Clear up things through 1) Using familiar tools to understand Kosovo 2) Be commited, in your efforts, to harmony between your personal Serbs and personal Albanians 3) Utilize to Internet links on the Balkan battle

4) And refer to an Identitarian path traveled from 2022

1) SOME OF THE "KOSOVO WAR FOR DUMMIES" FOR THE CONFUSED TO UNDERSTAND

Identitarianism is renowned for its divergent yet harmonious halves: self + others.  Yet it is felt for those who stumble upon the first part and get confused. 

Below, the notes add --background-- to the Kosovo idea.   Just in case your eyes roll over “consumer goods are the Serbs” and “the stimuli that comes in contact with your senses”. 

Point one

The “Kosovo” war as an outlet for your stress ^is no different^ than acting out fantasies through intense movies, video games, and music.

Point two

+ Memes! These Internet phenomena take existing image and adds a new message to it; result is the image has been appropriated for humorous or dramatic effect.  So in applying memes to the “Kosovo” idea, substitute similarly personal struggles, and commandeer the 1998-99 historical conflict to your own private life.

In the same fashion of the current girlfriend tagged with “my 13 other videos I haven’t start”, at the top ... take the very thought of the Serbs of Kosovo.   Like a news photo.

Ask yourself “what are the things I like?” from the catechism … and write your answer over that image in your head of the Balkan group. That’s the spirit!

Everything goes according to plan? Then an original photo is now seized to your own meme; rather than for the effect of amusement, but for *peace of mind* instead.

Point three

It’s an adaptation.  Your Kosovo is an adaptation of 1999’s Kosovo, ^in that same way^ the Oscar-winning movie “West Side Story” updates Shakespeare’s “Romeo & Juliet”. Or switch the musical for the “Romeo + Juliet” postmodern flick. 

For you, it's +a simulated Kosovo War+, like students similarly participating in mock trials or Model United Nations.  

But conduct your private self towards benign stress relief!

Point four

Why Kosovo and not other war-like, authoritarian places?  In Afghanistan and Iraq, entire Ameurocan counterinsurgency units have came and gone. 

Other “minority rule” areas never pursued the option of suppressing the guerrillas so hard.   Example being, the Israeli forces in the West Bank.    
> Also in "dominant minority" states, the minority is too large (the Sunnis in Saddam-era Iraq).  
It's harder to achieve that state of nihilism, if you empower oh-so-many things in life! 

Hope this holds up, so far.

2) ULTIMATELY, IN THIS IDENTITARIAN GAME, YOU HAVE TO WIN THE HEARTS AND MINDS OF ALBANIANS

+ ...But meaning has its costs.  
As I wrote on "a self to believe in", have AN IDEA, A VISION for conflicting parts in your personality to be eventually be content with.

Such a live + let live outcome can apply to Serbs + Albanians, but also to DCS; say, Dreamers + MAGAers.

+ The modernity we cope with… rose in the Balkan crisis. One that had real-life Albanian tragedies.

As economics tensed demographics--Kosovar Serbs went north for jobs.

And Albanian birthrates up? They outnumber others.

Like global selfishness up... an uptick in complex problems outnumbering us. Plus EACH PERSON has their own Battle of Kosovo moment in their past lives.

A personal equivalent of 1389, a personal episode influencing one today!

+  Jun 13, 2020: It was 22 years ago where, in my reaction to growing up DCS, my study of political/religious regimes went underway.

Today, Kosovo 1999 is the historical example to cognitively govern myself.

But I use that war to manage hardships, not support Serbian nationalism in real life!

I was born to Polish immigrants, so I have nothing political/personal with today's Kosovo. 

So it’s free to be independent, if not a province. 

And it was me at age 13 who made this discovery of belief … maybe because my mental puzzle is more monolithic and straightforward?

A melting pot DCSer puzzle may have quite a lot of *specialized* pieces, however. For them, using that ideology part may disrupt too many other parts.   Disrupt their kaleidoscope of things liked on social media. 

So being open to overlooked ideas is gratitude! 

3) GET A BETTER PICTURE, THROUGH THESE ONLINE LINKS ON THE 1999 CONFLICT

15 min news report of  the 1998 situation of police vs. guerrillas on the ground, none yet in the sky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjlbJDZaANQ&t=38s

The eyes have it: See the KLA ((0:55 to 1:10 of the video)) + NATO experience in the Kosovo War: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwP3P86u6e

Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway FULL GAME Gameplay Walkthrough

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wvopp5jVBcU&t=3193s

+ Actual screens of a third person shooter scattered throughout. 3PS is pertinent as the visual for this video games you’re playing … is lent from actual news photographers and video cameras that took place in the Balkans war.

+ In these two videos, dismiss the idea of taking sides. These reenactments of the Kosovo War here are about cinema, not ethnically based politics. Better study these videos to help you envision the “video game in your head.”

Racak

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwFEEfj6xJ4&t=4256s

Highlights: 

4:38 Casual ambush by the KLA
33:15 Exchanging of fire in a village street

1:10:05 Pursuing of guerrillas in the woods

Kosare

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULb6rrN0wCs&t=5482s

Noted points:

8:20 More concealed rebel ambush

1:28:20 Backing by tank firepower

1:40:40 Repelling the other side’s advances

Example of a combat in Kosovo: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Prekaz

Want more in-depth?  Here's the Kosovo region, it's history + it's people: washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/balkans/overview/kosovo.htm
 

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/world/europe/kosovo-airstrike-articles.3.html

4) REFRESH TO 2022

                                                    Envisioning a Future with No Second American Civil War

Do all good things really come to an end? As the very fate of the United States is now being brought up: there is active talk of secession and a “Brexit” like outcome for certain American states—done peacefully or not. What could forestall such conflict is a broad, novel order for democratic capitalist society (DCS) in the first place. Potential notions to institutionalize include, to cooperate more efficiently at home, being inspired by borderless ideals. As well, recognizing voluntary belief as a center of gravity--for good or bad. This discourse also investigates the fault may be less in the democratic capitalist system itself but more on the values of those participating in it. Acting promptly to correct such values and rallying around newly realized truths of human nature can transcend the status of being hopelessly stuck in modern day problems.

The 21st century has worldwide technology, worldwide economics. Yet why isn’t there a corresponding worldwide politics? Correcting this deficiency would do great help for those pushing for all the globe to be on the same page on all-encompassing issues like climate change. To make this a reality, could there be a drive, an inspiration for what globalization hasn’t pulled off yet: the collapsing of all borders? This type of ethos wouldn’t just have electoral benefits. At the lowest level, human judgments, assumptions, and stereotypes can be rife when at the verge of approaching a stranger. 

In a new situation when one crosses the line to interact—finally get it over with---the anxiety is over with. Correspondingly, situations get magnified to global proportions, and nations can get uneased at the potential of dealing with a foreign neighbor or differing ethnic group. This problem of space was evident in the 1990s conflict between Hutus and Tutsis, where Time magazine noted that "Rwanda is an explosive crucible that nations watching from a comfortable distance have no idea how to handle." Moreover, a de-boundarying spirit could extent to the workplace where fewer parameters in a job could lead to more autonomy.

It can be said that this borderless vision is all a pipe dream. But some may have had enough on life on the world as it is now—and are working towards new frontiers. Entrepreneurs today are more boundless in reach than those in political institutions: Elon Musk not just extends not his vision to markets overseas, but realms beyond Earth. Meanwhile, government is more bogged down with narrower concerns on its own jurisdiction; facing off over internal democracy gets protracted from the Civil War to the current deliberation on voting rights bills. In contrast, leaders in the United States solved domestic problems previously by evoking places outside the country—the Japanese making an armed incursion into 1940s Hawaii was one rallying cry that Washington seized to galvanize its citizenry. The ideal of borderlessness could what’s needed today to further fire up the imagination of conflicted citizens and politicians alike.

      *    *    *  

It is indeed a conflicted world, for it was said by Pliny the Elder that “the only certainty is that nothing is certain.” Thousands of tumultuous years later, that statement still holds. Sweeping waves of industrialization have vanquished alchemy but not unpredictability; the injustice stemming from the latter has also failed to be wiped out. Rectifying this unfairness looms large in the American ethos, as the Pledge of Allegiance concludes to advocate a nation with “justice for all.” Yet “justice” for the ordinary citizen is not attained by push button; Sen. Ted Cruz affects his guns rights stance more by committee, than in reaction to social media trolling following the shooting in that lawmaker’s state of Texas. 

Perhaps keeping a lid on injustice means increasing control. Running a tight societal ship may result in more controlled fairness, albeit at a cost of natural order that a more freewheeling DCS would permit. But could the “March for Our Lives” sentiment prevail over Second Amendment advocates? Or will there be caches that private militias will load upon for use in a second American Civil War? That said, DCSers are free to use their “freedom” to disrespect others as well as respect them. When disrespect builds up—and it does so in the political landscape--how can a fractious sequence end up as? Less cooperation to solve ever-more complex economic and technological problems. Rising sea levels, adjusting lean manufacturing to fix the supply chain crisis, making transhumanism ethical, and more.

Lack of cooperation shows now, as the division in the United States has never been this stark in recent years. As the “leader of the free world”, how would internal strife send a message to the rest of the globe? Especially when 21st century life has been marked by the large scale: a global pandemic, banks amid the late 2000s financial crisis being “too big to fail.” Could capitalism itself be affected—and improved upon--on such a grand scope? Redefining a system and adding change to it has its risks; the larger a social system becomes, the more stability becomes expected. Like jurisdictions for politicians, capitalism depends on places and geography. As big and small systems respectively depend on a sense of family—nationalism for millions of countrymen to mobilize citizens toward macroeconomic goals, communalism for microeconomies like a kibbutz. For the former, the media is critical for this bond to work. Yet were pandemics foreseen and debated during press coverage in the Western democracies, during the 2018 American congressional and 2019 European parliamentary races? Such is the flaw of “stable” capitalist society as it is now and a lack of vision. 

      *    *    * 

The complex modern world is not just beyond the grasp of being understood on an economic basis—it is confounding them politically as well. Modernity in action consists of a proliferation of needs to meet--as well as a proliferation of sophistication behind all of it. One person’s needs, or interests, hook up with that of another; particularly those interests that exist on a sub-level and as result, can be self-serving. For instance, Senator Krysten Sinema, could nominally justify supporting voting rights legislation, while behaving in a way that indirectly allows the filibuster to benefit other preferred colleagues in the Senate, to this dismay of those supporters in the former category. As well, the pursuit of needs and interests could be simply veiled as workers using back door connections in not just legislative politics, but office politics. How to get such divergent cliques to, for the benefit of the common good, to each have their eye on the ball? Make that ball a more concrete ideal. In contrast to American values that function more as abstractions—trying to get judges to agree on what a “right to privacy” is--that turn illusionary, and thus stands less the test of time.

Society under such “abstractions” in 2020 was not so good, so 2021 had pressure to make up for it. But high inflation and supply chain problems arising at the year’s end were not the holiday cheer to end things in style. These issues do have a common denominator, a source from where the problem may stem from: the bold exercise of freedom. This manifested in consumers emancipated to demand more following stingy pandemic days. While at the same time, truck drivers hampered the supply and distribution of goods by quitting their jobs for a more promising career. This contemporary era of many participants in a process-- “mass economics”--is brought together by people acting in their own self-interests. Yet what central authority whatsoever is there when the invisible hand has more DCSers involved? Such was the case in the financial crisis at the turn of the 2010s, when specialization of the industry changed how loans were repaid: now banks made money from the transaction itself. 

New players were involved to handle these loans, now converted into mortgage-backed securities, thus necessitating more people getting their piece of the pie. As well, a need for responsibility for all of those players involved—including the house flippers who instead approached homes like ATMs, and drove up the prices into bubble levels. Even though this Great Recession volatility eased up, similar implications of “mass economics” were apparent in the present-day inflation crisis. The prevalence of rising prices was contagious, as when one firm raises prices, other businesses may follow suit. To offset what was seen to be instigating corporate greed, introducing stimulus checks were an initiative to democratize matters. Yet, as a result, might have been that the way the checks were spent may have increased the money supply. 

Could all these partakers in “mass economics”, who can’t get their act firmly together, come together and confess that we are all just children of God? Yet religious fervor, as a widespread global trend, is not the hot commodity as it once was; from the Enlightenment onwards, nationalism replaced Christianity as the faith for many Europeans. Like nation-states asserting their interests on a large scale persist, private citizens on a small level pursuing their interests rolls on. Now if a commoner in the past did not have God as the ultimate goal, the local leadership could pick out some calamity like a famine, and scapegoat the malcontent for allowing that divine-bestowed hardship. Instead, today’s humanist spirit has made it that the individual is the end worth serving. Thus, organized monotheism couldn’t adapt so much to the modern era. 

Yet can it be made sure that ordinary people--the drivers of the Anthropocene era--will be able to do so? Consider an answer to that with the proposition that individualism should deal less with “man” with an “a”, and more on men in plural, spelled with an “e”. For this notion of “man” gets hampered when one individual is stuck in his or her own uncertain situation, which gets filled in by an array of empowered DCSers. Just as a reference to this, a large-scale example would be the forces of the Arab Winter exploiting the void left open by actors of the Arab Spring. In other, similar cases of a vacuum being infused in politics and business, the masses just can overwhelm what that mere, lone individualist thinks. 

      *    *    * 

Uncertainty though, is less celebrated than facts; it can also be said that facts are greater than opinions. Consider, though, how facts hold up against laws. As laws come from agreements: a leader has ideas, others carry them out. Yet to implement this, agreements can only become possible when all involved share the same opinion. This notion is backed up by the Oxford Dictionary, defining “agree”, as having “the same opinion about something.” Democracy isn’t so fixated on the facts of the majority. Rather, it is geared towards the opinions of the majority. And such sentiments march on: economic systems today depend on the customer always being right. This sets up the Anthropocene as the today’s supreme law of the land; the era of humans in effect means the era of opinions. 

Behold such opinions put into action, the power of voluntary belief. Even if that is found in just one person—the lone Tank Man seized the attention of a global audience during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Yet, in a democratic era of being left to your own devices, look at the places it takes people. To those on the center and left of it, the riot at the U.S. Capitol displayed a contempt of hitherto electoral outcomes that were accepted fair and square. Yet the storming of the legislature wasn’t like, in foreign coups, some form of Delta Force that spearheaded it; rather, it carried out by willing, private citizens. The focus may not be the Congress itself and political institutions as a whole. Rather, with democracy drawing in diverse peoples to resolve the needs of a modernizing economy, it is more judicious to make it right when a participant in all this suffers a setback and possible subsequent humiliation. What happens when people are free to engage in action that carries consequences? These victims can rally around whatever ideological remedy, now proliferated in DCS’ marketplace of ideas.

Democracies and dictatorships differ in each other’s goals. But, to achieve their aims, the free world is akin to authoritarian societies in needing to enlist its population. Thanks to its own economic successes, DCS depends on more needing hands on deck. In turn, these new peoples are bestowed rights and privileges. Given the obvious transfers of power in democracies, some rights can hang in the balance. Established leaders at the top anticipate this, and create, for challengers, barriers to entry. One example of this entrenchment are the fundraising advantages that incumbents enjoy. Still in these political contests, participants--and those pressuring them—are united in seeking political gain. Pursuing “gain” could be also anyone in DCS—including experts and specialists. What system could societally cover this whole web? Democracy, as it stands, may not be getting all these warring parties on the same page. Maybe expecting change through sheer voting isn’t working; it can get redundant when each election, even after 2020, becomes “the most important one in our lifetime.” Maybe it’s more necessary to change the one practicing “democracy”: the democrat. That is, by intellectually conditioning each person involved in the political system to more noble ends. 

      *    *    * 

Democracy somehow has to get its citizens involved. It depends on its subjects sharing the same goal: the seeking of a better life. Whether it’s conservatives thriving under less regulation, or liberals pleased with the safeguarding of “marriage equality”, seeking personal advantage is a notion that both sides of the table are in unison. This idea of private progress is personified on a mass scale by the European Union. Unlike other peoples around the globe united by a common language or history, member states identifying with the EU is made possible by the pursuit (similar to other points on “seeking gain” in this essay) of intrinsically advantageous notions of peace and prosperity. 

Was, for the EU and NATO, “advantageous” expansion towards Ukraine a Titanic heading in collision course with an iceberg? For democracy, whether be in Eastern Europe or elsewhere, overcoming the globe’s Putin bloc doesn’t mean pleasing the illiberal democrats of the world. Rather, it’s about the centrists getting out of the populists’ way--leaving the MAGA, Fidesz, PiS, and National Rally people alone. That would leave the “End of History” proponents with a more enduring ideal: people will adhere to the supply and demand principle, forswear the abolishment of private property, and value high that of public opinion. That’s capitalistic democracy. Yet navigating such public sentiment involves media magnification that exposes the warts of one side--ammunition for that particular perspective’s rivals to use.  

Early in the twentieth century, it was indeterminate where fascism and communism would take Europe. In this young millennium, it is also uncertain where authoritarian populism--wherever it may be across the spectrum—will go. To seek a resolution, conventional approaches of determining who is right and who is wrong may not be pertinent. Beforehand, the 19th century Southern United States already knew its Northern counterparts were “right”: as result of industrialization, the Union states had a higher standard of living. Armed conflict materialized when the Southerners simply ran out of time to find an economic alternative to the metastasizing system of slavery. Similarly, the peoples in today’s United States are all-too familiar with democratic capitalism. Being dependent on that system in the 2020s, to put reasonably priced gasoline into cars and affordable food on dinner tables. In these crises, could there be another option to guide society for people now, before it’s too late?

Demographically speaking in the United States, the political culture is gravitating towards the left. But that doesn’t mean that political elections are heading in that direction—like an underdog in sports, the right can find a way to win. And to “win” in a voting race is result in yet another loss that tears away at the social fabric. Even if wounds were to heal from the 2024 election, developments away from the ballot box can still be flashpoints. Such was the case by the Supreme Court when its Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization ruling overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022. Bringing people together from leadership at the top was the spirit at the 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote address. Yet finding universal truths in human nature, no matter how and where the discovery was made, is way for one to go beyond democracy and whatever stems from it. The best way to confront conflict? Preempt it with the tool that is knowledge and its ensuing victory that is self-confidence.