling me that all of a sudden corruption is your issue, but you're happy to vote for corrupt politician B?
I mean, think of Ukraine.
They were demonstrating against corruption there.
And who do they elect?
First chance they get, a US approved oligarch.
So it's not that oligarchs per se are the problem.
It's that the oligarchs not loyal to a certain foreign power are the problem.
And so here we have the situation again.
The current president was actually put into place with US support.
He was a loyal US client for the longest time.
But when he realized that he's not getting any money out of the US and that the West can't bail him out and he needs bailing out because they still have all sorts of problems with their name, with their recognition, with the Bulgarians, with the Albanians.
And in the grand scheme of things, the way Washington's strategy in the region has been organized, the Bulgarians and the Albanians will always have precedence over Macedonian interests just because of geopolitics, nothing personal.
And so this guy decided, well, maybe I should try to do something on my own.
And well, if there's one thing that US clients are never forgiven is trying to strike out on their own.
And so here comes the other guy who's from the reformed communist party.
And he says, oh, I'm a democratic liberal Democrat with democratic democracy and I'm against corruption, except that he was run out of office because of corruption.
His party was run out of office because of corruption.
So it's one of those, yeah, I get it that people are sick of corruption, but when you get professional demonstrators being funded by these US-based NGOs and suitcases of cash popping up, and that's corruption too.
Yeah.
Which, by the way, is that a proven fact in this case or it's just pretty damn obvious?
Well, I have to be absolutely fair, obviously, and say that there's been all sorts of allegations flying back and forth and that some pretty reputable, well-informed sources have actually tracked down all these US-based NGOs.
And in fact, one of my colleagues at RT actually had an interview with the director of one of these foundations at the demonstration in Skopje.
And he's like, yeah, we're supporting this 1000%.
But we're an independent human rights, open democracy, liberalism-type organization, and we're demonstrating against the corrupt government.
And she was asking, well, don't you see anything incongruous with the fact that you are an organization funded by George Soros, who is a known, I mean, we all know who Soros works with.
And he's like, no, no, this is perfectly legitimate.
So they admit it, but they don't see a problem with this at all.
It's perfectly fine if George Soros decides to overthrow a government on a Tuesday, because that's what he does.
Yeah.
All right, now, so, okay, let's try to sum this thing up, because it's complicated and nobody even knows where the hell Macedonia is right now, or where it was.
And I know there are two different countries fighting over the name and all kinds of crap, so.
The South Stream was shut down when McCain went to Bulgaria and told them, you know, tell Russians you can't do it.
And the Turkish Stream, the only way it can actually go anywhere is through Greece and then north through Macedonia and then north into Serbia and then north into Hungary.
So right now, because the US government doesn't want this Russian gas to go into Europe, because that would encourage commerce between Europe and Russia.
And, you know, according to the current crop of politicians running State Department, we need to, you know, put up an iron wall towards Russia and, you know, essentially recreate Cold War.
What they want to do is stop this.
And the way to stop this is to step on their client in Macedonia.
And they thought they could do this by, you know, taking 20,000 people out into the streets and then having these Albanians from Kosovo, which has been established as a sort of a vassal NATO state after they separated violently from Serbia, have these Albanians cross into the border, occupy a village and basically show the world that the government doesn't have control over anything.
And that should have overthrown the government simply because it would lose support of the people.
What happened was that the government actually sent special forces.
They retook the village, killed a bunch of these terrorists and then had like 100,000 people, or just about, march in support of the government and dwarfing the demonstrators completely.
And so they basically turned the script upside down and said, you know, we're not falling for this.
We're going to stay in place.
Is, am I going to defend these people as, you know, good, honest people?
Hell no, they're politicians.
They're corrupt by definition.
But when you have the opposition politician, essentially, you know, replaying the script that we saw in Ukraine with the Maidan and with all these other color revolutions from Serbia onward, that all resulted in not just a corrupt regime, but a corrupt client, like Quisling regime that serves not the voters or even domestic special interests, which most governments do, but a foreign power and directly takes order from the foreign power.
Well, you know, if I have to choose between a thief and a Quisling, I would always pick a thief because at least he's my thief and I can, you know, eventually figure out a way to get rid of him myself.
Now, of course, I'm not a Macedonian citizen and I don't live in Macedonia.
I have some friends who do, and they're sort of divided on the issue because, you know, some of them are like, well, we need to get rid of corrupt politicians and the other's like, well, yes, but we need to have our politicians, regardless of whether they're corrupt or not, as opposed to a Quisling.
Well, that's really a Serbia, right?
That's a tough part about just being from a small country, is that there are major world empires in the world that have major interests.
And so it's hard for you to take a stand on politics toward or against one group of people without, it's impossible to do so really without in effect siding with a foreign power.
Same thing's going on in Syria right now.
You're either a Russian sock puppet or an American one, an Israeli one or an Iranian one.
Yeah, pretty much.
And then, I mean, with Syria, of course, that's a situation in which hundreds of thousands have actually gotten killed over the past five years and it's a full-blown civil war and it's more brutal and more disastrous than anything we've seen in the Balkans in the 90s.
And we thought that was a big deal.
It certainly was to us who lived there at the time, obviously, but I won't mince words.
Syria is 10 times worse than anything that I've seen in Bosnia.
Yeah, no, it's an absolute catastrophe.
There's no doubt about that.
So, okay, now, but are they, so far they have not been able to overthrow this guy, but they're just trying.
They've decided we're just gonna go outside and stay there until they get rid of them one way or the other, just like Milosevic-style kind of thing, huh?
Well, yes, so far they have been doing that.
From what I can tell from the reports that I've been getting from the area, they haven't been really successful at that.
It's one of those, the problem with these color revolution scripts is that it's pretty much only one script.
Yeah, they wore it out already.
They've done this 10 times, man.
Yeah, and if you know how to counter it with counter rallies and shows of force at the proper time, and you don't allow yourself to be suckered into the assigned role, which the script is that the government reacts a certain way.
And if it doesn't react a certain way, then the script really doesn't adapt very well.
And so this guy seemed to have bucked the script successfully, and now they're probably gonna try to frame him for something else.
They'll find a sex scandal, or they'll accuse somebody else of corruption.
They'll try to switch the narrative to something else, because this was supposed to be done in a week.
This color revolution script, again, once it goes off the rails, it doesn't really work very well.
So the fact that they haven't been able to get this done in a week, the fact that these Albanian militants who took this village and were supposed to stay in the village as a symbol of the government's ineptitude were roundly defeated, and I think 18 or 20 of them ended up getting killed, and the Albanians in Kosovo had this grand ceremony and gave them a hero's funeral, pretty much putting the rest of Macedonia on notice that yes, this was an external operation aimed at their government.
And honestly, there's nothing that solidifies people more in good old-fashioned nationalism, whether we like it or not, than a manifest external threat.
And so they proved rather imprudently in the eyes of their employers that this was an external threat.
Had they kept mum about it, maybe somebody could have tried spinning the whole, oh, these weren't really Albanians from Kosovo.
These were local disenfranchised people who need more human rights or something, just like they did back in 2001.
But no, they weren't really subtle about this.
And so at this point, it seems like the government has solidified.
If you remember a few, maybe- So the protesters have gone inside, or they're still out there, or what?
Some are still out there.
The problem is that summers in Macedonia get pretty darn hot.
So it's not gonna be very good protesting weather next couple of months.
So it's gonna be too hot to protest.
But you're saying they've really shot themselves in the foot here pretty bad already at this point.
Yeah, they've pretty much shot their entire clip, I think.
But this is my personal opinion.
I'm not talking as an RT journalist or, this is just my personal feeling based on having observed many of these color revolutions.
My personal feeling is that they've pretty much, the script is off the rails.
They've shot their entire clip that they had, and they're gonna try to find something new to hang this on.
And it's going to be really, really difficult to keep momentum now that they haven't managed to achieve any of their initial objectives.
And the worst part is that there's plenty of objectively decent people in that crowd that were initially activated.
And they believe that they were fighting for truth, justice, democracy.
And when it became blatantly obvious that they were being astroturfed, a lot of them kind of went home and said, maybe this was not such a great idea.
Right, yeah, I mean, you gotta figure that, like you said, a manifest external threat, hey, we hate the current guy, but we're not teaming up with outside powers against him, there's not a way.
I mean, yeah, people who hated George W. Bush, who still rallied around George W. Bush, they didn't stop hating him, but they still rallied around him after the attack because, hey, you can't attack us, and he's our alpha leader and all this kind of crap, you know?
Well, can you imagine an anti, can you imagine like an anti-war demonstration with like the black flag of ISIS?
Right.
That would go off like a lead balloon.
And then the opposition leader has actually been photographed, waving the Albanian flag about, not just the flag of the local ethnic Albanian faction, no, the actual Albanian flag of Albania proper.
And I mean, this is about as, this is, yeah, that's not gonna go over well.
Not subtle at all.
So, well, so that's interesting, a color-coded revolution that seems to be stalling.
And then, so how big of a victory would that be for Putin then if this continues?
They go ahead and build the pipeline and he gets what he wants.
Well, if the pipeline goes through, that achieves several things.
Washington definitely loses leverage over these small countries where the pipeline is going.
For example, Macedonia, Serbia.
Greece definitely gets a leg to stand on because right now they have nothing regarding the European Union that the EU can pretty much say, you know, pay up or else.
And they can't even threaten the exit because that would collapse their government.
Whereas if they had the pipeline, they could say, hey, you know, about them gas pipes that were running.
So that would be an issue.
Macedonia would definitely have more leverage in terms of getting its name recognized and being recognized as independent of Bulgaria and Albania, which are two major U.S. clients in the region.
I won't even call them allies that can threaten to dismember it at any point.
You know, a Serbian government, if it ever decided to rediscover its spine, would have something to stand on.
Hungarian government, which has also survived and attempted to call a revolution.
The Hungarians would also have something more to stand on than they already do.
And you're looking at the Europeans who would be getting gas at much cheaper prices than the U.S. liquid offer.
If and when they ever build terminals to receive it would be.
I mean, there's this whole, you know, oh, the Europeans don't have to import gas from Russia.
We'll just send them American, you know, cheap American gas.
It's not cheap.
It's like 10 times more expensive.
And its market valuation is just completely unviable.
So that's definitely going to encourage commerce between Europe and Russia, which again is what the Russian government has been advocating for years.
So that would be a major political, not so, I wouldn't call it so much as a victory for Putin because he's not really looking for war.
He's looking for commerce.
Whereas Washington is trying to build this wall in Eastern Europe.
And that wall would not be able to exist if this pipeline goes through.
Well, and now, you know, it seems like the, obviously the Europeans are shooting themselves in the foot here, applying pressure.
And I guess they already failed to apply enough pressure to stop the Macedonians from wanting to do this, right?
That's why they've now had to go to the extent of trying to overthrow the government there because, and why are they so willing to act contrary to their own interests just because America says so?
Well, the leadership of the EU is, you know, pretty much loyal to the Atlantic consensus.
It's NATO that runs European foreign policy for all intents and purposes.
And so you've got these individual countries that are looking out for themselves, but you have this whole situation where the French had a multi-billion dollar deal to build some ships for the Russian Navy and they're trying to Welsh on it now and they're trying to cut their losses.
And the Russians are saying, well, you know, if you break the contract, you're going to have to pay double what the contract was and you can't afford it.
So who's going to cover your losses?
We're going to end up getting paid either way, ships or no ships, but who's going to cover your losses?
The US, nobody's off, you know, the US is not offering to make up for it.
So the French are in a bind now.
You've got the Germans who are hurting economically because of this whole trade war with Russia.
You've got places all across Europe, but especially in Eastern Europe, these poor countries that have been systematically looted by these so-called neoliberal advisors who essentially asset stripped entire economies like Gordon Gekko, who gave capitalism a bad name undeservingly.
And these people are saying, okay, well, you know, we've done everything the US to us.
Why don't you give us membership status or at least, you know, open up trade and the European commissioners are saying, well, you know, we don't want you.
We want your laborers and we want your assets.
We don't actually want you.
We don't care about you, except that they won't come out and say it.
So you have places like Macedonia that are languishing in limbo for, you know, two decades now.
And same thing with Serbia, same thing with, you know, the Bulgaria and Romania were only admitted because of NATO, nothing else.
And their citizens were until this January, I think they couldn't even travel freely.
So they were like third class citizens.
So you've got the situation where, you know, the Western European ruling cast, so to speak, the ruling circles, the transnational government that's loyal to NATO that doesn't really answer to any of the actual citizens, essentially exploit these areas like colonies.
And the people in the colonies have no say over their lives.
And when they do think they have a say in their lives, like with the street demonstrations, it very quickly turns out to be another Serbian scenario in which they essentially help shoot themselves in the head.
Yeah.
It's a very demoralizing effect.
Right.
So all these Eastern European countries are supposed to be abjectly loyal to the American empire and its prerogatives, but they get absolutely nothing out of it unless they're one of the 10th of a percent who's in on the Lockheed deal when they join NATO.
Pretty much, yeah.
You've got the establishment that's Atlanticist, that's one tiny percent of the population that gets all the benefits, and then the vast majority of the population is just servicing this apparatus.
In Poland, they just elected a new president because they were very, very displeased with the current government.
And Poland, I mean, in terms of popular sentiment, is anti-Russian as anything and very pro-EU, but I'm not so sure how pro-US they are right now because obviously they voted with their feet.
So you've got a situation where a lot of people are not happy, and a lot of people in Western Europe are not happy because whoever they vote for, their governments continue the same Atlanticist policy that seems to benefit only a handful of folks and everybody else ends up busting their humps for nothing.
Yep.
Sounds like same story on a different day and in a different place or the same one again, same little region again.
Same people, same techniques, right?
Yep.
All right.
Well, I'll tell you what.
It sure is interesting, as you said, about how it's too obvious what's going on here.
The script is too much the same.
They've already overplayed their hand, tipped their hand or whatever figure speech there about what's going on here.
And so it looks already like at least a half a failure.
So I guess I'll be watching real close, looking at your reporting at your blog and that kind of thing.
And please let us know if you find any new stories that we really ought to be watching at antiwar.com about this because it's a pretty obscure topic in the scheme of things with so much going on in the Middle East and all that kind of stuff.
But Justin already had one good one about it.
He definitely had.
And he recognized all of these salient points.
I mean, this is the same handwriting we've seen in many other places.
It's the same player, same script, just different venue.
And this time it didn't quite unfold according to plan.
Unfortunately, that doesn't mean they're gonna quit.
They're probably gonna regroup, take a break, try to rewrite the script a little bit and come up with another angle and then try again in a month, two, three, depending on how this goes.
And try doing something again because from the geopolitical and military standpoint, they cannot allow this pipeline to go through.
They cannot allow commerce to triumph over aggression.
And if that happens, their entire concept pretty much falls through.
Right.
All right.
Well, I look forward to your update.
Let us know when something important happens.
One way or the other.
Certainly.
Certainly.
Thank you for having me.
Thanks.
That, everybody, is the great Nebojsa Malic.
He writes at the Gray Falcon blog at grayfalcon.blogspot.com.
I think that's off the top of my head, but I'm pretty sure I'm right.
He's got a huge archive going back at antiwar.com.
That's current as of a couple of months ago, anyway.
But now he's full time at RT, so you can find him there.
It's Nebojsa Malic.
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