Literary Lunches: Rebecca West

Today we’ll kick off what will hopefully be a literary lunch series, in which I’ll showcase a (usually) simple meal from a great book.  All I had time for today was a quick lunch — a couple of slices of prosciutto di parma (Citterio, aged 420 days, Trader Joe’s; $6.49 for 4 oz.) on a leftover hunk …

Organ Harvesting in Kosovo

It’s such a common urban legend that it’s almost the stuff of jokes.  But organ theft is, apparently, alive and well, and right here in what’s loosely called “Europe.” Carla del Ponte caused a minor stir a couple of years ago when she alleged that the Kosovar Liberartion Army had been secretly harvesting organs from …

Old Gold

Doing some research on Milosevic cheerleaders and Srebrenica deniers Living Marxism, I happened upon this debate in the 8 July 1993 issue of the London Review of Books. If you’ve been following the discussion on my post on Mladic you might’ve heard the assertion that the only way to reverse the gains made by the ethnic …

More on Bosnia

It’s turning out to be a Bosnia-focused weekend here. Marko Hoare has an excellent and sober assessment of Angelina Jolie’s Bosnia “imbroglio” up here. For those who don’t know, the British left often has an odd — to say the least — way of viewing the Balkan Wars.  Mainly it consists of lionizing Milosevic as …

The Importance of Being Serbian

Belgrade’s Gay Pride parade has been an opportunity for the its nationalistic and regressive right-wing youth to rebel against European values for as long as Serbia has been trying to rehabilitate itself after the Milosevic regime, i.e., the last decade.   Although the mobs of the right succeeding in actually stopping it last year, this …