In Somalia, the American policy was
"nation-building." In the Balkans, America
insists it wants to help develop "truly multiethnic"
states.
That is a natural development from our domestic
policy of "multiculturalism."
And it is likely to be as great a success as "nation
building" was in Somalia, and as healthy and
productive as multiculturalism has been here.
What do you do with two people who have been trying
for years to kill each other? What do you do with
two people who, the moment they see each other,
grab weapons and become violent?
According to NATO, you take those two people, lock
them in a room together, and put a large guard in
the room to prevent trouble. This, says American
social doctrine, is the key to harmony in the Balkans.
The way to keep peace in the Balkans, we are told,
is to keep those ethnic groups jammed together -
multiculturalism, you know -- with lots of foreign
troops to keep them from killing each other. Tito
used to do the same thing in Yugoslavia with lots
of soldiers and the secret police.
Liberals today are always talking about how WONDERFUL
Tito was. Granted, they say, Tito killed people,
and he imprisoned thousands of people without trial,
and he had an outright, permanent dictatorship which
he openly intended to maintain forever.
Sure Tito did all that, the liberals say. After
all, nobody's perfect.
But Tito enforced multiculturalism. He killed or
imprisoned anybody who objected to the ethnic mix
he maintained anywhere he felt like maintaining
it. There, say the liberals, was a guy who knew
how to keep ethnic hatred under control.
That great guy Tito kept these ethnic groups living
cheek-by-jowl, and he kept them peaceful. Just think
of Tito as a guy who had a National Hate Law, and
was just a little overenthusiastic in enforcing
it.
Democrats and Republicans agree that it is now OUR
turn to do the same thing to Yugoslavia that Tito
did.
Two score and seven years ago, Tito enforced multiculturalism.
Now we are now engaged in a Great Civil War, testing
whether a Balkans so conceived and so dedicated
can long endure.
Actually, there is no question that it CAN endure.
You can keep people under the same roof despite
the fact that they are bound and determined to do
each other bodily harm. That proposition is proved
every day in prisons and institutions for the criminally
insane throughout the world. If you have enough
walls, cages, and armed guards, people who want
to kill each other can be kept in the same institution
indefinitely, and most of them will survive.
Liberals and therefore respectable conservatives
have often confused prisons with their ideal of
a normal society. They used to do it all the time
when they discussed immigration policy.
I remember that almost all political commentators
used to routinely say that the American Border Patrol
that kept Mexicans out of the United States was
the same thing as the Berlin Wall, which kept East
Germans from escaping their country's dictatorship.
The Washington (D.C.) Times used to repeat this
line in almost every issue. It demanded that America
get rid of all its immigration restrictions. It
stated that the Border Patrol on the Rio Grande
was exactly the same thing as the Berlin Wall! The
Times is certainly not liberal , but it is libertarian,
and libertarians are just as nutty on immigration
policy as liberals are.
After The Times repeated this libertarian nonsense
for the fiftieth time, I wrote them a letter explaining
something any sane person should know: there was
a difference between the United States border Patrol
and the Berlin Wall. I did this by reminding them
of a local institution with which they were familiar,
the District of Columbia jailhouse.
The guards at the DC jail don't just keep people
INSIDE the jail. They also keep people who don't
belong there OUT of the DC jail. After all, you
can't just walk into that jail, any more than you
can just walk out of it. The guards will not let
you stay in the DC jail unless a judge orders them
to.
Using the DC jail example, I explained that there
is a difference between being kept INSIDE a prison
like East Germany, and being kept OUTSIDE a wealthy,
free country like the United States.
In that letter, I pointed out that the difference
between being INSIDE the DC jail and OUTSIDE the
DC jail was exactly the difference between being
inside East Germany with the guards keeping you
IN, and being a Mexican in Mexico with the United
States Border Patrol keeping you OUT.
The guards at the DC jail would not let you into
the jail unless you have a legal reason to be there.
But nobody resents that. Like East Germany, the
DC jail was a place nobody really WANTED to get
INTO. Those same guards do not let people who are
IN the jail get OUT.
The people in the jail, unlike people outside, really
resent the fact that they are not let OUT by those
guards. People want INTO the United States, and
the guards keep them in their OWN countries. It
is their own countries that are the prisons, not
the United States. The problem with East Germany
and the DC jail, I had to explain to these clowns,
was not that the world outside the DC jail or the
United States was bad. It was the DC jail and East
Germany that were bad.
I had to explain that.
To grownups.
It was a very hard letter to write. It is very,
very hard to explain reality to liberals and respectable
conservatives, because when you start to explain
something every sane person should already understand,
you begin to sound as crazy as they are.
I will say this for the libertarians at the Washington
Times. After I wrote that letter, they no longer
made the insane comparison between the United States
Border Patrol and the Berlin Wall. They switched
to other utterly insane statements about immigration,
but they no longer made THAT one.
The liberal intellectual hothouse is not so flexible.
They have a host of people to protect them from
reality. They have respectable conservatives and
thousands of PhDs to tell them that, no matter how
crazy liberals get, what they say should be taken
very, very seriously.
The problem with leftists is that there is no one
to tell them that they are, quite simply, nuts.
When one points out to liberals and respectable
conservatives that the Balkans is essentially a
madhouse, and the thing to do is to SEPARATE the
violent inmates, they keep insisting that they have
a duty to keep them locked in together. They have
a duty to Eternal Justice.
By Eternal Justice, they mean whatever distribution
of the Balkan population was made by the latest
despotism, which happens to have been that of Marshall
Tito.
With certain exceptions, of course. One particular
population movement -- the one that gave Prestina
an Albanian ethnic majority -- is holy. Therefore
this particular population and border settlement
must be maintained at all costs. This ethnic Albanian
majority must be kept in Prestina, no matter what
the cost in lives or treasure, theirs or others'.
But there was also a recent major ethnic cleansing
of Serbians by Croatians. That is a different matter.
For some reason, that one did not offend the holy
cause of multiculturalism.
NATO says it's just as concerned about that case,
where the Croatians cleaned out the Serbians, as
they are about the Prestina situation.
I'm sure we all believe that, despite the absence
of bombers over Croatia, or of any discussion of
the matter by NATO.
The fact is that there are not going to be bombers
flying in to force those Serbians back into Croatia.
It won't be done because, now that Croatia is at
peace, nobody wants to put it back into a state
of war.
That would be crazy, right?
We are all perfectly aware that the justice of where
any population happens to reside in the Balkans
at any given time would not survive a moment's serious
discussion. There is no justice in the Balkans.
There is no record that there has EVER been any
justice in Balkans.
The bottom line is this: No one hesitates to move
populations by force if it's for integration. If
you want to shove people around to enforce multiculturalism,
the United States Army is at your disposal.
I have truly radical proposal:
How about moving populations for a SANE reason,
for a change? Instead of keeping the bloodbath going
forever in the Balkans, why don't we do in the Balkans
what a sane policy would do in any other madhouse:
separate the inmates.
Present doctrine, agreed upon by liberals, respectable
conservatives, moderates, intellectuals and libertarians,
requires us to keep NATO in the Balkans forever,
so we can keep these violently hostile populations
jammed as closely together as possible. All these
geniuses agree that it CAN be done.
As I said above, talking about reality to all these
liberals, moderates, libertarians, intellectuals,
PhDs, and respectable conservatives is always a
very, very uncomfortable thing to do. As I also
explained above, when you have to explain something
that any sane human being should already know, it
makes you feel a little crazy yourself.
Nonetheless, let us once again forget respectability
and go for sanity.
In a prison, you CAN keep the loonies with the general
population. But in most real prisons, the truly,
insanely violent inmates are separated from the
general prison population. The name of this process
is called "segregation." Even in a PRISON,
if you have two inmates who are absolutely dedicated
to killing each other, you SEGREGATE them.
Even in an institution for the criminally insane,
no one, INCLUDING THE INMATES, would suggest that
you put those who want to kill each other in the
same cell with a guard to keep them apart.
If an inmate in an institution for the criminally
insane suggested what is now the official policy
in the Balkans, declared by NATO, liberals, respectable
conservatives, moderates, intellectuals, libertarians,
and the American media, they would never let him
out.
I have suggested sanity for the Balkans. I can hear
the screams now: "Apartheid!" "Ethnic
cleansing!" "Hitler!"
But labels only bother RESPECTABLE conservatives.
I will take sanity over respectability any day.
In the Balkans, sanity means separation.
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