Stories like this were made for a media feeding frenzy, if the news consumer was as politically aware as the news media. These consumers remain instead as oblivious as heroin addicts, noticing only when a disaster has become so out of control they can feel the heatwave. Kosovo breaks away from Serbia. Serbs and Russians are pissed. Washington is delighted. Why?

The American agenda is unconscious. Americanism is a disease, called liberal democracy with consumerism, that can afflict anyone, but it hit the Americans first because they had the richest land, the best population genetics, and a historical founding after the crisis of the church wrecked European politics. Like Israel before them, they were leaders, and so got infected first.

Americanism states that if we just bring freedom, democracy, consumerism and representation to everone on earth, they'll all suddenly get happy. The origin of this thought is in the idea of the individual who wants the world to be less risky. He or she will opt to mentally control it, forgetting that outside his or her own mind, the world carries on with its own agenda. We think that if we act as if we were immortal gods, and that everyone else being the same way guaranteed our immortal godship, all would be better.

It is a bizarre merging of cognitive dissonance psychology, moral revenge, and the simple mathematics of civilization -- most people aren't geniuses, but if you make them feel like geniuses, they'll make you feel the profit. It is both the anarchist hippie, and the McDonald's owning suited capitalist, who these days is mostly of Indian or Chinese heritage. This is Americanism, and it is nowhere better stated than in the hands of this sophomore:

"The world's problem is not too many people, but lack of political and economic freedom."

"Based on first-hand evidence of your own senses - the improved health and later ages at which acquaintances die nowadays as compared with the past; the material goods that we now possess; the speed at which information, entertainment, and we ourselves move freely throughout the world - it seems to me that a person must be literally deaf and blind not to perceive that humanity is in a much better state than ever before."

"The increase in the world's population represents our victory against death..."

"The most important benefit of population size and growth is the increase it brings to the stock of useful knowledge. Minds matter economically as much as, or more than, hands or mouths."

-- Julian Simon

Together, we conquer death. Freedom for each of us means freedom for me. We're on the right path. Everything is great. You are growing very sleepy... soon you will do anything I say. It doesn't take a genius to recognize that Americanism is a salesjob, and that it works on the Ponzi scheme of growing human populations, and that we've replaced geniuses with salesmen who are quite contentedly telling us lies and selling us garbage while the ship of our future goes off course.

Whenever you're getting sold a bill of goods, some part of you has doubts that are re-inforced by things you see, like the Bryl-Creem on your salesman or the way some explanations just don't add up. We as moderns are aware of the many gigantic plot holes in our utopian Americanist globalist plan, but we don't want to acknowledge them. Do you want to face the fact that you've been laboring for your own doom? Neither does anyone else.

Americanists delight in the splitting off of Kosovo. It hits our emotional factors -- little Kosovan butterflies floating toward the sun, in glorious freedom! Different religions and races working together in the oldest-known multicultural part of Europe! Moderate Islam having champions! Oh and finally: all these people are going to need whatever crap we're selling, and they're so cow-stupid drugged on the salesjob they'll buy anything. Deep fried Coke, Kosovo? Don't mind if you do. Slide card here.

The Russians on the other hand have metaphorically just got done eating all all their unnecessary cousins, since Communism starved the country and killed off its smart people, while helping sleazy pseudo-intellectuals and toadies thrive. What the Russians really need is a super-cold winter with no oil furnaces, and all their guns to stop working as a horde of violent zombie bears attack.
Natural selection would win over entropy at that point, but for now, they're an entropic regime headed by a few xenophobic spies of ex-Finnish descent. They know realpolitik in a way American intellectuals can't -- they can feel the base of their necks throb whenever their enemies are around. Russia is as a result baseline pragmatist in all that it does, and it does not want instability, either near its border or in the form of the idea that any Muslim ethnic group in Europe should feel free to form a breakaway state. (Suppressing that idea was in part why they fought that big loss in Afghanistan.)

I know that no one knows history anymore, because it's impossible to summarize the really important parts of history on television and still keep your audience. Here's a briefing: Kosovo was originally a stronghold of Albanians, themselves the decomposed remnants of the once-great Illryian civilization. They got multicultural, got taken over by the Turkic Ottomans, and then got funky with a mental meme of tolerance for both Christians and Jews. At this point, the place became a "believe anything you want and you're part of our culture."

The Serbs know this, and the Russians know this. Kosovo is as American as Detroit or Los Angeles. Unlike culture, it is the anti-idea: that we can have a culture of no culture, that we can agree to disagree, that we'll all get along together by compelling each other to do things for money because we basically agree on nothing. It is the un-society. You'll hear Americanists upholding it as a vision of tolerance, religious cooperation, beauty, cosmopolitanism, et al. These are salesman terms, not reality.

In the meantime, the big self-promotion party is going strong in Kosovo. A few hundred Serbs want to wreck this nightmare by rioting, but in my view, they're taking the wrong path. Un-societies thrive on having enemies, because then they can blame them as evil oppressive slave-masters and use that to explain their failures. The best policy is this: don't touch them. Don't trade with them, don't mention them, don't do anything to them or with them.

Let them stand or fall on their own. America, for example, enriches itself anytime it has a war and can claim that Saddam Hitler or Adolph ben Laden harmed the well-meaning dunderheads from the freedom, peace and happiness party here in the USA. If tomorrow it found itself embargoed not by act of government but by popular decree, it would be forced to do something radical, probably to itself. Word to the wise.

Sure, you're going to have to take that odd Serb who found a great deal on used iPods in the Kosovan quarter, haul him out of his home at 4 am, and beat him until his bones crack, but anyone who behaves for selfish gain over principle isn't a loss if you accidentally kill him. It takes time for nightmares like Kosovo and America to collapse, but it's worth waiting, because with them will collapse the principle of Americanism that underwrites both McDonald's and Kosovo.